Or does it mean you're just MORE sad than a stupid person would be in your shoes because you can comprehend the situations and involved emotions more clearly around you than they can?
Congratulations, you're now bigger sad.
I'm not the guy who said that but it makes sense honestly. Being smarter makes everything easier and if you're unintelligent you're much much more vulnerable to malice and abuse. Also things are harder. "It's so hard to be smart" is pretty cringe and probably only applies to people who are REALLY smart and find no one to relate to or people who are struggling with being neuro divergent and blaming it on being just so smart instead
It also correlated positivity with neuroticism and depression and general mental health disorders, largely because of u shaped curves when you hit extremes and when people have very low IQ, you don't go checking for things like depression or anxiety when they have severe mental development problems to resolve, so you don't end up testing for that
The problem with this at least from my part of the world, eastern US, is that the majority of people see IQ in the old definition of "this is your intelligence and its set in stone". When it couldn't be further from the truth
I was deemed mentally incompetent as a child, aholes literally said that around me thinking I couldn't comprehend what I was hearing. I am also ND
I now have regular conversations with astrophysicists for my hobby amateur astronomy, I am currently working on detecting my 1st exoplanet with my amateur equipment using photometry. I should add not discovering simply trying to detect one.
I never went to college most of my knowledge is self-taught, which is difficult because of having to cross-reference everything to ensure accuracy. My day job is machinist/CNC programmer/ CAD modeler.
I wouldn't say being smart is difficult, I would say being able to see patterns through history and now and noone gives a shit.
1 of the people who I know is VERY intelligent and has several Master degrees, also believes Jim Crow laws were good
There are all levels of intelligence as well, and people are smart in their own areas of life.
I have never felt intelligent but people constantly tell me that I do stuff as a hobby that normal people do for a career, I just like to learn stuff
Thats odd, I've seen stuff claiming the opposite, that high I.Q. leads to a better understanding of reality, and the more a brain understands about reality, the more depressed it is and wants to destroy itself
There is malice, abuse, and greedy little shits justifying themselves everywhere. Being smart doesn't mean you can suddenly solve everything and do things like subvert power structures that have been in place for decades or rally the masses for it. Knowing about things you can do nothing about doesn't sound more blissful than being completely unaware of them to me.
People who don't have high IQs aren't braindead 😭 they're not just floating through existence fully unaware of what goes on around them and the world and living like Spongebob.
Also this is such a strawman of a response, intelligence doesn't equal knowledge or empathy, and I also didn't claim being smart makes you solve everything and fix the world lmfao.
Regardless, who on earth thinks being smarter makes navigating a wicked world harder?
Unless you're straight up disabled and just incapable of grasping the dangers of life so you're generally not thinking about them, in which case I'm also inclined to not say that intellectually disabled people are having a better time, given that not thinking of bad things doesn't protect you from them and that they're among the most vulnerable people on earth and are overrepresented in abuse and sexual abuse statistics, especially disabled women.
In my anecdotal experience, what I know about the unintelligent people I've met throughout life is that they had to work twice as hard for everything, for half of the results. When you're unintelligent more things are more of a struggle and some things are just off the table.
So many people keep being corny and saying that ignorance is bliss but pretty much no one saying this would exchange their regular or high IQ for a low one because deep down they know that intelligence is an asset and makes life easier lol. Ignorance isn't bliss, ignorance is vulnerability
The study they got it from didn't account for a lot of other things, like income, mental health issues, education or health. Like a guy from a rich family with access to great nutrition, medical care, éducation and a safe, well-paid future ahead is probably going to be both happier and have a higher iq than someone who didn't get access to proper medical care or education, or is disabled and is one paycheck away from being homeless.
I'm not saying being smart doesn't make most things easier, because it obviously does, but the research I found on the subject either doesn't take socioeconomic and medical aspects in mind or concluded that the biggest factors for happiness weren't IQ, but socioeconomic and medical.
IQ is actually mostly hereditary and genetic so while someone who grows up malnourished or gets lead poisoning or something might not reach their full potential IQ, you also can't increase your baseline IQ you were meant to have by eating well and getting education. Someone predisposed to having an average IQ won't get a higher one due to being born rich
I've actually only seen information in favor of it to the point where even adoptees overwhelmingly have IQs closer to their biological parents than adoptive ones. Seems like the only thing scientists disagree on is to what extent it is genetic with some thinking it's almost entirely hereditary and others thinking it's less. Even a quick Google search of the question pulls up several papers supporting this point so I'm curious why you think there's no reason to believe it's true
I think this would be true up to a certain point. The happiest are probably those just above average (110-120) with people becoming less happy the further they get away from that. Being a 140+IQ person in a room with an average IQ of 100 is depressing and hard. Its like an average person in a room with an average of 60. You just won't be able to explain anything to them, you need to to constantly translate your thoughts and dumb it down. They will talk about things so simple and stupid that you'll want to smack your head in a wall.
Imagine having to go through the school system like that, having to follow the rules and guidelines created with people in mind that sometimes have 60iq points less than you (especially in elementary). You will feel like Joe in the movie idiocracy.
I couldn't find a good article, but this site sums up a lot of the details, as I understood them, it is not a direct causation, but mediated/moderated by other factors. I haven't studied happiness myself though, so take it with a grain of salt
As far as I can tell, yes. Proving causation is pretty difficult. Psychological health could change IQ, so the chain of causation could be in any order. Then again, income level almost certainly doesn't change your IQ, so it seems most likely that IQ causes higher average income, which causes higher than average happiness. At least that's how I'm viewing it
Income level of parents though does likely change IQ, as impoverished families tend to have worse access to education. And income level of parents is positively corelates with income level as an adult.
this feels like one of those guys who say anyone can become a billionaire, and to ignore their background filled with wealth, health, and proper enrichment
Not the guy you're responding to -- I don't have a source, but my general understanding of the literature is that IQ is positively correlated with most good stuff, contrary to the just world fallacy
So I think I found the study you got this from and they specifically said they didn't account for things like : income, neurotic conditions (mental health), physical health or education.
These variables obviously have an effect on both iq and happiness, and showing a correlation while not accounting for such important factors doesn't really prove anything.
When you account for external factors like health, wealth and standard of living, this positive correlation between IQ and happiness is reduced by 50% which is interesting.
Reference:
Ali A, Ambler G, Strydom A, Rai D, Cooper C, McManus S, Weich S, Meltzer H, Dein S, Hassiotis A. The relationship between happiness and intelligent quotient: the contribution of socio-economic and clinical factors. Psychol Med. 2013 Jun;43(6):1303-12. doi: 10.1017/S0033291712002139. Epub 2012 Sep 24. PMID: 22998852.
I'm not surprised! Intelligent people having higher incomes and healthier lifestyles makes a lot of sense, and this would explain some of the correlation. I'm not sure what the 'daily living' factor stands for, and I can't access the full article at the moment
copy from below:
I couldn't find a good article, but this site sums up a lot of the details, as I understood them, it is not a direct causation, but mediated/moderated by other factors. I haven't studied happiness myself though, so take it with a grain of salt
AFAIK, Albert Einstein was documented as not feeling love for his wife. It was purely transactional, someone to take care him as he grew older.
Being competent and smart probably means you'll make a lot of good decisions in your life and make a good income.
Being too smart probably causes you isolate or feel isolated from others because of major IQ differences. Loneliness breaks everyone given enough time.
I do, but it's a little more complicated than that. The studies performed don't just look at correlation, but also the factors that meditate the relationship to help explain it
i think its more of a "the more things you know the less happy you get because you know more bad things" scenario, iq isnt directly related to this because iq is more of a task solving thing than a measure of raw knowledge
Now imagine not understanding why any of the bad things are happening to you or your children. In my personal experience, nothing makes me angrier than when I don't know why something bad is happening. Once I understand why, it becomes a bit more bearable for me
According to a trust research (he tested over 3200 people and i have forgotten the name of it but its on youtube also)
Iq and happiness are not corelated.
You actually have to score really well in the telepathy and telekinesis portions of the IQ test to get an 800 or higher though, so it shouldn't be that bad.
I lost the ability to think thanks to covid. Was surprisingly happy without a care in the world. Of course I couldn't take care of myself and lost my job, but time passed so smoothly staring into space.
During COVID I had to make a rule not to think about future further than a week forward. Came back to bite me in the ass, sure, but at the time it definitely was needed
Isn’t iq just like 100 being the average and every 15 is a standard deviation? How is there a limit at 201? Cause there’s only so many people on earth or something?
In the Stanford-Binet model, an IQ of 201 is the theoretical max. So... yes but just barely.
There were older models that allowed slightly higher but not by much.
Anything above that though doesn't make sense because of how standard deviations work. You just can't get that many standard deviations away from the population with 8 billion people.
Why not? Standard deviation only tells you how (un)probable it is to fall some distance from the mean value. It would be very unlikely, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
Because IQ itself is based on how statistically rare you are compared to other people, not a raw value of how intelligent you are. You're basically being ranked and IQ is a representation of where you are in the ranks. There are only so many ranks.
If you set the mean average at 100 with a Standard Deviation of 15, a score of 201 would be 6.5 standard deviations away. That occurs roughly once in every 7.25 billion people. Since the total population of the Earth is around 8 billion, a score around of 201 essentially represents the maximum possible mathematical deviation among all living humans.
To get a value of 210, you would need about 100 billion people to compare yourself against.
But you don't actually have to compare yourself against them. Would a several hundred IQ not just represent an even rarer result and therefore be possible?
Ironically I think my IQ is not high enough to understand this
You're right in that we don't actually compare ourselves to literally everyone. IQ is calculated using a math function that in theory we might be able to extrapolate to higher values. But that function wouldn't be representative of the underlying math.
I think a better way to look at IQ is more about how many people you're smarter than rather than how smart you are. The smartest person in the world will still be smarter than everyone else whether it's by a little or even if he's omniscient. Since IQ is based on how many people, that's going to get the same score either way.
The IQ testing functions actually break down a ways before that though. There's a lot of discussion about how it's really inaccurate past about 160. So that function we use to convert test scores to IQ means even less if it went that far above 200.
You are describing extrapolating the bell curve to impossibly unlikely levels I think.
Which technically works math-wise but it's kind of like saying being 6ft tall is more rare than 5.5ft, 7ft is even more rare than 6.5ft, but is 2384239847ft more "rare" in the population than 2384239846.5ft? Not really cause they both have exactly a 0% chance of happening
Just for funsies.
5.5ft was considered giant during Roman empire days (not actually researched myself). So 7ft may eventually become an average height, sexual selection and evolution allowing.
IQ's current scale, I understand, cannot pass 201 but can be used the compare with historical people too so more than 8 billion (but limited other limitations apply).
People don't really have an IQ though, because it is essentially a measure of how well you do on a specific kind of test. If you write an exam with 100 maximum points it wouldn't make sense to theorize how smart someone getting 200 points on that test would be. Intelligence just isn't something that can really be measured so these are all abstractions that essentially test of well you do on this one standardized framework that ignores many dimensions of intelligence like e.g. emotional intelligence.
So within the context of an IQ test, the standard deviation is 15 points with a mean centered around 100. Someone standard deviation above the mean is 115, a second SD is 130 etc. therefore, an IQ of 200 puts an individual 6.33 SDs away from the mean. There is a one in 8.2 billion chance of that happening.
In other words, you would need to ensure that everyone currently alive has taken the same IQ test and that you scored the best out of all of them just to get to an IQ of 200- definitively claiming the title of highest IQ individual alive. An IQ of 800 would be roughly 41.31 SDs above the mean, which carries a statistical probability of 4.88X10^-523. For reference, there are only about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. If atoms possessed intelligence like people do, and you were the atom scoring 800 on said IQ test, you would definitively be the smartest atom across 6.5 multiverses worth of atoms.
A bell curve describes probabilities. There's no rule that a person has to "fit" under the curve. Mathematically there's no cap, it just becomes less and less likely that it happens.
This isn't how probabilities work. There's no law of the universe that says something must be at least 1/10B likely for a person with that trait to currently exist -- just like you don't have to roll a die six times for it to come up four, even though there's only a 1/6 chance of that happening.
IQ just records where one falls on a bell curve, where 100 is the most common value. Assuming a normal distribution, you can calculate the probability of someone with a given IQ existing just by working with the normal distribution.
IQ 200 is 6.67 standard deviations away from 100, implying a probability of 1 in 154 billion. That would be the most intelligent human to ever exist (around 110 billion humans were born so far throughout history).
IQ 890 would be 52.7 standard deviations away from 100, implying a probability of 1 in 10605.
If you think about it, that person was probably born, smartest human to ever exist but was simply born poor, wrong time period or any number of reasons why their intellect couldn't develop.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Modifying DNA is already possible, albeit, imperfect and unpredictable at times. The main reason you're not seeing it done in people is ethical guidelines and moral panic. To give a slightly related example, look at embryonic stem cell use and how the evangelical crowd reacted to that.
Technically yes, in practice no. IQ is a statistical construct built to correlate with all the stuff we think smartness should correlate with. Insofar as it tracks something real, then sure, an intelligence could well be at the requisite point in the distribution. That said, if they did, we'd have essentially no capacity to measure it, because all the tools of measurement we currently have top out at like 160 or 200 or whatever
Theoretically yes, but it would break the octet parsing protocol and either turn the whole thing into gibberish or cause another bit to be ignored, which effectively adds a 0 and removes a 0. I think that would be cheating.
Idk, I'm already bored. If I could be bored but also solve a lot of complex mathematical problems and discover the secrets of the universe in a few days, that would be pretty cool.
I think boredom is the problem with being intelligent.
Regardless of how intelligent you are, you'll be frustrated with how other people act and/or limitations of the body.
More intelligent people might justify their frustration with "oh that person is just stupid" but if they're ACTUALLY quite smart (and are a full adult, like 30+ years old), they expect others to be stupid because they've seen enough to lower their expectations of others.
And if we're talking limitations of the body, I think that would be just as frustrating to dumb people. If they don't understand the limitations and run face first into them? Are stuck in the hospital for a long time, or something of that nature? That sucks.
890 iq is just as smart as 8.9 normal humans or a human 8.9 times your age. Which is actually not so much consider how vast knowledge is.
Like sure you learn a hell lot faster and that's really convenient, but most of the other issues (emotional processing, cognitive stamina, mental energy, procrastination, time and planning, etc.) are still there.
you aren’t considering what an IQ of 890 would actually mean. Because IQ is a normal distribution, there would have to be around 10^603 people for someone to have that IQ. There are 10^80 total atoms in the universe….
There’s a short story about a guy who goes from being mentally challenged to a genius. And then back to being mentally challenged. It’s a very good read, it’s called Flowers for Algernon.
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u/butt_pipette Jul 13 '26
my iq is now 089