I have noticed that a lot of/majority of "regular people" tend to coast along on the back of others as a way of life. If "smart people" are perceived by friends and family as being problem solvers, many will route their problems to a "smart friend", someone who seems to have their life somewhat in order or always have the answer to everything. I used to get an endless stream of requests for everything from technical help, legal/financial advice, help planning vacation, help making decisions on purchases, career advice and help fixing their "failed to launch" kids, really often far exceeding simply asking for an opinion, folks effectively transfer ownership of their problems to you for you to fix.
Of course they may praise you for this and perhaps you get addicted to this positive feedback, but it comes at a high cost, especially as you can end up spending so much effort on "friends" that you neglect to solve or even recognize your own problems.
I have come to realize recently that I don't actually have any friends, only dependents. Declining to take ownership of people's problems caused basically all of them to more or less cut off contact with me (maybe I get a text once a year or something), but I am so much happier now that I ever was before.
> "regular people" tend to coast along on the back of others as a way of life...many will route their problems to a "smart friend"
The human animal's basic survival strategy is cooperation. I'd imagine your "regular people" friends should be willing to help you out with something not readily in your power (e.g. house-sitting). Because you are intelligent, you get a certain kind of request; if you had a big truck or big muscles, you'd get a different sort.
If you've helped people without the expectation of reciprocity or setting boundaries, you've created the dependencies. On the other hand, it sounds like you have a lot of favors you can call in :-)
My experience has been that when you go to call in these favors you get to encounter that person's boundaries. Often their boundaries are that they don't like to help in the same way that they ask for help.
I don’t see what the problem is. If you have helped someone a lot, and then call in a favor and the ghost you, you didn’t lose a friend. You lost a parasite.
It’s like when you lend money to someone and they avoid you to never pay you back. Depending on the amount that can be money well spent.
The problem is the transaction is unbalanced. They got help when they needed and refused to help when called upon. Someone took more than they gave and there's no real way to address the issue so the only sensible thing to do is to avoid putting oneself in such a position in the first place.
It's not a "transaction", it's a relationship: they are never perfectly balanced.
It's also hard to measure one's contribution in a relationship (hey, maybe they were a really good listener; or maybe they can't find time to help you move, but when your kids get sick, they'll move the world to get the best possible care for them?), so let's not go and introduce quick-and-simple rules for what definitely are relations on a case-by-case basis.
Yes, it is hard. It's okay if it's a little unbalanced. Thing is a lot of altruistic people end up getting stuck in a pattern they're there for everyone but nobody is there for them. That seriously hurts.
Yeah, I agree. It's a problem with the world. But it's not generally a problem you can solve.
The problem that you solve is information. You don't know who's trustworthy and who isn't. If I can give a small amount of help to someone in exchange for knowing if they are trustworthy or not, that's probably worth it.
The people that reciprocate you can keep in your life and they become valuable friends. I am more than happy with the tradeoff of sometimes giving people some help that they don't reciprocate in exchange for finding the ones that will.
> If I can give a small amount of help to someone in exchange for knowing if they are trustworthy or not, that's probably worth it.
That's a life skill I had to learn. I was raised believing that if I was a good altruistic person all that goodness would come back to me. Well, way too many times it didn't and it was extremely frustrating until I figured out how to deal with it.
Sometimes it's okay to be selfish. It stops people from taking advantage.
Sure, I'd love to have real friendships where friends stay by my side through the good and bad times. Unfortunately it turned out to be difficult to make good friends like that. So I've decided to never do anything that leads to these expectations and "you owe me" situations.
> I'd imagine your "regular people" friends should be willing to help you out with something not readily in your power
That was actually the trigger for me...a few years ago I needed a very small favor and literally not one person would help because it was just slightly inconvenient for them, at the same time it was a massive ordeal for me, (I had to take a week off work, rent a car, and drive across the country and spent two weeks in a terrible panic besides). Given how much time and resources I'd spent on every one of these folks I was completely shocked to say the least. Everyone gave an obvious and transparent lie as an excuse, saying something like "oh sorry, but hopefully you can find someone else".
I really picked up on this broadly shared idea that "someone else" is supposed to handle this. I really think a lot of the traits that produce "regular people" as I use the term here are this combination of laziness, irresponsibility, and a narrow focus such that they're truly only aware of their own wants and needs at any given moment. I guess things in modern society are so diffused nowadays that it is possible for people deflect a ton of responsibility on other people.
Put another way, most folks are just coasting by as efficiently as possible, but this strategy doesn't produce world class anything, nor deep knowledge nor expertise of any subject. And these are the people who will disproportionately be looking to others to solve their problems.
Another interesting thing I've noticed on this is that while I quickly fell off the radar after a just a few "sorry, I can't help" replies, these folks don't seem to have any trouble whatsoever dealing with each other. Sure, they complain about people quite a lot, about lies and excuses and last minute cancellations or whatever, but week after week it seems everyone in their social group is just fine with the situation.
I think Seneca addresses this well in 'On the Shortness of Life'[0][1].
Essentially we are very wise with our money -- we don't just give it away freely, because it is of value to us. We aren't as wise with our time -- we give it to anyone that asks. If you're frugal with your time -- no longer giving your time to others except when you want to, your life suddenly becomes longer and more effectively used.
Of course there are a few missing puzzle pieces like what is worth spending time on, how do you motivate yourself to fill this time, etc.
it comes at a high cost, especially as you can end up spending so much effort on "friends" that you neglect to solve or even recognize your own problems.
This is a valuable insight. At some point, even the closest to you are their own individuals. Short of saving their lives from imminent physical danger, at some point, one must leave others "to their fate."
I have come to realize recently that I don't actually have any friends, only dependents.
This is not either-or. There is a friend-dependent spectrum. Also, how you might evaluate this is strongly affected by your own personality. The closer you are to the "dark triad" in the space of personality traits, the more skewed your perceptions will be towards the "dependent" viewpoint.
I'm not the author of the parent comment, but I think you may be taking the message too far.
>"Short of saving their lives from imminent physical danger, at some point, one must leave others "to their fate.""
I think it's good to help people who are going through challenging periods in their lives. The key to limiting one's efforts is that the problems need to be temporary ones, and the 'assistant' should take on a supporting role, not a leading one.
The key to limiting one's efforts is that the problems need to be temporary ones, and the 'assistant' should take on a supporting role, not a leading one.
Sounds like we agree, actually. At a certain point, one must leave others "to their fate" good or bad. In certain matters, we can only help. It's up to them to actually do the work, if they can or if they will.
In other words, it's not healthy to be committed to controlling that which one cannot control. Especially if it's another sentient being.
In addition to what you mentioned, there is a hidden cost of responsibility. Once we advise people, they start holding us responsible for the result. Something goes wrong? It's now our fault.
I stopped helping people with basic computer problems the second or third time I was told that I broke something. I realized that the interactions were basically always unpleasant. People seem to be much happier just calling geek squad, or whomever.
Exactly. People can be so ungrateful sometimes. You help them enthusiastically, talk to them about good computing habits like not opening spam email links and not installing 20 untrustworthy browser extensions (the modern day toolbars!) only to get blamed when their computers fall into disrepair for the exact same reasons. It got to the point I'll pretend to be technologically illiterate just to avoid these situations.
If I take the initiative to build something that I think will be helpful, or fix something that’s broken in someone else’s project, then I suddenly “own” that thing.
Which is ok, until I get 20 things piled on me that I now “own”, and I can no longer keep up with them all.
Suddenly I’m the impediment to getting anything done, because everyone turns from “collaborative problem solvers” into “users of my thing”, and when any of the things need more things added to it, then my “things” are no longer just tools to make their jobs better.
They are now, instead, obstacles somehow keeping everyone from doing the things they were managing to do (less efficiently and less comfortably) before.
And if your advice was good it was their idea all along.
Kind of like fixing computer stuff.
6 months later something completely unrelated breaks and it's obviously your fault because they can do no wrong and you were the last person messing with it.
Each person is responsible to solve their own problems, but I see intelligence as a type of "strength". A 30-year-old is far stronger than a 75-year-old, so it's nearly a moral duty to help them get a fridge through their door (provided, of course, that the older person isn't being a jerk about it).
In the same way, a tech-savvy smart person should help a less-than-gifted person with things like setting up their email or figuring out an ideal flow system for their small business.
Granted, this must all be driven by love for people. Without that, it's worse than just pushing them away.
I'm not especially smart, or happy, but, personally, I don't know how to be it, or what it feels like. I know pleasure, but being in a constant pleasurable state is not what is meant by happiness as far as I know.
Slavoj Žižek (someone who does seem to be especially smart):
“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”
The 'eternal struggle' is such an interesting concept and I've thought about it a lot. It really does seem like, while true happiness may not solely come from overcoming challenges, if those challenges aren't present you definitely won't be happy. I think this aligns better than the top post's idea of "smart people see the awful things that can't be changed", it's moreso that smart people aren't finding satisfying challenges in the first place. I remember when I went wild downloading ROMs for games when I found out that was thing; once I ended up with all the games I wanted to play, I lost most of my interest to play any of them.
My headcanon is that it's tied to the fact that our life spans are limited and we've evolved to derive the most satisfaction when we're working on a task that is difficult for us individually or has vague success criteria, which seems to match up in part with the article's takeaway. It's also how I reason that not only fucking things up, but also complaining about it and trying to fix it are all required for people to feel happy. I see this ethos in a lot of old religions as well - humans striving towards the same qualities as a godhead but never quite getting there no matter how awesome their abilities become, or how our 'perfect' state was when we were ignorant of the consequences of our actions.
> Pleasure is not the right goal. Homeostasis, balance, equanimity, peace are much better.
Along with these, sustainability. Imagine finding balance and peace, but seeing clearly that the tools and techniques used to get and stay there are temporary. Pretty unsettling. We have to get there in ways that are long lasting and unlikely to change radically.
Appreciating and creating beauty isn't contingent on peace. Often art comes from a place of passion. I think freedom from emotional turmoil in the general sense would be enjoyed by everyone, I can agree in that capacity. However, that list of synonyms is rather ambiguous and to me elicits an imperative for impassivity, antithetical to striving towards anything. I guess it's a valid path if that suits your nature, but I'm getting more out of the human experience by evoking passions.
I'm just saying that comment I replied to makes this sound as universal truth. Wanting children and being happy about having children are subjective things. There are people who don't have children and are happy about it, people who have children but are unhappy about it and everything inbetween.
People who want to have children should have them, and people who don't want to have children shoudln't have them =)
Its not a mathematical problem that you just compare the curves, some problems are hard and cannot be generalized.
And you are adding other factors if you think people who do not want kids are somehow the outliers. Same as if people wanted kids might be if you actually looked closely, for most people its not a very well thought out choice.
I'm with you wrt everything you wrote, except this part:
> People who want to have children should have them, and people who don't want to have children shoudln't have them =)
I think it's fine either way! People who want to have children are often disappointed when it's not all roses as they imagined. Conversely, people who don't want to have children are often surprised at the little joys they bring...
Having kids is insanely stressful in the beginning. Your entire life shifts to revolve around them and its utterly exhausting. I could not manage having kids and maintaining friendships at the same time and lost most of my friends due to inaction on my part. As kids get older though for me ~10 years old, they begin to have a lot of autonomy. You see the results of all of your efforts and you realize that everything you have done has contributed to create these small awesome little people with their own thoughts and goals. I have not cried since I was a small child, even when close family died I just shrugged and trudged on. I am for the most part relatively unemotional. My kid came into my room the other day, just smiling and telling me about something and it was suddenly the proudest I have ever been, I almost cried in happiness. It was one of the most surreal things I have ever experienced. I am really looking forward to see what he does next in life and am actually happy about getting to find out.
And that's my fear when I get older (without kids). That the happiness of being single now and not dealing with kids and having more disposable income, etc. etc. will only go so far but that I'll be depressed about being lonely in the future when I am a senior.
I can definitely see how my siblings with kids will be way happier as grandparents.
But yeah, I'm content now without kids cause I get to sleep whenever and my disposable income is enough. lol
Also though, I'm never arrogant in making proclamations that people with kids are miserable.
They might have tough times in the beginning, but the older I get the more at peace they seem as parents.
For one thing, after your children have grown up and moved out, most people are really glad they've gone through parenting, have an adult child they are in relation with, potentially grandchildren to enrich their lives with etc.
To claim that having kids makes you happier in the long-term requires comparing against the control group of childless adults. Last I checked, there was no appreciable difference in happiness between these groups in middle age.
From the data I've seen, the strongest predictors of happiness are maintaining strong social ties. Children are only one way to do that. I've seen no data suggesting having children specifically is associated with more happiness at any stage of life.
Naval has a great definition which I agree with. Happiness Is Peace in Motion
Peace is happiness at rest https://nav.al/peace-motion
Another less liked person, haha is that Andrew Tate knob, and while for a knob, he does have some good ideas, one of them is something along the lines of, I dont need to be happy, I dont even think about it, as long as there are no problems, I am happy, if there are problems I am unhappy, unless I am unhappy, then I would say that I am happy.
There's a beautiful poem by Giovanni Pascoli, "Aléxandros" in which Alexander the Great gets to the Indus river with his army after having conquered half of Asia; he knows it's the end of his conquest and thinks - it was better when I was dreaming of it, I was happier when more challenges, road, destiny where ahead than behind.
James Clear talks about this in his book Atomic Habits. Basically people are happier during the _process_ of trying to accomplish some goal than when they actually accomplish that goal.
I am biased against Slavoj Žižek because I'm not very fond of him.
I disagree with happiness not being important. It is important, but it is not something that you can have all of the time, because human mood, emotional state and the experience itself is always a wave, going up and down, constant fluctuation. A person needs to learn to identify where in the curve they are and not allow the curve to rule their life. Once your able to be aware of the curve you can start taking steps to decrease the down trend of the curve so that you can spend more time in the up trend.
Humans notice change - diff, if you will. Meaning if you were to be in absolute happiness for extended period of time, your frame of reference would slowly fade and you would no longer know what is happiness for you.
That's why, it is my personal opinion, that you should just sit down, drink a hot beverage of choice, acknowledge the Yin-Yang nature of reality and choose happiness.
No curve goes up or down for ever. I'm not a financial adviser.
I can’t stand Zizek’s verbose nonsense. In this one paragraph he makes like 5 absurd statements one after the other, with such confidence and certainty that they look smart.
The closing sentiment takes the cake for me. A neat little shanty of the mindset of the communist smart men.
Not to mention that Zizek talking sounds like someone slurping ramen.
I understand the quotation (and only partially agree), but only because I've seen the same thing expressed much better, and without the absurd parts, in... the Unabomber manifesto. Basically, people need sensible difficulties to overcome.
I can guarantee, that trying to make someone else happy, will never ever fail to make you happy :). Even in the unlikely event you fail to make that person happy, the effort of trying is fulfilling. Now the problem is, most of us , myself included, forget to direct our efforts to making others happy. I imagine God up there like an exasperated parent : "If only you guys would actually listen to what I suggested, you know, loving each other and stuff, you would actually be happier. You know that? but instead you insist on being out for yourselves"
> I can guarantee, that trying to make someone else happy, will never ever fail to make you happy :
I can guarantee that there exist several data points that refute this.
Definitely can guarantee many cases where doing this to excess for some people is a net negative.
Can certainly show cases which led to divorce (i.e. always trying to make spouse happy was unstable, and the marriage would have been much better off with randomly ignoring spouse).
Helping others can make you happy. Just don't do it at the expense of self care.
I agree 100% with your last line ;). OK, my statement "trying to make someone else happy, will never ever fail to make you happy", perhaps needs a footnote such as "in moderation, obviously. does not include sacrificing your entire life for someone determined to remain unhappy or suffering from severe depression". Then again, its surprising even someone with depression who doesn't give a lot back, you can still go around thinking "well I tried" and your friends respect you, perhaps they emulate you. Good begets good, and all that. That's the idea of the pay it forward movement etc
What a great quote. I fully agree with the part that we don't actually know what we want most of the time. I have begun to ask myself exactly this question if I feel unhappy about something vague. Often I cannot really answer my own question.. or lose myself in if-then scenarios or plain uncertainty.
I guess my own realization is that there usually are many satisfying goals or outcomes and those change more often than you'd like. That's why "the path is the goal" is also a great quote.
There’s a point in getting the best with what you’ve got. But I know, sometimes we are served really crappy cards so unless that’s the case there’s no reason not to be happy. Comparing ourselves with others is quite often a major reason for unhappiness for many. Avoiding that is key
How long are you going to be unhappy about that? It’s passes even quicker than a cold and everybody gets it once in a while. Happiness is not to cry over spilled milk.
Many people conflate hedonistic pleasure with happiness. This is a big mistake that leads to addiction, selfishness and inevitable dissatisfaction. Even happiness as a sustainable state may be an unrealistic or unattainable goal. For me the answer to this puzzle is a finely tuned balance between self growth and contentment with perhaps a heavier emphasis on contentment. Regular and consistent periods of reflection and appreciation for what you have (no matter how small) is the recipe for promoting states of contentment. Pleasure is ephemeral, happiness comes and goes but contentment can be reliably and directly cultivated.
Some elaboration on your opinion would provide a greater contribution to the discussion. As an aside however, 'Henry' in Oscar Wilde's A Picture of Dorian Gray provided the most beautiful and articulate defence of hedonism I have ever read. But I am still convinced that in relation to the project of the promotion of ones long-term well-being hedonism is a philosophical and psychological dead-end.
In my own experience the more I satiated my hedonistic desires the more I wanted and the less pleasure I attained from doing so. Furthermore it promoted a sense of selfishness in me that made the experience of living less fulfilling. Couple that with my own observations working in a variety of medical settings encountering a wide range of people from all walks of life. Without exception I noticed that the people who were selfish were unhappy and the people who were the most selfish were the most unhappy (correlation not causation I know but pertinent none the less). Generally the people who were most concerned about others well-being were gifted with a light and pleasant demeanour that gave me the strong impression that they were experiencing life in an altogether different (and to my eye more desirable) way than those that were selfish.
And the pattern running through all of that was that selfish people were always unhappy with what they had or what they were given, invariably showed little or no appreciation for anything. Selfless people were always appreciative of everything and anything.
The above is anecdotal but from my prospective not inconsequential. And for me at least, intentionally practising appreciation, when I manage to do so, never fails to have a positive impact on how I feel in the world. Just my two cents.
> Generally the people who were most concerned about others well-being were gifted with a light and pleasant demeanour
Kinda like the light and pleasant demeanor of Robin Williams? This is crazy ovservation bias, you have no idea of the actual, lived experiences of these people. Honestly, my experience is that people who really suffer with depression are consistently some of the nicest, most thoughtful people. They understand how shitty it is to be down and do as much as they are capable of to try and stop the spread and help themselves, and being appreciative and positive are, as you point out, pretty excellent at making one feel better. People who are constant downers and negative, in my experience, are more self-obsessed and trying to get something.
Completely agree. My views stated above however don't rest purely on these observations because the data (my observations) are inherently noisy. A certain amount of inference needs to be made based on direct behavioural observation of others and with any inference comes a margin of uncertainty. I outlined these observations in response to someone who seemed to object or disagree with my original comment but gave very little in terms of supporting argument. But my views on these matters do not solely rest on observations of others but also by my own experience as a conscious and self aware (I think :) being and reading about the ideas of what others think about this issue of "happiness".
Disclaimer: I don't think my original comment is correct in any absolute sense, but I do believe that it is a more promising and fruitful direction than merely perusing pleasure for its own sake, based on my own experience and the observed behavioral and emotional patterns of some of my most intimate relationships
I don't want to speak for bobsmooth either but I'll take their comment at face value until given reason otherwise.
I agree with the sentiment, I think it's underrated. I live a fairly hedonistic life and I'm overall a very happy and content person. But I think hedonism only brings value in the context of an otherwise stable life at its foundation. You could make the argument that it's the stability that brings me happiness, but I've introspected about this a bunch and the pursuit of pleasure really does bring a large chunk of the sustained happiness.
As an aside, one of the common warnings/issues with hedonism is the hedonistic treadmill; that we become accustomed to our current pleasures and receive diminishing returns. But the way I think I get around that by rotating between various pleasures, so once I come back to one in particular it's once again novel.
If you are equating 'hedonism' and 'living in the moment' then we have a language issue. Which is understandable as our language for such concepts and our language for mental states in general is not very well defined. My interpretation of hedonism is seeking pleasure for pleasures sake. Pleasure is the end goal and the more that is experienced the better!
Living in the moment is a stated goal of many contemplative disciplines including ones that explicitly eschew any hedonistic tendencies by practicing some flavour of asceticism.
Actually an argument could be made that hedonism can lead you astray from the present moment as your yearnings and desires increase for more and more pleasure the more you try and satiate these desires which usually entails some yearning for some pleasure experience in the future.
Living in the moment it seems is closer to the bullseye in terms of ones ability to experience well being. Hedonism just breeds further desire which by definition gives rise to what Buddhists termed Dukkha which is often poorly translated as 'suffering' but a more apt word would be 'dissatisfaction' (1)
I’ve seen some other studies that say the opposite and I’m generally skeptical of results that come out of the GSS (it’s too easy to data dredge). There’s a decent amount of evidence that IQ positively correlates with happiness. Here’s a study I found real quick: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22998852/
Results: Happiness is significantly associated with IQ. Those in the lowest IQ range (70-99) reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with the highest IQ group (120-129). Mediation analysis using the continuous IQ variable found dependency in activities of daily living, income, health and neurotic symptoms were strong mediators of the relationship, as they reduced the association between happiness and IQ by 50%.
There’s also evidence that IQ correlates with education, income, number of friends, lifespan, having a successful marriage, and having the desired number of children you desire (in case that’s not clear here’s an example: if you want 2 kids, it’s more likely you end up with 2 kids the higher your IQ). All that surely plays into happiness
Smart people will on average probably be better of financially, but that doesn't transfer directly to happiness.
A characteristic of "smart people" is the ability to identify and solve problems across a range of domains. That works well when the problem is some programming task, drawing a new house, gathering data for a report you write or whatever.
But what if you identify problems you cannot solve? E.g. a smart person might realize, that the "American democracy" is fundamentally broken, but there's no way to solve this (vote all you want, the top of both parties gets their way anyway, so unless you're 100% aligned with Pelosi or Trump you're shafted). A smart person will identify the challenges their children have and will try to solve it by choosing the right school, but will fret forever that it wasn't the right choice.
A not-so-smart person will believe, that as long as his party wins the next election everything will be better. A not-so-smart person will send their children to the default school for the district where they live.
So a smart person will every day identify problems there are out of their realm to solve. They know their actions only have very limited - and perhaps even detrimental - impact on solving these things. All the while the not-so-smart people goes with the flow, doesn't worry too much, because they don't realize there was a problem to begin with.
(I'm doing "averages" here. Of course a not-so-smart and poor person might be acutely aware of their dire financial situation which reflects negatively on their happiness, but at least they're being told they have the power to change that)
I'm not sure, it anecdotally appears to me that not-so-smart people tend to get angrier over political problems, for example, and just problems in general.
The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy.
But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congrats, you have learned the history of humanity and how our society functions, and your reward is you get to be angry at the vast amount of injustice.
I was expecting the OP to say that smarter people were less likely to be happy, because that is the sense a lot of us who believe ourselves to be "smart" have.
But that's not what OP is about, and it suggests that's not really what the research says either, there's maybe a bit of hint of a small negative correlation like that, but mostly it says: no correlation.
Rather than making the argument you are making, which I have heard before, I found the OP argument to be novel to me, and find really thought-provoking:
The model of "well-defined" vs "poorly-defined" problems, and that what we call "smart" is skill at solving "well-defined" problems, but that happiness actually depends on skill at solving "poorly-defined" problems. Which is probably not correlated to skill at solving well-defined problems at all, that being "smart" at solving well-defined problems doesn't help or hurt happiness, it just doesn't matter.
This rings really true to me, and isn't quite as depressing as the oft-heard theory that you're saying here, that smart people are more likely to be miserable because they see the awful. Not what OP is saying, OP is even disagreeing, really.
Problem is there is no real evidence provide to back the assertion. Is the ability to solve well-defined problems really different from the ability to solve poorly-defined problems?
"One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives" seems like a circular definition. So people that feel good do so because they are better at solving poorly defined problems? How do we know?
I'm positive it is a different skill and I even think that those two skills can be at odds at times.
Poorly defined problems often come down to things like creativity and your ability to handle emotions. Sometimes you have to follow a seemingly senseless curiosity to find the right path forward. Sometimes it is about finding beauty where it isn't expected. Also these problems have multiple valid and fundamentally different solutions and can be highly subjective. Think art.
Well defined problems are about juggling multiple things in your head, high concentration, relying on fundamental knowledge, heuristics etc. All of that possibly under pressure. There might be multiple solutions but they are typically on a scale (good enough vs perfect etc.) or are choices between measurable tradeoffs. Think engineering.
Intuitively sure, but would be nice to have some data to back it up; my intuition could say otherwise. Also, even if they're different how do we know how the correlation works? The article claims there is either no correlation or negative correlation. How do we know that?
There's even less evidence for the idea that smart people see how bad reality really is... Even dumb people know there are "kids starving in Africa", and people beat their wife and kids in their home town.
Yes, but dumb people think those problems can be easily solved, and smart people think about the second and third order effects. A dumb person will think sending free food will solve the problem, and a smart person will realize that will negatively effect food production as local farmers cannot compete with free
Well at least I didn't see any evidence that says a good accountant would make a worse physicist than a bad accountant. So the assertion that people that are good at solving well-defined problems are not as good at (or at least has no correlation with) solving poorly-defined problems is not well supported.
Seems to indicate that the threshold hypothesis (IQ helps creativity/divergent thinking up to a point, then levels out in correlation) is largely correct
Good points, and I would even go one step further and cast doubt on the notion that "dumb" people don't see the awful. That is not my experience at all.
I think we have different experiences then. Or, maybe, your interpretation of 'seeing the awful' is different.
I see 'dumb' people fall for pyramid schemes/MLM which seem obvious to me. They will only see the awful after they've lost money. We both see it, but there's a period where they don't, while I do.
I see people fall for sales tactics and which are transparent to me. Getting a €400 discount on an €800 delivery package for a second hand car that has €150 in actual value, does not seem like a deal to me. Others are very happy and are happy the sales person gave them the fake discount.
When other people are happy that the government reduces taxes on gas due to rising prices, I see rising corporate profits that were paid for with public funding.
When some people get angry about the conspiracy they read on Facebook, I get angry about the manipulation going on that caused that conspiracy to spread.
In the end, in my experience, the 'dumb' people see awful more on the micro level, while I see it more on the macro level. That probably probably makes us just about as unhappy about the stuff that happens around us, just from completely different perspectives.
The only real difference I see, is that I seem to have a harder time finding people to discuss things with than the average person seems to. Where 'dumb people' just seem to be able to repeat talking points and opinions they've heard somewhere, I often prefer more in depth discussions and conversations on the why and how, causing me to be an outsider (sometimes).
The isolation is horrible. All I can see is bickering between interest group/partisant politics when the solutions require neither or in fact require the best of both. Any sane person would agree with both sides but get rid of all the rent seeking. Hence you are now stuck in this position where you hate everyone for their horrible, pointless and counterproductive actions and love them for all the good ideas they have.
Because you aren't picking sides, you will be accused by every side to be siding with the "enemy".
> Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they're also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today."
Part of the problem IMHO is that we make out wisdom to be this grand thing, rather than simple and effective thinking (that cannot be put into a short list of rules).
“How do you host a good party” might be ill-defined to OP, but I’m sure this is a well defined question with a good answer for a lot of people. (Let’s call that “social quotient”)
I came here to make the same points that you made so eloquently. The only thing I’ll add is that I wonder if there is some correlation between the traits that make someone so good at solving “well defined” problems and mental illnesses. You can’t be “happy” if you’re paranoid (as one of the OP examples- a 9/11 conspiracy where his own theory- Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe, or CTMU- is under attack.
I forget where, but I read somewhere that people are good at recognizing patterns are susceptible to conspiratorial thinking because they see patterns everywhere.
And one of the components of intelligence is pattern recognition.
Basically they fall for the social version of pareidolia.
It's less about making an argument for the "correct" definition of "smart"; and more about saying that the way psychologists measure "intelligence" (eg when trying to study things like "are smarter people more or less happy") is measuring success at solving well-defined problems. That things like IQ tests as well as academic success are about solving well-defined problems.
You can think "smart people" are whatever you want, it's not about any "true" definition of what "smart" means, it's just a word that means different things to different people -- often probably not very rigorously defined or consistently applied. The OP is in fact about investigating what some of these different meanings may be with relevance to correlation to happiness.
I don't think academic success only involves well-defined problems even if your work doesn't involve research and just teaching. Being able to convey properly ideas, concepts and information to students is not a well defined problem...
Oh, I think OP is talking about success in school as a student, particularly children in "lower" education (K-12), not adults in post-graduate academic careers.
Serious question - how old are you? Anecdotally I’ve noticed smart people tend to have this attitude until their late 20s when it starts mellowing out.
Now I’m a bit older I see my smarter friends happier than anyone and the less smart just about the same as always
I'm much happier in my 30s, having enough experience that I've learned to let go and accept existential dread for the useless bother that it is, than I was in my 20s. Truly realizing that nobody's that special also was a qualitative leap.
Not that I'd call myself « smart » with a straight face, but I certainly used to care a lot about things outside of my control.
Same, but part of that is I realized how much I didn't know about things which I was originally quite certain about. Epistemology is a field which is sadly usually confined to religious schools. It's pretty eye-opening when you start applying it to things you think you knew.
It was more than a little disturbing when I started reading the methodology sections of scientific papers that make the headlines and I realized at LEAST 90% of them were absolute bullshit.
You have the life experience to know what will and won't affect you, and you've found an equilibrium of control and impact that apparently makes you happy.
That's very you specific, not really related to your age, other than that it took you until your 30s to find that equilibrium.
There's nothing at all written down anywhere that ensures such an equilibrium for everyone, however. Especially for folks who represent a minority in their society, life is a lot more threatening and a lot less controllable for them, typically.
For some, that equilibrium may never come, and while that doesn't invalidate your experience, it certainly doesn't support the idea that "you'll calm down when you're older".
> You have the life experience to know what will and won't affect you, and you've found an equilibrium of control and impact that apparently makes you happy.
I think some people have too much empathy to ever reach that point.
I have a few friends that literally broke out in tears when Russia began the invasion of Ukraine. They don't know a single person in Ukraine. Nothing about the war truly has an effect on their day-to-day lives. They don't even have investments that got clobbered.
Yet they shed tears over innocent civilian lives being lost.
These people have been on the verge of nervous breakdown ever since COVID hit.
Seeing people on such an extreme end makes me feel like I might be slightly sociopathic because I read the news and just think "Well that sucks" and then move on with my day, knowing it makes no difference to me and my life.
What you're feeling is selfishness, not sociopathy, for what it's worth! I don't think a sociopath would wonder what you're wondering here, but I'm no expert.
I think of selfishness and I think of taking deliberate actions to serve ones self at the detriment of others. Things like hoarding limited resources or taking a second slice of cake before everyone has had their first.
I will never forgive you, John. You denied me cake.
Ding! At a certain point constant existential dread becomes tiring. You spend years mulling on it and the answer continues to be there’s nothing you can do, so what’s the point in worrying? Might as well go do something else and enjoy yourself.
Precisely! In the end, life will kill all of us at some point. Until then we have two choices: We either do what we can with what we have, or we don't.
That’s exactly my strategy for shutting down the existential dread mill. Whenever it bothers me too much I’m pointing my attention to how it all eventually turns to dust. The effect of that enables me to try to enjoy the now.
To me it is mostly that life is boring. At some point you have seen everything interesting and anything you see hence are just fitting into the same basic patterns. Discussions, tv shows, books etc. Living is still better than not living, but every time you experience something new the things left to experience becomes smaller. A few romance movies and you have seen all of them, a few action movies etc, or even psychology papers or math papers etc.
You haven't seen all of them, but the more you see the less value you get from seeing another. So we can conclude that living for an eternity wouldn't be particularly more interesting than living for 100 years, as 100 years is more than enough to see many things in each category. You might not become a world expert in everything, but experiencing the things worth experiencing in the categories doesn't take particularly long to do and after that life is just padding.
The main reason to live now is that there are new interesting things coming out still, since computers are still young. That adds new things over the years. But interesting progress isn't really the norm, it isn't like physics or math has gotten any more interesting over my lifetime and I expect computers to get there before I die and then there isn't much left.
Edit: For example, everything we produce today is based on the same math and physics my grandfather learned in college. There has been no practical progress since then there. Main thing since is new tools enabled by computers that are more precise or automate things, that is interesting but the discoveries enabled by more automation/precise tools will run out at some point.
I think you need bias for the things you create for that to work. For me, if I create something then it isn't more interesting than if someone else created it, and creating something that is really interesting is really hard, people who can do that get rich.
You're focusing on how socially valued your creative work is (and how it ranks relative to others), which is an external factor. I tend to find that if you justify doing creative work on whether it'll be better/more interesting than others or you think it'll increase your status somehow (popularity/wealth), it's not as fulfilling and you'll probably never create anything.
What I find more fulfilling is creating for its own sake and for myself. Completely abandoning the thought of whether what I'm making will have utility for the whole world and I'll be lauded for it. Creating things that I find interesting, and also abandoning the view whether others will find it as interesting or high quality. For me, I've realized that I feel more fulfilled if I'm doing/creating more and consuming less. The mere act of doing/creating something in of itself is the end I try to seek.
But I don't find the things I create to be interesting, that was my point. To me things aren't interesting just because I create them, but that seems to be the case for you, you think that the things you create are interesting somehow, I don't understand that.
Do you mean you find it interesting to learn how to create things? I can agree with that, but once I've learned to create something then I don't see why it would be interesting anymore. That feeling ends very quickly once you've created a few things and understand how to create most related things. If you have programmed games, web, low level and ML at a professional level there isn't much more fun things to learn in programming, and so on. And you get there very quickly if your goal is to learn those things and not to make the most money you can. And even learning more domains and more things gets boring after a while, as the process isn't that different between learning different things.
I think there a few aspects to whether something can be 'interesting' to me with regards to creation (i'm probably missing some):
1. Is the broader topic/activity interesting to me? (interesting in of itself, not for the other reasons listed below)
2. The act of doing is interesting to me in of itself (as opposed to consuming)
3. The act of growth/learning/getting better is interesting to me
4. How good the output of my creation can/will be
5. How will the output be socially valued in a way beneficial to me (whether status/wealth/whatever)
I will say as I've gotten older, I've started to really decrease focus on #5, as I've found it to be the most empty for me (not to say I haven't achieved success there, but it's just a never-ending treadmill when you compare with others).
I try to really focus on #'s 1-3, as they give me the most joy.
As another commentator pointed out you seem entirely focused on consuming. Yes, I can see where this gets boring. I am less apt to visit Reddit because I've seen the same posts dozens of times. I am not apt to watch many movies or shows for the same reason.
But life boring because consumption becomes boring? Nothing could be further from my experience! Instead of a focus on consumption, or even a focus on creation, I find a focus on skill-building to be where it is at. This summer I have taken up beekeeping, keeping chickens, and learning to fish. (We also got a second puppy which is also an adventure in getting to know this dog's way-of-being and how we can train her to be one of us even as she changes us by her inclusion.) Even though I've put hours and hours into all of my projects I am a novice and I recognize that. I have more questions and ambitions now than when I began. With fishing I've caught 9 different species so far this summer. Now I want to catch another set (pike, walleye, perch, catfish), try new lures and learn how to use them, explore new places to fish, and learn how to clean and cook them. (Catch and release solely so far.) I haven't harvested honey yet from my hives nor dealt with mite infestations. With my chickens I'm still learning their patterns and waiting for the first eggs. The chickens also forced me to upskill my building abilities so I could make them a coop and run.
I also have in my wheelhouse of fun-to-me (ie not work) skills house repair (remodeled a bathroom last year), my own car repairs, woodworking, reading and writing, baking, sourdough, kombucha, beer-making, yogurt making, gardening etc. I am no where near a master in any of them and I don't do them all all the time. There is so much fun in learning a new skill, and seeing over time how I become better at it. I am a master of none of those, but I keep growing in all of them. There's always someone else better than me at an aspect of each of those. There is always a new thing to learn to do, something to be better at, feedback to receive. Any one of these could keep me extremely busy for several years trying to master them.
And there are definitely more skills than anyone could learn in a lifetime. Off the top of my head I have on my to-learn list leatherworking, blacksmithing, circuitry, furniture building, 3dprinting, basic microbiology and chemistry, cnc machining, publishing a book, photography, guitar, piano, singing, hunting, target shooting, skeet shooting, and on and on. This is my list, I'm sure other people have their own list with really cool things I've never thought of. (And once I do they get added to my list!)
I think the difference is the mindset. It isn't about whether or not someone else cares about the end product. It isn't even about whether the end product is really any good. It is about me being able to do it adequately. It is about growth and change in myself. If I judged myself by Hollywood, YouTube, or Instagram portrayals of any of my hobbies I would despair. I'm not as good a fisherman as Richard Gene. I'm nowhere near as capable with hand tools as Paul Sellers. My sourdough is pathetic compared to Maurizio of The Perfect Loaf. I don't have the teaching/communication skills of someone like Feynman. But that isn't the point. The point is I'm better at something today than I was yesterday. The point is I did something successfully, even if it isn't perfect. After enjoying that success I can always find more areas to improve which is a new challenge to accept.
Boring? Only if I gave up my personal drive to improve and find things to do.
edit: I focused entirely on skill here. There are also interpersonal relationships that take time and effort and can be richly rewarding. Even without all of the above my life would never be boring because of the people in it.
But isn't it boring knowing roughly where you will be in a year or two? It isn't like fishing or cooking are unknown territory, the skill curve is very easy to look up so you know roughly what you will be able to cook or what kind of things you will do when you go fishing. When I learned physics or programming that altered my worldview, many other things I've learned like play tennis didn't give me anything like that at all. Its just a list of things to practice, and then you have built the skills to execute them and that is it you can now serve properly or whatever you practiced, doesn't give any satisfaction since you knew the outcome even before you began.
So at least to me there aren't many things left worth learning. Maybe chemical engineering could be interesting to learn, as it isn't entirely clear to me how people work with chemistry, I have no idea what I'd be able to do with a few years learning chemical engineering.
I can see the argument. I hope I'm not mischaracterizing is by saying your position is something like: because I can look up the best and what that looks like it is boring to strive for it.
The difference for me is I haven't experienced what it is like to be good. You know how an olympic gymnast makes insane feats of body control appear easy? I have no idea what that feels like. (and I never will, in my upper 30s I am beginning to lose flexibility needed, not to mention I have no desire to put in the effort in that area.) I don't know what it feels like to fight a 70lb halibut in the north pacific. Sure I can watch someone do it, but to have the skill to do it, to have the experience of catching a massive fish is entirely different than watching someone else do it.
yeah, someone else does it better. (In fact I'm watching Richard Gene the Fishing Machine on Youtube as I write this. I'll never be a fisherman like him. ) The difference is doing as opposed to watching. I have all sorts of second-hand fun watching youtube. But I have so much more fun when I make my own accomplishment. My fish may be smaller and objectively less interesting than the one I saw caught on YT. But the experience of doing is radically different than the experience of watching. I find doing much more engaging.
If I were you I'd look for something that you like to do. Doesn't have to be fishing, that's me. Maybe you like to crochet or program, cook or build. Whatever it is, find something that makes you say "hey, I did that. cool." and go with it. That's where living is!
People have treated me like a genius wherever I go. I got invited to do research in my freshman year in college. To me being among the best at something isn't very interesting, its just going through the motions, have gone through it many times. It gets boring quick, instead of focusing on one area I just went into new ones because it isn't fun to be among the best. But that gets tiring as well. Made lots of money working for Google, so now I don't even have a good reason to work so quit and spent time just learning whatever and now I don't have anything left I care to learn really.
Not sure what to do, maybe people who learn faster run out of things to learn faster and therefore aren't as happy? I can see life being much more interesting if you learn much slower, since then there are more interesting stuff left to explore. Basically, the better you are at predicting stories the more boring movies and books will be, etc.
Seems you’ve resigned yourself to “default boring”. That’s your prerogative, but it’s no different from the “existential dread attitude shift” which spurred the conversation.
You have the means to meaningfully improve the lives of others and are focusing on how to entertain yourself. Do something for another, like teaching them your skills or donating your money. Heck, start a non-profit which does both! It’s not as easy to be the best when your success depends on the outcome and performance of others.
Have you ever tried getting an addict in a bad place to straighten their life? Frustration is the opposite of boring. There is no formula for that problem or a myriad of other societal issues. There is no right answer for you to arrive at and be objectively the best. In the off-chance that you do crack it, you would have revolutionised at least one field, solved some of humanity’s problems, and gotten a challenge for a while.
It seems like you are hyper-focused on ends/outcomes. And if an end/outcome of a pursuit isn't completely novel, unpredictable, or result in you being the best at the pursuit, then what's the point? Is that an accurate summary?
I wonder whether there's a higher level view that really prioritizes status seeking, and that a life should be valued based on outcomes/production. And if you can't produce things at the level of the best, what's the point?
If that is the case, I've certainly had those thoughts when I was younger, and I would offer to consider giving yourself a break. Release yourself of expectations of being the best/most novel/etc. Give yourself permission to be a flawed human. Focus on enjoying the little things, focus on the present. Focus on the journey, not the end. We're the self-aware universe, we're so lucky we get to experience things as we do, let's enjoy the ride while we can. And contrary to what you're hinting at, there are an infinite number of possibilities/knowledge to gain. To think us humans have answered all of the questions of conscious experience and the universe (and what may lay beyond) is incredibly naive.
Not sure. I've done original contributions to math, physics and did some significant work as a software engineer. It was fun, but then the void hit where you look back and realize the end result wasn't really interesting. And then you go look for that feeling again, but it gets harder to find every time, just like everything else. Not sure how art would make a difference here, it isn't like art is more interesting than those things, will likely just meet a void again.
In Buddhism, they advise against spending time pondering "unanswerable questions." [1]
If you know a question is unanswerable, and mulling it over makes you unhappy, then it's foolish to continue thinking about it. You can just leave it be and move on with your life. I think most people eventually figure this out on their own some time in their late 20s.
I'm not too familiar with Zen, but questions like these are often meant to be nonsense questions with no answer. They push you to think harder and harder until you realize the futility of doing so, at which point you've found the "real" answer.
Previous poster either got this subtly wrong, or phrased it badly, or belongs to a tradition that I'm not familiar with, but a good story on this is the parable of the poisoned arrow: Someone gets shot by an arrow and his friend tells him they have to get to a hospital - the person shot starts worrying about what kind of poison it is, who shot him and why, if the hospital they are going to is any good, etc, etc - really he needs to go and get it treated RIGHT NOW and nothing else matters - he can answer all those questions after he's treated.
And I wouldn't say the zen koans are unanswerable, you can think of them like riddles that force you to think a different way than you normally do.
Yeah this - it just takes time, and some don't reach that point, but it's a natural progression after you get your first glimpse at how things are. I often forget how dark it can get when you first face that dread.
Unsolicited advice from some random guy on the internet:
Don't start down that road. Material success will always be just over the next hill, regardless of how much you already have. Happiness and satisfaction can't come from accomplishment or material gain.
Compared to what it was like when I was working at Walmart...?
Yeah, material gain has certainly made me a thousand times happier. I haven't had to worry about an Electric bill in years. I used to have to navigate and memorize the electric company shutoff routine so I could pay as late as possible while selectively mitigating late fees and disconnect fees in relation to payday.
I can afford to go on vacations now. Take PTO when I want to. When my AC dies I don't have to just suffer until my landlord decides to do something; I can just pay the repair guy $700 to fix it and have AC in a couple hours. Eating healthier is easier; I don't have to stress in social situations about how run down or holey my clothes are. I have the luxury of being able to eat and survive if I am fired allowing me to be more confident in how I carry myself at work. (Meaning I don't have to kiss-ass when I am being mistreated). I have the money to travel if god-forbid my wife needs an abortion, or I can move away from bad neighborhoods very quickly.
The pursuit of wealth in and of itself as a measure of personal worth will not bring happiness, but let's not all pretend that money doesn't bring happiness insofar as it provides individual autonomy over their lives.
I agree with the OPs point that some older people may have just reached a level of material success that grants them the luxury of 1. Processing their existential dread through things like therapy; and 2. Live a less stressful life that comes with a certain level of wealth
Whether you like my definition or not, I would argue that you are describing the difference between poverty and sufficiency. This is not wealth or achievement, but our system makes it easy to assume that.
The churn at the bottom is intended to motivate your continued activity and striving.
You are perhaps still too close to the stress of poverty to see that what you are describing is not happiness either, but something more like the removal of capitalism’s sharp rocks from your shoes.
Jordan Peterson (I know, I know...) made an interesting remark in one of his lectures recorded long before he became famous:
"Once you make about $60,000 a year for your family, but let's say for you personally, additional income makes zero has zero impact on your quality of life."
I've definitely gotten better at consciously adding things the list of shit I try not to to think about. Which is pretty long at this point.
I finally tried weed well into my 30s and discovered it's great at making sure I don't think about those things when I'm trying to go to sleep, which is really nice.
In general I'm pretty sure I've got a fair amount of derealization going on all the time now, which... helps?
I suppose that all adds up to some kind of mellowing out.
Yeah, I find that looking at anything space-related helps me remember that our entire species and history are completely and utterly insignificant in the grander scheme of things. All this day-to-day drama just really isn’t that important.
well i mean it's also completely valid to say everything else in the universe is completely and utterly insignificant compared to my decision on what to have for lunch.
just because the universe is big and old doesn't mean it has any special meaning or significance.
A possible explanation is that the mellowing is due to the loss of acuity with age. The more likely explanation is that it's an evolutionary adaption in response to how ones function in society changes with age.
I think it's just increased wisdom and maturity. Some people need a certain number of years (their twenties) before you start noticing how pointless and bad for you it is to be angry at the world.
I think it is more you start out trying to fix the worlds problems, and then after some years you give up and become happier. I don't think it is wisdom or maturity, many people give up as a kid and just go through the motions from the start, I wouldn't call those wise or mature.
> I think it is more you start out trying to fix the worlds problems,
I can't think of that many young twenty-somethings who want to fix the worlds problems. If anything, younger people are more focused on themselves [1] that people after the 30-35 yo mark.
[1] That's not an accusation or anything. It's natural that, when you're young, you need to figure out who you are and what you want out of life, and that requires a lot of focusing on oneself. Not to mention just growing into being an actual adult is also not easy and requires a lot of trial, error and introspection - something that is not as required when one is older and more formed already.
I think both generalizations are off the mark a bit. A lot of young folks are very idealistic and think they can have a larger impact (i.e. fix the world's problems). You also have those that are self-focused. Some of that is combined - focused on self means you may have an over-inflated sense of what you can accomplish and how your contributions will be received.
A lot of that is why some young entrepreneurs do go on to actually change the world (and we definitely need those people, although it isn't always for the best). But most that think that's what they are going to do fail a few times, and become more realistic in their views of what they can accomplish.
Sometimes the smarter someone is, the more quickly they can think through the possible results and come to those conclusions that they probably aren't going to be one of the few that does succeed to change the world, and that can (to the overall point here) lead to a sense of sadness and loss, maybe without having gone through the effort and failure, even. Which is a bit sad for everyone, because some percentage of those people probably could succeed if they just got out of their own way and stopped over thinking things, also.
Speaking as someone not totally young, and (hopefully) not totally un-smart, I think its true one mellows out with age, also you can "be the change you want to see". That to me is the only thing we can do. If we all do our bit we can make things a bit better. Some people can make a disproportionately large positive difference. Its never too late to do that.
Even worse is that smart people see the patterns and can predict the outcome with a reasonable degree of accuracy, however, they can not do anything about it because speaking up usual results in being labelled negative and being shunned.
This is very much like knowing the train is going to fall off the bridge but not being able to stop people from boarding.
Eh no, "speaking up" has varying outcomes in varying environments, this is not a universal constant.
I've chosen the job I have now specifically because I wanted to be able to do something about things I see that could be going wrong. Anyone can do this, but especially smart people.
This is why acceptance is such a key value. Acceptance is both an obstacle to progress and a prerequisite for continued existence. It's the line between Yin and Yang, where the duality of wrong and right is forced to blur.
> But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things.
You don't need to be very smart to get existential dread from "climate change will kill us all and I can't influence much", "the upper class can still fully rule our lives" or "at some point, someone will create an AI that might kill us and there's not much anyone can do about it". Even someone hardly qualified to work at McDonalds can think that, usually in addition to "I can never handle a job to get a living wage", which I'd actually consider to be more serious downers on ones happiness.
If someone is convinced that climate change will kill us all then I'd say they're not exceptionally smart to begin with, and are misattributing to cynial high intelligence that which is the much more common phenomenon of media-induced blind hysteria.
It sounds like you're confusing intelligence with depressive realism and cynicism. :)
Sure, the universe itself is indifferent at best, but that doesn't mean you can't find meaning in life, or that you can't experience happiness. On the contrary, admitting that most things are completely outside one's control seems to be a key to being happy with life.
Realism is seeing an issue and recognizing that it is a problem.
Intelligence is seeing an issue and recognizing that it is a problem and recognizing the root issues to how it became a problem.
Proper action is seeing both of the above and addressing the immediate issues and the longer term ones so the problem does not happen again.
Cynicism comes from when you are not allowed any sort of action and actively denied the ability to fix cause root issues. Then gaslighted into thinking you are wrong for wanting the change or forced into fixing the wrong things.
On the other hand, I don't think it's "smart" for a person to ruminate and dwell on problems they can't change, especially not to the point that it has negative effects on their life.
The way I see it, we're all going to be dead in 100 years, and life will go on without us. It's not my place to solve every problem in the world, and in the grand scheme of things, my life is very unimportant, so I might as well relax and enjoy it.
There are problems that are due to others. And they wreck your life. Being known as a pedophile when you’re not, it’s a problem worth solving. Because you can’t really live your life.
Those who dwell, think that people can change.
Those who don’t dwell on it, just accept the various other accusations, he stole this and that you know because he’s a pedo etc.
I wager that those who believe they don’t dwell on things, have never had real problems.
Smart people are unhappy because they have a whole identity constructed around being smart and in order to be happy they would have to shatter this construction.
I used to have this worldview then I realized “smarter” people self select lives that tend to be more neurotic and tend to overthink things to the point of anxiety
Do you really need to worry over all the things you do? Or have all the years of being schooled and trained and under pressure to constantly juggle multiple things made your brain’s default state anxiety?
I'm not sure if they're actually better at seeing the truth, than building a more complex mental model of the world and its processes. If anything such ad-hoc modeling tends to be an obstacle that obscures the truth, rather something that reveals it.
A lot of very smart people call themselves skeptics and are very keen at questioning what other people believe when it is not what they believe, but are incredibly blind to the fact that they make assumptions on their own that they have very little basis for.
I very much disagree with this, just look at politics; everyone sees / imagines the "awful reality of things". Whenever the other side is in power the out of power side thinks everything is terrible and the world is ending. Even though objectively everything is pretty much the same. Objectively the world is only getting better over time. Generally the loudest people on each side screaming that its the end of all things are not the pinnacle of intelligence. I like the authors theory that happiness involves "skill at solving poorly defined problems". Think about how many smart people on this board complain about being lonely and unable to find friends. The ability to feel satisfied with one's lot in life is probably much more of a driver for happiness than being able to get a 1600 on the SAT. I consider myself relatively intelligent but was heavily involved in politics when I was younger and worrying about things. As I got older I realized I was wasting my time. I cant change anything and my life is slipping past. It really clicked for me when I went to the parkland anti gun rally in DC because my wife wanted to go. There were hundreds of thousands of people there and at the end of the day, nothing changed and politicians just closed their blinds or left work early to avoid the gridlock. The only way to affect change on a large scale is with very large amounts of money. Short of that, I just focus on my family and myself and things are much better. Took my kid to baseball tryouts the other day after practicing with him all week and it was awesome. Still cant figure out how to get IRL friends though :)
i am not sure if this makes sense, but when i read your comment i wondered if part of the difficulty of finding friends is that smart people find it difficult to associate with people who are not as smart as them or do not have the same interests as them, and thus the problem becomes one of selection.
Maybe, and I could see this for top 1% people but I'm not that smart :)
For me its a time management thing, I am unable to figure out how to manage time for my own activities between looking after kids, working remote and just sitting around wasting time.
The article says that incredibly stupid people and people who scored high on a vocab test were slightly less happy. Being intelligent also doesn't mean you are a cynic who laments over history, I would generally attribute that to pseudo-intellectualism and people with shallow understandings of how reality works when the tires touch the road.
Happy because they apply stoic philosophies to their life and making the lives of their immediate surroundings better instead
Yeah, things look bleak. However you need to realize that there ARE things you can do. Maybe not on the world stage, but in your own community. Sign up for a soup kitchen, clean up a street that is full of garbage, etc. Anything is better than being terminally online and doomscrolling. You will be happier for doing so, I guarantee you.
Smart people are very often terrible people. Being smart exists ok a different axis to being wonderful/awful, well-adjusted, fulfilled or even being successful.
I agree. Intelligence and wisdom are two very different things. Many intelligent people I know are unwise, and act terrible to those they disagree with. It is best to have a healthy dose of intelligence with the wisdom to be able to handle it.
I think it is harder to convince smart people that their illusion of control is just an illusion. When you’re a dope you get smacked in the face by your limitations and you give up, or at least you’re easier to manage by the people around you.
I think there are also a lot of smart people that aren’t pegged as smart because they’ve let go of controlling everything, and we mistake lack of engagement for lack of capacity.
We have a friend who has a very aw shucks personality. A mutual friend and I have twice had a conversation about how she might actually be the smartest person we know, and I say that as someone who has a fondness for thinking they are the smartest person in the room. She is scary intuitive, the person people talk to about problems, she is a terrible movie companion because she guesses the ending ten minutes before I do, which is usually ten minutes before anyone else does. But she never made a career out of being clever, which feels like such a waste. I worry that it was beaten out of her at a young age. Girls aren’t supposed to be smart. You should be pleasant instead. If not that then I get some subtle ADHD vibes and it’s a common pathology to desire anonymity, a coping mechanism for passing as normal.
>Congrats, you have learned the history of humanity and how our society functions, and your reward is you get to be angry at the vast amount of injustice.
I think you're imbuing your own value judgements into this. Many of us don't share the same urge to fix everything that's "wrong" with the world or society, and simply learn to accept it and roll with punches. But that still doesn't mean we're happier in life.
Smart enough to see the bad, but not smart enough to look away.
The world is in roughly the same spot as it was when I was 20, and my body is certainly worse off, but I'm much happier now simply because I don't steep myself in the shittier parts of the universe.
> But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread.
On the contrary, the more you learn about history of humanity, the more you appreciate the modern world for being uniquely wonderful in historical perspective.
How people see is just a reflection of their minds. If one sees world as awful - that only tells about that person mind. It has nothing to do with the world. And talking about seeing truth is just inflated ego, nothing more. Some of the wisest and most impactful people in history talked about truth being the ultimate ecstasy. That is a smart way to live, I would say.
The other side of this is that happiness is available to you as someone intelligent and aware of societies shortcomings when you use that intelligence at any opportunity to help the life around you. And that's an ongoing journey that requires maintenance not a one time event or goal.
I think the truly smart, or perhaps wise people accept their understanding of reality as it is and don't attribute subjective human concepts like "injustice" to it.
Note that there is no such thing as 'optimistic nihilism', though. People at Kurzgesagt probably thought of it as a novel thing, yet it is not. There is already a name for it, that is, existentialism.
I honestly can't tell if I'm smart or stupid any more... It seems that the absolute dumbest schemes are paying their creators out in millions as I struggle to find success in the normally iron clad business methods... I tweet about things that matter to me and often things I think that are of solid comedic value, but it doesn't connect with many others due to it's lack of conformity with what others are posting online... Which constantly tells me there's something I don't know or may be missing. Success tips online are totally generated to make money, and it floods out what once used to mostly be useful and meaningful advice from smart and experienced (intelligent) people.
I also have been working harder than ever on creative things, and they literally seem to only be valued online for 5 seconds until they go completely dead. I know I'm being manipulated and twisted, but my morality makes me not want to hack my way into public consciousness for money and popularity.... I might by citing that, and citing that many others are hacking their way in, be quite stupid.
Are the people that make and hack manipulative schemes smart? Are the people that break the law and get away with it smart? I don't do those things, so maybe I'm stupid.. At least I can admit it I guess.
I think we're living in a time where an entire generation of people born into inherited wealth are buying their way into popularity (which is painting a very weird and false picture of what success and intelligence really means), and when combined with all the smart people trying to climb life's ladders, the ability to succeed is under threat now more than ever.
Intelligence to me has always been based more on overall life survival skills and growth success rather than human engineered IQ tests... I know actual critically acclaimed surgeons and engineers that literally couldn't tell you where a spare tire is on a car when they get a flat, and if no one else is there to help them.
When one has the financial augmentation of being born into vast amounts of wealth, social status, and connection (which often the individuals most deemed as "smart" are) the very ideal of intelligence is turned upon it's head... The lucky ones can literally fail their way into success without anyone knowing the difference.
To me, the most simplified definition of intelligence for an individual is living life fully and well, with ethics and reputation in balance, being free from the control and influence of others, accomplishing notable things, and skillfully overcoming obstacles as they present themselves... I can't really say I'm smart at this point because many of those things mentioned prior are under threat for everyone right now, and it seems like I'm pitted against others for a limited pool of success resources more and more every day. I'm not happy about that at all.
I actually would not expect smart people to be happier. In fact, I wouldn't expect any group of people to be particularly happier than anyone else.
Happiness and suffering are two sides of the same coin and we evolved these feelings (or they were bestowed upon us by God, either way) in order to guide us. We do more of what feels good, less of what feels bad.
If we're happy all the time, happiness loses its intended purpose. Same for suffering.
That's why, no matter what financial windfall you may experience, give it 6 months and you'll be just as miserable (or worse) as you were before. But because you got a high off of it initially, you keep pursuing more and more, always convinced the next upgrade in your life is what will do the trick. But it doesn't. All you're doing is raising the bar for what it takes to make you momentarily happy.
It's the "poverty of affluence", as described by Paul Wachtel in his book by the same name.
So our minds are constantly adapting to our circumstances and rebalancing things so that we come back to the center.
Chasing happiness, much like running away from suffering, is a fool's game. We are hard wired to feel both in roughly equal measure, regardless of our circumstances, over the long haul.
For this reason, I think the buddhists and stoics have it right. The best thing we can do is nothing. Sit down and shut up. Get off the wheel of suffering, observe the world as dispassionately as possible, and accept both joy and suffering as inconsequential inputs meant to guide us.
It's the closest any human will ever be allowed to experience peace in their mortal life. If you chase the highs of life, expect massive lows, as well. Accept life on life's terms. Stop chasing things and you may not be happier, but you'll probably be less miserable and experience fewer bouts of crippling depression and anxiety.
Or as Charles Bukowski's epitaph famously reads: Don't try.
> That's why, no matter what financial windfall you may experience, give it 6 months and you'll be just as miserable (or worse) as you were before. But because you got a high off of it initially, you keep pursuing more and more, always convinced the next upgrade in your life is what will do the trick. But it doesn't. All you're doing is raising the bar for what it takes to make you momentarily happy.
I am pretty sure someone who has no security of shelter/food/water/healthcare/education/legal who gains those securities is happier than before they had those securities.
At least I am. It is nice being able to sleep knowing I don not have to worry about my basic needs, and being able to walk away from tasks I do not want to do.
Very much the same here. I grew up without security of those things either, and never quite managed to lose the appreciation or happiness in finding a career in tech that pulled me out of that. Buddha-like dispassionate observation of my situation wasn't really an option, or at least I wasn't capable of it.
Something else that helped, I think, is that when I did have a life-changing windfall (a company stock actually paid out) I didn't change anything in my life. I just use it to do relatively humble but satisfying things, like family vacations that I wouldn't have had access to before. I imagine if I had blown it all on parties or something I'd have had major ups and downs, but having it be a source of stability and little happiness bubbles released over a long period of time has been really positive.
I often think about the law of diminishing returns. My finances had a few inflection points that improved my life tremendously:
- Left the violent neighborhood I grew up at
- Was able to eat real food every day
- Started being able to save money
- Stopped using public transport
- Got a place for myself
- Got a job with great work life balance
Now, every extra cash I make improves my peace of mind, as my biggest fear is being poor again. I don't think any extra luxury will ever make me happier than the points I outlined above did.
I agree. When I was counting every dollar to survive, I was a nervous wreck. I had no capacity to be happy. Now I can buy whatever I want during grocery without caring. I’m not necessarily happier, but I have the capacity to be happy.
But I’m guessing what the OP meant was after basic affluence is met(which probably varies wildly by person), then more money does not correlate with happiness. Which I would also agree with.
You and others are quite correct and I misspoke: It's hard to experience happiness if you're worried about your basic survival. A few years ago, it was found that an average of $70k in North America was the cut off, where anything above that has little to no impact.
While I stand by the contention that virtually nothing will provide sustainable happiness in the long-term, existential problems (lack of food, shelter, or love) can certainly get in the way.
Likewise, experiencing chronic pain will continue to impact your ability to enjoy life.
But!
The mind does have an incredible ability to adapt. Ask anyone experiencing chronic pain and you'll find they have a higher pain threshold than most. Likewise, those who have been poor their whole lives find poverty to be less traumatic than those who've had a "fall from grace" and have to adapt to sudden poverty. But adapt they will.
The mind is constantly trying to return to the middle. So if you're trying to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, know that you're working against your own biological wiring. Good luck with that!
Stoicism and buddhism never worked for me—observing the world as dispassionately as possible is the most dead I’ve ever felt inside. Pouring myself out as passionately as possible to what I consider my life’s work is the happiest, most satisfying feeling in the world, and that’s despite the setbacks.
I still come across as stoic to some people, though, just because it takes a lot (if at all) to upset me, but my calmness is not borne out of dispassion—I really just know now which arguments or fights are worth having and with whom, and the vast majority of those arguments and people are simply inconsequential.
Ditto. My view of this disparity in outlooks now is that the important thing is to be honest with yourself about your nature, i.e. figure out if you're a slacker or a go-getter. Some people take comfort in coasting and consuming, they likely never needed a buddhist parable to figure that out. I could attempt to give myself "permission" to do nothing using an -ism but I can't believe it, and I don't find it satisfying. Striving affords a higher-order level of living. I certainly had to "try" to resolve issues like insomnia, and had to "try" to create new habits, "try" to reach a state of flow at work, "try" to strive towards mastery in an art.
I'm actually more perplexed by creatives who would suggest they don't actually try, but I imagine this is only because they've created habits long ago, sparked by a mere interest, to the extent that biasing towards action (pursuing those habits) requires no effort. I found myself having to create new habits because I was in a state of complete disarray, purely trying to avoid pain.
As for Bukowski, he was an alcoholic and seemingly a miserable misanthrope. Seems like "don't try" was of little comfort.
"Don't try" was his take on a lifetime of trying. He failed in all areas of his life until he hit it off as a writer in his 60s (after decades of rejection).
In other words, his biggest regret was all that effort he made. All it did was make him a miserable misanthrope. It was only when he let go of his expectations and stopped trying so hard that he started finding success.
The success was incidental, but ultimately not trying didn't make him happy. That's the point, they're the words of a miserable man. I don't think misery scales with effort. It might with a sense of entitlement to monetary success or self-perception of failure for failing to reach arbitrary heights that have nothing to do with the art. The antidote is perspective not inaction.
"Don't try" != "inaction". It means letting go of expectations.
The wind blows to and fro with incredibly amounts of energy, but there's no "try". The lion doesn't try to hunt. It simply hunts, and sometimes that results in a meal. It doesn't sit around wondering why it's such a failure as a lion. And it doesn't gather trinkets to prove how successful it is. In other words, it doesn't obsess about its own happiness.
Would you say Yoda believed in inaction? Do or do not. There is no try.
The "words of a miserable man" were his take on why he was miserable. My interpretation, in any event, is he was saying that all that effort and caring about success and worrying about what others thought... all of that made him miserable and he wished he hadn't bothered with any of that.
In other words, I didn't bring him up as an example to follow. I brought him up as a word of caution. "Try" too hard and you might become a miserable misanthrope obsessed with all your perceived failures.
Doing, unless we've already instilled a habit on auto-pilot, requires effort to varying degrees. That is trying. It's impossible to divorce.
I think letting go of expectations is a positive, but I think the aphorism in question does not translate to it. Cognitive trappings have nothing to do with effort. Effort in itself can be rewarding.
Sounds we're just arguing about the definition of the word "try". I'm ok with adopting your definition, I suppose, but "let go of expectations" doesn't quite capture it either. I suppose there may simply not be a word for exactly what I'm talking about, and what I believe Bukowski and the buddhists and stoics and Yoda are all referring to. They're not opposed to the expenditure of energy, which is what effort is.
They, and I, are referring to... striving, perhaps? The combination of pursuing something and being attached to the anticipated or desired result. To me, "try" comes closest to that. But I recognize you use the word in a more precise manner and are probably correct to do so.
That's the other route for sure. It's what Mark Manson proposes in "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F---". His contention is that it's impossible to stop worrying about things. We're always going to worry about things. The only thing we can do is choose better things to worry about.
For my money, I prefer the dispassionate route. I get way too hung up on results and expectations otherwise.
This entire comment is full of mistakes and logical errors.
> We are hard wired to feel both in roughly equal measure, regardless of our circumstances [...] So our minds are constantly adapting to our circumstances and rebalancing things so that we come back to the center.
Citation desperately needed. This sounds like pure pseudo-science. There definitely exists a bio-chemical mechanism that attempts to normalize the numbers of hormone receptors w.r.t. the level of released endorphins, but it's in no way a simple zero-sum mechanism like you're describing.
> Stop chasing things and you may not be happier, but you'll probably be less miserable and experience fewer bouts of crippling depression and anxiety.
Your conclusion isn't consistent with your premise. Didn't you just claim that "our minds are constantly adapting to our circumstances and rebalancing things so that we come back to the center". By your logic, everything we do is futile, and nothing will change the feeling of anxiety and depression.
> I wouldn't expect any group of people to be particularly happier than anyone else
Interestingly, there is at least 1 group (to my knowledge) that is particularly happier than most everyone else. When surveyed, nearly 99% indicate that they are happy with their lives.
I agree, and am currently looking for additional studies about this group. I have found one that was conducted in Japan [1]. I would be very interested to see how reproducible the results are, especially across a variety of demographics.
Yes and even more because "intelligence" alone doesn't even help you climb to the highest positions.
People, especially on forums like HN, tend to mistake being 'intellectual' to actually 'intelligent'. There are various ways of being "smart" and being good at math and code is only one of them (Emotional intelligence, relationship intelligence, intelligence in career) etc...
People who say 'Iam so smart' are usually not so intelligent in the end
The article covers this as well: the author claims that studies show that all of those different intelligences correlate, so it is not very useful to categorise them individually.
The thing that is a main driver to "climbing to higher positions" is usually desire and motivation, which is a cultural trait. Intelligence has a high correlation because there are plenty of motivated people across all levels of intelligence, so highly intelligent are better at succeeding at such well-defined problems.
Smartness is sometimes about well-educated or simply experienced and knowledgable. Eg. even if I was more intelligent, I'd trust a medical doctor because they have a vast knowledge and experience that I lack.
Still, the article makes a nice distinction between well- and poorly-defined problems. It's definitely going in the right direction, so go and have a read!
> The article covers this as well: the author claims that studies show that all of those different intelligences correlate, so it is not very useful to categorise them individually.
I would strongly doubt that they correlate tbh.. where would the "virgin math genius" cliché would come from ?
I have been versed into various socio evonomic and hobby environement over my life, and have met natural geniuses in several unrelated fields (sport, math, chess, boxing, military, art, entrepreneurs /investors, emotional connections and / or sex). I can assure you i didnt not observe such correlation.
At best what ive noticed is how some of them would be clueless about their gift, and pretty average on the rest.
I mean I understand and welcome you enthusiasm about science and research papers, unfortunately it's largely misguided in my opinion.
Even in actual scientific fields like computer science (In particular machine learning and reinforcement learning academic environement in which I work and hold a PhD) 'doubting' is necessary, since a large percentage of papers are unreproducible and largely biaised for publication... [0]
Regarding social sciences papers, I give 0 credit to any of them and that won't change soon.
First it's literally impossible define rigorously any term to differentiate (I mean seriously how are you going to "measure" emotional intelligence or entrepreneurship skills). Secondly there a large fraction of the field which is just pretending to do science and circlejkerking each other by accepting their own papers without rigorous due diligence, to the point they can't even detect hoax and fraud [1]
At the end of the day I am not here to fight you. If you don't believe me then be it but I stand by my assessment that various kind of intelligence are at best losely related. Some math genius are 100% clueless in emotional or business intelligence, some genius entrepreneurs are 100% clueless with math or girls, some really good artists completely clueless in business or academic stuff. Some athletes too... Of course some will have all but imo it's a lucky minority.
I am fine with doubting any particular study, and I certainly have my reservations about social science studies in particular (most of them try to categorise "poorly-defined problems").
But we can either doubt the entire scientific process and throw our hands in the air, or we can work to improve it and look at it critically. At the moment, it's the best thing we've got.
Thus, I dislike the generic "I don't believe results of any study disagreeing with my anecdotal evidence", which is exactly what our scientific process is set up to dispell with. Proper argumentation is about misinterpretation of data, misapplication of statistical methods, insufficient sample size, outright data fabrication or anything along those lines.
Eg. in all your anecdotal examples, you are misinterpreting what "correlates" means. In particular, all intelligences correlating does NOT mean that "some will have all" (a famous statistics observation that there is no representative ever matching your average/median result in any complex measurement: eg you can have an average height of a group of people being 170cm and nobody being exactly 170cm — yet you can still claim how people in the group are 170cm tall on average, and then we can debate if that makes sense depending on the distributiin, sample size etc).
> in all your anecdotal examples, you are misinterpreting what "correlates" means. In particular, all intelligences correlating does NOT mean that "some will have all"
No, i'm saying exceptional intelligence in a field didn't lead to a discernable increase of intelligence in other aspect of life in general, which would actually be the definition of "correlate", in a large sample of people and fields I have seen.
Now you may disagree, or make another generic authority argument which invoke 'scientific studies' that I have yet to see the existence, but respectfully, I'm not here to debate and I'm also quite sure my point of view will not change by reading such 'study'. I was just here sharing my point of view of someone who have seem various exceptional people in various fields and expressing my doubts the whole "intelligence correlate" thing..
> all of those different intelligences correlate, so it is not very useful to categorise them individually
Maybe it's not useful for the sake of discussion to list them individually, but it's definitely useful to measure them individually. Or you'll mistake someone who's a master of rotating abstract shapes in their head for someone who manage to get things done in a complex environments. The full-scale IQ tests (WAIS?) do actually test many different manifestations of intelligence.
This is a bit on the side of the point, but it's an important distinction when you're discussing and trying to measure people's real-life abilities.
I am not making this claim, the article is based on a number of studies measuring different types of intelligence.
It actually does say that they are all almost exactly the same (sure, highly intelligent individuals will score better on one set of problems than on another, but they will score highly on most of them; similar for average or lower intelligence folks — their scores on each of them correlate but are not in a strict linear relationship). That suggests that they are ultimately one and the same (as per those studies).
I don't know if wisdom really helps. Or, maybe I just feel that way, because I lack it. How would wisdom help with happiness, when you see a likely worsening climate, rampant inequality for really no good reason, which together with the former is bound to cause significant sivil unrest and wars in the coming decades?
In my limited version of it, is to strive to be humble, and the happiness for those around you. Find joy in helping the communities (whichever that be in the connected world) you care about. But... That still doesn't truly make me happy. And relies on willfully ignoring everything mention earlier.
The only thing to hope for is a miracle in both energy production, and a sudden increase in empathy. I fear that human nature is stil stuck in a the ape mindset of "I got mine", and will never get out of.
Wisdom, I think, wants us to focus on our abilities and what we can do.
Things that are outside our control will always make us unhappy.
So if we do our part I think we eventually find happiness in whatever change we were able to bring in this world. And when enough people do that we fix all the problems mentioned at beginning of your comment.
> You want to change world? Go home and love your family. - Mother Teresa
I don't want to sound like a contrarian, because, I sort of agree. Or, rather, I would like to be able to agree.
Perhaps presumptuous, but I don't think wisdom goes together with either inaction, complacency, or otherwise willful ignorance. Which, seems to be the gist of the replies my previous comment received.
I still think that not worrying/complaining about things we cannot control or affect holds true for many things, and many aspects. However, I disagree with the premise. We can all do something, some more than others.
I've categorically refused jobs in the oil and gas sector, and increasingly become picky about what to devote my professional life to. I very consciously try not to be a consumerist, though I'm probably in the global top 10%, given statistics for my country. I eat meat, even though it doesn't help. I have traveled the world for my own amusement, though I've come to see it as an absolutely ridiculous thing to have done.
I could definitely do more. I could actively devote my life to it. I could decide not to have kids. Etc.
Is it wisdom to ignore these problems? Or to find happiness as a state of mind, in spite of it? I would assume it's the latter. I just don't know if wisdom is the right word for it. But maybe it is.
> when you see a likely worsening climate, rampant inequality for really no good reason
What are you, as an individual able to do about any of that?
Think about it the other way, if you wanted to make it worse could you meaningfully? Could you make the seas rise by even a single millimeter? Probably not.
Now say you wanted to make it better, a single private jet trip for a CEO to visit his mistress will wipe out any gains you have made.
What does your worrying do? Great you aren't "willfully ignorant" but since your ideal future requires a miracle anyway, and you aren't God, it's out of your hands.
You are probably like almost every other person who has ever lived, you don't matter at all. Nothing you do will meaningfully echo throughout history. Once you are gone, nobody will ever say your name again.
What's true about you is probably also true about the human race. The sun will consume the earth eventually, we will either leave this rock, or die on it. Why not enjoy your brief time here?
Not everyone finds comfort in nihilism; it can be pretty off-putting to read something like "you don't matter at all, and will be quickly forgotten" and than be told "so, enjoy!".
Is it nihilism? A plage could evolve and wipe out the human race at any time, a asteroid could end all life here in a instant. Most people are engaging in "nihilism" on those topics, and many others, but if they instead made the choice to dwell on them it wouldn't make them any less likely. I suggest simply you engage in "nihilism" on a few more things you have no control over.
>You are probably like almost every other person who has ever lived, you don't matter at all. Nothing you do will meaningfully echo throughout history.
That sentence is basically the definition of nihilism. I don't see any possible interpretation of it which isn't categorically nihilistic.
>I suggest simply you engage in "nihilism" on a few more things you have no control over.
I get what you are saying, and broadly agree with it, but that wasn't the point of my comment.
I wasn't commenting on whether or not your take on the subject is helpful or not, just that the delivery of "you don't matter [...] enjoy it" is off-putting to the many people who don't take such a nihilistic viewpoint, and probably does no favors in convincing them such a view would be beneficial.
The relationship between wisdom and intelligence is complicated in practice. But the benefit of wisdom is often that it allows you to accept the bad that you can't fix or affect and move on.
You can't single handedly fix any of the problems you highlight. The most you can do is alter your own behavior but let go of the consequences of other peoples behavior. You can't do anything about it.
The balancing act of wisdom is that:
* You can care about and advocate for solutions.
* But you can't own the success or failure because it's not realistic for you to do so.
I do have hope for the former. I expect it to come at a high cost, since we are already a bit too late. We did manage to do well with the ozone layer. Prediction models still put as at a likely unparalleled humanitarian crisis, even if we act more and faster than we will.
As for human empathy, much more unlikely. Humans are born flawed, selfish and amoral. It has to be taught away. To reach the point of a world society that can reliably "fix" this, for a large enough percentage, would be a more impressive feat IMO than solving the coming food and energy crisis. If only we had evolved from the bonobos instead of the chimps.
There is still room for hope, I agree. It's just that the rational part thinks the hopeful one is being naive.
Get to know your bosses. Like really get to know them.
Mine have told me stories about how their wives left them because they made less than a million one year. Or how their kids are strung out on drugs beacuse they failed to be around them often enough growing up. When they have a conversation, 90% of the time it's about how many widgets the widget factory is going to pump out next month. Old friends come out of the woodwork to ask for money. They are hungry ghosts[0].
Advertising has been effective in putting people on a treadmill. They compete with neighbors for who has the more expensive car, the most attractive wife, the biggest house, who went to the most expensive school. Their days are full of jealous resentment. People who are among the wealthiest to ever live on this planet, feel poor, not beacuse they lack the ability to provide for themselves or their children, but beacuse don't have everything they see on Instagram.
I'm not a religious man, but religion can offer wisdom if you are willing to read beyond the claims of magic.
Christianity prohibited the coveting of your neighbor not because it would make God angry, but because it makes your life worse.
"Christianity prohibited the coveting of your neighbor not because it would make God angry, but because it makes your life worse."
Citation needed. It's one of the commandments: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male slave, or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Exodus 20:17 (NASB). A book of magical thinking, created out of bronze age mythology, around a hateful, spiteful, capricious god is no basis for a system of philosophical world-view.
You would be better served studying philosophy directly, rather than a book filled with misogyny, slavery, thought-crime and magic.
Aristotle invented the logic that was encoded in the software you used to respond to my comment. He was also a racist. Do you cast your laptop into a lake?
Jefferson argued that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights", he also owned slaves. Do you argue that men are not equal?
Take the good parts, leave the bad. Like it or not Christ was one of the great moral philosophers. His surmon on the mount was revolutionary for it's time[0]. You can read it without believing in the magic, in the same way you can read the Tao Te Ching or Art of War while not being a Taoist or a general.
Which famous philosophers incorporated magical thinking, thought-crime, misogyny and slavery into their philosophy? What is the wisdom imparted by officially sanctioned chattel slavery, wherein beating your slave to death is perfectly acceptable [as] long as they live a few days after the beating: "And if someone strikes his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies at his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives a day or two, no vengeance shall be taken; for the slave is his property." Exodus 21:20-21 (NASB)
Yes, if you go back several thousand years, you can find such trash. I suppose I should have limited it to modern philosophers that are more relevant and less influenced by magical thinking to discourage lazy answers. You have not bothered to address the question of the VALUE of incorporating slavery, thought-crime, misogyny and magical thought into one's philosophy. Are you incapable of addressing the problem or do you realize you cannot justify it?
I used to say simply having common sense, but wisdom is fine too: plenty of smart, intelligent people lack the most common of common sense (I have no idea why it's called "common" when it's anything but — in Serbian, we say "zdrav razum" or "healthy sense/reason" which is slightly better).
I found it particularly funny when my University math professors displayed a complete inability to reason about the simplest of things.
"Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it." — René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode (1637) (Or in French: "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée, car chacun pense en être bien pourvu.") In some philosophies, what stands opposite of wisdom is not folly, but common sense. However, it might be possible that neither common sense, nor wisdom will bring you happiness: the former is unable to provide it, the latter is unable to be attained (philo-sophia, an asymptotical wanting of wisdom).
True leaders (in the abstract, idealised sense), maybe, but actual people we have in real-life leadership positions definitely not. They need to be super-smart to handle the corporate game of thrones without getting stabbed in the back too quickly.
Everyone seems to have missed one subtlety: the article only states (with references) that smart people are not happier.
At no point does it say that smart people are less happy (it does mention two studies where in one "lowest scoring" were a tiny bit unhappier, and in another "highest scoring" were happier): the overall tone is that they are equally happy regardless of their intelligence.
And then it wonders why the familiar trait of intelligence does not translate to those people setting their lives up for happiness?
Yes! And the main theory of the article is barely discussed in current comments thread, but to me novel and very thought-provoking: The model of "well-defined problems" vs "poorly-defined problems" and the hypothesis that what we call "smart" is usually being good at solving well-defined problems, but it's being good at solving poorly-defined problems that might correlate with happiness, and being good at solving well-behaved vs poorly-behaved problems does not correlate.
This rings true to me, in that in that model I recognize I'm pretty good at solving well-defined problems, but pretty terrible at solving poorly-defined problems (and currently not especially happy).
That was all new to me as a way of thinking about it! Most of the comments here are about "why are smarter people less happy", which is not what the OP is about, and is more well-trodden.
On the other hand, my experience is that the smartest people I know are very effective at simplifying / formalizing poorly defined problems and then solving the resultant well-defined problems.
"""
Point eight is enough. In fact I've concluded that it's really a good thing for people not to be 100% happy. I've started to live in accordance with a philosophy that can be summed up in the phrase "Point eight is enough," meaning "0.8 is enough."
You might remember the TV show from the 70s called "Eight is Enough," about a family with eight children. That's the source of my new motto. I don't know that 0.8 is the right number, but I do believe that when I'm not feeling 100% happy, I shouldn't feel guilty or angry, or think that anything unusual is occurring. I shouldn't set 100% as the norm, without which there must be something wrong. Instead, I might just as well wait a little while, and I'll feel better. I won't make any important decisions about my life at a time when I'm feeling less than normally good.
In a sense I tend now to suspect that it was necessary to leave the Garden of Eden. Imagine a world where people are in a state of euphoria all the time — being high on heroin, say. They'd have no incentive to do anything. What would get done? What would happen? The whole world would soon collapse. It seems like intelligent design when everybody's set point is somewhere less than 100%."
"""
How would the world collapse? This sounds like mixing up "the world" with "human society". I know I do more when I'm happy because things are enjoyable. No disrespect to Don Knuth and it's obviously good to realize you're not gonna be happy all the time but that line of reasoning is just not true.
This question generally presupposes a misunderstanding of the physiological purpose and phenomenological experience of happiness. Happiness by its nature is not sustainable. Contentment and well being with a high happiness surface area and a low suffering surface area is sustainable. This does not look very dramatic from the outside, and is poorly captured by many metrics. Neuroticism might be one of the best psychometrics, with most people experiencing only a small decrease over a life time, with some experiencing a very large one.
>Neuroticism might be one of the best psychometrics, with most people experiencing only a small decrease over a life time, with some experiencing a very large one.
Would you say this is more of a nature or nurture effect? I.e. some people naturally decrease in their neuroticism levels as they mature and most people don't, OR a small percentage of people stabilize their lives and statuses in their respective societies, which presumably leads to a decrease in their neuroticism levels.
There are a few prerequisites (proper sleep, nutrition, exercise) and many ways (social connections, meaningful activities, grateful attitude) to being happy.
The sad fact is that humans can never be happy for any length of time.
It is how our brains are wired and a result of evolution. Even if a person lived in a paradise and had all their needs and wants provided; one of two things will occur - Either that person becomes bored or they wonder 'hmmm, I wonder if x,y or z could be better in some way?' and then trying to improve on perfection.
Actually, money can buy happiness, or at least, the lack of worry. A study [1] found, "the ideal income point is $95,000 for life evaluation and $60,000 to $75,000 for emotional well-being... this amount is for individuals and would likely be higher for families."
[1] Jebb, A.T., Tay, L., Diener, E. et al. Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world. Nat Hum Behav 2, 33–38 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0277-0
If you assume happiness is a feedback mechanism rewarding you for doing the right thing, then it makes sense. The reward needs to be modulated to be effective, constant reward would stop us from improving
Smart people are just as given as anybody to the idea that happiness is about controlling outcomes, hence they are no happier. The desire to control outcomes is correlated with unhappiness because that very desire is predicated on the belief that happiness is a small target - if one would be happy with any outcome then there'd be no need to control which one eventuates. Put another way: happy people aren't the ones who win every game of chess, happy people just like playing chess.
Another aspect of this is that smart people - people good at solving well-defined problems - tend to see well-defined problems everywhere, tend to try and reduce things to well-defined problems, so that they can apply their unique gifts. This manifests as an apparent discomfort with ambiguity, which poses a problem, because comfort with, or at least an openness to, ambiguity is a prerequisite for happiness. The analytical mind is quick to label things and categorise them, including whether they are good or bad, but I find that happiness is more about refraining from applying such labels to things.
It's like with dealing with an incident. The unhappy say "the website is down, this is terrible", whereas the happy merely say "the website is down".
Because happiness isn't a mental skill. What makes you happy is try to have and keep peace with everyone and do good things, make presents to others, give and don't expect to get something back (you will but don't expect it). (it's the opposite you see nowadays in movies or series ;-)
It's about social connections and inter-human things ... not some skills you learn on universities but from loving and well raised parents.
>What makes you happy is try to have and keep peace with everyone and do good things, make presents to others, give and don't expect to get something back
Some worse-if-wiser part of me suspects this piece of advice is given out of altruism to the community as a whole, not the person receiving it. Doing this has never made me happy. I'm more willing to do it when I'm already happy though, so maybe there's a corellation.
Here is how I correlate with the article as a developer.
I believe myself to be pretty good at programming because I can achieve execution performance that almost nobody else can and solve problems most people cannot. After 20 years of practice my greatest enabling skill is better organizational skills.
I am not good at bad programming though. I have spent a good deal of effort in the first half of my career to thoroughly refine my precise which also means recognizing and avoiding anti-patterns. I avoid things like frameworks because they are much slower, super large, get in the way, and really slow me down. As a result people dependent upon frameworks probably think I am a really bad programmer.
As somebody who has learned to increase their own productivity by doing more from less, better organizational skills and higher conscientiousness, encountering excess complexity in other code makes me unhappy. It’s really depressing. Often solving simple problems in such code is a tip-toe dance through a minefield unless I have the bandwidth to write it again with test automation.
For me it is quite simply because I lack the human touch. Due to a multitude of compounding factors I cannot manage to find a soulmate, and life alone is miserable.
I don't see how being smart would help in this situation. If anything it makes it harder to connect with someone, because the pool of compatible people is smaller.
I consistently find that people who are unhappy/unsuccessful and also identify as "smart" are generally very good at rationalizing why things don't work out for them in a manner that protects their ego.
I think those two can ironically often go hand-in-hand.
You over value your self-importance which gives you ego/arrogance. Yet at the same time that self-importance with self-criticism leads to low self-esteem.
I think this is something that I often demonstrate. I feel the need to prove that I'm smart (ego), and I have very high standards for myself (low self-esteem, but it's getting better).
I'm not necessarily saying this is you, just that those two traits aren't mutually exclusive.
Regarding the loneliness problem, that isn't as intractible as I used to think it was for us Venusians. In my case it was largely an issue of getting my emotional algorithms right, which requires effort that isn't quite intellectual effort - but intellectual capacity certainly helps understand what the new version should look like.
If you're interested in solving this problem for yourself I would recommend the book 'models' by Mark Manson, reading it made a world of difference for me.
I know I can work on my social skills. The compounding factor that ruins my chances is that I also am not physically attractive. So I get very few chances to practice my social skills.
This whole getting few chances in the first place is what is making me unhappy and making me feel lonely.
And before you ask, I do put a lot of effort into meeting new people.
Thanks for the book suggestion, anyway.
What makes you think it's because you're unattractive? Even so, you can achieve a lot with 3 months of strength training at the gym. (hell, you'll see results in the first couple of weeks)
Consider that the vast majority of people don't even do that much - It doesn't take much to be above average.
What have you done to stop being unattractive? Unlike the common copes I think attractiveness is one of the most important attributes for a person in determining how the world treats them. Depending on how much money you have there are a lot of options for changing it
In my early teens my Dad said something to the effect of, "If you're so smart... how come nobody likes you?"
Now, this sounds mean, but my Dad was a psychological genius.
This was exactly what I, personally, needed to hear in order to trigger the thought, "Wait a minute.. these are social SKILLS... I should be able to learn them"
And I could, and I did.
A few years after that I asked myself, "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?"
Reminds me of this quote from Stop Stealing Dreams [1]:
> Philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that if two kids playing hopscotch or push-pin are gaining as much joy and pleasure as someone reading poetry, they have enjoyed as much utility.
> John Stuart Mill took a different approach. He argued, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”
I found both this book and the above JSM quote to be violently antithetical to the very existence of all pleasure seekers.
My disdain for them led me into the arms of the philosophers who don't hate pleasure and the sensual world, like Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and the works of the critical theorists.
The general disdain for hedonism felt in this world is extremely stupid. Brave New World is objectively a utopia, regardless whatever that one native american MC thought
I think what I found convincing was that, despite it being a utopia, the people living in it were awful. I read it imagining myself living there and saying 'of course if I lived there, I'd be happy' but they weren't, and the things that made them unhappy were so incredibly petty.
It's funny to see Nietzsche invoked in this context, since I'd imagine him giving much more weight to the slightly-more-ubermensch native MC than that of the society he clashed with. Nietzsche's a very subjective philosopher of course, but I'd imagine him saying that to love the world would be to refuse to engage with it in the glib way the society in BNW does.
I suppose I'm quite the idiot because for a big portion of the time, I'm happy. In a way, I learned to distance myself from things and people that made me unhappy; this was already a huge step towards happiness. Another thing was to learn to appreciate even the smallest things most people deem insignificant: a ride through town, the way the light breaks through the glass in the shower, an interesting pattern on the sidewalk, listening to the wind through the trees. I am a living being existing in this exact moment in time and space, experiencing life. And apparently, being a happy idiot.
Potentially controversial take: Unhappiness and intelligence are both correlated with deep rumination.
Deep rumination over negative things is a hallmark of depression, and deep rumination over a hard problem is a hallmark of intelligence. I suspect the "deep rumination" instinct can go astray, causing deep-set unhappiness.
This is a question I have been giving some thought to. I am certainly not a genius, and I have known many people smarter than I am, but I have cognitive abilities above the average of the population and of my social circle.
But we associate and measure intelligence (think g) with respect, broadly speaking, to abstract problem solving; it is mathematical ability, logical thinking, shape rotation, vocabulary, working memory. In fact, for people who are "smart," but not in the sense we normally associate with that term (e.g., typically not good at math), we use "street smarts." Picasso, who was an artistic genius, is not defined as "intelligent," and we don't say, "Picasso was an artist, why wasn't he happy (assuming he wasn't)?
The idea is that happiness and cognitive ability live in the same space, but why should that be true? All of us have seen many people with low IQs happy, cheerful, satisfied. We might think it's because they don't understand much, and we'd be approaching an important insight.
Why are we surprised that smart people are not as happy as we think they should be (which is not true, as far as the literature tells us), but not that smart people are not more physically fit (if you are so smart, you can't lift weights three times a week on a rational program, can't you use your brain to eat moderately and be satisfied with 2k calories instead of 5k), and not that smart people don't get laid as much as we think they should, since that should be a positively selected trait?
> So smarter people are happier, right? Well, this meta-analysis says no.
The linked meta analysis says:
> At the macro-level, we assessed the correlation between average IQ and average happiness in 143 nations and found a strong positive relationship.
...
As for the 'IQ poorly measures solving ineffable, poorly defined problems' - sure. IQ is however strongly correlated with how much money people make. If making a living over decades in a fast changing world isn't a poorly defined problem, I don't know what is.
Smart people (and specifically smart technical people) are always looking for problems with a view to solving them. That was the case with me, for example. People with lots of problems are generally less happy! I've approached this more recently, after unpleasant circumstances, by investigating meditation, Buddhism, fitness and relationship management and generally just having more "fun". Works for me.
The problem here IMO is that although intelligence can be fairly well defined and measured and it tends to be fairly static over a given period of time, happiness can be more difficult to measure or define and fluctuates.
Someone may say they are less happy on Monday Morning than on Friday afternoon, or they were happier last year but then the pandemic lock down saddened them. And, some people perceive their own happiness differently, on person may say, I am very happy, but they perhaps are not as happy as another person who says they are only moderately happy because they may have a higher expectation of happiness.
And what is it really, many philosophers have spent a lot of time on that topic. Is it that all my needs and wants are met and I am in a committed relationship? Others may define it differently. The article touches on these points.
In my view these are just two different unconnected attributes, asking if intellect and happiness are correlated is like asking "how big is the color red?" it is not really a meaningful question.
Anyone can be happy, whether they have a high IQ or not.
Say you have one man who has a low IQ, works as a laborer, but comes home to a wife and loving children. They do not have a large house or fancy car but if you ask him, he may say he is very happy.
Another man, lives alone in a large home with a nice car but enjoys solitude and contemplation, perhaps occasionally having a friend over and they have a deep conversation about quantum mechanics. You ask him and he might say he is very happy.
Obviously, you could easily reverse those examples and add many more.
Appreciate many of the points made in there. However, I still don’t see why intelligence should make one happier, and why when we don’t observe that in data it should be worth mentioning.
I grew up in a culture that did not talk about being happy or cared about objectifying happiness in any way. In fact, we don’t even have good words for it that would be separate from other notions. Growing up, I only ever experienced people talking about if they were healthy or satisfied or enjoying life.
This is a long way of saying that perhaps, it’s not only about calling out the vagueness and ambiguity of “intelligence”, but about considering that the term “happiness” also deserves the same degree of scrutiny. It, too, lacks a clear objective definition and comes with a lot of subjective and cultural ambiguity.
Maybe asking why one ambiguous undefinable thing doesn’t cause or correlate with another ambiguous undefinable thing is a futile statistical exercise to begin with?
Ignorance is bliss is more than just a cliche. The converse is that intelligence is anxiety. Or at least that’s my hypothesis. The more you know, the more you are aware of what can go wrong.
If consider yourself one of those people who are smart, but not happy, ask yourself these questions:
Would you sacrifice a portion of your intelligence for an equal (whatever that might mean) portion of happiness?
There are people that you would consider very dumb and very happy, do you desire to swap places with them?
And finally, would you sacrifice all of your intelligence for eternal bliss?
If the answer is no to all, then you simply don't value happiness that much, which is totally fine. Society/culture might force you to think that happiness is the ultimate goal, but you don't have to accept that.
YMMV, but what worked for me is accepting happiness as a resource, same as food or sleep. You don't need too much of it, just enough be healthy and get through without dying.
I wish this view would gain more currency in the zeitgeist. Who do we grow up idolizing? I can't speak for everyone. Maybe somebody grows up looking at a Bob Ross or Tommy Chong or someone who seems to be happy all the time and thinks that is what they want to be. Not me. I was watching someone like Michael Jordan win over and over again, dominate competition, achieve at the top of his field. Did it make him happy? As far as I could tell, no, but so what? Happiness is incidental to your personal temperament, not the point in itself. The point is to win. Set goals and achieve those goals. Maybe it's a nice afterthought if achieving those goals makes you happy, but just achieving the goals at all is the objective of your actions. It's at best orthogonal and maybe even counterproductive to the extent that being too happy risks making you less driven. The world's greatest winners all seem to hate losing more than they enjoy winning.
Is this really supposed to be a bad thing? The humans in WALL-E all seem pretty happy. The central premise of Brave New World is everyone is happy. Yet these are seen as dystopias. Why? Clearly, humans value other things more than happiness, and these other values have driven us to dominate the world and build civilizations. So why does so much of our self-actualization literature seem to assume happiness is some kind of supreme value and the ultimate goal of all other action? It isn't.
Evolution seems to explain most of it. There's humanity as species, where decision making process is quite primitive, hormones drive most of it. And then there's humanity as civilization, where decisions are supposedly driven by culture and obtained knowledge. For millions of years hormones were the only tool for decision making and evolution was the only tool at our disposal for progress.
But now those two are at conflict, and the winner is clear. We are way past those times where evolution has any noticeable effect on our species. More has changed for humanity in the last 100 years than in 50,000 years somewhere in the middle of our history.
With this mindset, treating happiness as the ultimate goal seems ancient and barbaric. We're not cavemen anymore, it's no longer cool.
That said, it does give an easy meaning to those who can't choose the meaning themselves. If you don't have any purpose in life, happiness is the inherited factory default setting.
I decided I don't want to be a boring human being with factory default settings. I'd rather be wrong than boring.
Most smart people are smart enough to know they're getting screwed, but they're not smart enough (or connected enough, or rich enough) to do anything about it.
"I'm getting hustled only knowing half the game."
"Fat Cats, Bigga Fish" by The Coup
You can be smart, but if you are seen as inferior in reason of your perceived race, gender, social status and so on, you will usually not be given the means to act.
Because they are a group of people who have a set of common problems often not addressed as they are believed to do better in life due stereotypes. In reality many perform poorly in academic results and abandon any studies, the largest majority suffer from bullying and most of them struggle in getting a successful life by social standards.
Why aren’t smart people and their problems studied as a particular subset of society?
Presumably because happiness somewhat follows from material circumstances, and smarter people are more effective at obtaining better material circumstances. There is no such association with tallness.
IQ correlates pretty well with various measures of economic success, so I'm not sure the association of smarter with better material circumstances is false, if that's what you're implying. If you mean the association with happiness, then yes that's probably false.
> Most HNers and programmers have only average intelligence.
I'm going to need a source for that. I don't think the average HNer is a genius, but it's quite likely that the average IQ on HN is a bit higher than the population average.
Probably in the 110 range. The average programmer IQ is 110. And I don't think the average HN user is better than the average programmer.
You have to figure that from 85 - 120 (depending on the scale) is a huge chunk of the population.
Considering that the average HN commenter is involved in programming in some fashion, and that programming is practical math in some fashion, it does stand to reason there's a higher floor.
But that floor is lower than you might think. In IQ in the 125 range is sufficient for every task on the face of the Earth. You can perform any mental task. That's mildly gifted or above average.
Around 110 would've been ny guess, too; maybe a tad lower - we have some exceptionally gifted people, but also a lot of non-programmers, which probably moves us a bit towards the population average.
I see a lot of data to prove smart people aren't much happier, but no data at all to prove that
A) multiple types of intelligence exist and can be measured that aren't already measured by a mainstream intelligence test
B) a type of intelligence that makes you happier exists, and can be measured by performance on another task
C) when you ask someone how happy they are and they say "7", it means they're experiencing the same level of happiness as another person who also said "7", or even experiencing the same level of happiness they were when they said "7" decades ago
C is one of the biggest issues in happiness surveys. Those world surveys are the worst. They tell you more about the socially acceptable answer to "are you happy?" (actually to the translation of that) than how people feel.
When I used to battle my depression I came across an article/paper that stated that smart people are more prone to depression. Same with "creative" people.
I have overcome depression and I am "satisfied" with my life (I prefer the word "satisfied" to the overinflated one: happiness). And now that depression is in my past I think that was a puff-piece article, and so is this.
One could say that more intelligent people tend to overthink things; then again someone even more intelligent would know better and not overthink things.
>In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems.
>Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems.
I wish the article went a bit deeper into analyzing the structural flaws of intelligence tests, because I think this is also an answer to why some people do poorly in school, yet seem to do very well in life overall (materially and emotionally speaking). The ability to find happiness is something worth teaching to people, if it can be taught. I honestly don't know if it can be. Certainly the ancients believed a good, moral life could be achieved through instruction, as the sheer number of writings on that topic they left behind clearly indicate, but then they also had a lot of curious ideas about the nature of reality as we know it. I think it's definitely worth considering reordering the priority of our education toward "poorly defined" questions, at least in part. The real difficulty will be finding people "qualified" to teach these "lessons".
First, I think the reasonable null hypothesis -- the hypothesis that needs to be disproven if you want to claim something -- is that intelligence is unrelated to happiness. That's the weakest, most natural assumption. So I don't really buy the framing of the article.
Specifically, I don't think there is any evidence that happiness comes from having "solved" problems in your life. It is well-known that winning the lottery doesn't change happiness -- you get happier for a short period, but then people seem to re-normalize to the new wealth level. Other changes in life circumstances seem similar.
Happiness as a transitory emotion certainly exists. But is happiness as a reportable statistic (like weight or income) meaningful? I think the null hypothesis should be "no". It isn't clear what we are measuring, or what it means in terms of our lives. If I report that I am happy, there is some notion that it is durable and meaningful, but three hours later, I may think about my relationship with my estranged kid and be feeling blue.
I don't think "happiness" has any meaning beyond "the emotions I feel this moment", which are inevitably a reflection of "what I have been thinking about in preceding moments". If I am working on an engineering problem and come to a satisfying solution, am I "happier" than I will be when thinking of my ex-wife?
As local "emotional weather", it's meaningful. As a reportable statistic, it's garbage.
The authors seems to imply that that Christopher Langan who scores extraordinarily high on IQ tests and who is developing a Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" (CTMU), is somehow dumb or ill informed for believing that the 9/11 attacks and subsequent collapse of the twin towers and world trade centre building 7, was planned.
Regardless of whether that is true or not, the author of the article takes direct aim at him for believing such a "conspiracy". Not only that, the OP also takes some personal shots at John Sununu and Bobby Fischer for their personal beliefs also.
I guess when you are smart as the author(Adam Mastroianni) and know everything there is to know about EVERYTHING because you have read it on CNN, you can pass judgment on other people like Langan, Fischer and Sununu for their beliefs because you know better than them, and you know for a fact that their beliefs are dumb and nonsensical because you read it somewhere and that is fact.
The OP seems to feel vindicated that someone who believes in a conspiracy theory is actually dumb and that actually intelligence tests mean nothing anymore and are not a relevant metric we should be using. Instead we should be using his Grandma as a baseline because she can raise a family and that, is all the intelligence we need. So shutup and talk to his grandma and get some wisdom.
It's difficult to take the OP seriously when he resorts to denouncing certain people as idiots for believing in non-mainstream accepted theories of certain historical events.
Let's be clear, the article states Christopher Langan believes 911 was an inside job created specifically to distract the world from Christopher Langan's work.
It seems to me you're offended that the OP implies that, e.g. Bobby Fischer wasn't good at non-well-defined problems. I would be interested to know why is that.
To clarify: I don't like the way they phrased it either (it was too judgemental), it just didn't bother me so much.
I get annoyed about the OP's arrogance in assuming he is right, because 'reasons', and everyone else mentioned is somehow wrong regarding the conspiracy theories mentioned.
Remember, people are still debating the JFK assassination, and those that don't believe the mainstream accepted narrative that Oswald single handedly fired those shots, considered crazy.
It bothers me, not that it makes any difference. I just wanted to point attention to it.
"People are idiots" as Scott Adams wrote. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and people considered smart are usually surprisingly ignorant about things outside the areas where their strengths are.
Happiness is such a vague concept that it's hard to measure. It's hard to imagine why something like being good at <insert arbitrary field of expertise here> would translate directly into living a happy life when most people's lives revolves around other things.
Going by the comments quite a
few didn't actually read the article fully. Happiness isn't even a particular focus, just that "how to live happily" is an example of a poorly defined problem that is different to the well defined problems "smart" people are good at.
It doesn't rule out the possibility that one day such a question might be well-defined and solvable, which is an intriguing thought.
Who says they aren't happier and why should the two even be connected (correlation vs causation)? For myself - much of the unhappiness I feel is connected to things out of my control. Being smarter will have little or no effect. "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" changed the way I think about happiness a great deal. Smart people know that meta-analysis is often wrong:)
My theory is that overall life happiness is a measure of your reality vs your potential.
If you're smart then you're probably in a field that has infinite opportunities and paths available. If you're not, you've probably landed in the niche that works nicely for you.
The former's potential is near infinite, the latter is pretty damn close to their endgame and happy to repeat till retirement.
Sidebar I dislike the term smart, I make no intentional judgements in this comment in regards to intelligence or lack of in comparison to career choice. I know plenty of people who have been called smart (including myself under protest) who are absolute doofuses outside of their field haha. Smart might as well just mean specialised in something that took more than 4 years to learn.
Even despite trying to be super delicate there.. actual smarts vs not smarts (normal definition) is probably similar. Smart folks have more potential to live up to.
I have no science to back up my claim but my knee jerk hunch is that people who weren't supported by their peers during the learning process go on to develop imposter syndrome.
Y'know like the classic story of being outcast unless you hide being into learning "You read books?! What a nerd!", "Teacher's pet!", "Why don't you go invent a gravity, Einstein"
Without early peer support there's no foundational confidence in your abilities and without that comes imposter syndrome later
Again I have no data other than my own experience, n=1 and barely at that. You'd definitely want to ask around a bit to see if this even matches up with other peoples experiences before accepting it as any sort of truth
E: It might not be that specific, any sort of educational trauma (for lack of a better way to describe it. Learning disorders, dyslexia, a lack of school experience entirely, having to take care of someone during your school years) would probably do it if the foundational skill confidence theory is in any way plausible
There is a type of problem called a Bongard problem, where participants are required to find the rule distinguishing images on the left from images on the right. There is an index of Bongard problems (and a nice explanation) here [1]
Bp's skirt the line betwen well defined and ill defined questions: there is no general rule you can follow to always solve it, but the answer can be trivially checked. I'm sure there is data on whether the ability to solve BPs is correlated with IQ, I assume so. It would be interesting if it was not, or only weakly.
I've never much enjoyed "intelligence" as a way to box groups of people. Everybody knows something I don't, can do things I cannot, solves problems in ways I would not think to. I would not call a math professor who does not know how to fix a car dumb. For me, the line between a lack of skill and a supposed lack of intelligence is too blurry. Of course all of this may be some sort of cognitive dissonance about myself probably not falling particularly high on an intelligence curve.
Either way, if joy and happiness is the goal, than a lot of adults are morons measured against trying to do that. We isolate ourselves, allow stigma and bias to push our choices, and ultimately worry so much about happiness that we do a poor job being happy.
"Happy" and "intelligent" are just different axes.
Being intelligent[0], I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. And I choose to work on the hardest problems I can manage.
Dogs are not known for their intellect, and can be made incredibly happy just by the appearance of their favourite person (who may be a human or another dog). Anyone who expects dogs to be anxious about global warming, AI alignment, or the thermodynamic heat death of the universe, has probably overestimated them.
[0] any comment which contains claims of this type must contain at least one unfixed tupo or autocorrupt error, it's traditional.
> Being intelligent[0], I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. And I choose to work on the hardest problems I can manage.
So what description would fit me then: "I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. I still don't act on it lots of times."
Smart people understand that “happiness” is not the point of life, and thus do not seek it out as much.
I could move to Hawaii, teach surf lessons, live in a shack, and smoke weed all day. That would probably make me “happy”. But what the hell is the point?
You are right. Instead of happyness better strive for usefulness. It makes one more happy when you know your work, your life, your comment on HN or your existance is/was useful for something or someone.
We often equate success with problem solving. I think people underestimate how much and how often worry plays a role in problem solving. We lionize the people who win the lottery by realizing that chocolate and peanut butter taste great together, but most of the rest is a slog, overcoming adversity and pushing through internal and external resistance. We don’t seem to connect that there are reasons things advance so much during wartime. More worry, less resistance.
Driven people aren’t happy. Sometimes they aren’t even sad. They’re just driven. How are you going to fix problems if you look around and see no problems?
My suspicion is that low birth rates and blazingly fast cultural evolution (is anybody here single and working from home?) have more to do with unhappiness than intelligence / computational ability / etc.
> Naturally, people with more of this mental horsepower must live happier lives. When they encounter a problem, they should use their superior problem-solving ability to solve it.
That's not all. Smart people are also more perceptive to problems, they identify more of them, and solving one problem is never enough. Ergo they can't ever be happy as in "content" (which is what all those 'happiness' self-report studies measure), in fact as time goes by they should get increasingly depressed by identifying more problems. Ignorance is often a bliss.
Also, at least for sustainable, healthy activities, there may also be some difference in the kind of life that a person in the bottom 10th percentile and a person in the top 10th percentile of the scale will find gratifying.
> We sometimes condescendingly refer to this kind of wisdom as “folksy” or “homespun,” as if answering multiple-choice questions is real intelligence, and living a good, full life is just some down-home, gee-whiz, cutesy thing that little old ladies do.
I'm not going to address the condescending tone, but is it possible that for the grandma what otherwise seems like a poorly defined problem is actually pretty well defined because of exposure and the experience that comes from living a long life?
To me, happiness equals headphones. If I have nice headphones, with nice audio, meaning can listen to the song I want to listen to whenever I want, I'm happy. Headphones are the most direct path to happiness for me. It's like I'm happy if and only if I have good audio.
But beyond good audio, I have ambitions that don't have anything to do with having good audio. In fact I reject happiness, I find it a weakness to pursue it, it's the easy way out.
This seem to fit with a related idea I have been thinking a lot about. What the relationship between having potential when you're young means in terms of how much success you will reach when you're older. And where does passion fit in this picture. If smart people end up being able to find their passion, are they more successful and does that lead to more happiness? Or is the hedonic treadmill inescapable.
Something that'll make me happy whatever happens, that could remove all motivation to look after myself and those I (currently!) care about: no. Because I don't want to become that person even if it would be very pleasant to be him.
Something that puts me in a buoyant mood each day, that makes life a pleasure and smooths all the rough edges away, well, maybe. I'd like to become that person.
I liked the big about granny.
I also like Navals take on this, he asks a similar questions 'if you're so smart, why aren't you happy?'.
I think Navals conclusion is that smart people take to things differently, they try to use the same tools that they've used in their lives such as logic and math to try get to happiness but its not physics, its more like philosophy.
One aspect I realized over time is that smart people tend to try to have knowledge and explanations for much more of the world than most of the others. And many times these explanations are completely wrong and partisan when it is out of their main areas of expertise but they cling to it really hard. Over time this tends to dissipate in many which also make them much nicer to be around.
Still digesting this, but part of what makes some of the smartest people smart is the ability to find an interesting, well-defined, problem in a vague question. Great mathematicians don't just solve such problems, they help formulate them.
All of which is an aside -- I doubt it has bearing on finding happiness. It's more a critique of the way the paper wants to frame the problem.
People, especially on forums like HN, tend to mistake being 'intellectual' to actually 'intelligent'. There are various ways of being "smart" and being good at math and code is only one of them (Emotional intelligence, relationship intelligence, intelligence in career) etc...
It's generally a mix of them who lead to happiness, if that even exists
What kind of smart people are we talking about? I know lots of dumb smart people, some smart dumb people, and a very few smart smart people. The dumb dumb category I try and avoid as find the company stress inducing. I didn't define these as either you know exactly what I mean, or you don't. If you don't, its not easy to describe.
This author gets so many things wrong. Self-reported happiness, linking intelligence to results of synthetic tests, assuming that problem-solving capabilities makes people happier instead of having a different altitude to happiness, etc. American pop psychology poorly understands happiness and has an overly technical approach to it.
Shouldn’t the real question be “why aren’t more people happy”.
Lack of happiness isn’t relegated only to “smart people”.
My observation: managing stress related to ever growing amount of responsibilities (as comes with age), finances, and spouse can have a disproportionate impact on one’s happiness. None of which are tied to intelligence.
If you use your smarts to conclude that having a spouse will negatively affect your happiness, don't have one.
A very intelligent person should be able to figure out a way to improve their finances.
The article makes the distinction between well-defined problems (eg. increase my monthly income) and poorly defined problems (eg. find a spouse that matches you for life), and clearly suggests that intelligence helps with one but not the other.
> If you use your smarts to conclude that having a spouse will negatively affect your happiness, don't have one.
You're assuming the negative. Your spouse can be a huge overall help in achieving happiness.
> A very intelligent person should be able to figure out a way to improve their finances.
It's not that simple.
You could be exceedingly smart but medically handicapped, which leads to lower paying jobs. Or could have been a high earner and then come down with an unfortunate disease which greatly impacts you ability to work and medically bankrupts you.
> You're assuming the negative. Your spouse can be a huge overall help in achieving happiness
I am not assuming anything, but explaining that, in theory, one could decide to have or not to have a spouse to increase their happiness — if they could reasonably deduce what the outcome would be, which they can't.
I was mostly tongue-in-cheek in relation to a spouse: that's a "poorly defined problem" that, according to the article, intelligence does not help with.
> It's not that simple
Oh, agreed. But we are talking about averages, and there is a known correlation between intelligence and financials.
Statistics, unfortunately, never says anything special about any single case.
I don't think our society has any focus on happiness, it's not easily measured or produced and there's little proof that it'd benefit the economy..
I mean..
What if people suddenly discovered that enough food and shelter is available, that they could do maybe a days work a month and just walk around to smell the flowers the rest of the time?
There are many people for whom that is true (chiefly the retired). The ones who are physically able generally choose to do something marginally “productive” than continuously smelling flowers. (Perhaps that’s related to what got them to a position to retire, whether a work ethic, other personal mindset, or programming.)
Good post. Yes - we only know how to measure one type of smartness which does not collerate with happiness at all.
Maybe some people are happier when they are in relationships? Others when they are alone. Some when they have a dog. Then some can be happy only if they have a bird… I wish I knew.
One model we could use is the hedonic treadmill plus normal distribution of baseline happiness across IQ. That would lead to uncorrelated happiness vs. IQ.
But I think I find that second assumption hard to justify.
Thanks for the thought pattern about "well-defined" vs. "ill-defined" intelligences.
It's the little things for me, sitting out back of my house, looking over the garden at this time of year, and chilling out with a cold brew from Stoneman brewery in upstate MA. I wouldn't trade it for a million bucks.
Happiness has to do with brain chemistry and disposition. It has nothing to do with intelligence or problem solving. Achieving goals and rewards gives a dopamine hit but it doesn’t produce happiness in any lasting sense.
Well, smart people are wealthier and we know that income and happiness follow a logarithmic linear curve. Maybe these research are over adjusting (controlling for income) and therefore are unable to find the true effect.
Because we can tell whats going to happen sooner or later and don't get all giggly when some bimbo on tv or politician says the world will be a Utopia where we get rich by being cool people and all have playboy models in bed with us. When Gas and technology prices skyrocket and people find it entertaining, then nothing good is on its way. RaspberryPi had to hike up prices for the first time ever but you think awesome and quality made battery powered vehicles are just around the corner and with and afforable enough for the majority?
Hell if I know, Right now is the best time to focus on personal lives and relationships or all this mass bs will never let you be happy... None of it matters for us..
The whole premise is weird. Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes. A cat almost certainly doesn't think about things more than one day in the future.
Many people eventually give up thinking about things too much and give up to various forms of hedonism, but that's not real happiness. When it happens after 40s it's called a 'mid life crisis', I don't think it has a name when it happens earlier, but fundamentally it's the same thing.
Real happiness would require advanced transhumanism or even more (ie. uploading) - without it, we are all trapped only being able to imagine perfection.
> Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes.
You don't need to be very intelligent to consider climate a very hard problem. In fact, if we follow this logic, less smart people should be unhappier, since they are in an even worse position to do something, while smart people might choose to go into an engineering job to help solve the problems or gain enough influence in politics to change things for the better.
I consider climate change a negligible issue, it's just the hype of the day, something you're "supposed" to virtue signal about. Even a 10C temperature change won't change much in the grand scheme of things.
Average person is dumber each year because high iq is negatively correlated with fertility. On top of that populations are collapsing due to below replacement tfr. There's a real danger that technical civilization collapses later this century. The problem is that all easily accessible fossil fuel sources are already used up, so restarting much later from eg. a late xix century level is borderline impossible - civilization will run out of wood fast and progress stops due to an energy deficit. Advanced semiconductor manufacturing beyond proof of concept requires scale unattainable by such a civilization.
In short, the falling intelligence trend coupled with running out of easily accessible energy means that most likely, either humanity escapes biological-planetary constraints this century, or becomes stuck in a low-tech hairless ape local maxima until the inevitable extinction. A very good candidate for the Great Filter.
Fossil fuels only exist in the first place because for millions of years no organism on Earth was capable of digesting lignin. As trees died they just became buried, eventually transforming into coal and oil. That process stopped the moment fungi evolved the ability to digest lignin. This means that there's not going to be another chance even in millions of years, whether for human descendants or some other intelligent species (racoons seem like a good candidate). Easily accessible fossil fuel energy is a one time event per planet.
There's less than 100 years to escape the trap and it requires sci-fi level tech, either advanced genetic modification of humans or superhuman level ai.
>In fact, if we follow this logic, less smart people should be unhappier, since they are in an even worse position to do something
Worrying about something requires realizing it's a problem first.
> I consider climate change a negligible issue, it's just the hype of the day, something you're "supposed" to virtue signal about. Even a 10C temperature change won't change much in the grand scheme of things.
Well, I think the majority of the people who study these exact kinds of problems would probably disagree with you, no? AFAIK, the human contribution to climate change is actually very drastic and will probably show huge effects.
from what I've seen, 10c change (even in a developed country) would fundamentally change life and at least how much we spend on commodities like food, energy, water
I don't know why you assume in the first place that intelligence correlates at all with happiness or unhappiness. There's no adequate proof for any of those
asumptions.
To be happy, you must define something as a source of happiness. Smart people might be more nuanced or finnicky about actually making such a determination.
Don’t have too many comments on the article but the headline makes me think of an Andrew bird line “if you cried when you were born, cus it’s not fair”
People seem to conflate "intelligence" and like "all good qualities/effective goodness". I suspect that that's partially because that was a goal of a search for general intelligence, and partially because intelligence (or lack thereof) is a primary way people have marginalized people, but maybe intelligence is not correlated with "all the things" maybe it's just sort of a neutral factor that may or may not be as important as things like creativity, or empathy or discipline or having good vision or whatever. Why instead of empathy do we talk about "emotional intelligence" why instead of artistic or musical do we have spacial intelligence or musical intelligence. You're not a dancer, you have Z"Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence"
I prefer the idea that not everyone has to be intelligent, or that intelligence is not in fact correlated with "goodness" or "selfesteem" because it makes understanding people like Elon Musk a lot easier. It also makes understanding the self a lot easier when in fact strengths in one area do not correlate to strengths in another area.
I think the author is skipping a step in their logic.
Happiness doesn't come from succeeding in your goals. This seems childishly naive, like "if only I got that promotion then I'd be happy". "If only I had a better car then I'd be happy". No… you wouldn't.
The author's thesis that (tl;dr) "IQ tests only measure ability to pass IQ tests" completely disregards just about all research on the topic of intelligence and success, and the actual correlation between success in poorly defined problems and IQ tests.
It's not that "IQ test scoring" defines an intelligence scale. It's that it's strongly correlated with success.
So whatever intelligence is, IQ tests are strongly correlated with it.
But success, or intelligence, is not happiness.
A person with Down's syndrome can be very happy, but there is no "therefore is more intelligent than the Mensa member successfully running a multinational conglomerate" or the next Einstein, even if they are happier.
So this article is not "A new way to think about brainpower", but an old and tired disproved one.
I think the answer is that intelligent people tend to suffer from depression more than “simpler” people. Insecure over-achievers, “introverts”, and the like.
the intelligence of someone is foolishness in other eyes. Simpler people, as you call them, have often solutions for problems with which well educated people struggle with.
So not looking down on someone is a good beginning for be more happy. :)
> And that’s a shame. My grandma does not know how to use the “input” button on her TV’s remote control, but she does know how to raise a family full of good people who love each other, how to carry on through a tragedy, and how to make the perfect pumpkin pie. We sometimes condescendingly refer to this kind of wisdom as “folksy” or “homespun,” as if answering multiple-choice questions is real intelligence, and living a good, full life is just some down-home, gee-whiz, cutesy thing that little old ladies do.
I think this gets to the meat and potatoes of something I've been thinking about after reading some Marcuse[1] recently. I think our whole idea of IQ, at least popularly, revolves around how well someone's able to succeed capitalistically. It's all about how Productive someone is, or their productive capabilities. Earlier in the article the author wrote:
> Over the last generation, we have solved tons of well-defined problems. We eradicated smallpox and polio. We landed on the moon. We built better cars, refrigerators, and televisions. We even got ~15 IQ points smarter! And how did our incredible success make us feel? ... All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier. I think there’s an important lesson here: if solving a bunch of well-defined problems did not make our predecessors happier, it probably won’t make us happier, either.
Implying I suppose that we got smarter but not happier, which is a surprising conclusion from someone that was so careful throughout the article to point out the racist and unscientific history and basis for much of what makes an IQ. Are we smarter? I don't know. Are we happier? No, we know we aren't, and I don't think it's because we're smarter, I think it's because we're poorer, and doing things that hurt us. How can a species who have Curiosity built in, and a evolutionary strategy utterly dependent on community building and society skills such as communication and tool building, be happy in an increasingly isolated, repetitive society? Our needs and wants have been coopted. Marcuse wrote:
> The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment...
We've been reduced to consumers and producers. No wonder we're sad. Like the blog author wrote:
> So if you’re really looking for a transformative change in your happiness, you might be better off reading something ancient. The great thinkers of the distant past seemed obsessed with figuring out how to live good lives: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, even up through Thoreau and Vivekananda. But at some point, this kind of stuff apparently fell out of fashion.
I always wonder why that kind of thinking fell out of fashion. Why did I find myself arguing with a college educated person a few days back about why cutting off the hands of thieves is bad? We've got a couple thousand years of work done here and we've spent it mostly, it seems, making fantastic technologies that indisputably make our lives better, safer, more comfortable, and longer, but I wonder if we're not spending as much energy as we should on these "hard to define" problems? To call back to the first paragraph I quoted, are we spending enough time venerating and learning from grandmas who know how to build and hold together a community? That seems like some core, important intelligence that we should be taking notes on.
> Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitols is not going to help you solve them.
That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed. I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed. Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.
> smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed
Define 'better'. For example:
> “How do I get my child to stop crying?”
Lots of 'dumb' parents are very good at solving this question, they give the kid what they want and put them in front of the TV or give them a bunch of candy. Smart parents might overthink the question, read a book on parenting, try a naughty chair, fail and get stressed.
The smart parents answer might be the one that's best in the long term, but it might not and really doesn't solve the actual problem right now. So is it the better answer? That depends, because it's not a well-defined problem, which I think is the point.
There's no indication that smart parents don't get their child to cry less than dumb parents either shorter or longer term, so the entire argument is baseless.
How about an indication of the opposite? Since you stated that smart people "are better at answering all of the questions you listed".
You seem to have completely missed the point of my comment though, which is that the questions are not well-defined and therefore it's not obvious what 'the better answer' is.
I don't see then how that can explain why smarter people are less happy.
In fact if you believe this article, unhappiest people have avg. IQ. Low and high IQ are happy, with >120 being the happiest: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-19659985
The article doesn't state that they are less happy. It just states that they are not happier as in, they are probably pretty much equally as happy as other people.
The article does not provide data significant enough to support its basic assumption, that smart people fail to solve ill-defined tasks more than dumb people.
It asserts the two are uncorrelated, not that the two are anticorrelated. But I agree, data regarding this theory would be great. It is not immediately obvious how to come up with more informative data than what is given though, because the ill defined questions necessarily have ill defined answers, so any data will be heavily determined by subjective judgement. Nevertheless I think you are too dismissive. The basic premise is that most intelligence measures we have concern well defined tasks, so it is interesting to explore the relationship between intelligence and ill defined tasks.
> I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed.
The article has this paragraph that seems to contradict your position:
> This is exactly the situation we’re in with tests that claim to measure people’s “reasoning” and “problem-solving ability.” Christopher Langan, a guy who can score eye-popping numbers on IQ tests, believes that 9/11 was an inside job meant specifically to distract the public from his theories, and he claims that banks won’t give him a loan because he’s white. John Sununu supposedly has IQ of 176, but he still had to resign from being George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff because he flew to his dentist appointments using military jets. Bobby Fischer is one of the greatest chess players of all time, but he also claimed that Hitler was a good dude, the Holocaust didn’t happen, and "Jews murder Christian children for their blood and they’re doing it even today." Then there's the ever-lengthening list of professors at elite universities who have been disciplined or dismissed for doing things like sexually harassing colleagues and students or completely making up data or hanging out with a known pedophile. These are supposed to be some of the smartest people in the world, endowed with exceptional problem-solving abilities. And yet they’re still unable to solve basic but poorly defined problems like “maintain a basic grip on reality” and “be a good person” and “don't make any life-altering blunders.”
If "smarter people are better at answering" those sorts of questions, why do the allegedly smartest people in the world make such blatantly stupid decisions or hold such obviously wrong, easily proven wrong, beliefs?
> Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.
What does this mean? What was the result of your search? Did you find higher IQ people are more or often less married? Or more or less often divorced? Is it good to be married? Is it smart to get married? I don't understand.
I found this part of the article a bit hair raising, especially the examples -
Bobby Fischer was mentally ill - is not being schizophrenic a form of intelligence?
I read the article linked about 'Christopher Langan' - the guy lost out on a scholarship and got kicked out of college because of circumstances related to his poverty and uneducated single mom.
Is having loaded parents also a form of intelligence?
> Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that
The article is concerned with happiness and intelligence. I can’t speak to the strength of its evidence, but it does present a graph that shows a flat lined measure of happiness that spans 80 years despite an increase of 15 IQ points in that time.
> That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed.
I wasn’t answering a question I was just quoting the article
Seems like the correlations between IQ tests and life outcomes related to this ill defined questions does imply a degree of crossover in rotating shape skill and dealing with the ambiguities of life. However that is probably genetic or due to early development , not something where practicing shape rotation to improve it further will improve your marriage or relationship with your kids.
We as society shouldn't focus so much on being „happy“. Happiness by itself is not worthwhile. What are you going to tell on your deathbed and how will your relatives remember you? Oh, he never did anything, but he seemed happy all the time!
Hmm, living life for its own simple satisfaction seems like a worthwhile option and no small legacy. Being happy and lifting up the spirits of those around you is no small contribution - and is certainly not exclusive with “doing something”.
I wonder about optimizing your life around your deathbed, obituary, or your contribution to society…if it makes you happy I guess;)
Given how complicated life is, „living life for it's own simple satisfaction“ frequently involves freeriding on people around you.
Being happy, possible with substances involved, is not exactly inspiring to people around. And, usually, people try to keep away other people from such... inspiration.
Of course, you can be „simply happy“ and a productive member of a community. But usually happiness comes as a byproduct then. And there're lots of other emotions aside from „being happy“.
Maybe it's worth to optimise around reducing misery around or being a net-positive on society where the life satisfaction will eventually come. But happiness may be out of reach due to stuff you can't unknow.
Those who achieve a lot professionally/outwardly are more often than not lacking seriously in some personal aspect. Most often messed up childhood with wrong/missing father figure, unhealthy competitive. I am sure everybody knows them - never staying at one place too long, never happy with anything they have/achieve, always chasing next challenge... no, thank you. Life ending in regrets later on is practically guaranteed.
Long term happiness is an art these days, being too smart is definitely not a prerequisite (more like the opposite of it). Also, I think we lack proper definition for it so people take it as some sort of nirvana levitating a meter above the ground type.
For me personally, living life that I will judge positively and without regrets on the proverbial death bed is form of long term happiness.
I'm not sure theres such a thing as smart people to begin with. Plenty of people know their own domain very well, but it seems only a few domains are arbitrarily chosen as intelligent ones. Seeing as we're still struggling to define what intelligence even is, I don't see how we can start labelling people as intelligent or not.
At that point, the question is just "why aren't people happier". I doubt theres any one answer, but a lot of the responses in this thread seem to point to some of the possible reasons.
There is a widely accepted definition of intelligence in there, and the article attempts to delineate between problems intelligent people are good at and not-so-good at (at least not better than everybody else).
If intelligence were universally desirable then a stroll through the forest would be akin to a disney feature, with all of the rest of the animals being as intelligent as us. They're not. It's not like they haven't had enough time to evolve superior cognition. Humans proved that under the right conditions, it only takes a few million years.
Superior human cognitive ability is a merely an instrument of male territorial aggression which was subject to a fisherian runaway sexual selection process beginning around australopithecus and terminating with the advent of civilization. This process accelerated, jerked, snapped, crackled, and popped because superior human cognition has a side effect of enabling humans to more effectively extract resources from their habitat.
To even ask the op's question is to presume some utility or value for superior individual cognitive ability. It isn't meaningful, useful, special, or advantageous. An outright stupid human is perfectly capable of achieving the resources, relationships, habits, and social standing among peers necessary to be reliably content.
If anything, the gifted man is burdened by going through life with the false conviction that his life and ideas matter more because of some trait he possesses which is altogether vestigial in the modern world.
Of course they may praise you for this and perhaps you get addicted to this positive feedback, but it comes at a high cost, especially as you can end up spending so much effort on "friends" that you neglect to solve or even recognize your own problems.
I have come to realize recently that I don't actually have any friends, only dependents. Declining to take ownership of people's problems caused basically all of them to more or less cut off contact with me (maybe I get a text once a year or something), but I am so much happier now that I ever was before.