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0 pointsnecovek3y ago0 comments

What do you mean are not tied to intelligence?

If you use your smarts to conclude that having a spouse will negatively affect your happiness, don't have one.

A very intelligent person should be able to figure out a way to improve their finances.

The article makes the distinction between well-defined problems (eg. increase my monthly income) and poorly defined problems (eg. find a spouse that matches you for life), and clearly suggests that intelligence helps with one but not the other.

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alberth3y ago

> If you use your smarts to conclude that having a spouse will negatively affect your happiness, don't have one.

You're assuming the negative. Your spouse can be a huge overall help in achieving happiness.

> A very intelligent person should be able to figure out a way to improve their finances.

It's not that simple.

You could be exceedingly smart but medically handicapped, which leads to lower paying jobs. Or could have been a high earner and then come down with an unfortunate disease which greatly impacts you ability to work and medically bankrupts you.

necovekOP3y ago

> You're assuming the negative. Your spouse can be a huge overall help in achieving happiness

I am not assuming anything, but explaining that, in theory, one could decide to have or not to have a spouse to increase their happiness — if they could reasonably deduce what the outcome would be, which they can't.

I was mostly tongue-in-cheek in relation to a spouse: that's a "poorly defined problem" that, according to the article, intelligence does not help with.

> It's not that simple

Oh, agreed. But we are talking about averages, and there is a known correlation between intelligence and financials.

Statistics, unfortunately, never says anything special about any single case.

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