Why smart people are better off with fewer friends

Also ignores other things that seem likely to me:

- People in cities have more people to compare themselves to when calculating 'how well they're doing' relative to people around them. In a big city you're less likely to be at the top.

- Smart people are more likely to need opportunities provided by big cities and big city networks, and are probably more unhappy in smaller rural areas.

The 'evolution' argument sets off bad science alarms, no ability to test and not even very good speculation. Then going on to suggest that smart people are more able to ignore evolutionary pressure also strikes me as a stretch.

The idea that smart people have a bigger project in mind and time spent socializing makes them sad because it's 'wasted' does seem reasonable to me though.

Depends on the problem. If the general human consensus believes the sun revolves around the earth, you're going to have a hard time working with multiple minds. Problems which require radical shifts in ideology are more than likely going to be tackled alone. It would come down to the maximum power principle. You would waste a significant amount of energy pulling someone psychologically one step in your direction, whereas independently, you could be three steps closer to proving your thesis. Not to mention, social cohesion, or whatever you want to call it, encourages group think and naturally ostracises outsiders as a primitive form of bonding or fitting in with one another.

Really hard problems fight monocultures of 'obvious truth' in the bonds of multiple minds.

... Did you mention where you live?

Satoshi Kanazawa is not an intellectual I respect very much

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa

> views such as that African countries suffer chronic poverty and illness because their people have lower IQs and that black women are objectively less attractive than other races

> a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists issued an open letter titled "Kanazawa's bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology",[6] and an article was published by 35 on the same theme.[7]

Yeah, I'm not sure I buy the reasoning. I can sort of relate with the premise of the article itself, but, like you said... there's something off with the reasoning.

How about that it's transparently self-serving?

I think we should be really careful about ideas like this which tell us what we want to hear about a thing that "sounds negative on the surface but is actually good!"

I've reread it 3-4 times, and I'm having a hard time understanding what the argument is. Typically, you'd expect something like

> if p, then q

> if q, then z

but this article reads as

> if p, then q

> if z, then m

Except that it's all wrapped in language - the ideas look like they should flow together, but they don't. There are probably missing steps in the analysis. Might be a case of over-summarization by the journalist.

> Theres something odd about the reasoning in the article thay I cant quite put my finger on

Yes, it is all over the place:

1) "Why smart people are better off with fewer friends"

2) "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" - for everyone that is.

3) "[...] one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed."

4) "The effect of population density on life satisfaction was [...] twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,"

COMMENT - So, trusting the writing, presumably low-IQ individuals are more happy in a small town where fewer people are around to socialize with and more unhappy in a big city where more people are around to socialize with.

5) "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."

COMMENT - So they have that in common with low-IQ people? This claim contrast oddly with 4) and also the graph pointing out that this is a population wide trend..

6) "If you're smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being"

COMMENT - Then the whole article could be summon up into something a bit shorter basically, smarter people have a relatively easier time than less smart people, no matter whether they are in a small town or a big city. I feel the reason for the sense of oddness stems primarily from point 4 which remains unexplored/explained and stands out against some but not all of the other claims made.

Since it's a correlational study, I'm pretty sure all you can say is that "smart people who spend more time with their friends tend to be less happy". This could be due to any number of reasons. Either spending more time with their friends makes them less happy, or, more likely, they spend more time with their friends because they are unhappy and are trying to make up for it.

Yeah, if you lived past age 1 it might have been alright, until you died at 50.

Sure, in a nasty, brutish and short way, I can totally envision quality of life to be better "in the good old days".

Or was your comment meant to be snark that I didn't get?

If I were going to expound from imagination about how remotely ancient peoples lived, I would prefer to really exercise the imagination and give them magical powers. Might as well have fun with it.

Yeah, and even though you're fighting for your life every day then, it seems so much simpler and not so bad once you've developed a community that can share the chores. I watched this documentary on David Beckham's trip to the native tribes in Brazil. They're all very happy with their life. Everyone is very close and it's nice because all your time is spent with family. They get to be with nature all day, have fun and joke while collecting and preparing meals for the tribe, and afterwards they all sing and dance.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046prs6

The actual happiness of hunter-gatherers is seriously in dispute. It's by no means a settled anthropological question.

For a useful perspective from the other side, you might want to read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

No one was there at that time, no one will truly know if this is true. I don't even think that we can compare the happiness between two people (I am happy doing things other find horrible like programming), so two people from different time ? Impossible in my opinion.

Me too friend! Actually, we no friendz coz we smart!

I don't mean to toot my own cranium horn but my social life is pretty terrible if I say so myself... which I just did.

Only if you are happy.

good point! Title should have been "Why smart 20-somethings.."

I was thinking at first that it was ridiculous to examine questions about a life "well lived" through people who haven't lived too much of one (ages 18-28), but then I wondered if people actually maintain the same relative level of "social-ness" throughout their lives. For example, let's say in your twenties, people who are "very social" have 10-20 friends whom they see often, but in your sixties, people who are in the "very social" category typically have 5-10 friends that they see often. My thought is actually that once you are in a particular "category" of socialness, you probably continue having that same level of socialness throughout your life. Probably very social people in this study were also very social at age 5-10 - so maybe age doesn't matter. I am assuming that all people are less social as they grow older - but I actually don't know if this is true.