"One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives" seems like a circular definition. So people that feel good do so because they are better at solving poorly defined problems? How do we know?
Poorly defined problems often come down to things like creativity and your ability to handle emotions. Sometimes you have to follow a seemingly senseless curiosity to find the right path forward. Sometimes it is about finding beauty where it isn't expected. Also these problems have multiple valid and fundamentally different solutions and can be highly subjective. Think art.
Well defined problems are about juggling multiple things in your head, high concentration, relying on fundamental knowledge, heuristics etc. All of that possibly under pressure. There might be multiple solutions but they are typically on a scale (good enough vs perfect etc.) or are choices between measurable tradeoffs. Think engineering.
Or it'll be seized and hoarded by corrupt governments or militias.
It seems plausible. For instance, would a good accountant (well defined problems) necessarily make a good physicist (poorly defined problems)?
Seems to indicate that the threshold hypothesis (IQ helps creativity/divergent thinking up to a point, then levels out in correlation) is largely correct
I think we have different experiences then. Or, maybe, your interpretation of 'seeing the awful' is different.
I see 'dumb' people fall for pyramid schemes/MLM which seem obvious to me. They will only see the awful after they've lost money. We both see it, but there's a period where they don't, while I do.
I see people fall for sales tactics and which are transparent to me. Getting a €400 discount on an €800 delivery package for a second hand car that has €150 in actual value, does not seem like a deal to me. Others are very happy and are happy the sales person gave them the fake discount.
When other people are happy that the government reduces taxes on gas due to rising prices, I see rising corporate profits that were paid for with public funding.
When some people get angry about the conspiracy they read on Facebook, I get angry about the manipulation going on that caused that conspiracy to spread.
In the end, in my experience, the 'dumb' people see awful more on the micro level, while I see it more on the macro level. That probably probably makes us just about as unhappy about the stuff that happens around us, just from completely different perspectives.
The only real difference I see, is that I seem to have a harder time finding people to discuss things with than the average person seems to. Where 'dumb people' just seem to be able to repeat talking points and opinions they've heard somewhere, I often prefer more in depth discussions and conversations on the why and how, causing me to be an outsider (sometimes).
Because you aren't picking sides, you will be accused by every side to be siding with the "enemy".
> Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they're also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today."
“How do you host a good party” might be ill-defined to OP, but I’m sure this is a well defined question with a good answer for a lot of people. (Let’s call that “social quotient”)
And one of the components of intelligence is pattern recognition.
Basically they fall for the social version of pareidolia.
It's less about making an argument for the "correct" definition of "smart"; and more about saying that the way psychologists measure "intelligence" (eg when trying to study things like "are smarter people more or less happy") is measuring success at solving well-defined problems. That things like IQ tests as well as academic success are about solving well-defined problems.
You can think "smart people" are whatever you want, it's not about any "true" definition of what "smart" means, it's just a word that means different things to different people -- often probably not very rigorously defined or consistently applied. The OP is in fact about investigating what some of these different meanings may be with relevance to correlation to happiness.
But that's not what OP is about, and it suggests that's not really what the research says either, there's maybe a bit of hint of a small negative correlation like that, but mostly it says: no correlation.
Rather than making the argument you are making, which I have heard before, I found the OP argument to be novel to me, and find really thought-provoking:
The model of "well-defined" vs "poorly-defined" problems, and that what we call "smart" is skill at solving "well-defined" problems, but that happiness actually depends on skill at solving "poorly-defined" problems. Which is probably not correlated to skill at solving well-defined problems at all, that being "smart" at solving well-defined problems doesn't help or hurt happiness, it just doesn't matter.
This rings really true to me, and isn't quite as depressing as the oft-heard theory that you're saying here, that smart people are more likely to be miserable because they see the awful. Not what OP is saying, OP is even disagreeing, really.