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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-what-soylentils-want-to-hear dept.

From BBC Future:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:04PM (#171168)

    Not to take your excellent post lightly, I would like address some select points. The internet at large might just be the system of gaining awareness more easily that you wish for. It is something that I pretend gives my work meaning. Another is related to both the "intellectual elite" and machine learning. We have been focusing on sentience of AI and increasing our own without regard to sapience. It is that we should be trying to maximize. Wisdom, for lack of a better term, I take as being awareness added to intelligence. Technical correctness is great and we have made wonderful strides in that area, but have been stagnant for centuries in applying awareness with it such as your example of automation being great, but also being bad. It is a never ending wonder to me how so many things in the doing annihilate itself or the gains made. That may be some sort of subconscious or even conscious awareness of those with high IQ that pushes them to apply their abilities in realms of triviality, as the end results of trivial things don't particularly matter as much as the process. That might explain why so many brilliant minds have more passion for sci-fi, video games, or debating if this post would have been more well received with paragraph breaks than doing something of actual value ;)