There’s this worry that high intelligence itself drives you to be more dismissive of other people. I don’t really think that’s the case. I think intelligence can help you understand and sympathize better with other people.

Anyway, if you go by IQ, the upper one percentile score about 135 or higher, so that’s where your dividing line would be in raw numbers.

But since intelligence is distributed in a continuum, it wouldn’t make sense for everyone at or above 135 to consider everyone else equally ‘dumb’ - even if they did choose to use the IQ-scale to gauge everyone’s ‘stupidity’.

To do so would be like you getting first place in a spelling contest by a single point and then concluding that the person in second place (and everyone following) must be completely illiterate.

All that being said, the one percent really are very far from average. One way of putting it is that these people are further from the average than average people are from the ‘extremely low’ range (>69).