What can you expect from life if you have a high IQ? A scientist gave an interesting answer – Science – Life

Castaldo addressed some common misconceptions about intelligence, people with high IQs, and the problems that many highly intelligent people face, and a number of commenters agreed with his answer and outlined the problems they encountered in doing so.

The question was, “My IQ is about 151 (male). What can I expect to achieve in life?”

“You can expect absolutely nothing”

Castaldo responded and we are reproducing the response in full:

Welcome to the club! You can expect absolutely nothing. It’s like saying, “I have a race car engine, how fast can I go?”

So, my friend, you need the rest of your car, and unfortunately, nature won’t always match your engine to the rest of your car’s mechanical parts. All parts are randomly selected and forcibly joined.

The “rest of the car” in this case is the physical and emotional parts of you, and all you’ve proven with an IQ test is that you’re capable of solving analytical problems quickly. It doesn’t mean you’re automatically emotionally adjusted or an athlete, it doesn’t mean someone will love you or that you’ll love someone, and it doesn’t mean you’ll make a lot of money.

This is something you will learn over the years. It may take time, but now I give you advice to recognize some things before I do – emotions are everything and will ultimately decide your destiny. Not prudence, because reason is the servant of your emotions and always will be.

The neocortex is so called because it developed recently, before that we were ruled by instincts, emotions and very limited reasoning power. As with other animals. In this case, evolution did not take away from us, but added something new. Before the neocortex, our instincts and emotions guided our actions and you know what? They are still on the throne!

A “random” experiment

There is a “random” experiment involving a man who lost his amygdala (an emotional clearing structure) during brain tumor surgery. The result was that man was still rational. He could solve math problems, he was good at quizzes and he didn’t lose his intellect. However, he was disabled because he could not make decisions.

If you told him to pick out an outfit for the day, he would rummage through his closet for hours until he had to go to the bathroom. Describing what he was doing, he would endlessly analyze and find reasons why he wanted to choose one shirt and not another, depending on who he would meet, where he might go, what the weather would be like, but he could never make a decision.

You might think that over time he would get bored or angry with that choice of shirts. Not. These are emotions. He wasn’t ashamed that he had chosen for so long, he didn’t hate himself, he didn’t worry about what his inability to make a decision meant. It’s all emotions. He simply didn’t particularly like either shirt, so he had no rational reason to choose one over the other. His intellect only created the reasons he presented to the amygdala, which was dead and never suggested to the intellect, “I prefer this option.”

Bladder discomfort, hunger, muscle and joint pain from standing for a long time, these are not emotions and he knew how to react to them. Physical discomfort exists, but it has nothing to do with the intellect. He knew how to respond to orders.

What is the evolutionary role of the intellect?

Why stay in school when it would be so much more emotionally satisfying to get a job and make money? Your intellect will create two futures. In one, you will have a better chance for a better job and a better life, and in the other, short-term satisfaction that will lead to fewer jobs and a harder life. And when you emotionally consider the options and decide that one is better than the other, the intellect has done its job and you stay in school, regardless of the short-term appeal of not being a bad student.

You have to learn to manage your emotions, delay gratification, and your intellect can help you do that, but at the same time it depends on your current emotional makeup. Intellect can help you fly through school and college without any problems. Mine helped me get my bachelor’s degree in mathematics in three years and my doctorate in 18 months. He made me study for 12 years during which I earned five degrees and a Ph.D.

Academic success is yours and can help you be financially successful because our society places too much value (literally and figuratively) on higher education.

But your emotions can derail it all. Mensa has also studied this problem because not all of their members are successful or live happy lives. They have members who have become drug addicts, been victims of fraud, served prison terms for impulsive crimes. They had women with high IQs who, as impulsive teenagers, got pregnant and gave birth at the age of 15.

Mensa members end up working as janitors, truckers, and warehouse workers at Amazon. Mensa members struggle with depression, and some of them have committed suicide.

Mensa members made some stupid moves and ended up paralyzed for life.

Mensa members become obese, have diabetes, and develop other illnesses because they can’t control their diet, their depression, or they can’t resist their impulsive temptations.

And you know what? All that crap happens to the same extent as other people who don’t have such a high IQ.

“Emotions rule our lives”

Why? Because emotions rule our lives. The best thing you can do with your intellect is not to try to control your emotions. What you can do with it is manipulate the emotions, learn how to make sure you choose the most balanced outcome with short, medium or long term benefits.

If you decide to ever study computer science and within those algorithms, there is an interesting lecture – greedy algorithms. The characteristic of these algorithms is that the selection of an optimal short-term solution guarantees the creation of an optimal long-term solution.

That’s how animals work, as if that’s how it’s always been in the world. That’s why we can trap them. We humans can design traps as an optimal short-term solution that will not lead the animal to the best long-term solution for them. Instead, it will kill them. A rat biting into the cheese activates a spring that snaps its neck. A deer being hunted by a man chooses the shortest path that leads to freedom and ends up in the hole we have hidden.

Humans have the same greedy algorithm built into them. The purpose of intellect is to allow you to overcome that strong tendency to choose the optimal short-term solution because a greedy algorithm does not solve all problems. Animals and we have evolved emotions to use the greedy algorithm because it is the simplest and easiest algorithm to implement, just a step above the random moves of bacteria and viruses.

The intellect is there to help you accurately predict the consequences and outcomes of your actions so that emotions can make an informed decision about what will give you the most emotional satisfaction in the long run, or at least as far into the future as you can imagine.

“It’s no use being smart if you’re not happy because of it”

There is a tendency for people with high IQ to place great importance and value on their intellect. They want to be like Spock and tone down the emotions.

But Spock is made-up shit, that’s not how people work, so it’s important that you realize that as soon as possible. The meaning of life is emotions and the best thing you can do with your intellect is to use it to delay gratification and ensure you live a happy life, find love, avoid fear, discomfort, prison, illness, handicap and find a job you love and where you use your talents.

There’s no point in being smart if you’re not happy about it. You have the gift of superior ability to solve problems and understand consequences. A bigger tool to solve life’s problems or avoid them altogether. But all that is useless if you don’t use it. There is no point in being proud of the fact that you have a bigger tool, you have to use it.

And don’t forget that your intellect is the servant of your emotions. It is not there to replace them, but to inform them. To help you avoid short-term gratification when your intellect sees the possibility of sabotaging your long-term future. This way you will avoid falling into the trap of being an animal and suffering because of the actions of others.

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