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Can High Intelligence Be a Burden Rather Than a Boon?
HughPickens.com writes David Robson has an interesting article at BBC on the relationship between high intelligence and happiness. "We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness," writes Robson. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest." As Ernest Hemingway wrote: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." The first steps to studying the question were taken in 1926 when psychologist Lewis Terman decided to identify and study a group of gifted children. Terman selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the "Termites", and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day. "As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the time his series aired on CBS, the Termites' average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman's expectations – there were many who pursued more "humble" professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that "intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated". Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average."
According to Robson, one possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball and chain. During the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look back at the events in their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations (PDF).
My problem with General Intelligence is it's frequently a proxy for cultural awareness that's used by the dominant preppy-ass culture to justify them having more nice things then good old boys. I, for example, have sufficient felicity with the language that I can explain precisely why the phrase "sufficient felicity with the language" is somewhat of an infelicity. Most people are gonna need to spend some time on Wiktionary to understand that an infelicity is an awkward way to say something, so my original statement ("sufficient felicity with the language") literally means "sufficient unawkwardness with the language," which is a really awkward way to put it. Since people like me write IQ tests I will never waste time on an IQ test trying to figure out what some obscure word means.I already know it.
Moreover since people like me like to do shit like take IQ tests as part of a group to see whose smartest I will have a major advantage over many others because I've probably seen the questions before.
Which in turn means that while my performance on IQ tests can be meaningfully compared to my fellow college-educated-white-people's results it's really hard to argue that my success on an English-language IQ test designed by (and for) Anglophone, college-educated, American white people can be meaningfully compared to the performance of some Indian guy with a PhD in engineering whose mother is illiterate. He probably has more "General Intelligence" then me, because going from illiterate mother to PhD in a technical subject requires lots of brains, but coasting through a liberal arts course in a major University with a 2.6 does not. But since English is his second language, I will kick his ass on the test.