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from the not-what-soylentils-want-to-hear dept.
If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
The question may seem like a trivial matter concerning a select few – but the insights it offers could have ramifications for many. Much of our education system is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the primary way of measuring cognitive abilities, and we spend millions on brain training and cognitive enhancers that try to improve those scores. But what if the quest for genius is itself a fool's errand?
The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California's schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the "Termites", and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.
As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the time his series aired on CBS, the Termites' average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman's expectations – there were many who pursued more "humble" professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that "intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated". Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.
As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story – that intelligence does not equate to a better life – has been told again and again. At best, a great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can actually mean you are less fulfilled.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday April 17 2015, @03:59PM
Definitely better than fail. Trading in a license instead of doing everything from scratch saves me gobs of time and money. At least I don't have to do a practical driving test too. I'm a safe driver, so everything is good. After all, I'm just like the other 95% of the people out who think they're better than the average driver.
[Looking up bureaucracy] Looks like the word comes from the French sometime about 200 years ago. The Americans and Germans have it down pat and I'm pretty sure the Brits are pretty steeped in it too. Maybe the four countries have some kind of competition thing going?
(Score: 1) by deroby on Friday April 17 2015, @05:08PM
Hmm.. if there is a challenge going on between France, Germany and the UK, that would explain the situation here in Belgium...
I'm kidding... kind of.
My experiences here with bureaucracy are that they are probably not worse than anywhere else, but in all honesty I can't compare really. In fact, each time I go out of the Shengen Area I'm getting the feeling that I'm living a sheltered life.
Then again, here too it sure helps to ask the right people because on your own you're never going to get it right the first time.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday April 17 2015, @06:40PM
You're spot on and this is the thing that gets me pretty frustrated. You walk into a place that should have the answers and if you don't fall into the 80% category, they don't know what to do with you. In my case with driving, it probably works ok if you go through a school of driving for a few months. (Germany is pretty strict.) I have decades of experience driving and Germany is happy to "simply" trade licenses under certain circumstances which is what I tried to do. Unfortunately, no one person seems to be able to give you a single set of instructions to get through on the first shot. They seem to expect the driving schools to help you navigate their bureaucracy. And it isn't just for driving. It seems to be everything: banking, internet setup, apartment hunting... everything. And it was mostly the same way in the U.S. too when I lived there. A few details may have been different, but the mentality was the same.