“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden see here
Did you know The surprising downsides of being clever? Is Happiness And Intelligence: Rare Combination? There are longitudinal studies which seem to imply this: Being Labeled as Gifted, Self-appraisal, and Psychological Well-being: A Life Span Developmental Perspective
I found these via slashdot.
As LessWrong is harbor to unusually high-IQ people (see section B in here). I wonder how happiness compares to the mean. What are your thoughts.
If people choose goals according to their ability to achieve them, then ability and success in achieving those goals will be uncorrelated. Where a correlation would be expected is between ability and achievements, not between ability and the difference between achievements and goals.
Intelligence is a puzzle-solving, dealing-with-complexity thing, the measure of how complicated a picture can be broken down to elements (understanding, analysis) and reassembled (model, prediction). At least this is how doing the Raven tests feels like. What puzzles me about intelligence-as-goal-achieving-ability is that is this really the bottleneck in so many goals? In my experience very few goals require dealing with complexity, and the most succesful people I personally know are rather simple-minded, their success lied in choosing a goal and then never, ever ever giving up, having a bulldog-like determination. Complexity was usually not a part of the picture.