

Do Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol? - rblion
http://news.discovery.com/human/do-intelligent-people-drink-more-alcohol.html

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hugh3
_Psychology Today takes an evolutionary approach. They argue that drinkable
alcohol is a relatively novel invention of 10,000 years ago. Our ancestors had
previously gotten their alcohol kick through eating rotten fruits, so more
intelligent humans may be more likely to choose modern alcoholic beverages._

Is it my imagination, or does that leap of logic make no sense whatsoever?

Perhaps I'd need to be drunk to understand it.

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Alex3917
I think they are saying that until relatively recently only people lots of
openness-with-experience and intellectual curiosity would spend the time
learning about and tracking down random fruits in order to get fucked up. And
so between roughly a million years ago and ten thousand years ago, it was
mostly intelligent people who were co-evolving with alcohol. So that's why
intelligent people today get more pleasure from drinking.

I personally would propose that intelligent people are more likely to have
less empathy and social intelligence as the evolutionary tradeoff for being
smart, so they benefit more from using alcohol socially.

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dolphenstein
So the smelly bum on the street corner who mutters to himself is at the peak
of the evolutionary hierarchy? The assertions made seem too simplistic.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

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JimboOmega
I would think more intelligent people would tend to be wealthier, and
wealthier people can consume more alcohol. I realize there are plenty of broke
alcoholics - but leaving out chronic alcoholics, I think you're more likely to
have a bottle of wine with dinner if you're rich than poor.

A more tongue in cheek and/or political answer is to suggest that smart people
realize how ruined the world is and drink to assuage their pain.

The article gives so little info, you could easily suggest other explanations
by making other assumptions about the data; all they give is very dull vs.
very intelligent.

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andrewvc
Agreed. Fresh out of college and broke, having a beer with dinner, or having
that second or third drink at a bar was just not in the budget.

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dfox
Tell that to anyone in Czech Republic, where beer is in most restaurants
cheaper than softdrinks :)

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larrykubin
Increased alcohol consumption is also linked to child abuse, divorce, DUI
arrests, alcohol poisoning, people losing their jobs, fights, and brain
damage.

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sabat
And depression and its associated pathologies. But as with everything, YMMV.
Some people can drink a lot and have it not affect anything at all. Only some
people, though.

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Alex3917
Smoking weed when drinking reduces the associated brain damage, and most
likely it would reduce the depression as well. (I'm guessing that most of the
depression is from alcohol being a pro-inflammatory, whereas the CBD in weed
is a powerful anti-inflammatory.)

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rdouble
I used to live in Cambridge, MA. The bars were filled with graduate students,
post docs, and PhD burnouts. I'm not sure how much dumb people drink, but the
smart ones could drink me under the table.

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detst
1\. There are simply more of these people that make their way to Cambridge for
obvious reasons. Naturally you'll find a larger proportion in most
environments there.

2\. These people probably don't have much in the way of manual labor in their
day-to-day work but do have a higher level of stress (manual labor and
exercise reducing stress) and mental exhaustion. The guy that spends his day
working with his hands might like a drink after work but it's more likely at
home and not as much because he doesn't have the physical energy to stay up
and drink.

Someone that has mental exhaustion wants to unwind and has the physical energy
to take themselves to a bar and socialize.

I know I've worked a full day in one part of the country, got on a plane to
another part and spent the night out drinking. I don't think this is because
I'm more intelligent than a guy swinging a hammer all day but I simply had the
physical energy to do it; the work wasn't physically exhausting.

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rblion
I think there is a correlation between intelligence, existential angst, and a
need to 'get fucked up' to let it all go for the night. It's not EVERY
intelligent person, just a subset that doesn't feel any stigma about
drugs/alcohol. The big problem is when people start to believe alcohol/drugs
are an escape from reality, they really just alter consciousness up or down a
few levels. Over the years, alcohol will also make you dumber and more likely
to do something you'll regret for many years.

I prefer cannabis and acid instead of alcohol. They seem to elevate
consciousness instead of depress it. But who could say no to a beer with your
friends after a hard day's work?

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epo
My experience from observing people over the years is that prolonged or heavy
cannabis use is as damaging as prolonged or heavy alcohol use, if not more so.
Lightly used each is relatively harmless.

The 'elevated consciousness' is just your drug addled mind flattering itself,
to an outsider you will seem imbecilic. Your slightly self-satisfied tone is
really, really unwarranted.

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swift
The high you get from cannabis, to my mind, restores a playfulness and
creativity to your thinking that most people have as children but lose as
adults. It can sometimes make linear, technical thinking harder, but it tends
to make it easier to see the big picture and brainstorm new ideas. It
certainly can benefit artistic work, too.

Acid is even better; it maintains the creativity advantages of cannabis while
adding a clarity of thinking that can often be superior to sobriety.

I'm not saying everyone will benefit from these drugs, or that they will
improve your performance on every task, but you seem to suggest that they
don't offer any benefit at all and simply reduce the user to an imbecile. That
does not remotely resemble my experience.

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rblion
I agree fully. It just amplifies who you are deep down. It can be creative
under the right conditions or destructive under the wrong conditions.

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Nick_C
Funnily enough, I was talking about this exact topic with a clinical
psychologist recently. In a nutshell, intelligent people think more. They
don't just think better, or more efficiently, they think _more_.

The side-effect is that certain illnesses like depression affect intelligent
people quite hard. They self-medicate, often with alcohol.

As well, otherwise healthy intelligent people might self-medicate to calm down
their perceived over-active thoughts.

Combined, the result is that intelligent people are over-represented in
alcoholism, albeit perhaps as high-functioning alcoholics.

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nswanberg
There was a paper from an ornithologist in the Czech Republic a few years back
that found that the more a scientist drinks, the fewer and lower quality the
scientist's papers.

The interesting part isn't the conclusion, which seems suspect, but the
scientists' reactions.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/science/18beer.html>

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/03/19/a-sci...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/03/19/a-scientific-
defense-of-beer/)

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burgerbrain
All I know is that it is certainly comforting to think so ;)

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steven_h
Not to sound overtly obnoxious, but I drink so that I can tolerate things
other people say when I spend time in a mixed social group.

An fictitious example would be an episode of House where a genius would
robotrip because it was the only way he could tolerate his wife because of an
intellectual barrier.

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Toucan
My expectation would be that more intelligent children have more demanded of
them, and go on to choose or take more stressful careers. Are there any
studies correlating stress levels and drinking? Personal experience would
suggest a relationship.

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Mz
Having seen nothing about the guts of how the study was done, I will suggest
the following possible explanation for the difference in how much each group
supposedly drank:

More intelligent, educated people are less likely to view alcohol as "sinful"
and may have therefore been more honest and accurate when reporting how much
they drank. Less intelligent or less educated individuals may have
underreported alcohol consumed due to denial (since it is impossible to tell
the truth to someone else and keep lying to yourself about something) or even
simply not remembering it as accurately.

I'm not a big believer in the accuracy of studies of this sort.

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MisterWebz
I highly doubt intelligent people drink more alcohol. Anyone have additional
information about this?

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gte910h
As alcohol is moderately expensive, I assume it would correlate with income,
which does moderately correlate with intelligence.

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Psyonic
Low-riding your car also costs money, but I don't think it correlates with
income. At least not in the direction you'd expect.

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gte910h
While you are pointing out something that does cost money, it is a niche
product only used by a certain social group.

I'd assume _within the social group_ (which I'm not even sure how to define),
you actually would find it correlates with income.

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Psyonic
While this is certainly true (you have to a car to low-ride it), shouldn't be
expect social groups to be at play with alcohol as well?

For example, lawyers tend be to more intelligent (and have higher incomes)
than the general population, and perhaps lawyers tend to drink more. Is this
suggestive of a correlation with income, or profession? Do the smarter and
presumably better paid lawyers drink more than others?

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gte910h
It actually looks like they controlled for income, see the link above.

It looks like its actual IQ that has the highest correlation.

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Psyonic
Ya, it appears so. I wonder what their methodology was.

