That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed. I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed. Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.
> smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed
Define 'better'. For example:
> “How do I get my child to stop crying?”
Lots of 'dumb' parents are very good at solving this question, they give the kid what they want and put them in front of the TV or give them a bunch of candy. Smart parents might overthink the question, read a book on parenting, try a naughty chair, fail and get stressed.
The smart parents answer might be the one that's best in the long term, but it might not and really doesn't solve the actual problem right now. So is it the better answer? That depends, because it's not a well-defined problem, which I think is the point.
There's no indication that smart parents don't get their child to cry less than dumb parents either shorter or longer term, so the entire argument is baseless.
How about an indication of the opposite? Since you stated that smart people "are better at answering all of the questions you listed".
You seem to have completely missed the point of my comment though, which is that the questions are not well-defined and therefore it's not obvious what 'the better answer' is.
I don't see then how that can explain why smarter people are less happy.
In fact if you believe this article, unhappiest people have avg. IQ. Low and high IQ are happy, with >120 being the happiest: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-19659985
The article doesn't state that they are less happy. It just states that they are not happier as in, they are probably pretty much equally as happy as other people.
The article does not provide data significant enough to support its basic assumption, that smart people fail to solve ill-defined tasks more than dumb people.
It asserts the two are uncorrelated, not that the two are anticorrelated. But I agree, data regarding this theory would be great. It is not immediately obvious how to come up with more informative data than what is given though, because the ill defined questions necessarily have ill defined answers, so any data will be heavily determined by subjective judgement. Nevertheless I think you are too dismissive. The basic premise is that most intelligence measures we have concern well defined tasks, so it is interesting to explore the relationship between intelligence and ill defined tasks.
> I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed.
The article has this paragraph that seems to contradict your position:
> This is exactly the situation we’re in with tests that claim to measure people’s “reasoning” and “problem-solving ability.” Christopher Langan, a guy who can score eye-popping numbers on IQ tests, believes that 9/11 was an inside job meant specifically to distract the public from his theories, and he claims that banks won’t give him a loan because he’s white. John Sununu supposedly has IQ of 176, but he still had to resign from being George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff because he flew to his dentist appointments using military jets. Bobby Fischer is one of the greatest chess players of all time, but he also claimed that Hitler was a good dude, the Holocaust didn’t happen, and "Jews murder Christian children for their blood and they’re doing it even today." Then there's the ever-lengthening list of professors at elite universities who have been disciplined or dismissed for doing things like sexually harassing colleagues and students or completely making up data or hanging out with a known pedophile. These are supposed to be some of the smartest people in the world, endowed with exceptional problem-solving abilities. And yet they’re still unable to solve basic but poorly defined problems like “maintain a basic grip on reality” and “be a good person” and “don't make any life-altering blunders.”
If "smarter people are better at answering" those sorts of questions, why do the allegedly smartest people in the world make such blatantly stupid decisions or hold such obviously wrong, easily proven wrong, beliefs?
> Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.
What does this mean? What was the result of your search? Did you find higher IQ people are more or often less married? Or more or less often divorced? Is it good to be married? Is it smart to get married? I don't understand.
I found this part of the article a bit hair raising, especially the examples -
Bobby Fischer was mentally ill - is not being schizophrenic a form of intelligence?
I read the article linked about 'Christopher Langan' - the guy lost out on a scholarship and got kicked out of college because of circumstances related to his poverty and uneducated single mom.
Is having loaded parents also a form of intelligence?
> Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that
The article is concerned with happiness and intelligence. I can’t speak to the strength of its evidence, but it does present a graph that shows a flat lined measure of happiness that spans 80 years despite an increase of 15 IQ points in that time.
> That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed.
I wasn’t answering a question I was just quoting the article
