Stupidity in the sense of doing nothing good for themselves or anyone else, yeah. People are mostly a collection of local context clues about overly emotional nonsense.
There's different flavors of stupidity. There's the "oh damn, why didn't I think of that first" and there's the smug "I did my own research and your evidence doesn't match by beliefs".
> Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity
And then we visit websites like HN, filled with people who think they are smart.
I don't mind a stupid person who knows they are stupid, but I despise the so-called 'expert' who is wrong, but society considers that person to be the authority
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.
A high IQ allows for a higher quality of life both superficially and meaningfully. This experience is usually weighted down by bullies and vindictive dysfunctional people. Envy is an intense oppressive force.
I think the essay has the implicit assumption that if you're 'better' at doing things, you'll end up happier. Since intelligent people aren't happier, the conclusion becomes that intelligence is mostly only relevant to a subset of well-defined abstract problems that don't represent the real messy problems of life.
I think the reality of human happiness is that being in better material circumstances, or being better at solving problems practical or not, doesn't necessarily improve long term happiness.
Adaption to circumstances, the 'hedonic treadmill', means most people aren't going to obtain some very high level of happiness and sustain it indefinitely, regardless of station.
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.
Along this particular axis I prefer to think of intelligence is to wise as smart is to knowledgeable. It may be simply wordsmithing but it provokes empathy.
The golden ticket to happiness is having particular aptitude for some skill that there are supply constraints for and make it pay more than it ought to and being dumb as rocks beyond that.
I'm not very smart, but I've read so much history.
I've also got a pretty strong pattern matching engine.
Since the age of 8 my family traveled across the world interacting and working with thousands of folks of all walks of life. I still travel a lot and love to talk to people and ask them their stories.
The pattern matching engine has a lot input to match on and it reminds me a few dozen times a day that today my current country is fractionally less safe than it was yesterday.
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?
Are you expecting some kind of positive reinforcement by saying this or were you just hoping to humble brags and leave it at that? Some applause maybe?
> Hell, “figuring out” what to do is pretty much all of life!
Only a smart (and often: modern) person would end up with that idea, and it's bad and sisyphean one. If that's what you think life is, of course you won't be happy. You'll never be done and you'll always be able to notice that you're getting something wrong.
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 don't think Warren Buffet is the last word on this.
The top of the IQ stratosphere is functionally unusual.
Set a room full of 130s on a hard problem. When they get stuck, adding more 130s won't help.
Throw a >160 into the room and see what happens.
>160s don't necessarily think they have it all figured out. But as long as they're functional - not always easy - their raw ability at certain tasks is qualitatively different to those closer the norm.
I've occasionally had dealings with these people. They really do understand things phenomenally quickly, and some of them can turn their insights into gold.
Buffett famously said “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ. Rationality is essential”
Buffett said it in the book, “Warren Buffett Speaks.”
He also said if you do have an IQ of 160, you might as well give away 30 points, they’re not going to help you be a better investor.
Maybe he’s wrong, but at this time he’s regarded as one of the most successful investors ever, if not the very best.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure he never said that. He has become like Einstein, where people have projected their beliefs onto him.
> Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter.
This is patently untrue. My middle school kid finished Calculus 1/2 last year and got a 5 on AP without breaking a sweat. He’s taking college calculus this year and we need to figure out what math he’s going to do next year already. He has friends who are younger and even more advanced.
There are genius level kids that are at another plane of intellectual existence. It’s quite something to see.
> There are genius level kids that are at another plane of intellectual existence. It’s quite something to see.
It does not require genius level intelligence to do Calculus. It takes a genius to discover Calculus in the first place. Genius refers more to curiosity in my opinion, and not being able to do something at a young age.
Im not smart (maybe average), but a lot of my unhappiness starts from just having access to information. And then more I process the information, the more unhappy I become. Smarter people than me probably have more information and are able to process it faster, uncovering effects that are not readily perceived by normal folks like myself.
While my intelligence is ~ constant, my levels of happiness fluctuated during my life and now, at 48, I am maybe twice as happy as I was at 24. There is definitely an upward trend with me...
During the same period, I also absorbed a lot of information, including some ghastly one. And yet my overall feeling of well-being improved.
IDK what happened, I can at best describe it as if "someone slowly changed the lens I am using to view the world for a less cloudy one".
Maybe some sort of hormonal development. It seems to be outside my will, though. Just happened.
I stopped viewing all news media companies five years ago. Real news will get to you pretty quickly by other means such as HN which I still frequent a couple of hours a week. Modern news is re-hashing even the trivial in the worst possible way and inviting the extreme idiots on both sides to fight it out in the comment section, I can honestly say I am missing nothing and still find myself informed and happier.
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.
pretty sure if you're commenting on here then you're way above average. It's not a compliment, its just that you're misunderstanding how low the bar is.
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.
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.
Nah, people here often have knowledge in varied but very niche subjects, but because this is the place for niche subjects, you can always find a handful of people knowledgeable on any given subject.
Plus, it’s fairly common to see people saying the most amazingly simple things but with big words, fancy terms, heavy phrasing and all that just to sound that little bit smarter.
None of that tells me people here are more intelligent than the average Joe walking by living their life. Just that people here flock on posts with subjects they enjoy or know a bit about.
It’s very easy to sound intelligent, all you have to do is leave people confused with a bit of theatre and misdirection (oh, and a dash of arrogance!). True intelligence, though, is owning what you don’t know. True intelligence is not trying to make everyone around you feel dumber so you can be the clever clogs.
I don't think its wildly optimistic at all. Coming here, reading stuff and commenting is such a self-selecting process that it leaves you mostly with people who have extremely high cognitive function and intellectual curiosity and bravery. This is so far away from the fold and is an extremely aggressive filter.
The dread is that even this suggested "5%" contains many idiots (this idea of 5% also being rather idiotic). But if you think 5% is wildly optimistic then I fear you don't appreciate what the baseline is like. People are proper stupid and uninterested in thinking when it comes down to it.
I think a part of happiness is just knowing that you cannot win the game of life. Even if you could process a thousand times more information, would that make you any happier? If anything, your craving for information would only increase.
It's not the processing that is the problem but the craving.
That said, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. There is a nice middle ground.
Humans simply didn't evolve to be connected to a constant firehose of random information. I firmly believe that even the smartest person will become an idiot if they just scroll X all day
> Let’s not pretend X is bad because of Musk alone. HN can be just as terrible too.
I am yet to see racial slurs, hateful speech, scams, porn (consensual and non consensual) or any of the endless things that are okay on X but not on HN. So no, HN can not and will not be just as terrible. The two platforms aren’t even close in terms of the health of the discourse.
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.
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.
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".
It sounds like you're always in the pursuit of happiness, you just don't frame it that way. You are always trying to make your life better than it is, which either leads to less misery or more happiness. 2 sides of the same coin.
Yeah, maybe! I def don't frame it as "happiness", because I don't expect to be especially happy, but hopefully content or accepting of what my life "is". I actually have worked throughout my life to accept bad/difficult things, and just "work with what I have", because there are always some pretty bad things in life, and I know the badness level will probably increase as I get older (already had numerous friends pass away, family members, etc.)
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
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.
I think these things are true for some people, but I think there's also a sampling bias when it comes to generalizing these things for the broader population of smart people.
IMHO even just the phrase "smartest person in the room" already frames the conversation in terms of stack ranking and some form of implicit value judgement on being smart, and this in turn opens to the door to all kinds of squishy emotional bias and self-identity issues that go well beyond any objective measure of smartness. In short, I think someone who even thinks in terms of "being the smartest person in the room" is likely to have their ego tied up in the self-perception of being smart, and thus more likely to feel the lack of intellectual stimulation you describe. Whereas I hypothesize there are many equally smart people who do NOT have their ego tied up in being smart, don't see the world this way, and simply don't show up in the data for smart people and their relative level of unhappiness.
> In short, I think someone who even thinks in terms of "being the smartest person in the room" is likely to have their ego tied up in the self-perception of being smart, and thus more likely to feel the lack of intellectual stimulation you describe.
Nah. I wouldn't even admit to being smart until I was nearly 40 (no matter what people said, or what I accomplished), and that's only because after taking an IQ test I decided that it was obnoxious and often insulting to other people to deny it. I still don't emotionally accept it, and I think a faithful watcher of "The 1% Club" since it came on would have probably raised their tested IQ a standard deviation. I'm always confused and lost in this world, struggling to understand, and screwing things up, and that's not my mental image of how intelligence should feel.
But when you get something, the rest of the people in the room don't, and you say that you're just an idiot, how do you think it makes them feel? I've been told how it makes people feel, in no uncertain terms.
It's better just to accept reality, and also not to let people make you feel guilty about your needs. I don't know if that's what you mean to be doing, but you're obviously trying to cast the need for intelligent people to have stimulation as some sort of morally-dubious personality flaw. It's unfair.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 38.0 ms ] threadThere's different flavors of stupidity. There's the "oh damn, why didn't I think of that first" and there's the smug "I did my own research and your evidence doesn't match by beliefs".
And then we visit websites like HN, filled with people who think they are smart.
I don't mind a stupid person who knows they are stupid, but I despise the so-called 'expert' who is wrong, but society considers that person to be the authority
I sometimes wonder what would happen if the population's average IQ was (the current equivalent of) 130 instead of 100.
Would things be better? Worse in more complex ways? Both?
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.
There's truth to the saying, "ignorance is bliss."
I think the reality of human happiness is that being in better material circumstances, or being better at solving problems practical or not, doesn't necessarily improve long term happiness.
Adaption to circumstances, the 'hedonic treadmill', means most people aren't going to obtain some very high level of happiness and sustain it indefinitely, regardless of station.
I've also got a pretty strong pattern matching engine.
Since the age of 8 my family traveled across the world interacting and working with thousands of folks of all walks of life. I still travel a lot and love to talk to people and ask them their stories.
The pattern matching engine has a lot input to match on and it reminds me a few dozen times a day that today my current country is fractionally less safe than it was yesterday.
We aren't optimized for smart, for happy, or for truth - we are optimized for getting our genes into the next generation.
Only a smart (and often: modern) person would end up with that idea, and it's bad and sisyphean one. If that's what you think life is, of course you won't be happy. You'll never be done and you'll always be able to notice that you're getting something wrong.
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.
The top of the IQ stratosphere is functionally unusual.
Set a room full of 130s on a hard problem. When they get stuck, adding more 130s won't help.
Throw a >160 into the room and see what happens.
>160s don't necessarily think they have it all figured out. But as long as they're functional - not always easy - their raw ability at certain tasks is qualitatively different to those closer the norm.
I've occasionally had dealings with these people. They really do understand things phenomenally quickly, and some of them can turn their insights into gold.
Buffett famously said “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ. Rationality is essential”
Buffett said it in the book, “Warren Buffett Speaks.”
He also said if you do have an IQ of 160, you might as well give away 30 points, they’re not going to help you be a better investor.
Maybe he’s wrong, but at this time he’s regarded as one of the most successful investors ever, if not the very best.
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.
Per Google, the current world’s highest IQ belongs to Younghun Kim, with 276. That’s disputed, of course.
Next up is Terence Tao with 230.
I guess there isn’t a single standard.
I'm pretty sure he never said that. He has become like Einstein, where people have projected their beliefs onto him.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/12/heres-the-iq-score-warren-bu...
This is patently untrue. My middle school kid finished Calculus 1/2 last year and got a 5 on AP without breaking a sweat. He’s taking college calculus this year and we need to figure out what math he’s going to do next year already. He has friends who are younger and even more advanced.
There are genius level kids that are at another plane of intellectual existence. It’s quite something to see.
It does not require genius level intelligence to do Calculus. It takes a genius to discover Calculus in the first place. Genius refers more to curiosity in my opinion, and not being able to do something at a young age.
During the same period, I also absorbed a lot of information, including some ghastly one. And yet my overall feeling of well-being improved.
IDK what happened, I can at best describe it as if "someone slowly changed the lens I am using to view the world for a less cloudy one".
Maybe some sort of hormonal development. It seems to be outside my will, though. Just happened.
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
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.
–Thomas Jefferson
Thanks, you had me feeling all smug and then you had to add that part.
I refuse to believe the average person here is any more intelligent than the average person on the street.
Plus, it’s fairly common to see people saying the most amazingly simple things but with big words, fancy terms, heavy phrasing and all that just to sound that little bit smarter.
None of that tells me people here are more intelligent than the average Joe walking by living their life. Just that people here flock on posts with subjects they enjoy or know a bit about.
It’s very easy to sound intelligent, all you have to do is leave people confused with a bit of theatre and misdirection (oh, and a dash of arrogance!). True intelligence, though, is owning what you don’t know. True intelligence is not trying to make everyone around you feel dumber so you can be the clever clogs.
There's zero filter that could cause this effect.
This is a website of words. The average person looks almost exclusively at moving pictures.
Embarrassing admission: I'm probably much closer to the middle of the open-mindedness chart than i pretend. (I wish i was Bertrand Russell.)
Indictment: so are very many commenters here.
The dread is that even this suggested "5%" contains many idiots (this idea of 5% also being rather idiotic). But if you think 5% is wildly optimistic then I fear you don't appreciate what the baseline is like. People are proper stupid and uninterested in thinking when it comes down to it.
It's not the processing that is the problem but the craving.
That said, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. There is a nice middle ground.
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 am yet to see racial slurs, hateful speech, scams, porn (consensual and non consensual) or any of the endless things that are okay on X but not on HN. So no, HN can not and will not be just as terrible. The two platforms aren’t even close in terms of the health of the discourse.
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.
IMHO even just the phrase "smartest person in the room" already frames the conversation in terms of stack ranking and some form of implicit value judgement on being smart, and this in turn opens to the door to all kinds of squishy emotional bias and self-identity issues that go well beyond any objective measure of smartness. In short, I think someone who even thinks in terms of "being the smartest person in the room" is likely to have their ego tied up in the self-perception of being smart, and thus more likely to feel the lack of intellectual stimulation you describe. Whereas I hypothesize there are many equally smart people who do NOT have their ego tied up in being smart, don't see the world this way, and simply don't show up in the data for smart people and their relative level of unhappiness.
Nah. I wouldn't even admit to being smart until I was nearly 40 (no matter what people said, or what I accomplished), and that's only because after taking an IQ test I decided that it was obnoxious and often insulting to other people to deny it. I still don't emotionally accept it, and I think a faithful watcher of "The 1% Club" since it came on would have probably raised their tested IQ a standard deviation. I'm always confused and lost in this world, struggling to understand, and screwing things up, and that's not my mental image of how intelligence should feel.
But when you get something, the rest of the people in the room don't, and you say that you're just an idiot, how do you think it makes them feel? I've been told how it makes people feel, in no uncertain terms.
It's better just to accept reality, and also not to let people make you feel guilty about your needs. I don't know if that's what you mean to be doing, but you're obviously trying to cast the need for intelligent people to have stimulation as some sort of morally-dubious personality flaw. It's unfair.