On reflection, I think it's highly likely that in the past I've gone out of my way to signal high intelligence (by learning memory tricks, "deep" quotations, display intellectual reading prominently, etc) because on some level I suspected that I'm not actually very smart and yet I hugely value massive brainpower (alas, my parents praised me for "being smart").

Interestingly (to me, anyway), I think that this has greatly diminished since I got involved with LessWrong. My belief is that interacting with actual extremely smart people made the whole thing seem silly, so I was able to get on with just trying to level up and not making such a big show about it.