I didn't understand this article at all. It's funny, the author mentions the dunning-kruger effect but I feel like most of the audience of this article will fall into this mental trap of thinking themselves more intelligent that they are (rather, that the article applies to them).

Especially the suggestions addressed to self-identifying smart people:

> 1. Give your ideas away.

> It amazes me how many pious philanthropists give generously to charity but are loath to share the secrets of their success.

Maybe I'm naive but I don't think there are a lot of "million dollar ideas" that are just being hoarded and all people have to do is share them

> 2. Don’t use your intelligence to tear others down.

> Deploying cleverness for one-upmanship, sarcasm, and snark is easy.

This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with negativity (and self-esteem, if someone is tearing others down to feel better about themselves).

The one thing I found interesting was

> the researchers also found a strongly negative association between happiness and vocabulary. To explain this, they offered a hypothesis: People with a large vocabulary “self-select more challenging environments, and as a result may encounter more daily stressors and reduced positive affect.” ... (They talk themselves into misery.)

That logic doesn't track for me, I feel like simpler explanations could be be that people fall into a lower level of vocabulary (a more common set of words) as they socialize with a variety of people. Or just office workers and academics broadly seem to be more frequently depressed (my theory is partially the sedentary lifestyle and lack of sun) and they have a larger vocabulary from communicating more through writing than orally.

> Maybe I'm naive but I don't think there are a lot of "million dollar ideas" that are just being hoarded and all people have to do is share them

Often, the important things are the ones that we have already heard many times. ("Don't take drugs", for example.) Following these ideas consistently could already dramatically improve many people's lives.

Even if you learn something that most people don't know, such as software development, again there are relatively simple ideas, such as "write unit tests" or "prefer immutable values and functions without side effects". I am saying this as an example of an idea that may sound mysterious to someone outside the profession, but inside the profession it is just the boring advice that all of us have heard many times... but still many of us don't follow.

I imagine that there are things like this in other professions, too, and I would be happy to see their list. The important aspect is that those should be things that sound boring and obvious to people in that profession.

> This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with negativity (and self-esteem, if someone is tearing others down to feel better about themselves).

Kinda yes, but negativity can become a cultural thing, if you see other people around you do that all the time.

Also, most people have a status instinct; it is too cheap to dismiss it as not having self-esteem. Probably the solution for them is to create a culture where being nice to others is the high-status thing, but that is easier said than done.