Peterson says that there are many people with 160 IQ who are worthless at being successful in life. — Gregory

Haha! Is Peterson brainwashed by capitalism, too? Successful in life? In what way? If you create great music that doesn't sell, and you're forced to rely on your parents or partner for support, is that a failure?

I'd like to know what's his definition of success. I bet it's defined by capitalism.

Peterson has debated Zizek on capitalism. They are both extreme in many ways imo

Peterson has debated Zizek on capitalism. They are both extreme in many ways imo — Gregory

Žižek's not extreme in my opinion. Well, I browse through his thoughts on capitalism. And I couldn't disagree -- capitalism encourages greed, and it encourages people, even the ordinary people to be corrupt.

The rich will always cause inflation because it is how their psychology works. One equal state of ownership couldn't happen because there are too many who want to be rich

So I've been watching videos of Jordan Peterson... — Gregory

There's your problem, right there. Just don't. There are better ways to spend your time. Take up walking, or gardening. Get a pet, or start making miniatures. Learn yoga. Just about anything.

The rich will always cause inflation because it is how their psychology works. One equal state of ownership couldn't happen because there are too many who want to be rich — Gregory

It is not enough that one has a lot of money. It also must be at the top 1%. So there's never enough, as one should feel that there's enough.

There's your problem, right there. Just don't. There are better ways to spend your time. Take up walking, or gardening. Get a pet, or start making miniatures. Learn yoga. Just about anything. — Banno

:up:

:smirk: :up:

IQ is simply a constructed evaluation of what some people think it means to be intelligent. Considering we're still learning a massive amount about the brain, I'm quite sure in another 100 years we'll look back at IQ tests much like people looked at measuring the size of a person's skull for intelligence.

Being rich causes more problems than it solves, as even Sean Hannity admitted. The richs' dilemma is that they are tempted to be greedy by the very thing that makes them unhappy

I agree! Consider musicians like the Beatles that make creative music and play them themselves (which takes more than coordination). The result is clearly intellectual and has nothing to do with IQ skills. An Olympic skier uses more than coordination to do his feat. He uses mind

Now IQ skills may be slightly different subjectively than other skills even though they would fall under the field of intelligence. I wonder what evolutionary biology says about mental skills and how they change and evolve

I think a happy chimp has more intelligence than someone who never finds happiness. — Gregory

Better Socrates dissatiafied than a fool statisfied — John Stuart Mill (Hedonic ethics aka utilitarianism)

Opinions seem divided. No clear-cut answer as to whether pleasure/happiness is the be-all-and-end-all of life. Cypher (The Matrix) did choose an illusory happiness over the miserable truth; so yeah, the OP's proposal does have takers.

As for absence of a correlation between IQ and success, IQ tests are a bit too abstract and quite removed from real-word, concrete problems for anyone with just common sense, the actual determiner of how well one does in life, to suss out without the necessary amount of familiarity, familiarity that comes with praxis.

I know a lot of people who would solve many of the questions on IQ test if only they were asked in the right way. What is the right way depends on what sort of experiences people have.

The crux of IQ tests is pattern-recognition and I'm willing to bet a lot of money that everyone is proficient in this skill; lacking this ability would mean certain death or grievous injury i.e. schmucks (like me) have short, painful lives.

Why would anyone not choose happiness if it's an option? It's good for oneself and available with effort. I'm proposing that will is what makes men intelligent primarily and the abstract stuff, if disconnected, is not of much use. So use is what is important. But what other goal can a person have than happiness for all incarnations of humanity? Are you saying with Kant that actions with motives are flawed? The end result would be happiness though

As you so rightly pointed out, happiness is our primary objective. It's just that craving for happiness is reminiscent of opium addiction. It can be used to manipulate us and unscrupulous folks have used opium addicts to commit crimes paid for with just the right amount of the drug to keep them coming back for more; the drug-crime cycle thus kicks off and sustains itself until the hapless addict is spent, following which s/he is ejected from the gang and left to die! Is momma nature a crime boss? :chin:

Food for thought:

I tried to google this: How to identify plant molecules?

In my humble opinion this is a crucial question that needs an answer asap.

Why?

Well, look at how many psychogenic drugs have plant origins (marijuana, shrooms, tobacco, etc.). Is it possible that happiness neurochemicals of the reward center too are plant derivatives? Are animals being mind-controlled by plants?

Does anything and everything we do in the name of happiness directly/indirectly benefit plants? :chin:

Everything is chemical in biology. When you meditate to happiness you use chemicals as when you take shrooms or salvia. But with naturally finding happiness it goes from a chemical thought to a chemical thought. The initial thought it not "I am eating shrooms" but something greater. I don't think you can shoom your way to happiness. Now plants do give us chemicals but choices are free. Are you saying that some people are never given a chance for happiness or enlightenment or that it takes a lifetime to find? I would agree with the latter

The goal of life is survival and happiness. Some people define their survival is such a way that they choose their death in sacrifice.

How is it possible that life itself could have a goal, when it has no interests, desires, or appetites of its own?

But does it matter if they don't score high in math, logic, and language??

Tests are all about making definitive expectations and having them met. They don't truly provide or reveal knowledge so much as they allow us to see our ideal image and to make it real. This double-meaning is part of the word 'test' itself, like 'testing for bacteria,' 'testing for covid19,' 'testing for intellect,' etc.

All I can do here is point out the addictive nature of happiness; the word "crave/craving" is used to describe unbridled desire for drugs and, in my humble opinion, happiness. To reiterate, for emphasis, happiness = drug. @180 Proof, on more than one occasion, has mentioned joy to be a morphine drip.

Morphine appears to mimic the body's endorphins that are responsible for analgesia (reducing pain), causing sleepiness, and feelings of pleasure.

Why, oh why, does the pleasure system of our brains have receptors for plant molecules?

There's more:

Dopamine can promote the growth of plants under various stressful environments. More recent studies have shown that dopamine can enhance tolerance to drought, salt stress, and nutrient deficiency in plants. In addition, dopamine can improve the ability of plants to resist biological stressors.

The most important reward pathway in brain is the mesolimbic dopamine system, composed of the VTA (ventral tegumental area) and NAc (nucleus accumbens). This (VTA-NAc) circuit is a key detector of a rewarding stimulus.

There appears to be a connection between the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom vis-à-vis happiness.

His point was that IQ does not, on its own, a determine ‘success’ in life. There are some physiological parallels with g and physical markers like reaction time and general health.

Psychometrics are not exactly precise and only have any means across large samples and only take into account the average differences. Someone with an extremely high IQ could find it difficult to achieve anything in life simply because they have no one on their level to bounce off so they may be more likely to be lonely. But the g factor is just ONE part of a human. Having a high IQ does not mean you will find it hard to find stimulation or meaningful relationships as other parts of your personality can compensate.

What makes the goal of life, happiness. Happiness is highly dependent on the goals of the society one lives in. IQ as far as I understand it is an attempt to rate how good a mind is at detecting patterns(probably a gross oversimplification.) Happiness has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. A chimp can be sad too, as can a human being. The only relation that happiness and intelligence have is that they occur in conscious beings.

I've met people with 140+ IQ who were dumb as rocks. Maybe the human drive to categorize everything leaks on to actual humans as well (RIP Carl Linnaeus). Yes, it does. We love to judge, define, categorize based on looks, style, demeanor and so on. And poof along comes a "tool" to measure once level on intelligence. Would you rather get surgery by a trained surgeon with 100iq who reads books on anatomy every free hour, or a random person of the street with 200....? Peterson is a trained psychologist; he is not dumb but he sure isn’t the brightest. You can train for IQ test and score higher just that in itself should discredit IQ as some magic number that limits what a human can achieve.

Maybe if you want to do top level mathematics you need a higher-than-average IQ. I don't think so, you just need to be properly educated and have a passion for it. What Jordan is trying to do, and what he fails to realize is that; in trying to help people understand what they want to do, he is selling them the fears and insecurities of the capitalistic power hierarchy, he is trying to crush people’s desires to educate based on societal pressure and other’s opinion, which i guess he is successful in doing? I wouldn’t know. One must wonder why he choose the field of psychology; he sure does seem to think a lot. Hope he gets well soon and sorts out that nasty addiction.

The first thing that comes to mind is that he seems obsessed with the subject and also this is coming from someone (him) who scores very high on IQ tests. — Gregory

Yes he obviously sees himself as above the average. To add to this he is on a self-proclaimed quest to stop the communist youth from destroying the west. He bases this conviction on the works of Carl Jung which by today’s psychology is basically mysticism.

Addition (to whom it may concern):

When I ask myself "why am I here" I think of the good parts of my life and that becomes a goal to sustain wherein being happy amounts to thinking rightly. Is not the act of thinking itself supposed to be and is better done united to enjoyment? A goal oriented mind is a smart mind that doesn't wander. You know when you say something wrong in a conversation, things get awkward. All these things I see as intelligence and there seems to be agreement that intelligence is more than just logic.

1) we are all human
2) we all have the same survival needs
3) we have intelligence to survive
4) to survive you must have hope

So to have hope is smart, it is the psychology of survival which is linked to intelligence