Have you ever experienced alienation? I’m not talking about feeling a little bit annoyed. I’m talking about:
Half the time when you express your feelings, people misunderstand you.
Half the time when you explain an idea, it’s too complicated and they either stop listening or misunderstand.
You start to learn not to express certain thoughts and feelings. After a while, these add up, until you’re barely expressing yourself at all. Then you start to feel like life itself is boring, something very important is missing.
Your friends say they care, but you can’t escape the fact that they have no idea who they care about.
You try and try to find people who can understand, with any amount of explaining, and they never do.
You feel like you’re from a different planet.
For some people, the amount of loneliness or alienation they experience due to being gifted is very small, or they don’t notice it at all. I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of people with very high IQs are frequently alienated, settle for a social life that isn’t satisfying, or give up on ever finding anyone.
It’s not just that they feel that social enjoyment could be improved, it’s that they feel exhausted from being different.
I’m talking about burnout.
Some people are different enough that they literally burn out from having to interact with people who misunderstand them, who they can’t explain things to without frustrating themselves, who can’t truly care about them because they never understand their feelings, who don’t share their interests, etc.
Maybe you have never experienced this burnout. My whole life is that burnout.
Some people really do have a need to get away and be with people who are like minded. It’s not about power, it’s not about ego, it’s not a game. The need is real and I’m sick and tired of it being misunderstood and politicized.
I do not often feel that, but sometimes I do. It might be due to my young age (early 20s, although I suspect that’s the lesswrong median) or because I happen to have an unusually happy disposition. And though both are just an accident of biology, I take pride in having a happy disposition, much as I take pride in being intelligent.
But I recently had what I believe was an adverse reaction to a medication which triggered a period of depression for a couple months. I’m still in the recovery phase from that, but I’m getting much better.
During that period, I found it much more difficult to put up with the company of ordinary people … the only thing that would cheer me up was intellectual conversation with an intellectual equal. I didn’t realize what immense reserves of emotional energy a happy disposition gives you until I was robbed of it.
Depleted of emotional energy, it was much harder to maintain a conversation with ordinary people, and I would burn out and retreat to my room after a while. Before my period of depression, when my emotional reserves were virtually unlimited, I actually enjoyed talking to almost everyone...at worst, I’d get bored and move on to talk to someone else.
What you are describing sounds a lot like the “need for cognition” which I was talking about earlier, but it goes a step deeper because you also want to be understood by others.
It also sounds like your emotional reserves are generally at the low end of the spectrum, which makes it hard for you to find enjoyment among dull company—although I may be extrapolating too much from my own case.
For me, what drove the “burnout” for me was an immense feeling of cynicism. I’d talk to people, and every word would show me the weakness, laziness, and foolishness that makes up the nature of most ordinary people. And because I was depressed at the time, I saw a lot of that weakness in myself as well, which troubled me.
The happy, high emotional reserve me cared about understanding how other people worked, and doing my best to make their lives better. Even if they had dull intellects, I could make them happy through my actions and I could help them move forward, and that would make me happy as well. When my friends had problems, I put my intelligence to use in understanding and solving those problems.
The depressed, anxious, low emotional reserve me needed someone to understand me, to make my life better. But a complicated person often has complicated problems, and no one was really able to help me. A well meaning gesture of caring goes a long way and means a lot to me, but it can only go so far in helping me. I have to spend hours explaining “Today I am sad because person A did X, which reveals Y about the person’s nature, and I feel like everyone I know has Y as part of their nature” or “today I feel lonely because I care passionately about Z and no one else including you even knows what Z is” in order to get coherent help from anyone, and the response is usually something I’ve thought of before. Fighting hard to be understood didn’t necessarily improve my mood.
By the way, I’ve checked the data. Contrary to stereotype, there is no correlation between IQ and depression, even at the very high end. Sad people with low IQ, sad people with high IQ … they may attribute the sadness to different sources (and they may or may not be attributing correctly), but at the end of the day the overall rate of depression is the same.
So...to answer your question, yeah, I feel different. Sometimes it is lonely. I wish more people were like me, that would make life much more interesting. I’m glad I am intelligent in the absolute sense, but in the relative sense I wish that everyone around me was smarter than me.
At the same time, when I am in a healthy frame of mind, I do not feel burdened by having to associate with dull people. It’s only when I am in an unhealthy frame of mind to begin with that this is an issue. Healthy me has a need for cognition which is fulfilled by like-minded people, but healthy me does not have a need to be understood by others. We all go through life fundamentally alone, that’s a lesson I learned early on—and not just those of us who are intellectually gifted. Everyone.
And in truth, though my intelligent friend understands my intellectual thought process, he doesn’t always understand my emotions … it takes more than just IQ to understand that. You’ve also got to learn to read faces too. As you said, I’ve given up on the prospect of someone understanding me completely… there are some people who understand my intellect, there are some people who understand my emotions, but it’s too much to expect one person to fulfill all those requirements at once. This isn’t a cause for unhappiness, by the way—it’s just how reality is. One might as well be sad about the fact that their is no heaven, as long as one is going to be sad about the imaginary visions that reality doesn’t live up to. I’d rather appreciate what people are, rather than hanker after the gaudy vision of what I imagine they could be.
And when I’m under-stimulated...I do my science. I read articles, write articles. I think every smart person needs a hobby or job or some other creative outlet that they are passionate about in order to be happy. That way you don’t have to depend on another person—plus, you often meet interesting people this way.
Thanks for making the effort to try and understand. You’ve thrown one more variable into the equation—emotional energy. I don’t know if you’ve considered how these other variables would affect things, but:
Other Variables Involved in Gifted Alienation
Ability to communicate is something that will increase or decrease frustration / alienation / misunderstanding, depending on whether it’s low or high. Unfortunately, not all gifted people get the gift of communication, and gifts come in different sizes so they may not get enough of a gift in communication to compensate for the difficulty of communicating ideas and feelings that are as different as theirs.
Age of the person matters a lot. Supposedly, the speed at which you learn doesn’t change, but if you’re learning at say, twice the average speed, you’ll be much further ahead of your age peers at 30 than at 20, and so on. The gap seems to have grown as I have aged (I’m in the ballpark of 30 myself). It has become harder and harder to find stimulating intelligent conversation. Make sure to value your sources of intelligent conversation, you may need them more later on.
Amount of intelligence. If your IQ is 130, you’ll notice a difference between yourself and others but if it is over 160, you may feel like a complete alien. One interesting characteristic of the people I’ve met who have IQs in the profoundly gifted range is that they feel so very different that it’s like being stranded on a planet full of aliens. It can be very stressful for them. I don’t know what your IQ is, but it sounds to me like you can understand a little bit what this sort of problem would be like for them. You keep saying “need for cognition” but firstly, that’s a trait that’s more common to gifted people (it fuels the gift!) and not as common to non-gifted people. Secondly, have you ever been asked a lot of “why” questions by a little child and gotten burned out on answering them? Or can you imagine going a year without having a conversation that wasn’t one-sided? These are the experiences that some of the very gifted people might have with “need for cognition”. It’s better if the person wants to know what you have to say, and compensates a little for the difficulty of communication, but it’s not a substitute for having a conversation with an intellectual equal.
Also, understanding people’s feelings is a lot more complicated than reading faces. If I make a sad face, why did I make a sad face? Is it because someone said something that hurt my ego, and I need a compliment, or is it that the person was trying to hurt my ego, which kicked me in a deeper place—the part of me that questions why I bother to make a difference when the world can be so nasty. I get this kind of misunderstanding a lot. They read my face right, if I show emotion at all (I frequently don’t) but they interpret the wrong reasoning into it. People can be particularly stubborn in their interpretations. I can tell them “It’s not my ego” and they will insist that it and ignore the real problem. I’m different enough that my explanations sometimes seem unlikely to people, and they disagree with me about my own feelings. I find it intolerable.
If you imagine for a moment that there’s a wild variety of people here, all with different amounts of emotional energy, communication ability, different mental age gaps and different IQ gaps. Some of those people will be lucky, like yourself, and have a gap that’s not too difficult to overcome considering the communication and emotional resources they have. Others will either have gaps that are much larger than yours, or won’t have the same resources to compensate, or both.
Are gifted people more frequently depressed?
As far as whether gifted people are more frequently depressed, this really depends on the source that you read. A lot of things about gifted adults are not well-established. There’s not nearly enough research on them, and a lot of published research findings are false. One source of confusion is that there are a lot of prejudiced myths about gifted adults (before Terman did his research, apparently people thought that gifted people were ugly, unhealthy and all kinds of things) so there are studies that refute these myths and do not tell the whole story, and some of the sources disagree on important things. I’ve read a lot of stuff about gifted adults (I’m a psychology enthusiast and that’s my main psychology interest), and here’s my take:
For people with IQs under 145, I’d bet that they do have pretty normal rates of depression. For people with IQs over 145, from what I’ve read, I’d bet that they have elevated rates of existential depression. Whether or not existential depression was lumped in with depression, or did not qualify as depression might be something that influenced the studies you read. For a citation, I will select “Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults”. Here is an excerpt:
“There is relatively little inherent in being a gifted child or adult that makes them more prone to depression than others. Most often, it is a poor fit between the gifted person and the environment that creates the problems. A lack of understanding and support from teachers, peers, or family can precipitate very real problems of various kinds, including depression. Existential depression is an exception; it seems to emerge in most environments, though some circumstances prompt it more than others. Existential depression is particularly likely among the highly gifted, even though it is not a category of depression that is recognized in the DSM-IV-TR.” (Page 133)
Can anything (like intellectual activities) compensate for unmet social needs?
No. If you want a source, I will refer to Mazlow. His hierarchy of needs clearly includes various social needs. Further, his take is that you need to have social needs met before you can actualize your potential. Trying to channel your potential into intellectual activities without having your social needs met is likely to be frustrating. A lot of people (possibly everyone who is not a sociopath?) experience purpose in relation to other humans. This post by Academian explains that experience. The gist of it is: When asking “What is the purpose of life” this question implies a “who” so you need to have agents to have purposes to in order to have a sense of purpose. I experience this need, myself. I need someone to be close to, to have a purpose to. Random strangers and donations are not enough. I am a social organism. I need to bond emotionally with others, to need others, and to be needed by them.
Someone I know with a very high IQ said one key reason he hasn’t made anything of his potential is that he has to spend so much time trying to get his social needs met. This is a lot of work—it can be like rebuilding your social life after a move, except imagine that the social life you build never sticks. You’ll be constantly rebuilding your social life over and over again. Some people in that range are lucky and meet someone that fulfills their social needs. Others rarely ever find an intellectual equal, let alone one who is compatible with them (even friendship requires a certain amount of compatibility—though this may not be very obvious to people who aren’t really different). Some of them try marrying someone that’s not an intellectual equal, but the people I know who have tried this struggle with severe depression due to it.
There unfortunately appears to be no substitute for having your social needs met. Therefore, I regard it as important for people who are significantly different (any meaning of different, including different due to having a high IQ) to be able to participate in a haven where they can interact with like minded others without being made to put up with alienation.
On NFC—NFC is moderately correlated with IQ, it’s true. But personality traits turn out to be equally accurate predictors.
I’ll also point out that the loose correlation between NFC and intelligence is an implicitly made assumption underlying the worry that the quality of posts at Lesswrong will deteriorate with the new user influx...if it were true that NFC has an extremely strong relationship with intelligence, unintelligent people would simply would not be interested in participating in the discussion on the site, and there would be nothing for the older-user base to fret about.
We observe in everyday life that NFC doesn’t imply giftedness...there are lots of people who have extremely complicated but stupid opinions. Ever spend time on a white nationalist forum? Or argued with an intellectual fundamentalist christian? They write long sentences and cite academic papers, while simultaneously lacking even a basic understanding of how the world works. I don’t know whether people like this would score low or high on an IQ test—it’s possible that this faulty reasoning results from deficits which does not influence IQ scores—but it can’t be disputed that they’ve put a lot of thought into it.
On existential depression—This will naturally be correlated with intelligence, since you need to ponder philosophy in order to be identified as having this issue. However, is a social life really the cure for that? It seems to be like introspection is the only solution to existential depression … the issue arises via faulty philosophy in the first place.
Moreover...it would be really easy for someone suffering normal depression to attribute it to existential problems. We often feel emotions and then look around for the source afterwords. Naturally, only intelligent people would think to attribute the sadness to a philosophical issue.
On social life—I agree that smart people are more socially fulfilled when they are around other smart people.
In my earlier post, I was conveying that social needs and intellectual needs can be met separately. If I understand your post, you believe that in order for the social need to be met, one must be conversing with an intellectual equal.
From your post, it appears that you feel like an adult surrounded by children. The children tirelessly engage in activities which you do not find appealing, and will be unable to understand complex, adult matters.
I guess I feel more like a child surrounded by adults. The thing that bothers me about people is a profound unwillingness to engage and a stubborn lack of curiosity about anything. Yes, there are things that they don’t understand .. but that’s okay, those are my things and I can play by myself, like I always have.
I guess it’s not really a point that can be argued, since there’s no accounting for utility functions. Either you’ve got different needs, or the gap in intelligence for you is greater, etc...
Anyway, I’ll pick your brain on this, since you seem to have thought about it quite a bit - how does one create these safe havens for smart people? Is it really as simple as filtering out those who don’t pass an IQ test’s threshold?
Can anything (like intellectual activities) compensate for unmet social needs?
No. If you want a source, I will refer to Mazlow. His hierarchy of needs clearly includes various social needs. Further, his take is that you need to have social needs met before you can actualize your potential.
That’s a rather quick dismissal. Maslow’s hierarchy is a “most people are mostly like this” type of argument. I’d think you’d need something stronger to argue for “no people are ever unlike this”.
Have you ever experienced alienation? I’m not talking about feeling a little bit annoyed. I’m talking about:
Half the time when you express your feelings, people misunderstand you. Half the time when you explain an idea, it’s too complicated and they either stop listening or misunderstand. You start to learn not to express certain thoughts and feelings. After a while, these add up, until you’re barely expressing yourself at all. Then you start to feel like life itself is boring, something very important is missing. Your friends say they care, but you can’t escape the fact that they have no idea who they care about. You try and try to find people who can understand, with any amount of explaining, and they never do. You feel like you’re from a different planet.
For some people, the amount of loneliness or alienation they experience due to being gifted is very small, or they don’t notice it at all. I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of people with very high IQs are frequently alienated, settle for a social life that isn’t satisfying, or give up on ever finding anyone.
It’s not just that they feel that social enjoyment could be improved, it’s that they feel exhausted from being different.
I’m talking about burnout.
Some people are different enough that they literally burn out from having to interact with people who misunderstand them, who they can’t explain things to without frustrating themselves, who can’t truly care about them because they never understand their feelings, who don’t share their interests, etc.
Maybe you have never experienced this burnout. My whole life is that burnout.
Some people really do have a need to get away and be with people who are like minded. It’s not about power, it’s not about ego, it’s not a game. The need is real and I’m sick and tired of it being misunderstood and politicized.
I do not often feel that, but sometimes I do. It might be due to my young age (early 20s, although I suspect that’s the lesswrong median) or because I happen to have an unusually happy disposition. And though both are just an accident of biology, I take pride in having a happy disposition, much as I take pride in being intelligent.
But I recently had what I believe was an adverse reaction to a medication which triggered a period of depression for a couple months. I’m still in the recovery phase from that, but I’m getting much better.
During that period, I found it much more difficult to put up with the company of ordinary people … the only thing that would cheer me up was intellectual conversation with an intellectual equal. I didn’t realize what immense reserves of emotional energy a happy disposition gives you until I was robbed of it.
Depleted of emotional energy, it was much harder to maintain a conversation with ordinary people, and I would burn out and retreat to my room after a while. Before my period of depression, when my emotional reserves were virtually unlimited, I actually enjoyed talking to almost everyone...at worst, I’d get bored and move on to talk to someone else.
What you are describing sounds a lot like the “need for cognition” which I was talking about earlier, but it goes a step deeper because you also want to be understood by others.
It also sounds like your emotional reserves are generally at the low end of the spectrum, which makes it hard for you to find enjoyment among dull company—although I may be extrapolating too much from my own case.
For me, what drove the “burnout” for me was an immense feeling of cynicism. I’d talk to people, and every word would show me the weakness, laziness, and foolishness that makes up the nature of most ordinary people. And because I was depressed at the time, I saw a lot of that weakness in myself as well, which troubled me.
The happy, high emotional reserve me cared about understanding how other people worked, and doing my best to make their lives better. Even if they had dull intellects, I could make them happy through my actions and I could help them move forward, and that would make me happy as well. When my friends had problems, I put my intelligence to use in understanding and solving those problems.
The depressed, anxious, low emotional reserve me needed someone to understand me, to make my life better. But a complicated person often has complicated problems, and no one was really able to help me. A well meaning gesture of caring goes a long way and means a lot to me, but it can only go so far in helping me. I have to spend hours explaining “Today I am sad because person A did X, which reveals Y about the person’s nature, and I feel like everyone I know has Y as part of their nature” or “today I feel lonely because I care passionately about Z and no one else including you even knows what Z is” in order to get coherent help from anyone, and the response is usually something I’ve thought of before. Fighting hard to be understood didn’t necessarily improve my mood.
By the way, I’ve checked the data. Contrary to stereotype, there is no correlation between IQ and depression, even at the very high end. Sad people with low IQ, sad people with high IQ … they may attribute the sadness to different sources (and they may or may not be attributing correctly), but at the end of the day the overall rate of depression is the same.
So...to answer your question, yeah, I feel different. Sometimes it is lonely. I wish more people were like me, that would make life much more interesting. I’m glad I am intelligent in the absolute sense, but in the relative sense I wish that everyone around me was smarter than me.
At the same time, when I am in a healthy frame of mind, I do not feel burdened by having to associate with dull people. It’s only when I am in an unhealthy frame of mind to begin with that this is an issue. Healthy me has a need for cognition which is fulfilled by like-minded people, but healthy me does not have a need to be understood by others. We all go through life fundamentally alone, that’s a lesson I learned early on—and not just those of us who are intellectually gifted. Everyone.
And in truth, though my intelligent friend understands my intellectual thought process, he doesn’t always understand my emotions … it takes more than just IQ to understand that. You’ve also got to learn to read faces too. As you said, I’ve given up on the prospect of someone understanding me completely… there are some people who understand my intellect, there are some people who understand my emotions, but it’s too much to expect one person to fulfill all those requirements at once. This isn’t a cause for unhappiness, by the way—it’s just how reality is. One might as well be sad about the fact that their is no heaven, as long as one is going to be sad about the imaginary visions that reality doesn’t live up to. I’d rather appreciate what people are, rather than hanker after the gaudy vision of what I imagine they could be.
And when I’m under-stimulated...I do my science. I read articles, write articles. I think every smart person needs a hobby or job or some other creative outlet that they are passionate about in order to be happy. That way you don’t have to depend on another person—plus, you often meet interesting people this way.
Sorry if this is nonsensical...it’s late.
Thanks for making the effort to try and understand. You’ve thrown one more variable into the equation—emotional energy. I don’t know if you’ve considered how these other variables would affect things, but:
Other Variables Involved in Gifted Alienation
Ability to communicate is something that will increase or decrease frustration / alienation / misunderstanding, depending on whether it’s low or high. Unfortunately, not all gifted people get the gift of communication, and gifts come in different sizes so they may not get enough of a gift in communication to compensate for the difficulty of communicating ideas and feelings that are as different as theirs.
Age of the person matters a lot. Supposedly, the speed at which you learn doesn’t change, but if you’re learning at say, twice the average speed, you’ll be much further ahead of your age peers at 30 than at 20, and so on. The gap seems to have grown as I have aged (I’m in the ballpark of 30 myself). It has become harder and harder to find stimulating intelligent conversation. Make sure to value your sources of intelligent conversation, you may need them more later on.
Amount of intelligence. If your IQ is 130, you’ll notice a difference between yourself and others but if it is over 160, you may feel like a complete alien. One interesting characteristic of the people I’ve met who have IQs in the profoundly gifted range is that they feel so very different that it’s like being stranded on a planet full of aliens. It can be very stressful for them. I don’t know what your IQ is, but it sounds to me like you can understand a little bit what this sort of problem would be like for them. You keep saying “need for cognition” but firstly, that’s a trait that’s more common to gifted people (it fuels the gift!) and not as common to non-gifted people. Secondly, have you ever been asked a lot of “why” questions by a little child and gotten burned out on answering them? Or can you imagine going a year without having a conversation that wasn’t one-sided? These are the experiences that some of the very gifted people might have with “need for cognition”. It’s better if the person wants to know what you have to say, and compensates a little for the difficulty of communication, but it’s not a substitute for having a conversation with an intellectual equal.
Also, understanding people’s feelings is a lot more complicated than reading faces. If I make a sad face, why did I make a sad face? Is it because someone said something that hurt my ego, and I need a compliment, or is it that the person was trying to hurt my ego, which kicked me in a deeper place—the part of me that questions why I bother to make a difference when the world can be so nasty. I get this kind of misunderstanding a lot. They read my face right, if I show emotion at all (I frequently don’t) but they interpret the wrong reasoning into it. People can be particularly stubborn in their interpretations. I can tell them “It’s not my ego” and they will insist that it and ignore the real problem. I’m different enough that my explanations sometimes seem unlikely to people, and they disagree with me about my own feelings. I find it intolerable.
If you imagine for a moment that there’s a wild variety of people here, all with different amounts of emotional energy, communication ability, different mental age gaps and different IQ gaps. Some of those people will be lucky, like yourself, and have a gap that’s not too difficult to overcome considering the communication and emotional resources they have. Others will either have gaps that are much larger than yours, or won’t have the same resources to compensate, or both.
Are gifted people more frequently depressed?
As far as whether gifted people are more frequently depressed, this really depends on the source that you read. A lot of things about gifted adults are not well-established. There’s not nearly enough research on them, and a lot of published research findings are false. One source of confusion is that there are a lot of prejudiced myths about gifted adults (before Terman did his research, apparently people thought that gifted people were ugly, unhealthy and all kinds of things) so there are studies that refute these myths and do not tell the whole story, and some of the sources disagree on important things. I’ve read a lot of stuff about gifted adults (I’m a psychology enthusiast and that’s my main psychology interest), and here’s my take:
For people with IQs under 145, I’d bet that they do have pretty normal rates of depression. For people with IQs over 145, from what I’ve read, I’d bet that they have elevated rates of existential depression. Whether or not existential depression was lumped in with depression, or did not qualify as depression might be something that influenced the studies you read. For a citation, I will select “Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults”. Here is an excerpt:
“There is relatively little inherent in being a gifted child or adult that makes them more prone to depression than others. Most often, it is a poor fit between the gifted person and the environment that creates the problems. A lack of understanding and support from teachers, peers, or family can precipitate very real problems of various kinds, including depression. Existential depression is an exception; it seems to emerge in most environments, though some circumstances prompt it more than others. Existential depression is particularly likely among the highly gifted, even though it is not a category of depression that is recognized in the DSM-IV-TR.” (Page 133)
Can anything (like intellectual activities) compensate for unmet social needs?
No. If you want a source, I will refer to Mazlow. His hierarchy of needs clearly includes various social needs. Further, his take is that you need to have social needs met before you can actualize your potential. Trying to channel your potential into intellectual activities without having your social needs met is likely to be frustrating. A lot of people (possibly everyone who is not a sociopath?) experience purpose in relation to other humans. This post by Academian explains that experience. The gist of it is: When asking “What is the purpose of life” this question implies a “who” so you need to have agents to have purposes to in order to have a sense of purpose. I experience this need, myself. I need someone to be close to, to have a purpose to. Random strangers and donations are not enough. I am a social organism. I need to bond emotionally with others, to need others, and to be needed by them.
Someone I know with a very high IQ said one key reason he hasn’t made anything of his potential is that he has to spend so much time trying to get his social needs met. This is a lot of work—it can be like rebuilding your social life after a move, except imagine that the social life you build never sticks. You’ll be constantly rebuilding your social life over and over again. Some people in that range are lucky and meet someone that fulfills their social needs. Others rarely ever find an intellectual equal, let alone one who is compatible with them (even friendship requires a certain amount of compatibility—though this may not be very obvious to people who aren’t really different). Some of them try marrying someone that’s not an intellectual equal, but the people I know who have tried this struggle with severe depression due to it.
There unfortunately appears to be no substitute for having your social needs met. Therefore, I regard it as important for people who are significantly different (any meaning of different, including different due to having a high IQ) to be able to participate in a haven where they can interact with like minded others without being made to put up with alienation.
On NFC—NFC is moderately correlated with IQ, it’s true. But personality traits turn out to be equally accurate predictors.
I’ll also point out that the loose correlation between NFC and intelligence is an implicitly made assumption underlying the worry that the quality of posts at Lesswrong will deteriorate with the new user influx...if it were true that NFC has an extremely strong relationship with intelligence, unintelligent people would simply would not be interested in participating in the discussion on the site, and there would be nothing for the older-user base to fret about.
We observe in everyday life that NFC doesn’t imply giftedness...there are lots of people who have extremely complicated but stupid opinions. Ever spend time on a white nationalist forum? Or argued with an intellectual fundamentalist christian? They write long sentences and cite academic papers, while simultaneously lacking even a basic understanding of how the world works. I don’t know whether people like this would score low or high on an IQ test—it’s possible that this faulty reasoning results from deficits which does not influence IQ scores—but it can’t be disputed that they’ve put a lot of thought into it.
On existential depression—This will naturally be correlated with intelligence, since you need to ponder philosophy in order to be identified as having this issue. However, is a social life really the cure for that? It seems to be like introspection is the only solution to existential depression … the issue arises via faulty philosophy in the first place.
Moreover...it would be really easy for someone suffering normal depression to attribute it to existential problems. We often feel emotions and then look around for the source afterwords. Naturally, only intelligent people would think to attribute the sadness to a philosophical issue.
On social life—I agree that smart people are more socially fulfilled when they are around other smart people.
In my earlier post, I was conveying that social needs and intellectual needs can be met separately. If I understand your post, you believe that in order for the social need to be met, one must be conversing with an intellectual equal.
From your post, it appears that you feel like an adult surrounded by children. The children tirelessly engage in activities which you do not find appealing, and will be unable to understand complex, adult matters.
I guess I feel more like a child surrounded by adults. The thing that bothers me about people is a profound unwillingness to engage and a stubborn lack of curiosity about anything. Yes, there are things that they don’t understand .. but that’s okay, those are my things and I can play by myself, like I always have.
I guess it’s not really a point that can be argued, since there’s no accounting for utility functions. Either you’ve got different needs, or the gap in intelligence for you is greater, etc...
Anyway, I’ll pick your brain on this, since you seem to have thought about it quite a bit - how does one create these safe havens for smart people? Is it really as simple as filtering out those who don’t pass an IQ test’s threshold?
That’s a rather quick dismissal. Maslow’s hierarchy is a “most people are mostly like this” type of argument. I’d think you’d need something stronger to argue for “no people are ever unlike this”.