Interesting post -- if you haven't checked out his work yet, I highly recommend Ian McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary". What you're describing as neurotic Aspergers-like high intelligence here is better described as hyper-mechanistic and left-brained intelligence, couple with a dysfunctional right hemisphere. In other words, the mad scientist isn't mad because he has a high IQ, but both the madness and the "high IQ" (keeping in mind IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence and misses many aspects of it) are both a result of a brain that is lopsided toward the left hemisphere and mechanistic, black-and-white, bottom-up, abstract, hyper-logical, autistic/schizophrenic thinking.
“[T]he Binet test, especially at older age levels, involves above all logical, abstract thinking. Since this is what autistic children often find so congenial, they may achieve a high score, which would give a false picture of their intelligence.” -- Hans Asperger
It's also worth noting that IQ tests are extremely limited in their ability to accurately measure any IQ beyond that of the designers of the tests.
Here, I dive into the relationship between a high IQ (particularly in childhood) and Aspergers' in detail in this essay. I also look at causal factors and the relationship to gender dysphoria.
I'd definitely be down! The only issue is I'm nine months pregnant with my second child and presumably could go into labour at any moment. And then, you know, I'll have an infant. So it'd either have to be like, this weekend, assuming I don't go into labour, or maybe in like three or four months.
> The brain makes its final transition from “under construction” to “open for business” during puberty, which is a very difficult period emotionally and psychologically. Like our ape cousins, we are social creatures. The longer we draw out our maturation, the more K-selected we become.
One problem of relying on physiological puberty as the 'final step' toward maturation is that it commits you to deploying velocity that is only appropriate to a narrow, stable socio-emotional ecology that can be expected to persist. As soon at that external ecology changes, you are pretty fucked. And we live in a time where that foundational ecology could be ripped out from behind you in 5 years or even 5 months.
I cannot look at a single person who is 21-24 years old today, especially the men (incl. me), and conclude that even if they had the right upbringing, virtue, health, etc. – they possess more than 15% of the requisite maturity to handle modern life in all of its exploding complexity. Anybody who 'succeeds' so simply today is just outsourcing the fragility to somewhere else in the web of interdependence, and if you trace the lines, you'll just see the neuroses/symptoms appear at the other end (or in many places between).
At the same time, the people who focus only on being super Lindy and RETVRN-ing to timeless principles, I find laughably naïve. There is 0% guarantee that the shredder of late stage empire won't come and rip up everything you love just because you submit yourself to TRADITIONEM.
> As a result, yes, you can forcibly change your personality with psychedelics, lobotomies, and other physical interventions, but these are crude and inaccurate ways of targeting neurotic neural pathways.
Yes, because in the capitalist West, these treatments are offered in a highly left-brained, disembodied, abstracted manner. It's the same thing as looking the back of a can of vegetables and seeing percentage daily values of various minerals and vitamins, and then downing the can because it promises to deliver some quantity. No, you did not get 200% of your necessary Magnesium, Jerry, because none of it may have properly metabolized and entered your bloodstream before you diarrhea-ed it all out.
The lens of medicine from Hippocratic, Galenic, Ayurvedic, Unani, TCM/中医, etc. is both more comprehensive and more surgical because it can place "selves" or "individuals" into larger & smaller contexts and treat them on different scales at the same time.
One wild trip with LSD won't make your CTO less abusive or less obsessed with securing Series C funding by hitting target metrics for app usage.
I'm highlighting those systems because certain lefty-ish Americans love to fetishize 'indigenous wisdom' by saying the Incas went into the forest and on the mountain and danced for hours after downing Iboga. There is a place for such entheogenic interventions in 'civilized' society, too, especially when it comes to correcting arrested maturity or inducing further maturational steps beyond puberty, as long as they are placed in the appropriate arena.
> This is where neurotic traits, which are generally debilitating or at least inconvenient, start to shine. Normal people have a very difficult time dealing with extreme, catastrophic events. Neurotic people, on the other hand, have the time of their lives. They dream of collapse. They imagine it every day. They are ready.
Look, as someone who is quite neurotic, but who doesn't appear that way (because my assertiveness sub-score from extraversion is absurdly high), I do not 'dream' of catastrophe, but you are right that I am *extraordinarily* prepared to wade through it, probably because of my neuroticism, which is a trait that helps one cope with volatility.
It's why I got paid $180K/y to help handle the largest distributed computing system on the planet. That sort of environment is nothing but perpetual crisis. It's also why I quit that environment, because I realized it was only training my catastrophizing neurons/muscles more deeply. Perhaps I have spiritually become drunk Appalachian cousin-fucker, not by birth, but through training.
I wish I got the catharsis that you speak of, because then there would be some payoff. Instead, even when shit falls apart and I handle it like a boss, I *still* feel utterly depressed. I theorize this is my conscientiousness signaling that even after eschaton, there is work to do, and all the more work to do since I was a survivor everything is now broken.
> We punish dysfunctional smart people more than functional dumb people. Hence the “evil genius” archetype is constantly getting beat up by the hero.
Yeah, I always found this trope to be a bit frumpy. In real life, I think it's much more practical & realistic for the chadly hero and the awkward mad scientist to pair up and find a way to conquer the world together. One supplies the technology, the other the social proof. Men tend to find ways to prioritize each other's interests foremost, far more than the interests of the princess locked in the tower, when they can leverage each other's strengths.
In the good old fairytales, the chivalric trope in literature was at least understandable because the knight-in-armor was facing genuinely terrible forces, e.g., a ten-headed monster that rapes fairies, and eats babies, and poops out poison bombs.
Beating up the resentful guy who is a loser because he read too much anime as a teenager, but is otherwise harmless, to impress your girlfriend is not heroic.
Yes, because in the capitalist West, these treatments are offered in a highly left-brained, disembodied, abstracted manner.
I always blanch at these sorts of critiques. Yes, in the capitalist west we aim to achieve things. We meditate, use psychedelics etc with a goal of improving ourselves along some metric. How could it be otherwise?
I am not against metrics or improvement. My comment is not a dig at capitalism nor the West. In fact, the West has plenty of history contextualizing especially medicine and maturation much more effectively. However, much of that has been replaced or overshadowed by a James C. Scott-like focus on legibility—the idea that everything must be made quantifiable and understandable through the lens of 'scientific management principles'.
I am specifically challenging the reductionistic sense of 'improvement' that comes from mechanistic + left-hemisphere apprehension that dominates over everything else. Especially when it comes to things like 'performance', 'focus', 'output', etc.
If someone takes psychedelics to increase creativity or reduce neuroticism, this can’t be measured purely through brain scans or behavioral metrics, e.g., they paint seven more art pieces per week. A metric is worse than useless (it is actively misleading) when observed in a decontextualized way.
These interventions may not “stick” or "stick too much" if they aren’t integrated into a person’s life holistically. If they’re used in a reductionist way (i.e., isolating a compound and dosing on it over and over again)—without proper guidance, community, or a spiritual/meaning-making framework—then the "improvement" is superficial at best and potentially harmful and inappropriate at worst.
(Would you give TRT to a 9 year old because testosterone production is important for boys; after all more testosterone is better, right? What if your blood test comes backs and says you are in normal cholesterol range, but normal is defined according to a median where 3/4 of the population can't run a mile?)
Psychedelics, in particular, are being increasingly marketed as quick fixes for personal development, but this fails to recognize that deep, meaningful change occurs within a relational and contextualized framework, not through the application of some abstract percentage of personal growth.
(Why can't you just grow your organs one by one to move from being a teenager to an adult? 'Oh, wow, my legs are 60% bigger, but everything else is the same, I must be 17% closer to being an adult')
– I focused on bodybuilding and dramatically increased my muscle mass by 19%. (However, now, experience significant joint problems, hormonal imbalances, or cardiovascular issues)
– I've made widespread use of industrial farming techniques, including chemical fertilizers and pesticides, increasing crop yields by 600%. (Meanwhile this has degraded and depleted the soil quality soil so the food produced is not as nutritive)
– We have decreased the cost per patient in our new healthcare system by $X (Meanwhile, this has made the number of chronic conditions skyrocket, and dragged out wait times indefinitely.)
– I have increased my social media engagement by 85K impressions (Meanwhile, the impressions don't reach the people who need it or whom it would have the most impact on.)
Really interesting. I agree that the negative stereotypes of smart people come from the neurotic ones. It's true that if you are a neurotic smart person, you'll have a harder time fitting in doing normal activities with normal people. I wonder about people who are high in openness and intelligence. In my twenties, I spent a lot of time going to parties, traveling, talking to all different kinds of people. Once I gathered all this experience, I find most people kind of boring now. It's not out of neuroticism but rather that they don't have interesting observations or experiences. It's getting worse in the social media age, where people are taking fewer risks.
Sometimes I think I find other people boring as a defense mechanism -- if I consider them boring, I don't have to feel as bad about a lack of connection. This fear of rejection might be rooted in sensitivity, romanticism, or perfectionism.
I'm high in openness. I spent months road-tripping to meet people in real life, and then spent months living in a post-grad alt-frat house. Now I spend all of my time in complete isolation as a writer and all my social interaction is digital.
Speaking of digital interaction, I'm seeking out more Asian Americans to interview for my podcast if you're interested. No pressure, I'm just trying to get different perspectives on Asian identity and culture.
Yeah I get your point about whether it's a defensive mechanism or not. I also think people's standards get higher as they get older. Thanks for the offer but I'll keep myself anonymous for now. Maybe one day.
Better data on Ashkenazis and mental illness diagnoses from the UCLA genetics study. Based on the identification of patients using genetics, they compared non-Jewish Europeans vs. Asheknazis in the same they area. They find that Ashkenazis have more frequent diagnoses of: 1) eating disorder (a high IQ diagnoses), 2) OCD, 3) anxiety, phobic and dissociative disorders, 4) psychogenic disorder. Europeans were higher in alcoholism and related medical issues (e.g. liver damage).
Great post. An analogous red-pill is about intelligence and things like conscientiousness, agency, diligence, hardwork, not being lazy or absent minded. The lazy or spacey genius is another archetype, tho different from the neurotic or alienated genius. But, tough truth, some people really are both smart and hardworking! I think a few things create these and similar misperceptions. First, no one wants to think that he’s strictly just worse than someone else. Like, if we can’t be literally equal, then we must be equal in some other sense, like aggregated over all our strengths and weaknesses over all the possible circumstances where they play out. Or so the cope goes. Second, the smartest person any one specific person knows is likely to be nuerotic, introverted, lazy or otherwise bad, relative to the people they know. Why is this? People tend to assort with people at their level, by neighborhood, school, church, workplace. So, when they come across someone they know well enough to say, wow this guy is really a lot smarter than I am, chances are that the smartie is in fact bad in some other way and that’s why the observer and he are in close enough proximity for the observer to know that he is really that smart.
"One of the ways for neurotics to cope is to call stable high IQ people “boring.” Stable people are bourgeois. They have no beautiful suffering. They do not understand “the truth.” The truth, in this case, has nothing to do with facts and figures or philosophical arguments, but with the sense of doom, pessimism, and despair that comes with a neurotic personality."
I wonder about the subset of Ashkenazim who have high IQ and are Orthodox. My understanding of the literature and experience shows a correlation between genuine faith in god/Divine and lower neurosis. There’s less of a need to rely on intelligence for survival/professional or social status when surrendering to a divine intelligence to guide one’s choices.
I also see how people limit themselves by relying on intellect (because it can be an addictive coping mechanism) as the predominant intelligence over other forms necessary to build character and cultivate worldly intelligence.
"Velocity" is not a bad model, per se. But you have to take into account that the brain is a distributed computing network with lots of specialized regions, networks and coalitions. Cognition solving a specific problem means that some subset of the brain will move/be active, whereas other non-involved parts will not. Working on a problem at "higher velocity" means that the involved parts will be more active, which increases the velocity delta with the inactive regions. That can lead you to synchronization errors piling up and highly uneven power output. High, manic output phases followed by long depressive recovery phases. Driving your cognition usefully at higher speeds in a predictable and sustainable manner requires a lot of self-knowledge and practice ideally informed by some decently accurate neurological models to properly self-regulate. I have dedicated my life to figuring these things out and am quite happy with my progress so far.
Both. Helping explain (and often failing to) my methods and models to others helped me made sense of them myself. As I master them more, I’ll teach them publicly. What’s public now is still experimental and rough to be convincing/intelligible to most, but that’ll change within the next couple months.
The evil genius and depressed intellectual archetypes that culture popularized is just an effect of artists leaning greater towards slave morality over recent years,and favoring more egalitarian values for their charactes.You don't get the superman(pretty strong intelligent generous)and penguin(ugly greedy selfish rude) but characters are more complex and dont lean heavily into position with strong negative or positive attachments.Dr house is a depressed asshole,Big Bang Theory geniuses are social rejects,due to both wokification and capitalism making art less elitist and more populist.You don't try to appeal to the aristocracy that adore Shakespeare but to the people eating chips at the sofa.
We have some shared intuitions here. The part about the end of civilization seems rather key here. I had been puzzled why especially neurotic people seem to enjoy watching horror films and this makes sense.
I believe it was ScholarStage, but we had mentioned that during German air raids over London that the number of people checking into hospitals for psychiatric maladies declined. I am forgetting the details, but interesting phenomenon.
In any case I would be curious to see if anyone has a research program that and to alleviate anxiety and depression through exposure to highly stressful situations. The problem has gotten really serious and very interested in novel approaches.
Is it Daily Stormer you’re talking about? He had an article about mental health recently and how some guy on the Internet made a video being honest and saying things like he didn’t brush his teeth when he got depressed.
He just wanted to reach out to people and tell them the same thing was happening to him so if it’s happening to them, they shouldn’t feel bad because they are not the only ones going through that.
I don't believe Substack will allow me to link directly to that website as it is banned, but I think the sentiment is accurate and relevant in pure psychological terms, without considering the particular political positions involved.
I think you can tell a different story about IQ that makes some of the things that are confusing to you cohere, although it is not a story that most people will believe. It is because they want IQ to be this all encompassing totalizing force. The IQ as a form of CPU processing speed I think has slight merit to it; I think Garrett Jones is the popularizer of it.
But, if you've ever listened closely to say James Flynn; he'll characterize IQ as just a measure of ability to abstract. The fact that Flynn lived till 86 and was alive in the 30s/40s and saw people in the 2010s and how different they were. When he explains how the Flynn effect was possible, he does not rely on genetics, but that everything in modern life makes people think abstractly at a base level: internet, television, snapchat, memes, video games. Flynn used to tell this story of his dad who was kind of a virulent racist of his era and Flynn tried to get his dad to be less racist. He asked his dad once, "Imagine, you are a black person, what would you believe about the world or how would you feel." His dad would reply, "That's absurd, I'm not a black person." Flynn implies that people were much more literal in his era and that they no longer are; you would not get his father's response currently.
Usually, people think of IQ as some kind of keyhole stat like INT in an RPG that is good for everything. There is one negative correlation I'm aware of. Parents that are high IQ have a higher chance of their children having autism who are low IQ, even though on net children of high IQ people have high IQ. People who work on autism have a few theories. I'll just mention Simon Baron-Cohen's theory which is something like high IQ people are heavy systemizer, low empathy people and that when you load too much on high systemizing you get autism, even though in general this results in just a bog standard high iq person. The extreme version is autism.
Baron-Cohen and Flynn's rough versions of IQ: systemizing or abstraction are loosely related. Insisting that IQ is this master stat, CPU power version of the world can not explain many things (flynn effect, that you can practice and increase your IQ) whereas the abstraction explanation can fit more facts of the world within it
"high IQ people are heavy systemizer, low empathy people"
Well, that's not true. People with higher IQ have higher levels of empathy.
I don't understand autism very well, and I understand the genetics of autism even less. I know there are certain diseases (like Tay-Sachs) that are associated with higher intelligence, so maybe you're right. However, my belief is that autism is caused by high parental age, and intelligent people defer pregnancy. Hence why intelligence causes autism -- environment effects of mutational load from reproductive aging. Nothing to do with autism as "hyper-systematization."
I'm not sure that society places a greater "abstraction burden" on the average person in 2024 than 1914. The internet provides people with pictures and videos, whereas in 1914, most entertainment was contained in books and newspapers. Text requires higher levels of active abstraction in order to be consumed. More adults have more years of highschool than in 1914, which trains test taking. Nutrition is possibly better. But those effects probably peaked between 1960 and 1990, and now intelligence is almost certainly decreasing. The Flynn Effect is over.
Here is one study from Sweden based on military conscription that tries to control for age that still finds the effect of IQ on Autism Spectrum Disorders. They include a variable parental age at birth.
I did a quick search for Baron-Cohen's work; it is disputed as all these psych constructs can be. I misstated; in his framework systemizing quotient is positively correlated with IQ while his empathizing quotient has no relationship. It's only people with aspergers and not general high IQ people that have a low empathizing quotient in combination with systemizing quotient.
"In Study 1, as predicted, normal adult males scored significantly higher than females on the SQ and significantly lower on the EQ. In Study 2, again as predicted, adults with AS/HFA scored significantly higher on the SQ than matched controls, and significantly lower on the EQ than matched controls. The SQ reveals both a sex difference in systemizing in the general population and an unusually strong drive to systemize in AS/HFA. These results are discussed in relation to two linked theories: the 'empathizing-systemizing' (E-S) theory of sex differences and the extreme male brain (EMB) theory of autism."
On Flynn's abstraction premise. He gets the intuition and the color because during the Flynn effect, the increase in scores are in particular types of questions. It is not symmetrical across the board and some questions are easily answered by people in the 70s and some are the same as they were in the 30s. I don't know which book or paper best characterizes this so I'll just clip a transcription from his Ted Talk.
"Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria. Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions.
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.
...
Now, not only do we have much more education, and much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. You can't do science without making it logically consistent. And even down in grade school, things have changed. In 1910, they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds, and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information. They were things like, what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time? When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 1990, they were all about abstractions. They were things like, why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? And you were supposed to think, well, the state legislature was rural-controlled, and they hated the big city, so rather than putting the capital in a big city, they put it in a county seat.
...
If you look at the I.Q. test, you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification, and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest. There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions. Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it's all about analogies. And in 1900, people could do simple analogies. That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. What are dogs like? They would say wolves. But by 1960, people could attack Raven's on a much more sophisticated level. If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, what follows two circles? They could say a semicircle. Just as a triangle is half of a square, a semicircle is half of a circle. By 2010, college graduates, if you said two circles followed by a semicircle, two sixteens followed by what, they would say eight, because eight is half of 16. That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question."
Superb dive into the connections between intelligence and personality, and on the conditions under which neuroticism might be adaptive. The fact that individual differences in intellect and personality exist indicates that there are factors beyond simple directional selection at work.
> Whereas Christians seem to think of their problems as spiritual, and reject secular therapists as “worldly,” reform Judaism has always been proud to support the field of psychology, which was one of the earliest fields where Jews were recognized and celebrated. In the same way that 76% of Jews have incorporated Holocaust remembrance into Jewish identity, it seems that Jews have (consciously or unconsciously) adopted psychoanalysis as an important element of Jewish culture.
Ehh, Christians consult their priests in a pretty similar manner. But yeah, Psychology is very big among Jews.
> if people were not unhappy with their lives, they wouldn't
be on the internet looking for explanations for problems in society.
Yep, I realize that I started getting into politics after a rough time in my life, but then I continued to be into it and even became more radicalized when I was socially successful and happy. I think I bet on the wrong racehorse. Oh well, this is my life now and I dont plan on bluepilling any time soon.
> Mental illness as a strategy
If we believe Reich’s new study, people in the prehistoric past were autistic schizos, so perhaps it’s useful in that sort of environment where you have to be on edge. I don’t believe in the whole “religion is schizos” stuff though. Shamans and priests tended to be well-respected members of the community known for good judgement, while schizos are nothing like this.
I believe the mouse utopia experiment points in the direction of humans needing some kind of baseline human life to avoid buildup of neuroticism. But there have been so many sweeping changes in the industrial revolution it can be hard to pick out which ones matter the most and the least.
Interesting post -- if you haven't checked out his work yet, I highly recommend Ian McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary". What you're describing as neurotic Aspergers-like high intelligence here is better described as hyper-mechanistic and left-brained intelligence, couple with a dysfunctional right hemisphere. In other words, the mad scientist isn't mad because he has a high IQ, but both the madness and the "high IQ" (keeping in mind IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence and misses many aspects of it) are both a result of a brain that is lopsided toward the left hemisphere and mechanistic, black-and-white, bottom-up, abstract, hyper-logical, autistic/schizophrenic thinking.
“[T]he Binet test, especially at older age levels, involves above all logical, abstract thinking. Since this is what autistic children often find so congenial, they may achieve a high score, which would give a false picture of their intelligence.” -- Hans Asperger
It's also worth noting that IQ tests are extremely limited in their ability to accurately measure any IQ beyond that of the designers of the tests.
Here, I dive into the relationship between a high IQ (particularly in childhood) and Aspergers' in detail in this essay. I also look at causal factors and the relationship to gender dysphoria.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children
Hey Meghan, this is great stuff. Let me know if you're open to coming on my podcast so we can explore this.
I'd definitely be down! The only issue is I'm nine months pregnant with my second child and presumably could go into labour at any moment. And then, you know, I'll have an infant. So it'd either have to be like, this weekend, assuming I don't go into labour, or maybe in like three or four months.
did you guys ever talk?
we did a podcast
> The brain makes its final transition from “under construction” to “open for business” during puberty, which is a very difficult period emotionally and psychologically. Like our ape cousins, we are social creatures. The longer we draw out our maturation, the more K-selected we become.
One problem of relying on physiological puberty as the 'final step' toward maturation is that it commits you to deploying velocity that is only appropriate to a narrow, stable socio-emotional ecology that can be expected to persist. As soon at that external ecology changes, you are pretty fucked. And we live in a time where that foundational ecology could be ripped out from behind you in 5 years or even 5 months.
I cannot look at a single person who is 21-24 years old today, especially the men (incl. me), and conclude that even if they had the right upbringing, virtue, health, etc. – they possess more than 15% of the requisite maturity to handle modern life in all of its exploding complexity. Anybody who 'succeeds' so simply today is just outsourcing the fragility to somewhere else in the web of interdependence, and if you trace the lines, you'll just see the neuroses/symptoms appear at the other end (or in many places between).
At the same time, the people who focus only on being super Lindy and RETVRN-ing to timeless principles, I find laughably naïve. There is 0% guarantee that the shredder of late stage empire won't come and rip up everything you love just because you submit yourself to TRADITIONEM.
> As a result, yes, you can forcibly change your personality with psychedelics, lobotomies, and other physical interventions, but these are crude and inaccurate ways of targeting neurotic neural pathways.
Yes, because in the capitalist West, these treatments are offered in a highly left-brained, disembodied, abstracted manner. It's the same thing as looking the back of a can of vegetables and seeing percentage daily values of various minerals and vitamins, and then downing the can because it promises to deliver some quantity. No, you did not get 200% of your necessary Magnesium, Jerry, because none of it may have properly metabolized and entered your bloodstream before you diarrhea-ed it all out.
The lens of medicine from Hippocratic, Galenic, Ayurvedic, Unani, TCM/中医, etc. is both more comprehensive and more surgical because it can place "selves" or "individuals" into larger & smaller contexts and treat them on different scales at the same time.
One wild trip with LSD won't make your CTO less abusive or less obsessed with securing Series C funding by hitting target metrics for app usage.
I'm highlighting those systems because certain lefty-ish Americans love to fetishize 'indigenous wisdom' by saying the Incas went into the forest and on the mountain and danced for hours after downing Iboga. There is a place for such entheogenic interventions in 'civilized' society, too, especially when it comes to correcting arrested maturity or inducing further maturational steps beyond puberty, as long as they are placed in the appropriate arena.
> This is where neurotic traits, which are generally debilitating or at least inconvenient, start to shine. Normal people have a very difficult time dealing with extreme, catastrophic events. Neurotic people, on the other hand, have the time of their lives. They dream of collapse. They imagine it every day. They are ready.
Look, as someone who is quite neurotic, but who doesn't appear that way (because my assertiveness sub-score from extraversion is absurdly high), I do not 'dream' of catastrophe, but you are right that I am *extraordinarily* prepared to wade through it, probably because of my neuroticism, which is a trait that helps one cope with volatility.
It's why I got paid $180K/y to help handle the largest distributed computing system on the planet. That sort of environment is nothing but perpetual crisis. It's also why I quit that environment, because I realized it was only training my catastrophizing neurons/muscles more deeply. Perhaps I have spiritually become drunk Appalachian cousin-fucker, not by birth, but through training.
I wish I got the catharsis that you speak of, because then there would be some payoff. Instead, even when shit falls apart and I handle it like a boss, I *still* feel utterly depressed. I theorize this is my conscientiousness signaling that even after eschaton, there is work to do, and all the more work to do since I was a survivor everything is now broken.
> We punish dysfunctional smart people more than functional dumb people. Hence the “evil genius” archetype is constantly getting beat up by the hero.
Yeah, I always found this trope to be a bit frumpy. In real life, I think it's much more practical & realistic for the chadly hero and the awkward mad scientist to pair up and find a way to conquer the world together. One supplies the technology, the other the social proof. Men tend to find ways to prioritize each other's interests foremost, far more than the interests of the princess locked in the tower, when they can leverage each other's strengths.
In the good old fairytales, the chivalric trope in literature was at least understandable because the knight-in-armor was facing genuinely terrible forces, e.g., a ten-headed monster that rapes fairies, and eats babies, and poops out poison bombs.
Beating up the resentful guy who is a loser because he read too much anime as a teenager, but is otherwise harmless, to impress your girlfriend is not heroic.
Yes, because in the capitalist West, these treatments are offered in a highly left-brained, disembodied, abstracted manner.
I always blanch at these sorts of critiques. Yes, in the capitalist west we aim to achieve things. We meditate, use psychedelics etc with a goal of improving ourselves along some metric. How could it be otherwise?
> How could it be otherwise?
I am not against metrics or improvement. My comment is not a dig at capitalism nor the West. In fact, the West has plenty of history contextualizing especially medicine and maturation much more effectively. However, much of that has been replaced or overshadowed by a James C. Scott-like focus on legibility—the idea that everything must be made quantifiable and understandable through the lens of 'scientific management principles'.
I am specifically challenging the reductionistic sense of 'improvement' that comes from mechanistic + left-hemisphere apprehension that dominates over everything else. Especially when it comes to things like 'performance', 'focus', 'output', etc.
(Read Meghan's article here for definition of those terms from Ian McGilchrist and Badcock. https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children)
If someone takes psychedelics to increase creativity or reduce neuroticism, this can’t be measured purely through brain scans or behavioral metrics, e.g., they paint seven more art pieces per week. A metric is worse than useless (it is actively misleading) when observed in a decontextualized way.
These interventions may not “stick” or "stick too much" if they aren’t integrated into a person’s life holistically. If they’re used in a reductionist way (i.e., isolating a compound and dosing on it over and over again)—without proper guidance, community, or a spiritual/meaning-making framework—then the "improvement" is superficial at best and potentially harmful and inappropriate at worst.
(Would you give TRT to a 9 year old because testosterone production is important for boys; after all more testosterone is better, right? What if your blood test comes backs and says you are in normal cholesterol range, but normal is defined according to a median where 3/4 of the population can't run a mile?)
Psychedelics, in particular, are being increasingly marketed as quick fixes for personal development, but this fails to recognize that deep, meaningful change occurs within a relational and contextualized framework, not through the application of some abstract percentage of personal growth.
(Why can't you just grow your organs one by one to move from being a teenager to an adult? 'Oh, wow, my legs are 60% bigger, but everything else is the same, I must be 17% closer to being an adult')
– I focused on bodybuilding and dramatically increased my muscle mass by 19%. (However, now, experience significant joint problems, hormonal imbalances, or cardiovascular issues)
– I've made widespread use of industrial farming techniques, including chemical fertilizers and pesticides, increasing crop yields by 600%. (Meanwhile this has degraded and depleted the soil quality soil so the food produced is not as nutritive)
– We have decreased the cost per patient in our new healthcare system by $X (Meanwhile, this has made the number of chronic conditions skyrocket, and dragged out wait times indefinitely.)
– I have increased my social media engagement by 85K impressions (Meanwhile, the impressions don't reach the people who need it or whom it would have the most impact on.)
Really interesting. I agree that the negative stereotypes of smart people come from the neurotic ones. It's true that if you are a neurotic smart person, you'll have a harder time fitting in doing normal activities with normal people. I wonder about people who are high in openness and intelligence. In my twenties, I spent a lot of time going to parties, traveling, talking to all different kinds of people. Once I gathered all this experience, I find most people kind of boring now. It's not out of neuroticism but rather that they don't have interesting observations or experiences. It's getting worse in the social media age, where people are taking fewer risks.
Sometimes I think I find other people boring as a defense mechanism -- if I consider them boring, I don't have to feel as bad about a lack of connection. This fear of rejection might be rooted in sensitivity, romanticism, or perfectionism.
I'm high in openness. I spent months road-tripping to meet people in real life, and then spent months living in a post-grad alt-frat house. Now I spend all of my time in complete isolation as a writer and all my social interaction is digital.
Speaking of digital interaction, I'm seeking out more Asian Americans to interview for my podcast if you're interested. No pressure, I'm just trying to get different perspectives on Asian identity and culture.
Yeah I get your point about whether it's a defensive mechanism or not. I also think people's standards get higher as they get older. Thanks for the offer but I'll keep myself anonymous for now. Maybe one day.
Better data on Ashkenazis and mental illness diagnoses from the UCLA genetics study. Based on the identification of patients using genetics, they compared non-Jewish Europeans vs. Asheknazis in the same they area. They find that Ashkenazis have more frequent diagnoses of: 1) eating disorder (a high IQ diagnoses), 2) OCD, 3) anxiety, phobic and dissociative disorders, 4) psychogenic disorder. Europeans were higher in alcoholism and related medical issues (e.g. liver damage).
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/a-theory-of-ashkenazi-genius-intelligence
Great post. An analogous red-pill is about intelligence and things like conscientiousness, agency, diligence, hardwork, not being lazy or absent minded. The lazy or spacey genius is another archetype, tho different from the neurotic or alienated genius. But, tough truth, some people really are both smart and hardworking! I think a few things create these and similar misperceptions. First, no one wants to think that he’s strictly just worse than someone else. Like, if we can’t be literally equal, then we must be equal in some other sense, like aggregated over all our strengths and weaknesses over all the possible circumstances where they play out. Or so the cope goes. Second, the smartest person any one specific person knows is likely to be nuerotic, introverted, lazy or otherwise bad, relative to the people they know. Why is this? People tend to assort with people at their level, by neighborhood, school, church, workplace. So, when they come across someone they know well enough to say, wow this guy is really a lot smarter than I am, chances are that the smartie is in fact bad in some other way and that’s why the observer and he are in close enough proximity for the observer to know that he is really that smart.
"One of the ways for neurotics to cope is to call stable high IQ people “boring.” Stable people are bourgeois. They have no beautiful suffering. They do not understand “the truth.” The truth, in this case, has nothing to do with facts and figures or philosophical arguments, but with the sense of doom, pessimism, and despair that comes with a neurotic personality."
Well put.
I wonder about the subset of Ashkenazim who have high IQ and are Orthodox. My understanding of the literature and experience shows a correlation between genuine faith in god/Divine and lower neurosis. There’s less of a need to rely on intelligence for survival/professional or social status when surrendering to a divine intelligence to guide one’s choices.
I also see how people limit themselves by relying on intellect (because it can be an addictive coping mechanism) as the predominant intelligence over other forms necessary to build character and cultivate worldly intelligence.
Great piece!
> I also see how people limit themselves by relying on intellect (because it can be an addictive coping mechanism) as the predominant intelligence
Yeah, same with willpower.
"Velocity" is not a bad model, per se. But you have to take into account that the brain is a distributed computing network with lots of specialized regions, networks and coalitions. Cognition solving a specific problem means that some subset of the brain will move/be active, whereas other non-involved parts will not. Working on a problem at "higher velocity" means that the involved parts will be more active, which increases the velocity delta with the inactive regions. That can lead you to synchronization errors piling up and highly uneven power output. High, manic output phases followed by long depressive recovery phases. Driving your cognition usefully at higher speeds in a predictable and sustainable manner requires a lot of self-knowledge and practice ideally informed by some decently accurate neurological models to properly self-regulate. I have dedicated my life to figuring these things out and am quite happy with my progress so far.
> I have dedicated my life to figuring these things out and am quite happy with my progress so far.
Do you mean for yourself particularly? Or more universally?
Both. Helping explain (and often failing to) my methods and models to others helped me made sense of them myself. As I master them more, I’ll teach them publicly. What’s public now is still experimental and rough to be convincing/intelligible to most, but that’ll change within the next couple months.
The evil genius and depressed intellectual archetypes that culture popularized is just an effect of artists leaning greater towards slave morality over recent years,and favoring more egalitarian values for their charactes.You don't get the superman(pretty strong intelligent generous)and penguin(ugly greedy selfish rude) but characters are more complex and dont lean heavily into position with strong negative or positive attachments.Dr house is a depressed asshole,Big Bang Theory geniuses are social rejects,due to both wokification and capitalism making art less elitist and more populist.You don't try to appeal to the aristocracy that adore Shakespeare but to the people eating chips at the sofa.
use your spacebar
We have some shared intuitions here. The part about the end of civilization seems rather key here. I had been puzzled why especially neurotic people seem to enjoy watching horror films and this makes sense.
I believe it was ScholarStage, but we had mentioned that during German air raids over London that the number of people checking into hospitals for psychiatric maladies declined. I am forgetting the details, but interesting phenomenon.
In any case I would be curious to see if anyone has a research program that and to alleviate anxiety and depression through exposure to highly stressful situations. The problem has gotten really serious and very interested in novel approaches.
Is it Daily Stormer you’re talking about? He had an article about mental health recently and how some guy on the Internet made a video being honest and saying things like he didn’t brush his teeth when he got depressed.
He just wanted to reach out to people and tell them the same thing was happening to him so if it’s happening to them, they shouldn’t feel bad because they are not the only ones going through that.
I don't believe Substack will allow me to link directly to that website as it is banned, but I think the sentiment is accurate and relevant in pure psychological terms, without considering the particular political positions involved.
I think you can tell a different story about IQ that makes some of the things that are confusing to you cohere, although it is not a story that most people will believe. It is because they want IQ to be this all encompassing totalizing force. The IQ as a form of CPU processing speed I think has slight merit to it; I think Garrett Jones is the popularizer of it.
But, if you've ever listened closely to say James Flynn; he'll characterize IQ as just a measure of ability to abstract. The fact that Flynn lived till 86 and was alive in the 30s/40s and saw people in the 2010s and how different they were. When he explains how the Flynn effect was possible, he does not rely on genetics, but that everything in modern life makes people think abstractly at a base level: internet, television, snapchat, memes, video games. Flynn used to tell this story of his dad who was kind of a virulent racist of his era and Flynn tried to get his dad to be less racist. He asked his dad once, "Imagine, you are a black person, what would you believe about the world or how would you feel." His dad would reply, "That's absurd, I'm not a black person." Flynn implies that people were much more literal in his era and that they no longer are; you would not get his father's response currently.
Usually, people think of IQ as some kind of keyhole stat like INT in an RPG that is good for everything. There is one negative correlation I'm aware of. Parents that are high IQ have a higher chance of their children having autism who are low IQ, even though on net children of high IQ people have high IQ. People who work on autism have a few theories. I'll just mention Simon Baron-Cohen's theory which is something like high IQ people are heavy systemizer, low empathy people and that when you load too much on high systemizing you get autism, even though in general this results in just a bog standard high iq person. The extreme version is autism.
Baron-Cohen and Flynn's rough versions of IQ: systemizing or abstraction are loosely related. Insisting that IQ is this master stat, CPU power version of the world can not explain many things (flynn effect, that you can practice and increase your IQ) whereas the abstraction explanation can fit more facts of the world within it
"high IQ people are heavy systemizer, low empathy people"
Well, that's not true. People with higher IQ have higher levels of empathy.
I don't understand autism very well, and I understand the genetics of autism even less. I know there are certain diseases (like Tay-Sachs) that are associated with higher intelligence, so maybe you're right. However, my belief is that autism is caused by high parental age, and intelligent people defer pregnancy. Hence why intelligence causes autism -- environment effects of mutational load from reproductive aging. Nothing to do with autism as "hyper-systematization."
I'm not sure that society places a greater "abstraction burden" on the average person in 2024 than 1914. The internet provides people with pictures and videos, whereas in 1914, most entertainment was contained in books and newspapers. Text requires higher levels of active abstraction in order to be consumed. More adults have more years of highschool than in 1914, which trains test taking. Nutrition is possibly better. But those effects probably peaked between 1960 and 1990, and now intelligence is almost certainly decreasing. The Flynn Effect is over.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890856719302710#:~:text=We%20observed%20an%20association%20between,portion%20of%20the%20test%20(OR
Here is one study from Sweden based on military conscription that tries to control for age that still finds the effect of IQ on Autism Spectrum Disorders. They include a variable parental age at birth.
I did a quick search for Baron-Cohen's work; it is disputed as all these psych constructs can be. I misstated; in his framework systemizing quotient is positively correlated with IQ while his empathizing quotient has no relationship. It's only people with aspergers and not general high IQ people that have a low empathizing quotient in combination with systemizing quotient.
"In Study 1, as predicted, normal adult males scored significantly higher than females on the SQ and significantly lower on the EQ. In Study 2, again as predicted, adults with AS/HFA scored significantly higher on the SQ than matched controls, and significantly lower on the EQ than matched controls. The SQ reveals both a sex difference in systemizing in the general population and an unusually strong drive to systemize in AS/HFA. These results are discussed in relation to two linked theories: the 'empathizing-systemizing' (E-S) theory of sex differences and the extreme male brain (EMB) theory of autism."
On Flynn's abstraction premise. He gets the intuition and the color because during the Flynn effect, the increase in scores are in particular types of questions. It is not symmetrical across the board and some questions are easily answered by people in the 70s and some are the same as they were in the 30s. I don't know which book or paper best characterizes this so I'll just clip a transcription from his Ted Talk.
"Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria. Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions.
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.
...
Now, not only do we have much more education, and much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. You can't do science without making it logically consistent. And even down in grade school, things have changed. In 1910, they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds, and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information. They were things like, what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time? When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 1990, they were all about abstractions. They were things like, why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? And you were supposed to think, well, the state legislature was rural-controlled, and they hated the big city, so rather than putting the capital in a big city, they put it in a county seat.
...
If you look at the I.Q. test, you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification, and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest. There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions. Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it's all about analogies. And in 1900, people could do simple analogies. That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. What are dogs like? They would say wolves. But by 1960, people could attack Raven's on a much more sophisticated level. If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, what follows two circles? They could say a semicircle. Just as a triangle is half of a square, a semicircle is half of a circle. By 2010, college graduates, if you said two circles followed by a semicircle, two sixteens followed by what, they would say eight, because eight is half of 16. That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question."
Superb dive into the connections between intelligence and personality, and on the conditions under which neuroticism might be adaptive. The fact that individual differences in intellect and personality exist indicates that there are factors beyond simple directional selection at work.
> Whereas Christians seem to think of their problems as spiritual, and reject secular therapists as “worldly,” reform Judaism has always been proud to support the field of psychology, which was one of the earliest fields where Jews were recognized and celebrated. In the same way that 76% of Jews have incorporated Holocaust remembrance into Jewish identity, it seems that Jews have (consciously or unconsciously) adopted psychoanalysis as an important element of Jewish culture.
Ehh, Christians consult their priests in a pretty similar manner. But yeah, Psychology is very big among Jews.
> if people were not unhappy with their lives, they wouldn't
be on the internet looking for explanations for problems in society.
Yep, I realize that I started getting into politics after a rough time in my life, but then I continued to be into it and even became more radicalized when I was socially successful and happy. I think I bet on the wrong racehorse. Oh well, this is my life now and I dont plan on bluepilling any time soon.
> Mental illness as a strategy
If we believe Reich’s new study, people in the prehistoric past were autistic schizos, so perhaps it’s useful in that sort of environment where you have to be on edge. I don’t believe in the whole “religion is schizos” stuff though. Shamans and priests tended to be well-respected members of the community known for good judgement, while schizos are nothing like this.
I miss the old profile picture...
It might come back. I am thinking of having a pfp vote, this one is only temp
I believe the mouse utopia experiment points in the direction of humans needing some kind of baseline human life to avoid buildup of neuroticism. But there have been so many sweeping changes in the industrial revolution it can be hard to pick out which ones matter the most and the least.