Smart people are drunks | Hacker News Reader

Smart people are drunks

drinksafterdark.com

53 pointsbd63 comments

At first I interpreted this as wishful thinking, but there may be a bit of truth to it. To some extent intelligence can breed disillusionment and along with that depression. I don't think that I need to convince anyone in this crowd that smart creative types tend to be stifled and frustrated in most of today's institutions; school, office jobs. The associated depression can easily manifest itself as a drinking problem.

The concept of emotional intelligence, while buzzwordy and overused, goes a long way to explain this as well. IQ doesn't correlate with or slightly negatively correlates with EQ. Self control is supposed to be an element of EQ. Higher IQ students can often coast though school without developing self-control and healthy coping mechanisms needed in later life.

"Higher IQ students can often coast though school without developing self-control and healthy coping mechanisms needed in later life."

I second this sentiment, having experienced it myself. I coasted through high school while many of my peers had to work extra hard to get good grades, and it subsequently took me seven years to finish a three year degree (an illustration degree, no less, which requires patience far greater than what I had).

I don't consider it a failure - I consider it a lesson well-learnt, and don't regret the time it took - but if I had developed that discipline earlier, it wouldn't have taken nearly so long nor been so difficult.

But at the same time you may not have appreciated it as much. Of course that doesn't change how you feel but it just comes to show that almost everything has both a cost and a benefit.

Agreed, and I now appreciate the determination it took to complete the degree considering the spectacular number of failed courses on my academic transcript. It was a humbling experience, and for someone of my hubris at the time, really the only way I could have learnt persistence and followthrough.

Another problem is that our society attaches romance to being depressed and smart, such that people can sometimes go out of their way to be depressed just so they seem smart. Additionally, smart people who lack EQ will find their self esteem in being perceived as smart, both by themselves and others, and thus have incentive to be depressed, especially if they are already depressed from being lonely. So, we've just got a nasty vicious cycle going on with smartness and depression.

Just examine your first impression of a happy person and an unhappy person. The former will probably seem more vapid to you. Or, look at how depression themed submissions are highly modded on this site (check my submission history for an example).

I think your comment is right on the mark. The cycle you describe paints an unfortunately accurate picture of many of my high school and university years. I derived not just self esteem but much of my identity from having people perceive me as smart. I learned early on that people don't readily equate perky with intelligent so I dampened my enthusiasm for, well, effectively everything. Loneliness, too, played a role. Being "the smart one" shut me out of a lot of social situations which fed into my depression. But the exclusion also fueled my image of intelligence. I'm sure you can see how this situation has vicious cycle written all over it.

Thankfully I can write about this in the past tense. What changed? I moved to San Francisco for four months for an internship. I didn't know a single person in the city and used the opportunity to forge a new identity. Day after day, person after person, I would try a new Eric. I pretended, on various occasions, to be a cook, a banker, a mechanical engineer, a park ranger, any number of other professions. And, funny thing, I was happiest just being me. When I moved back to finish my degree I was happier than I had ever been. So it all came down to a change of scenery!

Wow, how coincidental. I have the same name and went through a similar deal. In my case, it was gaining responsibility for my life that has helped break me out of the cycle. The social culture of high school and college is just in no way good.

That's a good point, about responsibility. My glib comment on a change of scenery wasn't very insightful. For the first time in San Fransico I lived alone and knew nobody so it was me, and only me, that was responsible for doing everything. In retrospect, I think the situation forced me into being functional.

Yes, to be more specific, responsibility means that if I do not like my life, it is in my power to change it. Before, if I didn't like my life, there wasn't a lot I could do about it. So, since the social structure wasn't conducive to my personality, I would retreat from it all, leading to the depressive cycle.

Thanks for the discussion, you've helped me clarify my ideas on depression.

Lisa Simpson: "As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs."

Makes me think of that Einstein quote: "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity"

Probably because you're more likely to be unhappy with the state of things if you understand them well.

My professor tells me of a fellow PhD student that fits the study well. He was absolutely brilliant, way above any of the other students, but he would spend all his time in the bar and ended up dying from drinking too much. I think he didn't even get the degree.

I have another similar anecdote.

We had one TA for Mathematical Analysis class that was smart. Smarter than professors. Freakishly smart. Like, he could just look at the equation that others needed a full blackboard to solve and tell the solution straight away.

He drank. He looked like hell. Legend was that he was frequently found in ditches, completely drunk, looking at the stars.

Sad story.

Smarter people will stop before it has a chance to ruin their lives.

I remember Feynman mentioning that once, when walking past a bar, he realized that he had considered going in and drinking (he was alone, it was in the middle of the afternoon), so he decided it would probably be better to quit entirely.

What was easy for one exceptional person doesn't invalidate the research.

I never said it did. If drinking excessively is gradually killing somebody, though, it might not be a bad idea for them to stop drinking, you know? Seems like the smart thing to do.

As far as I can tell from the summary (has anybody actually read it? I don't have a subscription...), the point the research makes is that people who have tested as having above-average IQs at the age of 10 also have a higher-than-average incidence of problems with alcohol as adults (meaning what, I'm not sure: arrests and/or medical problems, I assume). That could be read as, "smart people don't necessarily have smart coping behaviors".

I'm flabbergasted by the people in thread going, "Smart people have a statistically higher incidence of winding up dead in ditches due to alcohol poisoning! Go us!". But then again, the top level post was summarized as "smart people are drunks", so maybe I'm being naive in expecting people to respond to more than just a summary-of-a-summary in a post about alcohol.

"Smart people have a statistically higher incidence of winding up dead in ditches due to alcohol poisoning! Go us!"

Who actually said that? I'm sorry if the anecdote I mentioned was misinterpreted. It was just one data point. Just like the one about Feynman :).

BTW the original article had 8170 datapoints. And in the free abstract they tell that higher childhood mental ability scores were related not just to incidence of the problems but also with "to higher average intake of alcohol and to drinking more frequently".

http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/98/12/2237

It wasn't yours, and the ones I had in mind (in tone, not verbatim) seem to have been deleted or rephrased enough that I'm no longer reading them that way.

As for your anecdote, sad indeed. I was also thinking of the post about Phil Katz's death on here a few weeks back. It's a horrible way to die.

What field?

Physics

Maybe, but I find some of the arguments that the opposite result is true (http://neuroeconomics.typepad.com/neuroeconomics/2007/02/alt...) convincing.

A poor omen for the direction of western society.

Not necessarily. Smart people don't comprehend the big picture in its entirety: they just grasp more, on average, than less intelligent people.

There are plenty of smart people who don't abuse substances. Plenty of those people are actively pushing to move the world ahead, and they're succeeding. Things are better now than ever. The people who see the bad in the world are going to be brighter and less oblivious, but that doesn't preclude the possibility of good and better things happening.

> Things are better now than ever.

You can't possible believe this, can you? The notion that history is a steady, near-constant ascent for humanity is flawed.

I don't think it's constantly ascending. I think that over any lengthy period of time, things are getting better. Every century we understand more about the universe and about ourselves than we did just a little while ago. That's a good sign.

I know humanity is capable of ridiculous evils. At the same time, though, it's capable of breathtaking goods. When I think about the future, those goods are what I focus on. Yes, the evils will happen - but why bother worrying about them too much? They'll pass.

"Yes, the evils will happen - but why bother worrying about them too much?"

Because the next evil might just be the one that kills you.

That's a reason why you ought to be cautious for your own sake: why you should always be aware of your surroundings and of the things happening around you and even around your country. But you can't live your life in constant fear. Even if that helps you survive, that's a miserable life to live.

I think it helps to admit that you might die at any minute, and then throw that into a small, survival-geared part of your mind and go about living your life anyway. Fact of the matter is, a great deal of people live long and happy lives, and for most people live is pretty good. Too many bright people throw out the evidence of happiness to dwell on the bad.

I might trade living in the 90's for right now but there is not other time in the history of the US which I would prefer than right now. There are plenty of country's which are worse off now than they where 5 years ago but in the US with some minor variations the further back you go the worse things get.

This is what we call optimism. Just as having both risk-loving and risk-averse people creates a more stable species, so does having optimists and pessimists.

Its a perfectly reasonable thing to believe--just like its opposite--and depends solely on how you're measuring. All in all, I think it depends on the reduce function. If it was reduce(lambda a,b: a+b,[ x.happiness for x in humanity ]), then maybe there is the most happy the world has ever seen. If you took that number and divided it by the population, than maybe the average happy per person has gotten lower. And so on and so on.

I think its definitely possible to believe it.

> If it was reduce(lambda a,b: a+b,[ x.happiness for x in humanity ])

Well, when you put it that way, Batman...

I'm very optimistic for my own life and for things that I can manage. I'm not optimistic for humanity as a whole at any given time, nor am I pessimistic. History is history, and we are all victims of human nature. Good will happen, bad will happen, the lot of some will improve as the lot of others worsens.

The key is to not let your kids know they are smart. Challenge them, and encourage failure. Get them outside their comfort zone. Everyone's a "moron" at something.

It's those people that have high IQs and think that's enough that I know that have the problems with substances. A gift is useless sitting in the closet.

How many "gifted" people you know that are kicking ass every day are substance abusers? None that I know!

I don't abuse substances, but I'm definitely addicted to the internet.

Do you do any packet sniffing?

In german there is a proverb which says (roughtly): smartness drinks, stupidity eats (too much in both cases).

This is becoming more and more true. Being overweight is a social problem nowadays.

For a country with Beer better then it's food, that makes sense ;)

touché :o)

In Tipping Point the author said that in a study they found that cool people smoked. They weren't cool because they smoked, but the ones who did smoked tended to be "cooler" than those that did not.

Do not let the tobacco companies get ahold of that one.

I don't have access to the full report (roll on open access!), but I'm confused by this:

"Of the 3,895 men and 4,148 women who reported drinking alcohol as adults, those with higher average scores on childhood mental ability tests were also more likely to have indications of alcohol problems in adulthood"

How does the picture change if you include the teetotalers? Did they plan from the start to exclude the non-drinker, or is that just being repeated because it's a more interesting figures?

Good observation. I wonder if anybody here has actually read the report. (The author of the linked post writes a cocktail blog, so she's at least upfront about her biases.)

"People of above average intelligence don't always have equally intelligent coping mechanisms" isn't as punchy a headline, of course...and this is about people whose drinking has caused them serious problems (hospital visits? incarceration?), as per the report, not people who just drink socially or whatever.

I think people who never drink, may tend to do so for religious reasons. If someone has never had a drink, they could have a tendency for alcoholism that never has a chance to manifest itself. So maybe that justifies excluding teetotalers from the data?

Couple of notes:

1) Some anthropologists see intoxication as the natural state of man since fermentation was invented until just recently.(No, I don't have a link, although there was a Scientific American article about this within the last few years)

2) I have family (an uncle) who are active in AA. They tell me that this is well known in the AA community. Instead of a lot of bums and ex-cons (which there are), the most interesting observation is the number of doctors, lawyers, professors, etc -- professions that usually require a high degree of intelligence.

3) Freud was of the opinion that depressed/addicted people simply were better at understanding how crappy life was than other people. Of course, Freud was a coke-head, so take that with a grain of salt.

4) I've been toying with the idea that the junkie mentality produces more creative and intelligent works than the sober one. Take, for instance, all of the famous authors who are addicted. Or comedians. It seems like there is some hunger, some desperate reaching out that comes with addiction that translates well into creative efforts. It might sound bad, but I don't think Stevie King is as good now as when he used to be a junkie. Sames goes for Robin Williams. It's just a working hypothesis. I wouldn't use any of these observations to justify addictive behavior.

Depression leads to amazing creativity. Just look as Eliot, who wrote his masterpiece "The Wasteland" while in a middle of an extremely turbulent time with his family and friends.

It's actually "The Waste Land". I realize I am being over-anal, but assuming I am one of the few English graduates here I will grasp an opportunity to shine. That said, I fully agree.

Jim Morrison of The Doors fame was supposed to be quite bright [1].

There is an alleged quote of his [2]:

I drink so I can talk to assholes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Morrison#Biography

[2] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Doors_%28film%29

Have you also noticed that a majority of the famous classical music composers had extremely screwed up lives? I thought this was particularly fascinating when I took a music history class.

I think Stevie King is different.

Tommyknockers, which he wrote when going through one of the worst addictive periods, is horrible in my opinion. I suspect it's better if you're snorting.

Obviously though, other stuff from the early years is universally regarded (by fans I mean!) as quite good.

He writes a lot about the effect of being a junkie on art during the semi-autobiographical parts of the last volumes in the dark tower series.

I like both stevie kings, but I'm glad he sobered up, or the king we have now might have ceased to be with us long ago.

SCENE 1: A Party.

SCIENTIST IS TALKING TO A HOT LOOKING GIRL AND HOLDING TWO DRINKS.

SCIENTIST: Hey! CORRELATION! C'mere honey! You gotta see this?

CORRELATION WALKS UP IN A HOT RED COCKTAIL DRESS SIPPING AN APPLETINI

CORRELATION: What is it, darling?

SCIENTIST: Honey, this is CAUSATION. Isn't it amazing how much she looks like you?

CAUSATION: Pleased to meet you! That's a lovely dress.

CORRELATION: Why thank you. You're right, dear, we do look an awful lot alike.

SCIENTIST GETS A WICKED GRIN

SCIENTIST: Hey, girls. Let's say we go somewhere more comfortable together. I think we might be able to work with this.

CORRELATION AND CAUSATION, FURIOUS AT THIS SUDDEN TREATMENT, SPLASH THEIR DRINKS ON SCIENTIST AND STORM OFF. HE LOOKS AT THE CAMERA THINKING "YES, I DESERVED THAT."

You're besieged by idiots on all side. What else is there to do but drink?

> Smart people are drunks

And you don't understand correlation and causation.

Where do you see causality implied in that title?

Have you been drinking? :-)

It looks like the title says being smart causes people to become drunks. To see this, reverse the title:

"Drunks are smart people"

The reversal should be meaningless if the title only implies correlation, since correlation is bidirectional. However, since the reversal is not meaningless, then the title must imply causation.

I think you've got it backwards. Since correlation is bidirectional then the reversal should NOT be meaningless.

Sorry, bad wording on my part. I don't mean the reversed phrase should be meaningless, but that it should not mean something different than the unreversed phrase. However, it clearly does mean something different, therefore the implied relationship between smart and drunk is not bidirectional.

That being said, I missed the possibility of a 3rd underlying factor. The title is agnostic about this possibility.

Interesting video:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs&NR=1

Turn this on its head: if people with higher IQs drink more, people who drink more have higher IQs. While correlation doesn't imply causation, the hypothesis that drinking alcohol makes you clever cannot automatically be ruled out.

"IQ scores obtained when 8,170 boys and girls were 10 years old and their alcohol intake and any problems when they were 30 years old."

[I'm assuming not many of them were heavy drinkers in kindergarten. Go on, call me naive]

So p -> q /= q -> p. Aren't there a lot of things you can't rule out?

I think it may be related to the drive for mental stimulation. The same way smart people devour information and ideas they also devour other mental stimulants like alcohol.

I wouldn't class alcohol as a stimulant. Stimulants are things like speed, meth, etc. Alcohol is a depressant.

And caffeine. :]

Sounds like addictive personality disorder to me.

But then again, psychologists seem to have a name for everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com