https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa
> views such as that African countries suffer chronic poverty and illness because their people have lower IQs and that black women are objectively less attractive than other races
> a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists issued an open letter titled "Kanazawa's bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology",[6] and an article was published by 35 on the same theme.[7]
But hey, Hakuna matata! Disney told me so. /s
> if p, then q
> if q, then z
but this article reads as
> if p, then q
> if z, then m
Except that it's all wrapped in language - the ideas look like they should flow together, but they don't. There are probably missing steps in the analysis. Might be a case of over-summarization by the journalist.
Yes, it is all over the place:
1) "Why smart people are better off with fewer friends"
2) "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" - for everyone that is.
3) "[...] one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed."
4) "The effect of population density on life satisfaction was [...] twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,"
COMMENT - So, trusting the writing, presumably low-IQ individuals are more happy in a small town where fewer people are around to socialize with and more unhappy in a big city where more people are around to socialize with.
5) "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."
COMMENT - So they have that in common with low-IQ people? This claim contrast oddly with 4) and also the graph pointing out that this is a population wide trend..
6) "If you're smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being"
COMMENT - Then the whole article could be summon up into something a bit shorter basically, smarter people have a relatively easier time than less smart people, no matter whether they are in a small town or a big city. I feel the reason for the sense of oddness stems primarily from point 4 which remains unexplored/explained and stands out against some but not all of the other claims made.
I think we should be really careful about ideas like this which tell us what we want to hear about a thing that "sounds negative on the surface but is actually good!"
I do think this particular article is transparently self-serving, and not in a way that is particularly effective. (For the reader, at least; it's pretty effective for the writer, in that it gets people to read it, nod their heads, and then share it, resulting in more pageviews.) Much better to reframe reality in ways that are long-term beneficial for you rather than just make you feel good once.