btrmt. | Betterment

Are intelligentsia less happy? An argument for why intelligent people are less happy—because intelligence does not measure how good you are at solving the poorly defined problems of life.

People love ‘g’—the general mental ability Spearman was measuring. It predicts all sorts of things. But it’s not really clear what it is. Maybe processing speed?. This guy thinks we could extend that to speed at ‘well-defined problems’:

Spearman … did not, as he claimed, observe a “continued tendency to success throughout all variations of both form and subject-matter,” nor has anybody else. It merely looks as if we’ve varied all the forms and the subject-matters because we have the wrong theory about what makes them different … I think a good name for problems like these is well-defined … problems

But perhaps not to ‘poorly defined problems’ like raising a family well.

The Personal and Private Nature of Smartphones:

because smartphones are considerably more personal and private than PCs, using them activates intimate self-knowledge and increases private self-focus, shifting attention toward individuating personal preferences, feelings, and inner states

This is precisely the kind of thing I’m talking about what I complain that the idea that social media is bad is too simplistic. The effects of social media are extremely unclear, because we’re responding to an environment that’s unclear (see also this). Social media might be problematic, but probably the effects have much deeper roots than simply that.

See also amusing ourselves to death, on the medium and the message.