Saturday, December 10, 2011

Don't envy the intelligent (much)

Don't you just hate it when wealthy people complain about their problems?    They whine about how horrible it is to have all that money.  The problem is of course that it is rather easy to get rid of money.   Charity, tax,  luxury items, not to mention con men, are all perfectly happy to take your money.

While it is a bit harder to dumb yourself down than it is get rid of your money, I do not pretend that being stupid is better than intelligent.  Only an idiot would want to be stupid.  :)

That said, being intelligent is not quite as great as it sounds.   Consider that someone with an IQ of 65 is considered "defective intelligence" (source).   That's 35 points below the average and "normal" IQ of 100.   Now suppose you have an IQ 135.   The average person is that same 35 minutes below your intelligence.   They just don't understand things that are obvious to you.  Effectively you are surrounded by idiots.  (Note I would rather be called an idiot than defective. )

Ever been in traffic and had some idiot cut you off then return to his original lane?   Ever watch some fool try and fail to use a vending machine?   You know that guy at meetings that just does NOT understand anything - no matter how many times you explain it? The customer service guy that clearly knows less than you do?   The cashier that thinks a $2 bill must be counterfeit because they never saw one before? Those are just some obvious examples.  Think about having things like that going on ALL the time. 

Now, I don't want to be stupider than I am.  But being smart is not all it's cracked up to be.   Would you marry an idiot?  (See, this post does have to do with dating.)   Being smart has a lot of advantages.  You tend to earn more money, fall for less stupid tricks, and in general make slightly better decisions.  But stupider people seem to have more fun (or are at least more easily amused), and have an easier time finding someone to love.

Dating makes this issue much more obvious.   If you are only willing to date people whose IQ is over 125, you only have 6% of the population to select from.  For those of us that are very intelligent, we have a significant disadvantage.  Worse, people don't paste their IQ on their far head.  You can't even make a reliable guess based on clothing.   You have to talk to them - usually for more than 10 minutes - to figure out if they qualify.

I think that's why intelligent people do so much better at college dating than in high school dating.  Everyone around you usually has intelligence similar to yours.   This makes certain things a lot simpler.

You can't even use advanced degrees as a shortcut for intelligence.  School requires hard work more than intelligence.  I know people with (estimated) IQ's of 110 that have a doctorate, and lazy geniuses with (estimated) IQ's of over 130 that barely finished college.  Which school they went to is more important than how far they got.  People accepted into Harvard Undergraduate program are smarter than people that finish Touro Law school

Now, some people do prefer a partner that is smarter than them.   At the same time, other people prefer someone less intelligent than them.   I don't see a general trend making intelligent people either more or less desirable.  But we do have a smaller section of the population to choose from.

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