[personjerry]

I too am very smart.

But more seriously, if you correlate happiness with ignorance and pass that off as something you don't have the power to change, that is a mistake. Happiness and your attitude towards things is something you can work on.

[eric_h]

> I too am very smart.

Intelligence, "smartness", and ignorance are all orthogonal.

Even very intelligent and very smart people can approach an issue with extreme bias and blatantly ignore (get it ;) news, facts, etc. that contradicts that bias.

I would argue that William Dembski[1] is both smart and intelligent, but I would also call him ignorant.

[Edit: my point being that people who choose to ignore the things that contradict their bias are happier as a result of their ignorance]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Dembski

[personjerry]

Apologies, I guess that was more of a reference appropriate for Reddit than HN.

> I too am very smart.

is a reference to the subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart which points out people describing themselves as very smart, often in ironic ways. I realize now that it may have looked like I was actually making a claim about my own intelligence; I was not.

[Dylan16807]

The joke was clear, but as eric_h explained it is largely a non-sequitur when talking about deliberate ignorance.