From: Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Date: Fri Jan 02 2004 - 13:13:52 MST
"Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org> writes:
> I don't think there is a correlation between high IQ and psychological
> problems.
There most certainly is -- people with high IQs tend to have serious
social problems. That's not to say I would prefer to be dumber, of
course.
> If there were, I guess it would likely be ascribable to
> difficulties associated from being too far away from the mean of society in
> any major dimension, rather than due to intrinsic problems associated with
> intelligence.
Unclear. Many people who are possessed of high IQs lack "social
intelligence", and it may very well be a question of how much effort
can be put in to both problems simultaneously. It is hard to be good
at things like deep math or physics problems without being obsessive
about them -- but if you are obsessive about them, it leads to
spending a lot less time learning about social skills, which can lead
to things like having a lot more trouble doing things like attracting
a mate.
One of the revolutions technological society has brought us is the rise
of conditions in which socially inept people can gain large amounts of
resources with the application of pure problem solving intelligence,
and then gain reproductive success even absent significant social
skill. One wonders if the rise in the population of syndromes like
autism (especially in forms like Asperger's Syndrome) is correlated
with this shift -- though of course it might not be connected.
Doubtless, by the way, evolution would "fix" such things with time. As
has been pointed out, high intelligence is a relatively recent
phenomenon and there hasn't been so much time for evolution to shake
the bugs out.
However, also doubtless, we aren't going to have much time for
ordinary biological evolution to deal with this problem, since it
isn't likely that the cutting edge of evolution will be biological
humans for much longer.
Perry
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