Theory: There are more smart, happy people than it seems. It’s just, that particular combination tends to come with a reduced inclination to question their feelings and to engage in discourse about feelings.

Because you realize everything is a scam.

The premise of the title is wrong. Being Smart and Happiness is not related. There is no cause and effect.

Whenever I see title like this, I wonder why do you make the connection of thoes two unrelated concepts?

Baity Title.

I live by "everything is grey". I am interestingly smart in some niche domains that I have a hard time communicating exists. I also insist on not fitting any template. Pretty dumb, right?

Bertrand Russell wrote a text which touches on this exact subject, The Conquest of Happiness [1].

Ignore the hyperbole of the "who should read it". In my opinion, it is his thoughts on happiness from his own life. Some of it is dated, but I found it a relaxing and rational take on the topic.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Happiness-Bertrand-Russell/d...

What about this: Happy people try less hard (because why would you? things are going great!), thus getting challenged less, thus appearing not as smart/proving themselves less.

If monkey know how to open coconut and monkey like coconut, then eating coconut is what make monkey happy, not knowing how to open coconut or reflecting on its ability to do so…

The first comment on the blog has it.

Subjectively, personally, we can all decide for ourselves what purpose we live for, but the purpose of life as a phenomenon in the world is not to enjoy itself. It's to perpetuate itself. Stay alive long enough and win a competition for scarce resources needed to reproduce. Being largely freed from the tyranny of constant threats and true scarcity, humans can aspire for more, but we're still living creatures. When bears come down from the mountains to fight to the death for winner take all access to the pool of twelve available mates, they're not happy when they win. They mate and get back to it, rest a few months, then fatten up again and prepare for another year of fighting to the death, until they finally get old and lose to a younger, stronger competitor. That's the tale of thousands of generations of ancestors spilled into all of us, humanity included.

Even just look at specific highly successful humans. Take famously miserable, no friends Michael Jordan. Win every year, enjoy it for twenty seconds, then immediately get back to work, 14 hours in the gym every day, alienating everyone you ever meet, having no friends, only to win again and feel just as hollow. Why? Because genes and behaviors that make an animal that driven, to succeed at any and all cost, including their own wellbeing, is the basis of success at the only thing that actually matters to life itself, as opposed to any individual thinking creature.

He may or may not want to be that way. I'm a reasonably smart guy, nowhere near as driven or successful as Michael Jordan, but I still often wish I was less smart and less driven than I am. The logic of life dictates that we always want more. Nothing is ever good enough. It's why we're collectively miserable no matter how much abundance and wealth we collectively create, even among those who have more than 99% of the world. We can tell each other all the stories we want about the fairness of the distribution, convince yourself your misery is especially justified because you believe you'll be the first generation of humans ever to pay more for housing than your parents. It isn't that. You're not special. None of us are. Dissatisfaction and always wanting more are core to what makes life life.

Being smart probably makes you better at life, but being better at life is barely correlated with enjoying it, if at all.

As a Smart Person with at least 2 sigma IQ, never studied in school, college was not a wake up call it was also easy, yes it was a good college, blah blah...:

Knowing what is worth doing or what would make me happy is the hard part. Achieving the goal isn't the hard part, it's setting one. Knowing what will make me happy is something philophers smarter than me have been wondering about for thousands of years.

Because it's hard to be "happy" when you know how shitty this world is for the majority of life on it, even if your own life was perfect

In my experience who live and work with smart people, and make smart decisions about their personal lives and families are pretty happy .

You can have a high IQ and make really stupid personal decisions.

Albert Einstein was notorious for this . He made catastrophic personal decisions that destroyed his families. His various wives and numerous mistresses ended up despising him and his son ended up in an asylum .

> Why aren't smart people happier?

I think any discussion on this topic should begin with answering "Why would one expect smart people to be happier?"

Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.

If you're interested in this topic, I love pg's Why Nerds are Unpopular. It was the first place where I started to realize things like being popular, being happy and others require their own sort of intelligence and effort.

https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Because you can be smart about 1 thing, but have all the wrong assumptions in life. I.e. just must deeply believe that it is your right to seek hapiness, not that you must adhere to what people generally believe is the optimal way to exist in your culture.

Such realizations require experience, wisdom, contemplation. Not whatever leads to a high IQ.

Other people call me smart. I think I'm just hard working.

I read enough books to spot liars, and when people you built Idealistic trust with break it, you never leave your guard down.

No psychologist or psychology book can break it. They are just idiots. Or maybe they believe Plato's Noble lie is good for society. But once you see, you can't unsee.

Now everything in my life has ~0 trust but all supervision.

From politics to food safety to personal relationships, don't trust. Verify.

I am not the smarter, but I believe that I am smart enough. My problem is that my mind overthinks all the possible scenarios that could happen. For example, now with AI, what happens if the AI replaces all jobs, are we going to all live happy lives doing nothing? or are we going to be all super poor with the top 1% living in closed cities?

Good question. For me the problem is complex. It is not only about self feelings, the educational system and our society is a part of it...kids are growing up with "facts" that good results and adults high income make happiness...and often the essential is forgotten!

Likewise, rich people don't seem to be happier - sampling the few thousand people I have spoken to in my life.

This is exactly the question considered in Voltaire's short story "The Good Brahmin"[0]

0: https://www.online-literature.com/voltaire/4411/

I would rather know who is happy, what is meant by happy and why those cohorts are more happy. Smart may or may not be the primary thing. E.g. if parenthood makes one "happy" (defn. needed) and being smart makes you forgo that for ambition that would be interesting to know.

To address this question, apply a mathematical trick, and convert it to the equivalent "Why aren't happy people smarter?". This new question admits a range of straightforward solutions, depending on how kind you are to the handicapped.

It's practically a disorder. I remember the book, Too Smart to Be Happy by Jeanne Siaud-Facchin. (French)

Gifted people often are top-down thinkers, which has a lot to do with creating connections, so we can gain insight as we keep the bigger picture in mind.

Because we’re social animals and 84% of the population can’t do calculus or understand any meaningful statistics. It makes honest discussion and cooperation with the average person nearly impossible.

Pressure, from inside and out, concisely.

Smart people aren’t lazy. They often speak less because their attention is focused on productivity, achieving their goals, and earning more money.

Maybe because they are not that smart? :)

Gotta love all the “I don’t consider myself intelligent but…”.

HN is one bad UX decision away from becoming the new LinkedIn. Humble brags galore!

"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher

Because they can see the consequences.

The idea that stupid people are happier comes from the effects of lead poisoning, which turned you into a happy, inane person.

Because junk food and soda tastes good but we are smart an know it will make us fat and dead so we drink water and eat carrots.

> "Müller-Lyer illusion, the two lines that look like they’re different lengths but aren't"

I hate that the author gave a picture in which the two lines actually are of different lengths, as you can see from trying to pick a rectangular screenshot.

I'd quantify the exact feature in the line that I'm using for reference (which would be by itself ironic considering the discussion on well-defined relations between entities attached to that picture), but it's unnecessary - none of them match!

All thought is born of failure.

Because being smart doesn't mean being wise. Lack of wisdom can fuck up your life far, far worse than lack of intelligence... and I for one am not wise when it comes to people.

because they are not using their smartness to make themselves happier

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

If you're smart you probably have bigger, more challenging goals, so chances of success aren't higher. Deliberately setting goals lower might not help. Having a mindset which decouples happiness from goals would help, but people are generally not wired for that, evolution wanted us to push harder.

Simple, many-times-repeated fact: smartness -> high expectations but low yield -> disappointment. The imbalance between expected and returned may or not be the person's responsibility.

Every smart person should invest time to learn the dexterities to manage their talent.

> people score higher on IQ tests when you pay them for performance, so what looks like a test of intelligence may in part be a test of how hard you’re willing to try.

I remember when I took the WAIS-IV for diagnostic purposes. I do not think I have ever taken a more boring testing in my entire life. Not to mention, the test felt like it was never going to end.

I eventually got so bored that I started intentionally giving incorrect to questions to just to see if the psychologist would say anything. That was until I got in an actual argument with the psychologist during the symbol matching section.

I do not think there is enough money that one could pay me to take one of those tests ever again. I seriously rather put toothpicks under my toenails and proceed to kick a brick wall. I already held much of the field of psychology in great contempt. After my test, I proceeded to do more reading of research on the topic of IQ, and I must say, I think it only furthered my contempt for psychology.

Honestly, I think the entire notion of IQ is disgusting and dehumanizing. If you need an IQ test to figure out if someone is "intelligent" then you might be incompetent or an imbecile.

No think, no worry.

Ignorance is bliss.

Lots of moving parts on this discussion and wise / smart people have probably all weighed in without solving the problem necessarily

I'll suggest that maybe "biologically" speaking, intelligence makes smart people seek out knowledge which makes them "unhappier"; this would explain why they can't simply use their knowledge to become happier, as "ignorance is bliss" and their native intelligence naturally has them seek "knowledge which isn't bliss".

Along with this, I've experimentally noticed that what we focus on seems to influence our sense of happiness, so then you could hypothetically just try to focus on things that make you happier; with the intelligent, though, they may tend to focus on things that do not make them happier, even though they may trade happiness for a greater sense of meaning and purpose. For example, it's been said that parents are less happy but have a greater sense of purpose in life (according to some studies). Likewise, the intelligent person may try to contend with difficult and troubling intellectual issues, or may become aware of thoughts which have a greater emotional impact on them than a less intelligent person. So again, intelligent people "just happen" to likely make themselves unhappy, by virtue of being intelligent (?).

There is some fuzziness about what it means to be intelligent or happy, and yet at the same time we seem to have an understanding of what those things mean. If it is clear what makes us happy, then the smart person can just do those things. But, basically happiness can be subjective - some people derive a lot of happiness from inflicting a lot of pain on themselves (like a smart person trying to tackle progressively more painful intellectual problems). So... it's also kind of unclear if we know what makes us happy (it might vary per person), and also if happiness is even the goal in life (versus living a meaningful life, although happiness and meaning are often thought to go hand in hand).

The article notes that positive psychology cannot be used to increase happiness; I'm kind of skeptical of this view, but sympathetic to the view as well. What I did was ask AI what makes people happy and to try to do likewise, and the conclusion was kind of like going fishing, like you can go out on the water and show up, but the fish still decide if they bite or not. Happiness is like the fish - still a little outside our control, but we can possibly create some conditions where it might be likely to "bite" us.

Also there may be "multiple happinesses" - kind of again getting at the question of what it means to be happy. I've seen Christian saints describe a kind of internal sense of joy, even when externally they might be in lots of physical or emotional pains. Or by contrast there may be a sense of "inner peace" which a person could have, while their life physically or otherwise is chaotic and might be associated with "unhappiness". A clean conscience can be important and overlap with some of these things.

Anyway, just a quick comment reflection after reading the article and mulling it over a bit - surely more is to be said on such an enduring topic.

What does being smart even mean?

A few observations. I consider myself smart, but far from smartest.

tldr: intelligence lets you control some variables for happiness, but it is not the entire happiness function.

1. We're social and emotional beings beings. Emotions are more powerful than intelligence. We gladly choose something that we enjoy over something that will make us happier long term. All humans do this, mental fortitude is in short supply.

2. Life, and society move the definition of happiness constantly. Either through manipulation, new discoveries, new laws, new constraints. So even smart people need to adapt. If yo were happy last year, maybe today you have to pay higher taxes, or your country gets into a war, or you get a new president, or you're just competing with other smart people in an endless game of chess.

3. We move our own goalposts. Think the rich who thought wealth was the source of happiness, then they get there are are miserable. Or simply spend their time looking for new challenges, infinite growth, etc.

4. Living in a society means your happiness is always, always dependent on the state of that society, and therefore the happiness of others. It's like fluids. You can't be the one drop of water in a bottle that is red. It will dilute, and vice-versa. Maintaining a state of happiness in an unhappy society means building barriers and constantly fighting "them".

5. I have a theory that live is like a wave of ups and downs. The sum of all your highs will equal the sum of your your lows by the time you die. You have some control of when, how much and for how long to be happy/unhappy (unhappiness also means hardship, work, selling time for money, etc, the things we use to pay for happiness), and that controls how the quotas get distributed throughout your life. I have absolutely not tested this, I am still experimenting with my life. Counter examples may exist, I have a sample size of 1.

This is one of those topics that everyone likes to have an opinion on, especially smart people :)

Folks that are smart also have a common set of medical conditions. This ranges from everyday annoying like insomnia, NCAH, EDS, IBS, and more to more life long ADHD, ASD, and Alzheimer's. I spent years researching the underlying genetics and how they are connected while working with a doctor to be able to take care of this group better. Being able to help so many fundamentally improve their life has given my life impact in a way that many things haven't. Often small things, but more than we as a society would like to admit, fundamentally changing their life for the better and in the long run helping to dramatically reduce their Alzheimer's risk.

Genetics is a compression system and re-uses stuff. Serotonin in the brain and the gut for example. The fact that we see overlap is both expected, but also a great way to decode what is going on. The fact that I can see their whole genome for under a grand is amazing. Combined with lab work and symptoms treatment has never been easier.

Intelligence can be broken down into a few different things. Starting with raw brain "stuff". Literally needing more brain stuff, faster brain stuff, etc. When I have given talks and walked through all of those mutations I can quickly draw your attention to the common pattern of what they are compensating and I can walk back through human dna several hundred thousand years talking about that, but that simply sets up the hardware. (A big AI model that is barely trained isn't great)

The other half is to keep trying, but trying something different and learn from what it tries. To do this the hormones result in someone who is more on edge, more sensitive to any change, etc. aka they are less happy.

While you can see this individually smart folks seek out each other, have kids and so you see this all together is a bit of a cop out. Long term evolution doesn't care about that. There is a fundamental basic biological systems problem that all of these are compensating for which brings up the how did humans even climb this ladder to begin with.

This heavily overlaps with AI models and at this point I have tools to rapidly convert from the brain and genetics related to intelligence to AI models You want bigger and better brains (more weights, etc) and you want to expose them to more data and you want to fine tune them etc.

A personal favorite topic is white boarding out why brains have ~4.7bit weights and why brains didn't go down to 2bits. I can show this both at the biological level, but quickly go to the information theory math on this.

There is also Williams syndrome aka "happy syndrome". Like anything you want to be able to articulate not just why some folks are sad, but why some are really happy.

This is a deep rabbit hole, didn't even touch on dreaming and many other topics that all influence this in their own way.

So why are smart people not happy? Sure there is always the outliers of bad environment and other causes, but more often than not the story can be found right in their genes and not one gene. Like everything it is more complex than anyone saying it is X.

This is a topic I have fallen into which heavily overlaps with AI for the obvious reasons. If any AI labs want a more detailed Friday afternoon talk on it feel free to reach out.

Can everyone afford to be curious though? I think being innately curious like cats is a double-edged sword. I think most people aren't privileged enough to explore their curiosities fully. Curiosity often costs much more than time when we take opportunity costs into account.

For example, I used to be much more curious about a lot of things but now that I'm stressed about my life, my priorities shifted.

It is true that K. is an open and inquisitive person.

Math is a thing of interest and time investment to better understand the world but it’s also got a IQ entry fee.

It happens everywhere.

She is equally pleasant to everyone, including her kids, her friends and her neighbors. We have known each other for 10 years as amateur singers before I even employed her.

Your cynical view of reality is also extremely narrow and misleading. The world is more varied and colorful than you think.

She would have laughed you heartily for suggesting that she could simply wear different personalities to her work like clothes. This is precisely what highly emotional people struggle to achieve. On the rare occasion when she feels dejected or depressed (the kids, twins, are 16 and sometimes a handful), everyone around will definitely know.

Truncate the tips of the arrows. The lines are filled rectangles.

Happiness is subjective, so that is the first obvious problem. Thee are probably a lot of smart people are are not as successful as they feel entitled to despite qualifications, and maybe this leads to feeling of inadequacy or resentment.

To see, and to know, is to suffer.

The world is largely a horrible place and ignorance is bliss.

Also the smarter you are the more prone you are to mental illness, which may be related to the above or maybe like why you're more likely to crash a fast car.

We know that intelligence tests and tests in general can be impacted by motivation and potential monetary gains (the article brushes on that). Maybe they can also be impacted by the happiness and other emotional states of the test taker.

Decades ago Gerry Weinberg (and maybe Gauss--i can't recall) went down a similar path and used the word "puzzles" for the ones the author calls "well-defined".

Knowing a problem is a puzzle helps a lot to replicate a solution.

There's nothing clever about being "smart".

And being smart on its own really should not be seen as any kind of good thing.

Being smart _can_, however, be an enabler to achieving certain positive qualities (helping people, being considerate, being kind). But being smart can also enable negative qualities (exploiting people, being manipulative etc).

I used to think of myself as "smart" (top marks in high school, Oxbridge degree, PhD), but actually now I think I'm probably fairly average in objective intelligence, but I just try and think hard, and work hard.

I'm now surrounded by people that I think are smarter than me, but that doesn't mean I just give up thinking. Sure, it might take me longer to think of something, but that doesn't mean I still can't contribute.

Ever since I read "Flowers for Algernon" twenty years ago, I have known that being foolish does not necessarily mean being unhappy, nor does being intelligent guarantee happiness.

Pride. Regardless of intelligence the most miserable people I know are the ones who can't get over themselves trying to survive in a world that is not about them.

Yeh what even is smart really? There’s a bit of objectiveness here I think. For me, if you’re not using your smarts to be happy (or content with life) that’s not very smart.

I first came upon this phrase from the movie 'Liberal Arts' (quoting some religious text):

For in much wisdom is much grief. And he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.

have you met most people? I can't really recommend it.

Some of them put knowledge ahead of wisdom, but certainly intelligence also allows you to see the faults of the world and can create a pessimistic outlook.

I think saying the reason we are unhappy is because the biggest questions are poorly defined misses that happiness was never the goal for why consciousness is here.It's pretty clear to me that consciousness exists for the biology and not the other way around (I submit as evidence how much suffering your biological portion will let you experience before it dies, it's way more than your consciousness would ever authorize if it were in control). As long as your unhappiness isn't to the point of materially affecting your reproductive success, it's a non issue for your biology so has never been optimized for. Smart people are unhappy because they experience the irrelevance of their happiness more fully than dumber people. The dumbest people are slightly more unhappy because they have a way crappier experience on average and they are not dumb enough on average to not notice this.

People could be smart on something and be foolish on something else. The two founders of Apple could be a good example for this.

Understanding the problems in society and the solutions but also the barriers that are impossible to overcome.

Generally I believe a person's baseline happiness is determined at birth.

Some people are just born happier than others.

Mensa means “dumb” in Spanish. That’s evidence of how the smart can have so little common sense.

Knowing the retention time of CO2 in the atmosphere makes you BOTH smarter AND more worried.

Smart doesn’t mean they are necessarily emotionally intelligent or mature. Emotionally intelligent people know how to regulate their emotions and not to lose sleep over factors that are out of their control. Everything happening in and around the world is not your problem or concern most people are just unhappy because they focus on negativity

I'm reading all these accounts of people who were considered "smart but lazy", who were bright but not disciplined or driven to participate in things that gets grades. As a kid I had a near perfect memory and limitless curiosity. I would sit with all the textbooks before the academic year started, flip through them and feel excited. I also loved doing my own experiments, sometimes with near-perilous outcomes too. I was way ahead of the curve and did great academically too until high school.

Over time I lost my golden memory and started finding it hard to remember exact details and even vocabulary as easily as normal people do. The slowness and the academic rut also stifled my natural growth. I forced myself through a bachelor's in computer science. I loved every topic and went diving deep into many of them and I could explain them better than my professors, but I had no desire to pass silly exams and prove myself. I passed with a CGPA 8.4/10 and entered a workforce that followed the same rut. Silly, irrelevant interviews that force you to "prepare" for months for them. I did it early on to get my first job but never indulged in it since.

I have had a fulfilling career so far, working on interesting problems with real outcomes. I switched to data science. I dabbled on both sides of the industry; the research papers obsessed R&D and the whatever-shit-sticks side of software development and found mediocrity and sleaze on both sides. I never climbed the corporate ladder and never got close to getting loaded.

I think for smart people happiness comes from chasing exciting and meaningful goals, but the realities of life keep them chasing other more mediocre things and that takes a toll.

Personally, I have stopped looking to my work for intellectual satisfaction or growth or safety or camaraderie. It's a purely transactional relationship. I work sincerely and I get paid. I give them inputs on what can be improved and what makes more sense, but I don't go overboard and make any efforts beyond my paycheck.

I let my true self run amok in exploring things I do on my own, in applying the scientific and analytical mindset to everything from gardening to sewing to building better learning environments. If some of it brings a windfall someday, I'll be marginally happier.

I suspect it's because they can see through all the bullshit but can't do much about it because being smart is not enough and actually makes you feel helpless and inconsequential.

I’m interested in a different question: are powerful people happier?

Any references?

Because they're smart, but not as smart as they think they are.

99% of the replies here speak from the point of view that they are of the intelligent group. Hmmm, either hacker news is some sort of naturally forming mensa community or there's a lot of ego being put on display here.

I see a lot of top comments here about how smart people will be disappointed by the world. They see everything broken about it because they are so smart.

I don’t really buy it. There is a sizeable minority here with high enough wealth and income that also (because of their place in society) think that a lot of things are more benign, neutral, or good than they really are. I’ve seen enough threads here demonstrating that. They think that this thing is just a mistake. That other thing can just be fixed by getting smarter people in charge. We just need good and capable people in charge of this other thing and it will be alright. And so on.[1] They watch the news and think that the presenters and people they interview are on their side—and they often are, relatively speaking at least.[2]

This is basically “Mistake Theory” that that Alexander psychologist wrote about. Out of what I have read from him that was the most true thing I’ve read. (But those high IQ + higher income bracket + gadfly interest people just dress it up in let’s say less academic and more improvised theories.)

Independent of intelligence, people with less authority and wealth have more input in their life that gives them reason to doubt and fret.[1]

PD: People lamenting their smartness: 355 comments and counting. Predictably catnip subject.

PDD: It is weird that for an IQ fetishist community where intelligence can solve most things, the only thing it cannot solve is your own contentment, as in it actively sabotages you. But why not? I’m not convinced.

[1] This is basically my vulgar understanding of standpoint epistemology.

[2] But note: sizeable minority. It’s not like I have numbers or anything, but I think there are plenty of people here who are cynical and pessimistic. Not as in, they are wrong. But due to intelligence or background they have reasons to doubt the great order of things. And this place has gotten more realistic/cynical (I say both) over the years. Still, this still is a hub for well paid US West Coast programmers.

Which can both be optimized if the person is smart enough. The feedback loop even helps with learning.

We spend 24h/day in our own body and interacting with people.

Couldn't you say the very same about luck, too? I'd say luck and happiness are mostly an attitude thing. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade and all that.

> This large, nationally-representative study from the UK finds that people who score the lowest on an intelligence test are a little less happy than everyone else, but that’s pretty much it

There’s a rational explanation here: IQ is not an absolute or proportional scale, and the happiness data actually is reflecting the true absolute difference in intelligence, which is smaller than the authors and many people assume.

IQ is a ranking measure, not a proportional measure of intelligence. A high IQ does not imply high intelligence on an absolute scale. The IQ scale is just standard deviations. If we measured height in standard deviations, this becomes clear, but somehow people don’t understand what IQ is, and it has become essentially a popular misconception.

Let’s measure height using HQ, where the mean is 100 and 1 stddev is 15 HQ. Then a 30 year old male who’s 5’9” has an HQ of 100. A 30 year old male who’s 6 feet tall has an HQ of over 115. That’s a 15% increase in HQ score for a 4% increase in height. Someone who’s 7 feet tall would have an HQ of 175 - a score some people label as supergenius, or in the “profoundly gifted range” on the IQ scale - yet they’re only 20% taller than the average male. (IQ doesn’t even work reliably above 160 anyway). And the HQ distribution stops at 8’11” (HQ of ~195, tallest person to ever live, ~50% taller than average), humans don’t ever grow taller than that.

There are good reasons to assume IQ works the same way - score ratios exaggerate intelligence differences, and the highest IQs are only moderately more intelligent than the median. This fully explains the result above - higher IQ does make someone happier, but only in proportion to actual intelligence, not in proportion to IQ.

Speaking only for myself: you can't be tortured by thoughts you're not having, and I, sadly, am having thoughts.

Smarter to realize how the world actually works. Smart enough to reason through the “why,” solve problems, and stick with them instead of just letting them go. But thinking too much can also make it easy to overthink.

I am considered smart and yes I am unhappy from very young age. Mostly due to my family situation too but still: I don't see many kids realized unfair the world is at 6.

i’m sure everyone replying to this thread has a level headed and unbiased assessment of themselves

I think being smart and attentive means noticing a lot of poor craftsmanship (broadest sense, in a lot of areas from politics to whatever) and understanding why that can be sort of a stable situation with little chance of changing, so need to control attention which is not so easy.

When people talk about being happy (or not), I always wonder -- why does it matter? I don't expect to be happy, and I don't strive towards it. I DO strive towards making my life better in terms of engaging in enriching and rewarding experiences, spending time around people I care about, perhaps trying to ensure future stability to the degree I can, and generally growing as a person. Never do I consider the pursuit of "happiness". Interestingly this seems to kind of correlate with the premise of the post, where a lot of commonly-accepted definitions of "intelligence" often recognize only narrowly-defined scopes of intelligence, but not broad/overall multi-tiered general intelligence that translates to "having a good life".

All these studies suggest loneliness makes you unhappy, however I feel happiest most when lonely and doing my thing and not with people. With people I just feel frustrated or weird, because I think so different than the others.

Maybe happy smart people know better than to spend all their time taking IQ tests and participating in psychological studies?

You understand that everything which you value about yourself is not what other people value you for. Also, what you value in others also probably isn't an accurate reflection of who they are either. Everything feels hollow, performative, lacking in substance.

Worst of all, your understanding of reality works against you because it's demotivating. It's harder to perform your role when you don't carry any illusions about its true purpose.

It's difficult to be happy when you believe that everything good which happens to you is at someone else's expense and can see a lot of the tricks.

My observation is that people who are smart (or think they are) tend to express themselves via trying to be overly correct - on everything. And that gets exhausting.

People who try to be too precise and accurate, pay it with their happiness and peace. There is no better therapy than bullshitting with friends, just rolling with it instead of trying to make it all 100% perfectly accurate.

Technically, the article isn't about the title. It's about the limits of LLMs/AI.

It posits that smart people aren't happier because "living a good life" is a poorly defined problem and smart people aren't any better at figuring out poorly defined problems than anyone else.

And that may be fair. And I guess my conjecture is a bit in line with that.

Just because you know how the system works, does not mean you would be good at working the system. For instance, let's pretend that the easiest way to live a good life, it required you to do things that you felt were morally repugnant. Well, I'd have an unhappy life, because I won't do those things.

Or, let's say that you found out that in order to live a good life, you had to meet some physical requirement. Like, if you wanted to live a good life as a man, you had to be at least 6'0". I'd be fucked. And nothing I could do could fix it.

And in all honesty, there are a lot of factors that go into things like success and leading a good life. And while intelligence does help, it's not a guarantee. And I would think that intelligent people would also figure that out. And it's frustrating knowing that even if you do everything right, you could still fail through no fault of your own.

Interesting article. But here's my situation: I'm not smart, and I'm also not happy. So where does that leave me?

> 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?

One big outcome of this is being alive more, that doesn't really make you any happier. Also consider stuff like a growing global economy that helps with things like, well, not starting as many global-scale wars that decimate whole cities.

I also think there is a word for someone who is good at poorly defined problems. "Artist." If you define that very broadly and maybe throw in some religious type roles, community leaders, etc in there too, you have a whole group of people who are dedicating their whole life to this problem. But these are super ancient professions and it's not really surprising that we haven't got amazingly better at them recently. I mean, art from centuries ago is still incredible!

Likely related, what psychologists call "counterfactual thinking", and why a silver medal stings more than bronze for many Olympic medalists.

https://theconversation.com/for-many-olympic-medalists-silve...

Depression is a beast that demands to be fed and the Internet is a buffet. The smarter you are, the more you can put away.

This article is so mid. The author clearly feels how mid he is and is desperate to justify that mid people are also smart, maybe even smarter in that superior nebulous way on ambiguous, ill-defined problems than those squares that can only solve those boring textbook well-defined problems.

Intelligence is a slippery term, as plenty of smart folks have made dumb decisions. That said, I’ve noticed that many people who don’t understand why their choices are subpar tend to blame others, i.e. life happens to them. Someone more aware might internalize their failures. Plenty of mutations of this mechanism.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I will out myself as being incredibly smart and also incredibly unhappy in a general sense (although content with my life). The answer is very simple and mundane: I observe and understand problems that have simple solutions that will never be applied because the mass of people cannot understand the problem and solution or are unwilling for social reasons from implementing the solution. This creates a sense of powerlessness and futility, and if you aren't careful can cause you to spiral into nihilism.

Finding stoic philosophy was a major turning point in my life, because it helped me gain the perspective to understand that I should invest my mental efforts on things that are within my control. That's helped me be happier in my 40s than I was in my 20s.

This video hit me really hard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N6qPEA_dGc

As far as what approaches to life are enabled by high intelligence at "low level", but which simply do not work as "high level".

He talks about dealing with 100 problems not by prioritizing them and taking the first step on the first one, but by rotating them and recombining them until there are only 90 problems, and this becoming a terrible habit as the scale & complexity of the problems makes it less productive.

He talks about intelligent people simply noticing more things about the world that are working poorly and understanding what has gone wrong, but not having any commensurate capability to fix them.

Emotional intelligence and rational intelligence are different things. If you believe in IQ, this is rational intelligence. If you believe in the measure of emotional intelligence, it is considered EQ. They are not the same, the ability to solve problems, is different than social skills.

I don't think smart people ever ask this question.

It's an invalid question attempting to correlate unrelated dimensions. One would hope that's even the point the article goes on to make, I didn't read it.

The value of being smart, similar to the value of knowing the truth, is not in how happy it makes you.

There might be a coincidental inverse correlation that makes the two things seem related, but the two things are never the less, unrelated in any way that matters.

Your unhappiness isn't caused by your capacity to percieve or understand some bad thing, it's caused by the bad thing, and ignorance is no way to resolve it to get happiness.

The question isn't even interesting to ponder like some mystery, except for a few minutes one time one day as a young person.

Why should being smart make you happy?

Lots of reasons, I suspect.

Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter. They are subject to thinking they’ve got it all figured out, when really they don’t. Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.

Then there are other attributes like discipline. A very smart person with little discipline could easily end up in a worse state than someone with good discipline and less intelligence. Sort of the Forest Gump model, if you like.

Superior intelligence is absolutely a gift. But not the only kind of gift, and not necessarily the best one. Ask someone like Stephen Hawking.

I think it’s a combination of:

1. “Smart” people tend to constantly see patterns others are missing. So they’re fretting about problems others are blissfully unaware about. Sometimes these “problems” matter and somethings they don’t.

2. Contrary to popular belief, the smartest people in the room typically despise being the smartest person in the room. They typically are starving for someone to challenge them, to debate them, for them to learn something from others. That lack of stimulation is typically depressing to a “smart” person.

Well. Life needs diversity.

Higher IQ may give you more freedoms but also take some away. You can see what others can not, do things others can not, but at the same time you can get depression over something that won't affect someone else.

Not to mention we need people who's okay with doing simple hard jobs just as much as we need writers, doctors etc.

A nice quote from The Big Bang Theory:

Penny: Leonard, you are so great. Why can't all guys be like you?

Leonard: Because if all guys were like me, the human race couldn't survive.

>It’s funny you picked 160.

no, it's not anything like a coincidence or a quote of Buffet.

People always say "160" as the example number because the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler series IQ tests are among the most commonly used and they have a maximum score of 160.

That alone is not enough, you also need to know the std dev is 15 or 16. Therefore, 160 is 4 sd's above the mean which, regardless of the thing you are measuring, is very difficult to measure without massive numbers of sample points because the population density becomes very sparse.

there are other intelligence tests, some top out at 200, but you have to know the SD for that to be useful.

Now you sound like aligned AI — I get it

> Because intelligence is a physical attribute

I question this assumption. Especially considering you can train intelligence.

I’m not measuring with IQ tests nor defending the use of IQ tests, the authors of the article implicitly accepted them as a valid measure or proxy for intelligence, and implicitly assumed that happiness surveys should reflect proportional IQ scores. That is a bad assumption given that IQ scores do not measure absolute intelligence and they have an unknown scale factor at a minimum.

Okay, let's step back a little. When you said "there are good reasons to assume IQ works the same way [as the hypothetical HQ]" - what exactly did you mean by that? Did you mean to imply the ratio between intelligence of someone with IQ 100 and IQ 180 is smaller than a factor of 1.8, or did you mean something else?

The evidence that intelligence can be trained is that every metric of intelligence ever invented is consistently going up when the subjects spend time to prepare themselves before being measured. IQ tests, school grades, chess performance, math olympiads, you name it. Sure, you can always claim that all of those are skills separate from intelligence and that's why becoming better is possible - but then how do you explain that being better at one of these automatically makes you better at all the others, if the overall intelligence stays the same?

Also, I said the range is +/-20% already in my very first reply. Why didn't you correct me back then? Why did you wait until now?

> it feels like I wasted a lot of time […] Makes me hesitant to put too much effort into this conversation

Hahaha, buddy, this is very funny. Lack of effort is what caused your problem in the first place. I’m super surprised you’re digging in your heels on this. If it was me, I’d drop it, since it’s not a good look, but suit yourself. You got something wrong. So what? Own it. Fix it. It isn’t my responsibility to correct you, it’s yours. You did indeed waste a tiny little bit of time by arguing and jumping to conclusions before reading carefully. ;) And that’s okay, which is why I ignored it. I’ve wasted time making mistakes too. There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes. How you deal with mistakes is revealing though, and blaming others for your mistakes isn’t typically very productive here, even if some politicians seem to get away with it. :P I do honestly appreciate that your previous comment tried to de-escalate a bit. Asking what I meant was a positive step, and asking that earlier would have saved you some time. Always assuming good faith and making sure you read carefully and understood everything is a good thing to learn to do on HN, that’s what the guidelines are trying to hint at. I have learned this lesson myself the hard way, multiple times, FWIW.

> Intelligence is not, because it’s not a physical attribute

Well okay this is our core problem. We have been talking about different things. And, I need to concede on this point that you are right. If I google “is intelligence a physical trait” the results I get say: no. In my defense, I thought I was careful to qualify that what I was talking about earlier as the biological component of intelligence, but I’m okay admitting I’ve made some mistakes here.

It is worth noting that “Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits” and that “studies have consistently shown that genetic influence on individual differences in intelligence is substantial”. https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105

> A person with IQ 180 is likely two orders of magnitude more intelligent in absolute terms than someone with IQ 100.

There is zero scientific basis for that claim. This is exactly what I was talking about from the top. This popular interpretation of extremely high IQ scores substantially overstates what can legitimately be inferred from the numerical scores. That’s why I call it a misconception. IQ only directly measures how unusual someone’s intelligence is, not how good it is. IQ is at best only moderately good at predicting cognitive performance on some tasks, and whether it predicts anything is highly dependent on the type of task. And after reading about it more, I’m going to correct myself and agree that IQ does not predict cognitive brain capacity, and we don’t yet have anything that does. But scientists are looking for that.

Anyway, this belief you have that 180 IQ vs 100 IQ is 100x more intelligent - whatever more intelligent actually means - is extremely extreme!! Why do you believe this, and what evidence is there of your claim? You’re absolutely right that I disagree with you there. But I will read and consider any supporting links or data you can provide, and I am open to changing my mind if the data is compelling. There’s a reason that IQ is considered outdated now, that scientists do not accept that intelligence is 1-dimensional, and that cognitive scientists now talk about multiple intelligences, and use g instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

> As far as I know, neither brain size nor the number of neurons nor synapses is correlated with IQ.

Human brain size does correlate with IQ somewhat. Now you know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Intelligence

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7440690/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-m...

> So why do you believe someone with 180 IQ is that much smarter than 100, if you agree there are no metrics to back it up?

Because that's how it works for most other learnable, trainable skills that aren't dependent on physical limits of the body, and I don't see why intelligence would be any different. Yes I'm still saying intelligence isn't physical.

I know IQ is (used to be?) age-adjusted. I wasn't talking about IQ there, I'm talling about raw intelligence. Child prodigies beat adults at chess, at maths, at programming, you name it - and it's happening way more commonly than head/brain size variation would allow for it.

I never said entirely trained. For somebody who just spent 10 whole paragrahs across 3 comments (+/- 50%, like I said I wasn't really reading) chastising me for not reading carefully, you sure fumbled this one.

Think of intelligence like playing piano. Most people can't play piano. But most people can learn to play piano, to some extent. How good they are depends mostly on how much they've been learning, but everyone has some point they just can't push past through no matter how much they try. Usually that point is pretty low, way before the general audience is willing to pay for watching. For a tiny minority, that ceiling is much higher and the growth they get from practice is much faster too - we call these people talented or naturally gifted.

And then there are the piano prodigies who absolutely shred the keyboard at the age of 5. There are enough of them that you can't explain it away with abnormal growth of any relevant body organ. That's what I mean when I say head circumference variation is too small in children to explain the number of child geniuses, if intelligence is entirely biological.

IQ measures whatever intelligence happens to be. It's just an assumption that the kind of intelligence that helps with IQ tests is entirely biological, and only under that assumption IQ measures the biological component only. But that assumption is likely wrong, considering you can train to score better at IQ tests (it's a fact). Either intelligence isn't biological, or IQ metric sucks at isolating the biological component - feel free to assume the latter.

> Did you mean to say “intelligence is primarily genetic” instead? That I would agree with.

Perhaps I did mean to say child prodigies are evidence of the heritability of intelligence; that it suggests intelligence has a large, possibly majority, genetic component, if kids are outliers without much training.

Okay, so you’ve been objecting to ‘physical traits’ but agree with ‘genetic’… What is the difference in your mind between those? I see them as, broadly speaking, the same thing. Physical traits are phenotypes, no? Genetics is the biological component I’ve been talking about all along, and heritability is defined as that which is genetic, i.e., not explained by the environment or chance, i.e., not due to training.

Knitting, bull riding, and playing piano are neither intelligence, nor are they physical attributes. They are learned skills. It seems some people may have genes that may help them learn these skills faster than other people, but these are not ‘physical traits’ in any way shape or form, and your commentary on that term isn’t making sense to me right now. If you think piano playing is a ‘physical trait’, that could explain much of the miscommunication in this thread.

Most folks I've seen getting kicked out of university in first 2 years were in this category. High school was easy for them, so they lacked discipline and habits to learn stuff the hard/slow/boring way once topics went complex enough.

In that, and many more regards, I am happy I fall into 'above-average' category and nothing more. Especially memorizing larger texts and poetry wasn't easy (good ol' crappy rota education system in 80s and 90s in eastern Europe). Grit and discipline got me much further in life than those just coasting on natural talents.

Humans really need a bit of struggle to get the best out of us. Not too much, but not too little. One of quiet ways why capitalism on long enough scale outperforms other systems. Sweeping obstacles from life is one of the worst things that parents can do for their kids, regardless if its motivated by pure parental love.

Sometimes, even controversial people are right. Not just the "broken clock is right twice a day" kind of right, but actually right. We should endeavor to separate the message from the messenger, and evaluate the message on its own merits.

> In hindsight, I realized it was b/c I hadn't found subjects in high school that really resonated with me

My most frustrating experience was barely lazing my way through calculus I could not care about only to be working on a personal project years later where I really wish I paid attention.

>>Reading the material before the test/exam and then getting high enough marks that everyone leaves you alone so you can go play with computers/chess was not an effective long term strategy.

Don't tell my boss, but yes it is.

Great list!

I could link to a bunch more studies that find more direct genetic links to musical aptitude in particular rather than musical perception in general. But I'd rather skip the busy work and jump straight to the point where we both agree to the following.

1. Musical talent is hereditary to a significant degree.

2. Musical talent is NOT a physical trait.

3. Therefore, being hereditary is not a proof of being a physical trait, despite the literal physical differences in DNA sequence.

Deal?

I think there's an overload of the meaning of 'lazy' that describes a person who measures twice and cuts once, basically thinks the problem through rather than just piling on it. And as you said, they might even conclude the task isn't worth doing.

Since thinking is not a visible effort, these people are taken to be believed to do less work, when the truth is anything but.

Parenting philosophy rooted in growth mindset advocates less for "I am smart and therefore I can do this" but rather "the hard work that it will take to do this is worth investing, and failures along the way are opportunities to learn rather than judgments of whether I'm good enough or should continue."

The miserable bit is more past tense. Back in college I desperately wanted to have the academic success that my friends were having but I had never built that groundwork of organizational habits and consistency. I remember not doing any of the homework for my measure theory course, and getting an uncurved 50% on the midterm. I went into the professor's office hours to ask if I needed to drop the course, and he told me I had actually gotten a B and I was above the class average. There was this deep sense that I could've been a star student if I could just get my shit together.

Nowadays I'm generally happy and living a great life in a New Zealand mountain town. But, whenever I talk to anybody back home who's more academically successful, I really have this jealousy and I tell myself that I could've done that if I'd just tried. It's this combo of ego and self hate that's really toxic.

The buddha figured that part out 7000 years ago but people just don't want to hear it for some reason

Like the whole meme of "Well actually...".

Sometimes you just need to let it go, choose peace over proving something. Occasionally I still get caught up in something but it is very rare nowadays.

"academic outcomes predict academic outcomes" would be wholly uninteresting if "academic outcomes" was one thing, but it isn't.

Yup! Depression can cause psychomotor retardation, which can make even basic physical activities like sitting or walking painful because it feels physically heavy to carry all that weight.

I agree, and my experiences acho yours. I was put onto SSRIs at age six, which is highly unusual - especially at the time. It was not an easy hole to climb out of.

May I suggest crawlers? The RC kind. These things are so much fun!

Joke's on you (or on the void?), I'm into that.

And so we dance in a spiral until my skin falls off, my flesh gives up and my brain turns into a liquid.

You don't need to see the light in the void anyway.

Good points. I often think about this and I've come to the conclusion that just because other people don't have deep or niche interests doesn't make them any less smart than me. I lived in a city during my "social learning" phase and then moved back to my village. I realized that people I might have mistakenly categorized as less smart than me are absolutely amazing at things I constantly struggle with. They're street-smart, practical and genuinely content. It blows my mind to see how resilient they are when dealing with personal suffering and natural calamities. They're the perfect example of what Marcus Aurelius calls "living according to nature" in his Meditations.

Almost every reply to your comment points out your example "being smart" with a tired one of family vs work. What people in many other comments here point out that for many familie is just one of many areas in life and can have nothing to do with smarts or happiness.

Is the man abandoning his wife and child to find a better life happier for it, he can be. Has nothing to do with if he used his smarts to arrive at that solution to his unhappiness or resolution.

How many people choose their family based on some calculation where there is a right or wrong answer?

Like an comic said, most people choose their life partner while drunk in a bar (obv local example) but no way you would ever choose which toaster to buy while drunk! The toast have to be just right, doesn't it?

> Presumably miners get a high wage to offset the negatives of the job and attract people.

A common thread I see when these types of topics come up too is that the high pay in many of these jobs (trades, policing, nursing, etc.) is dependent on working large amounts of overtime.

Oh, that would be nice! Thank you.

Aw, sorry. I just wanted to sound sincere. Like you're underestimating yourself or well er.... others. Idk I'm sure you're smart. Stupid people think they're _really_ smart, imho being smart is mostly associated with having some level of self-doubt.

Well, I found it both interesting and worth reading, sorry that you didn't.

Yes, my mom has never told me the score, but it led to me being put in gifted classes. I took the SAT at 12 and did well enough to make JHU CTY's SET program.

So in terms of raw brainpower it's there, but I've never really been able to apply it consistently for whatever reason and have ended up very average. Still haven't really come to terms with that in my late 20s.

I've got a perfectly good life but I have this vague "what if" about if I had applied myself more.

Not really sure. The ADHD/"Gifted"/Twice Exceptional labels were even worse. I really wish my parents had made sure to always praise effort more than they praised me for the exam scores I got without studying. There was more focus from them on the final exam grade than on the process of showing my effort to the school system, and it created a sense of pride in how lazy I was.

I guess, don't praise your kids for lucky talents, praise them for the work they put in. I also wish that there had been more focus on participating in sports as a young child and less focus on therapy/psychiatry. As an adult I have found staying active is a much better treatment for my distractible/hyperactive tendencies than meds/therapy ever were. My mom didn't sign me up for sports because my brothers and I had so many shrink appointments, and looking back, I think she had it the wrong way around.

Important to define what is happy and what were problems to begin with. I'm 39, no kids, and my parents weren't happy with me, but were happy otherwise. How does this factor how I'm unhappy?

Happiness should be the end goal. Contentment is part of it. Compromise. Quality over quantity and the quality doesn't have to always be great, just no regrets according to modern death bed speeches. Being happy can mean chasing one thing and not the other, which would lead to some unspoken regret, loud enough in our head.

The news is virtually never important enough. And my definition of “important enough” is “actionable”.

There’s a pervasive idea, mostly among more educated people, that keeping up with political news is civic minded and responsible. I’m not sure if I’m just cynical or small minded but I just don’t see the point. Getting a daily blast of topics to worry about that I have no control over doesn’t seem like a good use of this life journey.

Marriages where the couple had children together are considerably less likely to end than marriages without children. A recent Canadian poll showed an effect size of ~60%. [1] Table 1 covers this nicely.

I’d be curious what data you’re citing to suggest children are by far the most destructive thing for a happy marriage. It seems like the kind of redditism most popular with people for whom it doesn’t apply :)

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-652-x/89-652-x2024001...

Potato, potahto.

X is the same as Instagram, that’s the same as reddit, that’s the same as HN.

The difference is in what flavour of propaganda are you most interest in and what type of bullshit are you willing to swallow.

Let’s not pretend X is bad because of Musk alone. HN can be just as terrible too.

> I didn't need to worry about finding a job, smart people always find work.

People don't like to hire people who are smarter than them. They want to hire people who are obedient and competent.

If you are too smart, the government will probably put you in prison, if you challenge the status quo and are not obedient.

That's interesting. I'm considering going back to get a second bachelor's in biology or biochemistry (my first is in math) and then going to PA school or medical school. I have to wonder a bit if part of that whole plan is that I want to show myself that I can be a good, hardworking student.

It was nice reading this, thanks for sharing

> you absolutely cannot know what it's like until you actually have them

While it's less common now, I don't think anyone who grew up in a bigger family under one roof could agree with that. Nothing divine is gatekeeping this experience. It's the socioeconomic climate we've created doing that.

It makes perfect sense that you value your family so deeply, but you might want to reconsider where you anchor your pride. It's a lot of responsibility. Unexpected things can happen.

I'm extremely grateful to have examined all stages of life on a daily basis before even going to college, but I think having kids is a heavy choice. It's perhaps the heaviest choice of all. Since there's no mystery in it for me, I'm still enjoying being unchained.

10/10, no notes.

> you absolutely cannot know what it's like until you actually

Is probably true for all life changing event. Extreme poverty, wealth, loss of a parent, etc. There's nothing special in that regard about having children.

> if you have even a slight feeling like maybe you want to have kids, I would absolutely do it

Nah, that's just being egocentric. Have children if you're pretty sure you can raise them in the best conditions possible for them to end up being happy, if not, better keep on hesitating.

I have come to wonder if lazy actually exists as a thing in it's own right. I too had the 'smart but lazy' label, was diagnosed with ADHD past the age of 50.

One of the things I noticed was when people talk about "Sometimes you just have to knuckle down and do the thing you don't want to do". That was an ability that just came and went with me, the same task one day would be "Right I had better do that thing now" and I could do it, another day, even the idea of it seemed impossible. The fluctuations were clear enough to show that it wasn't a moral failing, or just me doing the things I wanted to do. The same thing in the same situation was just so radically different. I can see how people who have only experienced the easy side could fail to understand the difficulty, I don't think night and day would do it justice.

ADHD is quite highly correlated with depression, one of the main hypotheses of why is because people with ADHD have grown up being told that the thing that is intrinsically them is a bad thing to be. A hypothesis of why not everyone with a genetic predisposition for depression becomes depressed is because there might be a form of feedback loop that makes things that make you feel bad make you feel more bad. Being critical of ADHD behaviour is an easy on-ramp to that feedback loop.

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 7 and took medication for it until 9th grade when I went off it because I didn't like how it made me feel, and I have really disliked it when I've been back on it as an adult. Strattera was better, though now I'm on Wellbutrin instead. I did a lot of therapy over the years, and never found it helpful, though I never did it with an organization focused coach.

I do think a lot of it was the attitude I took towards school. I know a lot of other people with ADHD who were less arrogant and approached school in a better way because of that.

In education these kids are termed “twice-exceptional” because they test as gifted but have some kind of disability that makes some things challenging.

I won't claim that I've ever suffered real ADHD, but after an experience I had years ago with phentermine, that stuff would have been magic when I was a teenager. Turned me into an unstoppable, focused machine. And phentermine isn't labeled for that effect, which makes me wonder what adderall would be like.

Many people, including myself, just know that we don't want to have children. Our outcomes won't have the same distribution as those of people who always wanted to have children, no matter how "smart" we are about it.

Another factor is that when you have children and regret it you can suffer a lot more than just "-1" of misery - I'd say the scale is more like -10 to +1 (centered around 0). Furthermore if you end up regretting it you will also inflict some part of that misery onto your children.

It seems like you maybe missed the part in the middle of the thread where I said you’re right about IQ scores and what we call intelligence not being a so called physical trait. I’m not arguing that at this point and haven’t been for a while, because it became clear we are talking about different things. I’m looking for more mature terminology at this point, established phrases and concepts we can agree on, because this is too sloppy of a discussion. You’re making assumptions and jumping to a weird conclusion about what ‘physical traits’ means and I don’t agree that it’s useless, other than that the term has somewhat poisoned this discussion and is preventing progress. Physical traits are phenotypes, and phenotypes are an extremely useful notion in a discussion of genetics vs environment vs chance.

Your statement about correlation being an admission of not being a physical trait sounds naive to me; it’s ignoring the existence of polygenic traits.

Another source of terminology confusion here is the difference in what we mean by ‘intelligence’, and it’s probably way more important than what ‘physical attribute’ means. I really meant something different by ‘intelligence’ than you mean, and that’s my fault for not clarifying I was trying to focus on heritability and factor out learned skill.

I would love to see additional references about music and heredity, I’m looking forward to it.

I don't think it's egoistical. I understand it's often uncomfortable to compare people by their intelligence, but by many measures of 'smart', people here have it, more often than not.

> I refuse to believe the average person here is any more intelligent than the average person on the street.

This is a website of words. The average person looks almost exclusively at moving pictures.

I'd suggest we're at least top 5% of some key things that make up intelligence: like curiosity and intellectual bravery.

An alternative design for an education system is quite a challenge. You say it allows smart but lazy people to succeed. In truth, it allows many kinds of people to succeed.

And “the hardworking but less gifted kids struggle” doesn’t ring particularly true, unless you mean something quite strong by “less gifted”.

"The 'smart but lazy' adults who stayed that way, who I've encountered IRL have been maliciously manipulative work avoiders, or straight up losers with superiority complexes."

Counterpoint, the "I had to work twice as hard for my A" people are prudish buzzkills who think that working hard has inherent value.

"Being smart won't get you a date, wont get you fit, play an instrument, learn to draw, program, wont allow you to fix the crooked cabinet door etc." I mean...it could? The whole article is about how "intelligent" isn't exactly one thing.

Obvious Smart and Lazy here: Life is easy, and I've been BSing my way through it for over 40 years. I work at one of the largest companies in my field on the planet, I'm well respected by my supervisors and coworkers, I make enough money to keep the lights on (and my artist wife and I both fed). I have friends I see regularly, love an affection, and time to garden and play video games.

There's no "right" way so there can be no "wrong" way, only ways that don't work for your skillset. Also, understanding how to navigate society/hierarchy is a skill and a lot of the try-hards don't realize that so they just brute force for results.

> I just never understood why the secondary education system is set up to make smart and lazy people succeed without effort while the hardworking, but less gifted kids struggle.

I think it's just as simple as its designed for the average case not the extremities. If it's designed for any extremity, it's to ensure the least bad outcome for the bottom 25%. If you're doing well you are not a problem as far as most schools are concerned.

Unfortunately "smart but lazy" types kind of fall through the cracks. For me "smart but lazy" was more being smart enough to understand the rewards in the system, but not smart enough/having context for the long term rewards.

In a lot of ways I saw life as a game, and had no one around me who could explain the higher level games of elite school admissions/job funnel/etc.

In the end I don't know if my life would have been drastically better if I'd gone to MIT/Carnegie Mellon instead of a "a top 25 engineering program". I'd have had more options for sure.

> I just never understood why the secondary education system is set up to make smart and lazy people succeed without effort while the hardworking, but less gifted kids struggle.

My high school math teacher didn't subscribe to this idea, so for the first time in my life I had poor scores in math.

We took six previous years' math finals as part of our preparation. I recall scoring a humbling 33/50 on my first attempt.

My final result was 45/50 because there was a 3pt. problem I couldn't solve, but decided not to since I had like 15 minutes left and was confident that the rest was largely ok.

Lost 2pt. on some minor stuff I overlooked.

Of course I didn't learn my lesson just yet back then because I had years of being lazy under my belt, so I struggled through college.

For what it's worth, I think that happens to everyone now because of all the bots and toxic astroturfing.

Since comments are sorted by points, it's more of an indication how touchy or dogmatic a subject is. I expect to lose points when I'm not the only reply. I've seen discussions where hours later a brigade of green accounts skyrocket to the top out of nowhere simply because they reinforce a more convenient idea. All of the original more interesting comments get downvoted.

With this one though, I don't know since all your replies are basically the same and you've all been here a while.

I actually expected my comment to get more downvotes since I was describing a tougher upbringing in a multi-generational household, but it got buried in noise. HN generally doesn't know how to handle more down-to-earth topics and defaults to thinking in stereotypes.

If there is a difference between the replies, the top one was made after yours and elaborates on being "tough" while still disagreeing, so maybe that's more convincing to some people?

I'm sorry for you. Genuinely. I've only read of cases like yours (I think Neko Case has a hard story).

Of course there are bad parents. I'm unlikely to encounter them, and even if I did I would probably not associate with them. But I suspect that you and anyone else on this thread offering thoughtful responses, are not the kind of person who would fall into that category.

I only offer my own experience, because I had the same fears as you. One datapoint, but parenting changed me in so many good ways, and the hardships fade from memory.

OK, ok, my bad, carry on! :)

If you watch the news, you'd think the sky is falling.

TOOL - Vicarious

"Eye on the TV, 'cause tragedy thrills me

Whatever flavor it happens to be like

Killed by the husband, drowned by the ocean

Shot by his own son, she used the poison in his tea

Then kissed him goodbye, that's my kind of story

It's no fun 'til someone dies

Don't look at me like I am a monster

Frown out your one face, but with the other

Stare like a junkie into the TV

Stare like a zombie while the mother holds her child

Watches him die, hands to the sky, crying

"Why, oh, why?"

'Cause I need to watch things die

From a distance

Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies"

Yes but very possible. I also did it during the latest once the latest election was decided.

Removed all news sites but also stopped looking at facebook, news on youtube, and the biggest one was reddit.

Reddit really affected me. It was so easy to read -> become angry -> engage.

I choose to be less informed to save my mental health, I know I'm way happier.

Maybe it's like a drug? I never read/watched news in my entire life and find it pretty easy. It's impossible to completely shield yourself from getting the news at all, which is a bit unfortunate. I feel I would lead a happier life if I didn't get to know who the president of the USA was, for example. It's completely meaningless knowledge anyway. But for some reason most people are really interested and will tell you, even if you never ask.

It really isn’t. I haven’t watched the news on tv in probably 20 years, I haven’t had any social media accounts ever, and at this point I use the internet as part of my day job, to do my job.

It is absolutely amazing to be so disconnected and I encourage everyone to try it. People at work tell me about interesting things happening in the world, and my role and my spouses role at her job have the (mis) fortune of keeping me informed about the goings on in the wider world. But there is no spin.

>> My dad actually arranged a visit with a psychiatrist who did an official IQ test (wooo! I'm a genius! yay!)

One must love the irony that those tests are mainly use as a way to pat yourself on the back (you and your dad) more than any possible actionable item out of it.

Funny how most people that take an IQ test come out as "geniuses"

This is consistent with the Terman study. The large majority of subjects had productive careers and lives for the follow-up.

What does real happiness look like to you?

You're asking me to enumerate the benefits of knowing what's going on the world around you? It's probably not relevant or beneficial if it's something like miners being trapped in a cave on the other side of the planet, but when you get down to your local community you might want to know about things like:

- Road closures - Boil orders - Product recalls - Neighborhood breakins - Weather forecasts and alerts - Updated laws and court rulings that might impact you - Public safety notices - Health inspections - Public works projects - and a zillion other things that happen as a consequence of living in a complex society

My point was less what the tests measure and more how they were applied: rationing higher education resources.

That may be true, or maybe you need to try some other things, including different medications and different pursuits.

Fwiw, I've been taking Concerta 27mg since being diagnosed. Haven't really felt much of a need to experiment with others, but full-on depression is a rarity for me, perhaps helped by investing heavily in my social and physical life. The only time I get jittery is when I accidentally drink as much coffee as I would on a non-medicated day, so I have to be a little careful with that. It's a very mellow, long-acting, subtle effect that is most noticeable when I'm trying to flow through a conversation or imagine things, which I think I'm better at on non-medicated days, but am okay with the temporary tradeoff. Overall, it's not magic, but it helps keep me on track. Higher doses have been slightly unpleasant and I've dropped back down.

I think what's become more clear to me over time is that I really shouldn't try to live like the stable careerists around me and on HN who have different kinds of parameters for success, yet have what I'd describe as immensely boring unhealthy or obsessive vanity-oriented lives. I'll never have a house, and I may never hold a job for 2 full years, but I can push myself to the top of a mountain, make friends and keep them in my thirties, and maintain a strong lean physique. The most difficult thing is figuring out how and where to apply myself when I have a blank slate professionally. I don't and will never speak like a manager, and yet my conduct with juniors in a recent role seemed to be welcomed and appreciated, before they threw me under the bus for some inane issue and fired me.

I say this mostly because although life is difficult, isolating, and ambiguous at times, to be comfortable in ones own skin means coming to terms with the things you do well, having humility, being open, ambitious, and authentically grateful for what that brings you (without depending on explicit praise or reciprocation, because it may never come from what you'd hope). You must be able to throw your own parade sometimes, be proud of the floats you can put together, and happy about whoever was able and willing to show up.

On this site there's constantly a vibe of "what should I be doing", but fuck that, do whatever you need to do and then let yourself do what you want to do; take some time, figure it out, let the nebulous sense of guilt subside, because it's not good for much.

Given you have some experience with this sort of medication would you say it could help with restoring any motivation? It's killing me slowly, but surely...

Welbutrin, while having some sort of stimulant effect, and often prescribed for ADHD, is not at all the same as real stimulant medications.

It often helps people with ADHD because they have been prescribed this almost-stimulant to anxiety or depression (often caused directly or indirectly by ADHD symptoms and life), and it makes them better, because it's finally treating an actual cause rather than a downstream effect.

But most people running into that situation are way better off just taking a real ADHD stimulant.

It looks like Strattera is similar. It claims to be about as effective as Concerta, but being someone who has tried welbutrin, there is just no comparison to what a moderate dose of a real stimulant does.

The continued refusal for society to just let ADHD people take a tested, proven, safe, effective medication because if you smoke an entire bottle of it at once it will get you high (something that is less useful to someone with ADHD! Lots of people found out they were ADHD when they tried cocaine for the first time, and instead of being high, were suddenly normal ) is infuriating.

One other note, my family for multiple generations has massively struggled with "seasonal" depression, or chronic depression, or constant "Fatigue" where working a full 8 hour day leaves you feeling like you just ran a marathon and your brain screams out to just go lay down and not function. My mother continues to suffer from this. I was starting to suffer from this immensely, and was worried I also had Fibromyalgia like my mom.

Right up until I took the first, minimum dose, of concerta. I haven't had that fatigue since. Because it was ADHD. It was always ADHD. I no longer get Seasonal Affective Disorder. I recently went through a life event that in the past would have left me crying in bed for an entire year. I am sad, actually I am gutted. I am depressed. But I can still do my job right now, because I can focus on what I want to focus on, and process my feelings when it's healthier to do so.

Did you know one of the side effects of Concerta is "elevated mood"? Literally a happy pill. You know what's really effective for an ADHD person who has spent their entire life spiraling in anxiety and suffering from depressive episodes? Being able to focus on the here and now, rather than whatever anxiety your brain was stuck on.

I'm not going to tell you to try those stimulants since you might have already, but so many people are sandbagged with their ADHD diagnosis by people giving them a shittier medication just because it won't involve paperwork with the DEA, or some moral panic bullshit.

I am constantly amazed by the people I interact with on this site. We live in a large universe, but a small world.

So, how are you related to Mister Transistor?

> did the idea to leverage the family name as a pseudo appeal-to-authority dawn on me

Did it work? I have the opposite problem. It takes a room full of engineers to get me to stop talking. I've been told I am very charismatic (though Dyslexia hinders my writing severely). Though perhaps like Icarus, my strengths are my weaknesses. I am, let's say, not a very serious person. I like to have fun and I am goofy, hyperactive, immature, and obnoxious. It makes people love me, but makes me Hell to work with. ;)

Good for you for being a self-made man. I know very little about your ancestor, but he was likely self-made, so I imagine he would appreciate the same traits in you.

> I can confidently say the “genius” apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in regard to Shockmeister’s sub-genius status.

I am too asymptotically close to stupidly to understand what you are implying. I am confused because you use genius and sub-genius in the same sentence.

Also, the 'eugenics bug' doesn't work that. Shockley likely experienced something in his life that made him that way. I do not think it's some innate trait. I grew up 45 minutes away from where the KKK was founded. I have heard words out of people's mouths that would make Shockley sound like Mother Teresita. I did not acquire any of those wretched views.

> Based on my relationship with intelligence, it’s not been my sheer intelligence that’s been my greatest asset. It’s actually the inverse!

Say it louder for the people in that back. Real life is based on the game Dungeons & Dragons (except life is a much shitter, boring game). Everyone has various amounts of 'skill points' in their stats. Intelligence is one stat, and while necessary, it ain't enough on its own.

> spending ‘innovation tokens’ wisely, to quote Choose Boring Technologies. Concretely, the latest investment I made was in standardizing my current startup around Mise. Not because it’s a great DX, but because I believe the primitives mise provides are a key enabler for agentic development in a distributed org and team context

I am sorry, I have no idea what any of this means. I assume AI tokens? What is "Choose Boring Technology?" What is "Mise" and what does "DX" mean? In my world, DX means "diagnosis."

> he was already estranged leading up to his infamous public television appearances.

Why?

> while navigating recognition of the harm he caused has done to affect me

What harms? Is the harm not fulfilling his legacy or rather his eugenic views or something else? If so, may I offer some unsolicited advice? Well, you can't really respond in real-time, so I am just going to offer it anyway. I took me many years on this rock to understand that we are responsible for our own joy and suffering. The mind can easily poison itself via attachment. Or more aptly, as Zen Master Ts'ao-shan once said:

Student: Whenever there is any question, one's mind is confused. What is the matter?

Master Ts'ao-shan: Kill, kill!

In a similar vein, my grandfather was also a "genius." Definitely of no notoriety like your ancestor. However, he definitely held his own. He worked on the Manhattan Project (met Oppenheimer, Von Neumann, etc.). My grandfather also was an performed Opera at the NYC Metropolitan, was supposed to compete in the 1936 Olympics for weight lifting (pulled a hernia on his way to Germany, thus he couldn't compete), and helped program the computer system for the Apollo 13.

My cousin is the like the 4th or 5th highest rank in the U.S. Navy and a combat experienced Navy Seal. I am just some underpaid pawn wasting my life away building boring CRUD apps for my local government. To say I fell short of any legacy would be an understatement. However, I am not truly bothered by it.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair..."

I learned in my young adulthood to appreciate and enjoy whatever it is that you have, because no matter what it is, you’re going to lose it one day. You might lose it in death, or like von Neumann, you might lose it in life.

The Wheel of Time turns and everything is crushed beneath it.

Adderall felt to me more like a drug, and seemed to cause more of a feeling of being on speed with less objective productivity benefit. A lot of people prefer it though.

I'd imagine the only people taking it are on either end of the curve - smart people who want a gold sticker, and not-smart people that need a sufficiently low IQ score to qualify for a government program.

They are usually taken when a child struggles in school. The actionable item is 1. IQ is low, they probably need tutoring or special education classes; 2. IQ is high, they are probably too bored and need harder classes or some other intervention; 3. IQ is normal, probably it's some other issue.

As an adult the actionable item may be to adjust your expectations of yourself. For example if I'm 90IQ and beating myself up about not being a 10x dev despite my efforts, or if I'm 150IQ and feel too unqualified for some intellectual endeavor, I could make adjustments after knowing the truth.

I took one as an adult and my impetus was that I am contrarian about a lot of things, i.e. there are a lot of things I believe that most people don't believe. I wanted to know if I was just a midwit being an idiot contrarian or if there's at least some reason to believe I might have a better idea about things than average people. In the end I scored very highly, so I can now feel more comfortable trusting my own judgement. If I had scored much lower, I would accept I'm probably wrong about a lot more things and stop having such strong opinions.

Answers the question: low IQ, or low grit?