Not the best article. I fit everything this article described and didn't try drugs until college. On the other hand, if it had not been for the marjiuana, the loneliness would have consumed me long before I found real help.
Also came here to post this. I'm not sure why an NYT article would pass editing to have such a click-baity title yet bury its core premise inside the middle of the piece.
Hope it's not a sign of the way their journalism is headed.
That train has long since left the station. Journalism as it existed in the 20th century is long dead and it is not coming back. Technology has destroyed quality reporting and it is up to technology to now fix the problem.
Why is that? I think that the revenue stream from distribution has degraded so much that the 20th century journalism business model is not sustainable. Technology disrupted this business model. Instead of a media utopia where gate keepers and media companies were replaced with innumerable citizen journalists, each with their own cheap distribution platforms, we've seen the rise of click bait, echo chambers and fringe ideas seeping into the mainstream (birtherism and anti-vaxxers anyone?). How does technology fix journalism?
what's the role you expect g to have played? based on my own experience, how intelligent you are seems to have little or no correlation to whether you use or abuse drugs.
In your own experience how are you measuring the g of the people you know?
It is really dangerous to rely on the people you know to predict causes since the people you know are not a good cross section of the population. It is like people who say how did politician x get elected when everyone I know voted for his opponent.
For what it is worth my personal experience is that the use of drugs or alcohol are not closely correlated with my estimate of a persons g, but major abuse problems are quite negatively correlated.
It is a pity the study referenced in the article says the exact opposite [1].
"In our large sample of adolescents, certain items still did not perform adequately from a psychometric perspective, test–retest correlations were low to moderate, and predictive validities with respect to alcohol use, smoking, and cannabis use were low and limited to the IMP and SS subscales in this sample."
Edit. I am referring to the 90% indentification study. I am checking out the intervention study now.
Edit 2. OK in the intervention study the entire effect seemed to occur in the studied schools relative to the control schools. The overall rate of self-reported binge drinking fell for all students at the intervention schools, both those that experience the intervention and those that didn't. The major problem is the control schools did not seem to match the intervention schools in demographics so it looks like it is very hard to tell if the intervention worked.
