Are night owls generally more intelligent than other people? | Hacker News Reader

Are night owls generally more intelligent than other people?

quora.com

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Good news. What I thought were lousy sleep habits actually mean that my Fields Medal should be turning up any day now.

Paul Erdös quote:

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Erdös attributed that to Renyi.

A more modern variant is "A computer programmer is a device for turning coffee into bugs." -- Bram Moolenaar

drink coffee. create bugs faster. :)

What if i wake up early but work in the dark all day?

Buy a lamp?

There was an article posted to HN some time ago that claimed that being a Night Owl or Morning Lark isn't an intrinsic disposition so much as a lifestyle choice. Does this mean I can choose to stay up later and I'll get more intelligent?

Claim: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm#Lark-owl%20misco...

HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207945

If you're more intelligent, you'll choose to stay up later :)

Anecdotal evidence: I swap between the two, it just takes a creative sleep pattern, I had a strange schedule last year due to the layout of my courses, so some days I'd stay up till 4 sleep till 2, and other's I'd sleep at 11 and wake at 7:30. I guess my IQ last year was sinusoidal.

p -> q does not mean q -> p :)

Interestingly, this post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488225 talked about how morning people rule the worlds.

So the conclusion is - less intelligent people rule the world.

Of course, I always take IQ score with a grain of salt.

Hasn't that always been accepted wisdom (though maybe evoked by the Dunning-Kruger effect)?

"I'll randomly quote something that has been on HN/Slashdot recently, that's sure to get me some points!"

Why randomly? Thinking "our leaders are more stupid than me" seems to be a classic example of Dunning-Kruger?

http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k...

This recent post shot down a lot of things being mistakenly attributed to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Well worth the read, since it actually explains the study in a more comprehensive way, rather than the somewhat sensationalized version most articles have. Essentially, it says that the worst people judge their abilities to be on par with average people, thus grossly overestimating their abilities. The smartest people somewhat underestimate their abilities, but not nearly to the degree that the truly incompetent do.

I must admit, that article is way too long for me atm. Maybe that disqualifies me from posting here, but it also seems to me that the DK effect is more of a "fun fact" than a life changing realization. I have adopted the "I know that I don't know anything" wisdom long ago, and also subscribe to the "all code sucks" theory, so I try to shield myself from (what I think is) the DK effect a little bit.

From what I have seen of history, the most intelligent people (from what we have been able to tell) are never a regular part of the mainstream. They only dabble occasionally.

I don't know about that, Jefferson, Einstein and many of the members of the Royal society was quite involved with politics and society.

Are you saying Jefferson and Einstein are mainstream? That is clearly not the case. Their popularity is, but their actions were from from it. Hell, just LOOK at Einstein!

If this is true, and if the more intelligent people were really much more intelligent, then they would just start waking up earlier.

I interpreted night owl as an actual owl and hilarity ensued. More seriously though I have thought about this issue from an evolutionary perspective and in social animals it makes sense for a certain part of the population to be nocturnally inclined. If everybody wants to sleep at night who's gonna watch the mouth of the cave?

If everybody wants to sleep at night who's gonna watch the mouth of the cave?

Apparently my ancestors.

The more intelligent ones?

Perhaps it takes a bit more "intelligence" to keep one's attention focused for long periods on the kinds of subtle clues that one would first get of danger out in the dark beyond the cave.

And it could be a mutually reinforcing thing, in one direction, the higher IQ provides the right skills to form thoughts that keep the listening-&-watching game interesting longer and that interest gives one personal motivation to stay up. In the other direction, groups who delegated this job to those with higher IQ did better; as those members are better able to tease the right danger signals out of the noises in the dark. I.e. do you want the smart guy or the idiot to watch for the wolves as you sleep? I want someone at least as smart than all the wolves put together.

Personally speaking, I know my most creative schemes (leave aside the question of paranoid or not) for attacking/robbing a house all came as I sat listening to the sequences of noises from outside the house... trying to determine if I needed to use the flashlight or yard lights to confirm/dispel danger, weighing the benefits against giving my attention/position away to anyone who might be out there.

I am not too sure this has a lot of weight:

When I was in college there are far more might owls than early morning risers. Out of a 100 people 80 are probably night owls (some of them might just end up partying the whole time). So there is an inherent bias there, because there are more nightowls than 'early morning risers'. Which leads to the conclusion in a sample of 100 if 10 of them are intelligent: then obviously 8 are night owls. I would personally never judge a person's intelligence on this factor (even though I am a night owl myelf).

When we say "night owl", it is fair to assume we mean someone that would stay awake late into the night without any kind of social stimulation. Nobody will be tired if they're going to a party with tons of people and loud music, but most people will eventually get tired if they are alone. Night Owls usually enjoy the deep solitude and quietness of the night.

"Nobody will be tired if they're going to a party with tons of people and loud music"

I disagree, introverts (like myself and probably others here in HN) find social situations very tiring.

Not necessarily, some find it energizing. In my case (a night owl all my life) it also depends on the social group around me.

Large parties with a bunch of strangers aren't the only form of social situation. When I was in college, I had a mostly regular group of friends that I'd hang around with and chat politics/philosophy/whatever till late in the might. Regularly to 2 AM, sometimes to 4 AM. These days, I spend most of my evenings alone and naturally go to sleep around 12:30 to 1:00 AM if left to my own devices. I'm definitely more of a night-owl and an introvert, but close proximity to friends, as I had in college, I would stay up real late.

I agree. I used to fall asleep on the couch at loud parties in college.

This is related to the earlier submission

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492124

to an article from Psychology Today

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200911/intelligence-...

which seems to assume this as fact, starting:

    Night owls are smarter than other people,
    and now we may know why.

One of the cited sources is Satoshi Kanazawa. I really like Satoshi and he has an excellent blog on Psychology Today.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...

may be they are so bored with the world that they'd rather live apart from it ?

I am a night owl because the evening is the best time to pursue things of personal interest, and when I am on to something really interesting, sleep seems boring and useless in comparison.

Unless I know I have to get up by X hour tomorrow for something important, I will then proceed to stay up until I can't perform physically (e.g. I can't solder because my hands are shaking, or I can't read because my eyelids weigh 50lbs each)

I've been seeing quora show up on HN more and more lately. Seems to be gaining steam.

They have probably started to work at night...

Those studies do seem to indicate so. However, they do not take into account multiple other factors that could make an individual wanting to, consciously or not, become a night owl. The same is true for all a person's preferences, although we don't have enough theoretical nor practical knowledge on the topic. Also, the way they are phrased, particularly the one by Kanazawa and Perina, seem to indicate a causal link between the two states. Correlation does not imply causation. Furthermore, how many studies indicate the opposite point? I'd be interested in a comparison of results.

How unfair to post this so late! (3am EST)

Psh, the night is just barely getting started out here on the West Coast!

Tell me about it. I've been trying to get to sleep by 1am so I can get up and out in the morning to go running before the Scottsdale heat is overly oppressive. But even when I'm physically tired, I just want to stay up and hack on one ... more ... thing.

Would that I had that same drive at 9am. :(

I can believe owls are more intelligent than most people.

Can the stats be like this because generally great engineers can chose their time?

If you stayed up as late as I do, you would already know the answer to that question.

My question: Does forcing oneself to get up early lead to stupidity?

It does for me.

If staying awake is an effort for them, then yes, they generally are going to be more intelligent because they are dedicating more than the rest of the population, on average.

No. Night owls get more time do perfect their skills while others are asleep (no distraction).

It provides a good opportunity to self-censor the more screwy ideas too. Just show people the little program you finished around 2am, and no one need ever know about that 3am idea to revolutionize the world of juggling using hairdryers. Just put everything back where you found it before they get up.

It's works only for amateurs - mature people love to wake up with sunrise and emptiness and clearness of an early morning. ^_^

Why would you want to wake into sunrise and early morning, if you could wait for them?

Yes.

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