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Why aren't smart people happier?

• gadders 4y ago
  Overthinking.
• bigbluedots 4y ago
  If you could take a pill that had no cost or side effects but was guaranteed to make you happy for the rest of your life, would you? Why/not?
  • nottorp 4y ago
    Any pill like that would make you not care about the side effects wouldn't it?
  • mrwh 4y ago
    Something that'll make me happy whatever happens, that could remove all motivation to look after myself and those I (currently!) care about: no. Because I don't want to become that person even if it would be very pleasant to be him. Something that puts me in a buoyant mood each day, that makes life a pleasure and smooths all the rough edges away, well, maybe. I'd like to become that person.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  Smart people may be looking for more problems than normal people
• amai 4y ago
  Because happy people aren‘t smarter.
• NickRandom 4y ago
  The sad fact is that humans can never be happy for any length of time. It is how our brains are wired and a result of evolution. Even if a person lived in a paradise and had all their needs and wants provided; one of two things will occur - Either that person becomes bored or they wonder 'hmmm, I wonder if x,y or z could be better in some way?' and then trying to improve on perfection.
  • jrimbault 4y ago
    Aren't there some studies about how stress level doesn't seem to change much in relation to income and education ?
    • YeahNO 4y ago
      Actually, money can buy happiness, or at least, the lack of worry. A study [1] found, "the ideal income point is $95,000 for life evaluation and $60,000 to $75,000 for emotional well-being... this amount is for individuals and would likely be higher for families." [1] Jebb, A.T., Tay, L., Diener, E. et al. Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world. Nat Hum Behav 2, 33–38 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0277-0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0277-0
      • belkarx 4y ago
        If this brings the "diminishing returns" study to mind for anyone, PSA: A more recent study was done on the "ideal salary point" and concluded that there really isn't one: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016976118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
  • tonmoy 4y ago
    If you assume happiness is a feedback mechanism rewarding you for doing the right thing, then it makes sense. The reward needs to be modulated to be effective, constant reward would stop us from improving
    • me_me_me 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
  • refurb 4y ago
    Pretty much. If humans could ever reach a state that would guarantee happiness we’d still be living in caves and having 10 children so 5 make it to adults. Progress requires dissatisfaction with the status quo.
• moviewise 4y ago
  There are a few prerequisites (proper sleep, nutrition, exercise) and many ways (social connections, meaningful activities, grateful attitude) to being happy. From: Going Through An Existential Crisis? https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existential-crisis https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existentia...
• mantas 4y ago
  Ignorance is a bliss. We as society shouldn't focus so much on being „happy“. Happiness by itself is not worthwhile. What are you going to tell on your deathbed and how will your relatives remember you? Oh, he never did anything, but he seemed happy all the time!
  • Bootvis 4y ago
    Sounds pretty good to be honest.
    • mantas 4y ago
      Maybe good for individual, but sucks big time for the people around. Especially if there're substances involved.
  • voganmother42 4y ago
    Hmm, living life for its own simple satisfaction seems like a worthwhile option and no small legacy. Being happy and lifting up the spirits of those around you is no small contribution - and is certainly not exclusive with “doing something”. I wonder about optimizing your life around your deathbed, obituary, or your contribution to society…if it makes you happy I guess;)
    • mantas 4y ago
      Given how complicated life is, „living life for it's own simple satisfaction“ frequently involves freeriding on people around you. Being happy, possible with substances involved, is not exactly inspiring to people around. And, usually, people try to keep away other people from such... inspiration. Of course, you can be „simply happy“ and a productive member of a community. But usually happiness comes as a byproduct then. And there're lots of other emotions aside from „being happy“. Maybe it's worth to optimise around reducing misery around or being a net-positive on society where the life satisfaction will eventually come. But happiness may be out of reach due to stuff you can't unknow.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• toolslive 4y ago
  surrounded by idiots?
• dekken_ 4y ago
  Happiness is temporary, much like life.
  • kbelder 4y ago
    So is suffering. But I find happiness more pleasant, so I spend most of my time there.
• willcipriano 4y ago
  Being smart isn't enough, you have to be wise. Intelligence can help you climb to the highest positions in business and academia, wisdom allows you to understand that it isn't really worth it.
  • necovek 4y ago
    I used to say simply having common sense, but wisdom is fine too: plenty of smart, intelligent people lack the most common of common sense (I have no idea why it's called "common" when it's anything but — in Serbian, we say "zdrav razum" or "healthy sense/reason" which is slightly better). I found it particularly funny when my University math professors displayed a complete inability to reason about the simplest of things.
    • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      "Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it." — René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode (1637) (Or in French: "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée, car chacun pense en être bien pourvu.") In some philosophies, what stands opposite of wisdom is not folly, but common sense. However, it might be possible that neither common sense, nor wisdom will bring you happiness: the former is unable to provide it, the latter is unable to be attained (philo-sophia, an asymptotical wanting of wisdom).
  • okamiueru 4y ago
    I don't know if wisdom really helps. Or, maybe I just feel that way, because I lack it. How would wisdom help with happiness, when you see a likely worsening climate, rampant inequality for really no good reason, which together with the former is bound to cause significant sivil unrest and wars in the coming decades? In my limited version of it, is to strive to be humble, and the happiness for those around you. Find joy in helping the communities (whichever that be in the connected world) you care about. But... That still doesn't truly make me happy. And relies on willfully ignoring everything mention earlier. The only thing to hope for is a miracle in both energy production, and a sudden increase in empathy. I fear that human nature is stil stuck in a the ape mindset of "I got mine", and will never get out of.
• voganmother42 4y ago
  “That is their happiness: they see all life without observing it. They’re buried in it like crabs in mud.”
• deleted 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• hestefisk 4y ago
  I think the answer is that intelligent people tend to suffer from depression more than “simpler” people. Insecure over-achievers, “introverts”, and the like.
  • frankzander 4y ago
    the intelligence of someone is foolishness in other eyes. Simpler people, as you call them, have often solutions for problems with which well educated people struggle with. So not looking down on someone is a good beginning for be more happy. :)
  • hestefisk 4y ago
    Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...
    • WithinReason 4y ago
      Criticism of that article in the comments: https://pubpeer.com/publications/2F26A22D54A2032B460B3037AF26C0 https://pubpeer.com/publications/2F26A22D54A2032B460B3037AF2...
  • deleted 4y ago
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• frankzander 4y ago
  Because happiness isn't a mental skill. What makes you happy is try to have and keep peace with everyone and do good things, make presents to others, give and don't expect to get something back (you will but don't expect it). (it's the opposite you see nowadays in movies or series ;-) It's about social connections and inter-human things ... not some skills you learn on universities but from loving and well raised parents.
  • foobiekr 4y ago
    For you.
  • suoduandao2 4y ago
    >What makes you happy is try to have and keep peace with everyone and do good things, make presents to others, give and don't expect to get something back Some worse-if-wiser part of me suspects this piece of advice is given out of altruism to the community as a whole, not the person receiving it. Doing this has never made me happy. I'm more willing to do it when I'm already happy though, so maybe there's a corellation.
• dwighttk 4y ago
  “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.” ‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭1:18‬ ‭NRSV‬‬
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • m348e912 4y ago
    That seems to be a fancy way of saying "ignorance is bliss"
    • dwighttk 4y ago
      Or if not bliss, perhaps lesser vexation and sorrow.
• davidguetta 4y ago
  People, especially on forums like HN, tend to mistake being 'intellectual' to actually 'intelligent'. There are various ways of being "smart" and being good at math and code is only one of them (Emotional intelligence, relationship intelligence, intelligence in career) etc... It's generally a mix of them who lead to happiness, if that even exists
• robviren 4y ago
  I've never much enjoyed "intelligence" as a way to box groups of people. Everybody knows something I don't, can do things I cannot, solves problems in ways I would not think to. I would not call a math professor who does not know how to fix a car dumb. For me, the line between a lack of skill and a supposed lack of intelligence is too blurry. Of course all of this may be some sort of cognitive dissonance about myself probably not falling particularly high on an intelligence curve. Either way, if joy and happiness is the goal, than a lot of adults are morons measured against trying to do that. We isolate ourselves, allow stigma and bias to push our choices, and ultimately worry so much about happiness that we do a poor job being happy.
  • dusted 4y ago
    You can be really intelligent without knowing much, and you can know tremendous amounts without being intelligent, at least up to a point.
• mebassett 4y ago
  > The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. - Ecclesiastes, somewhere between 450-180 BCE.
• makach 4y ago
  Because ignorance is bliss, and knowledge is pain.
• seydor 4y ago
  > Naturally, people with more of this mental horsepower must live happier lives. When they encounter a problem, they should use their superior problem-solving ability to solve it. That's not all. Smart people are also more perceptive to problems, they identify more of them, and solving one problem is never enough. Ergo they can't ever be happy as in "content" (which is what all those 'happiness' self-report studies measure), in fact as time goes by they should get increasingly depressed by identifying more problems. Ignorance is often a bliss.
  • dusted 4y ago
    I think there's a lot of truth in that. Also, at least for sustainable, healthy activities, there may also be some difference in the kind of life that a person in the bottom 10th percentile and a person in the top 10th percentile of the scale will find gratifying.
• dusted 4y ago
  I'm not especially smart, or happy, but, personally, I don't know how to be it, or what it feels like. I know pleasure, but being in a constant pleasurable state is not what is meant by happiness as far as I know. Slavoj Žižek (someone who does seem to be especially smart): “Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”
  • loonster 4y ago
    Happiness is not getting what you want. It is wanting what you get.
    • Bolkan 4y ago
      What if you got diarrhoea?
      • tartoran 4y ago
        How long are you going to be unhappy about that? It’s passes even quicker than a cold and everybody gets it once in a while. Happiness is not to cry over spilled milk.
        • Bolkan 4y ago
          *chronic diarrhoea
      • ravenstine 4y ago
        Diarrhea is a survival mechanism, so be happy you have it.
        • LoveMortuus 4y ago
• SMAAART 4y ago
  When I used to battle my depression I came across an article/paper that stated that smart people are more prone to depression. Same with "creative" people. I have overcome depression and I am "satisfied" with my life (I prefer the word "satisfied" to the overinflated one: happiness). And now that depression is in my past I think that was a puff-piece article, and so is this. One could say that more intelligent people tend to overthink things; then again someone even more intelligent would know better and not overthink things. Mindfulness is a big component of my new Life.
  • id 4y ago
    You can know better to not overthink and still overthink.
    • SMAAART 4y ago
      You got it. And on a more broad level, knowing better but not doing is the root of all maladies. And brings out questions about free will, agency, self-control, volition... and more. These days I am fond of 2 books that actually touch on this very topic: "Grit" and "Ego is the enemy".
• goindeep 4y ago
  I liked the big about granny. I also like Navals take on this, he asks a similar questions 'if you're so smart, why aren't you happy?'. I think Navals conclusion is that smart people take to things differently, they try to use the same tools that they've used in their lives such as logic and math to try get to happiness but its not physics, its more like philosophy.
• alberth 4y ago
  Shouldn’t the real question be “why aren’t more people happy”. Lack of happiness isn’t relegated only to “smart people”. My observation: managing stress related to ever growing amount of responsibilities (as comes with age), finances, and spouse can have a disproportionate impact on one’s happiness. None of which are tied to intelligence.
  • dusted 4y ago
    I don't think our society has any focus on happiness, it's not easily measured or produced and there's little proof that it'd benefit the economy.. I mean.. What if people suddenly discovered that enough food and shelter is available, that they could do maybe a days work a month and just walk around to smell the flowers the rest of the time?
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      There are many people for whom that is true (chiefly the retired). The ones who are physically able generally choose to do something marginally “productive” than continuously smelling flowers. (Perhaps that’s related to what got them to a position to retire, whether a work ethic, other personal mindset, or programming.)
  • necovek 4y ago
    What do you mean are not tied to intelligence? If you use your smarts to conclude that having a spouse will negatively affect your happiness, don't have one. A very intelligent person should be able to figure out a way to improve their finances. The article makes the distinction between well-defined problems (eg. increase my monthly income) and poorly defined problems (eg. find a spouse that matches you for life), and clearly suggests that intelligence helps with one but not the other.
    • alberth 4y ago
      > If you use your smarts to conclude that having a spouse will negatively affect your happiness, don't have one. You're assuming the negative. Your spouse can be a huge overall help in achieving happiness. > A very intelligent person should be able to figure out a way to improve their finances. It's not that simple. You could be exceedingly smart but medically handicapped, which leads to lower paying jobs. Or could have been a high earner and then come down with an unfortunate disease which greatly impacts you ability to work and medically bankrupts you.
• Apreche 4y ago
  The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congrats, you have learned the history of humanity and how our society functions, and your reward is you get to be angry at the vast amount of injustice.
  • solumunus 4y ago
    Heard this so much as a teenager.
  • throwaway6734 4y ago
    Sounds more like midwits than smart people
    • Bolkan 4y ago
      Let the poor guy cope.
  • toyg 4y ago
    This is why acceptance is such a key value. Acceptance is both an obstacle to progress and a prerequisite for continued existence. It's the line between Yin and Yang, where the duality of wrong and right is forced to blur.
  • klik99 4y ago
    Serious question - how old are you? Anecdotally I’ve noticed smart people tend to have this attitude until their late 20s when it starts mellowing out. Now I’m a bit older I see my smarter friends happier than anyone and the less smart just about the same as always
    • pixl97 4y ago
      Could it be that 'smart' people have accomplishment or material gain later in life they are satisfied with?
• bodge5000 4y ago
  I'm not sure theres such a thing as smart people to begin with. Plenty of people know their own domain very well, but it seems only a few domains are arbitrarily chosen as intelligent ones. Seeing as we're still struggling to define what intelligence even is, I don't see how we can start labelling people as intelligent or not. At that point, the question is just "why aren't people happier". I doubt theres any one answer, but a lot of the responses in this thread seem to point to some of the possible reasons.
  • necovek 4y ago
    It might help to read the actual article. There is a widely accepted definition of intelligence in there, and the article attempts to delineate between problems intelligent people are good at and not-so-good at (at least not better than everybody else).
    • deleted 4y ago
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• necovek 4y ago
  Everyone seems to have missed one subtlety: the article only states (with references) that smart people are not happier. At no point does it say that smart people are less happy (it does mention two studies where in one "lowest scoring" were a tiny bit unhappier, and in another "highest scoring" were happier): the overall tone is that they are equally happy regardless of their intelligence. And then it wonders why the familiar trait of intelligence does not translate to those people setting their lives up for happiness?
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    Yes! And the main theory of the article is barely discussed in current comments thread, but to me novel and very thought-provoking: The model of "well-defined problems" vs "poorly-defined problems" and the hypothesis that what we call "smart" is usually being good at solving well-defined problems, but it's being good at solving poorly-defined problems that might correlate with happiness, and being good at solving well-behaved vs poorly-behaved problems does not correlate. This rings true to me, in that in that model I recognize I'm pretty good at solving well-defined problems, but pretty terrible at solving poorly-defined problems (and currently not especially happy). That was all new to me as a way of thinking about it! Most of the comments here are about "why are smarter people less happy", which is not what the OP is about, and is more well-trodden.
    • ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
      On the other hand, my experience is that the smartest people I know are very effective at simplifying / formalizing poorly defined problems and then solving the resultant well-defined problems.
      • necovek 4y ago
        So why are they not happier on average?
  • asojfdowgh 4y ago
    They didn't miss that line: they never read the article.
• kypro 4y ago
  I think part of what makes someone a good problem solver is having an affinity for problems.
• 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  "People are idiots" as Scott Adams wrote. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and people considered smart are usually surprisingly ignorant about things outside the areas where their strengths are. Happiness is such a vague concept that it's hard to measure. It's hard to imagine why something like being good at <insert arbitrary field of expertise here> would translate directly into living a happy life when most people's lives revolves around other things.
• wanderingmind 4y ago
  """ Point eight is enough. In fact I've concluded that it's really a good thing for people not to be 100% happy. I've started to live in accordance with a philosophy that can be summed up in the phrase "Point eight is enough," meaning "0.8 is enough." You might remember the TV show from the 70s called "Eight is Enough," about a family with eight children. That's the source of my new motto. I don't know that 0.8 is the right number, but I do believe that when I'm not feeling 100% happy, I shouldn't feel guilty or angry, or think that anything unusual is occurring. I shouldn't set 100% as the norm, without which there must be something wrong. Instead, I might just as well wait a little while, and I'll feel better. I won't make any important decisions about my life at a time when I'm feeling less than normally good. In a sense I tend now to suspect that it was necessary to leave the Garden of Eden. Imagine a world where people are in a state of euphoria all the time — being high on heroin, say. They'd have no incentive to do anything. What would get done? What would happen? The whole world would soon collapse. It seems like intelligent design when everybody's set point is somewhere less than 100%." """ -- Don Knuth
  • bbqbbqbbq 4y ago
    How would the world collapse? This sounds like mixing up "the world" with "human society". I know I do more when I'm happy because things are enjoyable. No disrespect to Don Knuth and it's obviously good to realize you're not gonna be happy all the time but that line of reasoning is just not true.
• wikitopian 4y ago
  If intelligence were universally desirable then a stroll through the forest would be akin to a disney feature, with all of the rest of the animals being as intelligent as us. They're not. It's not like they haven't had enough time to evolve superior cognition. Humans proved that under the right conditions, it only takes a few million years. Superior human cognitive ability is a merely an instrument of male territorial aggression which was subject to a fisherian runaway sexual selection process beginning around australopithecus and terminating with the advent of civilization. This process accelerated, jerked, snapped, crackled, and popped because superior human cognition has a side effect of enabling humans to more effectively extract resources from their habitat. To even ask the op's question is to presume some utility or value for superior individual cognitive ability. It isn't meaningful, useful, special, or advantageous. An outright stupid human is perfectly capable of achieving the resources, relationships, habits, and social standing among peers necessary to be reliably content. If anything, the gifted man is burdened by going through life with the false conviction that his life and ideas matter more because of some trait he possesses which is altogether vestigial in the modern world.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  What kind of smart people are we talking about? I know lots of dumb smart people, some smart dumb people, and a very few smart smart people. The dumb dumb category I try and avoid as find the company stress inducing. I didn't define these as either you know exactly what I mean, or you don't. If you don't, its not easy to describe.
• aaron695 4y ago
  [dead]
• h0l0cube 4y ago
  The crux of the article: > Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitols is not going to help you solve them.
  • jackmott 4y ago
    Seems like the correlations between IQ tests and life outcomes related to this ill defined questions does imply a degree of crossover in rotating shape skill and dealing with the ambiguities of life. However that is probably genetic or due to early development , not something where practicing shape rotation to improve it further will improve your marriage or relationship with your kids.
    • MichaelZuo 4y ago
      There may be small, sub-linear improvements. But the general thesis seems roughly correct.
  • lostmsu 4y ago
    That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed. I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed. Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.
    • karaterobot 4y ago
      Ahh, the power of a cursory search to prove just about anything. What about the arguments given in the article?
      • lostmsu 4y ago
        The article does not provide data significant enough to support its basic assumption, that smart people fail to solve ill-defined tasks more than dumb people.
• sudden_dystopia 4y ago
  Ignorance is bliss is more than just a cliche. The converse is that intelligence is anxiety. Or at least that’s my hypothesis. The more you know, the more you are aware of what can go wrong.
• pestatije 4y ago
  I tend to view it the other way round: happy people are dumber. As a general rule only though.
• nootropicat 4y ago
  The whole premise is weird. Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes. A cat almost certainly doesn't think about things more than one day in the future. Many people eventually give up thinking about things too much and give up to various forms of hedonism, but that's not real happiness. When it happens after 40s it's called a 'mid life crisis', I don't think it has a name when it happens earlier, but fundamentally it's the same thing. Real happiness would require advanced transhumanism or even more (ie. uploading) - without it, we are all trapped only being able to imagine perfection.
  • Sebb767 4y ago
    > Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes. You don't need to be very intelligent to consider climate a very hard problem. In fact, if we follow this logic, less smart people should be unhappier, since they are in an even worse position to do something, while smart people might choose to go into an engineering job to help solve the problems or gain enough influence in politics to change things for the better.
    • nootropicat 4y ago
      I consider climate change a negligible issue, it's just the hype of the day, something you're "supposed" to virtue signal about. Even a 10C temperature change won't change much in the grand scheme of things. Average person is dumber each year because high iq is negatively correlated with fertility. On top of that populations are collapsing due to below replacement tfr. There's a real danger that technical civilization collapses later this century. The problem is that all easily accessible fossil fuel sources are already used up, so restarting much later from eg. a late xix century level is borderline impossible - civilization will run out of wood fast and progress stops due to an energy deficit. Advanced semiconductor manufacturing beyond proof of concept requires scale unattainable by such a civilization. In short, the falling intelligence trend coupled with running out of easily accessible energy means that most likely, either humanity escapes biological-planetary constraints this century, or becomes stuck in a low-tech hairless ape local maxima until the inevitable extinction. A very good candidate for the Great Filter. Fossil fuels only exist in the first place because for millions of years no organism on Earth was capable of digesting lignin. As trees died they just became buried, eventually transforming into coal and oil. That process stopped the moment fungi evolved the ability to digest lignin. This means that there's not going to be another chance even in millions of years, whether for human descendants or some other intelligent species (racoons seem like a good candidate). Easily accessible fossil fuel energy is a one time event per planet. There's less than 100 years to escape the trap and it requires sci-fi level tech, either advanced genetic modification of humans or superhuman level ai. >In fact, if we follow this logic, less smart people should be unhappier, since they are in an even worse position to do something Worrying about something requires realizing it's a problem first.
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  Why are people dumb enough to think that 2 effectively unconnected variables should correlate asking?
• temptemptemp111 4y ago
• nickelcitymario 4y ago
  I actually would not expect smart people to be happier. In fact, I wouldn't expect any group of people to be particularly happier than anyone else. Happiness and suffering are two sides of the same coin and we evolved these feelings (or they were bestowed upon us by God, either way) in order to guide us. We do more of what feels good, less of what feels bad. If we're happy all the time, happiness loses its intended purpose. Same for suffering. That's why, no matter what financial windfall you may experience, give it 6 months and you'll be just as miserable (or worse) as you were before. But because you got a high off of it initially, you keep pursuing more and more, always convinced the next upgrade in your life is what will do the trick. But it doesn't. All you're doing is raising the bar for what it takes to make you momentarily happy. It's the "poverty of affluence", as described by Paul Wachtel in his book by the same name. So our minds are constantly adapting to our circumstances and rebalancing things so that we come back to the center. Chasing happiness, much like running away from suffering, is a fool's game. We are hard wired to feel both in roughly equal measure, regardless of our circumstances, over the long haul. For this reason, I think the buddhists and stoics have it right. The best thing we can do is nothing. Sit down and shut up. Get off the wheel of suffering, observe the world as dispassionately as possible, and accept both joy and suffering as inconsequential inputs meant to guide us. It's the closest any human will ever be allowed to experience peace in their mortal life. If you chase the highs of life, expect massive lows, as well. Accept life on life's terms. Stop chasing things and you may not be happier, but you'll probably be less miserable and experience fewer bouts of crippling depression and anxiety. Or as Charles Bukowski's epitaph famously reads: Don't try.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > That's why, no matter what financial windfall you may experience, give it 6 months and you'll be just as miserable (or worse) as you were before. But because you got a high off of it initially, you keep pursuing more and more, always convinced the next upgrade in your life is what will do the trick. But it doesn't. All you're doing is raising the bar for what it takes to make you momentarily happy. I am pretty sure someone who has no security of shelter/food/water/healthcare/education/legal who gains those securities is happier than before they had those securities. At least I am. It is nice being able to sleep knowing I don not have to worry about my basic needs, and being able to walk away from tasks I do not want to do.
• velcrofruit 4y ago
  The more you know, the more you despair.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tlogan 4y ago
  Good post. Yes - we only know how to measure one type of smartness which does not collerate with happiness at all. Maybe some people are happier when they are in relationships? Others when they are alone. Some when they have a dog. Then some can be happy only if they have a bird… I wish I knew.
• ospzfmbbzr 4y ago
  Ignorance is bliss. Most things labelled smart these days are not. Happy (one of my least favorite words) seems to mean passive contentment in the modern context -- a recipe for getting nothing accomplished. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/happy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/happy "characterized by a dazed irresponsible state" a punch-happy boxer That definition seems to fit the 'happy' people pretty well.
• paganel 4y ago
  > hanging out with a known pedophile Bill Gates seems to be doing quite well on the happiness front.
• foobarbecue 4y ago
  "We eradicated smallpox and polio." Smallpox, yes. Polio, unfortunately, no, as evidenced by the current anti-vaxxer polio outbreak in New York.
• onion2k 4y ago
  Most smart people are smart enough to know they're getting screwed, but they're not smart enough (or connected enough, or rich enough) to do anything about it. "I'm getting hustled only knowing half the game." "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish" by The Coup
  • ta988 4y ago
    You can be smart, but if you are seen as inferior in reason of your perceived race, gender, social status and so on, you will usually not be given the means to act.
• corobo 4y ago
  My theory is that overall life happiness is a measure of your reality vs your potential. If you're smart then you're probably in a field that has infinite opportunities and paths available. If you're not, you've probably landed in the niche that works nicely for you. The former's potential is near infinite, the latter is pretty damn close to their endgame and happy to repeat till retirement. Sidebar I dislike the term smart, I make no intentional judgements in this comment in regards to intelligence or lack of in comparison to career choice. I know plenty of people who have been called smart (including myself under protest) who are absolute doofuses outside of their field haha. Smart might as well just mean specialised in something that took more than 4 years to learn. Even despite trying to be super delicate there.. actual smarts vs not smarts (normal definition) is probably similar. Smart folks have more potential to live up to.
  • bitcurious 4y ago
    > My theory is that overall life happiness is a measure of your reality vs your potential. It's an interesting theory, can you reconcile it with the propensity of the intelligent to feel imposter syndrome?
    • corobo 4y ago
      I have no science to back up my claim but my knee jerk hunch is that people who weren't supported by their peers during the learning process go on to develop imposter syndrome. Y'know like the classic story of being outcast unless you hide being into learning "You read books?! What a nerd!", "Teacher's pet!", "Why don't you go invent a gravity, Einstein" Without early peer support there's no foundational confidence in your abilities and without that comes imposter syndrome later Again I have no data other than my own experience, n=1 and barely at that. You'd definitely want to ask around a bit to see if this even matches up with other peoples experiences before accepting it as any sort of truth E: It might not be that specific, any sort of educational trauma (for lack of a better way to describe it. Learning disorders, dyslexia, a lack of school experience entirely, having to take care of someone during your school years) would probably do it if the foundational skill confidence theory is in any way plausible
• perlgeek 4y ago
  When I read the title my first thought was "because of the hedonic treadmill". Ctrl-F, appears about 2/3rds down the article. Could have come around a bit quicker :-)
• ben_w 4y ago
  "Happy" and "intelligent" are just different axes. Being intelligent[0], I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. And I choose to work on the hardest problems I can manage. Dogs are not known for their intellect, and can be made incredibly happy just by the appearance of their favourite person (who may be a human or another dog). Anyone who expects dogs to be anxious about global warming, AI alignment, or the thermodynamic heat death of the universe, has probably overestimated them. [0] any comment which contains claims of this type must contain at least one unfixed tupo or autocorrupt error, it's traditional.
  • 4ggr0 4y ago
    > Being intelligent[0], I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. And I choose to work on the hardest problems I can manage. So what description would fit me then: "I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. I still don't act on it lots of times."
• throwaway0asd 4y ago
  Here is how I correlate with the article as a developer. I believe myself to be pretty good at programming because I can achieve execution performance that almost nobody else can and solve problems most people cannot. After 20 years of practice my greatest enabling skill is better organizational skills. I am not good at bad programming though. I have spent a good deal of effort in the first half of my career to thoroughly refine my precise which also means recognizing and avoiding anti-patterns. I avoid things like frameworks because they are much slower, super large, get in the way, and really slow me down. As a result people dependent upon frameworks probably think I am a really bad programmer. As somebody who has learned to increase their own productivity by doing more from less, better organizational skills and higher conscientiousness, encountering excess complexity in other code makes me unhappy. It’s really depressing. Often solving simple problems in such code is a tip-toe dance through a minefield unless I have the bandwidth to write it again with test automation.
• dimensionc132 4y ago
  The authors seems to imply that that Christopher Langan who scores extraordinarily high on IQ tests and who is developing a Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" (CTMU), is somehow dumb or ill informed for believing that the 9/11 attacks and subsequent collapse of the twin towers and world trade centre building 7, was planned. Regardless of whether that is true or not, the author of the article takes direct aim at him for believing such a "conspiracy". Not only that, the OP also takes some personal shots at John Sununu and Bobby Fischer for their personal beliefs also. I guess when you are smart as the author(Adam Mastroianni) and know everything there is to know about EVERYTHING because you have read it on CNN, you can pass judgment on other people like Langan, Fischer and Sununu for their beliefs because you know better than them, and you know for a fact that their beliefs are dumb and nonsensical because you read it somewhere and that is fact. The OP seems to feel vindicated that someone who believes in a conspiracy theory is actually dumb and that actually intelligence tests mean nothing anymore and are not a relevant metric we should be using. Instead we should be using his Grandma as a baseline because she can raise a family and that, is all the intelligence we need. So shutup and talk to his grandma and get some wisdom. It's difficult to take the OP seriously when he resorts to denouncing certain people as idiots for believing in non-mainstream accepted theories of certain historical events. Was that really necessary to trash these people?
  • endorphine 4y ago
    It seems to me you're offended that the OP implies that, e.g. Bobby Fischer wasn't good at non-well-defined problems. I would be interested to know why is that. To clarify: I don't like the way they phrased it either (it was too judgemental), it just didn't bother me so much.
    • dimensionc132 4y ago
      I get annoyed about the OP's arrogance in assuming he is right, because 'reasons', and everyone else mentioned is somehow wrong regarding the conspiracy theories mentioned. Remember, people are still debating the JFK assassination, and those that don't believe the mainstream accepted narrative that Oswald single handedly fired those shots, considered crazy. It bothers me, not that it makes any difference. I just wanted to point attention to it.
• komali2 4y ago
  > And that’s a shame. My grandma does not know how to use the “input” button on her TV’s remote control, but she does know how to raise a family full of good people who love each other, how to carry on through a tragedy, and how to make the perfect pumpkin pie. We sometimes condescendingly refer to this kind of wisdom as “folksy” or “homespun,” as if answering multiple-choice questions is real intelligence, and living a good, full life is just some down-home, gee-whiz, cutesy thing that little old ladies do. I think this gets to the meat and potatoes of something I've been thinking about after reading some Marcuse[1] recently. I think our whole idea of IQ, at least popularly, revolves around how well someone's able to succeed capitalistically. It's all about how Productive someone is, or their productive capabilities. Earlier in the article the author wrote: > Over the last generation, we have solved tons of well-defined problems. We eradicated smallpox and polio. We landed on the moon. We built better cars, refrigerators, and televisions. We even got ~15 IQ points smarter! And how did our incredible success make us feel? ... All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier. I think there’s an important lesson here: if solving a bunch of well-defined problems did not make our predecessors happier, it probably won’t make us happier, either. Implying I suppose that we got smarter but not happier, which is a surprising conclusion from someone that was so careful throughout the article to point out the racist and unscientific history and basis for much of what makes an IQ. Are we smarter? I don't know. Are we happier? No, we know we aren't, and I don't think it's because we're smarter, I think it's because we're poorer, and doing things that hurt us. How can a species who have Curiosity built in, and a evolutionary strategy utterly dependent on community building and society skills such as communication and tool building, be happy in an increasingly isolated, repetitive society? Our needs and wants have been coopted. Marcuse wrote: > The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment... We've been reduced to consumers and producers. No wonder we're sad. Like the blog author wrote: > So if you’re really looking for a transformative change in your happiness, you might be better off reading something ancient. The great thinkers of the distant past seemed obsessed with figuring out how to live good lives: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, even up through Thoreau and Vivekananda. But at some point, this kind of stuff apparently fell out of fashion. I always wonder why that kind of thinking fell out of fashion. Why did I find myself arguing with a college educated person a few days back about why cutting off the hands of thieves is bad? We've got a couple thousand years of work done here and we've spent it mostly, it seems, making fantastic technologies that indisputably make our lives better, safer, more comfortable, and longer, but I wonder if we're not spending as much energy as we should on these "hard to define" problems? To call back to the first paragraph I quoted, are we spending enough time venerating and learning from grandmas who know how to build and hold together a community? That seems like some core, important intelligence that we should be taking notes on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse
• strken 4y ago
  I see a lot of data to prove smart people aren't much happier, but no data at all to prove that A) multiple types of intelligence exist and can be measured that aren't already measured by a mainstream intelligence test B) a type of intelligence that makes you happier exists, and can be measured by performance on another task C) when you ask someone how happy they are and they say "7", it means they're experiencing the same level of happiness as another person who also said "7", or even experiencing the same level of happiness they were when they said "7" decades ago
  • travisjungroth 4y ago
    C is one of the biggest issues in happiness surveys. Those world surveys are the worst. They tell you more about the socially acceptable answer to "are you happy?" (actually to the translation of that) than how people feel.
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    >A) multiple types of intelligence exist and can be measured that aren't already measured by a mainstream intelligence test G factor is well understood and is mainstream across Psychology/Neuroscience. Intelligence tests are highly correlated to G factor.
• dasil003 4y ago
  Happiness has to do with brain chemistry and disposition. It has nothing to do with intelligence or problem solving. Achieving goals and rewards gives a dopamine hit but it doesn’t produce happiness in any lasting sense.
• zw123456 4y ago
  The problem here IMO is that although intelligence can be fairly well defined and measured and it tends to be fairly static over a given period of time, happiness can be more difficult to measure or define and fluctuates. Someone may say they are less happy on Monday Morning than on Friday afternoon, or they were happier last year but then the pandemic lock down saddened them. And, some people perceive their own happiness differently, on person may say, I am very happy, but they perhaps are not as happy as another person who says they are only moderately happy because they may have a higher expectation of happiness. And what is it really, many philosophers have spent a lot of time on that topic. Is it that all my needs and wants are met and I am in a committed relationship? Others may define it differently. The article touches on these points. In my view these are just two different unconnected attributes, asking if intellect and happiness are correlated is like asking "how big is the color red?" it is not really a meaningful question. Anyone can be happy, whether they have a high IQ or not. Say you have one man who has a low IQ, works as a laborer, but comes home to a wife and loving children. They do not have a large house or fancy car but if you ask him, he may say he is very happy. Another man, lives alone in a large home with a nice car but enjoys solitude and contemplation, perhaps occasionally having a friend over and they have a deep conversation about quantum mechanics. You ask him and he might say he is very happy. Obviously, you could easily reverse those examples and add many more. Now let's measure that? Personally, I just don't see how.
• VikingCoder 4y ago
  1. Ignorance is bliss. 2. You learn something new every day. 3. Every day you have less bliss.
• gmays 4y ago
  Reminds me of this quote from Stop Stealing Dreams [1]: > Philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that if two kids playing hopscotch or push-pin are gaining as much joy and pleasure as someone reading poetry, they have enjoyed as much utility. > John Stuart Mill took a different approach. He argued, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.” 1. https://seths.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/stop-stealing-dreams6print.pdf https://seths.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/stop-stealing-...
  • suoduandao2 4y ago
    "Brave new world" made a very good case for Mill's side of that argument. I found it convincing, for what that's worth.
    • Der_Einzige 4y ago
      I found both this book and the above JSM quote to be violently antithetical to the very existence of all pleasure seekers. My disdain for them led me into the arms of the philosophers who don't hate pleasure and the sensual world, like Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and the works of the critical theorists. The general disdain for hedonism felt in this world is extremely stupid. Brave New World is objectively a utopia, regardless whatever that one native american MC thought
      • suoduandao2 4y ago
        I think what I found convincing was that, despite it being a utopia, the people living in it were awful. I read it imagining myself living there and saying 'of course if I lived there, I'd be happy' but they weren't, and the things that made them unhappy were so incredibly petty. It's funny to see Nietzsche invoked in this context, since I'd imagine him giving much more weight to the slightly-more-ubermensch native MC than that of the society he clashed with. Nietzsche's a very subjective philosopher of course, but I'd imagine him saying that to love the world would be to refuse to engage with it in the glib way the society in BNW does.
• dgudkov 4y ago
  This author gets so many things wrong. Self-reported happiness, linking intelligence to results of synthetic tests, assuming that problem-solving capabilities makes people happier instead of having a different altitude to happiness, etc. American pop psychology poorly understands happiness and has an overly technical approach to it.
• cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  I... object to the premise of this articles in the strongest possible terms!
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  I don't understand why people are making correlations between intelligence and happiness. Seems kind of arbitrary. Why aren't smart people taller?
  • naasking 4y ago
    Presumably because happiness somewhat follows from material circumstances, and smarter people are more effective at obtaining better material circumstances. There is no such association with tallness.
    • 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
      Yeah, i mean it's a false premise, in my opinion.
      • naasking 4y ago
        IQ correlates pretty well with various measures of economic success, so I'm not sure the association of smarter with better material circumstances is false, if that's what you're implying. If you mean the association with happiness, then yes that's probably false.
  • impalallama 4y ago
    the question tends to break really fast if you try to define almost anything in it. Intelligence is already notoriously difficulty to quantify, now compare that to something as ephemeral as happiness. what are you going to do? compare someone IQ against some self reported metric of happiness?
  • nudpiedo 4y ago
    Because they are a group of people who have a set of common problems often not addressed as they are believed to do better in life due stereotypes. In reality many perform poorly in academic results and abandon any studies, the largest majority suffer from bullying and most of them struggle in getting a successful life by social standards. Why aren’t smart people and their problems studied as a particular subset of society?
• ta988 4y ago
  One aspect I realized over time is that smart people tend to try to have knowledge and explanations for much more of the world than most of the others. And many times these explanations are completely wrong and partisan when it is out of their main areas of expertise but they cling to it really hard. Over time this tends to dissipate in many which also make them much nicer to be around.
• deltasevennine 4y ago
  The common prevailing theme among many programmers and many HNers is that they think they're smarter than average. That's why posts like this gets voted up all the time. Bad news: Most HNers and programmers have only average intelligence.
  • Sebb767 4y ago
    > Most HNers and programmers have only average intelligence. I'm going to need a source for that. I don't think the average HNer is a genius, but it's quite likely that the average IQ on HN is a bit higher than the population average.
    • bena 4y ago
      Probably in the 110 range. The average programmer IQ is 110. And I don't think the average HN user is better than the average programmer. You have to figure that from 85 - 120 (depending on the scale) is a huge chunk of the population. Considering that the average HN commenter is involved in programming in some fashion, and that programming is practical math in some fashion, it does stand to reason there's a higher floor. But that floor is lower than you might think. In IQ in the 125 range is sufficient for every task on the face of the Earth. You can perform any mental task. That's mildly gifted or above average.
      • Sebb767 4y ago
        Around 110 would've been ny guess, too; maybe a tad lower - we have some exceptionally gifted people, but also a lot of non-programmers, which probably moves us a bit towards the population average.
        • deltasevennine 4y ago
          Standard Deviation from a 100 average IQ is 15 points. So basically, more or less you agreed with me.
• bgroat 4y ago
  In my early teens my Dad said something to the effect of, "If you're so smart... how come nobody likes you?" Now, this sounds mean, but my Dad was a psychological genius. This was exactly what I, personally, needed to hear in order to trigger the thought, "Wait a minute.. these are social SKILLS... I should be able to learn them" And I could, and I did. A few years after that I asked myself, "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?" I got working on that... and I succeeded again
  • gandalfgreybeer 4y ago
    I don’t know what the point of this comment is. I guess you’re at least happy. Can you elaborate on how being happy is a skill?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• thorin 4y ago
  Smart people (and specifically smart technical people) are always looking for problems with a view to solving them. That was the case with me, for example. People with lots of problems are generally less happy! I've approached this more recently, after unpleasant circumstances, by investigating meditation, Buddhism, fitness and relationship management and generally just having more "fun". Works for me.
• eternalban 4y ago
  Perceptions of reality & self are (imo) more strongly correlated with character rather than intelligence level.
• knaik94 4y ago
  This seem to fit with a related idea I have been thinking a lot about. What the relationship between having potential when you're young means in terms of how much success you will reach when you're older. And where does passion fit in this picture. If smart people end up being able to find their passion, are they more successful and does that lead to more happiness? Or is the hedonic treadmill inescapable.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  Because the two have nothing to do with each other.
• _8j50 4y ago
  My simple non-blogpost answer to the headline is: they lack wisdom. Being smart and knowing how to make smart decisions are different. Being smart is the sword. Wisdom is swordmanship.
• rafaelero 4y ago
  Well, smart people are wealthier and we know that income and happiness follow a logarithmic linear curve. Maybe these research are over adjusting (controlling for income) and therefore are unable to find the true effect.
• throw__away7391 4y ago
  I have noticed that a lot of/majority of "regular people" tend to coast along on the back of others as a way of life. If "smart people" are perceived by friends and family as being problem solvers, many will route their problems to a "smart friend", someone who seems to have their life somewhat in order or always have the answer to everything. I used to get an endless stream of requests for everything from technical help, legal/financial advice, help planning vacation, help making decisions on purchases, career advice and help fixing their "failed to launch" kids, really often far exceeding simply asking for an opinion, folks effectively transfer ownership of their problems to you for you to fix. Of course they may praise you for this and perhaps you get addicted to this positive feedback, but it comes at a high cost, especially as you can end up spending so much effort on "friends" that you neglect to solve or even recognize your own problems. I have come to realize recently that I don't actually have any friends, only dependents. Declining to take ownership of people's problems caused basically all of them to more or less cut off contact with me (maybe I get a text once a year or something), but I am so much happier now that I ever was before.
  • Phileosopher 4y ago
    In some ways, I have to disagree partly. Each person is responsible to solve their own problems, but I see intelligence as a type of "strength". A 30-year-old is far stronger than a 75-year-old, so it's nearly a moral duty to help them get a fridge through their door (provided, of course, that the older person isn't being a jerk about it). In the same way, a tech-savvy smart person should help a less-than-gifted person with things like setting up their email or figuring out an ideal flow system for their small business. Granted, this must all be driven by love for people. Without that, it's worse than just pushing them away.
  • thankful69 4y ago
    Yup, is about learning to say "no".
    • sudhirj 4y ago
      Which is itself an excellent non-well-defined problem people need to learn to solve.
• antonymy 4y ago
  >In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems. >Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. I wish the article went a bit deeper into analyzing the structural flaws of intelligence tests, because I think this is also an answer to why some people do poorly in school, yet seem to do very well in life overall (materially and emotionally speaking). The ability to find happiness is something worth teaching to people, if it can be taught. I honestly don't know if it can be. Certainly the ancients believed a good, moral life could be achieved through instruction, as the sheer number of writings on that topic they left behind clearly indicate, but then they also had a lot of curious ideas about the nature of reality as we know it. I think it's definitely worth considering reordering the priority of our education toward "poorly defined" questions, at least in part. The real difficulty will be finding people "qualified" to teach these "lessons".
• ChicagoDave 4y ago
  Maybe it’s capitalism. The constant struggle to pay for basic needs distracts us from truly being happy. Also our ability to locate and live among the people with which we’d be most successful and happy.
• holyknight 4y ago
  I don't know why you assume in the first place that intelligence correlates at all with happiness or unhappiness. There's no adequate proof for any of those asumptions.
• jvanderbot 4y ago
  Potentially controversial take: Unhappiness and intelligence are both correlated with deep rumination. Deep rumination over negative things is a hallmark of depression, and deep rumination over a hard problem is a hallmark of intelligence. I suspect the "deep rumination" instinct can go astray, causing deep-set unhappiness.
• alexashka 4y ago
  The author says: > So smarter people are happier, right? Well, this meta-analysis says no. The linked meta analysis says: > At the macro-level, we assessed the correlation between average IQ and average happiness in 143 nations and found a strong positive relationship. ... As for the 'IQ poorly measures solving ineffable, poorly defined problems' - sure. IQ is however strongly correlated with how much money people make. If making a living over decades in a fast changing world isn't a poorly defined problem, I don't know what is.
• ramesh31 4y ago
  Smart people understand that “happiness” is not the point of life, and thus do not seek it out as much. I could move to Hawaii, teach surf lessons, live in a shack, and smoke weed all day. That would probably make me “happy”. But what the hell is the point?
  • amai 4y ago
    You are right. Instead of happyness better strive for usefulness. It makes one more happy when you know your work, your life, your comment on HN or your existance is/was useful for something or someone.
• danschumann 4y ago
  To be happy, you must define something as a source of happiness. Smart people might be more nuanced or finnicky about actually making such a determination.
• cryptozeus 4y ago
  Happiness has nothing to do with IQ. (Didn’t read the article but its very clear)
• knorker 4y ago
  Why is your assumption that they would be? I think the author is skipping a step in their logic. Happiness doesn't come from succeeding in your goals. This seems childishly naive, like "if only I got that promotion then I'd be happy". "If only I had a better car then I'd be happy". No… you wouldn't. The author's thesis that (tl;dr) "IQ tests only measure ability to pass IQ tests" completely disregards just about all research on the topic of intelligence and success, and the actual correlation between success in poorly defined problems and IQ tests. It's not that "IQ test scoring" defines an intelligence scale. It's that it's strongly correlated with success. So whatever intelligence is, IQ tests are strongly correlated with it. But success, or intelligence, is not happiness. A person with Down's syndrome can be very happy, but there is no "therefore is more intelligent than the Mensa member successfully running a multinational conglomerate" or the next Einstein, even if they are happier. So this article is not "A new way to think about brainpower", but an old and tired disproved one.
• dieselgate 4y ago
  Don’t have too many comments on the article but the headline makes me think of an Andrew bird line “if you cried when you were born, cus it’s not fair”
• adamc 4y ago
  Still digesting this, but part of what makes some of the smartest people smart is the ability to find an interesting, well-defined, problem in a vague question. Great mathematicians don't just solve such problems, they help formulate them. All of which is an aside -- I doubt it has bearing on finding happiness. It's more a critique of the way the paper wants to frame the problem.
• supercanuck 4y ago
  Ignorance is bliss.
• achikin 4y ago
  Because those unhappy people are not really so smart.
• pengaru 4y ago
  This was pretty well illustrated in the novel Flowers For Algernon, an overall excellent read FYI.
• adamc 4y ago
  First, I think the reasonable null hypothesis -- the hypothesis that needs to be disproven if you want to claim something -- is that intelligence is unrelated to happiness. That's the weakest, most natural assumption. So I don't really buy the framing of the article. Specifically, I don't think there is any evidence that happiness comes from having "solved" problems in your life. It is well-known that winning the lottery doesn't change happiness -- you get happier for a short period, but then people seem to re-normalize to the new wealth level. Other changes in life circumstances seem similar. Happiness as a transitory emotion certainly exists. But is happiness as a reportable statistic (like weight or income) meaningful? I think the null hypothesis should be "no". It isn't clear what we are measuring, or what it means in terms of our lives. If I report that I am happy, there is some notion that it is durable and meaningful, but three hours later, I may think about my relationship with my estranged kid and be feeling blue. I don't think "happiness" has any meaning beyond "the emotions I feel this moment", which are inevitably a reflection of "what I have been thinking about in preceding moments". If I am working on an engineering problem and come to a satisfying solution, am I "happier" than I will be when thinking of my ex-wife? As local "emotional weather", it's meaningful. As a reportable statistic, it's garbage.
• kazinator 4y ago
  > Why aren't smart people happier? Old adages sometimes have the answers; in this case "ignorance is bliss".
• magic_hamster 4y ago
  I suppose I'm quite the idiot because for a big portion of the time, I'm happy. In a way, I learned to distance myself from things and people that made me unhappy; this was already a huge step towards happiness. Another thing was to learn to appreciate even the smallest things most people deem insignificant: a ride through town, the way the light breaks through the glass in the shower, an interesting pattern on the sidewalk, listening to the wind through the trees. I am a living being existing in this exact moment in time and space, experiencing life. And apparently, being a happy idiot.
  • lioeters 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_fool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_fool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness_for_Christ#Holy_fool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness_for_Christ#Holy_fo...
• nazgulnarsil 4y ago
  This question generally presupposes a misunderstanding of the physiological purpose and phenomenological experience of happiness. Happiness by its nature is not sustainable. Contentment and well being with a high happiness surface area and a low suffering surface area is sustainable. This does not look very dramatic from the outside, and is poorly captured by many metrics. Neuroticism might be one of the best psychometrics, with most people experiencing only a small decrease over a life time, with some experiencing a very large one.
  • johndhi 4y ago
    Ehh, this feels like mere semantics to me.
  • jyscao 4y ago
    >Neuroticism might be one of the best psychometrics, with most people experiencing only a small decrease over a life time, with some experiencing a very large one. Would you say this is more of a nature or nurture effect? I.e. some people naturally decrease in their neuroticism levels as they mature and most people don't, OR a small percentage of people stabilize their lives and statuses in their respective societies, which presumably leads to a decrease in their neuroticism levels.
    • nazgulnarsil 4y ago
      Don't know. Not aware of any research on it.
• gsibble 4y ago
  High intelligence is highly correlated with personality disorders: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324#:~:text=Those%20with%20high%20IQ%20had,(RR%201.20%20%2D%20223.08).&text=High%20IQ%20was%20associated%20with,(RR%201.84%20%2D%204.33).&text=Findings%20lend%20substantial%20support%20to%20a%20hyper%20brain%2Fhyper%20body%20theory https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961....
• my12pence 4y ago
  This reminds me of a verse in the book of Ecclesiastes. 1:18 "For an abundance of wisdom brings an abundance of frustration, So that whoever increases knowledge increases pain."
• vlark 4y ago
  Because we're surrounded by idiots, that's why./s
  • scarmig 4y ago
    You joke, but when I'm surrounded by "dumb" people, I tend to be much happier than when I'm surrounded by "smart" people. Maybe I'm dumb.
• numbers_guy 4y ago
  For me it is quite simply because I lack the human touch. Due to a multitude of compounding factors I cannot manage to find a soulmate, and life alone is miserable. I don't see how being smart would help in this situation. If anything it makes it harder to connect with someone, because the pool of compatible people is smaller.
  • nemacol 4y ago
    > because the pool of compatible people is smaller. Why?
    • numbers_guy 4y ago
      Because of what is called assortative mating.
  • swinnipeg 4y ago
    I consistently find that people who are unhappy/unsuccessful and also identify as "smart" are generally very good at rationalizing why things don't work out for them in a manner that protects their ego.
    • numbers_guy 4y ago
      To be honest, I do not think I have a big ego. If anything I have very low self esteem.
      • shepherdjerred 4y ago
        I think those two can ironically often go hand-in-hand. You over value your self-importance which gives you ego/arrogance. Yet at the same time that self-importance with self-criticism leads to low self-esteem. I think this is something that I often demonstrate. I feel the need to prove that I'm smart (ego), and I have very high standards for myself (low self-esteem, but it's getting better). I'm not necessarily saying this is you, just that those two traits aren't mutually exclusive.
  • 4y ago
• johndhi 4y ago
  Imo it's a lack of meditation. We think too much and don't balance that with not thinking.
• mkl95 4y ago
  My suspicion is that low birth rates and blazingly fast cultural evolution (is anybody here single and working from home?) have more to do with unhappiness than intelligence / computational ability / etc.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  "Ignorance is bliss" can be be slightly altered to :Stupidity is bliss". Nothing insightful here.
• njharman 4y ago
  The inverse of "ignorance is bliss".
• strangattractor 4y ago
  Who says they aren't happier and why should the two even be connected (correlation vs causation)? For myself - much of the unhappiness I feel is connected to things out of my control. Being smarter will have little or no effect. "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" changed the way I think about happiness a great deal. Smart people know that meta-analysis is often wrong:)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bagol 4y ago
  I think it's because happiness is not about solving problems, but it is about getting what you want.
• starwind 4y ago
  I’ve seen some other studies that say the opposite and I’m generally skeptical of results that come out of the GSS (it’s too easy to data dredge). There’s a decent amount of evidence that IQ positively correlates with happiness. Here’s a study I found real quick: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22998852/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22998852/ Results: Happiness is significantly associated with IQ. Those in the lowest IQ range (70-99) reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with the highest IQ group (120-129). Mediation analysis using the continuous IQ variable found dependency in activities of daily living, income, health and neurotic symptoms were strong mediators of the relationship, as they reduced the association between happiness and IQ by 50%. There’s also evidence that IQ correlates with education, income, number of friends, lifespan, having a successful marriage, and having the desired number of children you desire (in case that’s not clear here’s an example: if you want 2 kids, it’s more likely you end up with 2 kids the higher your IQ). All that surely plays into happiness Disclaimer: Individual results may vary
  • M3L0NM4N 4y ago
    This sounds pretty intuitive, that smarter people should have better lives in general.
    • lostboomerang 4y ago
      Why? I'd think the opposite. Smart people will on average probably be better of financially, but that doesn't transfer directly to happiness. A characteristic of "smart people" is the ability to identify and solve problems across a range of domains. That works well when the problem is some programming task, drawing a new house, gathering data for a report you write or whatever. But what if you identify problems you cannot solve? E.g. a smart person might realize, that the "American democracy" is fundamentally broken, but there's no way to solve this (vote all you want, the top of both parties gets their way anyway, so unless you're 100% aligned with Pelosi or Trump you're shafted). A smart person will identify the challenges their children have and will try to solve it by choosing the right school, but will fret forever that it wasn't the right choice. A not-so-smart person will believe, that as long as his party wins the next election everything will be better. A not-so-smart person will send their children to the default school for the district where they live. So a smart person will every day identify problems there are out of their realm to solve. They know their actions only have very limited - and perhaps even detrimental - impact on solving these things. All the while the not-so-smart people goes with the flow, doesn't worry too much, because they don't realize there was a problem to begin with. (I'm doing "averages" here. Of course a not-so-smart and poor person might be acutely aware of their dire financial situation which reflects negatively on their happiness, but at least they're being told they have the power to change that)
• xnx 4y ago
  There's probably a IQ Bell Curve / Midwit meme distribution to "smart" and "happy".
• hinkley 4y ago
  We often equate success with problem solving. I think people underestimate how much and how often worry plays a role in problem solving. We lionize the people who win the lottery by realizing that chocolate and peanut butter taste great together, but most of the rest is a slog, overcoming adversity and pushing through internal and external resistance. We don’t seem to connect that there are reasons things advance so much during wartime. More worry, less resistance. Driven people aren’t happy. Sometimes they aren’t even sad. They’re just driven. How are you going to fix problems if you look around and see no problems?
• renewiltord 4y ago
  One model we could use is the hedonic treadmill plus normal distribution of baseline happiness across IQ. That would lead to uncorrelated happiness vs. IQ. But I think I find that second assumption hard to justify. Thanks for the thought pattern about "well-defined" vs. "ill-defined" intelligences.
• wizofaus 4y ago
  Going by the comments quite a few didn't actually read the article fully. Happiness isn't even a particular focus, just that "how to live happily" is an example of a poorly defined problem that is different to the well defined problems "smart" people are good at. It doesn't rule out the possibility that one day such a question might be well-defined and solvable, which is an intriguing thought.
  • powerhour 4y ago
    You don't need to read the article to be triggered by "smart people" articles. It really brings out the anecdotes.
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  Because "smart" is a label people apply to themselves to cope with being jealous of happier people
• xor99 4y ago
  Neurosis
• migro23 4y ago
  Many people conflate hedonistic pleasure with happiness. This is a big mistake that leads to addiction, selfishness and inevitable dissatisfaction. Even happiness as a sustainable state may be an unrealistic or unattainable goal. For me the answer to this puzzle is a finely tuned balance between self growth and contentment with perhaps a heavier emphasis on contentment. Regular and consistent periods of reflection and appreciation for what you have (no matter how small) is the recipe for promoting states of contentment. Pleasure is ephemeral, happiness comes and goes but contentment can be reliably and directly cultivated.
  • dmerrick 4y ago
    Beautifully put
  • bobsmooth 4y ago
    I disagree, hedonism is underrated.
    • migro23 4y ago
      Some elaboration on your opinion would provide a greater contribution to the discussion. As an aside however, 'Henry' in Oscar Wilde's A Picture of Dorian Gray provided the most beautiful and articulate defence of hedonism I have ever read. But I am still convinced that in relation to the project of the promotion of ones long-term well-being hedonism is a philosophical and psychological dead-end. In my own experience the more I satiated my hedonistic desires the more I wanted and the less pleasure I attained from doing so. Furthermore it promoted a sense of selfishness in me that made the experience of living less fulfilling. Couple that with my own observations working in a variety of medical settings encountering a wide range of people from all walks of life. Without exception I noticed that the people who were selfish were unhappy and the people who were the most selfish were the most unhappy (correlation not causation I know but pertinent none the less). Generally the people who were most concerned about others well-being were gifted with a light and pleasant demeanour that gave me the strong impression that they were experiencing life in an altogether different (and to my eye more desirable) way than those that were selfish. And the pattern running through all of that was that selfish people were always unhappy with what they had or what they were given, invariably showed little or no appreciation for anything. Selfless people were always appreciative of everything and anything. The above is anecdotal but from my prospective not inconsequential. And for me at least, intentionally practising appreciation, when I manage to do so, never fails to have a positive impact on how I feel in the world. Just my two cents.
• Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  It's the little things for me, sitting out back of my house, looking over the garden at this time of year, and chilling out with a cold brew from Stoneman brewery in upstate MA. I wouldn't trade it for a million bucks.
• daniel-cussen 4y ago
  To me, happiness equals headphones. If I have nice headphones, with nice audio, meaning can listen to the song I want to listen to whenever I want, I'm happy. Headphones are the most direct path to happiness for me. It's like I'm happy if and only if I have good audio. But beyond good audio, I have ambitions that don't have anything to do with having good audio. In fact I reject happiness, I find it a weakness to pursue it, it's the easy way out.
• mikkergp 4y ago
  People seem to conflate "intelligence" and like "all good qualities/effective goodness". I suspect that that's partially because that was a goal of a search for general intelligence, and partially because intelligence (or lack thereof) is a primary way people have marginalized people, but maybe intelligence is not correlated with "all the things" maybe it's just sort of a neutral factor that may or may not be as important as things like creativity, or empathy or discipline or having good vision or whatever. Why instead of empathy do we talk about "emotional intelligence" why instead of artistic or musical do we have spacial intelligence or musical intelligence. You're not a dancer, you have Z"Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence" I prefer the idea that not everyone has to be intelligent, or that intelligence is not in fact correlated with "goodness" or "selfesteem" because it makes understanding people like Elon Musk a lot easier. It also makes understanding the self a lot easier when in fact strengths in one area do not correlate to strengths in another area.
• hbrn 4y ago
  If consider yourself one of those people who are smart, but not happy, ask yourself these questions: Would you sacrifice a portion of your intelligence for an equal (whatever that might mean) portion of happiness? There are people that you would consider very dumb and very happy, do you desire to swap places with them? And finally, would you sacrifice all of your intelligence for eternal bliss? If the answer is no to all, then you simply don't value happiness that much, which is totally fine. Society/culture might force you to think that happiness is the ultimate goal, but you don't have to accept that. YMMV, but what worked for me is accepting happiness as a resource, same as food or sleep. You don't need too much of it, just enough be healthy and get through without dying.
  • nonameiguess 4y ago
    I wish this view would gain more currency in the zeitgeist. Who do we grow up idolizing? I can't speak for everyone. Maybe somebody grows up looking at a Bob Ross or Tommy Chong or someone who seems to be happy all the time and thinks that is what they want to be. Not me. I was watching someone like Michael Jordan win over and over again, dominate competition, achieve at the top of his field. Did it make him happy? As far as I could tell, no, but so what? Happiness is incidental to your personal temperament, not the point in itself. The point is to win. Set goals and achieve those goals. Maybe it's a nice afterthought if achieving those goals makes you happy, but just achieving the goals at all is the objective of your actions. It's at best orthogonal and maybe even counterproductive to the extent that being too happy risks making you less driven. The world's greatest winners all seem to hate losing more than they enjoy winning. Is this really supposed to be a bad thing? The humans in WALL-E all seem pretty happy. The central premise of Brave New World is everyone is happy. Yet these are seen as dystopias. Why? Clearly, humans value other things more than happiness, and these other values have driven us to dominate the world and build civilizations. So why does so much of our self-actualization literature seem to assume happiness is some kind of supreme value and the ultimate goal of all other action? It isn't.
    • hbrn 4y ago
      Evolution seems to explain most of it. There's humanity as species, where decision making process is quite primitive, hormones drive most of it. And then there's humanity as civilization, where decisions are supposedly driven by culture and obtained knowledge. For millions of years hormones were the only tool for decision making and evolution was the only tool at our disposal for progress. But now those two are at conflict, and the winner is clear. We are way past those times where evolution has any noticeable effect on our species. More has changed for humanity in the last 100 years than in 50,000 years somewhere in the middle of our history. With this mindset, treating happiness as the ultimate goal seems ancient and barbaric. We're not cavemen anymore, it's no longer cool. That said, it does give an easy meaning to those who can't choose the meaning themselves. If you don't have any purpose in life, happiness is the inherited factory default setting. I decided I don't want to be a boring human being with factory default settings. I'd rather be wrong than boring.
• soheil 4y ago
  > We sometimes condescendingly refer to this kind of wisdom as “folksy” or “homespun,” as if answering multiple-choice questions is real intelligence, and living a good, full life is just some down-home, gee-whiz, cutesy thing that little old ladies do. I'm not going to address the condescending tone, but is it possible that for the grandma what otherwise seems like a poorly defined problem is actually pretty well defined because of exposure and the experience that comes from living a long life?
• borroka 4y ago
  This is a question I have been giving some thought to. I am certainly not a genius, and I have known many people smarter than I am, but I have cognitive abilities above the average of the population and of my social circle. But we associate and measure intelligence (think g) with respect, broadly speaking, to abstract problem solving; it is mathematical ability, logical thinking, shape rotation, vocabulary, working memory. In fact, for people who are "smart," but not in the sense we normally associate with that term (e.g., typically not good at math), we use "street smarts." Picasso, who was an artistic genius, is not defined as "intelligent," and we don't say, "Picasso was an artist, why wasn't he happy (assuming he wasn't)? The idea is that happiness and cognitive ability live in the same space, but why should that be true? All of us have seen many people with low IQs happy, cheerful, satisfied. We might think it's because they don't understand much, and we'd be approaching an important insight. Why are we surprised that smart people are not as happy as we think they should be (which is not true, as far as the literature tells us), but not that smart people are not more physically fit (if you are so smart, you can't lift weights three times a week on a rational program, can't you use your brain to eat moderately and be satisfied with 2k calories instead of 5k), and not that smart people don't get laid as much as we think they should, since that should be a positively selected trait?
• purplepatrick 4y ago
  Appreciate many of the points made in there. However, I still don’t see why intelligence should make one happier, and why when we don’t observe that in data it should be worth mentioning. I grew up in a culture that did not talk about being happy or cared about objectifying happiness in any way. In fact, we don’t even have good words for it that would be separate from other notions. Growing up, I only ever experienced people talking about if they were healthy or satisfied or enjoying life. This is a long way of saying that perhaps, it’s not only about calling out the vagueness and ambiguity of “intelligence”, but about considering that the term “happiness” also deserves the same degree of scrutiny. It, too, lacks a clear objective definition and comes with a lot of subjective and cultural ambiguity. Maybe asking why one ambiguous undefinable thing doesn’t cause or correlate with another ambiguous undefinable thing is a futile statistical exercise to begin with?
• koz_ 4y ago
  Smart people are just as given as anybody to the idea that happiness is about controlling outcomes, hence they are no happier. The desire to control outcomes is correlated with unhappiness because that very desire is predicated on the belief that happiness is a small target - if one would be happy with any outcome then there'd be no need to control which one eventuates. Put another way: happy people aren't the ones who win every game of chess, happy people just like playing chess. Another aspect of this is that smart people - people good at solving well-defined problems - tend to see well-defined problems everywhere, tend to try and reduce things to well-defined problems, so that they can apply their unique gifts. This manifests as an apparent discomfort with ambiguity, which poses a problem, because comfort with, or at least an openness to, ambiguity is a prerequisite for happiness. The analytical mind is quick to label things and categorise them, including whether they are good or bad, but I find that happiness is more about refraining from applying such labels to things. It's like with dealing with an incident. The unhappy say "the website is down, this is terrible", whereas the happy merely say "the website is down".
• _tom_ 4y ago
  Because IQ is not emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence does lead to being happier.
• odd_chimera_out 4y ago
  A simple answer. Stupid people.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• BroadbandSurfer 4y ago
  Because we can tell whats going to happen sooner or later and don't get all giggly when some bimbo on tv or politician says the world will be a Utopia where we get rich by being cool people and all have playboy models in bed with us. When Gas and technology prices skyrocket and people find it entertaining, then nothing good is on its way. RaspberryPi had to hike up prices for the first time ever but you think awesome and quality made battery powered vehicles are just around the corner and with and afforable enough for the majority? Hell if I know, Right now is the best time to focus on personal lives and relationships or all this mass bs will never let you be happy... None of it matters for us..
• OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
  There is a type of problem called a Bongard problem, where participants are required to find the rule distinguishing images on the left from images on the right. There is an index of Bongard problems (and a nice explanation) here [1] Bp's skirt the line betwen well defined and ill defined questions: there is no general rule you can follow to always solve it, but the answer can be trivially checked. I'm sure there is data on whether the ability to solve BPs is correlated with IQ, I assume so. It would be interesting if it was not, or only weakly. [1] https://www.foundalis.com/res/diss_research.html https://www.foundalis.com/res/diss_research.html
• illuminant 2y ago
  They know social conventions are propped up by bullshit, and some are smart because they're allergic to exactly that.
• phs318u 2y ago
  Because happiness is orthogonal to intelligence.