The Curse of Intelligence | Hacker News Reader

The Curse of Intelligence

duttakapil.com

54 pointsduttakapil13 comments

This article resonates with me. However I have one beef. The author goes on to make some fuzzy claims about feeling your whole self, which I take to mean one's physical self, one's body.

But what if your body is failing? Then all you have really to depend on is your mind. I often wonder how Stephen Hawking managed to do such incredible work with such a limited physical existence. To some extent, we all become Stephen Hawking towards the end, unless the end is catastrophically quick.

Very interesting point of view! Stephen Hawking was the first mentor in my life. He was a great source of inspiration for me, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand what his life must have been like, with his body failing, and yet still motivating himself to do such brilliant work.

The last bit about spreading your focus to your entire body is more about detaching yourself from the continuous on-going rumination of the mind, to pay closer attention to what's real right in front of you right now as a unbiased unfiltered consciousness, rather than whatever your mind is occupied with. My experience is that this is the single thing which when practiced enough times can immediately pull you out of your misery, especially if your misery is self-inflected.

The esoteric term for this practice is mindfulness. I personally exercise my own style of mindfulness, which is partly inspired by Stephen Hawking as well. I visualize my present moment the same way Hawking would describe the mechanics of the Universe in his books and shows. I would go to the microscopic level, zoom in, zoom out, follow the flow of energy, matter, cause, effect, I would imagine a quick timeline of the objects in front of me, where they came from, how they came into existence, I would see how everything is connected with each other, rather than being separate individual entities. I would pay attention to myself, all my senses, my perceptions, emotions, reactions, almost from a 3rd person pov. Like a Scientist observing a Monkey, and all my agitation and worries just disappear.

All of this helps me realign myself. It grounds me in a way that nothing else does. I find it quiet relaxing honestly

As far as it’s about intelligence, don’t the author suffer the navel- glazing biais to only consider intelligence in one dimension, as an individual characteristic.

Human like many others species is a social species. And collective intelligence is what emerge from social interaction in a cohesive group.

A bee hive is able to solve geometrical series, while none of individuals in the hive is able to solve it by himself.

Human are not différents and collective intelligence is what truly exists and is important despite all the individualism propaganda.

So there might be a curse of intelligence at individual scale. But we don’t have to worry about it. Because individual intelligence as almost not importance compared to collective intelligence.

In fact it’s almost the opposite, the curse of intelligence can only exists in individualistic environment when no feedback is provided, by censorship, or silencing process from the inner rules defining the social link between individuals.

For instance I would suggest reading the “gossip trap”’from Erik Hoel explaining how archaic social structure based on personal branding as the only sustainable way to survive in the group is destroying civilisation and pushing the group back in barbaric time.

Managing you own notoriety and personal branding is the core aim of social media. With this new category of influencers.

There is no curse of intelligence. There os curse of social mediation which fails to modulate individual intelligence in the benefit of the collective intelligence.

Cheers

I feel for the author, as it seems they are going through an existential crisis. That’s rough, to say the least. Sounds like they might be on a path to finding some help, though.

I’d encourage the author to stash this one away and come back in 20 years and look at it again.

I think far more of what is examined is just part of the human condition, rather than anything to do with intelligence.

Hello, author here.

I think I failed to communicate the core idea of the article here. Of course what I describe is a product of the human condition, my argument was simply that "intelligence" dials up that conditioning, resulting in the person being more prone to such suffering.

Everyone thinks, everyone questions, it's just that the intelligence tends to make you think and question a lot more, resulting more often in the separation of mind and body. There are many research studies on this subject as well, I mentioned one of them in the article : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961....

The other part of the article was focused more on our higher expectation from such people around us, setting them up for greater disappointment. And the limitations of intelligence, how cognitive biases can creep in even if you are a highly rational person.

Also thank you for expressing your concern and kind words, I am not actually dealing with an existential crisis at the moment, although I have in the past :)

Intelligence is just the ability to think logically (at least as defined by iq). What you mean is probably overthinking, anxiety, etc.

Yes, and it seems to be that brains with higher intelligence have stronger tendencies to "overthink" and thus triggering anxiety, irrational discomfort, etc. Everyone experiences this in general, but with higher intelligence the likelihood dials up. See this paper - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961... for reference

You have a point with being aware of where the “you” ends and things out of “your influence” begin. Accepting that something’s can’t be changed is a good point to reflect that “your” happiness should come from internally - the external is a bonus. Failure to accept this puts others and external factors in control of “your” happiness.

Yes. Accepting what you can and cannot control is essential. Worrying about things beyond your influence can be futile. Even within yourself, you might not be able to control your mind or even your life in it's entirety, but you can control what you pay attention to this second. Simply paying attention to the present, mindfulness practice, helps modulate your experience of life without actively trying to control it

From the choices given, I'd definitely select 'friends and barbecue.'

Me too! :D

Love your site, did you make it from scratch?

I was learning Next.js long ago and got started with this tutorial : https://nextjs.org/learn/basics/create-nextjs-app. And then updated it as I needed

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