Why aren't smart people happier?(experimentalhistory.substack.com) |
Why aren't smart people happier?(experimentalhistory.substack.com) |
Ctrl-F, appears about 2/3rds down the article. Could have come around a bit quicker :-)
1:18 "For an abundance of wisdom brings an abundance of frustration,
So that whoever increases knowledge increases pain."
Most things labelled smart these days are not.
Happy (one of my least favorite words) seems to mean passive contentment in the modern context -- a recipe for getting nothing accomplished.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/happy "characterized by a dazed irresponsible state" a punch-happy boxer
That definition seems to fit the 'happy' people pretty well.
Old adages sometimes have the answers; in this case "ignorance is bliss".
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.
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.
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?
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.
Being smart and knowing how to make smart decisions are different.
Being smart is the sword. Wisdom is swordmanship.
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.
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.
It's generally a mix of them who lead to happiness, if that even exists
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.
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.
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?
But I think I find that second assumption hard to justify.
Thanks for the thought pattern about "well-defined" vs. "ill-defined" intelligences.
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..
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Bill Gates seems to be doing quite well on the happiness front.
Smallpox, yes. Polio, unfortunately, no, as evidenced by the current anti-vaxxer polio outbreak in New York.
Also our ability to locate and live among the people with which we’d be most successful and happy.
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.
Stupid people.
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!
I wonder about optimizing your life around your deathbed, obituary, or your contribution to society…if it makes you happy I guess;)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
The article listed.
> 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
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?
> What does this mean?
The very first article I saw was claiming that couples had average IQ higher than singles, and that divorcees had lower.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
"I'm getting hustled only knowing half the game." "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish" by The Coup
Why aren't smart people taller?
Why aren’t smart people and their problems studied as a particular subset of society?
Intelligence is already notoriously difficulty to quantify, now compare that to something as ephemeral as happiness.
what are you going to do? compare someone IQ against some self reported metric of happiness?
- Ecclesiastes, somewhere between 450-180 BCE.
That's why posts like this gets voted up all the time.
Bad news: 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.
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.
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
G factor is well understood and is mainstream across Psychology/Neuroscience. Intelligence tests are highly correlated to G factor.
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.
Mindfulness is a big component of my new Life.
And brings out questions about free will, agency, self-control, volition... and more.
These days I am fond of 2 books that actually touch on this very topic: "Grit" and "Ego is the enemy".
>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".
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.
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.
Was that really necessary to trash these people?
To clarify: I don't like the way they phrased it either (it was too judgemental), it just didn't bother me so much.
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.
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.
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.
It's an interesting theory, can you reconcile it with the propensity of the intelligent to feel 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
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.
2. You learn something new every day.
3. Every day you have less bliss.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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?
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.
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 :-)
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 wonder how reliable this is. I've seen people get offended when others tried calling in favors with them.
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.
[0]: This is what I read: https://smile.amazon.com/Shortness-Life-Penguin-Great-Ideas/...
[1]: Free online: https://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_...
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.
>"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.
"Smart People" (and the above is an example) often are not only knowledgable, but actionable, across a variety of subjects.
Leading to unhappiness is frustration that others choose not to or are otherwise incapable of this knowledge or action.
But especially when you hear "I wish I could do what you do" from people who have had more impetus, more opportunity, or have invested more than you.
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.
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.
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.
Not always, but occasionally roll a die and if it comes back a one, decline to help them and give a polite excuse.
You still benefit others without them consuming all your time.
And if they ask why, you could just say that they saw the dice, the Gods have spoken and they don't want you to help them.
I might actually try this, could be fun!
Nowadays whenever I get a call from an old friend out of the blue, I know what it is. Tech interview help OR career advice.
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.
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.”
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.
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
Disclaimer: Individual results may vary
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.
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.
Intelligence can help you climb to the highest positions in business and academia, wisdom allows you to understand that it isn't really worth it.
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?
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.
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%." """
-- Don Knuth
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.
From: Going Through An Existential Crisis? https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existentia...
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.
[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 humans could ever reach a state that would guarantee happiness we’d still be living in caves and having 10 children so 5 make it to adults.
Progress requires dissatisfaction with the status quo.
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".
It's about social connections and inter-human things ... not some skills you learn on universities but from loving and well raised parents.
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.
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.
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.
Why?
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?"
I got working on that... and I succeeded again
Can you elaborate on how being happy is a skill?
> 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.”
1. https://seths.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/stop-stealing-...
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
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.
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.
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.
Now let's measure that?
Personally, I just don't see how.
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.
Anything that doesn't do what they expect it's clearly your fault because you messed with it 8 months ago.
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.
Learn to appreciate beauty. Learn to create beauty. Learn how to get better at both.
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.
Thanks for stating it so clearly
Long term life satisfaction is the correct goal.
For example, having children decreases the former yet increases the latter.
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.
Don't try to be happy, try to be free.
Meaning that you should not focus on the ending, you should focus on the process. And try to get it so you get the most options
The closing sentiment takes the cake for me. A neat little shanty of the mindset of the communist smart men.
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 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 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.
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)
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.
"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?
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.
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.
This is very much like knowing the train is going to fall off the bridge but not being able to stop people from boarding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Relative to 200 years ago, we do. People aren't any happier. That's not how happiness works.
See: Hedonistic adaptation.
"I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom." - John Carmack
Which I think balances it out.
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.
Happy because unaware of world situation
>mid intelligence
Unhappy because aware of world situation
>high intelligence
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ignorance is bliss.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1767679-tfw-too-intelligent-...
Call it "optimistic nihilism", if you will.
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 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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!
Guess it stops mattering when you attain some kind of financial peace of mind.
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.
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.
For my money, I prefer the dispassionate route. I get way too hung up on results and expectations otherwise.
> 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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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
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?
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.
Humans can work miracles sometimes. We came up with microprocessors, I'm sure we'll think of a good way to increase energy production and empathy. :)
> I fear that human nature is stil stuck in a the ape mindset of "I got mine", and will never get out of.
Maybe it will. No reason not to hope.
Ah, what a relief. Phew!
(I'll choose to believe you, short of understanding this, but this is probably enough to be happy)
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.
I don't really think that's true. Some of the smartest people I know are nowhere near the highest positions of business and academia.
I found it particularly funny when my University math professors displayed a complete inability to reason about the simplest of things.
A more recent study was done on the "ideal salary point" and concluded that there really isn't one: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
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.
Consider that the vast majority of people don't even do that much - It doesn't take much to be above average.
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.
just because the universe is big and old doesn't mean it has any special meaning or significance.
eh, not exactly true: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
> But what if you identify problems you cannot solve?
then you shouldn't take it personally
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.
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.
And one of the components of intelligence is pattern recognition.
Basically they fall for the social version of pareidolia.
> 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."
“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”)
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 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.
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.
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).
Because you aren't picking sides, you will be accused by every side to be siding with the "enemy".
The ecological kind, misery path for sure.. Until entropy can be reversed at least.
(fwiw, I'm not saying you're wrong)
People who want to have children should have them, and people who don't want to have children shoudln't have them =)
Simply compare the two curves. Those with children vs those without.
Your comment stands if you look at outliers, GP stands if you take the curves.
> 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...
A great example of focusing on the positive in any and all situations!
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 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.
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.
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
No kidding. I wonder how many tech workers have had a job outside the industry. Money solved a whole shitload of my problems.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
Yes.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
EDIT: rephrased to not be snarky
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.
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.
[0]if you aren't familiar check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3nN9-C1yKU
Quite a hot take. Most famous philosophers lived in similar environments. I don't know how your environment precludes you from wisdom.
-edited for typo.
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.
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.
Yes.
>as your yearnings and desires increase for more and more pleasure
Why is this an inevitability? I've lived in my current condo for 2 years and I still enjoy the simple pleasure of standing on the balcony that I own.
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.
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.
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.
Funny that you're mentioning that, the Epistemology classes I took in university while I was studying History were some of my favourites.
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".
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.
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.
Article talks of scientific studies supporting that claim: you doubting it and sharing your anecdotal experience does not change what the stats say.
I do welcome you to challenge those studies (that's what science is all about), but that's not done with "doubting" them on HackerNews.
(Oh, and cliches are just that, cliches: they were never universally true, which is why we don't use words like "facts" for them)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unanswered_questions#Sabba...
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.
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.
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.
Or it'll be seized and hoarded by corrupt governments or militias.
It seems plausible. For instance, would a good accountant (well defined problems) necessarily make a good physicist (poorly defined problems)?
Seems to indicate that the threshold hypothesis (IQ helps creativity/divergent thinking up to a point, then levels out in correlation) is largely correct
Plato, father of most modern philosophy. You have a lot of reading to do my friend.
I'm not sure how you can say the father of modern philosophy is a lazy answer.
I think that you can find wisdom even in the presence of flaws. You can always gain something by studying the imperfect.
I will never forgive you, John. You denied me cake.
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).
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..
Turn to creating (art, science, a better mousetrap), and there’s no end in sight.
Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm
I'd agree that at some point being "creative" feels like just another kind of killing time with minesweeper or crossword puzzles or whatever.
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.
It should be. As you get to see the heat death of the Universe. Or at least experience its beginnings; or at experience an ice-age or something.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
