Do Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol? | Hacker News Reader

Do Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol?

news.discovery.com

27 pointsrblion36 comments

Psychology Today takes an evolutionary approach. They argue that drinkable alcohol is a relatively novel invention of 10,000 years ago. Our ancestors had previously gotten their alcohol kick through eating rotten fruits, so more intelligent humans may be more likely to choose modern alcoholic beverages.

Is it my imagination, or does that leap of logic make no sense whatsoever?

Perhaps I'd need to be drunk to understand it.

I think they are saying that until relatively recently only people lots of openness-with-experience and intellectual curiosity would spend the time learning about and tracking down random fruits in order to get fucked up. And so between roughly a million years ago and ten thousand years ago, it was mostly intelligent people who were co-evolving with alcohol. So that's why intelligent people today get more pleasure from drinking.

I personally would propose that intelligent people are more likely to have less empathy and social intelligence as the evolutionary tradeoff for being smart, so they benefit more from using alcohol socially.

So the smelly bum on the street corner who mutters to himself is at the peak of the evolutionary hierarchy? The assertions made seem too simplistic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

I would think more intelligent people would tend to be wealthier, and wealthier people can consume more alcohol. I realize there are plenty of broke alcoholics - but leaving out chronic alcoholics, I think you're more likely to have a bottle of wine with dinner if you're rich than poor.

A more tongue in cheek and/or political answer is to suggest that smart people realize how ruined the world is and drink to assuage their pain.

The article gives so little info, you could easily suggest other explanations by making other assumptions about the data; all they give is very dull vs. very intelligent.

The researchers supposedly took earnings into account, though without looking at the raw data we can only speculate as to how effective they were at doing so.

Agreed. Fresh out of college and broke, having a beer with dinner, or having that second or third drink at a bar was just not in the budget.

Tell that to anyone in Czech Republic, where beer is in most restaurants cheaper than softdrinks :)

I've known a few broke people in my life, and most of them never let it stop them from working their way through a case of natty light each night.

Increased alcohol consumption is also linked to child abuse, divorce, DUI arrests, alcohol poisoning, people losing their jobs, fights, and brain damage.

And depression and its associated pathologies. But as with everything, YMMV. Some people can drink a lot and have it not affect anything at all. Only some people, though.

Smoking weed when drinking reduces the associated brain damage, and most likely it would reduce the depression as well. (I'm guessing that most of the depression is from alcohol being a pro-inflammatory, whereas the CBD in weed is a powerful anti-inflammatory.)

I used to live in Cambridge, MA. The bars were filled with graduate students, post docs, and PhD burnouts. I'm not sure how much dumb people drink, but the smart ones could drink me under the table.

1. There are simply more of these people that make their way to Cambridge for obvious reasons. Naturally you'll find a larger proportion in most environments there.

2. These people probably don't have much in the way of manual labor in their day-to-day work but do have a higher level of stress (manual labor and exercise reducing stress) and mental exhaustion. The guy that spends his day working with his hands might like a drink after work but it's more likely at home and not as much because he doesn't have the physical energy to stay up and drink.

Someone that has mental exhaustion wants to unwind and has the physical energy to take themselves to a bar and socialize.

I know I've worked a full day in one part of the country, got on a plane to another part and spent the night out drinking. I don't think this is because I'm more intelligent than a guy swinging a hammer all day but I simply had the physical energy to do it; the work wasn't physically exhausting.

I'm in grad school elsewhere and i'm surrounded by alcoholics.

I think there is a correlation between intelligence, existential angst, and a need to 'get fucked up' to let it all go for the night. It's not EVERY intelligent person, just a subset that doesn't feel any stigma about drugs/alcohol. The big problem is when people start to believe alcohol/drugs are an escape from reality, they really just alter consciousness up or down a few levels. Over the years, alcohol will also make you dumber and more likely to do something you'll regret for many years.

I prefer cannabis and acid instead of alcohol. They seem to elevate consciousness instead of depress it. But who could say no to a beer with your friends after a hard day's work?

My experience from observing people over the years is that prolonged or heavy cannabis use is as damaging as prolonged or heavy alcohol use, if not more so. Lightly used each is relatively harmless.

The 'elevated consciousness' is just your drug addled mind flattering itself, to an outsider you will seem imbecilic. Your slightly self-satisfied tone is really, really unwarranted.

The high you get from cannabis, to my mind, restores a playfulness and creativity to your thinking that most people have as children but lose as adults. It can sometimes make linear, technical thinking harder, but it tends to make it easier to see the big picture and brainstorm new ideas. It certainly can benefit artistic work, too.

Acid is even better; it maintains the creativity advantages of cannabis while adding a clarity of thinking that can often be superior to sobriety.

I'm not saying everyone will benefit from these drugs, or that they will improve your performance on every task, but you seem to suggest that they don't offer any benefit at all and simply reduce the user to an imbecile. That does not remotely resemble my experience.

I agree fully. It just amplifies who you are deep down. It can be creative under the right conditions or destructive under the wrong conditions.

to each his own. you get yours, ill get mine. don't judge a sentient being based on a few sentences. who are you to do that?

Wasn't judging, just pointing out that your claim of elevated consciousness and the implication that cannabis was somehow 'better for you' than alcohol was illusory. I was commenting on the tone of your writing not on you yourself. Yours is just the most recent generation to rediscover acid, cannabis etc. You'll make exactly the same mistakes that they did in the 50s, 60s, 70s .... Anyway, no offence intended, to you or any other sentient being.

I also prefer cannabis to alcohol. From what I learned, the difference is -- when you're stoned, you become numb to the pain and can think about the stuff you can't think while sober. It's like an anaesthetic for emotional (and physical pain) that might allow the healing process to go faster. Alcohol merely makes you not give a shit for a while.

Funnily enough, I was talking about this exact topic with a clinical psychologist recently. In a nutshell, intelligent people think more. They don't just think better, or more efficiently, they think more.

The side-effect is that certain illnesses like depression affect intelligent people quite hard. They self-medicate, often with alcohol.

As well, otherwise healthy intelligent people might self-medicate to calm down their perceived over-active thoughts.

Combined, the result is that intelligent people are over-represented in alcoholism, albeit perhaps as high-functioning alcoholics.

There was a paper from an ornithologist in the Czech Republic a few years back that found that the more a scientist drinks, the fewer and lower quality the scientist's papers.

The interesting part isn't the conclusion, which seems suspect, but the scientists' reactions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/science/18beer.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/03/19/a-sci...

All I know is that it is certainly comforting to think so ;)

Not to sound overtly obnoxious, but I drink so that I can tolerate things other people say when I spend time in a mixed social group.

An fictitious example would be an episode of House where a genius would robotrip because it was the only way he could tolerate his wife because of an intellectual barrier.

My expectation would be that more intelligent children have more demanded of them, and go on to choose or take more stressful careers. Are there any studies correlating stress levels and drinking? Personal experience would suggest a relationship.

Having seen nothing about the guts of how the study was done, I will suggest the following possible explanation for the difference in how much each group supposedly drank:

More intelligent, educated people are less likely to view alcohol as "sinful" and may have therefore been more honest and accurate when reporting how much they drank. Less intelligent or less educated individuals may have underreported alcohol consumed due to denial (since it is impossible to tell the truth to someone else and keep lying to yourself about something) or even simply not remembering it as accurately.

I'm not a big believer in the accuracy of studies of this sort.

I highly doubt intelligent people drink more alcohol. Anyone have additional information about this?

I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps you could ask "the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States".

You may doubt it, but their study indicates otherwise. Now there may be problems with their paper, but random "doubts" aren't them.

Psychology Today tries to give an explanation on Why Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol, and they claim:

It is important to note that both income and education, as well as childhood social class and parents’ education, are controlled in multiple regression analyses of these data from the US and the UK. It means that it is not because more intelligent people occupy higher-paying, more important jobs that require them to socialize and drink with their business associates that they drink more alcohol. It appears to be their intelligence itself, rather than correlates of intelligence, that inclines them to drink more.

also interesting:

Consistent with the prediction of the Hypothesis, more intelligent children, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, grow up to consume alcohol more frequently and in greater quantities than less intelligent children. Controlling for a large number of demographic variables, such as sex, race, ethnicity, religion, marital status, number of children, education, earnings, depression, satisfaction with life, frequency of socialization with friends, number of recent sex partners, childhood social class, mother’s education, and father’s education, more intelligent children grow up to drink more alcohol in the UK and the US.

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

As alcohol is moderately expensive, I assume it would correlate with income, which does moderately correlate with intelligence.

Low-riding your car also costs money, but I don't think it correlates with income. At least not in the direction you'd expect.

While you are pointing out something that does cost money, it is a niche product only used by a certain social group.

I'd assume within the social group (which I'm not even sure how to define), you actually would find it correlates with income.

While this is certainly true (you have to a car to low-ride it), shouldn't be expect social groups to be at play with alcohol as well?

For example, lawyers tend be to more intelligent (and have higher incomes) than the general population, and perhaps lawyers tend to drink more. Is this suggestive of a correlation with income, or profession? Do the smarter and presumably better paid lawyers drink more than others?

It actually looks like they controlled for income, see the link above.

It looks like its actual IQ that has the highest correlation.

Ya, it appears so. I wonder what their methodology was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com