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Why super-smart people may be drawn to a life of crime

80 点作者 randomname2大约 8 年前

12 条评论

AndrewKemendo大约 8 年前
<i>Many prevailing theories of intelligence suggest that people with lower IQs are the ones most likely to break the law, since impulsivity, struggles at school, lack of social bonding, and lack of foresight are all linked to criminality.</i><p>...<p><i>the overall amount of crime in this range is still “much, much lower” than among people with very low IQ scores.</i><p>In fact what I would expect you find is that these groups of people break <i>different</i> laws, not fewer.<p>The &quot;low IQ&quot; group likely have less capability of breaking say, regulatory laws, by virtue of standing or access. They are more likely to break laws like B&amp;E, drug dealing, petty larceny, etc... that are more harshly and more frequently prosecuted.<p>The laws that high performing, and High IQ people would be breaking, securities, privacy, regulatory etc... might not be prosecuted at all, or at most would lead to civil fines.<p>I think the bottom line is that &quot;high IQ&quot; people will tend to have more capability to break white collar crimes, and will do so with better cover (lawyers, special accounting etc...).
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VA3FXP大约 8 年前
2 reasons: (1) Boredom - &#x27;work&#x27; is boring and involves tedium. Smart people try to avoid that. (dad joke: That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s called work and not play!)<p>(2) False idols - We have been told since we are children, &quot;work hard, and get ahead&quot; or &quot;you need an education to get ahead&quot;. We know this is only works to a certain degree. The wealthy stay wealthy because the game is rigged. The laws are tailored so that they can maintain wealth. They don&#x27;t have to pay the same amount of tax and there are multiple tax-loopholes that allow them to keep their money. They get the public to pay for their expenses and are not forced to share the wealth that they generate.<p>Smart people recognize this and do not want to play that game. Why should I bust my ass to make some millionaire more money? It is obvious that the &#x27;easy&#x27; way to make money is to break the law. It&#x27;s only the poor people who end up getting caught&#x2F;punished.
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sulam大约 8 年前
My IQ tested in this range, and I&#x27;ve broken some laws that aren&#x27;t entirely common. I managed to get a copy of the master key to my campus and had essentially unfettered access to all the buildings and rooms I wanted, provided I was careful (for a while I shifted my waking time so that I was able to take more advantage). I got into software development as a profession by way of breaking into systems for several years. This was a time when the only way to get the access I needed normally was to be in the major and I wasn&#x27;t.<p>I&#x27;ve never killed anyone, although I can think of one instance where I considered it and would certainly have gotten away with it. It would have been a big hassle, though, and honestly who wants that on their conscience?<p>At the end of the day it seems to me that I&#x27;ve only done the things other people would have also done if the opportunity arose. I may be somewhat more attuned to those opportunities than the average person, but in many cases they arrived after a cascade of events that weren&#x27;t specifically aimed at any kind of criminality. At worst I was initially guilty of a high degree of curiousity.<p>The only thing that <i>really</i> resonates for me in this article is low attachment, although I find it hard to really quantify that. I do seem to have fewer friends than most people, but there are probably mathematical reasons for that. I am confident in my ability to make friends, but don&#x27;t feel like making the effort usually. I have a busy life and can barely keep up with work and family -- having more than a few good friends outside those two groups takes more time than I have.
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VLM大约 8 年前
When a culture and economy are in general decline, lots of equations indoctrinated into kids along the lines of &quot;do ABC, get XYZ&quot; will be broken, and the smart kids will feel ripped off and at the same time have the agency, time preference, and logical thinking skills to achieve XYZ anyway, just perhaps while bending the rules.
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lordnacho大约 8 年前
What about the simple idea that being smart means you find more opportunities to commit crimes where you won&#x27;t get caught? Is that addressed? It seems to square with the fact that high IQ people commit fewer crimes; they&#x27;d also find more legit opportunities to enrich themselves.
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Pitarou大约 8 年前
What utter garbage. Not to put too fine a point on it, this isn’t a survey of the high IQ population; it’s a survey of high IQ losers.<p>The sample is drawn from a high IQ club. You won’t find many Nobel laureates, brilliant engineers and so on in these clubs. Why would they bother? They have nothing to prove and better things to do with their time.<p>Broadly speaking, people join a high IQ club because their performance on standardized tests is the ONLY thing they have going for them.<p>And by the way, the average IQ of the sample was 149, so many must have been below that score. Smart, but not exactly Hannibal Lecter.
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brilliantcode大约 8 年前
Here&#x27;s what I disagree about the article. That white collar crimes are committed by high IQ people.<p>It&#x27;s the socioeconomic lineage that gives you to access to such position where it&#x27;s very easy to commit crimes that the law is not designed to punish. Much of the written laws are around hauling violent criminals away from civilization.<p>While high IQ could empower someone to feel that they can get away with white collar crime, such disposition are innately built from their lack of attachment that arises from being isolated from poverty and all the bullshit that comes with non-upper class life.<p>You go to an elite school, meet other friends who think rules for tools, they go onto work at powerful positions, it&#x27;s all too simple to collude and create secret societies to further their collective monetary ambitions.<p>It really seems to be true what they say. There are rules for those who made it (because they create the rules) and conditions and terms for those who didn&#x27;t make it (you follow the rules). It almost seems to me like the whole system is a sham.<p>Imagine if Ghengis Khan discovered the best way to conquer people and other nations is not by force but by credits and materialism. In a chaotic and lawless reality, law is created by individuals who impose their power on rest of society. We are so entrenched that we are &quot;right&quot; and rest of the world is &quot;wrong&quot;, we&#x27;ve become a slave because we are told we are free to make our own decisions-limited by powerful men who play God.
adrusi大约 8 年前
The study looked at members of high-iq societies and alumni from elite universities primarily, which is going to select for a disproportionate amount of people who consider their high-iq important to their personalities. Intuitively, I&#x27;d expect high IQ to be correlated with narcissism, and in this group even more so. Narcissists are going to be more likely to commit crimes.
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YCode大约 8 年前
I suspect the two pragmatic points to take away are:<p>&gt; Many of Oleson’s respondents discussed the alienating effects of their high intelligence; social maladjustment could be a possible explanation for their elevated crime rates.<p>&gt; Another issue is that the bulk of his gifted cohort was recruited from a private high-IQ society, and people who join such clubs might not represent highly intelligent people in general.<p>To that last point, this has the same vague smell of the kind of study whose participants were from the college it was sponsored by and so as he says it should be taken as preliminary and I&#x27;d add with a large grain of salt.
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eyeownyde大约 8 年前
Can you help me reconcile these two quotes?<p><i>But Schwartz stresses that the overall amount of crime in this range is still “much, much lower” than among people with very low IQ scores.</i><p><i>“Not only does it mean that elites are just as likely to lie, cheat, and steal as anyone else,” Oleson writes</i><p>Do these people simply disagree, or am I misinterpreting one of them?
foldr大约 8 年前
I think there&#x27;s a presupposition here that&#x27;s worth challenging. Smart people aren&#x27;t morally superior to dumb people; they&#x27;re just smarter. They&#x27;re drawn to crime for the usual reasons: greed, selfishness, lust, etc. etc.
booleandilemma大约 8 年前
<i>But Schwartz stresses that the overall amount of crime in this range is still “much, much lower” than among people with very low IQ scores.</i><p>The smartest criminals don&#x27;t get caught.