IQ Matters Less Than You Think
nautil.us
nautil.us
If you compare the top 20% to the bottom 20% of the distribution I bet there will be a strong correlation to professional sucess.
It's the rocket scientist saying he knows lots of people smarter than him, and obviously hard work and precision are what really matter in rocketry - never mind that estimates put the average IQ in the physical sciences around 125. Or the pro basketball player saying that it's not enough to be the biggest, they key is to train hard and work as a team - never mind that the person saying it is the NBA-average height of 6'7". What these people are actually seeing is that once you have lots of a key trait, other traits gain relevance.
Or to take a less quantifiable example, we can look at something like musical skill. 10,000 hours of practice will (in)famously make you an expert, but Ericsson et al actually found that "time to expertise" is fairly constant in some fields, and massively variable in others. (I seem to remember examples varying by a factor of four?) Skill at a musical instrument can be learned by almost anyone, but some people will see vastly better return on their time investment than others. And if we're looking at professionals, then "just practice harder" ceases to be an option.
None of which means most people are excluded from most roles, or that success is tightly correlated with IQ. But there's a distinct pattern of assessing the importance of some trait after applying a hard filter on that trait, and it does everyone a disservice to pretend that's comparable to a population-level result.
I just noticed yesterday for the nth time a girl on facebook posting her pic with a caption saying how true beauty is on the inside. Can't help noticing it's only the most beautiful girls who do that, which I've always found puzzling. You've shed some light on why for me, thanks. I'll think twice before again writing on here how unimportant talent is in music! (I'm a musician.) I just don't know about that. My favourite story about talent, from Kevin Spraggett:
"I remember fondly one conversation I had a few years back with Boris Spassky. We were discussing 'THE' Victor Korchnoi...Boris and Victor had been bitter adversaries for more than 40 years at the time of this conversation, and they had played more than 60 times in official competitions..(including 2 candidates finals)... Boris [said] that Korchnoi had every quality necessary to become world champion but lacked one very essential quality...and it was precisely this quality that prevented him from attaining chess' highest title. I coaxed Boris on...He began to list Korchnoi's many qualities: ...Killer Instinct (nobody can even compare with Victor's 'gift')...Phenomenal capacity to work (both on the board and off the board)...Iron nerves (even with seconds left on the clock)...Ability to Calculate (maybe only Fischer was better in this department)...Tenacity and perseverance in Defense (unmatched by anyone)...The ability to counterattack (unrivaled in chess history)...Impeccable Technique (Flawless, even better than Capablanca's)...Capacity to concentrate (unreal)..Impervious to distractions during the game...Brilliant understanding of strategy...Superb tactician (only a few in history can compare with Victor) ...Possessing the most profound opening preparation of any GM of his generation...Subtle Psychologist...Super-human will to win (matched only by Fischer)...Deep knowledge of all of his adversaries...Enormous energy and self-discipline...
'But, Boris, what does Victor lack to become world champion?' Boris' answer floored me: "He has no chess talent !" And then he roared with laughter..."
For example, when I was in graduate school, the chair was discussing how high GRE scores were not very strong indicators of 'success' in grad school (i.e. doing good research, publishing it, and getting out in a reasonable time). However, low GRE scores were much stronger indicators of 'failure' given these criteria.
IQ probably maps pretty linearly to GRE scores (for most of the small subset of the population who would ever take such a test), but with regards to scientific progress there are a series of thresholds that are more important (grad school, faculty hiring, securing funding, etc. etc.). These thresholds are really about opportunity and access.
For native english speakers, you mean? When i participated, GRE had 2 sections on english language: 1. about vocabulary(may not be relevant depending on your discipline) 2: reading comprehension(certainly useful). I don't think it maps that well to IQ. I certainly had to work on my vocabulary, which i don't have any use for and don't remember much at all.
One factor doesn't seem to me to get mentioned enough in these discussions - call it "agreeability" or "sanguinity." Basically, ability to successfully cope with neuroses and other social/behavioral challenges that seem to be more common among intelligent people.
I put some thought into the people I've met who seemed to me to be the greatest outliers in terms of intellectual achievement. One is a famous writer, another is a classics professor, and another is a math prodigy turned neuroscientist. The commonalities between the three are a combination of 1) high g, 2) obsessive focus, and 3) the aforementioned happiness/agreeability/ability to cope with neuroses. All three of the people I have in mind are neurotic in some ways, but can channel it toward constructive channels. Haven't looked into the research on this but I would be curious if you could recommend any study that addresses this component. I agree that the Gladwellian "just practice a lot" view doesn't seem to hold a lot of weight, but anecdotally it seems to me like raw intellectual ability isn't the determining factor either.
Well, that much is probably true: the very nature of his/her profession surrounds him/her with similarly smart people, some of whom are going to be smarter.
https://www.honorsociety.org/articles/trouble-geniuses-malco...
“Gladwell cites studies done by Arthur Jensen that indicate the IQ level needed to successfully attend and graduate from undergraduate college is 115, after which Jensen believe IQ becomes relatively unimportant. For comparison, Albert Einstein, a well-known and commonly agreed upon genius, had an IQ of 150. Studies by Liam Hudson indicate that, ‘a mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180.’”
He gives the example [paraphrasing from memory] of an individual with an IQ of 170 who was so intelligent it impaired his ability to relate to normal people and hold a job.
High IQ doesn't do that (in fact, it makes it easier to understand other people, including those of average intelligence, if you are so inclined), though people with high IQ and a problem that does impair their social interactions may be inclined to prefer to attribute the social difficulty to their strength (IQ) rather than some problem.
Some of the problems that do that may be loosely correlated with IQ, despite being distinct from it, though.
Firstly, as others have observed, it makes it hard to relate to others when the majority of people you meet seem to have the intellect of a child - I don’t mean this unkindly, rather more that one ends up looking at most folks as making grievous and avoidable errors incessantly, and almost as overgrown children. You want to help, but you can’t, because nobody likes being patronised or made to feel inferior, but if you don’t help, they resent you for not having helped. It isn’t intractable, but it’s most readily avoided by avoiding interaction in the first place.
Secondly, intimidation. Ties back to making people feel inferior, and generally stymies social interactions. It’s tough, even in a marriage, as they either know you’re playing dumb, or feel like you’re beating them over the head with your intellect. Either way you end up hurting their self worth every time you notice something or think of something and unwisely decide to share it.
Thirdly, overshoot. I tend to assign far more intelligence and cunning to others than there is, and resultabtly second, third, fourth guess their mind-state, as it’s hard to comprehend the disappointingly facile motives behind behaviour.
Finally, expectations. Once you let on that you can solve the intractable while half-asleep, you’re expected to do it day in, day out, and find that the world beats a path to your door with their petitions and demands, which feeds more than a degree of misanthropy.
I’ve met maybe three people in my life who I’ve felt on a level with, and one of them is my brother.
Winning a Nobel prize is a highly random process as someone needs to be in an 'open' field ripe for major discovery.
You also have to be lucky enough not to have contemporaries with equally impressive work in more popular fields.
But he seemed to relate to people just fine.
Teller is best known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Cognitive_abi...
Obviously there won't be much disagreement on a platform dominated by computer scientists. If you went to forums for other fields they would also pick their favorites and see no reason to disagree that they are not only the best and brightest in the field, but also the best and brightest in general.
And to be clear I'm not saying he isn't. I don't really know.
The IQ content is less egregious than other flaws - his famous "10,000 hours" bit is so oversimplified that the authors of the study he cites have condemned Gladwell's treatment of their work. But even the IQ stuff is quite bad.
The first note would be that the initial statement here is a shockingly strong claim which goes far beyond Hudson's studies. (115 to 130 is the difference between 15% of the population and 2.3%.) And, of course, the followup reference to Einstein seems entirely self-defeating - how does it discount IQ to note that a famous genius was well above three sigma?
I don't have a copy of Outliers to reference, but the paraphrase of Jensen is also extremely surprising since he's widely criticized for over valuing the role of heritable intelligence in success. All I can find outside of his much-condemned racial work is a brief statement that he believed (in 1969) there were many unfilled jobs requiring an IQ upwards of 110. This is basically what I would have expected from his legacy - not a claim that higher IQ is irrelevant, but instead that +1 SD is enough to open many professional doors.
Meanwhile, the high-end claims raise several other questions.
Most damningly, any discussion of 170 and 180 IQs is garbage for the common 15 point SD. 5 sigma (IQ 175, depending on normalization) is a 1-in-1.7M event. No IQ test ever devised has been calibrated on that population; Raven's Advanced Matrices only goes to ~150, and other high-IQ tests are also seen to cap at 4 SD or lower. Test-retest and inter-rater variation are high enough that's it not entirely clear whether IQ tests can be calibrated out to 170+, at least without a massive test population.
I can't find Hudson's actual study, only replications of that quote, but it's a disaster coming and going. IQ 180 cannot possibly be a value he found in accurate studies, and a work on Nobel winners isn't necessarily relevant to high-IQ success anyway. Nobel winners are generally people whose research succeeded in a major way, not just those who did very good work, and often features mixed groups like "the theoreticians who made the theory" and "the experiments who confirmed the theory", where quite likely only one side is exceptional in the field.
Finally, the example of a very high IQ person leading a dysfunctional life fails on several levels. I'll let the Gladwell's use of anecdote slide, because studies on very high IQ children generally do find large rates of non-success, but those outcomes are heavily distorted. First, because childhood IQ testing is heavily age-adjusted, with the result that fast development can produce astronomical IQ scores in children who will be merely quite smart when their peers have caught up, both undermining the relevance of the result and creating unsustainable high expectations. Second, because it ignores the tendency of extreme outliers on one axis to be unusual on other axes also. High IQs might impede socialization, but they're also correlated with mood and anxiety disorders, torsion dystonia, and a variety of other conditions which have obvious negative effects on life outcomes. For these purposes, causation doesn't matter - it's enough to note that without correction, any study of success-by-IQ will be distorted by these conditions. We can imagine a case where success in certain fields is dominated by those very high IQs people who don't get nasty side-effects, while the overall performance for high IQ people is unremarkable.
None of which is meant as an attack on you, or even a claim that the people at the peak of e.g. physics are higher-IQ than the field's average. I just think it's worth noting how fractally wrong Outliers manages to be in even a brief statement like this one.
(In contrast, you can be relatively certain that someone in the top 1% of IQ has a higher g than someone with bottom 50% of IQ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G_factor_(psychom...
You get a multi-page report back with measurements of all types of cognitive functions. An IQ number is given, but it quickly becomes apparent that number is just a summary measure. Just as a 3.95 GPA doesn't tell what subjects a student is good in, a high IQ doesn't tell you what areas of mental strengths and weaknesses someone has.
That 3.95 GPA student may have had to spend 4 hours a day studying math, while being able to write beautifully structured long form English essays in half that time.
Maybe that student did great in stats and had a horrible time in discreet mathematics. Or vis versa.
Summary numbers are useful in that large variances can indicate overall trends, that 4.0 GPA student did better all up, but that student with a 3.0 GPA may very well be better in a given subject than the 4.0 GPA student.
Likewise, someone with a high IQ can still have weaknesses, it is just that to get the really high score, any weaknesses will have to be offset by strengths in other places.
If you are reading this an are interested in finding out an objective scientific measurement of what you are good and bad at, pay for a full psychological intelligence evaluation. It takes a long time, the testing is long enough that you probably want to do it over multiple days, insurance won't cover it, and it is rather expensive (I think I paid around $1500 for mine, maybe more).
At the end of it all you'll get an IQ number, and a better understanding of why one number does not represent a person's capability.
It is as if people argued about someone's GPA in college while not paying attention to the subject's major, study habits, or natural abilities.
1. Going from bad to good requires x amount of effort/persistence.
2. Going from good to best requires 1000x amount of effort.
When you've put 800x amount of effort, you'll realize this harsh bitter fact. You have already given up on your hobbies, family, social life, ... and you are still considered as "good+" not "best-". To bypass being-best-barrier you need more than persistence.
Things like IQ, family wealth, great coach, ... matter when you are approaching near top of the hill.
Such as?
1) Quora is a garbage site
2) All those examples minus one (which I'll get to) people started before the age of 22. That's not "late in life."
4) The example of the person who started running marathons at 84 has broken records "for his age group." Big deal, there's like, what, less than ~5 people in their 80s running marathons in the world?
5) Just because a few people can do it (and that hasn't even been demonstrated) doesn't mean everyone can with a little work.
2) 22 is late for athletic careers.
4) You skipped 3? Ok... so you want 80 year olds who just started marathon running to beat everyone aged 20-30 in their athletic prime? That's actually pretty impressive since those other 80 year olds have probably been running marathons their whole life.
5) I agree. It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice, and few people are willing to do that. Are you upset that only 10% of people can be the top 10% and that the distinguishing factor is often how hard they work?
You should also look at it this way: For most things, you don't need to be the absolute best in the world, nor is there a way to measure who is the best in the world. Who is the best in the world at software engineering?
I do agree with others mentioning comparisons about the top 0.01% and top 1% and top 1% versus top 2% and all that. At a certain point of achievement, virtually everyone at that level possesses that trifecta to some degree or another and then, in those cases, often luck and a little happenstance play a big part in which opportunities emerge and create significant value and success for only a small few individuals.
The sad part is that I have met some really low IQ people who are unable to even prep for a college exam, or the SAT, ACT, MCAT, whatever. So, their innate intelligence or upbringing denies them even the shot at an average comfortable life.
It's a tautology to claim "average genes, hard work, and sacrifice can generally guarantee upper middle class" because if someone isn't upper middle class you can just claim they don't have average genes, they didn't work hard enough, or they didn't sacrifice enough. None of those things are measurable.
If you have a four year degree with ten years or more of experience (eg you're around 35 years old), in almost anything to do with eg engineering, getting to $100,000 or close to it, is not difficult.
The average salary for a person with a bachelor's degree, in the engineering field, first year out of school, is around $65,000 for 2018. Emphasis that that's the first year income. Petroleum engineers with a bachelor's degree earn an average of more than $80,000 their first year out of school.
The parent's premise isn't very far out of line, even if it glosses over that the effort required is considerable, and a lot of people simply do not want to be engineers (with the best six figure alternatives for volume being healthcare and sales/biz-dev).
You seem to merely be saying engineering is a good career. Everyone already knows that.
It takes more than hard work to stick out engineering for 20 years, its not a job for everyone, you're going to burn out if you absolutely hate the work. I personally know two mechanical engineers who were both straight A students but hated it once they got to the job. Both didn't even make it to 5 years as engineers.
1. Pick practical degree, because you are poor and anything else is luxury.
2. Work in college, because you are poor. End up with 30k of debt because you are dumn and didn't get a scholarship.
3. Make 40k a year. (22% fed, let's say 4% state), 30k net. -10k rent, -10k expenses, 10k left.
4. Pay off college by 25.
5. Save up 50k by 30.
6. Masters degree by 32 with no debt.
7. Increase income to 100k by 45.
8. Congrats middle class pleb. (Which I am, though this isn't my story)
It might be "common sense" to you, but it's directly contradicted by all the data.
I completely agree that this is a huge issue. A large problem for kids from "bad" families is not having any idea what they "should" be doing, and by the time they figure it out, they may have already ruined their life and missed opportunities.
(Seriously. Training willpower takes willpower. If someone has some kind of executive disfunction or something, they literally can't 'just choose the right thing'.)
Excepting those with a medical condition, low willpower individuals can invest that willpower in developing more willpower and get to average levels over time.
I've seen this many times working with the homeless and in addiction recovery. It's just like compound interest with investing.
Just because you start with a very very small amount doesn't mean it can't grow over time.
This is embarrassing as hell to admit, but in high school my ADHD was so bad the only thing I enjoyed was World of Warcraft. I would commonly play for more than 24 hours and couldn't get myself to stop for anything. It completely dominated and ruined my life. You can say video game addiction isn't a thing if you want, but I was definitely acting like it was. Tried alcohol, cocaine, etc.. and never had a problem, but I could not control myself with certain video games.
When I started developing my Willpower it was literally with 5 minute breaks every 4 hours. And it was extremely difficult. After a week, I extended those to 15 minute breaks, and it was 6 months before I got my total WOW time to less than 8 hours in a day. But I did it.
I'm in my 30's now, and this new World of Warcraft expansion is the only one I haven't played at all. Hoping to keep it that way.
I can't stop myself comparing people. :D
Like in basketball - being 2.50m tall doesn't mean you'll beat everyone on the court. But being 1.50m pretty much guarantees you're out of luck.
1.60 m, though, is apparently good enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggsy_Bogues
Having an IQ 2 standard deviations above the norm (130+ SD15) tends to attract problems/difficulty/friction in corporate environments. That is, companies are biased toward Te users (xxTJs) and extroverts + judgers (ExxJs) with IQs in the 115-125 range.
Synthesis usually starts at 130+. Companies either don't like it, or want it cheaper.
115-125 is also most common among students enrolled in big-name universities. They also get an edge in high school, as they are smart enough to be better, and yet, not smart enough to get bored or be seen as a threat.
Please stop giving MBTI mind share, it has repeatedly been proven to be non-scientific. The creators of the test had minimal to no training in psychology, the underlying basis of the test are not based on sound theory, and test results for a given person are not stable across multiple retakes over medium periods of time.
MBTI was sold to corporations as a psuedo-scientific way to make employment decisions. It explains everything in a nice, simple way, that makes everyone feel good about their "strengths".
> Synthesis usually starts at 130+. Companies either don't like it, or want it cheaper.
MBTI doesn't represent people's actual personality. I am supposed to be INTP, yet I enjoy managing teams of people, I am capable of standing up and entertaining a room full of people, and I am able to play long term internal politics to help ensure the project I am on can stay on track.
I also haven't seen MBTI used, anytime recently, by companies as a management tool. I have seen other pseudo-science hackery in place, but they almost always has the same attitude towards results MBTI does, all positives, no negatives.
Actually a friend's company did recently go through a corporate psych test that was brutal in its results. People got results back that said things like "you try to control and manipulate other people around you to get results" and "you are insecure in your work and that causes you to lash out at others."
It was hilarious to see honest results being given to people in a corporate setting, not what people are used to. :)
For an actual scientific measurement of personality, Big5 is where to go right now.
Aside from that, the standard sources of psuedoscience woo debunking all have long articles
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221
and finally https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/the-personality-test-tha... has a brief bio on Katharine Cook Briggs
I'm really hoping you have some, because intuitively this seems very true for me.
b) Most people here also probably know people who are every bit as intelligent as they are who have repeatedly had really shitty luck and zero success. Similarly, most people know someone who is successful, but at the end of the day is pretty stupid. Regardless of IQ, I think most people here recognize intellect as really helpful, but also as neither necessary nor sufficient for success, wealth, happiness, etc.
b. Those instances tend to stand out (especially the people smarter than you with miserable outcomes), but also tend to not be statistically relevant.
Everyone here probably isn't.
People who have a near-average (on either side) IQ are less likely to have it tested, and those with an average or below IQ less likely than those above the average to talk about their score.
Consequently, people who talk about their IQ score tend to have a higher than average score.
Being a competent professional engineer requires some raw intelligence, true, but also determination, interpersonal communication skills, organizational skills, time, training, resources, access to the infrastructure you want to work with, and no small amount of luck. Those all interact in complicated ways, and most can be used to buttress the others depending on where one's personal talents lie.
There's probably some minimum necessary raw intelligence necessary to become a hacker, but I suspect that bar is much lower than HN would like to admit. And I am very sure that there's no maximum past which the rest of the list ceases to matter.
I’d assume a similar distribution to the general population, actually. Why would I think otherwise?
To name a few accomplishments..
* If wikipedia is correct, he was the "48th most cited psychologist as of 2002".
* He has an extremely popular metric named after him (Cronbach's alpha)
* President of American Psychological Association.
Maybe what he is missing to the author is the popular media appeal Feynman has. However, I'm not sure that's a good criterion for genius, since I'm not sure it's something Cronbach wanted.
So yes, the best CPU doesn't help if the IO is constantly blocked.
No, those are just the ones you know about. You know, the kind that tell people that they have a high IQ. You probably know more people with IQs > 130, you just don't know that you do because they're well-adjusted, and they don't feel the need to tell you about their high IQ.
On the other hand, almost all of my friends have anxiety, depression or executive disorders, but I know the IQ of a few of them.
I don't know...
Suppose that people associate with people of roughly equal "success in life". And suppose both IQ and executive function correlate positively with success. Then, at a given level of success, IQ and executive function would be negatively correlated, and so it would appear to an individual surveying their "peer" group.
Basically, consider what would happen if those high IQ individuals you knew combined their intelligence with an even mental keel and extreme conscientiousness. Lucky people like that do exist, but in rarified heights (financial/professional/whatever they choose to optimize for) rarely encountered by us mortals, and so you likely wouldn't have had the chance to meet them
I think the way we can measure "outcomes" is also highly debatable. Is becoming a wise monk with no possessions good or bad? What about a successful and influential CEO who is miserable?
The answer to that is often "Well, go on and tell a person who is much smarter than you that you know better what they should do with their time!"
Title of the article isn't
"High IQ always makes you successful"
Correct examples for claim in the title would be low IQ ppl becoming very succesful. Anyone know any low IQ successful ppl ?
It also seems like there's variance in the amount of "points" available normally. Dolph Lundgren for example seems to be playing with higher stats than most people.
Acquired Savants like Jason Padgett who seemingly become able to use dormant brain areas and Phineas Gage who's personality went in seemingly the opposite direction make me wonder if there might be some way to manipulate those odds-to make sure the IO doesn't wind up being a chokepoint.
I think the environment they grew up in is the problem.
People they had around them just handled them badly because of their intelligence. Sometimes because of envy, sometimes because of high-intelligence leads to being bored with most stuff rather quickly. If people around you think you are bored with everything they wanna do, they think you're a hater and don't want to be around you or even haze you in one way or another.
On the surface it seems like an absurd statement, since IQ isn't a "thing", like for example, sickle shaped blood cells, which are protective against malaria.
It's a human devised statistical metric, which says nothing about what actually causes a particular score.
Even if there is a population wide correlation of higher IQ to better mental health, it would be heavily confounded by other huge factors affecting mental health, like income, education, health care access, family conditions during childhood. To prove this you'd have to control for at least those factors, and possibly many others.
The better studies of high IQ and mental illness seems to only show a slightly higher occurrence of bipolar disorders.
Maybe being online turns anything into Reddit/HN.
On the other hand, word was most members are inactive and only a small percentage turn up at IRL events at all, i.e. strong (self) selection effects.
You don't need Mensa to meet some smart people, but it's an easy place to find them, for better or for worse (both of which can be interesting experiences, BTW).
I also know 2-3 people who are very smart AND don't have anxiety/executive problems, but they have social issues. They tend to burn out themselves and the people around them because they think their intelligence and work ethic is the base-line and the rest of the world is just dumb and/or lazy.
I was always very successful in my jobs but, when it came to starting my own business, I needed a lot of active encouragement or I would give up too quickly. However, in two cases, a business clicked with me, for some reason, which made me excited and driven. While others commented on my innovative approach to those businesses that made them successful, it was the enthusiasm that kept me going, followed by the excitement of success. You might say it's the difference between being a good player on a bad sports team versus a good player on a first place team. My IQ, perhaps, helped me see things most did not but it's the enthusiasm that keeps me going and, especially helpful, encouragement and support from others, not my IQ.
I was limiting myself from growing in important areas because I gave up too easily when my "talent" didn't shine through. I should have realized at some point that it's all work in the end, and sometimes you have to slug through it.
>> when it came to starting my own business, I needed a lot of active encouragement or I would give up too quickly
For that abstraction and patterns doesn't help, this is about your temperament, I'd look on how you score in the big five of personality traits. If you don't want to rely on being encouraged all the time. I think you could learn a set micro skills to compensate for those aspects that your natural temperament falls into 'need encouragement' pattern. Note there might not be known micro skill for some of traits, but at least you will have a model that explains your tendencies.
If it was something like WAIS you did it is actually a pretty comprehensive test including many different areas of mental performance (working memory, abstract verbal reasoning, visual spatial comprehension, inductive reasoning, attention encoding, auditory processing, quantative reasoning, associative memory, processing speed among others.).
A high score on something like WAIS is a pretty good predictor of work performance.
You need a sufficiently high IQ to seek out and achieve the higher things, such as productive sources of enthusiasm. Those with lower IQ will be less inclined to figure out how to become self-actualized.
That doesn't sound right - the Flynn effect causes IQ tests to get harder over time.
Also, I believe IQ reliably deteriorates with age.
Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused (2018)
https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/0...
This sort of collective amnesia happens often if you look out for it and this makes me suspicious of other conventional wisdom I see peddled here and on Reddit. Is it probably true because a lot of people think so or is it true because it chimed with a story. The mind warping powers of politics are well known but maybe the conceit every person shares is that we feel there ought to be a nice coherent story like a box to put things into - meanwhile Reality/Nature/God gives zero fucks about all that.
Nowhere in all of it is dumb luck considered a factor. Lottery winners are successful. What can you infer about their personality attributes? It's obviously risible.
At the other end of the scale is there ability so profound that considering the role of luck is uninteresting? Or are there N others with comparable ability who weren't so fortunate and did not succeed? How big is that N? Is it possible to answer such questions with anything more than prejudice? Do you have to get lucky with your research to get a Nobel? Eg would Feynmann have got one for something else if QED was published by someone else a couple of years before he got there? Don Bradman was lucky to achieve what he did in sports, really?
My own prejudice is that IQ is total bullshit. I believe in my ability and was once told as a child that my IQ was impressive (whatever that meant - I don't know). I know I mirror my parents reaction to that news: "We think you're clever and always did, just not because of this nonsense."
Maybe I'm not super remarkable too and who cares? Life is too short. All of us should rise early, work hard and strike oil.
― Calvin Coolidge
- Bryan Rasmussen
People who persevere but fail are also very common, so this does not prove its claim.
So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.
“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”
“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.
“But, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”
To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”
> Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.
Luck and circumstance can.
> Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
The world is also full of persistent failures as well.
> Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The Axis powers in ww2 were as persistent and determined as the allies. You could argue they were even more persistent and determined. They failed. Has there been a more persistent and determined presidential candidate than Hillary Clinton? She failed twice. If persistence was all it took, Hillary would have been president.
People love to pat themselves on the back for their successes. If coolidge was born into a black family in the 1800s rather than into an elite new england family, I wonder how much persistence and determination would have mattered.
Persistence is an important characteristic in life, but there are far more to success than persistence.
Preparation comes from persistence.
"Your parents have funny names for their genitals"
I think that luck is the only one you can't replace.
Being persistent will never give you the facial features to become a male model.
Conversely, being 7 feet tall isn't enough on its own. You still need persistence to get into the NBA.
Those born with the right skull shape still need persistence and discipline with diet and exercise to make it as a model.
Persistence is still critical to rise above the crowd with most things.
But at this day and age of modern cosmetic surgery, yes it does. (At least you need persistence to get the money to afford it)
>>> Being persistent will never give you the facial features to become a male model.
>> Yes it does!
> Okay. nods
Me and my sister are polar opposites in everything, I’m lazy. She’s motivated. I tended to be above average when tested. She tended to be below average when tested. She wanted nothing more than being outside in nature and I wanted nothing more than being inside and messing with my computer.
Hell. Even down to the fact she has a boys name and I have a girls name (I’m a guy) and that I was skinny and she was not.
She is now a barrister, something that I could never have become. I was close to being a shelf-stocker at the UK equivalent of wal-mart but ironically they wouldn’t have me. If not for the fact that this industry is a huge bubble I would be on my arse. And why? Because I’m lazy and smart. And she is persistent and dumb.
I have tremendous respect for my sister, but it’s a fact that her success is down to her persistence. She never gives up. Even when people dump all over her for being slow or sounding thick. She’s awesome. We could all learn something from her.
As an example: I once had a tax dispute where I was represented by a lawyer who I felt was not very sharp. We were losing / going to lose the case.
Realising the mistake I had made retaining him, I swapped to a senior lawyer of a named tax law firm. He was extremely sharp and experienced, and would think 10 steps ahead. He was also a bit lazy though (which is fine, so am I at times). But he's hands down the best professional I have ever worked with -- the only person I would ever trust without having to double check his work.
I prefer the smart lawyer, as opposed to any person with a law degree. The fact that the first guy in my example persevered and got a law degree says absolutely nothing about his ability.
Things like charisma, gravitas, luck / right place and time, attractiveness, height, inherited wealth or relationships, etc.
Shortfalls in any of these can be made up by excesses in others.
Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent, but also, there are plenty of persistent people around who are unsuccessful.
That’s arguable. I would hazard a guess that unsuccessful men without talent may be a larger group.
"People too often forget that IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old."
Yeah, because other metrics of human mental performance, or any kind of psychological property of humans for that matter are so much older than a century, right ? A century in psychometrics, is 13.5 billion years in physics, to make the "dog-years" analogy.
Reality: IQ is the oldest, best, and most solidly established predictive metric of success. In fact it's pretty much the oldest metric anyone bothered keeping at all (presumably exactly because it works, it seems very unlikely to me that it just happened to be the first one they tried. I remember studies that tried to quantify "nobleness" and "noble blood" in people and correlate that to intelligence for example).
Back to the article. The source for all this wisdom ?
https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Checklist-Paradoxical-Become-C...
(This book essentially makes the point that there is a lot or variability at the extreme outliers of genius. Even then, it is forced to conclude that while those extreme outliers weren't the very top geniuses at a young age, they were very smart. The just weren't top of the top early in life, even though they did become the top of the top later in life. It points out the corollary: genius increases the odds of success, which is very different from guaranteeing it)
I wonder how many IQ exams misclassify the intelligence of smart people with disabilities of some sort or high functioning autism. Not saying any of this applies to Feynman, he is just an example of where the test didn’t accurately capture his intellect.
The measurement of IQ borders on pseudo-science. It measures something, but what exactly? Everyone has a different answer. Ok, sure, intelligence. Now try to define "intelligence" empirically. What isn't a particular IQ test measuring that is relevant to intelligence? Different IQ tests often yield different results. And I'm not talking about online tests, but proctored tests administered by professionals.
How do you account for that amorphous quality known as "intuition"? You can't measure it or quantify it. You can barely define it. It is a finicky, inconsistent beast. Yet it has a profound effect on one's problem solving ability.
If the factors that determine IQ are individually difficult to define, differentiate, and measure, what does that say about the score itself?
In the broadest terms, IQ matters, but not in a way that makes one's score relevant for any practical purpose. You don't need an IQ test to measure competency in a specific task or occupation.
Ethical psychologists don't consider IQ in isolation the way that pop culture and many in forums like HN do.
Compare "mass". What is mass? Can you really define it? You can say what it does, but what "is" it? Well, nobody can define it, except in terms of the things that it does. Because those are all we see of it. We can measure it, we see those measurements let us predict other outcomes. So we can use our knowledge of mass in practical, predictive ways to build things and accomplish things. Physicists still don't know what it "is" and they don't have to.
Now intelligence. You can measure it. The measurements stay stable on a given person over time and between tests. The measurements predict a wide variety of outcomes - both of a large life scale (income, longevity, criminality, etc) and on an individual task scale (this person can learn X in Y time). It's the most solid, repeatable, predictive result in all of psychometrics - more than personality traits or anything else we can measure about the mind. but what "is" it? It's the thing that predicts all those outcomes. No practical use for it requires that it be anything else.
The whole "what is intelligence anyway" thing is a giant red herring; it's a specific case of a general-purpose counterargument that can be used to attack literally any statement about anything by demanding endlessly more rigorous definitions of the terms involved.
Intelligence is certainly something. It is relevant. But it is not precise, and is useful, as I said, only in the broadest strokes. And like all psychometrics, the manner in which it is measured is itself not stable.
But comparing intelligence to mass or any other physical measurement is a non sequitur. Mass is precisely measurable with perfectly repeatable results, and has perfectly repeatable interactions.
My main grievance with IQ as "general" intelligence is its human parochialism. It does not generalize much at all. "The most solid, repeatable, predictive result in all of psychometrics" sounds like very faint praise to someone with a background in the natural sciences.
So in that context, I'm sure the results are robust. But I don't think that means much
Good old HN: 1 out of 200 people in the population have an IQ of 140+, but half the people in this thread do.
Can't wait for the ironic "But HackerNews is filled with such smart people!" comments.
What is that, 25 million?
It is relatively difficult for a good IQ test to deliver a false positive — that is, a significantly higher score than a theoretical true score.
I personally don’t think that this issue is taken into consideration enough when discussing IQ.
IQ tests obviously do not account for __every__ variable which we cumulatively call "intelligence", but IQ is heavily correlated with the ability to succeed at tasks society classifies as "smart people stuff". The difference in intelligence between two individuals is much less pronounced if both individuals are already two standard deviations above the norm. But if you were to compare two individuals, one who is one standard deviation below, and the other one above, you would observe a clear difference in 'intelligence' between the two. Even in this comparison, there will be outliers, but the outliers are not statistically significant.
You missed my question. I am concerned with how many smart people with disabilities IQ exams misclassifies. I am not using Feynman to say he had a disability or anything, I was using him as an example of a case where his IQ score doesn't match his actual intelligence, and I am in no way claiming why that may be. I am merely stating IQ exams aren't perfect. If you are interested in replying, then reply to the question I posed. I think IQ test potentially misclassifies people with high functioning autism and other highly intelligent people with mental disabilities, showing they have lower intelligence than they actually have.
Or, more precisely, IQ is heavily correlated with the ability to succeed at taking IQ tests.
...and succeeding at taking IQ tests is also predictive of an individual's potential to succeed at, using the Feynman example, physics.
Lets say you were to gather two pools of individuals, one pool with IQ test results of 2 standard deviations below, the other with results of 2 standard deviations above, and provide them with the necessary materials and instruction to understand physics 101. Incentivize the participants by offering a $2000 cash reward for demonstrating the knowledge they were tasked with learning, lets say by answering X questions presented to them in whichever format would be optimal for their success.
How many from group -2 SDs do you think would receive the $2000, compared to group +2 SDs? -1 SDs compared to +1 SDs?
The choice of physics was arbitrary as well. You could assign almost any field of study, and you would still get almost identical results in performance.
Because that is very different than what I’ve heard. My impression is that most (perhaps not all) IQ tests are stable and highly replicable for results up to that range (assuming consistently motivated test takers, a very big assumption, particularly for bored smart people), but test scores above that range are mostly noise.
Meanwhile my sister, who had an utterly average iq by any measure has a masters degree and is a hospital executive.
The answer is she just worked harder than me. I gave up as soon as anything was difficult for me because I was so used to learning everything easily. She assumed that learning was supposed to be hard and put the work into it.
Effort without talent will get you somewhere.
Effort with talent will get you anywhere.
Failed a bunch of classes in high school and flirted with dropping out. Two misdemeanor arrests for underaged drinking and pot. Graduated in bottom quintile of my high school class, one failure shy of being held back. Managed to get into a far away college with a scholarship on the basis of a letter of recommendation from one of those once-in-a-lifetime teachers for whom I'll be forever grateful.
Did fine in college, got a 1600 on the GRE, went into dev work at startups and have since had a quite successful career.
I feel like being smart saved my butt multiple times over. I don't think I would have gotten that LOR if I hadn't made an impression on that HS teacher, wouldn't have been able to self-teach CS as a non-programmer as easily without smarts to fall back on, etc.
Maybe being smart was not a prerequisite for getting where I did, but I think it was a prerequisite for taking the winding path I took.
And also a gigantic, heaping helping of luck as well.
Usain Bolt obviously has incredible sprinting talent. But if he sat around at home playing video games and eating potato chips all day, nobody would expect him to be an amazing sprinter. Everyone knows this.
Yet for some reason there's this weird idea that intelligence without effort can yield results, where the same obviously doesn't apply to any other kind of natural talent. It's strange.
In my experience, that 'weird idea' comes from early schooling. Highly intelligent (gifted?) kids generally don't have to exhibit any effort on school work, at least up to a certain time. I can tell you that, in my case, I coasted up until around 11th grade, then I hit a bit of a mental wall. I'm sure other physiological changes impacted, but at core, I didn't know how to study or exert effort in 'learning' - everything had just fallen in to place for so long that I didn't have the skill or experience to learn how to get better. This was a confounding factor in college as well.
I've shared this with other folks, and had more than a few people share similar experiences.
If Usain just ran really fast, and people said "wow, you're fast", but he wasn't trained at how to get better, he probably wouldn't have become a world champ. But with 'raw intelligence', that often doesn't receive the same sort of coaching and support as specific sports or other identifiable talents.
So, I don't think it's strange, it's usually very different to the "physical training" example, because people don't see it directly.
I have a fairly high IQ, but there are things I'm terrible at, like music and art. I put a lot of effort in, and get no results.
That being said, I often find that I over-think tasks, and end up never completing them because I try to make them perfect, and find out at some point that I can't.
What's more important than "perfect" is "good enough", and sometimes a high IQ won't allow you to accept that.
It's one of the things I hate about myself at times.
Isn't this some kind of circular logic? A character with high intelligence is just that a charade of the user playing it. So it doesn't matter if the INT is high, if the player is a moron bad things will still happen.
I have a theory that a lot of highly successful people have either a partner or a team that is willing to do the grunt work. They basically have/created a surrounding that allows them to focus on what they do best. The media will picture how that person is so smart and great, but without the proper environment they wouldn't be able to thrive.
Smart people have a tendency to think they can do everything on their own because they are so smart, which is quite stupid actually.
How can we design tests and make definitive judgements about the best way to test intelligence when we do not fully understand it or even define it? What about things like curiosity, passion, emotional intelligence and team work?
Are we testing abstract thinking, visual thinking, language skills? What do they measure and how exactly do the scores translate into the real world? Without any comprehensive studies, data or evidence this quickly becomes a pseudo science.
Is there any guarantee and precision that a person with IQ of 140 is more 'intelligent' than a person with an IQ of 120? In what? In the IQ tests yes, but beyond that in what? The real world is much more than a single test in a controlled environment.
This is like claiming a student scoring higher than classmates in an english test will write a better novel or compose better prose. Does not follow, in the same way ascribing value in the real world to an IQ test does not follow.
An oversimplified example from electrical engineering:
Watts are units of power. Amperage * Voltage = wattage.
Amperage refers to how much current (width of the pipe) and voltage refers to the speed of the current (how fast the water flows).
I think that we focus so much on intelligence testing, but neglect to focus on attention. I think that making use of your smarts, intelligence, or whatever term you want to give it needs a combination of intelligence and attention.
If you are very smart (180 IQ) but can't focus for long, you will be outdone by the woman or man who "only" has 130 IQ but has persistence.
IIRC studies of Nobel winners (a good measure of "smarts" and achievement) confirm my theory - finding that after a certain cutoff, there are diminishing returns for IQ alone in terms of obtaining a nobel.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbFABnst8LsidYs5Y/goodhart-t...
And realistically the difference in quality/difficulty level of work people do to get their PhD is massive. Some people revolutionize their field for decades to come and some do a slightly more drawn out bachelors level thesis. Yet they both end up with the same degree.
I think a lot of PhDs find their study very difficult too, and simply have to persist.
Learning new things expands that, allowing you to make new and unique connections between ideas.
Knowing more will help your future learning too - many ideas from separate fields are similar. Once you have learned one, your brain can easily learn the other ones, as it just maps the concept.
Many people have said it's about perseverance, My take on that is that it is perseverance in learning. I don't know what the IQ fuss is about. It's about as useless as all the other categorisations such as the Myers Briggs Personality Types.
Don't let yourself be categorised by a made up number, based on the ideas of the 1900s that have nowadays been mostly proven wrong or, at the very least, unreliable at best.
Learning and doing will break any glass ceilings you may think there are. The people who are at the top of their fields got there by years of excruciatingly hard work that is often forgotten. (forgotten not as in that it didn't matter, but as in people looking at them often think they just became top of their fields in a fortnight, and forget their actual life's journey that led them there)
1. I feel less "sharp". By this I mean I feel slower to react to things and it takes longer for me to formulate thoughts. Words "caught on the tip of my tongue" happen more often.
2. It takes longer for me to learn. This applies to things like reading comprehension all the way up to learning new technologies. I need to read more slowly and practice more often before I can master a topic.
3. My concentration has decreased. I have ADHD, even as an adult, but following the trauma, it became worse.
What it didn't affect:
1. My motivation. I've always considered myself an entrepreneur. If anything, I am more motivated to be successful - even if I have to work harder.
2. My dedication to lifelong learning. I am a strong proponent of learning new things is important to being successful.
TLDR; IQ has its advantages, but it isn't the only factor.
Perhaps that accounts for some of this.
Everything calmed down after.
Those are really only importance to those who are inclined to hold value in those and they're not necessarily something everyone with a high IQ values.
So, the results they're measuring don't account for what the subject group (high IQs) deems important to them. For example, if your family is struggling to make ends meet one might work hard to solve that problem by doing what's necessary, including digging ditches if that's all they can find to make ends meet. If you follow them you might find they come up with a way to make digging ditches much easier, faster, and better. And you'll most likely find that they didn't get any credit at all for that, and that they didn't care.
The best determinants for being successful, in spite of a high IQ or lack thereof are the ability to focus and to have stamina.
Yet there were thousands just like them, that didn't succeed. The difference? Persistence, I think.
IQ is not a definitive 100% accurate predictor for intelligence, people expect that, and it doesn't work like that. But it doesn't mean it's not a predictor.
i.e. a lot of people say 'Feynman had an IQ of 125, I had an IQ of 140, but I'm not smarter than Feynman, thus I question IQ as a predictor for intelligence'. But that's a bit like saying 'Tyson was a small heavyweight boxer, but he's a more successful boxer than I am while I'm twice his size, thus I doubt size as a predictor for boxing success'.
Same with things like getting a college degree, and comparing your degreed success with that of Bill Gates who dropped out. It doesn't rule out education as a predictor.
Similarly, you can look at BMI and say that it is a predictor for being overweight (e.g. as a proxy for health, having too much fat, dietetc). But bodybuilders have high BMIs, the proxy doesn't work for them.
The key to all these edge-cases are interactive effects. Education works, but not when interacted with forgoing a billion dollar entrepreneurial opportunity like Gates or Zuckerberg. BMI works, but not interacted with a low-fat, high-muscle training goal. Size as a predictor works in combat sports, but can be overcome when low size is interacted with talent factors. Similarly, IQ works, but not in isolation, and not in every single case, but it is one of the more useful predictors with a lot of explanatory powers.
Lastly, estimating any predictor for a small subset of geniuses (the focus of this article), is hardly an effective metric when it's based on an IQ test that is designed for the general population.
Lastly, some bayesian perspectives... the article's premise is based on: how many high-IQ people go on to become a genius. Well, very few. Perhaps that's not because IQ doesn't matter, but rather that there's just very few geniuses. Instead if you look at geniuses and look at what their IQ is, it's virtually all substantially above average.
Insomuch as he's speaking to a rare strawman individual who holds the belief that IQ is the end-all metric of being a genius then yes, IQ doesn't matter as much as he thinks. Most other people however are much more nuanced about IQ and understand you can be unsuccessful with a high IQ and successful with a low IQ, but that it's a very strong predictor for success nonetheless.
I think that would be a useful indicator. I was a B student, but I've accomplished more than A students now that I'm approaching my 30s.
For adults, I propose giving them a mobile phone and a Twitter account, and seeing how long it takes for them to “just check it one more time”.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impu...
I wasn’t a fan of sweets as a kid, and I don’t have a Twitter account.
That said, I think that these, or some minor variation thereof, are fairly good and simple tests of willpower.
- Willpower at some point (age 4?) actually goes down for some period of time.
- Willpower at (I believe) age 8 was highly predictive of future success. Higher than IQ, but
- Willpower (I think here measured as focus) tends to increase with IQ.
rationally, i understand the importance of education, but emotionally, i found it a bit odd that i was paying to do work. so i always did the minimum required to get a B or low A, except on programming assignments where i wanted to prove to myself that i was the best. i usually had the highest project average in the class.
once i got myself into a position where i actually get paid to work, i didn't have much trouble getting motivated.
Let me know when you think you have finished the test, and we will evaluate it.
I have no incentive to do the test, so I wont.
My willpower is based on consequences?
So if you truly have no incentive to do the test, then you have no incentive to do anything that you choose to, and zero willpower.
That is foolish in my experience.
- Charlie Munger