Why do those with higher IQs live longer? A new study points to answers
statnews.com
statnews.com
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Part of it seems to be the lifestyle choices that smarter people tend to make: namely, that they smoke at much lower rates. Similarly, smarter people are more likely to follow other healthy practices, have a better handle on their health care, and be less likely to work in a job that puts them at physical risk.
Socioeconomic status could play a role as well, perhaps allowing people to access better education and care
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There are also genetic factors.
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And is smarter. Why are people allergic to the idea that some people are smarter than others?
If you are good at pattern recognition, then you may subconsciously realize that people who do X get result Y.
If you want result Y for yourself, then you may attempt to do X at a greater likelihood than your specific cultural or ethnic background would otherwise suggest.
Living longer, being richer, happier, healthier, etc. are all things that typically come to fruition for a person based on their activities and the choices they make.
Being smarter can result in a higher score, but so can practicing multiple choice tests, and being more familiar with the language used by the test. I won't get the same results for a test in English as one in French.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf...
This assumption is challenged by e.g. this study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
I'm still processing this truth. I basically put my life, university and career on stop to help my sister. I oscillate between thinking "I'm a good person" to "I just wish I were a selfish bastard".
Definitely a loser's strategy.
Curious, help with what? Why did you have to put your life on hold?
You prioritized one are over another and there is nothing wrong with that.
My particular solution to your dilemma was to find a better circle of friends. An anime club, of all things, some 20 years ago. The specific hobby doesn't matter, but having compatible people around helped a lot. I'm almost equally uncomfortable in the classic "party" scenario as I was at 18, but in my current lifestyle that happens maybe once a decade. The rest is filled with socializing, my way.
As for putting honesty and other people before yourself... hehe. That's classic lack of social skills and reading cues. Did that - god, that used to do a number on my dating experiences. Sometimes you have to NOT say the first thing that comes to your head. That's the first skill to learn. Second you'll find a small voice inside your head that'll start telling you when you're about to say the wrong thing - start cultivating it. But first of all you need the commitment to actually listen to it, and squash any trace of "but than I won't be the authentic me" excuse.
>squash any trace of "but than I won't be the authentic me" excuse.
This is super important. We, for lack of a better phrase, live in a society. And that means getting along with others in that society even though you might have to put on a false front from time to time. Other people will construct their own image of you that you will find to be inaccurate anyways, no matter how honest you may be.
The key I learned (for I used to be like you) was to just talk less. Not everything must be said. Preserves my honesty (I didn’t lie, I merely kept quiet). Preserves the peace. And so on.
I think I am pretty damn honest and my experience is that the more honest I am, the better my life becomes.
This holds true in my work, my relationships, and most importantly with myself
Always putting the well-being of other people before your own is indeed a bad strategy. It ignores self care and leaves you open to be taken advantage of.
You can do a lot more good if you are mentally and physically healthy and not being continually scammed.
As a trite example, I like to pick up mentally unstable hitchhikers (literally). I don't do it on my way to a job interview, and I don't do it if they seem especially dangerous.
This way I get to keep helping.
Otherwise, you need to make the argument that IQ enables people to make better choices, but until recently in history human biology was a mystery to even the most educated. The famous "food pyramid", for example, promoted a high-carb diet and did not favour health or longevity.
Such underlying factors could be caused by random conditions; illnesses, environment, sleep habits, or very early in life - even in womb?
Outside of that, and outside of COVID, the third leading cause of death for many years was "Accidental Self-Inflicted Injury." Just below Cancer and Heart Disease. The presumed correlations between higher intelligence and avoiding becoming a part of these categories seems like another accidental measure here.
This article only briefly touches on suicide so fast that I’m not even sure if they are saying higher IQ kill themselves less or not.
First it suggests wealth = iq… maybe thats what you mean? Not sure what you mean but my following points are related to this
Second it also means produced viable offspring with healthy people, which really means wealthy people *nutted in healthy people. There is an extremely high correlation to wealth and which sex is choosing based on “health” (as opposed to equal or greater wealth)
Third, they probably nutted in unhealthy people too. Just might as well acknowledge the human flexibility in reproductive activity.
Fourth, it suggests the healthy person needed the wealth to maintain the healthy lifestyle or spread it to the wealthy person or subsequent offspring, here I have the most doubts
But if I misunderstood what you were getting at, let me know. Married may be less crass but its probably inaccurate
Being wealthy is a proxy for intelligence that rhymes with the word healthy.
Genetic factors that affect intelligence may affect the whole nervous system. We already know that IQ is correlates strongly with reaction speed. It would not be surprising if there is correlation with immune system (immune and nervous systems communicate) for example.
pre- and postnatal health is big factor in decreasing intelligence. Parasite load and intelligence correlate in country by country comparisons.
same reason why married men live longer - less dangerous activities combined with wives who wanna keep their husbands alive so nag them about their health and prevention, for instance reason why my inlaw had to stop smoking
edit: also I will save you a click
"The slight benefit to longevity from higher intelligence seems to increase all the way up the intelligence scale, so that very smart people live longer than smart people, who live longer than averagely intelligent people, and so on."
"Part of it seems to be the lifestyle choices that smarter people tend to make: namely, that they smoke at much lower rates. Similarly, smarter people are more likely to follow other healthy practices, have a better handle on their health care, and be less likely to work in a job that puts them at physical risk."
Obviously if your work is less dangerous you are less likely to die, you could just get better work than improving your IQ. Same with prevention, you can have pretty low IQ if you just follow list of precautions, so only thing making the difference with IQ is those things you should be aware and it has nothing to do really in the end IQ. I'd like to see low IQ group vs high IQ group with same guidance, nagging about dangers of smoking, nagging about preventive checks etc, then we would most likely see there is hardly any difference. Maybe good test groups would be rich vs poor families taking care of kids requiring attention into late age like down syndrome or similar, them you work compare their health condition at same age, though obviously rich (read higher IQ usually) can provide better health, food and other options.
During lockdown panic I was 'critical infrastructure' fixing heavy equipment. Nothing slowed down for me, risks were same working on broken machines (or greater depending on your view of virus risk) and the laptop crowd got to 'stay safe' at home while others got pandemic pay to sit at home.
Many dangerous jobs get little acknowledgment. These people literally keep the gears of society turning, and are often derided as being dumb with dirty fingernails.
It made me really think...these people work way, way harder than me on something way more important to society (right now). Why are they so mistreated? Why do whole cities , usually poor, have to deal with the eyesore and potential health issues of oil and gas? And why do oil companies, who are unmistakably the richest in the world, pay less than tech companies who lose money each year?
It just feels like some weird, giant imbalance. If you asked me today whether I'd rather go without Twitter, FB, and Netflix...or gas and plastics, sorry, you lose Silicon Valley.
I don't have any answers or even suggestions, just thoughts and questions for now.
Just an aside, but oil & gas jobs are generally quite well paid, including the filthy ones. But maybe not all. The reason why very important jobs can be very low paid is no great mystery: it’s because the labor market is based on supply and demand, not importance.
Those "poor, filthy men" do not have O&G jobs, or if they do will not have them for long.
Unless you happen to be a doctor, lawyer or Silicon Valley software dev, they're probably taking home a bigger paycheck than you!
My dad was a heavy equipment mechnanic in El-Paso repairing the hydraulics on earth movers and everything else any of the big equipment needed.
I appreciate that hard work as only someone who has done it can do, but the angst over supposed derision reminds me of the rhetoric that comes from that think tank owned, walking, talking piece of propaganda Mike Rowe (such a shame I liked his show). No one is deriding anyone. If you want the truth, most coders, and system admins love anyone who can work with their hands and spend a bunch of time on projects of their own, getting grease under their fingernails, or wood shaving in their beard, or welding sparks in their hair. Most of them day dream of a job where they make things they can hold in their hands. I still restore and build period correct choppers and hot rods, my friends in the industry weld, or blow glass, or work with wood. Working with our hands is a way to get away from computer work.
The truth is people in tech just don't think about these jobs because they haven't come in contact with the people working them.
With that said, the dumb and dirty finger nailed trope didn't leap into existence out of thin air, you may not like to hear this but, a hell of a lot of people working those jobs ARE dumb as hell and would work any other kind of job if they could learn how to do so. I worked with them, and many could not do anything else. Being able to hang parts, or being clever about aspects of their trade does not mean someone is smart, or knowledgeable it means they are good at what they do for 40 to 60 hours a week. Racism, addiction to stupid vices like dip, violence at home to their wife or children, DUIs, were common at practically every place I worked, and I would get shit for reading during my lunch breaks. If I had known I could use my ability to research, remember, and learn complex ideas to get out of doing manual labor sooner I would have, and I would probably still have functioning l3, and l4, discs.
Conversely there are plenty of smart and driven men who just can't stomach being cooped up inside all day, in my experience they ended up running their own work crews as a general contractor, or becoming a foreman, or like yourself drifting to the technical end of things, working on complex equipment that requires problem solving skills rather than just hanging parts. Either way I guess the point of my reply was to try to let you know you probably have the wrong idea about the laptop crowd in exactly the same way some of them have it wrong about people who work with their hands.
Apologies for any grammar or spelling mistakes, while I can do anything computer related, I started working at 15 as a roofer and never returned to formal schooling, so writing well is a weakness of mine.
That is not completely obvious, some kinds of highly qualified work will wear you down with stress. In my country, female doctors and even veterinarians have significantly higher rates of suicide. Some other professionals "compensate" for their stress with booze and drugs. Being a singer or an actor isn't dangerous per se, but the levels of substance abuse among them are concerning. One of the most talented pop voices here died choking in his sleep when he was both drunk and high on cocaine. He was 40 something.
Notably, this is impossible to prevent with just better and safer work equipment. Work in mines etc. is still pretty dangerous, but thanks to better equipment and methods, the death rate is going downwards.
Pick almost any measures that you think Define general intelligence and you will see stark differences between a group at 80 iq and 120.
I am very curious to see those mappings. Can you point to some? I am especially unsure about what said «measures» can be, and if/which theories about them are developed.
In other words, most measures you might come up with are likely to be strongly correlated with IQ.
Personnel selection research provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essen- tially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well. Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across differ- ent arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability systematically improve individuals’ odds of dealing successfully with the ordinary demands of modem life (such as banking, using maps and transportation schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g, even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy.
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatt...
These people Have difficulty with everyday demands like using a phone or address book. May not be able to learn to read bus or train schedules, bank, fill out forms, or use household appliances like a video recorder, microwave oven, or computer. They therefore require assistance from relatives or social workers in the management of their affairs. They can be employed in simple tasks but require supervision.
This is not a matter of effort or exposure. Even with training these people may not be able to acquire these skills over decades.
People with higher IQs simply do not have these challenges to the same degree.
The tests, like the IQ, can flag potential problems that have gone over looked, but beyond that it doesn’t matter if someone runs a 4.3, 4.4, or 4.5 40.
IQ is unscientific nonsense from the 60s that that been overstudied for cultural reasons.
Any time you read it in an article you can substitute it for "socioeconomic reasons". Which is just as unclear but at least it is less of a smokescreen to cast doubt on causality.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf...
No one disputes that IQ works, that is not the claim, just as the even more nebulous term "socioeconomic factors" works across wide field s of study. But it is not the best predictor we have.
Not sure what types of propaganda you see in this, or who stands to gain from it. If any, it should be those heavily invested in questionable theories, perhaps even making money from peddling books and courses.
If you really want to argue that IQ is a scientific measurement, start by explaining the scientific process that arrived at the particular method that is broadly used to measure it. Then, if you really want to convince someone, explain what the feedback process looks like that guides the continuing work to improve the measurement process. Because surely there is one, unless you want to argue that IQ is a perfect predictor that could never be improved?
Many things from 60s psychology were quite extraordinary, and as the saying goes extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Efforts to reproduce these studies have had limited success, to say the least.
Are you claiming that social economic status is a better predictor of spatial Imaging and logic than a direct test of an individual in question?
If you're going to just make stuff up, at least be realistic.
It does not take into account perceptive intelligence, emotional intelligence, and others.
Until there's a new standard, or they see a need to do something different, scientists interested in intelligence are going to stick to measuring IQ.
What we have can and should be discussed and challenged. Not having a complete, new and better solution, doesn't prevent us from pointing at flaws. All the while working on the new thing.
The main fault of Gardner’s theory is that it has no empirical backing of any kind[1], which effects its popularity with Ed schools not at all.
Sternberg’s theory at least actually works. It’s just that it is extra work and complexity for no increase in predictive validity. There’s no way to distinguish it from straight g.
[1]According to a 2006 study, many of Gardner's "intelligences" correlate with the g factor, supporting the idea of a single dominant type of intelligence. According to the study, each of the domains proposed by Gardner involved a blend of g, of cognitive abilities other than g, and, in some cases, of non-cognitive abilities or of personality characteristics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intellige...
By whom? Previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31376980
How good you are at thinking about stuff.
Or even if you try thinking about a real problem, you won’t get the right answer because the way to do that is experiments, not thinking about it a lot.
A lot of people are very anti-IQ, but frankly they're usually just mediocre humanities mucklers who don't realize or accept that true intelligence requires the ability to do math, even if it's not your specialty or interest (the math geniuses amongst us are almost without exception 95+% in verbal ability).
thats where we are with IQ as well
Perhaps I am misreading your comment.
I don’t know if any hypothesis in itt/tfa are true or false, but regarding IQ tests I’d like to see much more diversity than stupid boolean ops and rotation over and over.
The thermometer as we know it didn't exist until the 17th century! Although the Chinese seems to have measured temperature with clay pots since at least the 6th century.
The concept of an innate ability to be smart, however, is something else entirely. It is at best a question "I know it when I see it", but where two observers seldom agree.
Compare the concept of "love". It is also an age old idea, a word that exists in all languages and used in conversation every day, but the vain of trying to get observers to agree on it has rightly been a trope for millennia.
The similarities doesn't end there, with books and courses being peddled on the subject of quantifying and scoring it. Very few of these have any scientific ambitions to speak of however, even among the most grandiose of claims.
Japan and Italy are the countries with the oldest people. Both countries are surrounded by sea.
Maybe my IQ is not that high but this study of 1000 people looks off to me.
Maybe it's the sea, maybe it's the food. Why not both?
Just a throwaway comment, but perhaps people who grew up near the sea eat more fish as well.
Maybe there're pockets, like in Okinawa again seaside lifestyle, people stay active till death etc.