Well, smart people are wealthier and we know that income and happiness follow a logarithmic linear curve. Maybe these research are over adjusting (controlling for income) and therefore are unable to find the true effect.
Why aren't smart people happier?
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Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#272I have noticed that a lot of/majority of "regular people" tend to coast along on the back of others as a way of life. If "smart people" are perceived by friends and family as being problem solvers, many will route their problems to a "smart friend", someone who seems to have their life somewhat in order or always have the answer to everything. I used to get an endless stream of requests for everything from technical help, legal/financial advice, help planning vacation, help making decisions on purchases, career advice and help fixing their "failed to launch" kids, really often far exceeding simply asking for an opinion, folks effectively transfer ownership of their problems to you for you to fix.
Of course they may praise you for this and perhaps you get addicted to this positive feedback, but it comes at a high cost, especially as you can end up spending so much effort on "friends" that you neglect to solve or even recognize your own problems.
I have come to realize recently that I don't actually have any friends, only dependents. Declining to take ownership of people's problems caused basically all of them to more or less cut off contact with me (maybe I get a text once a year or something), but I am so much happier now that I ever was before.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#273The 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…
Smart people are very often terrible people. Being smart exists ok a different axis to being wonderful/awful, well-adjusted, fulfilled or even being successful.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you read the OP? It's less about making an argument for the "correct" definition of "smart"; and more about saying that the way psychologists measure "intelligence" (eg when trying to study things like "are smarter people more or less happy") is measuring success at solving well-defined problems. That things like IQ tests as well as academic success are about solving well-defined problems. You can think "smart p…
I don't think academic success only involves well-defined problems even if your work doesn't involve research and just teaching. Being able to convey properly ideas, concepts and information to students is not a well defined problem...
Oh, I think OP is talking about success in school as a student, particularly children in "lower" education (K-12), not adults in post-graduate academic careers.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#275The 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…
How people see is just a reflection of their minds. If one sees world as awful - that only tells about that person mind. It has nothing to do with the world. And talking about seeing truth is just inflated ego, nothing more. Some of the wisest and most impactful people in history talked about truth being the ultimate ecstasy. That is a smart way to live, I would say.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which famous philosophers incorporated magical thinking, thought-crime, misogyny and slavery into their philosophy? What is the wisdom imparted by officially sanctioned chattel slavery, wherein beating your slave to death is perfectly acceptable [as] long as they live a few days after the beating: "And if someone strikes his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies at his hand, he shall be punished. If, how…
> Which famous philosophers incorporated magical thinking, thought-crime, misogyny and slavery into their philosophy? Plato, father of most modern philosophy. You have a lot of reading to do my friend.
Yes, if you go back several thousand years, you can find such trash. I suppose I should have limited it to modern philosophers that are more relevant and less influenced by magical thinking to discourage lazy answers. You have not bothered to address the question of the VALUE of incorporating slavery, thought-crime, misogyny and magical thought into one's philosophy. Are you incapable of addressing the problem or do you realize you cannot justify it?
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#277>In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems.
>Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems.
I wish the article went a bit deeper into analyzing the structural flaws of intelligence tests, because I think this is also an answer to why some people do poorly in school, yet seem to do very well in life overall (materially and emotionally speaking). The ability to find happiness is something worth teaching to people, if it can be taught. I honestly don't know if it can be. Certainly the ancients believed a good, moral life could be achieved through instruction, as the sheer number of writings on that topic they left behind clearly indicate, but then they also had a lot of curious ideas about the nature of reality as we know it. I think it's definitely worth considering reordering the priority of our education toward "poorly defined" questions, at least in part. The real difficulty will be finding people "qualified" to teach these "lessons".
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#278The authors seems to imply that that Christopher Langan who scores extraordinarily high on IQ tests and who is developing a Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" (CTMU), is somehow dumb or ill informed for believing that the 9/11 attacks and subsequent collapse of the twin towers and world trade centre building 7, was planned. Regardless of whether that is true or not, the author of the article takes direct aim…
It seems to me you're offended that the OP implies that, e.g. Bobby Fischer wasn't good at non-well-defined problems. I would be interested to know why is that.
To clarify: I don't like the way they phrased it either (it was too judgemental), it just didn't bother me so much.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know? People are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy/unhappy. (fwiw, I'm not saying you're wrong)
I'm just saying that comment I replied to makes this sound as universal truth. Wanting children and being happy about having children are subjective things. There are people who don't have children and are happy about it, people who have children but are unhappy about it and everything inbetween. People who want to have children should have them, and people who don't want to have children shoudln't have them =)
These debates always devolve into people pointing at outliers.
Simply compare the two curves. Those with children vs those without.
Your comment stands if you look at outliers, GP stands if you take the curves.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#280I'm not especially smart, or happy, but, personally, I don't know how to be it, or what it feels like. I know pleasure, but being in a constant pleasurable state is not what is meant by happiness as far as I know. Slavoj Žižek (someone who does seem to be especially smart): “Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dre…
The 'eternal struggle' is such an interesting concept and I've thought about it a lot. It really does seem like, while true happiness may not solely come from overcoming challenges, if those challenges aren't present you definitely won't be happy. I think this aligns better than the top post's idea of "smart people see the awful things that can't be changed", it's moreso that smart people aren't finding satisfying challenges in the first place. I remember when I went wild downloading ROMs for games when I found out that was thing; once I ended up with all the games I wanted to play, I lost most of my interest to play any of them.
My headcanon is that it's tied to the fact that our life spans are limited and we've evolved to derive the most satisfaction when we're working on a task that is difficult for us individually or has vague success criteria, which seems to match up in part with the article's takeaway. It's also how I reason that not only fucking things up, but also complaining about it and trying to fix it are all required for people to feel happy. I see this ethos in a lot of old religions as well - humans striving towards the same qualities as a godhead but never quite getting there no matter how awesome their abilities become, or how our 'perfect' state was when we were ignorant of the consequences of our actions.