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Comment by csa | Hacker News Reader

> while in some like learning a foreign language or music or art it's not

You absolutely must be joking.

This tells me that you have never learned a foreign language to a high level of proficiency, and that you know very little about art.

Regarding the rest of your post, talent certainly exists, and things like motivation and talent are better predictors of success than IQ, but IQ tests don’t claim to predict success (even though IQ scores and success might be mildly correlated).

As I mentioned in another reply (please read it), folks seem to think that IQ tests claim to predict success. They don’t. It’s an unfair onus to put on IQ tests.

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> This tells me that you have never learned a foreign language to a high level of proficiency, and that you know very little about art.

Well, I've obviously learned English well enough to fool you :P

Anyways, I might have misunderstood you, dunno... my impression was that you're saying exactly that - that IQ is the main predictor of academical success - which is something that I both strongly disagree, and have a plenty of anecdotal examples around me that prove it wrong.

> Well, I've obviously learned English well enough to fool you

Cheers. I walked straight into that. That said, I imagine that there is more to that story.

Fwiw, IQ is mildly correlated to a lot of things, including academic success. But as I said and strongly believe, success in academics has much stronger predictors than IQ.

I have personally trained many groups of “low performers” and “less smart people” to run circles around high IQ people. I have a mountain of (unfortunately proprietary) data that shows how much certain types of training can accelerate learning.

All that said, the toughest and most abstract ideas/areas are pretty much limited to the high IQ people. I will add that this comes with baggage — they are often frustrated that their peers don’t see or understand what they see and understand.

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