Hacker News Reader

Comment by betenoire | Hacker News Reader

But are they happy?

As someone who has been through the CTY program (I was a SET member, having scored above a 700 in math in 7th grade), I can say I've never been happier - I'm well off financially, have a career I greatly enjoy, and for the most part I can enjoy all the activities I have a desire for.

On the flip side, my brother was also a SET member, and there are some contrasts with me - he got his PhD in chemistry at 25 (I never finished my PhD in math) and was accelerated, having gone to college after 10th grade after cutting school for most of the year. He picked working with semiconductors, and that turned out to be a poor career choice. He accomplished much more in academic prestige than me, but his mistake cost him quite a bit financially - he is currently retooling to become a data scientist & is currently interviewing for entry level/junior positions.

You almost suggest your brother isn't as happy as you, but you don't come out and say that. You just mention financial costs.

Do you attribute your happiness do your intelligence? Just curious

I think he's not happy at the moment, especially after working a stint at Samsung as a senior chemical engineer after his post-doc - he is much happier than when he was working there though.

I attribute my happiness a lot to luck that I was able to get a foot in the door into software engineering, then made the most of it with a combination of my intelligence and work ethic. I was in total despair after leaving grad school without a PhD.

Apparently yes. Some people are just more privileged than others.

Insisting that rich people must feel more existential dread than poor people (money can't buy happiness!) and smart people must be more sad than stupid people (ignorance is bliss!) is a classic symptom of just-world fallacy.

Good point. Assuming that was what I was saying is another type of fallacy.

I understand why you'd want to have intelligent kids. All else equal, it is clearly an advantage in some respects.

But personally, I see no correlation between happiness and intelligence (even inversely as you suggest). I just find it peculiar that this collectively interests us. I spend a lot of time as a parent trying to teach my children that personal happiness is independent of what other people tell you about yourself. And here we are telling children how great they are.

I dunno, life is weird :)

I knew of only two SET students when I was in school. Student A you'd never guess was in the program. She went to a small college with only regional recognition, and she currently works as an accountant for a small business. Student B was another childhood friend of mine. Total geek who got me interested in programming when we were 13. He went to MIT for a semester when he was 17, and he returned home suicidal. He graduated from a community college and works at a Texas Roadhouse.

I wouldn't claim to know if either are happy.

I'm in the study and the long-term tracking surveys they send us periodically have many questions designed to ferret out different aspects and indicators of happiness and success in different dimensions of life.

I can't imagine how I could be much happier in life.

I have a great, healthy family, great career in a field that allows me to use my brain to create tons of business value for my company, take home an appropriate fraction of that, all for doing things that I'd pretty much happily do for free if I could afford to do so.

I seem to recall reading general summaries of the survey that suggest that we are, on the whole, happier than the average for our respective age groups, but I don't have any of those report summaries handy nor could I readily find them online.

Thanks for the comment. I have a sincere question for you, if you didn't have a great healthy family, and you had a shitty career or whatever, would you still be happy?

I tend to be fairly optimistic and see the good in even bad situations, so I'd probably OK with even a worse set of circumstances (once that was the steady-state normal).

IOW, if I suddenly lost my wife or we split up, I'd be unhappy as hell for a while. In a counterfactual where I never met her or even ended up single, I'd probably still be happy because I'd shape my world and interpret my world in a way that made me happy. Likewise, a career that paid me the local median wage, I'd probably find a way to be happy.

I don't claim this to be a super-human strength of mine, but just a choice. I have friends and friends-of-friends who seem miserable despite no particularly devastating circumstances. They just choose to focus on the bad rather than the good. I have no idea if that's correlated with anything SMPY-related or not, just one guy's life experience.

Thanks. I relate to what you said.

I was in the top cohort and I'm an Internet supervillain. Or something. You get what you select for, I guess!

Undoubtedly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com