Aug 14, 2022·edited Aug 14, 2022Liked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
If there's a club for people who are over 1m95 tall, no other qualification needed, whose point is to celebrate their height, is it likely to be a good source of information about say the athleticism of tall people?
One would think that the more athletic over-1m95s would spend their time doing sports that require height (basketball, swimming, volleyball, water polo) and therefore that club would end up being about Big&Tall stores & how close together airline seats are.
I tend to believe the idea that, at the highest levels of intelligence, mental health declines. I think the effect is definitely not as large as claimed, and I’m not sure if it represents a higher relative risk compared to the overall population or just to those a few IQ points lower. But I buy that there is some reversal.
Among Ashkenazis, for example, there is a hypothesis that some diseases like Tay-Sachs are tradeoffs for their high intelligence. While I am admittedly far from an evolutionary biologist, it makes sense that in equilibrium there should be some reproductive fitness tradeoff of high intelligence.
The problem is that quality-control mechanisms in science have broken down.
There is no professional penalty for publishing garbage studies.
When science was small (before WW2) peer estimations mattered to careers. Since science got big, few scientists, even in a sub-field, know each other personally.
I think it is likely that even the non-self-selected samples suffer from selection problems. This is most obvious if you study Nobelists or Field Medalists: highly intelligent but probably high work ethic and motivation as well. Even kids who exhibit interest in mathematics, participate in math competitions and olympiads, are likely to be those of high intelligence who are also well adjusted and have a good work ethic.
The problem is that you may only find an effect at the highest percentiles of intelligence, but it is impractical to sample those people at high enough numbers without running into selection issues.
I know, there are obviously good reasons to expect positive outcomes will correlate with intelligence across most IQ levels: low genetic load will manifest itself as high function across many traits, and cross-assortative mating for socially valuable traits will encourage everything people like to cluster together. But the *unusual* intelligence --> social isolation --> maladjustment & sadness pathway also seems pretty obvious, and there are some suggestions of it in the literature as well, for instance:
"a significant curvilinear relationship between intelligence and coital status was demonstrated; adolescents at the upper and lower ends of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex."
I mean seriously, not having anybody around who can understand your pillow talk is just going to be a real bummer no matter how you look at it.
Another problematic aspect of using “mental illness” as a precise measurement criterion is that doing so trivializes psychotic brain diseases such as Schizophrenia. Research shows that Schizophrenics possess lower IQs before the prodrome phase and diagnosis. Psychosis is almost always associated with lower pre-onset IQ scores. The genius outliers who suffered from severe mental illness -- like John Nash -- probably had high enough IQs to compensate for the noticeable deficits.
But yes, I believe, based on purely anecdotal evidence, that intelligence correlates with neuroticism, the latter of which is always found in OCD patients. However, researchers should partition hyperactivity and rumination from psychosis.
Lastly, high intelligence confers upon the elderly idiopathic protective effects from developing degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. The literature should focus on the healthy advantages of high intelligence — not neuroticism.
The people you meet at their member-only events and on their forums come across as quite angry at the world, they have A LOT of conspiracy theories, all accompanied by a superiority complex despite most of them having not really done anything spectacular.
If there is anything Jordan Peterson gets right, it's how hard it is for many hyper-smart people to come to terms with how useless they are in the world. It's much easier to blame the world than themselves
Plus, I think there are a small-but-significant percentage of Mensans who have hacked the test through repetition just so they can get in and appear smart to others.
At an IQ of 130, I am near the borderline to qualify for MENSA. I have none of the mental or emotional problems that the "studies" find correlated with MENSA-level intelligence. My principal problem in life has been being hampered by incompetents, be they colleagues, HOA members, attorneys, or physicians. I experience a small degree of stress from such interactions. Perhaps some of the MENSA members' complaints are related to similar interactions, but mostly not being INTJ's they don't realize that getting things done correctly is more important than being sociable. That is, their reported emotional problems are fundamentally problems of dealing with the less intelligent world, but they let their frustration damage other relationships which could be normal.
If there's a club for people who are over 1m95 tall, no other qualification needed, whose point is to celebrate their height, is it likely to be a good source of information about say the athleticism of tall people?
One would think that the more athletic over-1m95s would spend their time doing sports that require height (basketball, swimming, volleyball, water polo) and therefore that club would end up being about Big&Tall stores & how close together airline seats are.
Adverse selection is almost certainly guaranteed.
Dumb people like thinking that there is something wrong with smart people so there will always be demand for studies like this.
I tend to believe the idea that, at the highest levels of intelligence, mental health declines. I think the effect is definitely not as large as claimed, and I’m not sure if it represents a higher relative risk compared to the overall population or just to those a few IQ points lower. But I buy that there is some reversal.
Among Ashkenazis, for example, there is a hypothesis that some diseases like Tay-Sachs are tradeoffs for their high intelligence. While I am admittedly far from an evolutionary biologist, it makes sense that in equilibrium there should be some reproductive fitness tradeoff of high intelligence.
The problem is that quality-control mechanisms in science have broken down.
There is no professional penalty for publishing garbage studies.
When science was small (before WW2) peer estimations mattered to careers. Since science got big, few scientists, even in a sub-field, know each other personally.
We need new mechanisms.
I think it is likely that even the non-self-selected samples suffer from selection problems. This is most obvious if you study Nobelists or Field Medalists: highly intelligent but probably high work ethic and motivation as well. Even kids who exhibit interest in mathematics, participate in math competitions and olympiads, are likely to be those of high intelligence who are also well adjusted and have a good work ethic.
The problem is that you may only find an effect at the highest percentiles of intelligence, but it is impractical to sample those people at high enough numbers without running into selection issues.
First born children have ~3 IQ points advantage over later borns, and are also more prone to allergies, so that correlation could be real.
Hi Emil - You mention Terman's sample more than once. That was the sample popularized at https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/ , right? Looks like there was maladjustment at high IQ there.
I know, there are obviously good reasons to expect positive outcomes will correlate with intelligence across most IQ levels: low genetic load will manifest itself as high function across many traits, and cross-assortative mating for socially valuable traits will encourage everything people like to cluster together. But the *unusual* intelligence --> social isolation --> maladjustment & sadness pathway also seems pretty obvious, and there are some suggestions of it in the literature as well, for instance:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X99000610
"a significant curvilinear relationship between intelligence and coital status was demonstrated; adolescents at the upper and lower ends of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex."
I mean seriously, not having anybody around who can understand your pillow talk is just going to be a real bummer no matter how you look at it.
Another problematic aspect of using “mental illness” as a precise measurement criterion is that doing so trivializes psychotic brain diseases such as Schizophrenia. Research shows that Schizophrenics possess lower IQs before the prodrome phase and diagnosis. Psychosis is almost always associated with lower pre-onset IQ scores. The genius outliers who suffered from severe mental illness -- like John Nash -- probably had high enough IQs to compensate for the noticeable deficits.
But yes, I believe, based on purely anecdotal evidence, that intelligence correlates with neuroticism, the latter of which is always found in OCD patients. However, researchers should partition hyperactivity and rumination from psychosis.
Lastly, high intelligence confers upon the elderly idiopathic protective effects from developing degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. The literature should focus on the healthy advantages of high intelligence — not neuroticism.
This definitely sounds like the Mensans to me.
The people you meet at their member-only events and on their forums come across as quite angry at the world, they have A LOT of conspiracy theories, all accompanied by a superiority complex despite most of them having not really done anything spectacular.
If there is anything Jordan Peterson gets right, it's how hard it is for many hyper-smart people to come to terms with how useless they are in the world. It's much easier to blame the world than themselves
Plus, I think there are a small-but-significant percentage of Mensans who have hacked the test through repetition just so they can get in and appear smart to others.
At an IQ of 130, I am near the borderline to qualify for MENSA. I have none of the mental or emotional problems that the "studies" find correlated with MENSA-level intelligence. My principal problem in life has been being hampered by incompetents, be they colleagues, HOA members, attorneys, or physicians. I experience a small degree of stress from such interactions. Perhaps some of the MENSA members' complaints are related to similar interactions, but mostly not being INTJ's they don't realize that getting things done correctly is more important than being sociable. That is, their reported emotional problems are fundamentally problems of dealing with the less intelligent world, but they let their frustration damage other relationships which could be normal.