>Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average life expectancy. Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old.
Part of the reason for these "surprising" results is probably the individualistic framing of the question. It makes a difference if only you have unnaturally long life, or if you are part of a family or society that is similarly long-lived. For example, the thought of lingering on after friends and family from my generation have died has no appeal to me.
In general, the implication that it's surprising that people didn't want "happiness" and "life expectancy" as the end goals speaks to assumptions of atomization among the creators of the study. Deep down, I think people want meaning and a sense of narrative structure to their lives, not just chasing after pleasures.
>And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
How was the question structured? I have doubts that most people get the statistics of what it means to be 130 IQ vs 150 IQ, etc.
> Intelligence was assessed by asking, “If you could choose your level of intelligence, what level would you choose?” and referring participants to an IQ diagram, with labels for “moderate disability” (40), “below average intelligence” (70), “average intelligence” (100), “above average intelligence” (130), and “exceptionally gifted” (160). Participants were told, “We would like you to indicate your desired intelligence level using an IQ score. NOTE: although IQ has no ‘maximum’ score, a score of 100 indicates an average level of intelligence.” Participants were then asked to write their preferred IQ level in an open-ended box.
Later, from the results section:
> In terms of intelligence, the mean ideal IQ score was distorted by the fact that a small group of participants recorded very high ideal IQ scores (> 1,000), creating positive skew. To adjust for this, we placed an artificial ceiling on scores that corresponded to the highest IQ score ever recorded: 228. After winsorizing the 0.3% of participant responses greater than 228, the mean IQ score was 122.52 (SD = 25.23).
IQ is defined with a standard deviation of either 15 or 16 depending on the test. IQ 1000 is 60σ, or z>1.238e-784. As this is significantly less likely than randomly guessing the correct {plank volume, plank time} pair out of the visible universe from Big Bang to now, much more, I’d agree the such responses didn’t understand the statistics.
I don't think they're misunderstanding, though they may be ignorant of the stats, what they're saying is they want to be unimaginably intelligent. Perhaps assuming that special powers will go with that, like precognition.
It’s surprising how little extra skill in some area is required to seem like a wizard to outsiders. For example, I’m still amazing people by demonstrating Google Translate’s AR mode, and I remember when the tech was first demoed as WordLens 7.5 years ago.
But that is assuming that intelligence is a normal distribution, i.e. arises from a contributions of many independent random variables. Which is a decent approximation for underlying natural processes (human genetic pool and environmental contributions).
But it is just an approximation. For starters, there is a lower bound to intelligence (inert matter) so we're not really dealing with a normal dist, the truth would be closer to a skewed, semi-bounded distribution, we just don't see that because we're just measuring humans instead of also including animals on the left and hypothetical superintelligences on the right.
Secondly, modelling it as random independent variables breaks down if you start to deliberately engineer all those contributing factors. Natural processes are exceedingly unlikely to hatch ants from fly eggs due to random genetic mutation. But a process like evolution or engineering can bring such things into existence.
So asking for an IQ of 1000 is simply saying that you want to be more intelligent than random, natural reproductive processes could give you anytime soon.
> But that is assuming that intelligence is a normal distribution,
No, not intelligence, just IQ. They are not synonymous.
Modifying your example, if there is more than one braindead person on life support at any given moment, the minimum IQ for humans is greater than zero.
IIRC, the concept of IQ originated as the ratio between the individual's intelligence, evaluated through some way such as standardized test scores, and the average test score for individuals within a statistically representative group that reflects the individual's profile (for example, people of a certain age). The mere fact that the IQ is calculated as the ratio of two meaningless values used to reflect an intangible and subjective concept is enough to cast serious doubts about the accuracy of this particular test.
Honestly, looking at modern 90 and 100 year olds, who would want to live like that? But if I can be as vital as even say a healthy 50 year old (healthy 30 year old even better), then bring on the centuries! As many as you can give.
It’s always important to ask your genie not for eternal life, but for eternal youth and vitality.
Ah mind you I didn’t say undamageable. Gotta be able to die from injury because surviving the heat deatj of the universe, while fascinating, sounds kinda terrible.
Basically you want to avoid aging, not death. Imagine being immortal, but not infinitely healable, and someone chops you up into pieces. Not fun. Can’t even imagine the pain and you’d have to endure it for quite a while.
I have spent too much of ky youth working out details or such potential asks. Never know when you gonna meet a wish granting genie
I seem to recall that someone worked out that even for somebody who never aged, the cumulative risk of suffering a fatal accident of some kind meant that life expectancy would actually only be about 400 years or so. Unlikely events become more likely over the centuries :)
I also wonder if people felt like they had to give what they thought were "normal" responses just to hide what people really thought of them.
Maybe I'm crazy but I find it really hard to believe anyone would rather die than live forever if it meant being able to take a pill that prevented any form of aging or health related issues.
I think you might not have thought it all the way through yet.
For real, true immortality (a span of not hundreds, but also thousands, millions, billions of years), the problem shifts to what it means to be 'you'. You're not the same person you were when you were 5, 15, or 25, with different goals, preferences, and motivations.
Extend that to geological time, and there become only a few reasonable cases:
1. You stop changing; the core of your personality becomes completely fixed. I would claim this is a form of death, because although you are still physically healthy and moving about, change is an inherent part of life and growth.
2. Your personality drifts to the point that previous incarnations of your 'self' (even if you remember them) become very far from who you are currently. In which case, you're not really immortal, you're just a series of 'different people' who happen to share a single memory and narrative.
3. Your personality shifts at some point to wanting to death, at which point (assuming suicide is allowed) life ends
I highly recommend Schild's Ladder[1] and Permutation City [2], both by Greg Egan, which do an excellent job of asking 'who am I?' if we had the ability live for infinite time.
I've thought a lot about death, mortality, living in a futuristic world, etc..
I would immediately sign up for immortality instead of dying in ~70 years given the magic pill rule scenario.
Just think of all of the amazing things you'll witness while not having any forced pressure for all aspects of your life. You'll never get sick, you'll never need to worry about finances because there's nothing that would put you into a fear driven scenario where you "must" make money.
You could go through the years doing whatever you want and you'll live long enough to escape technology bubbles that each generation lives through. Like you said, you're pretty much a different person than you were 15 years ago. If you were 150 years old but still 25 inside, you'd get to experience a completely different world. It would be like having infinite lives with no reset switch on your memory.
On the other hand, Highlander explored some of the social and emotional consequences of outliving all your loved ones, needing to hide the truth about yourself from everyone else, etc.
Also quality of life takes a sharp decline after 90 as many parts of your body really struggle. Feeling your brain decay, dealing with incontinence, being unable to get out and embrace the world while watching your friends and partner pass on while the world moves further and further from you doesn’t seem that much fun.
That’s why the experimenters added the “assuming a pill that grants eternal youth” detail to the question. But it’s possible that inattentive test subjects didn’t fully internalize that.
Do people genuinely have modest ambitions, or are they avoiding the mental stress of thinking about how remote their true ambitions are from what's realistically attainable?
The "big ambitions" (and specifically, those not of the good kind, like e.g. becoming a doctor and such, but the "private pool", expensive car, lotsa money variety) have been shoehorned into the average American mind through over a century of indoctrination, advertisement, and propaganda.
It's all about making people never be content with their material belongings and thinking that the next purchase or achievement unlocked with make them happy.
> not of the good kind, like e.g. becoming a doctor
I would estimate that around 90% of the people I know who want to become a doctor (around 30 people) are motivated solely by the desire to make lotsa money and be able to drive an expensive car. Just saying, I don't think you can easily divide ambitions into "good" and "bad.
>I would estimate that around 90% of the people I know who want to become a doctor (around 30 people) are motivated solely by the desire to make lotsa money and be able to drive an expensive car.
There far easier ways to go about getting more money than spend over a decade in studying for it, plus all the hard work that comes afterwards.
More people that get into medicine that I know of either are idealistic, like the lifestyle (as portrayed on TV), had parents that were themselves doctors, or do it for the prestige. The money is not the biggest factor.
It’s not easy going into medicine but it is more reliable than many other paths.
In finance you can be very dependent on the market conditions, same in law (without a lot of business activity businesses don’t need to consult lawyers), in research you are also very dependent on the hype around your field to get grants, starting your own successful business is brutal if you don’t find the right opportunities or network of people, engineering is no cake walk of study either (especially adding in the work to stay relevant in the field) and joining a startup for good money is absolutely not a secure employment.
There will always be a need of medical personel however and since it requires a license given out by a few institutions you can be sure that your field will not be oversaturated, especially as it’s hard to obtain said license through study. Again, not saying it is easy becoming an MD, but if you are a competent person the path to a secure, good paying job is clearer if you choose med school than engineering, law, graduate or finance.
>It’s not easy going into medicine but it is more reliable than many other paths.
It is, but it also has a much smaller earnings cap than other professions. So "for the money" here means "for decent enough money but nothing to write home about".
I wouldn’t say that either, there are bio-tech startups you can join (only if you fail there’s a high paying job at the nearest hospital waiting for you) or you can climb within drug companies if you have the correct specialization to become an executive. I would say that’s analogous to becoming partner in the law world or a co-founder of a successful tech startup which is what money focused lawyers and engineers dream of respectively.
And depending on the country surgeons in specific fields can make obscene amounts of money. Neuro surgeons have a median salary of almost $600 000 in the US and to earn that much money as an engineer you have probably co-founded a successful startup or become an executive.
Aren't most biotech or drug companies are probably looking for scientists in biology or chemistry. Not run-of-a-mill medical doctors. And becoming a 600k-worth neuro surgeon is probably as likely as running a decent startup, if not less.
Never said becoming a median salaried neuro surgeon was more likely than running a decent startup but it is an argument against MDs having a smaller earnings cap than other professions.
I'd say good ambitions are those where you want X for X itself. If you want to be a doctor because you want love helping people - good. If you want to be a doctor just for $$$ - bad. If you want to become a singer because you love singing - good. If you want to be a singer just for $$$ - bad.
Not really. For example, a doctor who is here only for money can chose more expansive operation/treatment than necessary in order to win more even if it is not a good choice for the patient.
There was a comment here about someone who grew up in rural Africa and didn't have shoes, plumbing, etc. (the context was about chores being an indicator of future drive in children). He tellingly said he didn't feel underprivileged in his village as they were all in the same position; but IIRC when he moved to town his, and his siblings, expectations for basic necessities increased dramatically as they saw what others had. (I'm not sure he framed it like that. I may have erred).
That was probably me :-). You got the essence of my post correct. I was observing that human's wants, desires, aspirations seem to grow exponentially and as soon as you get what you wanted you want more. Yet back in the village my relatives have less, they want less and yet are less stressed than me the city dweller with more than them.
I definitely agree with this sentiment. I lived in the Philippines for over a year and I was expecting the people to have the kind of sadness I would see in the commercials they sometimes show in the US for charities and such. In my first area, in the Phillipines, out in the rural boondocks I saw a lot of poverty, but I also saw a surprisingly large amount of happiness and a deep community atmosphere.
The people were so kind and thoughtful. I didn’t ask them about their aspirations all that often, but they often seemed content with their life as it was. Every once in a while you would get someone who had higher ambitions e.g. those who wanted to move out into the city.
Seeing their contentment and the time I spent there helped me realize that happiness doesn’t need to come from material things and having more than everyone else. I feel American culture has often tried to teach me otherwise. Sad.
Yes it was! My short term memory isn't always reliable but glad if I got the gist right -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17373062 was your comment I was referencing for those following along at home.
It's more that human's judge their status relative to their peers, not by any absolute scale - so despite having more absolute wealth after moving to the city, their status relative to everyone else is far lower than it was back in their village.
Strange to think by nature my modest ambitions are genuine but I have been nurtured out of them by external forces. I suppose thinking this way would preclude one from seeing that ambition is primarily self driven (regardless of size or subjective definitions of "good").
We tend to think of desires, ambitions, ideals... in idealistic terms. That is, as if they are concrete and a relatively stable part of a person's identity, the product of rational or religious contemplation.
I don't this is how our psyche works. I think our psyche works in more practical ways, relativity is what's important. We feel rich or poor relative to yesterday, or our parents, or neighbours. We feel satisfied with our IQ, sex life, life expectancy or health and such in a similar, relative way.
I think what these results speak to is where the default goal flag sits, not how motivated, how active or how "genuinely" ambitious were are. We want 10%-50% more money, intelligence, sex, friends and career successes. We can express this as 10 percent more or 10 rabbits more. The specific quantification doesn't matter.
People consciously or subconsciously shed their desires as they become more unrealistic. If you ask a kid about their ideal life, most can rattle off a long list of desires. As we get older, I think we find happiness where we can so our ideal life looks more like what we know because we've been conditioned to think other forms of happiness are no longer possible or that we wouldn't like them.
One show , I don't recall the name,asked people answer some question like what is distance between NY to LA. They could choose any range as the answer and the right answer had to fall in that range.So to win people just had to select huge range like 0 to 1 million miles and be sure they got the answer right .However people would mostly select a narrow range that they felt was the right answer and got it wrong frequently. I think it is some desire not to sound stupid even though there is a incentive to select a ridiculous range.I think this desire not to sound stupid could be at play here as well so people choose things that to them seems reasonable even when asked about their ideal life.
I'd guess some of both. In my experience, the ability to realize your fullest ambitions (or not) in a society is not as related as it seems to people's innate desire to (or not). One's drive may be limited by external factors and their answers may reflect that, but the same humans in different environments might answer differently. Among groups of humans there are those that find contentment at all ranges of the spectrum, it's just the spectrum that changes.
I remember watching something that claimed the ancient Egyptian concept of heaven was, at some point, a place where you can perform agricultural labor without drought, pests, or blight etc.
“The data also revealed that participants from holistic cultures – those that value notions of contradiction, change, and context – chose ideal levels of traits that were consistently lower than those reported by participants from nonholistic cultures.“
This is exactly the empyrical explanation I gave to myself when I tried to understand why the people I met in Vietnam and Thailand are vastly happier than the average Westerner.
I have modest ambitions for an "ideal" life. Give me a pleasant place to live, Python, some musical instruments, and a working bicycle, and I'm happy.
Health and comfort for my family are also at the top of the list, likewise wanting my kids to have a good education -- that's just part of my culture.
But I can see lots of ways that my life could become profoundly miserable. So my pursuit of wealth is not so much to attain some high status, but to provide a safety net for myself and my family.
I don't know. Maybe if you've been reading bad science fiction with immortal geniuses running around everywhere, it might seem that living to 120 and having an IQ of 130 is leaving a lot on the table, but when you compare those numbers to what we actually get, I think calling them "modest" is missing the point. Those aren't numbers that say "I'm more or less content with my lot", those are numbers that say you wish you were as smart as the smartest person you ever met, and that the papers wrote stories about your birthdays. They're an argument against the idea that transhumanism isn't something that people actually want.
And of course, the implication is obvious: If everyone did on average live to 120 and get an IQ of 130 on our tests, then everyone would be wanting to live 200 years, and quite a few people would probably want an IQ of 160 on the old tests. That is, unless that was the point where people just switched to transhumanism as simplified humanism: Having the choice to live longer and to understand the universe better are probably always a good thing, regardless of how long you've lived and how much you understand.
Yeah. I agree that at least to our standards these answers are not modest. Having a relatively high IQ and a relatively long life expectancy are both (separately) relatively unlikely. So, to us these do not seem modest answers.
The goal of their study, however, was to see if it was true that when given the choice to have some attribute or quality of your life maximized with few limits would you choose the maximum. They say the choices were modest simply because in philosophical writings they often assume people will always choose the maximum if available. That is why they found this surprising and modest.
I legitimately don't know what I'd do with more "stuff" than what I currently have. For me, the ideal life would be having lots of good friends, and enough money to not have to worry about paying bills or doing things I like (i.e. a salary of around 60k/yr where I live).
That makes perfect sense if you have a job that you would still go to every day even if you weren't getting paid. But unless that's true, it's clear what the benefit of more money would be, and it has nothing to do with "stuff": having the freedom to choose what to do with your time.
Not really, that's kind of an invariant: As long as you have enough money to not have to worry about things, you can choose not to work. Sure, that raises the question of how you make money, but my point is that you don't need a lot of it to be happy.
Well, I think the amount of money you would need to support yourself indefinitely without being employed is an amount most people would call "a lot". Certainly that amount is more than almost anyone making 60k a year has.
> Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
Medians? The distributions would be more interesting.
130 would put them in the top 2% while that’s technically not some luminary super genius level that is for all intents and purposes “genius” as far as every day life and normal expectations go.
If your IQ is 130-135 statistically you are “smarter” than nearly anyone you meet in your life, in fact considering that 140-145 is at the 0.1% statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter by a distribution point even at places that skew towards a higher IQ due to selection bias.
Yes but 130 is already at the near top most successful professionals are well below that.
Half the population is below 100 IQ with over a third being between 85 and 100.
Top higher education institutions only score slightly above 115 on average 130 which is a whole bracket over that is exceptional even for places that are selectively biased towards higher IQ scores.
I think that's the assumption people are making when they select the 130s range (which the original study apparently explained as "above average). More people aspire to socialise with their existing friends and family and be a bit smarter than them than aspire to trade their existing friends for what they perceive as a nerd clique (and the ability to solve really difficult mathematics problems isn't adequate compensation for that)
Getting into an Olympic team and even passing the qualifiers isn’t the same as winning gold or even any medal.
2% of top performers in their sports can qualify for an Olympic (summer games) team spot.
And no we’re not even talking about extreme cases like those that happen in the winter games from time to time.
Also remember your selection pool if you think the top 2% of professional competitive swimmers in say 100M can’t get into the olympics again check their scores vs the Olympic qualifiers.
We are already discussing a relatively very small pool of subjects here.
>For comparison being in the top 2% of any Olympic sport would land you a spot in most Olympic teams.
Being in the top 2% of performers in a given sport qualifies you national and even international achievements, if you chose to follow that or not it’s up to you.
But in any case top 2% of any group is by definition exceptional.
Last time I’ve chdcked in the US Ivy League was only slightly above the “normal” IQ upper limit which is currently set at 115.
85-115 is considered “normal” with 85 being the lower limit for what one would consider a functional adult and 115 is the upper limit around which most of the successful professionals will be hanging around.
Scoring in the top 2% of correctly normalized and clinically evaluated IQ tests is quite exceptional.
SAT scores do not actually correlate well to IQ scores directly and the higher you go the larger the actual distribution and variance is.
In fact if we take your study then the 120-130 IQ range correlates to an ACT score range of between ~20 and ~70.
If we take the ACT numbers they had for “study 2” which was conducted on 150 psychology students in a private university which is a highly selective group already you have an IQ range of 100-120 with the majority being between 105 and 115.
A normalized average IQ across the three main domains (verbal, spatial and math) of 130 or higher is unlikely even for Harvard, the only real good study we have for Harvard is the Carson study which used psychometric tests to measure IQ and it got an average of 122 amongst PHD graduates in exact sciences.
For all intents and purposes a clinical psychometric IQ score of 130 is exceptional even for elite school, STEM PHD graduates.
It's also close to the cutoff for Mensa membership (Wikipedia says they require 98th percentile or higher), so it seems to align pretty well with common ideas about what IQ qualifies as exceptional. That surprises me actually, since I'd expect most people to be unfamiliar with the meaning of IQ beyond "higher is better".
> considering that 140-145 is at the 0.1% statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter by a distribution point even at places that skew towards a higher IQ due to selection bias.
Two points:
- +3 sd puts you at the 99.7th percentile, not the 99.9th. 140 would be much less rare than that.
- The places that select for high IQ contain many, many people with IQs over 145. Princeton admits 6% of those who apply, not 6% of those aged 15-20. With 350,000,000 people in the US, applying a 0.1% filter will leave you with 350,000 people. With 20,000,000 people aged 15-19, that filter will leave 20,000. Princeton admitted ~1,300 last year.
If you never meet anyone with an IQ above 145, you're not in an environment that selects for high IQ people.
145 is 99.8650032777% (SD scale of 15 points) sorry for rounding up.
Even universities that select for higher IQ are not considerably higher than the normal upper limit look at the ACT IQ correlation study that was linked here or the Carson study.
There are 472,489 people in the US which have an IQ of 145 or higher when you count for the portion of those who will be students say age 18-35 you get about 100,000 now spread those around the best 50 schools in the country and you still get a pretty low percentage even if all of them enroll into higher education.
Using those numbers, it is extremely unlikely that you will fail to meet anyone of >145 IQ if you attend any of those top 50 schools.
Compare your earlier claim, "statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter". That is the opposite of the truth. If you are at a place that selects for high IQs, you are very likely to meet multiple people with IQs greater than 145. You are very unlikely to manage to avoid those people.
> sorry for rounding up
You were closer than I was, so touché. That said, the accurate figure is still quite far from your rounded estimate; while it may look like 99.86% is close to 99.9%, a 0.14% cutoff selects 40% more people than a 0.1% cutoff would.
The problem here is that you extrapolate too much from what I said.
I didn’t said it’s unlikely that you’ll meet anyone smarter in JPL, the noble prize awards or in the annual meeting of the Prometheus society.
I said you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter even at places that select for higher IQ this includes work places and school.
Sure Princeton with its I don’t know 6000-8000 student and faculty body likely has people with IQ of 145 or higher but Princeton on its own isn’t a likely place to be even if you are in the top 2% of the IQ distribution.
The popilation of the top 50 or so schools is about 700,000, and even those are not the only places that are selectively for higher IQ any higher education institutions would be.
If we take my rough numbers then you have about 1 in 7 chance on paper however that counts for the entire population bracket of 18-35 if we take the median age of those schools which is 23 then we have only a pool of 34,000 to work with which now brings up the chance to about 1 in 20.
Now higher IQ above a certain range which isn’t even “high” actually increases your chances of dropping out of both collage and high school it also correlated to higher likelihood of both clinical and social personality disorders and many other issues that can hinder one from becoming well adjusted.
I would honestly put the average “likelihood” of meeting someone at those places with a 145 IQ or higher to be about 1/50 if not worse and the further you go from there while still being perfectly in the domain of a highly selective organization it’s going to get worse.
This also doesn’t take into account that there seems to be something that is called “islands of intelligence” which means that despite the predictive distribution due to standard deviation IQ isn’t exactly linear and you might have more people with 138 IQ for example than 134.
There is a debate if this is due to how we are testing and scoring IQ or is this an actual trait of intelligence.
And ofc the “plastic” IQ decreases with age and for different people it decreases at different rates which again makes it problematic to really well account for.
However I still stick by my initial point that 130-135 is exceptional and you are quite unlikely to meet people smarter than you (as I said by a whole bracket) in life, at least not on a day to day basis even if you study or work at places that already select for a higher IQ as long as again those are your average selective place.
Want to meet someone with an IQ probably in the high 150s? Well it’s easy enroll in Stanford and go to one of Susskind’s classes that guy is probably up there.
But again I’m talking about normal day to day interactions for an average person with a 135 IQ at an average above average IQ selective place such as a work place or a collage.
Carry a pack of your favorite poison at all times. With practice, you can calibrate the amount you need to consume to acheive a desired iq level. Anytime you feel you’re getting smarter, take a dose of the magic potion. Of course, you’ll need to practice to attain perfection in basic motor skills at a slight level of inebriation, but that’s quite doable.
>And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
Which, given what we know about plenty of genius biographies, and how frail and paranoid their lives can be precisely because of their higher mental faculties, seems like a perfect compromise.
Except that the statistics show that smart people are happier, healthier, more successful, less prone to mental illness, and just generally seem to live better lives.
>Except that the statistics show that smart people are happier, healthier, more successful, less prone to mental illness, and just generally seem to live better lives.
Ever heard of diminishing returns? Statistics probably report of the more widespread smart people (which 130 qualifies just fine), not geniuses.
> Adolescents identified before the age of 13 (N = 320) as having exceptional mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked over 10 years. They pursued doctoral degrees at rates over 50 times base-rate expectations, with several participants having created noteworthy literary, scientific, or technical products by their early 20s. Early observed distinctions in intellectual strength (viz., quantitative reasoning ability over verbal reasoning ability, and vice versa) predicted sharp differences in their developmental trajectories and occupational pursuits.
What if those genius biographies were not accurate description of what it means to be smart in general. What if they were highly biased selection of stories - biased toward a good story we like to tell and hear.
What if there were other super smart people who live their happy lives, are successful in their niches and generally avoided drama and therefore did not became so famous. Created difficult math proofs and conjectures, then spent time doing whatever else, but were not fun to be talked about and we are learning their results without learning their names. Or just stood up to some psychopath (pick up favorite historical person) for ethical reason fully knowing what will happen and then died.
Ignorance is bliss until you are bored. And knowing is usually better anyway, _IF_ you can get over the pain of knowing, which you do most of the time.
Godel, Nash, Erdos, Cantor, Tesla, and many others.
>Ignorance is bliss until you are bored
Aren't smarter people more easily bored -- because their minds need to have more stimuli all the time, as opposed to being more content with simple things like sports and a beer.
How's that a tautology ? I've worked with two people who are way faster than me mentally - just raw intelligence when problem solving - and I know one was ~160 range (or so they told me at least).
And even textbook definition of genius starts at like 140-145.
Having tested in that range and working with people who have - I'm noticably faster than most people at analytical stuff/learning - it's not a groundbreaking difference between from someone at 120 - but those 160 people I mentioned - I can't even keep up mentally without pausing - good luck if you're 100 range.
So that would be true genius in my view, 140 is like noticably intelligent, 120 is standard in professions that select for intelligence.
I'll get needlessly pedantic here, but I think it's more of re-iteration (with different words).
It would be circular reasoning only if the parent attempted to pin "being a genius" to having an > 160 IQ.
Instead, he said that he's only seen someone he'd classify as a genius when they had IQ >= 160 -- which is not circular. It's just using that observation as a supporting argument, without having established what a genius is first.
the saying of the same thing twice over in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style (e.g. they arrived one after the other in succession ).
"Surprising" only if you're in a small minority of people. To the vast majority, this is not surprising at all. To have an ambitious notion of an ideal life, that is what's surprising. (If you define surprising as whatever dominates the greatest concentration of the distribution, instead of focusing on the anomalies in the tail.)
When I was a young man I read in a book about Taoism of the farmer so content that, though he could hear the rooster of the next village crowing, he had never troubled himself to travel there.
When I read that I was vaguely horrified. Now, as an older man, I see the wisdom in it.
A higher purpose like spirituality, a tightly knit community of people similar to you, forming a family... something that some people are actively working against, so nobody can enjoy it.
For me: Good health, and peace and quiet. Fellow people to enjoy in same.
The U.S. has made it increasingly difficult to achieve these. "Health care" has become wealth extraction, and a culture of excess combined with cheap electronics have taught people to "turn it up".
And damned to your neighbor; they should learn to "collaborate" at work and turn up their own music, at home.
This study reports on attitudes to longevity that are reminiscent of the 2013 Pew survey [1]. When asked, people want to live a little longer than their neighbors, at the high end of the normal life span for old individuals today. When asked how long they want to live given the guarantee of perfect health, people pick a number close to the maximum recorded human life span. This sounds like a collusion between the instinctive desires for first conformity and secondly hierarchy, deeply entwined with the human condition, present in all of our primate cousins, a self-sabotaging gift from our evolutionary heritage. We are hardwired to feel comfortable in a hierarchical social structure. We desire to be higher in the hierarchy than those around us, yet not so high that we are non-conforming.
One might argue that the interaction between the need for hierarchy and need for conformity is also at the root of the essential conservatism in human nature: the urge to preserve the present state of the world, to change it as little as possible. Given a teacup, ambition is restrained to the safe, conformist goal of two teacups - rather than, say, the disruptive change of a tea set factory, a house, an end to aging, the colonization of Mars, the cure for cancer. We live in an age of radical change, a revolution in the capabilities of biotechnology presently underway, but when you ask people what they want for their health, they'll claim nothing more than ten more years. That is the least of what might be achieved soon in the medical sciences, but without the desire for more than that, the rejuvenation research projects capable of providing far more will continue to struggle to find funding.
At the same time as the potential has arisen for a future in which the suffering and death of aging is banished, all disease controlled through advanced medicine, the vast majority of people still march stolidly towards what they assume to be the same fate as their grandparents [2]. They are conforming. They expect to live a life that is the same in shape as it was for those born in the early to mid 1900s, somehow holding this idea in their minds at the same time as retaining the memory of living through the computing and internet revolutions, alongside any number of other sweeping changes in the nature of the human experience. How do we change this story that people are telling themselves? That is the fundamental question for all advocacy for radical change, such as the radical change of bringing an end to aging.
Hierarchy? I'm sorry but what I would gather from that is more or less the opposite: a kind of communitarian equality, if anything.
But my first instinct was to think that most people, when asked how long they want to live will have difficulty answering beyond current lifespan because we are instinctively trained to think that '100 = old and decrepit' - even if the question does say something along the lines of '100 but in 'good health''.
"for a future in which the suffering and death of aging is banished, all disease controlled through advanced medicine, the vast majority of people still march stolidly towards what they assume to be the same fate as their grandparents [2]. They are conforming."
Again I disagree because this utopian future is still essentially an illusion, which most people immediately recognize (they don't live in the tech bubble?), and in reality, 90 is getting pretty old and that's it for today, and probably for the next long while barring any 'big leaps' in tech. Which may happen, but there's no reason to believe they would.
Science has not really extended life. All we've done is perfected the conditions in which we live, and have learned out to take care of our bodies well.
Like you own a bike and used to run it through the forest, not oil it, parts would fall of. Now we run our bicycles on smooth surfaces, we get checkups, replace parts, oil the wheels. We have not improved bikes, we just extend them more or less towards their current, maximal life span.
Please tell me when they can regrow my hair, or do the simplest thing and make the skin on my face 'not sag'. Then we can talk.
I think that part of what is going on here is that in the holistic cultures there is more satisfaction from close, stable social relations, like for esteem, whereas in the non-holistic cultures there is more stress on individualistic satisfactions.
figures a psychology website would try to categorize everyone in one little box. nobody even knows what "life" is, so how would we even know what the "ideal" life is.
people only go into the psychology field for the $$
Part of the reason for these "surprising" results is probably the individualistic framing of the question. It makes a difference if only you have unnaturally long life, or if you are part of a family or society that is similarly long-lived. For example, the thought of lingering on after friends and family from my generation have died has no appeal to me.
In general, the implication that it's surprising that people didn't want "happiness" and "life expectancy" as the end goals speaks to assumptions of atomization among the creators of the study. Deep down, I think people want meaning and a sense of narrative structure to their lives, not just chasing after pleasures.
>And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
How was the question structured? I have doubts that most people get the statistics of what it means to be 130 IQ vs 150 IQ, etc.