
Downsides of Being Clever - walterbell
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247201
======
Htsthbjig
Is Lisa Simpson lonely?

I mean, If you go to play with the other kids, and they want to do something
you don't enjoy, and what you find fun to do no kid does... Does it mean you
are lonely?

When I was a kid I loved to play sports like the other kids, and was very good
at it, so I was very social,but I also loved reading tons of books and
mathematics. Most of the other kids did not.

When you read Kant, Descartes, Stefan Zweig(in german) books that tell you how
to raise a kid while you are the kid!, Asimov (in english), Feynman ... all
the other kids behavior becomes so childish and stupid.

You could be alone while standing with other people.

For me the fact that Lisa Simpson is alone is not that she is lonely, but the
consequence of being unique while other unique people live far away.

I got to find and regularly meet other people like me only as an adult. Most
of them are really successful now, but most of them also lived Hell in the
school days.

They were alone, but they are not lonely.

~~~
jkestner
Word. When I got to MIT, I found my community. I didn't realize up to then
that I had been restraining some of my nerdiness.

Same thing with my wife. When we met, I discovered that I didn't have to
censor the literary references... she read way more than I.

I love being around people I can be myself with.

~~~
Dewie3
Ah yes, embracing your inner elitist.

~~~
jkestner
That response is why I usually censor myself.

------
x0054
Another way to look at it would be that intelligence is just a tool every
person has. A tool we are all free to use and abuse as we please. It allows
one possessing a lot of intelligence to achieve once goals quicker and more
efficiently. However, the goals them selves can be as good, evil, misguided,
or downright stupid as humanly possible.

A very intelligent person with a good goal can achieve amazing things,
including happiness. But very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever
really know what we want, and in that lies the problem. Given a misguided
goal, high intelligence can quickly amplify your efforts of digging your self
deeper and deeper into a whole.

So, in the end intelligence is like a gun, a nice tool to have as long as you
use it wisely, carefully, and for it's intended purpose.

~~~
walterbell
_> very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want_

Here's a comic strip on the relative merits of questions and answers,
[http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-
park](http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
If your question can't really be answered, it's probably just ill-posed in the
first place.

~~~
crpatino
That is a very narrow mindset.

For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically
could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders
of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during
recorded history. Maybe some of those could be answered today if, say, the
whole world's GNP was redirected towards that goal... but this is not going to
happen. Multiple people have multiple, often contradicting, worthy goals.

Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer.
What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of
the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately
incomplete perspective of the whole issue. Of course, you need to believe that
these other perspectives offer value that Science(TM) cannot before you even
begin to consider them.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically
could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders
of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during
recorded history.

Ok, so they're well-posed questions. So?

>Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer.
What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of
the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately
incomplete perspective of the whole issue.

This sounds like the place of the argument. I think these questions aren't
well-posed: they're actually being used to imply a large number of smaller
questions. You can usually get a well-posed question by trying to break down
one of these questions, or expose the bad reasoning that led to considering
things like, "Well gosh, what's it all about anyway, when you get right down
to it?" real questions.

------
kstenerud
"The most notable, and sad, case concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof.
Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course before
taking her finals and started waitressing. She later worked as a call girl,
entertaining clients with her ability to recite equations during sexual acts."

The _sad_ case?? According to whom?

She's working in an area she enjoys and controls her own life, something she
didn't have as a "prodigy".

[http://inquiringfeminist.com/about-me/](http://inquiringfeminist.com/about-
me/)

~~~
melling
It's sad for those who understand what she may have contributed to humanity,
knowledge in general, etc.

There are no guarantees how impactful your work will be but if more of the 7
billion people on this planet could contribute, we'd all be better off.

~~~
stdbrouw
Meh. I think we'd all be better off if we did what was good for us and for
people in our environment, rather than trying to save the world.

~~~
melling
Well, you could be a great doctor or teacher, for example. Great architect or
artist? Poet, author? There are many ways to contribute.

~~~
c22
But you can't be a great call girl?

~~~
melling
Sure. Now can you figure out why that's different than being a doctor or
teacher?

~~~
gress
Not really. Care to explain?

~~~
melling
Nope. If you don't get it, it's probably lost on you, which makes it even more
painful to see people so gifted squander their abilities. There are so many
problems to solve and so few people who can solve them.

~~~
c22
Personally I'm happy enough when I see people just choosing activities that
don't cause more problems.

------
UhUhUhUh
When you are smart, trivial things, like making "good" or rational choices are
simply boring. This boredom naturally increases with the number of trivial
things. When confronted to boredom, intelligent people will generally choose
something stimulating, if not on an intellectual level, at least on some other
level. And since they are very good at finding lateral solutions to problems,
they will go for out of the box, so-called irrational, things/choices. The
world is boring, plagued by overly simple, artificially complicated, problems
and life goes by like water between your fingers. To survive and be productive
when intelligent, you've got to be happily endowed with autistic features,
which not all intelligent people are. The world is beating its own records of
waste every day and that goes for intelligence too. So, one might as well have
a less boring life. All this is not a downside of being clever. It's the
downside of living in a pathetically wasteful, boring and often plain stupid
world.

~~~
zamalek
On the contrary the simplest possible solutions are nearly always the most
difficult to find. Believing that a complex solution is the answer is
symptomatic of not understanding the problem - which is another trait of
intelligent people: belief that they can solve problems beyond the scope of
their current ability (i.e. believe that they are smarter than they are), or
too much haste when approaching a problem.

Possibly this stems from the expectations curse outlined in the article.

------
nopinsight
A standardized test for 'wisdom' as quoted below seems possible and worth
developing. In addition to personal self-improvement, a lot of companies would
be interested. Does anyone here know of any such tests?

> In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social
> dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt
> crises disclosed to Dear Abby, the Washington Post’s agony aunt. As the
> volunteers talked, a panel of psychologists judged their reasoning and
> weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded argument, whether the candidates
> were ready to admit the limits of their knowledge – their “intellectual
> humility” – and whether they were ignoring important details that didn’t fit
> their theory.

> High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship
> quality, and, crucially, reduced anxiety and rumination – all the qualities
> that seem to be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even
> seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores were less
> likely to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was
> not related to any of these measures, and certainly didn’t predict greater
> wisdom. “People who are very sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments
> [for] why their claims are the correct ones – but may do it in a very biased
> fashion.”

~~~
natosaichek
This was also one of the more interesting tidbits for me. I'd love to see such
a test. I wonder if it's easier to 'pass' or get a high score on a test like
this in a written format rather than the real life type scenarios typically
encountered where its not obvious that one is being tested.

------
jessriedel
The lede to this article is silly. IQ leads to substantial difference between
groups, but is not perfectly correlated with success, so that there is still
substantial variation between individuals with the same IQ. What is do
difficult to understand about this?

> the Termites’ [1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more] average salary was
> twice that of the average white-collar job. > Terman concluded that
> “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. > Over the
> course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about
> the same as the national average. > Why don’t the benefits of sharper
> intelligence pay off in the long term?

They _do_ pay off _on average_ for _certain measures_.

------
JoeAltmaier
In the case of the 'Termites' reporting unease over not achieving their
potential: perhaps something to do with being studied all their lives and
asked about it?

------
carrotleads
Why don't we see people talk about the downsides of being talented( in
sports)..

Why is being talented in a bookish or intellectual sense looked down upon? so
much so clever kids are asked to not show of their cleverness.

We don't ask sporty kids (or people) to be less sporty..

Is there an underlying principle at work here that threatens the average
populace?

~~~
notahacker
Did you actually read the article? The starting premise behind it was that
intelligent people ending up not using their life to showcase their
intelligence was a problem worthy of study.

The downsides of being talented at sports are well known: most don't make it
and many of those that do have a marginal income which lasts until they're in
their mid-30s at best. Apart from the confidence that comes with having being
respected for your sporting prowess as a young age (and possibly a free degree
if you're an elite kid in the US), there aren't many fringe benefits that come
from being [known as] an almost sportsperson, and physical faculties decline
faster and are less versatile than mental ones. Which is part of the reason
why they're actually _frequently_ told they should stop devoting so much time
to sport and make sure they pass their exams...

------
puranjay
> Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal
> intelligence – the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to
> prowess at spatial puzzles (which, in fact, seemed to reduce the risk of
> anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence might also make you more
> likely to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them.

While I'm nowhere near the same IQ as some of the people on that list, I do
believe I have strong verbal intelligence. And yes, I do suffer a lot from
anxiety, most of which stems from me explaining these anxieties in my own
head.

------
PhantomGremlin
"Clever" in the article means "high IQ". Some interesting nuggets. E.g.:

    
    
       maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford
       University aged 12, she dropped out of her
       course before taking her finals and started
       waitressing. She later worked as a call girl
    

and

    
    
       fair, unbiased decision-making is largely
       independent of IQ
    

and

    
    
       someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice
       as likely to max out their credit card.
    

etc.

I was initially going to skim the article, but I went back and read the whole
thing.

------
convexfunction
I really wish more people grokked Stanovich's algorithmic vs. reflective
intelligence thing. It is so much better at explaining reality than trying to
say "well they're smart but they have ~character flaws~ so they don't
succeed"!

~~~
cyphunk
i wonder if anyone could tell me the difference between Stanovich's autonomous
VS algorithmic mind and Kahneman's Fast VS slow thinking?

~~~
dunkelheit
(disclaimer: I have no understanding of the subject, I just searched the
Internet)

This longish article by Stanovich himself (link:
[http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_fil...](http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_files/Stanovich_Two_MInds.pdf))
seems to answer your question (and falcolas' question as well). I am reading
it right now and basically it seems that he proposes a three-level model as a
refinement of Kahneman's two-level model.

------
asgard1024
What if the causation is the opposite? What if the people who ruminate more or
are more anxious about conversations become smarter and more eloquent, by
taking more time analyzing those things?

~~~
sz4kerto
If we stick to IQ as the definition of 'cleverness' (which can be argued, of
course), then this is not really true. IQ cannot be significantly increased
with learning, conversation, etc. I used to be* a Mensa member, and it's
really surprising and eye opening to see the variety of people there. You can
find university teachers and enterpreneurs, but they are not too common. The
average Mensa member is really an average citizen with an average job -
librarian in a small town, sysadmin in an elementary school, or just an
unemployed, depressed twenty-something.

*: you need to pay membership fee to be a member, and I found it really uninteresting after a while to go to Mensa meetings. IQ is not something that can really connect people.

~~~
dunkelheit
I am curious what do these meetings look like. Could you describe them? Why
did you find them uninteresting?

------
nsomaru
seems to be a dupe of this BBC Article [0]. Sufiah Yosuf responds on her blog
here [1].

[0]: [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of-
be...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of-being-clever)

[1]: [http://inquiringfeminist.com/2015/04/14/hello-new-
readers/](http://inquiringfeminist.com/2015/04/14/hello-new-readers/)

------
jbrooksuk
> TerryADavis: Highs and lows balance for everyone.

------
danr4
I agree with the wisdom part. but wait... maybe I'm biased because I can
relate with it, which means it doesn't apply to me, which means i can't relate
with it. My mind is an escher drawing.

------
CPLX
I thought the most interesting observation was somewhat buried, specifically
the way the author closely links intelligence to anxiety. That has a ring of
truth to it.

------
thatswrong0
Ramblings:

I was recently talking with coworkers about intelligence, and the many forms
of it that exist beyond just raw cognitive quickness, of course in the context
of the company. There are social skills and being able to interact with
people, curiosity, the ability to absorb information quickly, the ability to
make cognitive leaps quickly, the ability to just get things done, etc.

I would say that these all qualify as different forms of intelligence. They
all have their uses. Some can be trained / improved more than others. They
also can conflict with each other at times. For example, one of my coworkers
talked about how he spent a couple hours investigating the inner-workings of
the Java garbage collector because of a bug that actually was caused by some
code that was accidentally allocating orders of magnitude extra memory than
intended. I laughed and said I was lazier and would never have bothered
looking so deeply and would have just assumed I did something stupid. I see
this as curiosity + quick cognitive leaps vs. getting things done.

Jumping to the end, the article talks about wisdom as a learnable skill. In
this context, I would say that wisdom is yet another type of intelligence, one
that can have an impact on your other intelligences, and it is one that is
quite trainable.

Onto happiness - I think it's a bit of a shame that society doesn't attempt to
teach "happiness"[0] more. Maybe this is a stretch, but I feel like there are
some legitimate fundamental ideas and mental skills that could help a lot of
people live more fulfilling lives.

In the case of worrying, for example, it would be helpful to be able to
quickly identify _that_ you're worrying (which can be hard to catch!), ask
yourself why you're worrying, and then either come up with an plan to resolve
it if it's solvable or, in the case of agonizing over the human condition,
accepting it as something that just is. This is something that you can
practice.

Or goals. Schools seem to emphasize setting goals and creating plans to
achieve them. But I feel like I was never taught about what to do once I
reached a goal, or what to think about goals in general. Every time I reached
a goal, I was satisfied briefly, and then I felt sort of an emptiness that
accompanied the thought of "That's it? What now?" Now that I've done plenty of
reading (e.g. Mastery by George Leonard), I've learned to accept that while
it's useful to set goals, they're inherently unsatisfying to achieve.
Fulfillment lies in the struggle to achieve them, and the struggle never ends.

Maybe these kinds of things are hard to teach since they're so inherently
personal and learning them requires tight integration with personal
motivations (which is hard to do on a grand scale), and maybe what works for
me wouldn't work for many others, but I still feel like there must be some
"happiness" knowledge nuggets that could be taught broadly.

[0] I prefer fulfillment to happiness because it's way more realistic. Minds
are pretty chaotic, and I've found that even when I _should_ be happy since
everything is going well, I can be unhappy. Likewise, even when a lot of bad
things happen, I can be really happy. Fulfillment, on the other hand, seems a
lot more stable and less vulnerable to the random meandering of mood.

------
Dewie3
People here seem to like talking about _trade-offs_ , specifically technical
ones. Maybe intelligence is just another trade-off.

~~~
Mithaldu
Purely biologically speaking it is a known trade-off. Intelligence allows tool
usage and abstract reasoning about one's surroundings, but it comes of the
cost of using up fantastic amounts of energy, which is why even in humans
intelligence is not continuously used at the highest level of processing.

~~~
x0054
Don't forget higher child infant mortality and premature births. Humans are
born several months earlier than optimal in order to be able to fit that huge
head of ours through the birth canal.

~~~
austinjp
That's not my understanding of the modern interpretation of head size and
pelvis size. I believe current thinking is that the (healthy) mother simply
cannot metabolise nutrients efficiently enough to sustain further growth of
the (healthy) foetus beyond a certain size. Evolutionarily, the pelvis has
adapted as far as necessary, and no further.

~~~
austinjp
Although actually your statement and mine aren't incompatible.

Anyway, it's quite a fascinating area of study, including biomechanics,
anthropology, metabolism, and more:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma)

