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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).
You've likely encountered this quote, but it bears repeating:
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. -- Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of US (1872 - 1933)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Happiness has a lot to do with attitude. I find that being generally happy is easy if you use your abilities to put yourself into situations that make you happy. I used to work for a place that got to be more and more like Dilbert. Instead of drowning in it, I broke loose and made a new life, using my brains to create interesting, fun things. I found part-time work in the sciences, and have extra time to make wacky inventions and volunteer with kids, teaching them how to do similar things. I am careful to take on projects only if they are likely to make me happier. The latest was building the red telephone for this...
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
"We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness."
This I think comes from identifying 'genius' as someone with special ability but not a popular, cool ability. Exceptional athletes, musicians, and actors are just as much outliers as 'geniuses', but their talents are never liabilities, and only rarely does society genuinely encourage any humility on their part.
intelligence without application is pointless.
Yet physical beauty without application is highly rewarded.
Intelligence in the intellectual, logical reasoning sense is a evolutionary epiphenomenon. It is only weakly selected for. We can tell this because its distribution in the population is so broad. There are no gazelles that run at half the speed of the fastest[*] but there is no shortage of people with IQs that are half the top and still manage to get along (putting "the top" at around 160 and "the bottom" around 80, which is the lower end of the "gets along OK in society most of the time" range.)
Logical, linear reasoning is a trick we've managed to train our bear to dance.
Some people happen to be really good at it. This can be a problem for them because so much of what humans do, and the accounts they give of it, make very little sense to the untutored mind.
We live in the Age of Bayes, and the Bayesian Revolution over the past thee hundred years (which takes in a lot of time before Bayes himself or the recognition that what we were doing is fundamentally Bayesian) has taught us some really important lessons about ourselves. Mostly how damned stupid we have been, even the highly intelligent. We've spent centuries arguing nonsense, from how three is equal to one for large values of three to the dharma of the tao.
In the past century or so we've been calling out the people who are most "intellectually gifted" and expecting them to solve our problems (in a past age it was the pious, or the people "of good family", etc). This has created a bind for them, because for most of that time we've also had no idea why people do what they do (spoiler: mate competition and selection play large roles, although we are still a long way from any kind of comprehensive understanding.)
There are also ethical constraints on what can be done to solve human problems. The utopian projects of the 20th century, despite their profound irrationality in so many respects, were manifestations of this belief that the human intellect had all the right tools for the job of reforming the planet. It didn't work, and that leaves us in the situation we are in today, where intellect is suspect as well as desired.
As such, it isn't necessarily a shock that people identified as "intellectually gifted" should feel less adequate after exemplary lives. Nor is it likely that's going to change any time soon, as we continue to look to the intellectually gifted to save us from ourselves, while steadfastly refusing to spend any time looking hard in a mirror for the source of most human problems.
[*] this may be false... feel free to fact-check me!
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I do not know if I qualify as a genius, but I would like to think I am above average in intelligence. I topped my undergraduate class in engineering, scored near perfect score in my GRE (2380/2400, back when it actually included an analytical section with puzzles), and was a graduate student in quantum computing at a top school.
I subsequently dropped out because I realized two things:
1. Most of my classmates were really good at the subject (e.g., people who won International Math and Physics Olympiads). They started their PhDs at a really young age, and were almost bored by the coursework. Homework that I would spend a Saturday doing were completed while still in class by these bored teenagers.
2. Most of them really loved the subject (i.e., people who loved doing physics at the expense of all else, such as dating, money, or having a social life). Or the subject was so easy that they had the time to pursue other things.
I realized I neither loved physics unconditionally nor was I good enough at it to warrant the pursuit of a PhD, not to mention the subsequent post doc and so on. All this happened at the same time that I fell in love with my now-wife, started a company, and subsequently got into management consulting to make money instead.
I do not mean to phrase this as a tautology (i.e., doing a PhD is mutually exclusive from making money or having a social life), but in my experience, the biggest sacrifice was watching classmates who were relatively mediocre (in my opinion) get "business" degrees and do exceedingly well in life in terms of money and relationships.
Most of my cohort completed their PhDs and now have very successful academic careers. I still love math, theoretical physics, and computer science. I keep myself apprised of most of the publications in the field, and occasionally, write a paper or two myself, and I certainly miss the challenge of advanced math and physics. I still envy my peers, and I am sure some of them envy me. But now being in an unhappy relationship, being a parent, having the burdens of a pointless life (the hardest thing I do is a spreadsheet that just helps some fool company make millions of dollars), I question my past choices. So much possibility lay ahead of me, and I gave it all up for what? For a few bucks, beers, and a few lays?
I'm probably considered successful by the measure of the quintessential American dream -- by ~30, I was a rising star at a top management consulting firm, had over 7 figures to my name, owned a large home in one of the best neighborhoods in Boston, and had a beautiful wife and son. I drove expensive cars, wore bespoke suits and expensive watches, spent time mountaineering in the Alps and the Himalayas, and traveled the world. But still, I always felt that I had missed something. That I will never come ahead of time. That no matter how successful I become in life, I will probably never have a theorem named after me or spend my days basking in the beauty of math.
No amount of sex or expensive liquor or material goods can equate the joys of just proving a theorem. I will forever have this knowledge, that I could have been more, and chose less. My life now reminds me of a Pink Floyd lyrics -- "Did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?".
If high intelligence were an unmitigated benefit, natural selection would have moved the IQ average to 130, 150 or whatever over the eons. There _must_ be commensurate down-sides. Depression? Slower reflexes? Go fetch!
As it is, we just have the Flynn effect of average IQs rising about 1 pt per decade over the past century. That might [or not] be considered as fast evolutionary change.
Who was a better engineer, Lee Felsestein or Woz? Hard to say. Woz was an unparalleled genius in getting less chips to do the same thing who designed the first popular computer system from chips to OS personally, Felsenstein did pretty much the same thing for one of the first trult portable computers.
Who have the kids heard of? Woz, because he was attached to a genius salesman with the drive to succeed, and they brought in a really smart businessman (Markkula) to do the technical finance/manufacturing shit. Felsenstein is totally unknown because he was attached to Adam Osborne, whose tendency to convince the press that the next great Osborne Computer was so good everybody should wait for it (and nobody should buy the current computer) coined the phrase "he osborned it" when the company went bankrupt.
IQ is somewhat important in determining whether you're a success, but there are so many other aspects that are more important. Networking, including the network you get at birth from your parents/neighborhood/elementary school; emotional ability to work with other people; etc. are at least as important as IQ score.
I can relate to that. People who live more in the moment are happier, because the long view always involves decline, death, and dying. I'm petting and really enjoying my dog, and somewhere I'm thinking how I might have another eight years before I have a 120 pound problem who is pissing and shitting huge logs everywhere, who is going to be a royal bitch to dig a hole for one day. I'm having sex with my wife, and somewhere I'm thinking how much it's going to suck looking at her when she's 80. The big picture long view always seems to have a down side, and it's depressing.
I can relate to the expectations thing too. Everybody looks up to you, and a lot of them are jealous of you, and it makes it that much harder to choose an ordinary life. I'm a truck driver, and I like my profession fine, but I constantly feel a need to apologize for not owning the trucking company or being a professor or something; for not aiming higher in general. I've found a lot of people don't like me, because they don't think they're good enough for me for some reason, and yet I feel the same toward them. I'd love to just be normal, and not have to think so much about everything. Too much knowledge can be crippling, instead of helpful. It's hard to invest in a business idea, knowing every conceivable way it might fail, and what all the odds are.
My mother was even more intelligent than I am, and she died young, of alcoholism. She was a miserable woman.
Intelligence is overrated. One side effect for me is that I can never enjoy the opiate of a nice handy sky daddy to make me feel less infinitesimal in the scheme of things. We evolved to see sky daddies in everything, and I have the same need in my brain as any other human, but there's nothing to plug into it. I haven't found the religion yet that wasn't just totally inconsistent and goofy.
The danger when you have the intelligence to do anything you want to do in life is doing nothing. You hesitate to focus narrowly on one field of study because that means you'll have less time for all the others.
I won't say what my IQ is, but it's up there. My grades, especially in science courses, were practically perfect. People were expecting me to go into all kinds of careers, including medicine, chemistry, physics, computer science, etc.. But, I'm interested in everything! Always have been. I chose a career that didn't need much thought so I could keep up with what was happening in science and technology. It's worked. How many 62 year olds do you know who build their own computers? Or just bought two new microscopes? Or diagnose their own problems before going to the doctor?
I know a lot of successful people. Most of them have very little time for fishing, hunting, camping, going to ball games, watching television, listening to music, playing with the children & grandchildren, or working in the garden. I have all the time in the world to enjoy life. Isn't that what it's all about?
Here is what you are missing -- helping others.
Most of the activities of my life have been trivially easy for decades. Helping others remains challenging.
If you really are "so smart", you are able to see what a disaster this world is today. Well, get busy changing it. You will be up against the most powerful, greedy, selfish & moneyed people on the face of the Earth. Challenge enough for me. What about you?
I come here for the love
Maybe the reason why geniuses are so miserable is because they look around and find themselves surrounded by morons.
Maybe - it (might) be dependent on several things: definition of genius (high level abilities across a range of fields); reaction to competition.
Not being a genius I'd be guessing - and that'd be ironic given my experience with people who consider me "very intelligent" and then say "I don't understand why you don't waste your abilities" (i.e. why aren't I famous/richer/better fit their stereotype of what "smart" people do). My experience is that the smarter someone is - the less certain they are of their abilities (the more you know, the more you know you don't know). One perception is that society (the average) recognises and rewards those that are not as clever as they claim to be (or good). E.g. Not so smart. If you are so smart why don't you cure cancer/old age? Smarter. Because I can extrapolate. (none of those things would improve the world in which I live) Not so smart You are an idiot.
As someone mentioned earlier in this thread - expectation is an important component. One of the smartest people I know lives under a bush - his family had high expectations for him and got him scholarships in the "best" schools. Their expectations were that he would do much "better" than them (make more money, get more respect). He thought (correctly) that they were ignorant and relied too much on the opinion of those "who appointed themselves as peers". So he went the the "best" schools - on scholarships offered to raise the academic ratings in order to attract the offspring of the wealthy, and not surprisingly was victimized and did not get to join the exclusive boys clubs. I don't know whether the unrealistic expectations of his family or the first-hand insights into the lives and realities of those who society calls successful, caused him to reject societies expected standards. He's clean and healthy - and one of the happiest people I know.... so I have no reason to doubt he's still very, very smart.
Some things he's said:- the very smart are a threat to those that are not so smart - so if you're smart, play dumb; the only way to get smarter is to challenge people who are even smarter (so being surrounded by morons might have several effects); most people are too stupid to know how stupid they are; approval is a prison - pick your jailer carefully; most things are without reason or purpose and the dumbest thing is to search for reason where there is none; happiness is a choice; don't ask me - if you can't work it out the answer is valueless.
My point - if I have one, is that I'm not sure "smarter" people are unhappier because the smartest people I've ever met are not obviously smart (they hide their abilities). There is a myth that those that are much smarter than the average have an advantage - which is like believing that because you have 20 years experience at fighting you can beat someone twice your weight who has no experience. Numbers of people is like the weight of your opponent. It also overlooks the fact that in life we rarely get to chose the games we play - you may be much smarter than your colleagues, but they may have devoted their lives to licking arses - and if you are so much smarter than your boss unless he takes advantage of your superior abilities you are of no greater value than your dumber colleague. You are also more cautious about implementing changes - your dumb colleague is not. Perhaps being smarter means that you are unwilling to shit upstream because of the perceived consequences (you drink that water) - your dumber competition is not so constrained and achieves greater financial success.... Does your extra smart make you aware of this? Does your extra smart make you realise that there is no point in trying to educate your dumber competitor or their customers?
Tricky..