Downsides of Being Clever | Hacker News Reader

Downsides of Being Clever

entrepreneur.com

88 pointswalterbell78 comments

Is Lisa Simpson lonely?

I mean, If you go to play with the other kids, and they want to do something you don't enjoy, and what you find fun to do no kid does... Does it mean you are lonely?

When I was a kid I loved to play sports like the other kids, and was very good at it, so I was very social,but I also loved reading tons of books and mathematics. Most of the other kids did not.

When you read Kant, Descartes, Stefan Zweig(in german) books that tell you how to raise a kid while you are the kid!, Asimov (in english), Feynman ... all the other kids behavior becomes so childish and stupid.

You could be alone while standing with other people.

For me the fact that Lisa Simpson is alone is not that she is lonely, but the consequence of being unique while other unique people live far away.

I got to find and regularly meet other people like me only as an adult. Most of them are really successful now, but most of them also lived Hell in the school days.

They were alone, but they are not lonely.

Word. When I got to MIT, I found my community. I didn't realize up to then that I had been restraining some of my nerdiness.

Same thing with my wife. When we met, I discovered that I didn't have to censor the literary references... she read way more than I.

I love being around people I can be myself with.

Ah yes, embracing your inner elitist.

The desire to have a community and shared culture doesn't make one elitist. The GP could have as easily said they found bookish people they could relate to by becoming a librarian. Would that have sounded elitist or was the MIT name-dropping what upsets you?

That response is why I usually censor myself.

Is it elitist to want to be around other kids you can mentally relate to? I suffered in school until I transferred to a 7th grade public magnet school. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged because I could be myself with the other kids, most of whom happened to be from poor immigrant families (it is not a class or culture issue).

It's not elitist to like something that makes you happy, even if that thing is being around a group of wealthy, intelligent people. Elitism is about how you treat the other people. Being elitist would mean refusing to socialise with any group other than the one MIT crowd because they're too 'dumb' to be fun around. I don't think that's what jkestner is suggesting; that he found a group he's happy with doesn't mean he refuses contact with the other groups.

"Elite" simply means "drawn out of the larger pool". Sure, there is a lot of social baggage around that word, as in a sense of superiority, but the in the general case there is no such implication.

What's wrong with hanging around with folks who get your jokes (and vice versa)? They don't have to form the totality of your identity.

Somehow it seems uncontroversial when someone finds a group of, say, fans of their favorite team (or rock band) and says, "now I am with my people!" Is there some peculiar difference in regards to books or maths jokes?

Nobody likes to feel lonely in a crowd. Everybody prefers the company of their herd.

However there is plenty to learn from those who are not like you, even if you struggle to understand them, or they you.

Variety is the spice of life. Avoiding the company of most others -- or the correlate of exclusively preferring the company of one group -- risks stagnation.

Humans are social beings and need to feel the closeness to other human beings. This does not mean, that Lisa Simpson is lonely - of course the exact level of closeness you need differs from human being to human being and she has parents after all. But more statistically speaking I would say that being alone does make you lonely, even though the reading German philosophers as a child part appeals to the exceptionalism of the other commenters.

But physical proximity is not emotional closeness. Being surrounded by people having negative effects (disrespect, incompatible value system,...) on you is far worth than bubbling alone walking in a forest.

Physical proximity certainly does help, that is why lovers cuddle and parents hug their children. They need this physical proximity to gain the ability to trust and build more complex relationships on more abstract forms of closeness.

I do not think that high intelligence removes this need and magically gives you the ability to create relationships or fight loneliness by brain power.

These are affectionate relationships and an exception rather than the norm. It's a massively important need, but you only have a handful of people you cuddle with. The vast majority of your relationship are social, smalltalkish, gossipish, etc.

Another way to look at it would be that intelligence is just a tool every person has. A tool we are all free to use and abuse as we please. It allows one possessing a lot of intelligence to achieve once goals quicker and more efficiently. However, the goals them selves can be as good, evil, misguided, or downright stupid as humanly possible.

A very intelligent person with a good goal can achieve amazing things, including happiness. But very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want, and in that lies the problem. Given a misguided goal, high intelligence can quickly amplify your efforts of digging your self deeper and deeper into a whole.

So, in the end intelligence is like a gun, a nice tool to have as long as you use it wisely, carefully, and for it's intended purpose.

> very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want

Here's a comic strip on the relative merits of questions and answers, http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

That's a keeper!

That was wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

If your question can't really be answered, it's probably just ill-posed in the first place.

That is a very narrow mindset.

For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during recorded history. Maybe some of those could be answered today if, say, the whole world's GNP was redirected towards that goal... but this is not going to happen. Multiple people have multiple, often contradicting, worthy goals.

Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue. Of course, you need to believe that these other perspectives offer value that Science(TM) cannot before you even begin to consider them.

>For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during recorded history.

Ok, so they're well-posed questions. So?

>Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue.

This sounds like the place of the argument. I think these questions aren't well-posed: they're actually being used to imply a large number of smaller questions. You can usually get a well-posed question by trying to break down one of these questions, or expose the bad reasoning that led to considering things like, "Well gosh, what's it all about anyway, when you get right down to it?" real questions.

That comic reminds me on the aviary example in the Theaetetus.

Very true! I think being 'wise' is for the most part pursuing worthy goals. But the article makes the mistake of equating wisdom with 'rationality'. Rationality is a tool too (as the article suggests a distinct tool from intelligence). It is not like being able to not worry about awkward conversations and not maxing out your credit card will lead you to good life.

A few years back I've heard about emotional intelligence. School enticed me to be academic smart, leaving family and society to grow the emotional counterpart, except it was easier to be comfy at answering math instead of understand my and others emotions. Which was a great loss. Balance is key.

"The most notable, and sad, case concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course before taking her finals and started waitressing. She later worked as a call girl, entertaining clients with her ability to recite equations during sexual acts."

The sad case?? According to whom?

She's working in an area she enjoys and controls her own life, something she didn't have as a "prodigy".

http://inquiringfeminist.com/about-me/

It's sad for those who understand what she may have contributed to humanity, knowledge in general, etc.

There are no guarantees how impactful your work will be but if more of the 7 billion people on this planet could contribute, we'd all be better off.

Meh. I think we'd all be better off if we did what was good for us and for people in our environment, rather than trying to save the world.

What do you base that on?

Life is a balancing act. People who worry about their legacy are usually not the nicest people to be around because they don't have time for other people, and they usually don't really end up making an impact either.

Mind you, I'm not a cynic, I think ambition is a wonderful thing... in the right quantity.

It has absolutely nothing to do with legacy. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will largely be forgotten in a couple hundred years. However, humanity benefits from their contributions.

I'm wondering why you think life is a balancing act. I hear people say "balance" all the time like this, but I don't see any real advantage to it. It just seems like a fluff word.

Like, what are you balancing, and where is the evidence that this is superior in ways that generally matter?

Well, you could be a great doctor or teacher, for example. Great architect or artist? Poet, author? There are many ways to contribute.

But you can't be a great call girl?

Sure. Now can you figure out why that's different than being a doctor or teacher?

Not really. Care to explain?

Nope. If you don't get it, it's probably lost on you, which makes it even more painful to see people so gifted squander their abilities. There are so many problems to solve and so few people who can solve them.

Personally I'm happy enough when I see people just choosing activities that don't cause more problems.

It sounds like you just have a lot of judgement about what is and is not valuable work in the world, and would rather hide behind condescension than be honest about that.

Okay, I get your point. But surely waitressing is better for society than writing poetry?

Depends on how good you are. Something like this will be inspiring people for a long time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWvcwVWCcnY

I dunno, even if the blame for going to university too early and subsequent estrangement from the family lies entirely with the parents it's not exactly a happy state of affairs, even if you don't think having sex to pay the bills afterwards is necessarily a bad thing.

All we know about her work as a prostitute, which might have ceased several years ago, is that newspapers reported that she started the work to pay off a relatively small debt and quoted her as saying she enjoyed the work, she may have earned from some of the racy images published and she now runs a blog dedicated to attacking the personalities behind said newspapers. I don't think that really leaves us with enough evidence to speculate on how much she's enjoying her life seven years after those reports.

When you are smart, trivial things, like making "good" or rational choices are simply boring. This boredom naturally increases with the number of trivial things. When confronted to boredom, intelligent people will generally choose something stimulating, if not on an intellectual level, at least on some other level. And since they are very good at finding lateral solutions to problems, they will go for out of the box, so-called irrational, things/choices. The world is boring, plagued by overly simple, artificially complicated, problems and life goes by like water between your fingers. To survive and be productive when intelligent, you've got to be happily endowed with autistic features, which not all intelligent people are. The world is beating its own records of waste every day and that goes for intelligence too. So, one might as well have a less boring life. All this is not a downside of being clever. It's the downside of living in a pathetically wasteful, boring and often plain stupid world.

On the contrary the simplest possible solutions are nearly always the most difficult to find. Believing that a complex solution is the answer is symptomatic of not understanding the problem - which is another trait of intelligent people: belief that they can solve problems beyond the scope of their current ability (i.e. believe that they are smarter than they are), or too much haste when approaching a problem.

Possibly this stems from the expectations curse outlined in the article.

A standardized test for 'wisdom' as quoted below seems possible and worth developing. In addition to personal self-improvement, a lot of companies would be interested. Does anyone here know of any such tests?

> In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises disclosed to Dear Abby, the Washington Post’s agony aunt. As the volunteers talked, a panel of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded argument, whether the candidates were ready to admit the limits of their knowledge – their “intellectual humility” – and whether they were ignoring important details that didn’t fit their theory.

> High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship quality, and, crucially, reduced anxiety and rumination – all the qualities that seem to be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores were less likely to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was not related to any of these measures, and certainly didn’t predict greater wisdom. “People who are very sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments [for] why their claims are the correct ones – but may do it in a very biased fashion.”

This was also one of the more interesting tidbits for me. I'd love to see such a test. I wonder if it's easier to 'pass' or get a high score on a test like this in a written format rather than the real life type scenarios typically encountered where its not obvious that one is being tested.

The lede to this article is silly. IQ leads to substantial difference between groups, but is not perfectly correlated with success, so that there is still substantial variation between individuals with the same IQ. What is do difficult to understand about this?

> the Termites’ [1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more] average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. > Terman concluded that “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. > Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average. > Why don’t the benefits of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term?

They do pay off on average for certain measures.

In the case of the 'Termites' reporting unease over not achieving their potential: perhaps something to do with being studied all their lives and asked about it?

Why don't we see people talk about the downsides of being talented( in sports)..

Why is being talented in a bookish or intellectual sense looked down upon? so much so clever kids are asked to not show of their cleverness.

We don't ask sporty kids (or people) to be less sporty..

Is there an underlying principle at work here that threatens the average populace?

Did you actually read the article? The starting premise behind it was that intelligent people ending up not using their life to showcase their intelligence was a problem worthy of study.

The downsides of being talented at sports are well known: most don't make it and many of those that do have a marginal income which lasts until they're in their mid-30s at best. Apart from the confidence that comes with having being respected for your sporting prowess as a young age (and possibly a free degree if you're an elite kid in the US), there aren't many fringe benefits that come from being [known as] an almost sportsperson, and physical faculties decline faster and are less versatile than mental ones. Which is part of the reason why they're actually frequently told they should stop devoting so much time to sport and make sure they pass their exams...

I believe it is partly influenced by culture and partly from game theoretical competition.

In Asia, smart people are usually admired. Smart kids are quite popular in many schools, or at least admired by their peers. There is sometimes a certain amount of jealousy too but generally they are well accepted and act as tutor for their friends and leaders in group projects.

In office and colleges where competition among peers is intense and zero-sum, jealousy overtakes admiration. In other situations, the culture of collaboration and a certain amount of plagiarism (which is probably more prevalent in Asia than the US) lead to quite a bit of respect from peers to smart kids/people.

In my experience, it's not ordinary people who look for the downside to intelligence, but above average intelligence people who don't want to believe that there are people who are beyond them.

On HN, people who are hard working, above average intelligence, and well rounded with good social skills, don't want to accept that a "rock star" kid out of college should earn much more than them.

I say this as someone who never worked very hard (although by the end of my PhD I had learned to be focussed and work consistently), never reached the point where the people around me were smarter than me (even though I went to a top school and then a top tech company). I feel a sense of gloating and smugness when people say "you won't be able to rely on your intelligence forever" or "when you get to X (company/university) you'll be shocked that you're not the smartest person around". Why can't people let very smart people enjoy their intelligence?

> Why don't we see people talk about the downsides of being talented( in sports)..

I think we often do talk about the downsides of being talented in sports and the arts (specifically American acting and music).

Early stardom often leads to a disappointing career. Heisman winners that rarely succeed in the NFL, NBA and NFL stars that often go bankrupt as soon as their career ends, child actors with drug problems.

Many times, this athletic ability or experience being a truly competitive athlete makes it very hard to play a more recreational version of their sport.

> Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal intelligence – the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to prowess at spatial puzzles (which, in fact, seemed to reduce the risk of anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence might also make you more likely to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them.

While I'm nowhere near the same IQ as some of the people on that list, I do believe I have strong verbal intelligence. And yes, I do suffer a lot from anxiety, most of which stems from me explaining these anxieties in my own head.

"Clever" in the article means "high IQ". Some interesting nuggets. E.g.:

   maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford
   University aged 12, she dropped out of her
   course before taking her finals and started
   waitressing. She later worked as a call girl

and

   fair, unbiased decision-making is largely
   independent of IQ

and

   someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice
   as likely to max out their credit card.

etc.

I was initially going to skim the article, but I went back and read the whole thing.

I really wish more people grokked Stanovich's algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence thing. It is so much better at explaining reality than trying to say "well they're smart but they have ~character flaws~ so they don't succeed"!

Do you have any sources for research other than the text book?

i wonder if anyone could tell me the difference between Stanovich's autonomous VS algorithmic mind and Kahneman's Fast VS slow thinking?

(disclaimer: I have no understanding of the subject, I just searched the Internet)

This longish article by Stanovich himself (link: http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_fil...) seems to answer your question (and falcolas' question as well). I am reading it right now and basically it seems that he proposes a three-level model as a refinement of Kahneman's two-level model.

What if the causation is the opposite? What if the people who ruminate more or are more anxious about conversations become smarter and more eloquent, by taking more time analyzing those things?

If we stick to IQ as the definition of 'cleverness' (which can be argued, of course), then this is not really true. IQ cannot be significantly increased with learning, conversation, etc. I used to be* a Mensa member, and it's really surprising and eye opening to see the variety of people there. You can find university teachers and enterpreneurs, but they are not too common. The average Mensa member is really an average citizen with an average job - librarian in a small town, sysadmin in an elementary school, or just an unemployed, depressed twenty-something.

*: you need to pay membership fee to be a member, and I found it really uninteresting after a while to go to Mensa meetings. IQ is not something that can really connect people.

Yes.

I know a few people who were Mensa members, but if you talk to them or look at their life, you wouldn't guess that they have rather high IQs.

Just because people have the ability to do intellectual demanding things, others couldn't, doesn't mean they will.

I am curious what do these meetings look like. Could you describe them? Why did you find them uninteresting?

seems to be a dupe of this BBC Article [0]. Sufiah Yosuf responds on her blog here [1].

[0]: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of-be...

[1]: http://inquiringfeminist.com/2015/04/14/hello-new-readers/

> TerryADavis: Highs and lows balance for everyone.

I agree with the wisdom part. but wait... maybe I'm biased because I can relate with it, which means it doesn't apply to me, which means i can't relate with it. My mind is an escher drawing.

I thought the most interesting observation was somewhat buried, specifically the way the author closely links intelligence to anxiety. That has a ring of truth to it.

Ramblings:

I was recently talking with coworkers about intelligence, and the many forms of it that exist beyond just raw cognitive quickness, of course in the context of the company. There are social skills and being able to interact with people, curiosity, the ability to absorb information quickly, the ability to make cognitive leaps quickly, the ability to just get things done, etc.

I would say that these all qualify as different forms of intelligence. They all have their uses. Some can be trained / improved more than others. They also can conflict with each other at times. For example, one of my coworkers talked about how he spent a couple hours investigating the inner-workings of the Java garbage collector because of a bug that actually was caused by some code that was accidentally allocating orders of magnitude extra memory than intended. I laughed and said I was lazier and would never have bothered looking so deeply and would have just assumed I did something stupid. I see this as curiosity + quick cognitive leaps vs. getting things done.

Jumping to the end, the article talks about wisdom as a learnable skill. In this context, I would say that wisdom is yet another type of intelligence, one that can have an impact on your other intelligences, and it is one that is quite trainable.

Onto happiness - I think it's a bit of a shame that society doesn't attempt to teach "happiness"[0] more. Maybe this is a stretch, but I feel like there are some legitimate fundamental ideas and mental skills that could help a lot of people live more fulfilling lives.

In the case of worrying, for example, it would be helpful to be able to quickly identify that you're worrying (which can be hard to catch!), ask yourself why you're worrying, and then either come up with an plan to resolve it if it's solvable or, in the case of agonizing over the human condition, accepting it as something that just is. This is something that you can practice.

Or goals. Schools seem to emphasize setting goals and creating plans to achieve them. But I feel like I was never taught about what to do once I reached a goal, or what to think about goals in general. Every time I reached a goal, I was satisfied briefly, and then I felt sort of an emptiness that accompanied the thought of "That's it? What now?" Now that I've done plenty of reading (e.g. Mastery by George Leonard), I've learned to accept that while it's useful to set goals, they're inherently unsatisfying to achieve. Fulfillment lies in the struggle to achieve them, and the struggle never ends.

Maybe these kinds of things are hard to teach since they're so inherently personal and learning them requires tight integration with personal motivations (which is hard to do on a grand scale), and maybe what works for me wouldn't work for many others, but I still feel like there must be some "happiness" knowledge nuggets that could be taught broadly.

[0] I prefer fulfillment to happiness because it's way more realistic. Minds are pretty chaotic, and I've found that even when I should be happy since everything is going well, I can be unhappy. Likewise, even when a lot of bad things happen, I can be really happy. Fulfillment, on the other hand, seems a lot more stable and less vulnerable to the random meandering of mood.

People here seem to like talking about trade-offs, specifically technical ones. Maybe intelligence is just another trade-off.

Purely biologically speaking it is a known trade-off. Intelligence allows tool usage and abstract reasoning about one's surroundings, but it comes of the cost of using up fantastic amounts of energy, which is why even in humans intelligence is not continuously used at the highest level of processing.

That doesn't look like much of a trade-off in the context of the article, though. Namely living in civilization.

Don't forget higher child infant mortality and premature births. Humans are born several months earlier than optimal in order to be able to fit that huge head of ours through the birth canal.

That's not my understanding of the modern interpretation of head size and pelvis size. I believe current thinking is that the (healthy) mother simply cannot metabolise nutrients efficiently enough to sustain further growth of the (healthy) foetus beyond a certain size. Evolutionarily, the pelvis has adapted as far as necessary, and no further.

Although actually your statement and mine aren't incompatible.

Anyway, it's quite a fascinating area of study, including biomechanics, anthropology, metabolism, and more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma

Reply on news.ycombinator.com