111–120 of 297 posts
Gwern's Algernon Argument is relevant here: https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics Logically, it's likely there must be trade-offs for higher IQs or it would have been selected for more strongly.
Otherwise we would also all have more muscle mass. There doesn't seem to be much downside to that.
> Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events such as bankruptcy. I’ll tell you why. Smart people listen to experts. Dumb people listen to other dumb people based on feeling. Case in point, the current pandemic. High-IQ people will get vaccinated. The people who won’t because of various conspiracy theories and mi…
I am not getting vaccinated, because I've analyzed that my odds of dying of Covid-19 at my age and health are less than my odds of dying in a car wreck. And I'm comfortable with that risk as opposed to the unknown long-term risks of RNA therapy.
Long, long ago, I came to the conclusion that intelligence was inversely related to sanity. Not a scientific observation, just that people who I knew who were very smart also tended to have difficulties in more ways than the people I knew who had typical intelligence. Typical issues were depression, insecurity, difficulty relating or communicating with others, ... Certainly you can find people with these issues in al…
Like watching someone take 5 seconds per keystroke because they have to hunt and peck on the keyboard while slowly and deliberately sounding out the letters they're typing?
You know that feeling of wanting to just push them out of the way because you could get whatever completely done by the time they finish the next step in the process?
You ever felt like grabbing someone's face and just point blank ask them why they don't "get it"? Because it's the simplest thing in the world to you?
Now imagine your entire life was that. Of essentially having to wait for people to catch up to where you were. Couple that with the nagging thought in the back of your mind that you could be the one that's wrong because so many people are on the other side of the issue. What do they see that you don't? And then when they finally do catch up, treat it like it was the most obvious thing ever.
I can see how that would wear on people. How that would make them depressed, how they would be difficult to relate to, how it would be difficult to communicate with them.
Sometimes I feel saying that intelligent people have difficulties relating to people or communicating with others is akin to saying it's difficult to run as fast as Usain Bolt. It's like "No shit, but it's not a problem on Bolt's end".
One is the overall concentration of rare mutations. The vast majority of mutations have a negative impact on fitness, so rare mutations (which haven't had enough time to be selected by evolution), almost always are bad across the board. This is why we see an association between IQ and facial symmetry. A random cosmic ray that flips a bit in the genome will lead to transcription errors which cause subtle but persistent problems across the phenotype. Individuals with a high mutagenic load are more likely to have a whole cluster of unambiguously bad outcomes.
The second force at work though are specific tradeoffs made by natural selection. Unlike rare mutations, an allele that's penetrated some fraction of the population comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Otherwise over time, it's penetration would either fall to zero if unambiguously bad, or rise to one if unambiguously good. You're more likely to see this allele have varying penetration for populations in different environments. For example Africans have high rates of sickle cell, because the advantage of malarial protection outweighs the disadvantages. Northern Europeans have high rates of hemochromatosis, because a very high dairy diet creates a high risk of anemia.
With that in mind, it's very hard to disentangle the relationship between phenotypical traits. To a first approximation, high IQ people are mostly those who won the genetic lottery and have low mutational load. You'd expect them to be healthier along virtually every metric.
However, that doesn't tell you if there's a fundamental evolutionary tradeoff. It very well could be the case that intelligence increases the risk of anxiety, schizophrenia or autism. There may be certain design constraints that evolution's working with, where increasing intelligence on the population level comes at too high of a cost in other areas. One example of this is that we know that APOE4, a gene that drastically increases risk of Alzheimers, confers a significant memory and IQ advantage in youth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moreover, you don't even need to pass an IQ test to join MENSA US. https://www.us.mensa.org/join/testscores/
What I find interesting on that page is that the more recent (past 2-3 decades) college preparatory tests (e.g. SAT) are not accepted as substitutes to IQ tests. Shows the trend of dumbing down the tests, I guess.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161104152027/http://www.us.men...
This is a survey of people who joined MENSA. I would posit that most normal, healthy, high-IQ folks never bother, and there's a selection bias at play.
Moreover, you don't even need to pass an IQ test to join MENSA US. https://www.us.mensa.org/join/testscores/
Maybe MENSA is a representative sample of smart people, but I have a lot of friends and colleagues I consider much smarter then me and none of us are in MENSA, so I'm skeptical.
As I am currently watching a documentary on the college admissions scandal I would love to see a correlation between standardized test scores, preparation in dollars, and IQ. My initial assessment is that there isn’t any correlation between IQ and test scores, ergo the tests are measure of preparation and preference not merit or performance.
> My initial assessment is that there isn’t any correlation between IQ and test scores This is completely false - I'm not sure how you got that assessment. Many test scores (e.g. ACT) are heavily IQ/g-predictive. SAT used to be better at predicting IQ/g but it's still pretty good. g-factor is the single largest predictor of academic success (which, these days, is mediated mostly by test scores).
Is there evidence of that? Many university recruiters at some of the most prestigious schools believe otherwise.
> It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health. Is Mensa really an "intellectual pursuit"? I'm not sure exactly what Mensa does…
My limited experience with Mensa is that it's a social/dating club for high IQ people. It's been too long for me to remember the details, but I recall reading about studies that suggest relationships where IQs are too far apart (more than 5-10pts) have a high failure rate. If you're more than a standard deviation from the mean, it probably makes sense to have a special dating circle if you're looking for a long term…
Long, long ago, I came to the conclusion that intelligence was inversely related to sanity. Not a scientific observation, just that people who I knew who were very smart also tended to have difficulties in more ways than the people I knew who had typical intelligence. Typical issues were depression, insecurity, difficulty relating or communicating with others, ... Certainly you can find people with these issues in al…
Too much thinking is unhealthy. The brain's main purpose is to be idle as much as possible. Perhaps your intelligent friends would do better if they meditated regularly.