Why do smart people live longer?

boing
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No these IQ findings are not corrected for income and social status. Read the paper. The correction they did ran entirely off of the postcode (in particular, the postcode they resided in at age 50) - i.e. the geographic location of the individual at that time. They didn’t have any data on the individual’s access to resources, only an aggregate census data for their locality, which gives a single number between 1-7. They then constrained the impact of this effect to be linear - grossly inappropriate given the categorical nature of this variable.

It should be utterly unsurprising that they couldn’t explain the correlation to IQ using this, given the crudeness of their analysis.

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Interestingly, higher IQ also appears to correlate with more propensity for substance abuse.

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Smart people live longer, smart asses on the other hand … ?

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If you tell me that “The reasons are unclear, but higher IQ is correlated with longer life span”, I’m going to go with ‘correlation’,

But you you tell me that “The reasons are unclear, but lower IQ is correlated with shorter life span”, I’m all ‘causation’!

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Why do smart people live longer?

Because they make better decisions than stupid people.

Jeeze. You don’t need a hygrometer to tell when it’s raining, and you don’t need an anemometer to tell that it’s windy out.

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The link between smoking and lung cancer was first suggested in 1912. Fritz Lickint provided statistical evidence in 1929, and more quickly followed.
Why was the link still unknown to smart people in the English-speaking world in the 40s?

Well, Hitler was a non-smoker. And the emerging anti-tobacco evidence fit well with an ideological desire to promote the health of the German people. The Nazi smoking bans went away after the war, and now people get away with claiming that the link between smoking and lung cancer was only discovered in the 50s.

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Intelligent people are lucky, and therefore live longer?

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Uh oh :slight_smile:

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instead of a simpler conclusion that a healthier lifestyle may enhance cognitive testing.

You don’t see the possibility of a two-way correlation?

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Sure. It could also be an epigenetics factor or any of a number of uncontrolled correlated factors.

Twin studies and IQ have a nasty tendency of turning political (pick up a copy of The Bell Curve). Care should be taken when claiming this that life expectancy, IQ and genetics are linked. Murray and Herrnstein claimed (essentially) there was no point to educating poor people. Should we not provide them health care either?

EDIT: And to be perfectly fair, I only scanned the research paper. It seemed like there was a rush to the genetics argument, but I could have misread it. The article the story links to however seems to have no qualms making a genetics connections.

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Perhaps I misunderstood you.

I thought you were arguing that they’d ignored the possibility that healthy living was driving up measures of “intelligence”.

I was suggesting that it could be both that and that the characteristics being labelled “intelligence” here could well be disposing people toward behaviour leading to longer life expectancy.

I hadn’t realized they were arguing for a genetic explanation. Next time I’ll RtFA

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