> views such as that African countries suffer chronic poverty and illness because their people have lower IQs and that black women are objectively less attractive than other races
> a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists issued an open letter titled "Kanazawa's bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology",[6] and an article was published by 35 on the same theme.[7]
Yeah, I'm not sure I buy the reasoning. I can sort of relate with the premise of the article itself, but, like you said... there's something off with the reasoning.
I think we should be really careful about ideas like this which tell us what we want to hear about a thing that "sounds negative on the surface but is actually good!"
I think ideas where you reframe an idea that "sounds negative on the surface but is actually good" are great. Much of success is about reframing the perspective of yourself and the people around you. If you can do this effectively, you get your own reality distortion field, which is a very powerful thing to have. Remember that nothing is intrinsically good or bad - good and bad are both human emotional responses that can be reframed in other terms.
I do think this particular article is transparently self-serving, and not in a way that is particularly effective. (For the reader, at least; it's pretty effective for the writer, in that it gets people to read it, nod their heads, and then share it, resulting in more pageviews.) Much better to reframe reality in ways that are long-term beneficial for you rather than just make you feel good once.
I've reread it 3-4 times, and I'm having a hard time understanding what the argument is. Typically, you'd expect something like
> if p, then q
> if q, then z
but this article reads as
> if p, then q
> if z, then m
Except that it's all wrapped in language - the ideas look like they should flow together, but they don't. There are probably missing steps in the analysis. Might be a case of over-summarization by the journalist.
> Theres something odd about the reasoning in the article thay I cant quite put my finger on
Yes, it is all over the place:
1) "Why smart people are better off with fewer friends"
2) "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" - for everyone that is.
3) "[...] one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed."
4) "The effect of population density on life satisfaction was [...] twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,"
COMMENT - So, trusting the writing, presumably low-IQ individuals are more happy in a small town where fewer people are around to socialize with and more unhappy in a big city where more people are around to socialize with.
5) "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."
COMMENT - So they have that in common with low-IQ people? This claim contrast oddly with 4) and also the graph pointing out that this is a population wide trend..
6) "If you're smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being"
COMMENT - Then the whole article could be summon up into something a bit shorter basically, smarter people have a relatively easier time than less smart people, no matter whether they are in a small town or a big city. I feel the reason for the sense of oddness stems primarily from point 4 which remains unexplored/explained and stands out against some but not all of the other claims made.
Since it's a correlational study, I'm pretty sure all you can say is that "smart people who spend more time with their friends tend to be less happy". This could be due to any number of reasons. Either spending more time with their friends makes them less happy, or, more likely, they spend more time with their friends because they are unhappy and are trying to make up for it.
First of all, the methodology is indeed wonky,I am not really a happy person but if I were asked whether I am satisfied with my life I would say Yes.
Second, the logic seems to be, smart people have bigger goals so they don't bother wasting time socializing. Which is true but not all smart people are well-accomplished. So although this might apply to researchers it might not to the "average" smart person.
Edit: I forgot to mention that the fact smart people feel less happy interacting with many friends can be simply due to introversion and not necessarily their IQ.
I don't know if this makes sense, but I read recently that contrary to many people's images, hunter-gatherers actually had much better lives than we do now. Less work-stress, more family-time, etc.
The highest age was about the same, but they were more likely to die at every age than we are today. A 40 year old still could expect a shorter average life than a 40 year old today.
Well, any culture existing today is by definition a modern culture. But, more substantively:
There are no cultures today which are comparable to primitive cultures of the past. One nice point I've seen made is that when hunter-gatherers were the rule, they could live on arable land. After the advent of agriculture, obviously, that became impossible.
suprising observation from an intro anthropology course i took in college: when you add up all the time it takes you to feed yourself now (including time spent working to earn money etc) vs then, most people spent much less time per week back then. granted, this might not be true for the typical software engineer. but maybe if you somehow account for the years that it took to acquire the skills, it might be close...?
It's not snarky. People who seem to me to be qualified and serious have suggested both that the initial converts to agriculture were less healthy and happy than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries, and that modern humans are less happy than hunter-gatherers. The first claim seems very plausible to me, but the second claim seems less so.
If I were going to expound from imagination about how remotely ancient peoples lived, I would prefer to really exercise the imagination and give them magical powers. Might as well have fun with it.
There are still hunter-gatherer groups existing today, and their happiness levels can be studied. I wonder how their level of snark compares to more modern societies.
Yeah, and even though you're fighting for your life every day then, it seems so much simpler and not so bad once you've developed a community that can share the chores. I watched this documentary on David Beckham's trip to the native tribes in Brazil. They're all very happy with their life. Everyone is very close and it's nice because all your time is spent with family. They get to be with nature all day, have fun and joke while collecting and preparing meals for the tribe, and afterwards they all sing and dance.
This is just my speculation but I bet it depended on wild animal populations, rainfalls vs droughts, peacefulness of neighboring tribes, etc. I don't think you can generalize on the happiness of all hunter gatherers.
No one was there at that time, no one will truly know if this is true. I don't even think that we can compare the happiness between two people (I am happy doing things other find horrible like programming), so two people from different time ? Impossible in my opinion.
I find in my line of work, which I think the average person would rate as very intellectually demanding, I find my lack of social connections to be my greatest weakness!
Hard problems might need solitude, but really hard problems seem to need multiple minds and perpectives to solve.
I of course need alone time, but only on focused portions of what adds up to a far broader and more cooperative strategy.
I've also found the smarter you are, the more likely you are to look down on larger portions of humanity, and it multiplies in higher density regions. This is a pathway to unhappiness that seems to be rooted in my own ego though more than an objective reality.
Depends on the problem. If the general human consensus believes the sun revolves around the earth, you're going to have a hard time working with multiple minds. Problems which require radical shifts in ideology are more than likely going to be tackled alone. It would come down to the maximum power principle. You would waste a significant amount of energy pulling someone psychologically one step in your direction, whereas independently, you could be three steps closer to proving your thesis. Not to mention, social cohesion, or whatever you want to call it, encourages group think and naturally ostracises outsiders as a primitive form of bonding or fitting in with one another.
Really hard problems fight monocultures of 'obvious truth' in the bonds of multiple minds.
> When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy.
This is obviously a correlational study (and not a randomized controlled trial) so inferring causality is just wrong.
Let me instead suggest an alternative explanation for the same correlation: smart people have more time to spend with friends when things are going badly for them (crashed startup, lack of grants for research, out of work, etc) than when things are going well (startup just got funded, just received a major grant, etc).
- People in cities have more people to compare themselves to when calculating 'how well they're doing' relative to people around them. In a big city you're less likely to be at the top.
- Smart people are more likely to need opportunities provided by big cities and big city networks, and are probably more unhappy in smaller rural areas.
The 'evolution' argument sets off bad science alarms, no ability to test and not even very good speculation. Then going on to suggest that smart people are more able to ignore evolutionary pressure also strikes me as a stretch.
The idea that smart people have a bigger project in mind and time spent socializing makes them sad because it's 'wasted' does seem reasonable to me though.
My mind also fired me a lot of "bullshit science warning" while reading this article.
And, event though the argument "smart people have a bigger project and they spend time realizing it rather than socializing" makes also sense for me, I don't really believe in it. Smart people may also spend time with friend to elaborate their plan and socializing in order to gather a group to execute that plan.
Another explanation would be that they have more problem finding like minded people so they'd rather spend time alone than being with uninteresting people.
Conclusion : if it is true that smart people need less time socializing to be happy than other people (psychology studies tend to always contradict each other, I don't rely on them too much), I don't have a serious explanation why.
tl;dr: Based on the information that's publicly available, which does not include the full text of the article, it passes the sniff test.
Long: To take a stab at the study's scientific integrity without access to it[1], other aspects may be better indicators than a Washington Post article written for a mainstream audience -- namely, the journal's reputation and review policy, the author's CV, and the abstract. That's not anyone's fault, but the Post author's goal - an understandable explanation - doesn't emphasize what you're evaluating.
He's a trained scientist with a lot of experience and many prior studies, and that this was published in a well-known peer-reviewed journal. Short of reading the actual article and having experience in the field, I think that's a more likely indicator of scientific integrity than the OP's URL.
[1]: The full text of the article isn't publicly available. While drawing conclusions without reading it would be crazy, checking the author and the journal are reasonable.
I was thinking at first that it was ridiculous to examine questions about a life "well lived" through people who haven't lived too much of one (ages 18-28), but then I wondered if people actually maintain the same relative level of "social-ness" throughout their lives. For example, let's say in your twenties, people who are "very social" have 10-20 friends whom they see often, but in your sixties, people who are in the "very social" category typically have 5-10 friends that they see often. My thought is actually that once you are in a particular "category" of socialness, you probably continue having that same level of socialness throughout your life. Probably very social people in this study were also very social at age 5-10 - so maybe age doesn't matter. I am assuming that all people are less social as they grow older - but I actually don't know if this is true.
I agree that people probably stay within the same class of sociability throughout their entire life-- but I think that as one gets older the disparity between the loners and socialites gets much closer.
With that being said, I still don't think you can take any kind of result from this age-group seriously. Even if we assume that these people will stay within the same sociability class, your twenties might just be a busy time in your life where hard work at your career and education make you happier. That might not hold true when you're 60.
I moved out to a small town a couple years ago, and a large part of that was I had a large group of friends. I wasn't able to really engage in many of my side projects, and just needed more space. I'm close enough that I can hit the big events of the group, but people don't swing much when you're an hour and a half away from the city core. But I'm not very smart, so I wonder if we have a correlation here between location and people that take on self initiated projects? And smart people tend to be in a position of initiating projects on their own without direction. I can honestly say, I love living where I am, and couldn't be much happier.
this has been true for my case. however, I don't consider myself to be particularly smart, rather its super tiring to navigate socio-emotional dynamics.
I do enjoy a few close friends but when I was living in and working in downtown vancouver, it was some of the most miserable chapters. In particular, the large density of people adds to my stress for some reason. I don't know why but I tense up and my senses are heightened when I'm in a crowd.
Stuff like this really hurts me. Hopefully we will be able to operationalize this into units of happiness one time, exactly what is it about socializing with more of their friends and whether we can cut that out.
I believe that the reasoning for this is probably that they'd rather spend time on their work or creating something than hang out with their friends because it gives them a nice creative outlet which they need to keep their mind at peace from all the inspiration and ideas racing through constantly.
I'm reasonably intelligent, would not call myself smart compared to some other people I know. My entire life I've always had just one or two close, low-drama friendships at any one time, and hardly any wider circle of friends. Not sure I can explain why, but it's always been that way and feels natural. I can't really relate to groups of 5-10 or more that get together and all seem to know each other and have fun.
As is too common in WaPo articles, a headline that starts with "why", but is actually making a novel claim, is usually a crap article.
"Why" articles go for things that we already know to to be true. When you make a novel or controversial claim, and slap a "why" on the front, you are intellectually dishonestly trying to trick the reader into believing the claim is already a known truth.
This article started badly and went worse. Needs a LOT of intellectual rigor.
Evolution hypothesis wasn't tested, study wasn't very useful at disproving anything or solidly claiming anything. A life well lived I believe has been solidly shown vt philosophers to have little to do with happiness, and "priests and novelists" is just silly IMO. They have no say whatsoever.
So its safe to ignore literally every claim of evidence in this post. That said, it is an interesting hypothesis. I can imagine being a loner and being intelligent could have many bits of positive feedback between them.
58 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa
> views such as that African countries suffer chronic poverty and illness because their people have lower IQs and that black women are objectively less attractive than other races
> a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists issued an open letter titled "Kanazawa's bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology",[6] and an article was published by 35 on the same theme.[7]
But hey, Hakuna matata! Disney told me so. /s
I think we should be really careful about ideas like this which tell us what we want to hear about a thing that "sounds negative on the surface but is actually good!"
I do think this particular article is transparently self-serving, and not in a way that is particularly effective. (For the reader, at least; it's pretty effective for the writer, in that it gets people to read it, nod their heads, and then share it, resulting in more pageviews.) Much better to reframe reality in ways that are long-term beneficial for you rather than just make you feel good once.
> if p, then q
> if q, then z
but this article reads as
> if p, then q
> if z, then m
Except that it's all wrapped in language - the ideas look like they should flow together, but they don't. There are probably missing steps in the analysis. Might be a case of over-summarization by the journalist.
Yes, it is all over the place:
1) "Why smart people are better off with fewer friends"
2) "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" - for everyone that is.
3) "[...] one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed."
4) "The effect of population density on life satisfaction was [...] twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,"
COMMENT - So, trusting the writing, presumably low-IQ individuals are more happy in a small town where fewer people are around to socialize with and more unhappy in a big city where more people are around to socialize with.
5) "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."
COMMENT - So they have that in common with low-IQ people? This claim contrast oddly with 4) and also the graph pointing out that this is a population wide trend..
6) "If you're smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being"
COMMENT - Then the whole article could be summon up into something a bit shorter basically, smarter people have a relatively easier time than less smart people, no matter whether they are in a small town or a big city. I feel the reason for the sense of oddness stems primarily from point 4 which remains unexplored/explained and stands out against some but not all of the other claims made.
Second, the logic seems to be, smart people have bigger goals so they don't bother wasting time socializing. Which is true but not all smart people are well-accomplished. So although this might apply to researchers it might not to the "average" smart person.
Edit: I forgot to mention that the fact smart people feel less happy interacting with many friends can be simply due to introversion and not necessarily their IQ.
However, you are definitely right about infant mortality. Kids were 30 to 100 times more likely to die.
0) https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
This means that life expectancy was short. It directly conflicts with
> short life expectancy is a myth, and that primitive cultures live[d] as long as we do
Surely you know what I meant. If you made it to middle-age you lived just as long.
That's not what I took away from the article, but I could be wrong. That wouldn't be anything interesting to discuss or write about.
BTW, an extremely minor point: I intentionally used present-tense because primitive cultures still exist.
There are no cultures today which are comparable to primitive cultures of the past. One nice point I've seen made is that when hunter-gatherers were the rule, they could live on arable land. After the advent of agriculture, obviously, that became impossible.
Or was your comment meant to be snark that I didn't get?
Nope, just reporting what I read. It was on the interwebs ...
Land ownership and class separation didn't start until agriculture.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046prs6
For a useful perspective from the other side, you might want to read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Hard problems might need solitude, but really hard problems seem to need multiple minds and perpectives to solve.
I of course need alone time, but only on focused portions of what adds up to a far broader and more cooperative strategy.
I've also found the smarter you are, the more likely you are to look down on larger portions of humanity, and it multiplies in higher density regions. This is a pathway to unhappiness that seems to be rooted in my own ego though more than an objective reality.
Really hard problems fight monocultures of 'obvious truth' in the bonds of multiple minds.
This is obviously a correlational study (and not a randomized controlled trial) so inferring causality is just wrong.
Let me instead suggest an alternative explanation for the same correlation: smart people have more time to spend with friends when things are going badly for them (crashed startup, lack of grants for research, out of work, etc) than when things are going well (startup just got funded, just received a major grant, etc).
- People in cities have more people to compare themselves to when calculating 'how well they're doing' relative to people around them. In a big city you're less likely to be at the top.
- Smart people are more likely to need opportunities provided by big cities and big city networks, and are probably more unhappy in smaller rural areas.
The 'evolution' argument sets off bad science alarms, no ability to test and not even very good speculation. Then going on to suggest that smart people are more able to ignore evolutionary pressure also strikes me as a stretch.
The idea that smart people have a bigger project in mind and time spent socializing makes them sad because it's 'wasted' does seem reasonable to me though.
And, event though the argument "smart people have a bigger project and they spend time realizing it rather than socializing" makes also sense for me, I don't really believe in it. Smart people may also spend time with friend to elaborate their plan and socializing in order to gather a group to execute that plan.
Another explanation would be that they have more problem finding like minded people so they'd rather spend time alone than being with uninteresting people.
Conclusion : if it is true that smart people need less time socializing to be happy than other people (psychology studies tend to always contradict each other, I don't rely on them too much), I don't have a serious explanation why.
Long: To take a stab at the study's scientific integrity without access to it[1], other aspects may be better indicators than a Washington Post article written for a mainstream audience -- namely, the journal's reputation and review policy, the author's CV, and the abstract. That's not anyone's fault, but the Post author's goal - an understandable explanation - doesn't emphasize what you're evaluating.
So, let's check these things out. Here's the CV of the first named author (I can't easily tell whether he was PI): http://www.smu.edu.sg/sites/default/files/socsc/pdf/psychvit...
The abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26847844
A preview: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.12181/pdf
The entity behind the journal (which also grants licenses to psychologists in Britain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Psychological_Society
ToC from the February issue: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.2016.107.iss...
Peer reviewers: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.12174/full
He's a trained scientist with a lot of experience and many prior studies, and that this was published in a well-known peer-reviewed journal. Short of reading the actual article and having experience in the field, I think that's a more likely indicator of scientific integrity than the OP's URL.
[1]: The full text of the article isn't publicly available. While drawing conclusions without reading it would be crazy, checking the author and the journal are reasonable.
I wish I stopped reading there.
With that being said, I still don't think you can take any kind of result from this age-group seriously. Even if we assume that these people will stay within the same sociability class, your twenties might just be a busy time in your life where hard work at your career and education make you happier. That might not hold true when you're 60.
I do enjoy a few close friends but when I was living in and working in downtown vancouver, it was some of the most miserable chapters. In particular, the large density of people adds to my stress for some reason. I don't know why but I tense up and my senses are heightened when I'm in a crowd.
Let's hope there's something like this.
"Why" articles go for things that we already know to to be true. When you make a novel or controversial claim, and slap a "why" on the front, you are intellectually dishonestly trying to trick the reader into believing the claim is already a known truth.
Evolution hypothesis wasn't tested, study wasn't very useful at disproving anything or solidly claiming anything. A life well lived I believe has been solidly shown vt philosophers to have little to do with happiness, and "priests and novelists" is just silly IMO. They have no say whatsoever.
So its safe to ignore literally every claim of evidence in this post. That said, it is an interesting hypothesis. I can imagine being a loner and being intelligent could have many bits of positive feedback between them.