Evolutionary psychology explains our behaviour

If you could sum up The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One in three words, what would they be?

We can't understand ourselves and our behaviour without evolutionary psychology.

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It made me think deeply more than once. Surely that counts for something?

Any additional comments?

It's very politically incorrect, so please avoid if you are sensitive to texts offensive to progressive worldview.

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useful concept

The main concept is good and useful.

Some of the traits like having less kids, having kids late, eating healthy... correlate with slow life history which is correlated with higher intelligence. So I'm not sure they provide proof that intelligent people are acting in novel ways instead of in line with evolution.

The narrator is awful but still worth listening to.

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Fascinating yet repetitive & robotically narrated

[{ "answer" : "Not for listening!", "type" : "Overall", "question" : "If you could sum up The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One in three words, what would they be?", "id" : 234, "typeString" : "overall" }, { "answer" : "My reaction was, 'Oh good, it's finished.'", "type" : "Story", "question" : "What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)", "id" : 201, "typeString" : "story" }, { "answer" : "Throughout the book I could never be sure if the narrator was a real person or a text-to-speech bit of software. The pauses often came in the wrong place. He would read one section, only pausing after, rather than before, reading the subheading of the new section. I'm afraid I fell asleep many times while listening, so monotone was the poor man's voice.", "type" : "Performance", "question" : "How did the narrator detract from the book?", "id" : 208, "typeString" : "performance" }, { "answer" : "Why intelligent people are often weird - and foolish.", "type" : "Genre", "question" : "If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?", "id" : 251, "typeString" : "genre" }, { "answer" : "This book, with all its dense data and graphs (presumably), has to be read, not listened to. Even then I think it might be a little repetitive for those who want a good read rather than to be informed. Still, the book really was fascinating and Mr. Kanazawa did a good job of condensing it into such a short book. He doesn't dwell overly long on details, for which I was grateful. I simply wanted to learn some curious facts about intelligence and get a general overview of what intelligence is and isn't, and this I did.

I liked the no-nonsense style, cutting out all the apologising and hand-wringing that what he had to say was politically incorrect. That was like a breath of fresh air.

In short, it's a fascinating, concise book but a little repetitive, too full of statistics for an audiobook and the narrator made rather heavy weather of it. This is an audiobook only for blind pop science fans. Any sighted person should read it instead.", "type" : "Misc", "question" : "Any additional comments?", "id" : -1, "typeString" : "misc" } ]

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interesting facts bent to author's agenda

What did you like about this audiobook?

The author describes an extenisve body of work that examines the relationship between IQ and personal characteristics e.g. marriage success, drug taking. There are some interesting and suprising results included that, like all good research, provoke interesting questions. Unfortunately, the author corrales them to emphasise his view that intelligent people (as measured by IQ) are not necessarily better than everyone else. This is clearly an important point for him, but I needed no convincing. People interested in this point would be much better off reading Grit.
His preoccupation with this "paradox" means that he ignores many of the interesting issues and questions that his results suggest. As a consequence, the book is laborious and a little frustrating

How has the book increased your interest in the subject matter?

The book raised some interesting observations that provoked some thought, but the focus of the book is not on these assumptions, but rather on demonstrating that intelligent people are not better.

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1 person found this helpful