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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to comment on this without sounding arrogant or entitled, but still I personally think this interview misses a couple of points I've seen in my own circle of friends.

1) Smart children are raised with expectations of doing great things because they are smart. If you have two children and one is obviously smarter than the other, the burden of your hopes and dreams will naturally fall on the smarter one, and equal accomplishments between the two will not have equal praise. Later in life this turns into being unhappy because you feel like you could do more because you are smart. It's a constant burden.

2) Being smart brings with it a certain level of ability to "peer behind the curtain" so to speak, and see just how dirty the real world is. It can make it seem like sinking time and effort to make meaningful changes is just futile because of how many things are messed up. And that kind of mindset saps happiness in a hurry.

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I think you have some good arguments. If you remove the external factors (parents, etc) the first argument simplifies to:

People are happier when they meet their own expectations, and people who are "smart" have higher self expectations.

There may be some transfer of parental expectations ("you are smart, you can do anything when you grow up"), but I suspect (apologies, I cannot cite anything) that even if you remove the external expectations, smarter people have higher standards for themselves. Thus, they are less happy.

The second argument is a variant on:

ignorance is bliss

... which is pretty well supported in literature. I am not sure if the futility/frustration causes unhappiness more than just increased awareness of issues, but it falls in line with that general theme.

Just my 2 cents, as someone who often falls into this category.

2) sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism which is still contested as a theory, but seems to fit experiences I've witnessed.

Your two points are really one point - the mistaken idea that one can 'change the world' in a significant way if only he/she works hard.

That's a tough idea to shake when people connect their self esteem and meaning in life to it.

The solution is to re-discover what you want your life to be about and then get to it. People usually either figure it out somewhat by the time they're 30 or they get burdened by self-imposed obligations to a point where they give up trying and just go with the flow.

So really, a temporary hurdle in the scheme of things :)

Hey! I resemble this remark.

"Peer behind the curtain" goes both ways.

I like to think I'm much happier knowing how wonderfully magnificent the universe is, rather than staring at the ceiling.

I think the parent comment is using "peer behind the curtain" not to describe insight into the physical universe and its wonders, but rather insight into the 'human universe' and its various disappointments (like how it's often non-meritocratic, the difficulties of making meaningful change, the political shietgeist, being better able to predict a decision's potentially disastrous consequences, etc)

Yes, that's the other side.

I've said it this way: I'm happy that I'm smart but being smart hasn't always made me happy.

I think it's a bit sad, really. Baring a discovery that fundamentally changes how the universe as we know it works, we'll very likely never communicate with another form of life. We'll never leave our solar system. We'll probably never even see images of other solar systems, much less galaxies. The universe is an amazing thing full of stuff that would probably sound far-fetched in a science fiction novel and we'll never even get to know whether it exists. If I could be dumber and more preoccupied with the material lifestyle of most people, I'd probably be happier.

You're being pessimistic.

We went from inventing powered flight to landing on the freaking moon in less than 70 years.

In any case, I suspect that you may not be satisfied no matter want reality was. If you had interstellar travel you wouldn't be happy without intergalactic travel.

Even if you only see your own planet, creation is beautiful. (FYI, you happen to be living on the most amazing planet known.)

With respect to your second point, I am in full agreement.

Not only do I routinely see right through the benign bullshit designed to keep most people fat and happy, I also often see past the second layer designed to let the people who see past the first layer think that they can actually "fix" anything.

Without the illusions, I'm just a terrified ant scurrying around in a world filled with uncaring stomping boots and sadistic kids with magnifying glasses.

Being intelligent and ethical is a great advantage in the secondary mythic version of life, but it seems in the real, un-glamoured world, the only quality that has value is the ability to excise essential bits of your own humanity and trade them away for power. Intelligence also helps there, obviously, but without principles, the smartest person becomes the worst monster of them all.

Can you give an example of one of those "double layered" illusions? I.e., the view most people are fed, the view most intelligent people are fed, then the view you see?

Not the above poster, but I'd say layer 1 is "I'll just become a pro-athlete/famous musician/celebrity then everything will be fine, I don't need school!" layer 2 is "I'll just go to school get straight As go to college and get a high-paying rewarding job, then everything will be fine!". I imagine layer 3 involves thinking everything will be fine if you drop out of Harvard and launch a tech startup.

I feel like he was referring the Current Events and the state of the world?

Here's a (cynical) quote describing modern US politics:

The United States is a corporate oligarchy pretending to be a two-party dictatorship pretending to be a representative democracy.

That's the sort of thing meant, I think. There are layers and in this quote the implication is that the fat and happy people are at the outer layer (they think the levers of power of a representative democracy are still valid ways to control the country), and others can see past that into the other two layers behind it.

That's about the size of it.

Most people are happy just to vote. Some people try to channel the overall direction of the vote via party politics. A handful of people know that the election is merely to choose between different means to exactly the same end.

The people can vote to name the ship Boaty McBoatface. The owner will name it something else. It will steer the same course without regard to its name or to the orientation of its deck chairs.

These smart people should really be working on a plan to make the economy more fair.

Sure, let them eat cake.

>It can make it seem like sinking time and effort to make meaningful changes is just futile because of how many things are messed up. And that kind of mindset saps happiness in a hurry.

Emphasis on "seem".

So youre saying smart people should ignore the information and feedback they are receiving and blindly follow an ambition to meaningfully change the world, even though their intelligence tells them this will not work?

So smart people should be dumber?

They should work smarter. Individual ability to effect change is negligible in the global scheme. Aggregate ability is what matters. People who seem able to effect global (or large-scale) change are better (or more successful) at combining the abilities of others. Any individual doctor in Doctors without Borders is ineffectual. The combined actions of their organization have real, positive, impact.

So instead of wasting their time on individual efforts that go nowhere or have no lasting effect, smart people should contribute their resources to a collective organization. Either by assembling such an organization and managing it, or by being a part of such an organization and providing skills/competency to it.

A parallel to analysis paralysis. Sometimes being less familiar with all the options is best. Instead of having to make a decision on what to work on, you have a task and you have a tool and you use the tool to complete the task.

If you're aware of all the problems in the world, of all the places that have issues, how do you decide which one to apply your time and talent to?

Or maybe it's actually the truth, and maybe smart individuals are more aware of their very small amount of power to change things for unworkable opportunity costs.

Unfortunately so many top achievers are working exclusively in internet advertising, simply because the economy is not so fair and in the US at least its extremely easy to fall into economic insecurity.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - said by Jeffrey Hammerbacher in 2011 is still incredibly poignant today.

All the more reason to celebrate the acceleration of ad blocking and the downfall of the internet driven by ad revenue.

How do you define "fair"?

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