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The journal article cited for this indicates not that smart people are happier with smart friends, but that "More intelligent individuals actually experienced higher life satisfaction with lower frequency of contact with friends." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26847844

A lot of the meta-articles seem to be hypothesizing that intelligence could be an evolutionary adaptation for dealing with novel circumstances, and intelligent people are therefore driven to attack these challenges -- thus making them unhappy when they are distracted.

This meshes with my experience -- while I certainly enjoy my highly intelligent friends, I have not developed time-consuming relationships with them, because we are often focused on our own particular highly specific challenges.

The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. If stimulating friends make you happy, and the average friend is less than stimulating, then spending more time with your friends may make you unhappier.

I would love to hang out with people who are directly mentally stimulating but even people who are less stimulating could be good friends if the activities are productive. (Contributing to physical and mental health, confidence, sustainable self-induced highs, etc.)

> More intelligent individuals actually experienced higher life satisfaction with lower frequency of contact with friends

Does the article imply causation or just correlation? If the latter, I would assume the causation is the opposite - happier people need other people less, because they're happier even by themselves.

this. if a person cannot be happy on their own, with only their body and mind present, then I believe they are not really truly happy. quite a few people I know claim happiness, very few actually are.

I don't mean flashes of happiness caused which happen in everyone's life, but stable, balanced feel that gets cannot be easily disrupted and rather quickly returns back.

> Do you have any advice for generalists in need of smart friends?

I'm a generalist in need of smart friends too :(. That said, I've had some success with helping to create (and now running) a local hackerspace - most people who hang out at such places are usually pretty smart, so you have one half of your criterion met. So maybe check out if there's a hackerspace in your town, and go see what kind of people come to it?

Also, a big reason why I'm hanging out on HN is because I get the chance to read (and sometimes even engage with) smart people with broad areas of expertise :).

Don't limit yourself to "intellectually stimulating". Lots of people have something to teach us about life if we open ourselves to them and go beyond "specialist, PhD etc.".

I agree with this. Everyone has something unique to offer, and not everyone enjoys philosophizing over "deep" conversation topics. (Although I will admit it can get annoying at times when someone spends ten minutes listing all the coupons they clipped from this week's Kroger advertisement...)

>and not everyone enjoys philosophizing over "deep" conversation topics.

Then what are you agreeing with? The GP is specifically looking for people that do. If he/she didn't want intelligent conversations, he/she wouldn't have complained about not being able to find intelligent friends.

I can't stand either of those kind of topics, fwiw. Intelligent conversation doesn't necessarily involve having opinionated debates about arm chair hypotheticals.

Exactly, my favourite types of conversation are usually about some specific thing that is not necessarily "deep" at all, be it a programming language feature or the troubled life of some historical character, or the reasons behind the prevalence of some observed phenomenon (like the colour spectrums of movie posters, say). When discussing something fairly simple with an intelligent generalist, it's usually really stimulating not because they have some deeper perspective, but because you get carried away and stumble upon new ideas and crazy thoughts that you would never have come across on your own. Discussing philosophy proper is usually quite boring and not stimulating at all - that's what you have books for imo.

The thing is... I have to find something interesting about folks and the activities going on to even be motivated to keep up interaction. I need something to be curious about. I can learn a lot about life by reading and random conversations with random folks. This is one of the greatest things about being an immigrant in language courses, and one of the reasons I'll do another solo trip to Amsterdam - people open up in coffee shops (though I understand that is partially because I'm female).

That all said, poplular culture often remains strange and unusual to me, along with the things people do with their time and the things people seem to like to talk about. I once googled who the Kardashians were because it came up in small talk and folks wouldn't believe that I quit watching television (outside of the random show). I watch conspiracy theories for fun while working on artwork, which is also incredibly boring for a great deal of folks to talk about. I don't have the formal education to keep up with some topics - for example, I read HN mostly because I think it is important to know some stuff about these sorts of topics and because I have great hope in technology, but not because I'm personally involved (and I learn quite a bit, thank you every random one of you).

I really wish it were as simple as you say, but forming anything long-lasting with some of this stuff has proven to be a futile thing. I'll take the random friends I wind up getting and be happy with that.

To start with, Put contact info in your hacker news profile. Then when you say interesting things, folks who are a bit more shy can contact you directly. Also reach out to those who interest you. Who knows, some of these brilliant generalists might have time to chat.

having contacts online isn't really the same thing as a "friend", right?

Friendships don't materialize out of thin air, you have to start somewhere. If you would like to become friends with people on HN, posting contact info in your profile sounds like a good place to start.

There's no reason a single email can't turn into a solid long term friendship if things click. Some of my closest friends live across the country from me after meeting online.

I met half a dozen very good IRL friends first through online discussion (though not on HN).

The thing about talking to people online is that you can use the medium to agree to meet up in person as well.

I found that going to talks and events to meet people can be extremely effective. I love living near a university, for example, to go to public colloquia and talks — you meet the most interesting people there, who often share the same interests as you. Going to a Papers We Love talk [0] can be a great opportunity as well.

Of course, this is really only available to people who live in a large metropolis, particularily if you live in the Bay Area (if you're interested in science and technology in particular).

[0] http://paperswelove.org

Such a simple thing, yet it hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for mentioning it.

> I've been trying desperately for years to make some intellectually stimulating friendships, and it's quite difficult.

It used to be easy, until Google killed the social aspect of Google Reader.

I will forever remain bitter about this.

NewsBlur doesn't have as large of a community as Reader did, but it has similar social features and I find that comments are generally high-quality. I recommend checking it out if you haven't found a good replacement for Reader yet.

(Suggested as someone who was similarly disappointed at the death of Reader. I tried a couple of alternatives but eventually settled on NewsBlur.)

I use NewBlur but never tried the social features. How does this community work for you?

I pretty much just use it as an RSS reader, but that's how I used Reader back in the day. Sometimes I do read the comments left by users though. I've experimented with using the "Blurblog" for sharing, but I generally prefer using G+ for social.

NewsBlur is good, as are its community members, and I'm happy to be a paying customer. However, the difference in community size is certainly notable. Similarly, only three of my friends making the jump, out of two dozen. We practically never have discussions about anything again.

I think I'm their main source of social shares now, tbh.

I could have written this comment above. One of the problems lies in the fact that "smart" means different things to different people. Firstly, it usually seems to take on the meaning of hard-science smart and, with that, one often finds specialists. I live in a city where every other person I meet literaly has a PhD (or two) but what am I going to talk about with them regarding particle physics or string theory?

If I were to call myself smart, I'd say I'm humanities smart, ie a generalist, ie utterly and insatiably curious. How many others in life have I met like me? Maybe one. That's it, and he's a DN so I don't get to see him much.

We also have to factor in lifestyle. I'm a VA and thus I've moved many times in my life so this doesn't help with the situation. For the last decade, I've accepted way less pay and less hours so that I can have the free time necessary to learn all the things I want to learn - long-term goals, if you will. As a trade-off (and I gladly do it), I live abroad because that's when quality of life goes way up and cost of living goes way down (most of the non-native English speaking world already lives this way, IMO).

In the end, I'm curious enough to take up my own free time, but since I'm also not a shut-in, I seek out ways to socialize with interesting people. The kicker is that most of them are travelers/expats, so they move too.

Recently I met a guy who is both nice and available (even though he moved away the other day), so we'd hang out quite a lot. He didn't have to share my interests or be a generalist or anything. He just had to be agreeable and available, and this surprised me a bit, though I'm not sure why. Not be an a-hole and say "I'm free, let's do something" can be a powerful motivator.

Always looking for interesting intelligent people, check my profile out and see if you think I might be interesting

Sounds like you might be interesting :)

Thanks. I actually added contact info in there this time. Whoops.

You have inspired me to fill in more profile information.

Don't forget contact info, which I just realized I neglected to insert in my own lol

You could also add your location, for people interested in meeting you in real life.

Good point. Added.

I have definitely experienced this, but till now hadn't had the words to describe it. Thank you stranger!

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