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Around the World, People Have Surprisingly Modest Notions of the ‘Ideal’ Life
- ericnyamu 8y agoYes
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lerie82 8y agofigures a psychology website would try to categorize everyone in one little box. nobody even knows what "life" is, so how would we even know what the "ideal" life is. people only go into the psychology field for the $$
- SquareWheel 8y agoWho's categorizing people into little boxes now?
- coldtea 8y ago>nobody even knows what "life" is, so how would we even know what the "ideal" life is. Yeah, so we should never generalize, just point at individual things and say "this". >people only go into the psychology field for the $$ So much for not generalizing.
- the8472 8y ago> Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius. Medians? The distributions would be more interesting.
- dogma1138 8y ago130 would put them in the top 2% while that’s technically not some luminary super genius level that is for all intents and purposes “genius” as far as every day life and normal expectations go. If your IQ is 130-135 statistically you are “smarter” than nearly anyone you meet in your life, in fact considering that 140-145 is at the 0.1% statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter by a distribution point even at places that skew towards a higher IQ due to selection bias.
- yorwba 8y agoIt's also close to the cutoff for Mensa membership (Wikipedia says they require 98th percentile or higher), so it seems to align pretty well with common ideas about what IQ qualifies as exceptional. That surprises me actually, since I'd expect most people to be unfamiliar with the meaning of IQ beyond "higher is better".
- ataturk 8y agoHaving a high IQ has never helped me write awesome Java code. I get hired because employers find out I have a PhD and am “smart” only to find out that I’m really just average at coding. Drives me crazy! I know I need a differeng career but not sure what would evwn work.
- eutectic 8y agoIf you have a high IQ then you will probably mostly hang out with other high-IQ people.
- cm2012 8y agoYeah. The majority of people in elite colleges are probqbly in that range (since SAT scores are a reasonable IQ proxy).
- dogma1138 8y agoLast time I’ve chdcked in the US Ivy League was only slightly above the “normal” IQ upper limit which is currently set at 115. 85-115 is considered “normal” with 85 being the lower limit for what one would consider a functional adult and 115 is the upper limit around which most of the successful professionals will be hanging around. Scoring in the top 2% of correctly normalized and clinically evaluated IQ tests is quite exceptional.
- amriksohata 8y agoThe ideal life is searching for a higher purpose other than chasing money till your death bed
- wencha 8y agoA higher purpose like spirituality, a tightly knit community of people similar to you, forming a family... something that some people are actively working against, so nobody can enjoy it.
- snvzz 8y agoThere's no higher purpose, or meaning of life. How can you get started if you don't even understand this much?
- mrob 8y agoDo people genuinely have modest ambitions, or are they avoiding the mental stress of thinking about how remote their true ambitions are from what's realistically attainable?
- coldtea 8y agoPeople genuinely have modest ambitions. The "big ambitions" (and specifically, those not of the good kind, like e.g. becoming a doctor and such, but the "private pool", expensive car, lotsa money variety) have been shoehorned into the average American mind through over a century of indoctrination, advertisement, and propaganda. It's all about making people never be content with their material belongings and thinking that the next purchase or achievement unlocked with make them happy. E.g. https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Consciousness-Advertising-Consumer-Anniversary/dp/0465021557/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid= https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Consciousness-Advertising-Co...
- tntn 8y ago> not of the good kind, like e.g. becoming a doctor I would estimate that around 90% of the people I know who want to become a doctor (around 30 people) are motivated solely by the desire to make lotsa money and be able to drive an expensive car. Just saying, I don't think you can easily divide ambitions into "good" and "bad.
- mantas 8y agoI'd say good ambitions are those where you want X for X itself. If you want to be a doctor because you want love helping people - good. If you want to be a doctor just for $$$ - bad. If you want to become a singer because you love singing - good. If you want to be a singer just for $$$ - bad. Old good "follow your passion"?
- ahartmetz 8y agoAs long as X is a good thing - a few people want power just so they can hurt others...
- coldtea 8y ago>And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius. Which, given what we know about plenty of genius biographies, and how frail and paranoid their lives can be precisely because of their higher mental faculties, seems like a perfect compromise.
- eutectic 8y agoExcept that the statistics show that smart people are happier, healthier, more successful, less prone to mental illness, and just generally seem to live better lives.
- matte_black 8y agoYes, but when they don’t, they really don’t.
- hawkice 8y agoThis seems true. Is there any data on why? Or is it just an illusion? We have speculation on why this illusion would exist?
- matte_black 8y agoNo data, only a hypothesis. Intelligence is an amplifier.
- coldtea 8y ago>Except that the statistics show that smart people are happier, healthier, more successful, less prone to mental illness, and just generally seem to live better lives. Ever heard of diminishing returns? Statistics probably report of the more widespread smart people (which 130 qualifies just fine), not geniuses.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
- DanAndersen 8y ago>Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average life expectancy. Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. Part of the reason for these "surprising" results is probably the individualistic framing of the question. It makes a difference if only you have unnaturally long life, or if you are part of a family or society that is similarly long-lived. For example, the thought of lingering on after friends and family from my generation have died has no appeal to me. In general, the implication that it's surprising that people didn't want "happiness" and "life expectancy" as the end goals speaks to assumptions of atomization among the creators of the study. Deep down, I think people want meaning and a sense of narrative structure to their lives, not just chasing after pleasures. >And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius. How was the question structured? I have doubts that most people get the statistics of what it means to be 130 IQ vs 150 IQ, etc.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoAlso quality of life takes a sharp decline after 90 as many parts of your body really struggle. Feeling your brain decay, dealing with incontinence, being unable to get out and embrace the world while watching your friends and partner pass on while the world moves further and further from you doesn’t seem that much fun.
- snvzz 8y agoMost people confuse age with aging, because aging is still unavoidable, and as it's always been the case, it looks like it will remain so forever. But that's wrong. The outlook is different now. Yet, unfortunately, most still see it as unavoidable. Everybody should watch The Fable of The Dragon Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Ari_Rahikkala 8y agoI don't know. Maybe if you've been reading bad science fiction with immortal geniuses running around everywhere, it might seem that living to 120 and having an IQ of 130 is leaving a lot on the table, but when you compare those numbers to what we actually get, I think calling them "modest" is missing the point. Those aren't numbers that say "I'm more or less content with my lot", those are numbers that say you wish you were as smart as the smartest person you ever met, and that the papers wrote stories about your birthdays. They're an argument against the idea that transhumanism isn't something that people actually want. And of course, the implication is obvious: If everyone did on average live to 120 and get an IQ of 130 on our tests, then everyone would be wanting to live 200 years, and quite a few people would probably want an IQ of 160 on the old tests. That is, unless that was the point where people just switched to transhumanism as simplified humanism: Having the choice to live longer and to understand the universe better are probably always a good thing, regardless of how long you've lived and how much you understand.
- drngdds 8y ago>those are numbers that say you wish you were as smart as the smartest person you ever met, A 130 IQ is the 95th percentile. I don't know about you but I've met more than 20 people.
- johnsonjo 8y agoYeah. I agree that at least to our standards these answers are not modest. Having a relatively high IQ and a relatively long life expectancy are both (separately) relatively unlikely. So, to us these do not seem modest answers. The goal of their study, however, was to see if it was true that when given the choice to have some attribute or quality of your life maximized with few limits would you choose the maximum. They say the choices were modest simply because in philosophical writings they often assume people will always choose the maximum if available. That is why they found this surprising and modest.
- reasonattlm 8y agoThis study reports on attitudes to longevity that are reminiscent of the 2013 Pew survey [1]. When asked, people want to live a little longer than their neighbors, at the high end of the normal life span for old individuals today. When asked how long they want to live given the guarantee of perfect health, people pick a number close to the maximum recorded human life span. This sounds like a collusion between the instinctive desires for first conformity and secondly hierarchy, deeply entwined with the human condition, present in all of our primate cousins, a self-sabotaging gift from our evolutionary heritage. We are hardwired to feel comfortable in a hierarchical social structure. We desire to be higher in the hierarchy than those around us, yet not so high that we are non-conforming. One might argue that the interaction between the need for hierarchy and need for conformity is also at the root of the essential conservatism in human nature: the urge to preserve the present state of the world, to change it as little as possible. Given a teacup, ambition is restrained to the safe, conformist goal of two teacups - rather than, say, the disruptive change of a tea set factory, a house, an end to aging, the colonization of Mars, the cure for cancer. We live in an age of radical change, a revolution in the capabilities of biotechnology presently underway, but when you ask people what they want for their health, they'll claim nothing more than ten more years. That is the least of what might be achieved soon in the medical sciences, but without the desire for more than that, the rejuvenation research projects capable of providing far more will continue to struggle to find funding. At the same time as the potential has arisen for a future in which the suffering and death of aging is banished, all disease controlled through advanced medicine, the vast majority of people still march stolidly towards what they assume to be the same fate as their grandparents [2]. They are conforming. They expect to live a life that is the same in shape as it was for those born in the early to mid 1900s, somehow holding this idea in their minds at the same time as retaining the memory of living through the computing and internet revolutions, alongside any number of other sweeping changes in the nature of the human experience. How do we change this story that people are telling themselves? That is the fundamental question for all advocacy for radical change, such as the radical change of bringing an end to aging. [1]: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/ http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-... [2]: https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apotheosis/ https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...
- tw1010 8y ago"Surprising" only if you're in a small minority of people. To the vast majority, this is not surprising at all. To have an ambitious notion of an ideal life, that is what's surprising. (If you define surprising as whatever dominates the greatest concentration of the distribution, instead of focusing on the anomalies in the tail.)
- camillomiller 8y ago“The data also revealed that participants from holistic cultures – those that value notions of contradiction, change, and context – chose ideal levels of traits that were consistently lower than those reported by participants from nonholistic cultures.“ This is exactly the empyrical explanation I gave to myself when I tried to understand why the people I met in Vietnam and Thailand are vastly happier than the average Westerner.
- megamindbrian2 8y agoA roof, clean water, and food. Waste and sewage removal is a mutually beneficial luxury.
- therealtomsmith 8y agopsychologicalscience.org has not been on any dating sites lately.
- carapace 8y agoSurprising to whom? - - - - When I was a young man I read in a book about Taoism of the farmer so content that, though he could hear the rooster of the next village crowing, he had never troubled himself to travel there. When I read that I was vaguely horrified. Now, as an older man, I see the wisdom in it.
- sethrin 8y agoIgnorance may be bliss, but can it be wisdom?
- SerLava 8y agoI remember watching something that claimed the ancient Egyptian concept of heaven was, at some point, a place where you can perform agricultural labor without drought, pests, or blight etc. Different strokes I suppose.
- StavrosK 8y agoI legitimately don't know what I'd do with more "stuff" than what I currently have. For me, the ideal life would be having lots of good friends, and enough money to not have to worry about paying bills or doing things I like (i.e. a salary of around 60k/yr where I live).
- ryanmonroe 8y agoThat makes perfect sense if you have a job that you would still go to every day even if you weren't getting paid. But unless that's true, it's clear what the benefit of more money would be, and it has nothing to do with "stuff": having the freedom to choose what to do with your time.
- StavrosK 8y agoNot really, that's kind of an invariant: As long as you have enough money to not have to worry about things, you can choose not to work. Sure, that raises the question of how you make money, but my point is that you don't need a lot of it to be happy.
- ryanmonroe 8y agoWell, I think the amount of money you would need to support yourself indefinitely without being employed is an amount most people would call "a lot". Certainly that amount is more than almost anyone making 60k a year has.
- monort 8y agoInflation adjusted rent of 60k a year is 1.5-2 million of capital, depending on the risk you are willing to take.
- scarface74 8y agoI like what I do for a living as a software developer that I don’t mind going to work everyday but I wouldn’t do it for free.
- Havoc 8y agoVery wary of the term "ideal" in this context. Good...sure that's easy. Basically need my current mid tier salary guaranteed minus the part of slogging 9-5 in the office. Ideal...well I'll need a couple billions to start with.
- analog31 8y agoI have modest ambitions for an "ideal" life. Give me a pleasant place to live, Python, some musical instruments, and a working bicycle, and I'm happy. Health and comfort for my family are also at the top of the list, likewise wanting my kids to have a good education -- that's just part of my culture. But I can see lots of ways that my life could become profoundly miserable. So my pursuit of wealth is not so much to attain some high status, but to provide a safety net for myself and my family.
- pasbesoin 8y agoFor me: Good health, and peace and quiet. Fellow people to enjoy in same. The U.S. has made it increasingly difficult to achieve these. "Health care" has become wealth extraction, and a culture of excess combined with cheap electronics have taught people to "turn it up". And damned to your neighbor; they should learn to "collaborate" at work and turn up their own music, at home. It's exhausting.
- woodandsteel 8y agoI think that part of what is going on here is that in the holistic cultures there is more satisfaction from close, stable social relations, like for esteem, whereas in the non-holistic cultures there is more stress on individualistic satisfactions.
- maxander 8y agoIt’s a nice result; a world full of 130-IQ humans with a 120-year life expectancy sounds stable and achievable next to most techno-utopian visions. But, I wonder if you asked a 115-year old whether they wanted to die in 5 years what they would say then.