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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 Thursday April 16 2015, @08:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @08:37AM (#171476)

    The GP doesn't seem to be aware that there far better ways of changing and influencing minds than in direct discussion/debate (where people are more likely to be ready to be defensive and hold their ground).

    Advertising, media etc work. And how the heck does he think ISIS gets so many recruits. Not all of them were born that way, or even were that way when they were children (just ask their parents).

    That said this guy sure has a knack of changing minds over a chat: http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/kkk-member-walks-up-to-black-musician-in-bar-but-its-not-a-joke-and-what-happens-next-will-astound-you/ [guardianlv.com]

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:21AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:21AM (#171488) Journal
    I think there's two things to note here. First, because not everyone agrees 100% with you, then you greatly reduce your ability to persuade when you have a terrible mental model of the other party. If Daryl Davis had thought "OMG! It's the Klan!" that would have been it. He wouldn't have been able to connect to the other person despite their common interest. The same went for the KKK member. If they hadn't approached Davis, despite him being a black man, there would have been no discussion.

    And of course, there was the approach that Davis used, which was to connect to people via a neutral subject, music. That gets to the point you were making, AC, of better approaches to changing and influencing minds.

    I think SoylentNews and other discussion forums are useful in that they bring people together without obvious cues that could lead to instant mental rejection. I like to head butt a lot particularly with unusual arguments. I'd say 60-80% of my posts are such. While they aren't likely to immediately convince the people I speak with (especially in the times when I'm in error), I think there is a crucial point to direct discussion, namely, a demonstration to people outside the conversation that there are other viewpoints out there than the standard ones.

    There's a clunky term for a sea change in group consensus called "preference cascade". The idea is that people of certain beliefs are more common than they perceive themselves as being and that due to this perception and perhaps external forces, people conform to the perceived beliefs rather than their actual beliefs. But at certain times, information is revealed that changes the perception of consensus. Then there is a shift in consensus to something which more closely matches the beliefs of the group.

    And it is possible for consensus to be way out of line with the beliefs of the people who constitute the group. A commonly used example is a totalitarian regime. Here, the idea is that almost everyone would rather not be part of the regime, but due to the rigid control on speech, they are unaware of how prevalent their beliefs are and are unwilling to act on them as a result. But when someone manages to publicly express discontent then that creates awareness that one is not alone and then revolution happens. The tyranny strives as a survival mechanism to create the appearance of consensus. Should that be broken, then there is a preference cascade to something which more closely matches the actual distribution of beliefs of the society.

    For example, I commonly engage people who assume something is true solely because of a vague "scientific consensus". This argument is notoriously common in climate research where most of the research is extremely hard for the layman to understand and there is an institutionalized propaganda machine to further the argument, but it appears in other places as well. Another example of assumed things are moral consensus arguments like the assumption that a social safety net is a desirable thing (because a lot of people would get a piece of the action) or that employers are always blood sucking parasites in the wrong (employers being a despised and envied minority). But these things aren't true just because a lot of people would like them to be true. As a result, merely speaking up publicly gives others the chance to see that there is not universal agreement on this and the possibility of a preference cascade to something which more accurate reflects our true beliefs and hopefully creates a saner approach to reality in the process.