5 ms·

Why smart people are better off with fewer friends

73 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

platz 11y ago
Theres something odd about the reasoning in the article thay I cant quite put my finger on
- RodericDay 11y ago
  Satoshi Kanazawa is not an intellectual I respect very much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa https://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]
  - miracle_code 11y ago
    Missing infrastructure for education due to hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and wars fought would be the obvious answer here. But hey, Hakuna matata! Disney told me so. /s
  - ryw90 11y ago
    I find it hard to take his work seriously. Here are detailed criticisms of some of his other papers: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...
- BreesusChrist 11y ago
  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.
- draw_down 11y ago
  How about that it's transparently self-serving? 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!"
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    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.
- pboutros 11y ago
  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.
- dingdingdang 11y ago
  > 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.
randyrand 11y ago
I have very few friends. I must be smart!!
- abc_lisper 11y ago
  Me too friend! Actually, we no friendz coz we smart!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- JayHost 11y ago
  I don't mean to toot my own cranium horn but my social life is pretty terrible if I say so myself... which I just did.
- Geee 11y ago
  Only if you are happy.
BreesusChrist 11y ago
"When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy." Maybe it's time for new friends.
- zhemao 11y ago
  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.
nether 11y ago
Validation at last.
noobie 11y ago
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.
mchahn 11y ago
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.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Yeah, if you lived past age 1 it might have been alright, until you died at 50.
  - mchahn 11y ago
    FWIW, this article [0] says that short life expectancy is a myth, and that primitive cultures live as long as we do. 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-expectancy-in-hunter-gatherers-and-other-groups/ https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      > Kids were 30 to 100 times more likely to die. 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
      - mchahn 11y ago
        > This means that life expectancy was short. Surely you know what I meant. If you made it to middle-age you lived just as long.
        wonderlust 11y ago
        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.
tsunamifury 11y ago
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.
- swe 11y ago
  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.
bjornsing 11y ago
> 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).
- fossuser 11y ago
  Also ignores other things that seem likely to me: - 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.
  - nibs 11y ago
    The migration pattern for the smartest people appears most likely to be growing up rural, moving to the city during peak earning years, and movng back to rural areas after. [1] [1]: http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/07/the-smartest-people-move-into-and-out-of-cities/373760/ http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/07/the-smartest-people-move...
  - gbersac 11y ago
    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.
nickysielicki 11y ago
> adults aged 18 to 28 I wish I stopped reading there.
- annaFin 11y ago
  good point! Title should have been "Why smart 20-somethings.."
- annaFin 11y ago
  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.
  - nickysielicki 11y ago
    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.
dumbguy 11y ago
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.
- adamsilver 11y ago
  Username checks out.
- sshykes 11y ago
  ... Did you mention where you live?
jorgecurio 11y ago
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.
eruditely 11y ago
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. Let's hope there's something like this.
hanniabu 11y ago
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.
ams6110 11y ago
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.
gohrt 11y ago
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.
wonderlust 11y ago
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.

73 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

platz 11y ago

Theres something odd about the reasoning in the article thay I cant quite put my finger on

RodericDay 11y ago
Satoshi Kanazawa is not an intellectual I respect very much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa https://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]
- miracle_code 11y ago
  Missing infrastructure for education due to hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and wars fought would be the obvious answer here. But hey, Hakuna matata! Disney told me so. /s
- ryw90 11y ago
  I find it hard to take his work seriously. Here are detailed criticisms of some of his other papers: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...
BreesusChrist 11y ago
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.
draw_down 11y ago
How about that it's transparently self-serving? 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!"
- nostrademons 11y ago
  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.
pboutros 11y ago
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.
dingdingdang 11y ago
> 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.

randyrand 11y ago

I have very few friends. I must be smart!!

abc_lisper 11y ago
Me too friend! Actually, we no friendz coz we smart!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
JayHost 11y ago
I don't mean to toot my own cranium horn but my social life is pretty terrible if I say so myself... which I just did.
Geee 11y ago
Only if you are happy.

BreesusChrist 11y ago

"When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy." Maybe it's time for new friends.

zhemao 11y ago
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.

nether 11y ago

Validation at last.

noobie 11y ago

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.

mchahn 11y ago

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.

ams6110 11y ago
Yeah, if you lived past age 1 it might have been alright, until you died at 50.
- mchahn 11y ago
  FWIW, this article [0] says that short life expectancy is a myth, and that primitive cultures live as long as we do. 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-expectancy-in-hunter-gatherers-and-other-groups/ https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > Kids were 30 to 100 times more likely to die. 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
    - mchahn 11y ago
      > This means that life expectancy was short. Surely you know what I meant. If you made it to middle-age you lived just as long.
      - wonderlust 11y ago
        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.

tsunamifury 11y ago

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.

swe 11y ago
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.

bjornsing 11y ago

> 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).

fossuser 11y ago
Also ignores other things that seem likely to me: - 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.
- nibs 11y ago
  The migration pattern for the smartest people appears most likely to be growing up rural, moving to the city during peak earning years, and movng back to rural areas after. [1] [1]: http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/07/the-smartest-people-move-into-and-out-of-cities/373760/ http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/07/the-smartest-people-move...
- gbersac 11y ago
  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.

nickysielicki 11y ago

> adults aged 18 to 28 I wish I stopped reading there.

annaFin 11y ago
good point! Title should have been "Why smart 20-somethings.."
annaFin 11y ago
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.
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  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.

dumbguy 11y ago

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.

adamsilver 11y ago
Username checks out.
sshykes 11y ago
... Did you mention where you live?

jorgecurio 11y ago

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.

eruditely 11y ago

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. Let's hope there's something like this.

hanniabu 11y ago

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.

ams6110 11y ago

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.

gohrt 11y ago

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.

wonderlust 11y ago

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.