The Trouble with High IQ | Hacker News Reader

The Trouble with High IQ

neurosciencenews.com

56 pointsamelius58 comments

Neuroskeptic is, unsurprisingly, skeptical: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/in...

Secondly, I have concerns about the sample. This wasn’t a study of high-IQ people. It was a study of Mensans, a self-selected subgroup of high-IQ people. 6.5 million Americans fall in the top 2% of IQ, and only 55,000 of them are members of American Mensa.

In other words, Mensans make up about 0.8% of high-IQs, and Karpinski et al. have data from less than 10% of Mensans, so the sample is seriously unrepresentative.

The ‘national average’ comparison data, however, were taken from nationally representative American samples. The age, gender, and ethnic demographics of the Mensa respondants differ considerably from the national average.

Even if we take the results of this study at face value, the ‘hyper-brain/hyper-body’ theory is rather horribly simplistic. It reminds me of ancient Greek humorism, or 19th century neurology’s talk of ‘nervous excitement’. The brain is not a gland that just pumps excitement when aroused.

It may well be that higher anxiety people are more likely to join Mensa.

I'd honestly be surprised if there weren't a correlation between distressed/disordered thinking of some kind and joining Mensa.

That sounds counterintuitive to me. "People with anxiety are more likely to join a community."

Not really, people with anxiety are often looking for self-validation and self-affirmation. Joining a community that screams "we're more intelligent than 99% of the population" sounds like a fair way to go with that anxiety.

You would be amazed in this instance. Mensa has a reputation for being very 'superior', very 'elitist', and that's the type of organization that is more likely to attract the more typically anxious or neurotic personalities.

Why? Communities allow people to work together to deal with shared problems -- like anxiety or not fitting in elsewhere.

Ehh, as someone with anxiety, it’s not that straightforward. Maybe you join it to socialize and improve your self esteem.

Granted, the members I know just really like puzzles.

>Secondly, I have concerns about the sample. This wasn’t a study of high-IQ people. It was a study of Mensans, a self-selected subgroup of high-IQ people

Sounds like a BS reason to dismiss the findings.

Any reason to believe that this "self-selection" has any impact on the people involved regarding "regular" non-mensa high IQ people?

>In other words, Mensans make up about 0.8% of high-IQs, and Karpinski et al. have data from less than 10% of Mensans, so the sample is seriously unrepresentative.

Again, BS.

0.08% can still be a perfectly valid sample.

The only valid reason to dismiss it would be not its size, but whether Mensans are for some reason widely non-representative of hi-iq people at large.

No, the "methodology" of using a very self-selected group to represent the whole is certainly and unambiguously complete methodological bullshit. The problem is known as "confounding variables" or "common latent cause". For example, people with anxiety and depression may be more likely to join a club like Mensa.

There's certainly interesting questions to explore here, but we shouldn't settle for this extremely weak sort of study. The authors are doing the best they can, but we should take this paper as a indication that further research in this area would be fruitful, not as an accurate measurement of the nature of reality.

>For example, people with anxiety and depression may be more likely to join a club like Mensa.

I already covered that though -- and said that if there was a reason to suspect a problem with the selection, then that would be an argument (and would have to be explicitly brought forth as such).

Alone that Mensa is a small subset of the high IQ population (as was put forth) is not.

> Any reason to believe that this "self-selection" has any impact on the people involved regarding "regular" non-mensa high IQ people?

Insecure people could prefer to counter their insecurity by hard to obtain status symbols such as Mensa membership.

Mensa members are a small subpopulation of Americans with high IQ, so it's a stretch to conclude that high IQ is the problem. To me it's more plausible that someone seeking to boost self-esteem and social status by joining a weird organization tends to be a more troubled person than intelligent people in general.

Good point.

Waiting for the follow up study that a low IQ and medium-IQ are also correlated with having problems.

It may only be a coincidence, but I do have high IQ and exactly the kinds of problems they mention in the article. I'm not American or a member of Mensa. I have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and inflamatory reactions to certain foods. I also have high anxiety. Strong emotions or stress can be overwhelming enough to give me gastritis or even ulcers sometimes.

Welcome to the human race. We all feel that way at times I would tend to believe.

I’ll second this. I have the same as you - autoimmune issues that cause hypothyroidism. Stress and anxiety that debilitates me at times. Not American, not Mensa too.

Just anecdotal but at least there’s two of us :)

Perhaps more appropriately "the trouble with Mensa members." A study consisting only of Mensa members might not generalize to all people with IQ >130. There are two things needed to get into Mensa: 1) a high test score on a qualifying test, and the important 2) some reason why it is worth it to pay $70 per year to be a member.

Reason 2) is why I think that these results might not generalize. Many people join Mensa for the narcissistic reason of being able to say that they are in Mensa. I'll bet that narcissism has a larger impact on anxiety disorders. Mensa is not representative of the general population of smart people when it comes to narcissism. Obligatory note: there are other reasons to join Mensa, such as the networking aspect of meeting other smart people.

There are tons of really smart people that have high test scores (or never bothered to take an IQ test) that are well adjusted and get by just fine in their life. They demonstrate their genius in their actions, not by their words.

They should have concluded that people with anxiety disorder more likely to join Mensa.

Would give this study a fresh angle, wouldn't it?

A possibility: People with high IQs notice patterns (with a higher fidelity) that are not noticed by people with lower IQs.

Thinking in terms of a bell-curve probabilistic distribution: If there is a baseline cultural perception (reality, narrative) shared by the majority of people, those with high IQs will notice the degenerate patterns, hypocrisies, and general systemic issues with the baseline.

One would need to live with these forces out of one's control. There are many strategies. Some involve exploiting information asymmetries, some involve creating a worldview (i.e. ethics, facts) that justifies these issues, some involve taking actions to improve the conditions of the individual & collective.

If one creates a personal worldview that is full of contradictions & unresolved paradoxes, then anxiety occurs.

This.

How valid is studying Mensa to get a representative cross section of intelligent people? I would wager many on this site are intelligent enough to qualify for Mensa, but why would they join? Most will be sufficiently surrounded by intelligent people in their day-to-day life to be stimulated. I wouldn’t be surprised if the membership of a selective club for clever people is most sought after by people missing something from their lives.

I can second this. I have met a few Mensans who said I should join, and I think I would qualify, but I just don't feel that interested in it (though it might be a good way to get some more community in my life). I too think people who would bother to enter Mensa probably think or feel a bit differently in a way which would affect a survey like this.

> Most will be sufficiently surrounded by intelligent people in their day-to-day life to be stimulated.

Totally independent of the discussion of Mensa, I'm somewhat sceptical of that claim.

Overexcitability is a known concept in the gifted education community but it does not usually imply disorders.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexcitability

A critical analysis of the research used in the article is worth reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/in...

The usual disclaimer is in order. Remember that just because A causes B, that doesn't mean that if you have B then you necessarily have A.

We haven't even gotten to evidence of causality yet.

increased instability at higher functions than normal?

...sounds like typical overclocking issues.

Reaction time correlates strongly with g factor.

My children have had their IQs tested with scores >= 150. This was a requirement for the private schools that we applied them to, it wasn't something we were particularly interested in scoring.

One thing we've learned about high IQ children is that many experience asynchronous development, meaning that some parts of their development are much faster than others, which could actually be delayed. Things like emotional immaturity, oversensitivity, etc are usual behavior traits of children with high IQs.

The private schools for gifted children are the ones that cater to those children with Social Emotional Learning (SEL). They focus on the emotional side of development as opposed to purely academic, and so far so good. I've met quite a few private-school grads from the Bay Area, and the last thing I want to raise are unhappy, anxiety-ridden children after spending tens of thousands of dollars a year. I've met quite a few adults who very much seem to be emotionally damaged from their private school experiences at places that seem to give detention for things like not tying your shoelaces, etc.

Focusing early on children's emotional needs and development early will I hope help them not be filled with anxiety, unhappiness, self-doubt, etc.

If you knowingly put your kids in a school for the gifted, didn't you expect them to evaluate their giftedness?

Where did I say I didn't expect them to be evaluated?

Do these schools differ from the top tier private schools in the Northeast (Andover, Exeter) or are they just the West Coast equivalents?

Unfortunately I don't know anything about the schools outside of the Bay Area.

The trouble with this study - if I should guess - is selection bias: How many of those high IQ individuals are actually member of Mensa?

Given some test many years ago, I might have been qualified to become a member of this club - but never tried, as I would like to see people as people and not people as their brains, only. Maybe Mensa selects for those who are anxious about their abilities and find the notion of the club card in some way - soothing.

Of course there is a bias in this study with people in Mensa. There is also an added bias: people tested for IQ (in Europe) are tested because of behaviour issues usually.

the interesting question is imho what do you think (from your experience).

Are you/your friends with high IQ psychological issues? I've read previously that high IQ protects from such trouble

So there is a correlation between having psychological problems to being in Mensa. Since no causation was demonstrated here, not even for the sample in this study, the conclusion is not more than a clickbait.

Terman in 1922 found similar levels of "maladjustment" in a long term study of the gifted. Women are more susceptible, and it increases with both IQ and age. http://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/

"Karpinski and her colleagues developed a hyper brain / hyper body theory of integration. It posits that individuals with high cognitive ability react with an overexcitable emotional and behavioral response to their environment"

This is one of the main characteristic of diagnosed gifted people as it is commonly admitted.

> Each was asked to self-report their experiences of both diagnosed and/or suspected [...] disorders

So who else sees a problem with the methodology here. I mean, it sounds as if the data was collected in a different way than the data it was compared to.

That particular caveat is actually mentioned in the paper:

With the self-report, survey method there is often a risk of selective recollection of data as well as potential over- or under-reporting. However, there are numerous published, peer reviewed articles in highly reputable journals that use a self-report method, including those that use data sets which rely heavily on survey data (e.g., Der, Batty, & Deary, 2009; Wraw et al., 2015; Wrulich et al., 2013). Additionally, empirical research has confirmed that self-reported health ratings are reliable and valid measures of health (Haapanen, Miilunpalo, Pasanen, Oja, & Vuori, 1997; Liang, 1986).

Thanks for the quote.

I am just wondering if '...empirical research has confirmed that self-reported health ratings are reliable...' is still true if you pre-select the individuals to have a high IQ.

Some earlier discussion of this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15501006.

On a tangent, does anyone here have any experience with other high IQ societies like the triple nine society?

Are they any good for networking (especially for people not in the US/Canada)?

I wonder if anyone will point out that limiting their study to Mensa members was a mistake.

Oh wait, that is what most of the comments are saying.

Mistake is harsh. Limitation is better. Finding a.sample given a set of resources can be extremely difficult.

I am above average intelligence and nothing pisses me off more than stupid people (especially stupid people gathering in large numbers). I can withstand nearby gunshots or explosions without emotional stress (I am military), but stupid people proclaiming their awesome wisdom really alters my emotional state.

I had to stop visiting Ars Technica. Their news is great, but I wish I could turn the comments at the bottom completely off. Their comments (really from any news site) are a marvel in the study of stupid people coming together (commonly referred to as an echo chamber).

Speaking for myself, I would feel pretty dumb if I got angry due to echo chamber comments on online articles. Why would you cause stress to yourself after reading vapid comments, when it's not mandatory to scroll to the bottom of the article/fb post and read them?

> Why would you cause stress to yourself after reading vapid comments

I am not a behavioral health researcher, and so cannot answer as to why people get mad at things.

Interesting that you shared this anecdote just now.

I've been an Ars reader for nearly 2 decades and noticed the comment quality drastically declining over the last few years. Used to mostly be people sharing interesting POV and polite discussion, now there seems to be much more policing of a 'pro science and technology' (but often inaccurate) viewpoint.

As a smart person it is unavoidable to be surrounded by people dumber than you.

In general it's not very smart to be angry at unavoidable realities.

One perspective shift I find helps is to not think of myself as normal and others as stupid, but to think of others as normal and myself as extra gifted in this area.

In general it's not very smart to get mad at nearly anything. This isn't a revealing or interesting conclusion.

1Blocker will hide the comments section of most sites. Or, if and when your outlook matures, you’ll find more productive uses for your rage. “Because stupid people...” is the lazy thinker’s way out. To paraphrase Jesus, “the stupid you will always have with you.”

> Or, if and when your outlook matures

My outlook will not change as I am sure you will not mature above anger after being punched in the face. I do not suspect you are objectively considering the behavior.

Getting mad because there are dumb people is like getting upset because rain exists. They're both forces of nature (and ones that you can choose to avoid for the most part).

The same could be said of any cause for getting mad.

Install "Stylish" browser extension and apply any bit of CSS you like to any page you want. You can hide whatever, resize, reshape, recolor.

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