The problem I have with dividing the space of problems up into a well-defined, and poorly-defined binary and saying they each have their own distinct type of intelligence, is that it seems like the way you make progress on poorly-defined problems is by taking it or a sub-component of it and making it well-defined.
For example, maybe "Do a good job raising a family" is poorly defined, but when we think about how we evaluate if we have achieved this, it sort of caches out into a list of criteria like:
- Your children have a happy childhood
- Your family's financial needs are covered
- Your children grow up to be well-educated and have fulfilling careers.
- Your children grow up to be healthy
- Each family member develops strong personal connections to each other family member
- ...
Then these things can be pursued using the tools of well-defined problem solving. If you can't do this, then how could you even tell if someone did a good job solving a poorly-defined problem, surely at some point you have to cache it out in some sort of objective criteria.
This would be a problem for your theory because if you can convert poorly-defined problems into well-defined problems, at least in approximation, then it seems like "smart" people, should be able to leverage their smarts to achieve all of the well-defined outcomes.
My answer to this would be that the alternative virtue which you are trying to pick out isn't some sort of "smartness in solving poorly defined problems" but instead something like "directionness". That is, the bottleneck isn't that people are trying to but don't have the right smarts to solve poorly defined problems, rather actually picking good poorly defined problems to pursue and sticking to them over ones life is really challenging and a virtue independent of IQ-smarts.
This is because the space of poorly-defined questions that are relevant to a good life is actually very nebulous and itself poorly-defined. People are confronted with many different poorly-defined questions they might want to satisfy (lets call them imperatives) e.g. "have pleasurable experiences", "make my loved ones happy", "affirm my identity(s)", "be high status", "Fulfill social pressure (x,y,z)", "benefit my culture/community/tribe/nation/species".
Most people most of the time are in a state of internal strife over which of these imperatives matter and to what extent, and its doubly hard because the relative imperative importance shifts over time so your actions to satisfy imperative X one day may be viewed as totally wasted the next because obviously imperative Y is the most important one!
This directionness virtue would pick out people who are better than average able to (1) develop a coherent, non-contradictory (or less-contradictory) understanding of the importance of various imperatives to them, (2) Keep them stable over time (or at least evolving in a slower, more orderly way).
Then, the high-intelligence person may be better at satisfying any individual imperative at any given point in time, but the high-directionness person will be more satisfied that their actions over time have accumulated in a way that satisfies their current desires.
Note this is a super vague and not well-evidenced theory, and it also has the problem where it still would predict SOME correlation between IQ-smarts and happiness even if it is less important than directionness.
I like your comment, though I will say that beyond a certain level of the criteria you listed, happiness does seem to become something more intangible, and not something that can be further "well-defined". The concept of directionness seems akin to agency, which is frequently mentioned in online discussion. I don't think it's a problem that SOME correlation exists between IQ smarts and happiness - possessing IQ smarts is likely to assist people in achieving tangible, hard-to-deny goals, which would can on average lead to a good sense of achievement/ feeling that one has put in a commendable amount of effort.
Physics isn't at all like chess in it's so-called "well-defined problems". Dark matter, the measurement problem, baryon asymmetry, etc. There really shouldn't be a single behavioral measurement that predicts success somewhat in both physics and chess. And yet IQ does. And that's amazing. And it does this across so many domains.
But you expect it to predict moral goodness also?! You want a measurement that differentiates good and bad outcomes in every kind of human behavior?
Meanwhile you've taken happiness measurements at face value as if they represent a valid target that IQ has failed to hit. The basic self reports you've mentioned are hopelessly entangled with multiple internal validity problems like social referencing and self presentation, which make time period comparisons really really hard to interpret. They are far weaker as measurements of anything. Don't blame IQ for being as bad as happiness scales.
This should really be an essay about the metacognitive failures of smart people.
Being more happy is something you can train. A little mindfullness goes a long way. Avoiding destructive patterns of thought can be taught. This isn't to say that unhappy people should be blamed for their unhappiness, but rather that most people could be a lot happier than they are if they made more of an effort. But many people are unaware of this, and expect happiness to be something completely outside of their control. How to be happy is not taught in school, but perhaps it should be.
The problem with almost all of these approaches is it doesn't account for real-world factors.
What we generally select for when we attempt to measure intelligence is performance to an activity, which is fundamentally flawed, both because we have no identity property we can objectively reference as definitional, and because even among the same individuals performance varies based on internal and external factors.
There is also a part of the problem domain that nearly everyone with only a few exceptions have been blinded to by a combination of their own biases, and structured induction or thought reform.
If intelligent people generally perceive and are more aware than normal people, and they were subjected to structured torturous conditions designed to impose psychological stress surreptitiously, they would mentally break down much faster than normal people because they become sensitized to things that cause such, where other people simply don't perceive (and habituate).
Intelligence at its core is a combination of mental framework and speed of association. This changes depending on many things.
Torture is one of those things that simply describing it is not enough, and people generally assume wrongly when they haven't had an associated exposure that they are aware of.
You have to experience it to have the appropriate perspective for how it works.
Quite a lot of corporate processes today, and bureacratic ones, are designed with object elements to impose psychological stress/cost in the most effective way known. As exposure increases, the victims lose their ability to maintain rational thought, they get to a point of involuntary hypnosis, and eventually with sufficient exposure either breakdown and disassociate (as one group), or enter a state of semi-lucid psychosis capable of planning and seeking annihilation, (in the other group). [Lifton, Meerloo]
The elements to look out for are the following in aggregate:
Cognitive Dissonance (through deception, or otherwise) - reality doesn't match what was expected or advertised.
Subliminal Psychological Blindspot (a Cialdini lever, or distorted reflected appraisal).
Lack of Agency to remove [stripping locus of control]
Elicitation of Participation - Inaction results in loss.
Isolation - [increases susceptibility of most blindspots]
The perceived or real threat of loss.
Loss
Many times there is no specific intent on the enforcer to do these things but there is systemic general intent when loss is present because failure to address loss leads to objective measures of gross negligence.
These elements are typically also coupled with structured trauma loops that are circular intervals or periods that include push/pull, confession/catharsis, strictness/leniency, in a circular loop that always starts over at the beginning.
Finally, there are elements that have increased effect when clustered with other similar elements, or with other actions. Narco-analysis/synthesis using barbituates would be used in the 50s to interrogate people, today the same thing can be done using operant conditioning and mis-association of stimulis to produce dopamine hits.
The reason intelligence is so rare today is because we've been killing them off, and not even noticing it happening through our centralized education system and other processes.
Intelligent people that are tortured to the breaking point generally don't have the opportunity to have kids, they can't deal with the social aspects when they've been tortured beyond a certain point. While trauma makes people compliant, for the intelligent they end up opting out after they break. The status quo has disadvantaged intelligence and stripped them of their abilities in various ways.
Historically, the intelligent would raise people up around them through communications, but with technology they've been isolated, ignored, tortured, often to the breaking point and beyond.
Centralized Schooling in large part has served its role in purging and sieving the intelligent from the gene pool over the last several decades. The problem is that eventually the less gifted depend on the gifted to solve a problem that becomes existential. When you've killed off the golden goose, and willfully blinded oneself through clever mechanisms of separation of objectionable concerns banking on complacency (the banality of evil, also known as sloth), there isn't a path forward. Its a great filter.
How will you overcome the existential problems you created that arrives on a lag? You aren't seeing poor performance in schools as a result of lack of ability, its because of trauma that's being inflicted on children without them knowing or understanding enough to recognize it. Its intolerable and lacks any basis of reason but its enforced systemically.
Procrastination is largely a trauma response and all our technology is geared towards enforcing those elements in a number of clever ways to avoid alerting you to an issue.
Wow!!!! I love it. First, I appreciate an article not written by AI. Thank you. Second, I agree so much with your points. We do easily cast aside what can’t be tied up in a little box. But we all know there are no well defined problems in our everyday lives. I would like to see more analysis of the happiness angle. Great read - thanks.
I really loved this article. With a background in psychology and a penchant for questioning our categories and definitions, this resonated to my core. I wonder if one of the glitches in this type of work is that we seem to consider the statements "I'm very happy" and "I'm living the life I want" as synonymous and interchangeable. I think they're quite different.
Interesting article, and thank you for the detailed explanations.
On the face of it...intelligence makes you question everything, including faith, traditions, and established structures. In high-context cultures, this becomes especially messy. Anyone who doesn't toe the line or doesn't do what's required of them unquestioningly is considered an outlier or even a threat. If an intelligent child (who hasn't become "wise" yet) begins to question the established norms, it begins to get sidelined. In several cultures, contact/riches/bribes are important to get ahead in life. By questioning the norms, these "intelligent" ones have already hurt enough egos and established themselves as black sheep - they've lost the advantage that their non-black-sheep peers have.
It's only later that the ill-impact of their intelligence is felt on their lives...and on their happiness. But, of course, this isn't science! Just the viewpoint of a layperson.
No no, your base assumptions are wrong and so are all the conclusions. Smart people aren't happier because smart people, by definition, developed logical aspect of mind, but happiness is existential, subjective experience and not an objective logical thing, so smart people miss the whole point.
> Nobody else can be completely sure whether I’m happy or not
This is exactly what subjective means: you might be completely blissed out but people around you will not see any difference. Objective things are obvious to everyone, subjective are only available to you, this is why modern science is helpless here: it only studies that which is objective and can be proven to others.
> The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable
The rules are perfectly stable: happiness is a certain peak of physical, mental and emotional states. What you are talking about is just different people found different ways to trigger that state, based on their culture, upbringing, past experiences, etc.
> unless I accept Jesus into my heart or reach nirvana or fall in love—if I think I’m happy before all that, I’m simply mistaken about what happiness is!
You are not mistaken, its just that moments of happiness that everyone has happen accidentally and don't last - they are not of any value if you want to reach the real thing.
I'm writing this all based on my own experience, I learned a particular meditation practice from one of the modern day gurus, and it changed something inside of me on such a profound level that I can sit and be happy throughout the day just like that. No relationships are needed, no money, fame, social approval or other nonsense that people are doing.
I've realised that in the eastern spiritual tradition they found how to trigger ecstatic experiences naturally, through breath, focusing mind, and positioning the body in certain ways.
Nowadays I see all the hardship that people are doing to become happy as a ridiculous circus, because if you know exactly what to do - being happy is very easy. I see many people who are smart, relate themselves to science, but for some reason can't do a simple experiment and try out some basic practices. Theory is nice, but without practice there won't be any real result.
You are more happy when you are content, less greedy (not ambition), wish well for everyone etc., etc., This is is when you understand life is temporary - we are here for < 100 years. We may just share a bit to move the needle. This world doesn't remember after few 100s of years an average human whatever they do. Realizing all these, managing your own small family & spread kindness to everyone - would make you really happy. A bit smartness on top of it is not bad.
Interesting essay. But it attributes something magical (ability to solve undefined problems) to humans and says that AI doesn't have it.
It seems pretty meaningless and not engaging with the real problem to say that AI doesn't "actually" write movie scripts or paint pictures. Like this doesn't line up with my definitions for doing those things which AI clearly fulfills.
And human intelligence arises from a well defined problem: maximizing f(environment, self) -> babies.
Also: if it were possible to measure, which it isn't, I strongly suspect that ability to solve well-defined problems and ability to solve poorly-defined problems are highly correlated, not totally uncorrelated. Happiness is a poorly defined problem, but it's just one of many, and has its own pile of things to consider that can isolate it from the general ability to solve poorly-defined problems.
I do like the framing. seems to be describing something similar to Goodhart's Law.
Nice Essay and a neat theory!
The problem I have with dividing the space of problems up into a well-defined, and poorly-defined binary and saying they each have their own distinct type of intelligence, is that it seems like the way you make progress on poorly-defined problems is by taking it or a sub-component of it and making it well-defined.
For example, maybe "Do a good job raising a family" is poorly defined, but when we think about how we evaluate if we have achieved this, it sort of caches out into a list of criteria like:
- Your children have a happy childhood
- Your family's financial needs are covered
- Your children grow up to be well-educated and have fulfilling careers.
- Your children grow up to be healthy
- Each family member develops strong personal connections to each other family member
- ...
Then these things can be pursued using the tools of well-defined problem solving. If you can't do this, then how could you even tell if someone did a good job solving a poorly-defined problem, surely at some point you have to cache it out in some sort of objective criteria.
This would be a problem for your theory because if you can convert poorly-defined problems into well-defined problems, at least in approximation, then it seems like "smart" people, should be able to leverage their smarts to achieve all of the well-defined outcomes.
My answer to this would be that the alternative virtue which you are trying to pick out isn't some sort of "smartness in solving poorly defined problems" but instead something like "directionness". That is, the bottleneck isn't that people are trying to but don't have the right smarts to solve poorly defined problems, rather actually picking good poorly defined problems to pursue and sticking to them over ones life is really challenging and a virtue independent of IQ-smarts.
This is because the space of poorly-defined questions that are relevant to a good life is actually very nebulous and itself poorly-defined. People are confronted with many different poorly-defined questions they might want to satisfy (lets call them imperatives) e.g. "have pleasurable experiences", "make my loved ones happy", "affirm my identity(s)", "be high status", "Fulfill social pressure (x,y,z)", "benefit my culture/community/tribe/nation/species".
Most people most of the time are in a state of internal strife over which of these imperatives matter and to what extent, and its doubly hard because the relative imperative importance shifts over time so your actions to satisfy imperative X one day may be viewed as totally wasted the next because obviously imperative Y is the most important one!
This directionness virtue would pick out people who are better than average able to (1) develop a coherent, non-contradictory (or less-contradictory) understanding of the importance of various imperatives to them, (2) Keep them stable over time (or at least evolving in a slower, more orderly way).
Then, the high-intelligence person may be better at satisfying any individual imperative at any given point in time, but the high-directionness person will be more satisfied that their actions over time have accumulated in a way that satisfies their current desires.
Note this is a super vague and not well-evidenced theory, and it also has the problem where it still would predict SOME correlation between IQ-smarts and happiness even if it is less important than directionness.
I like your comment, though I will say that beyond a certain level of the criteria you listed, happiness does seem to become something more intangible, and not something that can be further "well-defined". The concept of directionness seems akin to agency, which is frequently mentioned in online discussion. I don't think it's a problem that SOME correlation exists between IQ smarts and happiness - possessing IQ smarts is likely to assist people in achieving tangible, hard-to-deny goals, which would can on average lead to a good sense of achievement/ feeling that one has put in a commendable amount of effort.
Physics isn't at all like chess in it's so-called "well-defined problems". Dark matter, the measurement problem, baryon asymmetry, etc. There really shouldn't be a single behavioral measurement that predicts success somewhat in both physics and chess. And yet IQ does. And that's amazing. And it does this across so many domains.
But you expect it to predict moral goodness also?! You want a measurement that differentiates good and bad outcomes in every kind of human behavior?
Meanwhile you've taken happiness measurements at face value as if they represent a valid target that IQ has failed to hit. The basic self reports you've mentioned are hopelessly entangled with multiple internal validity problems like social referencing and self presentation, which make time period comparisons really really hard to interpret. They are far weaker as measurements of anything. Don't blame IQ for being as bad as happiness scales.
This should really be an essay about the metacognitive failures of smart people.
The factors that never seem to matter in "intelligence" testing are curiosity and empathy.
If you are not curious about the world and its systems, you really are not intelligent, you are learned at best.
And if you have no empathy, you don't have the engine for curiosity, which is always connected difference.
Being more happy is something you can train. A little mindfullness goes a long way. Avoiding destructive patterns of thought can be taught. This isn't to say that unhappy people should be blamed for their unhappiness, but rather that most people could be a lot happier than they are if they made more of an effort. But many people are unaware of this, and expect happiness to be something completely outside of their control. How to be happy is not taught in school, but perhaps it should be.
The short answer is what i want written on my tombstone. "He was too smart for his own good"
The problem with almost all of these approaches is it doesn't account for real-world factors.
What we generally select for when we attempt to measure intelligence is performance to an activity, which is fundamentally flawed, both because we have no identity property we can objectively reference as definitional, and because even among the same individuals performance varies based on internal and external factors.
There is also a part of the problem domain that nearly everyone with only a few exceptions have been blinded to by a combination of their own biases, and structured induction or thought reform.
If intelligent people generally perceive and are more aware than normal people, and they were subjected to structured torturous conditions designed to impose psychological stress surreptitiously, they would mentally break down much faster than normal people because they become sensitized to things that cause such, where other people simply don't perceive (and habituate).
Intelligence at its core is a combination of mental framework and speed of association. This changes depending on many things.
Torture is one of those things that simply describing it is not enough, and people generally assume wrongly when they haven't had an associated exposure that they are aware of.
You have to experience it to have the appropriate perspective for how it works.
Quite a lot of corporate processes today, and bureacratic ones, are designed with object elements to impose psychological stress/cost in the most effective way known. As exposure increases, the victims lose their ability to maintain rational thought, they get to a point of involuntary hypnosis, and eventually with sufficient exposure either breakdown and disassociate (as one group), or enter a state of semi-lucid psychosis capable of planning and seeking annihilation, (in the other group). [Lifton, Meerloo]
The elements to look out for are the following in aggregate:
Cognitive Dissonance (through deception, or otherwise) - reality doesn't match what was expected or advertised.
Subliminal Psychological Blindspot (a Cialdini lever, or distorted reflected appraisal).
Lack of Agency to remove [stripping locus of control]
Elicitation of Participation - Inaction results in loss.
Isolation - [increases susceptibility of most blindspots]
The perceived or real threat of loss.
Loss
Many times there is no specific intent on the enforcer to do these things but there is systemic general intent when loss is present because failure to address loss leads to objective measures of gross negligence.
These elements are typically also coupled with structured trauma loops that are circular intervals or periods that include push/pull, confession/catharsis, strictness/leniency, in a circular loop that always starts over at the beginning.
Finally, there are elements that have increased effect when clustered with other similar elements, or with other actions. Narco-analysis/synthesis using barbituates would be used in the 50s to interrogate people, today the same thing can be done using operant conditioning and mis-association of stimulis to produce dopamine hits.
The reason intelligence is so rare today is because we've been killing them off, and not even noticing it happening through our centralized education system and other processes.
Intelligent people that are tortured to the breaking point generally don't have the opportunity to have kids, they can't deal with the social aspects when they've been tortured beyond a certain point. While trauma makes people compliant, for the intelligent they end up opting out after they break. The status quo has disadvantaged intelligence and stripped them of their abilities in various ways.
Historically, the intelligent would raise people up around them through communications, but with technology they've been isolated, ignored, tortured, often to the breaking point and beyond.
Centralized Schooling in large part has served its role in purging and sieving the intelligent from the gene pool over the last several decades. The problem is that eventually the less gifted depend on the gifted to solve a problem that becomes existential. When you've killed off the golden goose, and willfully blinded oneself through clever mechanisms of separation of objectionable concerns banking on complacency (the banality of evil, also known as sloth), there isn't a path forward. Its a great filter.
How will you overcome the existential problems you created that arrives on a lag? You aren't seeing poor performance in schools as a result of lack of ability, its because of trauma that's being inflicted on children without them knowing or understanding enough to recognize it. Its intolerable and lacks any basis of reason but its enforced systemically.
Procrastination is largely a trauma response and all our technology is geared towards enforcing those elements in a number of clever ways to avoid alerting you to an issue.
Food for thought.
Wow!!!! I love it. First, I appreciate an article not written by AI. Thank you. Second, I agree so much with your points. We do easily cast aside what can’t be tied up in a little box. But we all know there are no well defined problems in our everyday lives. I would like to see more analysis of the happiness angle. Great read - thanks.
The reason smart people are not as happy as they could be is because they have to constantly deal with Stupid People.
🧠 Eight Minds, Six Questions — The Experiment Begins
I’ve started a new series testing how eight different AI systems interpret UCTiT–UCP v4.0, the Unified Theory of Coherence.
Each AI received the same document and six identical questions — revealing how different “minds” reason about time, information, and meaning.
You can now read the first conversation below:
Part 1A – Questions 1 to 3: https://substack.com/@ryanlaneuctit/note/c-169355519?r=62kent
Part 1B – Questions 4 to 6: https://substack.com/@ryanlaneuctit/note/c-169356801?r=62kent
This project is about more than comparison — it’s about seeing whether coherence itself is intuitive across all forms of intelligence.
Really great article!
I really loved this article. With a background in psychology and a penchant for questioning our categories and definitions, this resonated to my core. I wonder if one of the glitches in this type of work is that we seem to consider the statements "I'm very happy" and "I'm living the life I want" as synonymous and interchangeable. I think they're quite different.
Amazing read. Thanks for writing!
Interesting article, and thank you for the detailed explanations.
On the face of it...intelligence makes you question everything, including faith, traditions, and established structures. In high-context cultures, this becomes especially messy. Anyone who doesn't toe the line or doesn't do what's required of them unquestioningly is considered an outlier or even a threat. If an intelligent child (who hasn't become "wise" yet) begins to question the established norms, it begins to get sidelined. In several cultures, contact/riches/bribes are important to get ahead in life. By questioning the norms, these "intelligent" ones have already hurt enough egos and established themselves as black sheep - they've lost the advantage that their non-black-sheep peers have.
It's only later that the ill-impact of their intelligence is felt on their lives...and on their happiness. But, of course, this isn't science! Just the viewpoint of a layperson.
No no, your base assumptions are wrong and so are all the conclusions. Smart people aren't happier because smart people, by definition, developed logical aspect of mind, but happiness is existential, subjective experience and not an objective logical thing, so smart people miss the whole point.
> Nobody else can be completely sure whether I’m happy or not
This is exactly what subjective means: you might be completely blissed out but people around you will not see any difference. Objective things are obvious to everyone, subjective are only available to you, this is why modern science is helpless here: it only studies that which is objective and can be proven to others.
> The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable
The rules are perfectly stable: happiness is a certain peak of physical, mental and emotional states. What you are talking about is just different people found different ways to trigger that state, based on their culture, upbringing, past experiences, etc.
> unless I accept Jesus into my heart or reach nirvana or fall in love—if I think I’m happy before all that, I’m simply mistaken about what happiness is!
You are not mistaken, its just that moments of happiness that everyone has happen accidentally and don't last - they are not of any value if you want to reach the real thing.
I'm writing this all based on my own experience, I learned a particular meditation practice from one of the modern day gurus, and it changed something inside of me on such a profound level that I can sit and be happy throughout the day just like that. No relationships are needed, no money, fame, social approval or other nonsense that people are doing.
I've realised that in the eastern spiritual tradition they found how to trigger ecstatic experiences naturally, through breath, focusing mind, and positioning the body in certain ways.
Nowadays I see all the hardship that people are doing to become happy as a ridiculous circus, because if you know exactly what to do - being happy is very easy. I see many people who are smart, relate themselves to science, but for some reason can't do a simple experiment and try out some basic practices. Theory is nice, but without practice there won't be any real result.
You are more happy when you are content, less greedy (not ambition), wish well for everyone etc., etc., This is is when you understand life is temporary - we are here for < 100 years. We may just share a bit to move the needle. This world doesn't remember after few 100s of years an average human whatever they do. Realizing all these, managing your own small family & spread kindness to everyone - would make you really happy. A bit smartness on top of it is not bad.
Interesting essay. But it attributes something magical (ability to solve undefined problems) to humans and says that AI doesn't have it.
It seems pretty meaningless and not engaging with the real problem to say that AI doesn't "actually" write movie scripts or paint pictures. Like this doesn't line up with my definitions for doing those things which AI clearly fulfills.
And human intelligence arises from a well defined problem: maximizing f(environment, self) -> babies.
Also: if it were possible to measure, which it isn't, I strongly suspect that ability to solve well-defined problems and ability to solve poorly-defined problems are highly correlated, not totally uncorrelated. Happiness is a poorly defined problem, but it's just one of many, and has its own pile of things to consider that can isolate it from the general ability to solve poorly-defined problems.
I do like the framing. seems to be describing something similar to Goodhart's Law.