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Scientists Say Smart People Are Better Off With Fewer Friends
HughPickens.com writes: Christopher Ingraham writes in the Washington Post that a new study finds that when smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy. "The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it ... are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective," says Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. According to Graham you should think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life. (More, below.)
Hugh Pickens continues: Kanazawa and Li's theory of happiness starts with the premise that the human brain evolved to meet the demands of our ancestral environment on the African savanna, where the population density was akin to what you'd find today in, say, rural Alaska (less than one person per square kilometer). Take a brain evolved for that environment, plop it into today's Manhattan (population density: 27,685 people per square kilometer), and you can see how you'd get some evolutionary friction. "Our ancestors lived as hunter–gatherers in small bands of about 150 individuals," Kanazawa and Li explain. "In such settings, having frequent contact with lifelong friends and allies was likely necessary for survival and reproduction for both sexes." 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. Accordingly smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they're pursuing some loftier ambition. "Whatever the explanation might prove to be, this obviously doesn't mean smart people don't like having friends," says Emma Cueto. "But it does probably mean that they don't enjoy having too many — after all, keeping track of lots of people does usually involve, you know, talking to them. So if you're naturally more of a loner, congratulations! It might be a sign of intelligence."
Better to have fewer friends, but spend more time with them, than more friends, and only shallow interactions ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
... then wasting time socializing on bullshit topics likes (un)reality TV, soaps, social media, etc.
That's not to say they don't check social media like /. or Reddit -- they do -- but they would rather be creating then socializing the majority of the time.
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"Stop telling your big dreams to small minded people"
There are a lot of things wrong with this article. The idea that doctors spend their time curing cancer - hmmm, maybe one in ten thousand. Great writers don't tend to be highly intelligent (if they were, they'd get work that pays better). And I have yet to meet any lawyer IRL who was both intelligent AND spent all their time doing civil rights cases.
I also don't buy the "evolutionary" or sociological explanation. The population density of our ancestors might have been tiny, when measured over a whole country. But because they stuck together, it was clearly much higher in the groups they lived in. Since it took much more effort to build a house, they tended to be small and close to each other (within the village walls).
I would suggest that one reason that intelligent people would have fewer friends is the difficulty they would experience in finding like-minded individuals to be friends with. It wouldn't be very fulfilling for someone with a brain the size of a planet to spend all their time with people who only talked about soaps and sport.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Lots of posts saying "Yeah, smart people understand me, but people I don't understand are dumb."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Maybe they're not "mixing up" anything, maybe they found a correlation?
I recommend actually reading all of Feynman's memoirs. He had great charisma and liked people, but he was also somewhat introverted. He doesn't talk about having a lot of friends, though he does talk about meeting people and having an interest in meeting different sorts of people from different walks of life.
He actually describes spending most of his time alone, working on various math problems.
Being a good public speaker and enjoying people-watching doesn't really make him an extrovert. If you understand the technical difference between introvert and extrovert it becomes obvious; he didn't care about the "social environment," he cared about his own thoughts and feelings. For example where he talks about uniforms, and social expectations to "look like a professor." Those really expose where he is on that spectrum.
Introvert doesn't mean hermit; a charismatic introvert can be a great public speaker, and famous as a "people person." It doesn't keep them from spending the weekend working on a project, though. ;)
Better dumb and happy than smart and without any friends.
At least that's what people who are dumb and happy think... 8-)
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Most intelligent people soon learn that knowledge is useful, so they tend to learn as much as they can. Not all, but most.
On the other hand, people who know a lot are not necessarily intelligent.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.