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Why aren't smart people happier?

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Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed. I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed. Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.

> smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed Define 'better'. For example: > “How do I get my child to stop crying?” Lots of 'dumb' parents are very good at solving this question, they give the kid what they want and put them in front of the TV or give them a bunch of candy. Smart parents might overthink the question, read a book on parenting, try a naughty chair, fail and get stressed. Th…

There's no indication that smart parents don't get their child to cry less than dumb parents either shorter or longer term, so the entire argument is baseless.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed. I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed. Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.

Ahh, the power of a cursory search to prove just about anything. What about the arguments given in the article?

The article does not provide data significant enough to support its basic assumption, that smart people fail to solve ill-defined tasks more than dumb people.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#193

The whole premise is weird. Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes. A cat almost certainly doesn't think about things more than one day in the future. Many people eventually give up thinking about things too much and give up to various forms of hedonism, but that's not real happiness. When it happens after 40s it…

> Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes. You don't need to be very intelligent to consider climate a very hard problem. In fact, if we follow this logic, less smart people should be unhappier, since they are in an even worse position to do something, while smart people might choose to go into an engineering job…

I consider climate change a negligible issue, it's just the hype of the day, something you're "supposed" to virtue signal about. Even a 10C temperature change won't change much in the grand scheme of things.

Average person is dumber each year because high iq is negatively correlated with fertility. On top of that populations are collapsing due to below replacement tfr. There's a real danger that technical civilization collapses later this century. The problem is that all easily accessible fossil fuel sources are already used up, so restarting much later from eg. a late xix century level is borderline impossible - civilization will run out of wood fast and progress stops due to an energy deficit. Advanced semiconductor manufacturing beyond proof of concept requires scale unattainable by such a civilization.

In short, the falling intelligence trend coupled with running out of easily accessible energy means that most likely, either humanity escapes biological-planetary constraints this century, or becomes stuck in a low-tech hairless ape local maxima until the inevitable extinction. A very good candidate for the Great Filter.

Fossil fuels only exist in the first place because for millions of years no organism on Earth was capable of digesting lignin. As trees died they just became buried, eventually transforming into coal and oil. That process stopped the moment fungi evolved the ability to digest lignin. This means that there's not going to be another chance even in millions of years, whether for human descendants or some other intelligent species (racoons seem like a good candidate). Easily accessible fossil fuel energy is a one time event per planet.

There's less than 100 years to escape the trap and it requires sci-fi level tech, either advanced genetic modification of humans or superhuman level ai.

>In fact, if we follow this logic, less smart people should be unhappier, since they are in an even worse position to do something

Worrying about something requires realizing it's a problem first.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#194
post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

Spoken as if you were somehow owed something else than what is.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#195
post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

I would argue the opposite.

Smart people are unhappy because they have a whole identity constructed around being smart and in order to be happy they would have to shatter this construction.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#196
post #188

I see a lot of data to prove smart people aren't much happier, but no data at all to prove that A) multiple types of intelligence exist and can be measured that aren't already measured by a mainstream intelligence test B) a type of intelligence that makes you happier exists, and can be measured by performance on another task C) when you ask someone how happy they are and they say "7", it means they're experiencing th…

C is one of the biggest issues in happiness surveys. Those world surveys are the worst. They tell you more about the socially acceptable answer to "are you happy?" (actually to the translation of that) than how people feel.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#197
post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

I was expecting the OP to say that smarter people were less likely to be happy, because that is the sense a lot of us who believe ourselves to be "smart" have. But that's not what OP is about, and it suggests that's not really what the research says either, there's maybe a bit of hint of a small negative correlation like that, but mostly it says: no correlation. Rather than making the argument you are making, which I…

Problem is there is no real evidence provide to back the assertion. Is the ability to solve well-defined problems really different from the ability to solve poorly-defined problems?

"One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives" seems like a circular definition. So people that feel good do so because they are better at solving poorly defined problems? How do we know?

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#198
post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

The article says that incredibly stupid people and people who scored high on a vocab test were slightly less happy. Being intelligent also doesn't mean you are a cynic who laments over history, I would generally attribute that to pseudo-intellectualism and people with shallow understandings of how reality works when the tires touch the road.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#199
post #46

Everyone seems to have missed one subtlety: the article only states (with references) that smart people are not happier . At no point does it say that smart people are less happy (it does mention two studies where in one "lowest scoring" were a tiny bit unhappier, and in another "highest scoring" were happier): the overall tone is that they are equally happy regardless of their intelligence. And then it wonders why t…

They didn't miss that line: they never read the article.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#200

If you could take a pill that had no cost or side effects but was guaranteed to make you happy for the rest of your life, would you? Why/not?

Something that'll make me happy whatever happens, that could remove all motivation to look after myself and those I (currently!) care about: no. Because I don't want to become that person even if it would be very pleasant to be him.

Something that puts me in a buoyant mood each day, that makes life a pleasure and smooths all the rough edges away, well, maybe. I'd like to become that person.

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