Here's a summary for why smart people are "cursed":
If you are two or 3 standard deviations about the mean, you'll quickly realize society is optimized and caters to the average intelligence. You'll find it very boring and frustrating having to deal with rules and decisions that do not make sense. You must continually push yourself to stay entertained and meet like-minded people otherwise you'll get very depressed that everything is meaningless.
As a smart person, I see things a different way. There are certain hobbies that are only appeal to smart people, like pure math. But there are a lot of things that appeal to a broad range of people, like sport, arts, music and literature. I think it's very good to get involved in these things because they bring balance and a way to related to other people. In fact I created a "no programming related hobbies" rule for myself.
You would be amazed how much you can relate to other people, and how little intelligence is an issue, once you have common interests. I remember in my Judo club (which was open to the public but based at the university) a guy who wasn't attending the university commenting that he kept forgetting that a lot of the people in the club were really smart and accomplished (it came up because another guy complained about getting hit in the face, saying he had to present at a conference the next day).
That's not to say intelligence isn't an advantage in these other areas of life. But it's not a big deal or something that creates distance from others. People will appreciate your intelligence just as you appreciate their spontaneity, athleticism, kindness or any other qualities.
I like that attitude and have found it to be true in my experience.
Sports are good for this, you interact with people from many different occupations and age groups.
It's cool to see people from different walks of life solving the problems presented by the challenges of the sport in their own ways according to their own attributes.
I think it's funny that so-called smart people think that only smart people get bored or frustrated with arbitrary rules and decisions which seem to make no sense. Or maybe, just maybe, you're not as smart as you think you are if you can't discern the reasons for those rules and decisions (not saying they're good reasons, just that there is almost always a reason)
The “smart people” I know are seldom bored, because they are constantly reading interesting books, are fascinated by an endless stream of ideas, can think about a number of hard problems anytime they like, and have the curiosity and empathy and enough basic knowledge to coax an information-rich conversation out of almost any interlocutor. YMMV.
I think boredom is just fatal for some smart people. Look at DFW writing The Pale King, a tome on boredom, before his suicide last decade. You occupy yourself to avoid going mad.
Or more recently Mark Fisher, who at least in one essay (to be honest, I've only read this so far but just bought another book; I'm much more familiar with DFW and agree with your analysis) suggests that depression is societal (https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841) and who killed himself.
I think boredom is important, and if you aren't experiencing it in some measure on a regular basis then it is possible you're depriving yourself of the ability to experience maximum pleasure from the world around you.
Ok, that was a lot of hedging language. Here is what i mean. I tend to view the mind as a complex but general purpose signals processing device (its been a useful model for how i understand why i do what i do), and I tend to understand that the brain's natural bent is to normalize sensory input. This explains why if you wear colored lenses, the brain will filter out that color and return your perception of what you see to what it considers a normal white balance. The way the brain tends to filter out pain is another example.
Using that understanding, I tend to define boredom as the feeling of desire for stimulation. The reason why I think boredom is important is because if you have been experiencing a lot of stimulation your brain will have normalized those sensations down to a more normal level. That means your ability to derive pleasure (or pain) from an experience is dependent on how much experience you've had lately. When you do something that produces little stimulation, your brain allows itself to lower whats normal.
This is why, I think, meditation and the need to "unplug" are considered so beneficial. Ultimately, what you want in experience is a kind of sin wave, where the length and amplitude of a given experience has been tuned to your specific personality and physiology. Some people like a very mild wave form, some like an intense one, but times where you are able to normalize allow you to re-experience enjoyable activities over and over again without burning out.
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Having said that, I think that often what people like DFW experience that drives them to suicide isn't boredom perse but boredom combined with depression and/or despair. A struggle with despair is much worse when you go through periods of boredom because boredom makes space for the despair to fully occupy your mind. Experience is distracting, but not a cure.
Anyway... those are my thoughts. And for a bonus, a poem i wrote some years ago encapsulating some of these thoughts.
There's certainly some truth to this, especially in certain anti-intellectual societies and time periods. But many highly intelligent people have been truly gifted not only with intelligence but with the respect and even adoration of others.
You should read the biography of John von Neumann.[1] He's deserved the term "genius" if anyone ever did. George Polya[2], famous author of the math classic "How to Solve It"[3] wrote of him "Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper."
These were unsolved math problems -- unsolved to the entire field of mathematics that he was able to solve right after hearing them for the first time in class. The ability to do that is simply staggering.
Von Neumann went on to make so many contributions to so many fields that this would turn in to a huge post if I was to try to briefly mention them all. Some of the most notable was coming up with the von Neumann architecture on which virtually all modern computers are based, the central role he played in the development of the atomic bomb and the development and use of computers, the invention of cellular automata, and many, many others.
He was extremely highly regarded during his life for his intellect, and was enormously influential.
That's just one really obvious example, but you'll find many, many others. Einstein springs to mind as the quintessential intellectual superstar, as do Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking. Socrates and Plato had a gigantic influence on virtually all of Western philosophy and through that on much of the modern and ancient world. Aristotle, a student of Plato, had an incredible influence on more fields of study than can easily be counted, and could arguably be one of the most influential people in history. He also tutored Alexander the Great, one of the greatest of all military conquerors. Diogenes got away with telling Alexander to get out of his light.
Many many people "3 standard deviations above the mean" (or more) have been eagerly sought out and highly rewarded. Michelangelo got to paint the Sistine Fucking Chapel. Newton and Leibniz created fucking calculus, and were both highly regarded and influential in their time and after. Voltaire influenced all of France and was hugely popular even in his life, as was Benjamin Franklin.
It's actually getting to be a little exhausting to do an adequate summary of the hugely influential brilliant people throughout history, and I think this post could go on for quite some time and not be nearly complete.
Yes, plenty of "geniuses" do get overlooked during their lifetimes, and many more will probably never be "discovered" or acknowledged even after they are dead. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, and that was to his brother. Many anti-intellectual regimes have deliberately committed mass murder of their intellectual classes, staged mass book burnings, etc. Many intelligent people are bullied as children, and as adults are persecuted for being too far ahead of their time, as Gallileo was. But many others are recognized and rewarded -- much more so than most "average" people will ever be.
As for the "Curse of Smart People", I'd rather live with my eyes open, as painful as that might be, than be lulled in pleasant slumber.
My favorite von Neumann anecdote from the wiki page you linked to came from Edward Teller who said "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."
Exactly. I can't even fathom this level of intellect.
Edit: If anyone is interested in the topic of Hungarian scientists in the twentieth century, I can highly recommend the book The Voice of the Martians[1]. It can be a bit dry at times but it is incredibly interesting nonetheless. American scientists jokingly referred to their Hungarian colleagues as Martians due to their other worldly intelligence and their accents that no one could understand.
While we're on a von Neumann love fest, here are some other great quotes:
The Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe speculated: "I have sometimes wondered
whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species
superior to that of man". Eugene Wigner wrote that, seeing von
Neumann's mind at work, "one had the impression of a perfect
instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a
thousandth of an inch." Paul Halmos states that "von Neumann's speed
was awe-inspiring." Israel Halperin said: "Keeping up with him was
... impossible. The feeling was you were on a tricycle chasing a
racing car." Edward Teller admitted that he "never could keep
up with him".
When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in
linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which
there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von
Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of
over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto
unconceived theory of duality.
That said, as astounding as Neumann's intellect was, his, Teller's, and the other brilliant Manhattan Project's scientists' roles in devising arguably the most terrible weapons that human kind has ever produced, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and threatening the destruction of the world or at least civilization as we know it is certainly a sober reminder that intellectual achievement does not automatically result in ethical achievement. Though, of course, how ethical their actions were could be endlessly debated, and there are plenty of people who think they did the right thing.
On the subject of Hungarian scientists, I've read that Europe in general was a hothouse of intellectual achievement and education before the 2nd and especially before the 1st World War. It was just sheer insanity that they virtually destroyed themselves, their civilization, and culture, and exiled and murdered many of their most brilliant men.
Even sadder that the world might be preparing to do it again. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Certainly everything you have expressed is a somber reminder to never forget the lessons of history.
Hungary is a particularly interesting case in intellectual achievement since it produced so many influential scientists despite it not having the industrial base or wealth of many of its European neighbors, and a relatively small population.
You might enjoy JvN's take on the importance of a well run educational system[1]. His comments seem even more suited for our current condition.
I think a lot of people say these grandiose things about smart people because they don't want to consider that they simply spent 30+ years doing little but their work/passion and are simply very good.
Feynman was a genius, but he dissects his own accomplishments and you can see how if you only knew this, this, this, and that, plus a few different methods of integration, it would have seemed obvious to you too.
tl;dr we do our heroes a disservice when we hold them in too high esteem, because we discount their very human, and very costly, accomplishments.
Quite often great accomplishments are the result of a lot of hard work.
But lots of hard work alone does not explain why one person who put in a lot of hard work will greatly outshine many others who also put in a lot of hard work.
Nor does it explain phenomena like prodigies, who excel at a really young age, with far fewer years of effort than many others.
Finally, creativity and inspiration often play great roles in mathematical and other endeavors. They can't entirely be explained by hard work or dedication, which are often prerequisites for intense creative efforts but aren't all there is to it.
This almost seems like a cliche or a troll. I think smarts also lead people to miss the world around them and trivialize anything that isnt a "challenge". To some very smart people I know -- chill out and laern to enjoy the absurdity and mundane as well as the challenge. Be bored once in a while. Know satisfaction in the simple.
I think there's really something there that can't just be dismissed as "Just learn to enjoy the mundane". Go spend some time around people significantly more mentally challenged than yourself, like young children, and make an effort to enjoy their recreational activities in the same way that they do directly, and I think you'll find some things they genuinely enjoy that are just too simple for you, like watching a single youtube video on repeat dozens of times in a row.
There are definitely some relatively simple and mundane things that you can learn to find satisfaction in, but that doesn't apply in reverse; it doesn't mean that everything dismissed by someone as "too simple and dumb and boring for me to care about" is actually something worthwhile and valuable for every human to invest effort in learning to enjoy.
We can certainly debate over the details of precisely which activities might be more satisfying than expected when dismissed by someone for being insufficiently intellectual, but can we at least agree that there really are things that are too boring to enjoy, and that this set of things can vary between different people?
It makes the world a more-interesting and more-beautiful place for different people to have different interests and enjoy different things in different ways. We don't make the world better by insisting that everyone must learn to enjoy precisely the same activities.
> Go spend some time around people significantly more mentally challenged than yourself...and I think you'll find some things they genuinely enjoy that are just too simple for you...
Speaking as a non-smart person of boringly average IQ, so perhaps I'm inflicted with the myopia of someone without the raw intellectual horsepower of a 2-3 standard deviation smart person. But I do have an insatiable curiosity about the universe: for context, having the capabilities of a Banks'ian Culture Mind would be really neat to me.
My theory is people get bored because they self-select what interests them. That is, out of all inputs pouring in through their senses, their mind too-aggressively prunes the torrent of data, and they're left with a paltry amount, and as a consequence correctly declare that curated trickle as "boring".
Take your example, "watching a single youtube video on repeat dozens of times in a row". On the first pass, the video repeats over and over, what is there to counter that it isn't boring if you remember all the details? But do you really remember all the details, or are you fooling yourself? See if you can predict tiny details of the presentation in the video, for instance. Say you have perfect photographic recall, and you really can recall with perfect precision and clarity every moment of the video. Wouldn't that be sufficient cause to claim it is boring to watch it over and over?
Peel back a layer, and wonder about say, what would have motivated someone in the video to pursue whatever it is that they are displaying in the video. What kind of training would it take to say, balance a spoon on your nose? What kind of time commitment?
Peel back a different layer, and wonder about what specific details the young child is capturing with each pass. Talk with them about if they noticed some detail in the video after a certain viewing pass. Ask them what they like about it, in specifics.
Peel back yet another layer, and wonder about the implication upon cognitive neuroscience research. Are there pleasure hormones that reinforce repetitive learning better than without those hormones? How does that impact our understanding of machine learning?
Once you start looking around you this way, the details you can uncover go recursive and fractal. Lots of old religions and mysticism have expounded upon this way of perceiving the universe. If it helps to visualize in more modern concepts, then I sometimes liken this approach to "playing computer", except pretend the computer is the one that runs the simulation of our reality, and imagining all the details and principles that would get expressed in the simulation "software", right down to the quantum level. There is literally not enough time in the universe for a human mind running on chemical connections to run out of entertaining lines of thought this way.
To me that doesn't sound like the curse of the "smart" people, it sounds more like the curse of the arrogant people.
Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there. Usually the reason is not that everyone else is too stupid. The problem is usually that people have conflicting interests, and there just isn't a simple solution.
1000 times this. Raw brain processing power doesn't have all that much to do with one's disposition to the world. Wise people realize that the smartest human is still hopelessly incapable of really understanding the universe. Smart people can come up with better models of reality, but they are still subject to the chaotic nature of the universe just like the rest of existence.
Forming and dwelling on a belief that society wasn't created for you is something that can happen for a variety of reasons. The healthy thing is to accept the things you can't control and figure out how you can best get along in the environment to which you are subject. For the very smart, there has probably never been a better time to be alive in terms of applying ones gifts.
> Wise people realize that the smartest human is still hopelessly incapable of really understanding the universe.
Still the best theories that physics has to offer are the best that humankind has found in recorded history. And they were only found because there were people that did not tolerate this situation (being incapable to understand the universe).
> Smart people can come up with better models of reality, but they are still subject to the chaotic nature of the universe just like the rest of existence.
The moral should rather be: Because of this fact, sit down and develop better mathematics that will lead to us understanding this kind of chaotic situations much better in, say, 50 years.
> Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there.
Understanding that there is a reason (which is often that it was made as a political compromise in a distant past) does not imply that one tolerates/accepts it. As I hinted understanding the reason can also mean that one gets a much deeper hate for the rules.
And that can be the case just as much even if there is no simple win-win solution to the problem.
One can hate the rules -- for their injustice, ineffectiveness, abstract immorality, etc -- and at the same time realize that the rules are an inevitable result of the complex system we inhabit.
As a student of history and humanity and a free moral agent, you can recognize the reality we live in, acknowledge that it contains many no-win situations, and still hate the status quo even if you don't have a solution for how to fix it, because it deserves to be hated.
Oddly enough, the person who invented and attempted to enforce absurdly strict rules was smart. Except that autistic a bit and thus needed rules over nonsense crap to have sense of control. It seemed logical to him, but it did not seemed that way to non-autistic smart people.
If you are two or 3 standard deviations about the mean, you'll quickly realize society is optimized and caters to the average intelligence. You'll find it very boring and frustrating having to deal with rules and decisions that do not make sense. You must continually push yourself to stay entertained and meet like-minded people otherwise you'll get very depressed that everything is meaningless.
-t. "smart" person