Around the World, People Have Surprisingly Modest Notions of the ‘Ideal’ Life
psychologicalscience.org
psychologicalscience.org
Part of the reason for these "surprising" results is probably the individualistic framing of the question. It makes a difference if only you have unnaturally long life, or if you are part of a family or society that is similarly long-lived. For example, the thought of lingering on after friends and family from my generation have died has no appeal to me.
In general, the implication that it's surprising that people didn't want "happiness" and "life expectancy" as the end goals speaks to assumptions of atomization among the creators of the study. Deep down, I think people want meaning and a sense of narrative structure to their lives, not just chasing after pleasures.
>And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
How was the question structured? I have doubts that most people get the statistics of what it means to be 130 IQ vs 150 IQ, etc.
> Intelligence was assessed by asking, “If you could choose your level of intelligence, what level would you choose?” and referring participants to an IQ diagram, with labels for “moderate disability” (40), “below average intelligence” (70), “average intelligence” (100), “above average intelligence” (130), and “exceptionally gifted” (160). Participants were told, “We would like you to indicate your desired intelligence level using an IQ score. NOTE: although IQ has no ‘maximum’ score, a score of 100 indicates an average level of intelligence.” Participants were then asked to write their preferred IQ level in an open-ended box.
Later, from the results section:
> In terms of intelligence, the mean ideal IQ score was distorted by the fact that a small group of participants recorded very high ideal IQ scores (> 1,000), creating positive skew. To adjust for this, we placed an artificial ceiling on scores that corresponded to the highest IQ score ever recorded: 228. After winsorizing the 0.3% of participant responses greater than 228, the mean IQ score was 122.52 (SD = 25.23).
Across all species and stock market trading firms, this trend can actually be seen to some extent.
But that is assuming that intelligence is a normal distribution, i.e. arises from a contributions of many independent random variables. Which is a decent approximation for underlying natural processes (human genetic pool and environmental contributions). But it is just an approximation. For starters, there is a lower bound to intelligence (inert matter) so we're not really dealing with a normal dist, the truth would be closer to a skewed, semi-bounded distribution, we just don't see that because we're just measuring humans instead of also including animals on the left and hypothetical superintelligences on the right.
Secondly, modelling it as random independent variables breaks down if you start to deliberately engineer all those contributing factors. Natural processes are exceedingly unlikely to hatch ants from fly eggs due to random genetic mutation. But a process like evolution or engineering can bring such things into existence.
So asking for an IQ of 1000 is simply saying that you want to be more intelligent than random, natural reproductive processes could give you anytime soon.
No, not intelligence, just IQ. They are not synonymous.
Modifying your example, if there is more than one braindead person on life support at any given moment, the minimum IQ for humans is greater than zero.
There is a lot wrong with IQ as a metric.
This.
IIRC, the concept of IQ originated as the ratio between the individual's intelligence, evaluated through some way such as standardized test scores, and the average test score for individuals within a statistically representative group that reflects the individual's profile (for example, people of a certain age). The mere fact that the IQ is calculated as the ratio of two meaningless values used to reflect an intangible and subjective concept is enough to cast serious doubts about the accuracy of this particular test.
It’s always important to ask your genie not for eternal life, but for eternal youth and vitality.
Basically you want to avoid aging, not death. Imagine being immortal, but not infinitely healable, and someone chops you up into pieces. Not fun. Can’t even imagine the pain and you’d have to endure it for quite a while.
I have spent too much of ky youth working out details or such potential asks. Never know when you gonna meet a wish granting genie
Maybe I'm crazy but I find it really hard to believe anyone would rather die than live forever if it meant being able to take a pill that prevented any form of aging or health related issues.
For real, true immortality (a span of not hundreds, but also thousands, millions, billions of years), the problem shifts to what it means to be 'you'. You're not the same person you were when you were 5, 15, or 25, with different goals, preferences, and motivations.
Extend that to geological time, and there become only a few reasonable cases:
1. You stop changing; the core of your personality becomes completely fixed. I would claim this is a form of death, because although you are still physically healthy and moving about, change is an inherent part of life and growth.
2. Your personality drifts to the point that previous incarnations of your 'self' (even if you remember them) become very far from who you are currently. In which case, you're not really immortal, you're just a series of 'different people' who happen to share a single memory and narrative.
3. Your personality shifts at some point to wanting to death, at which point (assuming suicide is allowed) life ends
I highly recommend Schild's Ladder[1] and Permutation City [2], both by Greg Egan, which do an excellent job of asking 'who am I?' if we had the ability live for infinite time.
I would immediately sign up for immortality instead of dying in ~70 years given the magic pill rule scenario.
Just think of all of the amazing things you'll witness while not having any forced pressure for all aspects of your life. You'll never get sick, you'll never need to worry about finances because there's nothing that would put you into a fear driven scenario where you "must" make money.
You could go through the years doing whatever you want and you'll live long enough to escape technology bubbles that each generation lives through. Like you said, you're pretty much a different person than you were 15 years ago. If you were 150 years old but still 25 inside, you'd get to experience a completely different world. It would be like having infinite lives with no reset switch on your memory.
It seems to be the case already.
"Who wants to live forever, when love must die?"
But that's wrong. The outlook is different now. Yet, unfortunately, most still see it as unavoidable.
Everybody should watch The Fable of The Dragon Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
Correct. This is a construct that for most part has been tested and validated. More here:
And yet people get divorced and often stop talking to their family. Are you saying you’d commit suicide in that case? I doubt it.
How do you ultimately figure out what you think would be the best for you?
The "big ambitions" (and specifically, those not of the good kind, like e.g. becoming a doctor and such, but the "private pool", expensive car, lotsa money variety) have been shoehorned into the average American mind through over a century of indoctrination, advertisement, and propaganda.
It's all about making people never be content with their material belongings and thinking that the next purchase or achievement unlocked with make them happy.
E.g. https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Consciousness-Advertising-Co...
I would estimate that around 90% of the people I know who want to become a doctor (around 30 people) are motivated solely by the desire to make lotsa money and be able to drive an expensive car. Just saying, I don't think you can easily divide ambitions into "good" and "bad.
There far easier ways to go about getting more money than spend over a decade in studying for it, plus all the hard work that comes afterwards.
More people that get into medicine that I know of either are idealistic, like the lifestyle (as portrayed on TV), had parents that were themselves doctors, or do it for the prestige. The money is not the biggest factor.
In finance you can be very dependent on the market conditions, same in law (without a lot of business activity businesses don’t need to consult lawyers), in research you are also very dependent on the hype around your field to get grants, starting your own successful business is brutal if you don’t find the right opportunities or network of people, engineering is no cake walk of study either (especially adding in the work to stay relevant in the field) and joining a startup for good money is absolutely not a secure employment.
There will always be a need of medical personel however and since it requires a license given out by a few institutions you can be sure that your field will not be oversaturated, especially as it’s hard to obtain said license through study. Again, not saying it is easy becoming an MD, but if you are a competent person the path to a secure, good paying job is clearer if you choose med school than engineering, law, graduate or finance.
It is, but it also has a much smaller earnings cap than other professions. So "for the money" here means "for decent enough money but nothing to write home about".
And depending on the country surgeons in specific fields can make obscene amounts of money. Neuro surgeons have a median salary of almost $600 000 in the US and to earn that much money as an engineer you have probably co-founded a successful startup or become an executive.
Old good "follow your passion"?
The people were so kind and thoughtful. I didn’t ask them about their aspirations all that often, but they often seemed content with their life as it was. Every once in a while you would get someone who had higher ambitions e.g. those who wanted to move out into the city.
Seeing their contentment and the time I spent there helped me realize that happiness doesn’t need to come from material things and having more than everyone else. I feel American culture has often tried to teach me otherwise. Sad.
I don't this is how our psyche works. I think our psyche works in more practical ways, relativity is what's important. We feel rich or poor relative to yesterday, or our parents, or neighbours. We feel satisfied with our IQ, sex life, life expectancy or health and such in a similar, relative way.
I think what these results speak to is where the default goal flag sits, not how motivated, how active or how "genuinely" ambitious were are. We want 10%-50% more money, intelligence, sex, friends and career successes. We can express this as 10 percent more or 10 rabbits more. The specific quantification doesn't matter.
Different strokes I suppose.
This is exactly the empyrical explanation I gave to myself when I tried to understand why the people I met in Vietnam and Thailand are vastly happier than the average Westerner.
Health and comfort for my family are also at the top of the list, likewise wanting my kids to have a good education -- that's just part of my culture.
But I can see lots of ways that my life could become profoundly miserable. So my pursuit of wealth is not so much to attain some high status, but to provide a safety net for myself and my family.
And of course, the implication is obvious: If everyone did on average live to 120 and get an IQ of 130 on our tests, then everyone would be wanting to live 200 years, and quite a few people would probably want an IQ of 160 on the old tests. That is, unless that was the point where people just switched to transhumanism as simplified humanism: Having the choice to live longer and to understand the universe better are probably always a good thing, regardless of how long you've lived and how much you understand.
The goal of their study, however, was to see if it was true that when given the choice to have some attribute or quality of your life maximized with few limits would you choose the maximum. They say the choices were modest simply because in philosophical writings they often assume people will always choose the maximum if available. That is why they found this surprising and modest.
A 130 IQ is the 95th percentile. I don't know about you but I've met more than 20 people.
Medians? The distributions would be more interesting.
If your IQ is 130-135 statistically you are “smarter” than nearly anyone you meet in your life, in fact considering that 140-145 is at the 0.1% statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter by a distribution point even at places that skew towards a higher IQ due to selection bias.
Half the population is below 100 IQ with over a third being between 85 and 100.
Top higher education institutions only score slightly above 115 on average 130 which is a whole bracket over that is exceptional even for places that are selectively biased towards higher IQ scores.
If you are in the top 2% of anything in life you are quite exceptional.
For comparison being in the top 2% of any Olympic sport would land you a spot in most Olympic teams.
And to be clear this isn’t about if IQ is a good indicator of performance or not but rather about how people evaluate themselves.
If placing yourself in the top single digit percentiles is considered modest than I think we need to redefine modesty.
I think this is off by multiple factors of 10? 2% is really not THAT high..
In any sufficiently large city you can probably find 98 other players you are better than..
2% of top performers in their sports can qualify for an Olympic (summer games) team spot.
And no we’re not even talking about extreme cases like those that happen in the winter games from time to time.
Also remember your selection pool if you think the top 2% of professional competitive swimmers in say 100M can’t get into the olympics again check their scores vs the Olympic qualifiers.
We are already discussing a relatively very small pool of subjects here.
Being in the top 2% of performers in a given sport qualifies you national and even international achievements, if you chose to follow that or not it’s up to you.
But in any case top 2% of any group is by definition exceptional.
This is just nowhere near true.
85-115 is considered “normal” with 85 being the lower limit for what one would consider a functional adult and 115 is the upper limit around which most of the successful professionals will be hanging around.
Scoring in the top 2% of correctly normalized and clinically evaluated IQ tests is quite exceptional.
Page 4 has a graph. Since harvard and other elites average applicant math + reading is at least 64, probably closer to 70, IQ ia likely to be 125-130.
In fact if we take your study then the 120-130 IQ range correlates to an ACT score range of between ~20 and ~70.
If we take the ACT numbers they had for “study 2” which was conducted on 150 psychology students in a private university which is a highly selective group already you have an IQ range of 100-120 with the majority being between 105 and 115.
A normalized average IQ across the three main domains (verbal, spatial and math) of 130 or higher is unlikely even for Harvard, the only real good study we have for Harvard is the Carson study which used psychometric tests to measure IQ and it got an average of 122 amongst PHD graduates in exact sciences.
For all intents and purposes a clinical psychometric IQ score of 130 is exceptional even for elite school, STEM PHD graduates.
Two points:
- +3 sd puts you at the 99.7th percentile, not the 99.9th. 140 would be much less rare than that.
- The places that select for high IQ contain many, many people with IQs over 145. Princeton admits 6% of those who apply, not 6% of those aged 15-20. With 350,000,000 people in the US, applying a 0.1% filter will leave you with 350,000 people. With 20,000,000 people aged 15-19, that filter will leave 20,000. Princeton admitted ~1,300 last year.
If you never meet anyone with an IQ above 145, you're not in an environment that selects for high IQ people.
Even universities that select for higher IQ are not considerably higher than the normal upper limit look at the ACT IQ correlation study that was linked here or the Carson study.
There are 472,489 people in the US which have an IQ of 145 or higher when you count for the portion of those who will be students say age 18-35 you get about 100,000 now spread those around the best 50 schools in the country and you still get a pretty low percentage even if all of them enroll into higher education.
Compare your earlier claim, "statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter". That is the opposite of the truth. If you are at a place that selects for high IQs, you are very likely to meet multiple people with IQs greater than 145. You are very unlikely to manage to avoid those people.
> sorry for rounding up
You were closer than I was, so touché. That said, the accurate figure is still quite far from your rounded estimate; while it may look like 99.86% is close to 99.9%, a 0.14% cutoff selects 40% more people than a 0.1% cutoff would.
I said you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter even at places that select for higher IQ this includes work places and school.
Sure Princeton with its I don’t know 6000-8000 student and faculty body likely has people with IQ of 145 or higher but Princeton on its own isn’t a likely place to be even if you are in the top 2% of the IQ distribution.
The popilation of the top 50 or so schools is about 700,000, and even those are not the only places that are selectively for higher IQ any higher education institutions would be.
If we take my rough numbers then you have about 1 in 7 chance on paper however that counts for the entire population bracket of 18-35 if we take the median age of those schools which is 23 then we have only a pool of 34,000 to work with which now brings up the chance to about 1 in 20.
Now higher IQ above a certain range which isn’t even “high” actually increases your chances of dropping out of both collage and high school it also correlated to higher likelihood of both clinical and social personality disorders and many other issues that can hinder one from becoming well adjusted. I would honestly put the average “likelihood” of meeting someone at those places with a 145 IQ or higher to be about 1/50 if not worse and the further you go from there while still being perfectly in the domain of a highly selective organization it’s going to get worse.
This also doesn’t take into account that there seems to be something that is called “islands of intelligence” which means that despite the predictive distribution due to standard deviation IQ isn’t exactly linear and you might have more people with 138 IQ for example than 134. There is a debate if this is due to how we are testing and scoring IQ or is this an actual trait of intelligence.
And ofc the “plastic” IQ decreases with age and for different people it decreases at different rates which again makes it problematic to really well account for.
However I still stick by my initial point that 130-135 is exceptional and you are quite unlikely to meet people smarter than you (as I said by a whole bracket) in life, at least not on a day to day basis even if you study or work at places that already select for a higher IQ as long as again those are your average selective place.
Want to meet someone with an IQ probably in the high 150s? Well it’s easy enroll in Stanford and go to one of Susskind’s classes that guy is probably up there.
But again I’m talking about normal day to day interactions for an average person with a 135 IQ at an average above average IQ selective place such as a work place or a collage.
for the purposes of the survey it seems like some respondents didn't know how the IQ scale works, they probably assumed 130 is just above average.
It's very frustrating when most of the people you meet are dumb (out of your perspective).
Something about 110 IQ would be much better.
Which, given what we know about plenty of genius biographies, and how frail and paranoid their lives can be precisely because of their higher mental faculties, seems like a perfect compromise.
Ever heard of diminishing returns? Statistics probably report of the more widespread smart people (which 130 qualifies just fine), not geniuses.
> Adolescents identified before the age of 13 (N = 320) as having exceptional mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked over 10 years. They pursued doctoral degrees at rates over 50 times base-rate expectations, with several participants having created noteworthy literary, scientific, or technical products by their early 20s. Early observed distinctions in intellectual strength (viz., quantitative reasoning ability over verbal reasoning ability, and vice versa) predicted sharp differences in their developmental trajectories and occupational pursuits.
What if there were other super smart people who live their happy lives, are successful in their niches and generally avoided drama and therefore did not became so famous. Created difficult math proofs and conjectures, then spent time doing whatever else, but were not fun to be talked about and we are learning their results without learning their names. Or just stood up to some psychopath (pick up favorite historical person) for ethical reason fully knowing what will happen and then died.
Ignorance is bliss until you are bored. And knowing is usually better anyway, _IF_ you can get over the pain of knowing, which you do most of the time.
Godel, Nash, Erdos, Cantor, Tesla, and many others.
>Ignorance is bliss until you are bored
Aren't smarter people more easily bored -- because their minds need to have more stimuli all the time, as opposed to being more content with simple things like sports and a beer.
I have reason to believe that's specifically hazardous.
I wrote that stopping below genius level is a good compromise between being smart and what we know about the frailty of many (most?) geniuses.
The only people I get the impression of "genious" level intelligence would be those I would rank at like 160 levels
And even textbook definition of genius starts at like 140-145.
Having tested in that range and working with people who have - I'm noticably faster than most people at analytical stuff/learning - it's not a groundbreaking difference between from someone at 120 - but those 160 people I mentioned - I can't even keep up mentally without pausing - good luck if you're 100 range.
So that would be true genius in my view, 140 is like noticably intelligent, 120 is standard in professions that select for intelligence.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/34409/differe...
It would be circular reasoning only if the parent attempted to pin "being a genius" to having an > 160 IQ.
Instead, he said that he's only seen someone he'd classify as a genius when they had IQ >= 160 -- which is not circular. It's just using that observation as a supporting argument, without having established what a genius is first.
the saying of the same thing twice over in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style (e.g. they arrived one after the other in succession ).
What’s your definition?
- - - -
When I was a young man I read in a book about Taoism of the farmer so content that, though he could hear the rooster of the next village crowing, he had never troubled himself to travel there.
When I read that I was vaguely horrified. Now, as an older man, I see the wisdom in it.
Good...sure that's easy. Basically need my current mid tier salary guaranteed minus the part of slogging 9-5 in the office.
Ideal...well I'll need a couple billions to start with.
How can you get started if you don't even understand this much?
The U.S. has made it increasingly difficult to achieve these. "Health care" has become wealth extraction, and a culture of excess combined with cheap electronics have taught people to "turn it up".
And damned to your neighbor; they should learn to "collaborate" at work and turn up their own music, at home.
It's exhausting.
One might argue that the interaction between the need for hierarchy and need for conformity is also at the root of the essential conservatism in human nature: the urge to preserve the present state of the world, to change it as little as possible. Given a teacup, ambition is restrained to the safe, conformist goal of two teacups - rather than, say, the disruptive change of a tea set factory, a house, an end to aging, the colonization of Mars, the cure for cancer. We live in an age of radical change, a revolution in the capabilities of biotechnology presently underway, but when you ask people what they want for their health, they'll claim nothing more than ten more years. That is the least of what might be achieved soon in the medical sciences, but without the desire for more than that, the rejuvenation research projects capable of providing far more will continue to struggle to find funding.
At the same time as the potential has arisen for a future in which the suffering and death of aging is banished, all disease controlled through advanced medicine, the vast majority of people still march stolidly towards what they assume to be the same fate as their grandparents [2]. They are conforming. They expect to live a life that is the same in shape as it was for those born in the early to mid 1900s, somehow holding this idea in their minds at the same time as retaining the memory of living through the computing and internet revolutions, alongside any number of other sweeping changes in the nature of the human experience. How do we change this story that people are telling themselves? That is the fundamental question for all advocacy for radical change, such as the radical change of bringing an end to aging.
[1]: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-...
[2]: https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...
But my first instinct was to think that most people, when asked how long they want to live will have difficulty answering beyond current lifespan because we are instinctively trained to think that '100 = old and decrepit' - even if the question does say something along the lines of '100 but in 'good health''.
"for a future in which the suffering and death of aging is banished, all disease controlled through advanced medicine, the vast majority of people still march stolidly towards what they assume to be the same fate as their grandparents [2]. They are conforming."
Again I disagree because this utopian future is still essentially an illusion, which most people immediately recognize (they don't live in the tech bubble?), and in reality, 90 is getting pretty old and that's it for today, and probably for the next long while barring any 'big leaps' in tech. Which may happen, but there's no reason to believe they would.
Science has not really extended life. All we've done is perfected the conditions in which we live, and have learned out to take care of our bodies well.
Like you own a bike and used to run it through the forest, not oil it, parts would fall of. Now we run our bicycles on smooth surfaces, we get checkups, replace parts, oil the wheels. We have not improved bikes, we just extend them more or less towards their current, maximal life span.
Please tell me when they can regrow my hair, or do the simplest thing and make the skin on my face 'not sag'. Then we can talk.
It’s one thing to observe historical patterns. For the most part you can only guess about what is innate. And your language should reflect that.
Statements about what’s innate do tend to reveal the boundaries of what the speaker is willing to consider. So they are informative in that way.
But, I wonder if you asked a 115-year old whether they wanted to die in 5 years what they would say then.
people only go into the psychology field for the $$
Yeah, so we should never generalize, just point at individual things and say "this".
>people only go into the psychology field for the $$
So much for not generalizing.