One thing that helped me with this from an intellectual point of view was realising that this problem centers around an unprovable proposition. The proposition? That I am not a moron.

The problem's straightforward. Suppose I come up with an argument that purports to show that I'm not such a moron after all. Who's going to evaluate whether the argument is valid or not? Well, if it's not me, the moron - the idiot who doesn't know how to get stuff right. What am I doing trusting him?

Suppose instead someone else comes along and reassures me that I'm not a moron. Well, that's nice, but someone has to validate whether or not they mean what they say, or whether they have good reason to be right about that or not. Who's going to do that? You're right - it's me, the moron who has no idea.

So logically I can reach no answer regardless of whether I come up with a reason, or someone else does. Hey, if I'm a moron, I'm going to be wrong about this, aren't I?

Nowadays, when I see the moron argument, I recognise it and say to myself - yes, yes - the moron argument. I know I can't logically solve that - it's insoluble. And I stop trying to think about it.

This of course doesn't mean that I don't sometimes do things that make me want the floor to swallow me up. Everybody does those things, and learning something when it happens is wise. But falling into the moron argument afterwards is - unhelpful - a known waste of CPU cycles better spent elsewhere.

There is an analogous situation that occurs with social status - perhaps I could call it the 'loser' argument. The same problem applies - once you wonder if you're too much of a loser to know how much of a loser you are, you have a logically impossible problem to solve, and the only way to win that argument is to acknowledge that logic is powerless against it, smile and walk away.