21 ms·

Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

• invalidOrTaken 7y ago
  Ugh, this study selected its "superior iq" group by surveying Mensa members. Study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...) makes no mention of this selection bias, though even the article does.
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  • anewguy9000 7y ago
    any sampling method is 'biased', thats why its a 'sample'
    • bentona 7y ago
      This study not only selected for people who go out of their way to join a society based on high IQ, it also selected for people who open & complete email surveys. Yes, many practical sampling methods are biased, but it is not difficult for me to imagine that any result here is caused entirely by these biases.
      • anewguy9000 7y ago
        i agree with your criticism in general -- actually it applies to virtually all psychological and medical studies. but if you think the physical disabilities are better explained by something else to do with this population sample than their iq, you could very clearly publish this theory
    • scarmig 7y ago
      Mensa members are... Not representative of people with high IQs.
    • mindblock 7y ago
      Yeah I don’t think smart people pay a membership fee to an organization to be certified as smart.
    • mlyle 7y ago
      This is what my 4th grader just learned is called a "convenience sample" and all the ways it can be biased... :P If he can understand the shortcomings, then so can the rest of us.
    • richdougherty 7y ago
      If you take a look at the definition and you'll see it's possible to have an unbiased sample. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_(statistics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_(statistics)
      • anewguy9000 7y ago
        how do you randomly sample high iq? by definition the population would have had to have taken a test. so already, even if the study looked at every known high iq individual in the world, it would still be biased -- for those with academic backgrounds, psychological histories, criminal backgrounds, and whatever else leads one to take an iq test. nb i am not advocating for this particular study nor their methodology.
        • zingermc 7y ago
          You would have to sample a lot of people (yes, there is a selection bias in the people that participate) and give all of them IQ tests.
        • dahart 7y ago
          What you meant to say is that IQ tests are biased, not that “any sampling method is biased”. IQ tests are biased, but statistical sampling methods can be unbiased.
        • Mountain_Skies 7y ago
          Are there any widespread test given in schools that are proxy IQ tests? Mensa accepts older ACT and SAT scores as they consider the current versions to be knowledge tests but older versions to be intelligence tests. Not sure if this is still the case but at one time all high school students in the State of New York were required to take the SAT prior to graduation. While not representative of the entire population, it would have been a good representation of the high school student slice of the population across the entire state. Perhaps that would have been good enough for some uses.
  • btilly 7y ago
    I have long joked that Mensa membership indicates that you passed the IQ test and failed the intelligence test. More seriously, Mensa membership selects for people whose main accomplishment in life is doing well on an IQ test. So they are at least somewhat smart. But if you look for people who have actual accomplishments, you'll find people who tend to also be smart but are more interesting to be around. Note, this is not sour grapes. My test scores mean that I'm qualified for Mensa, but I've never been impressed enough by any Mensa member that I met to be interested.
    • kerkeslager 7y ago
      This was sort of my experience with Mensa. Their three purposes supposedly are: 1. to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity; 2. to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence; 3. and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members. It's not entirely clear to me how anything they do benefits humanity (1), the "nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence" seem to revolve around games for them which is a pretty meaningless measure of any form of intelligence I care about (2) and while I'm not a member so I can't say whether it's stimulating to them, I can certainly say that all the materials I've come across from Mensa have soon bored me(3). So from where I sit, Mensa fails on two of their purposes, and only succeeds in their third because of a technicality in their wording.
    • mcv 7y ago
      Mensa seems to have a pretty bad reputation in the US. I never had much opinion about and didn't know any Mensa members until my sister joined. She meets loads of interesting people there. They have game weekends where they play all sorts of interesting board games, but also in other activities it's nice to be around people who think a bit like you do. I've never felt the need to join Mensa because I studied CS and AI, and all my friends from there are probably about as smart as I am, so I already have plenty of people to relate to, but she was always very interested in sport, which probably attracts a different crowd (though she's working in IT now).
    • cs02rm0 7y ago
      My test scores meant I was qualified for Mensa too, I could've taken up the membership when offered as a kid but declined at the time. Eventually I took the quick test which suggested I should take the longer test as a young adult looking to bolster my CV (résumé). Narrowly missed out and before I was able to submit again I had enough on there not to give it much thought again for me. An IQ test was part of the qualification process for the first job I took out of university, something I've not seen since. I think my eldest son's probably at least as bright as I am, so this sort of thing has been on my mind again. We try and give him a breadth of experience - he does a lot of rugby (completely non-contact at his age), running and other sports, some child adventure centres, music lessons, scouts soon, etc. But I don't see too much wrong with adding Mensa as a small part in the context of a larger picture.
  • MagnumPIG 7y ago
    Yeahhh this study is near worthless. Still an interesting research subject if you can do away with the sampling bias though.
  • buboard 7y ago
    ah yes the lazy way to find smart people: go to mensa. Everyone in there is guaranteed to be well balanced, and surely will not exhibit any narcissism (did they check for narcissism btw?)
  • cirgue 7y ago
    Literally, using Mensa membership as a proxy for IQ was an example of selection bias in one of my undergrad research methods classes.
  • gwern 7y ago
    Indeed. This study is complete bullshit: https://www.gwern.net/SMPY#fn1 https://www.gwern.net/SMPY#fn1 It contradicts every (non-self-selected) longitudinal or cross-sectional study, including far more elite samples (which if their theory was correct would show vastly more dysfunctionality, except of course it isn't and those samples don't), and every genetic study as well, and the reported (self-diagnosis) rates are often orders of magnitude larger than any risk factor ever confirmed and literally unbelievable. Incidentally, Hambrick's writeup here is also quite bad. Aside from failing to mention all of those reasons why it's BS, he doesn't describe accurately the research he does mention. Consider this paragraph from the end: > All the same, Karpinski and her colleagues’ findings set the stage for research that promises to shed new light on the link between intelligence and health. One possibility is that associations between intelligence and health outcomes reflect pleiotropy, which occurs when a gene influences seemingly unrelated traits. There is already some evidence to suggest that this is the case. In a 2015 study, Rosalind Arden and her colleagues concluded that the association between IQ and longevity is mostly explained by genetic factors. How did he miss the fact that the Arden study in question shows, as all such studies show, that intelligence correlates with greater lifespan/longevity when he's written an entire credulous column about how intelligence is bad for you and makes people crazy and increases the rate of mental disorders (some of which, like schizophrenia, reduce your life expectancy by decades)? It's right there in the abstract, it's not hidden away. One would think that would at least merit a brief pause to puzzle over the discrepancy...
  • anbotero 7y ago
    Actually, I think it's kinda funny and ironic that in Spanish we use "menso" as an insult for someone that is stupid. Formal (kinda) definition on how we use it in the Spanish section here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menso https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menso
• williesleg 7y ago
  Of course they are, look at Biden and Warren.
• zxcmx 7y ago
  Edit: Joining Mensa is associated with mental and physical disorders.
  • abc_lisper 7y ago
    Hit the nail on its head!
  • batoure 7y ago
    I was skimming for a response like this... in my head it was more like "People who join Mensa are more likely to be part of socio-economic groups that self select to have doctors diagnose physical and mental issues no matter how minor"
• TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  I went through a battery of IQ tests as a kid and got a _high_ score (139). But that was when I was seven years old. I'm 30 now, have a master's degree (which was pretty pointless) and make 25 bucks an hour as a temp (more money than I've ever made in my life). I think my life and prospects have dimmed because I haven't been able to get over the anxiety and the depression that impact me every day. Interviewed for jobs for 14 months and didn't get a single offer. Haven't had a girlfriend in 3 years, lazy as shit, can't even look at myself in the mirror. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless. But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted! I think it's that sort of expectation that is screwing with us (at least those of us that didn't become comfy SWEs).
  • drcross 7y ago
    This may seem like an insensitive question and I don't mean it in that way but why can't you "think your way out of those problems". For example when I noticed myself being quiet as a teen I applied for a job in a shop to shore up my social skills. I had the keen awareness that ultimately no one cares about me having depression and only me alone can make efforts to treat it. How did your analysis compare?
    • vorpalhex 7y ago
      Similar situation. I was terriby uncharismatic and it was killing my ability to make friends and deal with the office well - so I studied charisma and practiced the skills. Lots of social A/B testing (that's a bit of a cold way to look at it) and evolving and now my situation is generally improved.
      • anon1m0us 7y ago
        What would you say are some of the things that helped the most? What did you practice? What did you study? How did you study? Reading? Watching?
        • 7y ago
• starpilot 7y ago
  > It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights. https://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2006/11/scott_adams_on_.html https://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2006/1...
  • wallace_f 7y ago
    I did first 2-years undergrad at a CC. My calc course had _2_ people from mensa, 1 failed. Anyways, the idea in academic literature -- that some super smart psychiatrists know the Right Questions to ask which correlate with _g_ -- is aggravating.
    • lliamander 7y ago
      Well, a sample of 2 isn't exactly a representative sample size. The thing is, if you look at IQ and ability to pass a math class, they do correlate strongly. The fact that these folks were Mensa means something else.
      • wallace_f 7y ago
        I think you misunderstood my comment. >The thing is, if you look at IQ and ability to pass a math class, they do correlate strongly. In fact, we actually agree here. My point can maybe be explained in a different way: So does playing chess at a high level, or I'd bet even probably even MMR in Dota does as well. Once you consider this, you may go the next step and ask what better methods test for ability to pass a math class (perform other tasks successfully). For example, consider that I know someone who has a far greater ability than I to learn a new language; while I have a greater ability with math.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I know a lot of very smart people and many of them have combinations of anxiety/depression/chronic pain/etc.
• underwater 7y ago
  Using Mensa members as the study group seems fatally flawed. Mensa seems to attract people who define themselves by their intelligence, instead of by their success. It wouldn't surprise me that they would be more anxious and depressed than average. Higher rates of allergies could be explained by socioeconomic, racial and cultural biases in those who gravitate towards Mensa.
  • throwaway9i2wmP 7y ago
    I am a recruiting manager for a start-up. I remember we received an application from a person whose resume promiscuously explained that he was a Mensa members, "an association for superior IQ people". Their resume overall was not bad (not top-notch either for the position), but the mention alone of Mensa drove me away from ever wanting to work with such kind of persons that look so full of themselves. I finally declined to interview this person. The question "Is it discrimination?" was always popping into my mind and I felt uneasy about it for about a week or so.
    • tdfx 7y ago
      Unbearable people are not a protected group. You did fine.
    • KhanMahGretsch 7y ago
      I find it entirely appropriate that recruiting managers wear their biases on their sleeves, in this manner. As representatives of the organization, you put its core values and culture at the forefront. You represent what the owners are really all about. It is important for those with the ability and inclination to be part of "an association for superior IQ people" to not be placed in an unsuitable role, at an unsuitable company, given their rarity. Better for all involved, I would say.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • underwater 7y ago
      It's not discrimination on multiple levels. Firstly IQ in general is not a protected category; and high-IQ certainly isn't. There might be good reason to assume that an intelligent person might be a poor fit for many jobs (insert joke here). Furthermore, what you were turned away was how that person presented themselves, and not their actual IQ. Including Mensa membership and framing it in those terms shows poor judgement.
• KorematsuFred 7y ago
  I request everyone to read Nissim Nicholas Taleb's criticism of this IQ BS. Now, I do not buy all his arguments but I do think his broader point is pretty much valid. At their core IQ tests measure how to answer exams designed by people like them. I was born dirt poor in a remote godforesaken village in India. Today I work for one of the FANG in bay area. The most depressing thing about working for this employer is howe dimwitted majority of their tech employees are beyond the core tech skills. Many of them can write complex code with ease and yet they do not understand simple sarcasm or hyperbole.
  • isoskeles 7y ago
    You know what they say about what it means if the majority of people you meet are X, right?
  • guessmyname 7y ago
    *** | Company | Employees ----|----------|--------------- [F] | Facebook | 39,651 (2019) [A] | Amazon | 647,500 (2018) [A] | Apple | 132,000 (2018) [N] | Netflix | 5,400 (2017) [G] | Google | 103,459 (2019) ---------------|--------------- Total | ±928,010 (2019) With all due respect, you are only one in ±1M people working in this group of companies, not very representative. I also work at a FAANG and many of my colleagues have excellent interpersonal skills, you cannot disregard that.
    • throwawaysea 7y ago
      I think at least 600K of those amazon employees are not at corporate but in fulfillment.
    • smm2000 7y ago
      Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook has huge number of non corporate employees - if you exclude them the FANG club is more exclusive. Nobody boasts that they work as a picker at Amazon or content reviewer at FB.
  • scottlocklin 7y ago
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  When I was involved with The TAG Project, this was common knowledge in gifted circles online. This is not limited to Mensa at all. Some fairly well-known names in the gifted community referred to issues like OCD and ADHD as "co-morbidities" for lack of a better word. The higher the IQ, the more likely there are to be other issues and the more likely they are to be severe. Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews win some inordinately high number of Nobel Prizes and happen to be a population with a high risk for genetic disorders, some of which have been proven to have impact on cognition. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Jews-constitute-20-of-all-Nobel-laureates-despite-being-0-19-of-the-worlds-population-What-specific-sociocultural-elements-are-the-root-cause-of-this-phenomenon https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Jews-constitute-20-of-all-Nobel... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligenc...
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    I wonder what the age range of those Jews is. Genocide has a way of efficiently selecting for intelligence.
  • gwern 7y ago
    > some of which have been proven to have impact on cognition. No, they haven't been. There are (still) no confirmed links between Tay-Sachs etc and intelligence. (The most recent study on the genetics of Jewish intelligence, in fact, suggests that any genetic advantage is purely on common variants present in non-Jewish Caucasians as well.) For that matter, there are zero confirmed genetic mutations, common or rare, which increase intelligence by even a few points, and this is despite sample sizes now approaching millions and use of exome sequencing to hunt for rare variants in extremely intelligent cohorts.
    • DoreenMichele 7y ago
      If they are known to cause retardation, then they are known to have impact on cognition. That statement was intentionally framed as neutrally as possible. Are you telling me that brain differences can only ever lower IQ and never, ever raise it (or, more accurately, raise the potential ceiling -- because nutrition and a million other things will impact this)? There is a lot of research out that says, basically, "genius" is, by its very nature, a brain that thinks differently from the norm. It isn't simply "more" of something. It is different and this is often a two-edged sword. I'm currently failing to find the source I know I saw not terribly long ago linking some genetic disorder to higher IQs and to altered brain stuff of some sort. I don't have the time to keep digging for it. But, here's a study of people with CF -- a common genetic disorder in the Jewish community -- that says, in essence "Lower IQ scores in this population can be linked to negative health impacts and other negative factors," yet seems to list the average IQ for this group of 89 very, very, deathly ill patients as 102.5. Which sort of implies to me that if they weren't basically dying from their disorder, they would be far above average intelligence. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15173473 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15173473
• zabzonk 7y ago
  Anecdote: My Dad was a MENSA member for a couple of years, but he was mostly taking the piss - he put down his "special interest" as "carved Dravidian lapis lazuli", which is not as far as I know a thing. He was an RAF V-bomber captain and never as far as I could see suffered from depression or other mental health issues (which would have affected his security clearance) - much the reverse. Edit: The lapis lazuli thing is (per Google) actually a thing, but in the early 1960s I don't see how my Dad could have come across it, but obviously he did. I could have joined MENSA (had the IQ) but thought it was all too silly and didn't. I've suffered a lot from depression. Go figure.
• ilaksh 7y ago
  They compared it to the national average but they didn't actually give the same survey to people who weren't in Mensa at the same time.
• KhanMahGretsch 7y ago
  >From a practical standpoint, this research may ultimately lead to insights about how to improve people’s psychological and physical well-being. If overexcitabilities turn out to be the mechanism underlying the IQ-health relationship, then interventions aimed at curbing these sometimes maladaptive responses may help people lead happier, healthier lives. Reading between the lines, in these cooling months, sent a chill up my spine.
• raincom 7y ago
  Late Dr. Oliver Sacks, a famous neurologist, became a neurologist because his brother had schizophrenia. Many of his books contains cases of people with extraordinary abilities, but with mental disorders.
• Madmallard 7y ago
  The kind of people that join a club to prove they are high IQ are likely insecure and feel the need to peacock. No wonder there's a higher incidence. Most high IQ people I know think Mensa is stupid and just want to have normal lives and hate talking about intelligence and think it's irrelevant and a cringe-worthy topic.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    And yet here we are, on HN, keep coming back to talk about IQ.
    • Madmallard 7y ago
      Well regression to the mean is a thing. Even on Hacker News.
• icedchai 7y ago
  As a "gifted child" of the 80's, this is obvious to anyone who was identified as one or had friends who were. Depression, OCD, anxiety, etc. are all very common in that crowd.
• solidsnack9000 7y ago
  Mutation-selection balance.
  • gwern 7y ago
    Mutation-selection balance predicts the opposite, that more intelligent people would be healthier and saner due to a lower mutation load. (Which, as it happens, is the correct prediction, and why most researchers now think intelligence is under mutation-selection balance.)
    • solidsnack9000 7y ago
      How does it predict the opposite for extreme intelligence, or any other extreme trait? It's not always the case; but sometimes what we think of as a single quality is actually the result of several genetic factors. When you say intelligence is "under mutation-selection balance", how does that relate to extreme intelligence?
      • gwern 7y ago
        To be under mutation-selection balance, mutations affecting a trait must be selected at a sufficient rate to maintain the trait, because it affects fitness. Those with the highest number of mutations affecting the trait must be selected against. The easiest way to affect fitness is to damage health. As it happens, mental illnesses damage fitness enormously. So, for a mutation-selection balance trait, those with the least mutations damaging health and fitness will have the highest trait values ie. extreme intelligence.
        • solidsnack9000 7y ago
          In the long run, yes. But it doesn’t mean that on a case-by-case basis we won’t see people with trait enhancing mutations that are maladaptive in other ways — like high intelligence in combination with mental illness.
          • 7y ago
• phkahler 7y ago
  >> This theory holds that, for all of its advantages, being highly intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological “overexcitabilities,” or OEs. On a speculative note, maybe those OEs are a result of maltreatment of some sort (there are many).
• bitL 7y ago
  Highly intelligent people should be pushed to physical exercise and forced to avoid sugary/processed food. I knew one girl with BPD and PhD and those two things helped her tremendously; every time she slipped her state rapidly deteriorated and it was hell for everyone around.
  • insulanus 7y ago
    Did you mean a PhD, like a doctorate? And by BPD, do you mean Bipolor, or Borderline personality Disorder?
    • bitL 7y ago
      PhD = doctorate, BPD = borderline according to older DSM-IV. PhD was in cognitive neurosciences, likely with silent goal for her to figure out what was wrong with her.
• freshhawk 7y ago
  This study shows that being in Mensa is associated with mental and physical disorders - based on self-reporting. I appreciate the irony of this study having been done by people who were being very very dumb.
• Hitton 7y ago
  I always thought that high IQ is correlated with high anxiety, because the smarter a person is, the better he can imagine all possible things to go wrong. On the other end of spectrum are people with IQ comparable to children, who presumably don't worry about too many things - ignorance is bliss.
  • anonuser123456 7y ago
    High IQ is also associated with higher executive function. This means higher IQ people should be better able to control those worries.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
• hoffrocket 7y ago
  All this study says is that there's a correlation of Mensa membership to a higher likelihood of certain disorders. It does _NOT_ establish any causal links, or even that Mensa membership is representative of the much much larger population of people who can get a 98th percentile score on an IQ test. Perhaps disorders cause people to join Mensa? Who knows.
  • crimsonalucard 7y ago
    Just because correlation doesn't imply causation doesn't mean you should negate it causation. You need correlation to exist to even have causation so correlation is evidence for causation.
• buboard 7y ago
  Give it ~ nine months before it 's refuted.
• a-dub 7y ago
  when i was in grade school, i was tested and put into the "gifted and talented" program which was mostly just a one hour session once a week with about eight kids. it was mostly just brain teasers but then they literally spent an entire year explaining and stressing the importance of charisma. they also told us that "this is easy for you now, and you may not have to work hard, but you need to learn how to work hard because one day you'll be taking classes that you can't just breeze through and if you don't know how to study you will fail." they were right on both counts. many times later in college and in working life i've thought back to these moments. also, "overexcitability", yup.
  • tracker1 7y ago
    I was in a similar situation... Though, really didn't get that type of advice, we did spend a year when I was in 3rd grade learning German (of which I've completely forgotten). In some ways it was interesting, in others it sucked. I seem to be very lopsided in both how I learn, and what kinds of things I can handle in abstract and concrete concepts. I do really well with math, and can carry concepts well from reading... but man, I hate reading fiction, I have way too much trouble remembering names vs. events. For comparison 760 math, 580 verbal for my SAT scores, not bad, just lopsided. I can relate to the social issues many in this discussion have eluded to though. Depression, anxiety, OCD and work really hard to not let myself fall into my own traps.
  • joshspankit 7y ago
    Noone once gave me any advice anywhere near that and I really wish they had. Not only is it important to know how to work hard (an easy skill to miss when tests are easy), but being able to relate to people is a huge indicator for happiness and success.
• johngrefe 7y ago
  While this is a neat surface level study, there's a few issues I see with it. >No separation of Full Intellectual Assessment or another re-test, simply self reporting the averaged figure. We lack resolution in results.(ex: were people with high verbal IQ more prone to schizophrenia?) >Subjects were those concerned with their own mental status. All respondents were MENSA members. While I could test into MENSA, I simply don't care. I have a friend who is in MENSA, they are quite proud of this over dinner conversation, but they are also quite neurotic. This observation is anecdotal, but I'd think you're going to get more people who live a lot of time "in their heads" in MENSA. I would love to have another control group to compare results over. >They understand that self reporting is ripe for error. An online survey is difficult to accurately administer, people will misrepresent things about them, especially if they think it is a reflection of their own personal value. It's neat, but I don't think it's reliable enough to make any declarative statements about a linear progression of IQ and health disorders.
• DanielleMolloy 7y ago
  I’ve had this little pet theory about high achievers and depression for some time. It boils down to: They apply the same thinking patterns that make them excel at work (= very controlled environments with binary answers, requiring perfectionism and attention to detail - e.g. programming, maths, fact-checking, engineering, arts) to every area in their far less binary lives. If you have very high standards at work you likely apply very high standards to yourself. How you view yourself is frequently how you view others, which can be destructive for relationships. If your job is searching for bugs 8h a day you likely develop the thinking pattern to take even the smallest issue very seriously.
  • nowisnone 7y ago
    I've had similar ideas. Pessimism is a personality trait which make for excellent designing and debugging in that it makes it easier to anticipate and identify problems, but if you can't turn it off outside of work, it can severely hinder your quality of life.
  • chubot 7y ago
    I agree, but I think sneaking the word "high achievers" into the conversation is part of the problem. "High achievers" shouldn't be people who scored well on tests (IQ tests, the SATs, etc.) They should be people who achieved things in real life! For example, building something people use (e.g. not "playing house" for investors), reforming our legal system or government, excelling at sports, music, etc. There's a certain part of the population that I'm familiar with where achievement means "performs well on metrics that somebody else designed". But I also think there is a large part of the population who "calls bullshit" on that value system. And I would call that "common sense" more than anti-intellectualism. The former kind of "achiever" lacks agency in the world, and that's probably a major reason why they're depressed (speaking from past experience). It's human nature to be depressed when you're being judged and have to jump through hoops set up by others. It's also natural to be depressed if everyone's telling you that you achieved something, but yet nothing in your life is actually better. I guess it goes back to the comment about passing the IQ test but failing the intelligence test ...
  • MaximumYComb 7y ago
• lallysingh 7y ago
  " example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction" ...or Mensa members are more interested in analyzing themselves as a whole, and will seek diagnosis more often than the general population.
• RandomTisk 7y ago
  I have a theory about high IQ and anxiety: The more intelligent and creative a person, the more sensitive to negative emotion they're going to be, simply because their subconscious mind will see more connections between their negative emotions and the things, people and places the person has, sees or frequents. In other words, they'll naturally realize the world is more inhospitable than the average intellect, so their subconscious will have more negative data points to track. When something bad happens, they'll need to work harder to convince their subconscious that it won't happen again. Anxiety itself is therefore because the subconscious currently sees familiar patterns it saw before, during painful experiences, and it throws out feelings of anxiety to slow down the conscious mind to force caution, as if the person is looking at a minefield and may not know it. Edit: And the key to living anxiety-free, at least for my own personal experience, is understanding every negative emotion in my past, why it happened (whether my fault or not), how I reacted, and how I would react today In a way that would avoid the same terrible outcome. Usually it requires forgiveness, either for something someone did to me or to forgive myself because I was ignorant but no longer am and most importantly I/my subconscious knows if my forgiveness is genuine, namely when I'm ready to sympathize with someone else in the same situation. It's incredibly liberating.
  • colechristensen 7y ago
    I would guess it has something to do with not experiencing certain kinds of difficulty and the reactions that come with it until a development window has passed. Everyone expects good things from you and congratulates you for achieving them without any effort during the years you are supposed to be learning about things like difficulty and success and failure and life doesn't ramp up in difficulty until well after some things are fairly set. Afterwords when things go beyond "effortless" difficulty you start to get negative feedback from people around you and yourself and this is a novel experience outside of the period where negative novel experiences are internalized as normal. (Related: fairy tales and scary stories told to young children help them cope with a dangerous and difficult world, "too scary for kids" attitudes build adults who have trouble with the real world.)
  • sytelus 7y ago
    I've been around too many high IQ/high anxiety folks. My read is that many of these people constantly obsess over everything that can possibly go wrong and try to think about work arounds, literally ALL their waking hours. They are master at finding things to worry about far in future whether its job, work, house, relationship, friends, family. It's like you are playing a big game of chess but you compulsively think about 8 moves deep instead of just 3 or 4. As you will totally overload yourself and always keep encountering pretty bad scenarios, it keeps you tremendously stressed all the time. Like your overclocked laptop is running very hot and built-in fans aren't able to keep up. The people who I thought had normal or even slightly below normal IQs live rather chill lifestyle and assume things will just take care of itself. I think the amount of average stress you experience after adjusting to direct causes is a pretty good signal of IQ you have.
• GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  Recommended book: The Curse of the High IQ Its points are debatable, but at the very least it offers some comfortable thoughts.
• Tomminn 7y ago
  Mensa members are an extremely biased sample of high IQ individuals.
• FillardMillmore 7y ago
  I have often wondered if there's any correlation between higher IQs and addiction rates, whether a positive correlation or a negative one.
• harry8 7y ago
  IQ is bullshit. Children surrounded by adults who believe that bullshit correlate highly with adults who maybe aren't doing the best job caring - and possibly nobody is at fault there. IQ is literally another example of the abject failure of psychology as an intellectual discipline. May it one day be rectified because the subject matter is fascinating and obviously deeply important. Choosing to not let children in your care do IQ tests is correlated with sensible, caring, intelligent adulting. No really. Really.
• acscott 7y ago
  Sampling the set of Mensa members is not the same as sampling "superior IQs". digression: My personal preference is to call IQ a testing quotient and not intelligence quotient--it's more specific and less qualitative, for "intelligence" is overloaded.
• elif 7y ago
  Since disorders were self-reported, I wonder if capacity or willingness to understand complex disorders was controlled. For instance, a low intelligence person might consider autism to be "bad" and avoid considering it, or unable to afford doctors to tell him. While a high intelligence person would recognize that the autistic spectrum has advantages and disadvantages, and would be more likely to accept it.
• jowday 7y ago
  Is it possible that the study shows that high IQ people who bother to join a "high IQ society" tend towards higher mental and physical disorders, rather than high IQ people in general?
• nkingsy 7y ago
  What if mensa members seek more healthcare than an average person?
• euske 7y ago
  What's more interesting to me is the fact that people are still sticking to this idea of expressing one's intelligence with one number. Just one. Using IQ as the degree of intelligence is like using one's weight or blood pressure as the degree of healthiness. It may be an important metrics, but only one of million variables.
  • haihaibye 7y ago
    It's not one of a million metrics, it's the best possible summary of all the metrics: * There is very high correlation between different cognitive tests (people who are good at one test tend to be good at others) * If you perform factor anaylsis, you can compute a common factor that can be regarded as a summary variable for the correlations between all the different tests. * This is the g-factor, or the single number produced from IQ tests.
• zw123456 7y ago
  The old trope is that there is a "fine line between genius and insanity". I was testing with above average IQ at a young age (6th grade, 11yrs old) of 160 or in that range many times since. But I have noticed that many of my family members, friends, associates and coworkers seem to look at my behavior with skew towards that bias. In my view, I think this idea that genius and insanity or abnormal behavior has been so ingrained in peoples minds that when they meet someone with elevated IQ they look for indicators to support their bias (bias confirmation). I think I am no weirder than other people, I know several people who clearly do not have elevated IQ's and they seem to "get away with" various strange behaviors but because they are "normal" it goes without notice. In my experience, once you are labeled with the big brain you come under more scrutiny than norms. Also, I don't think Mensa is a good sample, my experience is that people who seek the big brain recognition through things like Mensa may also have personality traits that trend towards those types of disorders. A true double blind study would need to be peer reviewed before I would lend any credence to this hypothesis.
• yummypaint 7y ago
  Advice to parents: Don't tell your kids their IQ. There are good reasons not to whether it is low or high, plus it doesnt mean that much. My parents offered to tell me my first year of high school after a big science fair win, but I didn't want to know. At the time I think I needed to believe I had the hardware needed to keep chewing what I had bitten off. A few years later, I had the luxury of still feeling like my achievements were born out of patience and passion rather than talent. I didn't finally ask until I was in grad school and knew myself well. Im grateful to have been given that choice.
• deleted 7y ago
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• todaysAI 7y ago
  This article sort-of falls in line with my theories on non-local consciousness. Intelligence could be just a particular manner in which that person's brain is accessing the consciousness dimension, and these mental disorders are just side-effects of this access. For example, I feel that the autistic can be more 'in-tune' with the non-local consciousness, which is why they have (generally) a different thought process. (I have ASD)
• kumarvvr 7y ago
  Perhaps people with superior IQs think and stress a lot. I recently came across the work of Dr. Robert Sapolsky and his research highlights the long term effects of chronic stress. It is possible that higher IQs lead to a lot of thinking and stressing out. I can safely consider myself in the above average IQ bracket and I tend to stress a lot about things as obscure as the world's oceans, climate, politics, science, the Arctic ice, etc. My brother is less inclined academically, is of a very easy going nature and always seems to be happy, with the exception being during difficult times in his business.
• meow_mix 7y ago
  Be careful gleaning anything with email surveys like one. There could be confounders. E.g. High IQ -> More $ -> More likely to see Dr for diagnosis I didn't read the whole thing though--did anyone w/ the time decide to do a deep dive on the study and see how they controlled?
• gafferongames 7y ago
  Can confirm.
  • anonytrary 7y ago
    This comment traditionally gets down-voted, however, I think it would be poetic as the top comment in this case, since I'd imagine most people who consume HN have above average intelligence. Personal problems lurk in every corner of the world, and no one is immune to them.
• nopinsight 7y ago
  This paper made some news before and was also debunked back then. Note that (2017) should be added. Here is a quote from Neuroskeptic: “The ‘national average’ data in the mood disorders category, for instance, are taken from the NCS-R survey (data collected 2001-2003.) The NCS-R survey did not ask people whether they’d been diagnosed with a mood disorder. Instead, trained interviewers asked participants a series of questions about their mood, emotions, sleep, and other symptoms, and made diagnoses based on strict criteria. Doctors in the real world don’t diagnose depression the NCS-R way, so we can’t compare the NCS-R estimate of mood disorder prevalence to the estimate of diagnosed prevalence from Karpinski et al.’s survey. It’s comparing Malus and Citrus. Secondly, I have concerns about the sample. This wasn’t a study of high-IQ people. It was a study of Mensans, a self-selected subgroup of high-IQ people. 6.5 million Americans fall in the top 2% of IQ, and only 55,000 of them are members of American Mensa. In other words, Mensans make up about 0.8% of high-IQs, and Karpinski et al. have data from less than 10% of Mensans, so the sample is seriously unrepresentative.“ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/intelligence-risk-illness/#.XaU5MowxVvI http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/in...
• alestainer 7y ago
  The study did not add income as a control variable, so the article is basically about how rich people go to the therapist more often.
• kordlessagain 7y ago
  Maybe people who feel the need to be in an exclusive group based on arbitrary test data are associated with mental and physical disorders, logic suggests.
• c3534l 7y ago
  So to be clear, this wasn't a study of people with high IQs, it was a study of people who signed up for a high IQ club that wasn't, say, academic research. Sounds like you're looking at people where the biggest thing going for them is not their accomplishments, but their IQ score.
• lucas_membrane 7y ago
  I scored 166 when they gave us an IQ test in the 8th grade. Two years later I gave myself an IQ test from a book in the local library, and I scored 149. Following that trend line, my IQ is now approximately minus 300, but the headline gives me some hope that my various disorders have slowed my rate of IQ decline.
• iamgopal 7y ago
  We are living in a more and more defined, secure, safe world ( and part of the world where this is not the case, they are getting there sooner or later ). In defined world, characteristics other than intelligence play a much heavier role and since intelligence doesn't rewarded enough becomes secondary. I hope it's cycle that comes and goes.
• AtlasLion 7y ago
  Sounds true to me (though based on a sample of one), My daughter of 16 with an IQ of 152 was diagnosed with autism and social anxiety.
• dcanelhas 7y ago
  I think a flaw in this study is looking at people who joined a club for smart people rather than just smart people.
• mongeese 7y ago
  Reading the study, it's more like, people whose identity is tied up with being smart, (members of Mensa) spend a lot of time thinking about their mental health and are likely to think that they are not normal and are also like to respond to questionnaires about their mental health.
• fortran77 7y ago
  I'm as dumb as a rock, but perfectly happy, healthy, athletic, and gainfully employed as a PHP programmer.
• uberduber 7y ago
  I have managed many people in industries that attract low IQ (70-90) workers. I also know a lot of high IQ people since I went to a gifted high school. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I believe the low IQ have WAY higher rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders, but almost none of them are diagnosed. Their lives run without much thought or planning so they often end up in very stressful situations. Sometimes they don't even realize that something is wrong or not normal. Or even if they do manage to figure that out, they cannot describe what they are feeling or communicate effectively which can be stressful in itself. I still think high IQ people have mild to moderately higher rates of mental disorders than normal IQ people, but with low IQ I think it's massively higher.
  • jotm 7y ago
    If one does not realize it and thinks it's normal, is that better or worse? Maybe working a deadend job your whole life is easier when you don't realize there's better stuff out there even for you. "Ignorance is bliss" comes to mind.
• zamfi 7y ago
  "Mensa membership associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests" would be both a more accurate description of the results, as well as perhaps a more believable correlation.
• Knufen 7y ago
  When I was 18 I tested 135 on a FRT based on Raven Matrices. I briefly joined Mensa and what I saw was quite depressing. Dysfunction upon dysfunction and wasted potential. Except for the dysfunction it reminded me too much of myself and I had to quit. This is of course a limited data set so take it with a grain of salt. I would recommend http://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/ http://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/
• misev 7y ago
  The study was only done on members of American Mensa, I wonder if there would be any difference across countries. I'm from a poor European country; in high school (~15 years ago) I measured 156 in a Mensa IQ test, a friend had 168, and a third friend 172. We were top students in the generation, going to programming and math competitions. Definitely not in the popular kids club, but otherwise perfectly normal as far as I can tell. In the couple of Mensa meetings I've been to back then I have not really seen any of the mental or physical disorders considered in the study either.
• rf15 7y ago
  I think Mensa is not a good frame of reference for intelligent people: You have to actively work towards getting into Mensa, which limits the target group to people who are willing to do that work, pay membership and possibly desire the prestige associated with it. Therefore it is very possible that some people with mental issues use it as a gateway to self-validation.
• gojomo 7y ago
  I suspect a form of survivorship bias is contributing to these results. Less-high-IQ people with the same disorders may never be diagnosed with these sorts of (often subtle & subjective) mood/anxiety/learning/chronic-immune disorders. Perhaps, even, less-high-IQ people are more likely to literally perish before such diagnoses show up in national averages. (And that's before considering the filter that many others have already mentioned: that only some, potentially-unrepresentative high-IQ people find the idea of joining MENSA appealing.)
• breadandcrumbel 7y ago
  Could this be caused by people with higher IQ being more honest and knowledgeable about things? The average person has undiagnosed issues. They may have a mood disorder, but either deny that they have something wrong with them or have never bothered to have it checked out? Compared to people who care enough to officially test their IQ. I argue that more people in a group like Mensa are more aware of their diagnosis' than the average person.
• NicoJuicy 7y ago
  There's a quote I have and that is that smart people have a harder time being happy, because they worry too much. I've never put it to test with others though. The reasoning is that you see some sort of pattern always and you believe it's the end of the world. Eg. China, climate change, ... So you believe you need to earn as much as possible, so your odds for survival are better ( as an example). Narcissists don't have this problem, as they are focused on themselves.
• foobar_ 7y ago
  And low IQ is consistent with right-wing barbarians.
  • dang 7y ago
    Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait, so we don't have to ban you? I don't want to ban you, but you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, and we've asked you multiple times already (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20900523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20900523). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• quibbler 7y ago
  I wonder how much of it is just society bot being accommodating for high IQ kids. Like school can be a hellish experience of boredom and being an outsider, that could set the mood for later life.
• manjana 7y ago
  Even for those with a normal IQ range and properly more so for those with better ability to recognize patterns - the world is a scary place sometimes. Being able to predict mind games, deception, passive aggressiveness without those at fault will admit to it can make you question your own sanity easily - now what if you had sharpened senses that picked up on these things. How I see it, the bottom line is this. If you are surrounded by a good and suppprting tribe it can be a gift, but at the other end it can seem like a mean curse.
• blablablerg 7y ago
  Saw an interesting talk on youtube about high IQ and underachievement, shame it is in Belgian dutch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFCLdJVoHVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFCLdJVoHVg). She states that an high IQ is most likely going to be an impediment to a succesful career rather than an advantage if unmanaged, because education is set up for the average kid. She makes an interesting car analogy: it doesn't matter whether you are too long or too short, if you deviate too much from the average length your seating is going to suck. Likewise, high IQ kids placed in the average education environment are going to get bored quickly, which if not overcome compounds over the years resulting in unsatisfying academic achievement. Another interesting analogy she makes is regarding athletes. When a recruiter finds a kid with high athletic potential, they get special training to transform that talent into superior skill. But children with a high IQ people are stuck in the school system designed for the average IQ kid, because in education they tend to think that "everything is so easy for them" instead of "they require special attention to let that talent bloom". So she claims that a high IQ warrants special attention to turn it into an advantage, otherwise there is an considarable risk of an unsuccesful life, which i personally can attest to. I was tested with an IQ of 140, almost dropped out of college, still managed to finish it at the age of 30, way too late. And while I have a decent job, chances of promotion are low because employers tend prefer the candidates who did finish their education in the avarage timespan. So now I am stuck in a dead-end and that is very frustrating because I know I can do better than most, and have gained the required displicine but get passed over because in my professional area they prefer the kids who did everything the way society set it up for them. My parents where even told that I needed special attention, but they couldn't afford it, so now I have to deal with it. Sucks but thats life for me I guess.
  • notretarded 7y ago
    High IQ == arrogance?
  • yoz-y 7y ago
    I think it is quite hard to separate the brats from the more intelligent kids as from what I heard the "symptoms" are basically the same. I also think that there is a big problem with special education since the differences tend to either taper off or increase, and you can not really know if this is thanks to the child or the program they are following.
• NohatCoder 7y ago
  Look at it like this: If high intelligence didn't come with some pretty serious drawbacks, evolution would have made short work of dumb people long ago.
  • FabHK 7y ago
    The hilarious (and somewhat scary) introduction to Idiocracy comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzbWXgM0ygU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzbWXgM0ygU
• FabHK 7y ago
  (2017) Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886128
• lawlorino 7y ago
  Unsurprised that most of the comments on this post are just people number dropping their IQ and anecdotes about their mental health problems and minimal discussion of the article itself.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • friendlybus 7y ago
    Not reading the article is somewhat common. Some people come here just to socialize I guess.
• hardlianotion 7y ago
  If the study is based on a comparisons between mensans and the general population, I can think of confounding factors that should make it impossible to draw these conclusions.
• _the_inflator 7y ago
  Have a look at this IQ critic: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-... Nassim Taleb has got some very valid points. Forget about IQ, it is not worth the time you focus on it.
• keiferski 7y ago
  Isn't it a likely explanation that society is generally structured (consciously and unconsciously) for the average person and therefore the further you get away from the average, the less ability to have to connect with the broad group/culture identity, ergo leading to isolation and thus more social and psychological issues? For example - imagine that you have an IQ of 150 in a society where the average is 100. If suddenly everyone else's IQ jumped 50 points, the society would then change to reflect this new increase in intelligence - jobs, social roles, and other aspects of culture would be different than those from the 100 IQ culture.
  • jcadam 7y ago
    > If suddenly everyone else's IQ jumped 50 points, the society would then change to reflect this new increase in intelligence... Nah, pretty sure you'd see a complete collapse of civilization if that were to happen.
    • keiferski 7y ago
      Well, that's sort of my point. The current civilization is built upon the average person's intelligence. If suddenly everyone became as intelligent as a 5-year old, current civilization would probably collapse. Ditto if everyone became drastically smarter. The interesting part, however, is what would come next.
• bashwizard 7y ago
  I'm clearly retarded since I'm happy all the time and I have no physical disorder!
• sajid 7y ago
  This article should be more accurately titled "Mensa membership associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests"
• didibus 7y ago
  Reading some of the other comments got me wondering, it seems most people had their IQ test when young, and were told their scores by their parents. I wonder two things, what would happen if they took that test again, would they score similarly now? And what if their parents told them a higher score then they actually did, I can imagine most parents don't want to have the you scored low conversation...
• cwmma 7y ago
  the thing about an IQ is that all it measures is the ability to take an IQ test, and ability to take an IQ test is thought to correlate with some sort of thing called intelligence, but nobody is quite sure how it relates to intelligence, what intelligence even is, or if intelligence is a single thing. Which is why the vast majority of the people who talk about IQ tests and IQ scores are people that scored highly on it and very much want it to mean something important.
• losvedir 7y ago
  I hate when IQ comes up on Hacker News because it's a topic that everyone feels like they have something to contribute on, and there's so many misconceptions floating around it's hard to know what's "orthodox" so to speak. Does anyone have a good reference about what the current, academic general understanding with regard to intelligence is? Are there any surveys of practicing psychologists, etc? The best I've found is the "Intelligence Knowns and Unknowns"[0] task force report published by the American Psychological Association in 1995, but I'm not aware of any such report since then. My takeaways from that report, are that IQ does capture the concept of "intelligence" that most people understand exists, that the tests aren't biased or flawed anymore, that IQ can't really be changed with any known interventions, and that it correlates well with success in school, jobs, and life. I'd love to know if that's still the academic consensus. You'd never know from these threads where people chime in with their own anecdotes what's real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unknowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unkno...
  • CaoCao 7y ago
    Those are still accurate. There's a short book by Stuart Ritchie called "Intelligence: All That Matters" that is a good summary of contemporary psychological understanding of IQ.
• czbond 7y ago
  Startups and continually "trying to improve the world" are where my mental health was severely impacted. That can be toxic ...
• scott00 7y ago
  The result here is from a survey of Mensa members. I'm skeptical Mensa members are representative of the high IQ population as a whole.
• tim333 7y ago
  There's an interesting if not politically correct theory that >Jews as a group inherit significantly higher verbal and mathematical intelligence and somewhat lower spatial intelligence than other ethnic groups, on the basis of inherited diseases and the peculiar economic situation of Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages. as >During the [...] period, laws barred Ashkenazi Jews from most jobs, including farming and crafts, and forced them into finance, management, and international trade. Wealthy Jews had several more children per family than poor Jews. I'm half jewish genetically myself and there do seem to be differences between the jewish and non jewish relatives kind of along those lines. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence)
• KurtMueller 7y ago
  As I've gotten older, my desire to be more intelligent has gone down while my desire to be more charismatic has gone up. It seems to me the ability to create and grow the social connections I desire is the key to happiness. With that ability comes to the necessary intelligence(s) to navigate through other parts of life as well.
• geoelectric 7y ago
  It's unclear to me that they've controlled for "people who join Mensa." To be clear, I'm not throwing shade, and I was a member for awhile before I got sick of paying dues, getting spammed, and not going to meetings. They're a fine organization, spam aside. But in general, people who join clubs based on personal qualities do so because they put some level of value and identity in that quality. Some people who tend that way do so because they have an emotional hole to fill, and some people who tend that way do so because it's their dominant positive quality (in their own perception). So, neither of those speak to Mensa's core message of joining so you have people as smart as you to converse with. But both of those suggest a higher potential for Mensa members in general to have life issues they're compensating for by joining intelligence clubs. I do believe the basic trend that very smart people have more mental disorders, at least. I think our knowledge of twice-exceptional people has grown a lot over time, and I think there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that quirks come with the intelligence territory. Get quirky enough and a quirk is a diagnosis. But I'm not convinced that particular skew starts at the 95% percentile.