James Nicoll links to a Gawker post on how Scott Adams has been trolling MetaFilter under a pseudonym. So far, so Mary Rosh, but what struck me was how his alter ego “PlannedChaos” defended Scott Adams:
As far as Adams’ ego goes, maybe you don’t understand what a writer does for a living. No one writes unless he believes that what he writes will be interesting to someone. Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that’s hard to hide.
Emphasis mine. That’s the hallmark of a true internet kook that is, that insistence on being a supergenius, too smart for your opponents to understand. It’s one consequence of the Dunning Kruger effect: people who are too obtuse to realise how dumb they are tend to overestimate their IQ as well, not to mention the importance of IQ as a real measure of intelligence.
(That this is not an exclusive internet phenomenon can be seen in Chuck Jones’ “Wile E. Coyote, Supergenius” cartoons, hence the title.)