Why IQ matters more than grit | Hacker News Reader

Why IQ matters more than grit

vox.com

31 pointswslh24 comments

The frustrating thing for me with IQ as a measure is that realistically, it conflates a couple of factors. Specifically, it is testing both the efficiency of your thought process (which is _extremely_ trainable) and the speed and error rate with which your brain executes that thought process (which is probably somewhat less trainable). The IQ test should really be re-designed into separate extremely challenging un-timed problems, and extremely simple timed problems. Problems should also be timed separately rather than as a group, and we should look at the average deviation from mean solution time; this would avoid penalizing people with poor test-taking strategies (i.e. spending an inordinate amount of time on one problem in a timed test, resulting in less time for other problems).

As for IQ being more important than grit, IQ probably explains more variance in success for the average person. On the other hand, if you look at the extreme outliers in terms of success, I would confidently wager than extreme grit is much more common than extreme intelligence.

Isn't efficiency one of the things that allows you to go faster (at the same effort level) ?

Yes and no. A useful analogy is to think of software and hardware. You have a general purpose CPU that runs software designed to solve a particular type of problem. The CPU (your brain) probably has a fixed frequency (you might be able to "overclock" it slightly, but not much). On the other hand, you can completely rewrite the software (your thought process) using better algorithms and get a MASSIVE speed increase.

> [in response to the idea that IQ doesn't change over time] Think about how it would it be if it was the other way around; there might actually be some bad outcomes. Because then parents would be able to totally control their kids with bad parenting, and wreck kids’ IQs for the rest of their lives. Governments could have big influences on people’s IQs by enacting different policies toward different sets of people in the country.

I can't quite put my finger on why I find this assertion so loathsome. As though having autonomy over your intelligence is somehow a betrayal to what I imagine is the interviewee's sense of societal "fairness" or "equality".

That line of thinking applied by the equality of outcome left leads to this particularly loathsome dystopia:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

One thing that put my eyebrows up is that the claim seems so contradictory to what we actually observe. Governments and parents do have big influences on IQ. Unleaded gasoline is the obvious winner, but there's fairly solid evidence that iodized salt, childhood nutrition, acute childhood stress, and traumatic brain damage all cause substantial changes in IQ.

Far from seeing some kind of discriminatory eugenics from all of this (anywhere, even in dictatorships), we see the Flynn effect. Things have gotten better across the board, and continue to whenever we track down a new way to modify IQ.

The suggestion that "controlling IQ would be horrifying" seems so unsupported that it's purely ideological.

To be fair, the author does make your point regarding nutrition:

>[Note: In the developing world, increasing nutrition — namely through iodine supplements — has done a lot to increase IQ scores. And overall, IQ across the globe is rising. These are good trends, and lend evidence to the idea that bettering a child's environment makes the child smarter.]

What is most distasteful is that, with the belief that IQ is set at birth, it legitimizes the study of race and intelligence, which, if history serves as a guide, is very dangerous.

One of the most horrifying things I ever read was the first(second?) chapter of A Brave New World. The thought of not helping a person is bad. Fysically stunting someones growth makes me sick. To just do it to escape the ethical debate at a later point is horrifying.

I've always held with the claim that BNW is far more interesting and applicable to our world than 1984. Totalitarianism is out there, but it's not absolute and it's largely understood as evil. The sort of glib, "everyone is happy" moralism of BNW presents much deeper questions.

Just a note, an r of 0.54 isn't exactly proof that IQ doesn't change over time; I would argue it indicates bounded changeability. I don't know why the researcher holds that data up as proof that IQ is "static"

He said something along the lines of it having variance within some region which matches up with what you said.

This is really surprising to me. It seems the popular narrative is much different from that found by actual researchers. I do have some reservations though. Do all of these correlations (happiness, job success, EQ, general intelligence, etc.) hold up at the higher and lower end of IQ (e.g. 130 -> 150 or 60 -> 80) Does the vast amount of data near the middle cloud what's happening at the ends?

Also, on the age 11 versus age 90 distribution, there appears to be a lot of funneling of the residuals. Lower age 11 IQs seem to have a lot less correlation with later life than higher age 11 IQs. I wonder if this has to do with late development or behavioral problems that cause artificially low IQs.

Either way very interesting article.

That guy seems to put an awful lot of stock in a test that can only correctly identify whether or not you're developmentally disabled.

"Congratulations on your high IQ! You're REALLY REALLY NOT developmentally disabled!"

Outside of identifying developmental disabilities, IQ testing is pretty useless. What's more loathsome is all of the pseudoscience that's crept up through overinterpretation.

I think the idea is, everything that requires skill and people have different ability levels at is an iq test.

That's the kind of thing laymen always say. Whenever I read reports of what the social scientists say it sounds like intelligence testing is one of the few sub fields with consistently reproducible and meaningful results. Even in this short article they contradict your point by stating the military finds it correlates with success. The military filters out those with developmental disabilities.

I thought you can improve reaction times, performance on sats, other iq tests using adrenaline or other stimulants. I have never taken them, but so I read in another hacker news discussion on drugs recently.

Seems to me, you can control intelligence within a day. Get better rest, take some coffee be smarter. Be tired, drink some beer, get dumber.

read all of hacker news, get smarter. Follow links from hacker news to youtube, Reddit, wikipedia, github, etc for more goodness.

Watch lifetime, the shopping network, 5 day cricket match, get dumber (or atleast no smarter during that time).

You give me an iq test, I will show you improvements on it over time in myself and any trainee. You give me someone too dumb. I will give them a computer peripheral brain / hardware to help them.

You can write a program to get good at iq tests, go, image classification. I don't see why I can't train people to get smarter. I do it with my kids all the time.

I have an higher than average IQ and I can't say that it helped me more than grit.

When I was lazy, I failed.

On the other hand, I don't know if I would have failed with a low IQ and not being lazy.

It takes two to tango.

I think a high IQ leads you to know what to quit when and when to persist. In my experience, smart people quit bad things sooner, and persist through good things longer. Stupid people quit the job of a lifetime or break up with a great person when they should have endured, and/or stick with the same horrible job/person through everything even though giving up would have improved their life. Or so the thinking goes.

This is interesting and helpful. Trying not to beat myself up for quickly realizing certain opportunities aren't for me long term.

I wonder why people assume accepting IQ implies a dystopian eugenics future. I see it as an argument for a lot of progressive policies. If everyone is in control of their mental abilities then it follows that lack of success is down to personal laziness and success is all about how diligent a person is. People "deserve" their fates.

On the other hand if some people are born with an advantage, they won the genetic lottery, it seems to me more justifiable to have government policies which prevent the clever from taking advantage of the dim. Today in the US the principle is if you are clever enough you deserve all the money and screw the people who didn;t have the good sense to be born smart.

Wow. Intelligence is actually linked to short-sightedness, apparently. I thought that was an urban myth.

I figured it was related to reading, which might also be correlated with intelligence.

Or acts of self-pollution? (that is an urban myth, right?)

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