IQ is only a minor factor in success | Hacker News Reader

IQ is only a minor factor in success

bloomberg.com

261 pointstempw273 comments

I'm probably decently smart, but I'm not rich at all. In fact I'm quite poor by most people's standards.

I'm also really happy and work fewer hours per week than anyone I know.

If there's one thing I worry about it's that I should be trying to be rich because I probably have the means to make that happen. I might be making 200k/yr if I worked full time. I might be able to start a successful company if I put my mind to it. I've never been able to convince myself that it's worth it.

Money just doesn't seem that useful to me. I don't need a car, I'd actually prefer a smaller studio for less money if I could find one. My bills add up to maybe $1400/month. It's trivial to make that much money. I have a fulfilling part time job which I could sleep through and still cover my expenses. Every dollar I earn writing software is a bonus. It constantly surprises me how much money my peers are capable of spending.

Fixing things is also really fun. I have $300 dollar headphones, they cost me $0 because I pulled them out of the trash and spent a couple hours overhauling them. The biggest material source of joy in my life is a $280 bicycle, my laptop cost the same, both off craigslist. Going out for a night on the town can cost hundreds of dollars, if I want to indulge in a vice I can buy enough weed to last me 3 months for the same amount of money. I'm always free to spend time with friends doing cool things.

The skills I have that I use to earn money are all learned from spending free time messing around doing small projects just for the hell of it. I wouldn't have these skills if I didn't have so much free time to explore whatever strikes my fancy.

It really seems like the point at which working harder to earn money hits diminishing returns comes much much earlier that most people think.

I own my own business and the company is worth some millions of dollars, so I am "rich" though by American standards, not really. My salary is rather low for being the founder. My partner has an equally low salary. Some employees make more than me.

I was formerly a data scientist with a salary 2x of what my current one is. I was miserable.

Today, I love work. I create things. I have two kids and a wife and she stays home with them and does actual tough work. I wear clothes from companies we partner with (sports science, so lots of universities give us free stuff) and company-logoed clothes only. I don't have expensive hobbies. My wife gets all of my money and I invest things at home like Blue Apron, a house cleaner, day care, etc, to make family life better.

Having a job I love and a company that fulfills my vision negated all need for tangible things in my life. When I was actually "rich" in regards to salary, liquid money, I was consumed by stuff. It was terrible.

Life's good now. I want for nothing expensive. I make this comment to tell you that you may be able to have both if your work is something that you truly enjoy.

I am rather curious what type of company you created. You mentioned sports science? Something in the direction of moneyball?

Email him :) mike dot anon at hotmail

"I wear clothes from companies we partner with (sports science..."

I'm intrigued... would you mind sharing a bit more about your business?

Diminishing returns for your personal enjoyment, sure. But there are plenty of ways any extra money you had could be spent to make a huge impact for other people: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/#approa...

I wish more people saw it this way. Philanthropy is the only thing driving me to amass wealth. I used to be ok with being poor and spending a lot of free time on side projects but more and more I'm becoming disgusted with myself and those around me for living selfishly when so many people around the world are in pain.

I found that there are actually relatively few people with the type of experience most of us here at HN have that work in philanthropy. I mean people with IT background, can-do attitude, consider scaling whatever you build to million or billions of people, entrepreneurial and able to pitch well for investments.

If I work as a reasonably successful IT entrepreneur (I don't think I am going to be Gates, Brinn or Zuckerberg). At most I will be able to give away few million to charity/philanthropy. That is going to have a relatively limited impact. International development funding is $130 billion / year.

Taking my skills and helping spending those $130 billion sensibly, by applying my skills is having a considerably bigger impact, I think.

My team is routinely involved in country level data-to-decision work around things like drinking water supply, sanitation access, food security, agriculture efficiency, climate change adaptation, disaster respons etc. If I add up the population of the countries where we our tools are used for rural drinking water mapping and prioritisation of investments, we end up with about half a billion people.

For me, the best way to use my time I think is helping others by applying my skills to the problem at hand. Working for a faceless shareholder (mine and your pension fund and a bunch of rich people) on something that may be technically interesting, but didn't make a big positive impact on the world and the people in it, just wasn't enough for me anymore. What I do now is more satisfying and has a much bigger positive impact, I think.

I'd love to be involved in something like that. I feel like most helpful innovation is hardware based or science-research based. I'm not a trained weather data scientist, for example, I'm just a boring backend developer. Have you seen much philanthropy positions for backend devs or any suggestions on where to look?

Sounds really awesome - if you'd care to share, I'd love to find out what company you work with!

edit: haha I'm dumb, just checked your profile.

I'd hardly say that I'm successful, and I know everyone I work with is smarter than me.

But I've been poor (poorer than you appear to be), and I'd be pretty happy to never, ever go back.

Money is a lubricant for so many things.

My impression is money gets more important as you get older because your ability to get other people to give it to you for work goes way down and your medical expenses go way up. At least that's what I've seen in my family

For nearly all countries in the developed world the medical expenses part is barely an issue.

I suggest you reconsider this. Not necessarily change your answer, but...

Earlier in my career, I chose jobs based on interest, challenge, excitement, and fun. As a result, I had a low salary history.

When I turned 45, I found myself in a position where, in absolute terms, I was making significantly less than the average for my experience and education in my area; relatively, I was making much less than coworkers who were significantly less competent (I make no claims as to my absolute competence) and receiving much less respect. To the extent that I was called in when the sky was falling but was ignored when pointing out that and obviously poor decision would result in the sky falling.

Fortunately, I had a habit of packing money into a brokerage account and a modest inheritance, so I am now happily unemployed and don't have to deal with the horseshit.

I just have to figure out what to do when I'm 75 and broke.

I am 36 and I feel I've been overly passive throughout my career. I only "activate" in emergency mode and during the last 15 months (a stable job) I started reflecting and understanding that I only ever tried hard only NOT to sink, and not a centimeter beyond that.

Your experience is something I fear will share in just several years if I don't get off my ass and invest in my future.

To be fair, I had a plethora of pretty valid reasons which I'll not list here. I grew to realize they gradually devolved in mere excuses however in my mind. They were valid for 5-6 years (between 19 and 25, let's say, and even that's a lot of time). Beyond those I just kind of loved the slack they were giving me.

TL;DR: I am stressed, tired and realizing that if I don't start getting much more things done, I'll face a VERY GRIM future.

I'm guessing you are single and not planning to have kids, right?

I'm not single, but you're right about the kids. In my world view having a kid is similar to an 18 year prison sentence.

My parental units divorced when I was six and my brothers and I grew up essentially feral. I was 16yo when my girlfriend got pregnant. After a few weeks she fessed up, and tests later proved, it wasn't mine... I always wore a rubber, the other dude never did. I had my vasectomy at 17 using my fake ID(easy enough in Cal City circa '87) and continued to practice safe sex, JIC. 30 years later, no regrets. I have lived similar to errantspark's minimalist lifestyle for 30 years, watching friends get married, have kids and drifting away while I ride the feast/famine waves of a single independent contractor. It's not as glorious as some outsiders believe, but for an introvert from an abused childhood it is the optimum life I am able to provide for myself. My only advice for my younger counterparts: always have a savings buffer, the 'famine' cycles become exponentially harder to weather the older you get.

Kids are great. I have 3 kids and to me it is nothing like a prison sentence. I love watching them grow up, it is taking me back to the happiness and carelessness of my own childhood every day. It also gives me a sense of purpose that I would have never found without kids and what I gave up in freedom is made up in love, affection and just plain fun.

Based on my experience I am 100% convinced that people that can't find joy in the happiness of others should remain single and even more important: never, ever have kids.

> Based on my experience I am 100% convinced that people that can't find joy in the happiness of others should remain single and even more important: never, ever have kids.

As a counterargument, I've seen a few people turn into complete monsters once their kids were born. Their justification was "I have kids now and I'll do literally anything for my family, fuck everyone else and their needs." (paraphrased). It's all fine and dandy until the instinct for survival kicks in.

Unless you're talking about friends in warzones I don't really see how their kids are a justification for being, or acting like a dick.

I don't see it either, but I guess people can justify whatever they want to justify.

I think people like this were that way before they had kids.

Dude. Just because someone is adamantly against having children themselves doesn't mean that they "can't find joy in the happiness of others." My wife and I decided to not have kids. I don't know that I would equate it to "an 18 year prison sentence" but...I wouldn't not call it that. I love all my little nieces and nephews; they're one of the best parts of my life. I also thank the noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster every time I'm with them for more than an hour my wife and I made the choice we did.

I said that people that can't find joy in the happiness of others should not have kids, not the other way around. That would be a stupid thing to say.

Fair enough. Apologies for misinterpreting.

It was a snotty thing to say. Even making the judgment that a another person is incapable of enjoying the happiness of others is a really judgmental and overall shitty sentiment. It's doubtful the person you are responding to would have the intimate information needed to make that assessment, further people are ever evolving for the most part. Just a shitty thought all around.

Where do I make that judgement? You're turning it around again. Read my comment, there is no judgement of people whatsoever, only the claim that you should not have kids if you're unable to enjoy the joy of others. Because otherwise, yes, they are likely to make you feel like you're subject to an 18 year prison sentence.

English is not my first language, can anyone explain why people read my comment and reverse the sentence structure?

They do because they see the intent to make that erroneous connection with backup plan of telling you 'only' said it one way and not the other (can't tell my self too). Higher order logic.

Kids can make you happy or tired, or both, too many factors for your parenting to go wrong way. Especially if you aren't rich. Imo, friends and gfs are far easier to get mutual happiness with, because they are self-established. I've lost too many friends to happy families they hate now, so personally I don't get your statement any way around.

I wanted kids. I believe your statement is still correct. In my case I subjected myself to prison because of biology ruling over my logical processing unit. Humanity goes on as a result of that, I am quite sure of it. :)

I get that, but my friends are starting to have kids and I'm rather looking forward to being their crazy uncle and teaching them how to solder and take things apart etc. I love kids, I just don't want to be the one primarily responsible for them

I cannot fault you. Most days I wonder why I decided to have kids. I realize that I didn't decide it in any sort of logical manner that implies normal decision-making. If I went purely on logic and rational thought, I certainly wouldn't have done it. Alas, that wasn't in the cards. I wouldn't take it back, but I tell everyone who is on the fence about having kids to very strongly reconsider if they want to go through with it.

On its face, it's an incredibly dumb choice. But biology wins out, sometimes..

It depends how big the field you have to plow is. Having many kids helps in keeping and maintaining the field then using it to grow food (for you and your free plowering kids).

Some kind of bootstrap if you will.

I don't really know about your situation and if you are actually doing it now. But based on experience, people who get married usually dismiss friendship with singles and instead look for friendships with people who have families/kids.

You certain thats not bi-directional, or more likely - the other way around? As a single person who can go do fun things at the drop of the hat without having to get permission from someone else, or set up a babysitter, or any other number of roadblocks, trying to set up an outing with married with kids crowd is incredibly irritating, time consuming and often fruitless.

A lot of this is simple scheduling pattern differences.

As an example, my no-kids friends typically schedule things like dinner parties starting at 8:30pm or so. The ones with kids would aim for 5:30 or 6 instead.

Well... in order for you to wonder at how "biology ruled over your logical processing unit" a lot of people had to sacrifice their freedoms, before you. Don't beat yourself over it, it's such an important thing that it is equal to "being alive". And what you lose as a person, your DNA gains as a living system. DNA is such a chump. I never realized how much work it does. Every protein in our bodies is copied from DNA. It does so much copying and processing, it's amazing. And for such a hardworking pal, it's OK to sacrifice yourself. It's busting its ass too, in order for any of the billions of processes in our bodies to happen.

What if you value your consciousness and the here and now more than the idea of your DNA staying alive well after you're dead?

To me, my consciousness is my identity (myself). The body is just a vessel for it, and once it craps out, and takes the consciousness down with it, I couldn't care less about my DNA (a bit of a tautology, but you get the idea).

Yes, I agree, we can value our consciousness more than the idea of DNA survival, but the reason it exists in the first place is to protect the DNA. It's just a mechanism to adapt and accommodate the organism to the changing external conditions.

I wrote it in so nice way. I'm usually more harsh to people.

Deciding not to have kids because it's too much of an effort is so selfish act. You're throwing away all the effort your ancestors put in to get to the point of you being alive.

Let's not get caught up on what dead ancestors may think. The world is already overpopulated. Overpopulation causes depletion of natural resources, degradation of the environment, conflicts and wars caused by such lack of resources, and there being less resources per capita. Adding people when it is causing problems like these is harmful.

However, people having 2 or 3 or thereabouts children isn't something to be worried about too much, so go ahead if you want to. But people who have lots of children has to stop. This is per person, so it includes men who have children with different partners. If it is left too late, then less can be done about it.

Just in terms of numbers isn't a man having a single child each with 10 women better than 10 couples each having two kids?

In response to your question, have another question. Does a man having a child with woman mean she won't have other children? I don't see any reason it does.

Would a man having a child with 10 women cause huge social problem? It certainly does. Do you want to be a single woman with kids? Doubt it.

Why should men get special status over women with the number of children they have? I really don't see any reason for that. There are men who deliberately get women pregnant and then leave them because they think they are great and winning life because they have so many children and let other people care for them. Those sort of people would support only having limits applied to women.

> Why should men get special status over women with the number of children they have?

I never said they should.

> There are men who deliberately get women pregnant and then leave them

What in the world does that have to do with anything?

> Those sort of people would support only having limits applied to women.

What are you talking about? I never said anything about any sort of limit.

Having kids is a far more selfish act than not. Our species and our planet would be way, way better off if about 9/10 of us elected not to reproduce for a few generations.

You are presumably delighted to know that Europe is in fact dying off with only France having a fertility rate of 2.0 (2014) which is not enough to sustain the population. One wonders who's going to be paying those taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly and the other massive liabilities of the European welfare states.

At < 2 replacement rate, the populations of Portugal, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria just won't be around in a few generations. The cultural identity of Europe will disappear on present trends.

Relying on fertility to prop up the welfare state was never a sustainable model to begin with. The adjustment will not be pleasant whoever is left in 200 or so years will be a lot better off because of it. To say nothing of all the non-human species with whom we share the world.

> One wonders who's going to be paying those taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly and the other massive liabilities of the European welfare states.

Can't pay for it. It's all gonna collapse =)

Couldn't agree more.

That's one of the reasons we decided to not have kids. There are too many humans consuming too many resources in an unsustainable lifestyle.

You are normally "way more harsh to people" for making the very personal decision as to whether they will have children?

You do realize just how offensive you are being? Whether other people have children is not for you to decide or deride.

I wrote "...because it's too much of an effort" was a really selfish reason. If you decide not to have kids on some grounds, I don't mind at all.

It amazes me how shallow has people's attention on HN become. Not even bothering to read the whole sentence. I feel like I'm on Reddit.

> I'd put this up there with racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.

This is probably the most offensive thing in this thread.

You are allowed to disagree with other people's choices. You are allowed to voice that disagreement, even publicly. People are allowed to think you're stupid for caring whether or not someone else has children.

Nothing about any of that is even remotely "discrimination" and to imply it's anywhere in the same universe as racism or sexism is offensive to real problems everywhere.

I'd argue that being harsh to women for their reproductive choices is a key component of modern sexism.

Discrimination has a variety of forms.

It takes a man and a woman to have a child. Stop trying to shoehorn cries of sexism into everything.

Sure. And women and men can both obviously face discrimination over their reproductive choices. The discrimination just disproportionally falls on women. Ie. less likely to be hired because she may have children. Expected behaviours and judgements if she doesn't.

What do women have to do with it?

> You're throwing away all the effort

How many children must one have before one is morally absolved of this sin?

Zero. I only wrote that for those citing "it's too much of an effort" as a reason not the have kids.

I intended to ask: how many children must I have before I'm allowed to cite "it's too much of an effort" as my reason for not having another child?

The topic is deciding to have kids or not. I doesn't matter how many.

As I understand it, though, the argument applies almost equally to deciding whether to have fewer than $n$ children, whether $n$ is 1 or larger.

You have no idea what his ancestors wanted.

I have two kids and whether or not they have kids makes no difference at all to me. Likewise, my parents never pressured me to have kids.

Most of our ancestors didn't get to reproduce all that offspring by being nice guys.

If you think about it for a moment they can't nearly have been as noble as they're made out to be, by far.

Reproduction is not a virtue in and of itself. There will come a moment when the next generation will not forgive us for this overpopulated earth.

But of course I never tell my friends what I really think when they tell me the happy news of their expectancy ...

> In my world view having a kid is similar to an 18 year prison sentence.

Unless something happens to them you have offspring for the rest of your life; not for 18 years. If you're referring to them leaving the house at 18 y.o. The US trend is that 18 y.o. stay living at home. Personally, I expect students to be the exception to that.

His world view isn't possible to have once you have a child. It's the world view that makes sense when you don't have the data.

How can you possibly claim to know how he would feel? Maybe he's different than you.

Think of kids as cloning yourself, or as close to time travel as your going to get. Your kids let you relive emotions and experiences from your childhood that you forgot about, and you get a chance to guide them through life with benefit of hindsight. I enjoy it. Not to mention free manual labor.

Less so when you have a lot of money.

eh, I have kids and don't make that much money, but I think the point is still valid.

My colleague and I were talking about this paper the other day because it led to huge questions about all the assumptions underlying our definitions of "success."

For example, my wife and I's household income was fairly big before we had kids, but not really anything noteworthy. It allowed us to save up enough so that her staying home with them isn't too much of a financial strain. I do worry about the long-term consequences in terms of savings, but I also know that to her, staying home with them at this age means a lot to her, and her going to work to be away from them was miserable when she was doing that. I think she feels lucky.

I could have gone into something more lucrative, and probably could be pulling in more money now, but it would mean less flexibility for me, and more stress, etc. I'd also have about as much independence now at my job as someone could have (for better or worse). Are we not successful? I'm not always sure, because I've thought a lot of changing careers, but one reason I haven't is because I'm not sure it would be worth it on balance. It might be, but it might not be.

To abstract it a bit, think about Donald Trump: is he successful? A lot of people would say yes, but is he a model of who we want to be, or our children to be? Sure, some people would say yes, but more would probably say no. So should income be a marker of success?

One problem with these studies (and I think they're valuable, so I don't mean to suggest otherwise) is that what constitutes success is so variable, and is so detached from income, that I'm not sure how to interpret them.

I mean, sure, all other things being equal, I'd rather have more than less money, but all other things are definitely not equal in life. There's pros and cons to everything. Income is a very weak metric of what an ideal life goal is.

I respect your calm-mannered response.

IMO part of my reason not to want kids is the fact that I am doing awfully with money even though I am a programmer in demand (which means I do a lot of things wrong on this platform, which is a fact I became painfully aware of in the last one year)... and thus, any extra expense would literally kill me in the long-term. I barely manage well right now.

That said, I don't think I'll be happy watching my kids wanting a toy, or new boots, or simply a scarf and a hat for the winter, or a cheap gaming console, and me being unable to buy them those. Where's the happiness in seeing your children being miserable? That's the thing that pushes normal peaceful people to attempt robberies!

So your case is anecdotal. Works pretty well for you but I know that for me and many others it won't. So my case is anecdotal as well.

All in all, I do my best not to let hormones or misplaced "duty" principles decide for me, and use my rational thought for my decisions.

I derive a lot of satisfaction from fixing things myself. I watch YouTube clips that show me how to do anything to my Jeep. I recently bought an old farm house that's a constant list of new projects to work on, and a yard to landscape. I feel like Hank Hill sometimes, and my co-workers act like it's not worth their time to do those kind of things (they just buy new cars whenever something little happens to them). But I've been pleasantly surprised by how much fun it is to save money and learn new skills. It's a great feeling when you have the right tool for an important job.

I am gradually travelling from your colleagues' state of mind to yours lately.

In my case though, it's not about "not worth my time". It's just that I am always tired and thus somewhat cranky, unhealthy and have a lot of things to care for -- debts, teeth fixes (and several other health issues), proper TV stand and bedroom floor fixators, get proper kitchenware (like, I have a pan that USED to be teflon for example), you name it -- loads of thigns to care for because they simply aren't where I want them to be. And I am talking things I find basic, not luxuries.

While I am in this drama, I really do find it hard to just screw everything and go fix an old PC or a bike lying around.

I started finding inner peace in tinkering with things but it's an uphill battle against my stress and messed-up life -- and it's gonna take a while for me to fully get there.

No real topic in my comment. Just wanted to offer you another point of view.

The thing is, that you're incredibly successful. You live life the way you want it and have the freedom to decide what you want to spend your time on. This, for me, is success.

What do you plan to do when you're old? Right now it might be simple to earn enough money to pay your bills, but if you don't earn enough to save a significant portion of it you risk not having enough once earning money becomes harder.

Unless he decides to make a one-way hike into the tundra when he can no longer work, the kids other people "selfishly" decided to have will support him (even if indirectly, e.g. by working at the companies that he has equity in as retirement investments).

For intelligent people, it can be nice to go to congresses a lot. Or buy computer gear, like a big GPU rig, just to play with (or develop a business from). Just some examples why money can still be nice.

You are like a guru of minimalism and self reliance. Bravo! I feel the same - we don't need so much money because, after fulfilling our basic needs, we have many other sources of fulfillment.

>It really seems like the point at which working harder to earn money hits diminishing returns comes much much earlier that most people think.

How old are you? Do you have children? Sick or elderly family to take care of?

I get a kick out of young people in the software industry talking about how easy it is. Of course it is when you're by yourself with very particular interests. But life circumstances can and do change.

So, no family to care for? What level of savings security do you have? What happens to you if you get cancer, or break a leg? What will sustain you in retirement?

If you live outside the US in some country where human basic needs are guaranteed, your approach would make more sense to me!

I love this. To me, this is real 'smarts'.

Could you explain what part of being a data scientist made you hate it?

How do you spend most of your free time?

I'd say about a 50/50 split between useless things like: hanging out with friends playing video games, riding my bike in traffic in a semi irresponsible manner, smoking weed, climbing trees; and useful things like reverse engineering/modifying things, exploring programming languages, painting/drawing, doing 3D graphics/art, working on various side projects and building things that come to mind.

Some examples of side recent projects if you're interested: a virtual reality strange attractor explorer, a high resolution bike speedometer/light system and a tool to record and subsequently play images from cassette tapes.

> hanging out with friends playing video games, riding my bike in traffic in a semi irresponsible manner, smoking weed, climbing trees; and useful things like reverse engineering/modifying things, exploring programming languages, painting/drawing, doing 3D graphics/art, working on various side projects and building things that come to mind.

Eerily similar to me, except that I have spent less than 400$ a month for the past 4 years due to where I live. I've traded most every comfort (hot water, air conditioning, possessions in general), which I could not care less about, for the ability to practically never work. I have a laptop, speakers, a table, a chair, a mattress on the floor, two fans, art supplies, sports equipment, and that's about it. I will live like this forever and my only motivation to become very rich is to help other people.

What do you do for work?

Getting rich, at least under our current system, has a lot more to do with luck (mainly being in the right place at the right time) than it does with being smart or even working hard. The reason perseverance (which is related to working hard, but is not quite the same thing) helps is that the more willing you are to keep playing the game without winning the more likely you are to eventually win.

(You can see this dynamic at work in the small here on HN. Getting a lot of upvotes has more to do with getting a pithy comment in early enough that it rises to the top where it gets noticed before the story falls off the front page and people stop paying attention. The wisest comment in the world won't get any love if it's submitted after the story drops off the home page. A similar dynamic also plays itself out on the New page. It's even more dramatic there because very few people ever look at the New page. And yet, the more participate, the more likely you are to hit an upvote jackpot.)

It depends on what you mean by "rich". If your goal is to be a billionaire, then yes, luck plays a major role. But if you simply want to get to the 99th percentile of income/wealth, that can be achieved in a pretty replicable manner. Study hard in HS -> Go to a good college -> Work your ass off for a good GPA -> go do a MBA/JD/MD/CS degree at an elite university -> get a six figure job and work your ass off. Not much luck involved there.

Interestingly, you don't need to have mensa-level IQ to achieve the above either. Hard work and grit is far more important, which is what the article is saying as well.

There cannot possibly be a reliable process to get you to the 99th percentile, because by definition 99% of people won't get there. Hard work will reliably get you to the 99th percentile only in a world where only 1% of people work hard.

> "Hard work will reliably get you to the 99th percentile only in a world where only 1% of people work hard."

Yes, and that's exactly the world we live in today. Most people don't work hard enough in their teenage-years/20s to become high paying doctors/lawyers/bankers.

Do you have any actual evidence to support that assertion, or are you just affirming the consequent? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent)

I'm making an assertion based on my own personal experiences, just like I'm assuming you're doing as well. I've yet to meet someone who studied/worked all the time during their high-school/college/career, and still failed to secure a six figure income.

A six-figure income does not put you in the top 1%. $100k/yr doesn't even get you into the top 20%. To get into the top 1% you have to make more than $500k/yr.

http://www.investmentu.com/article/detail/35049/mailbag-how-...

You're comparing two different metrics. Your source talks about household income, which is generally a measure of two primary incomes. You're comparing a single income to two incomes.

whatsmypercent.com utilizes some good datasets to build out income percentiles. They suggest that $100k/year puts in the the 96% percentile. The 80% percentile starts around $42k/year.

That being said, it is kind of a long tail situation, due to the effects of wealth inequality in this country. The 99% percentile starts at $193k/year.

(Assuming US differs and jobs here) A six figure income is way below 99%. It's below 90% for most six figure earners in the US. You need seven figures to get to the top 1%. I know smart people who worked very hard in high school and university who aren't even in the 90%. In fact, you are very unlikely to get into the 1% based on things you learn in college. You mostly have to be in finance or run a successful business to get there, or be quite lucky.

The top 1% in the US is around $500k/year, but that's not actually what you care about for measuring wealth. Many members of the top 1% are only there for 1 year, and of those who make it multiple years, even fewer manage 10+.

The number you should care about is net-worth. High net worth from a lifetime of careful financial decisions is much more indicative of success than being in the 1% for a year or two. It requires hard work, planning, and life-long frugality. This is in line with OPs assertion that working hard and planning for the future is uncommon and will get you far.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.htm...

Ah, yes. If someone challenges the luck/grit dogma, throw the just world fallacy at it method.

"only in a world where only 1% of people work hard." -- AND choose the steps that are reproducible. I'm very smart, but I got an English Degree thinking I would be a writer taught english for pennies and almost went into philosophy before thinking I didn't want to be poor and went into development (already had taught myself programming in highschool). Not all paths that can be worked hard on produce wealth.

>replicable manner. Study hard in HS -> Go to a good college -> Work your ass off for a good GPA -> go do a MBA/JD/MD/CS degree at an elite university -> get a six figure job and work your ass off. Not much luck involved there.

>Not much luck involved there.

Except being born in a white rich household with access to food, water, shelter, support system, good high school so you can go to an elite college. Do you think everyone born in Africa/China (just to name a few countries) have the option to take this route you describe?

I was making my comment in the context of developed nations where everyone has access to public schooling and college loans/financial-aid. It certainly doesn't apply to those in developing nations.

I've noticed that a lot of successful people got there by doing things that, on the surface, don't seem to need a lot of brainpower. But, when you get to know them more, you find that they're smart. I think that very often, being smart leads someone to succeed but invisibly, so it's easy for others who don't know the whole story to attribute it to luck.

Being smart helps stack the deck in your favor, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Ben Carson and Steve Harvey are both rich, but I wouldn't consider either of them particularly smart.

Neurosurgeons have higher than average IQ, and Carson is one of the best. He's smart.

I don't know much about Harvey, but ironically I found this article http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/steve-harvey-success-series-ki...

>Spend time with a person who is very successful in some field or pursuit; it doesn't matter what.

After a few minutes you'll probably think, "Wait, this guy isn't any smarter than me."

After a few more minutes you'll probably think, "Hey, I'm actually smarter than he is."

Success doesn't require a high IQ or some special intangible quality that you don't have. Successful people only become "special" after they succeed; before they put in all that time and effort they were just like everyone else.

Spend time with a few successful people and you will realize you are just as capable of achieving great things.

I disagree with some of this, as above.

There's some of each, some lucky and some skilled. But I think skill plays a bigger role in the variance of similarly situated people. Luck in the sense of where you're born, how privileged your family is, etc play a larger role than luck later in life, I think.

I also consider brains a luck factor as well.

> Neurosurgeons have higher than average IQ

That's the conventional wisdom, but is it really true? Or do they just have above average mechanical skills?

I followed Carson closely during the presidential campaign and I saw no evidence that he's particularly smart (and quite a bit of evidence to the contrary).

I know a couple of people who went through medical school. It is not easy. Being smart certainly makes it easier (to get in as well as getting through all of it), so doctors are selected for intelligence, as well as hard working.

AFAICT getting through med school mainly requires the ability to memorize a ton of random facts and a willingness to defer to authority and put up with a boat load of bullshit. The ability to actually think critically (which is part of my definition of "smart") is not only not a requirement, it can be a distinct disadvantage.

Memorization skills are g-loaded and hence correlated with other g-loaded measures, like critical thinking.

I'd even put "willingness to put up with BS for an eventual reward" in that category, see marshmallow studies and e.g. http://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20080910/delayed-gratificati...

What can I say? There are exceptions to every rule, and I see very little direct evidence of critical thinking skills in Ben Carson. Geez, the man is a YEC. That's about as far from rationality as you can get without being locked up.

Fair enough, I guess.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/seven-nobe... might change your mind on whether there are smart YECs. Apparently the inventor of the MRI machine was one.

Like I said, there are exceptions to every rule. There might be smart YEC's, but to me it's a very strong counterindication. Also, that's far from the only evidence there is with regards to Ben Carson. Try searching for "stupid things Ben Carson has said" some time.

You are aware of the correlation between being smart and thinking things which aren't true, right? Smart people are very good at rationalizing.

No, that's news to me. Do tell me more.

People have beliefs and goal functions (religious - obey God; love / protect spouse and family; acquire money and power; maintain health and increase status, and positive image of self.)

A powerful brain is like an engine with more horsepower and torque - like a fast car, if you're going the wrong way it will just get you there even faster.

It's very human to be unwilling to admit error or change your mind. The smarter you are, the more tools you have at your disposal to reason out complicated methods by which you may be correct. Of course, if your position is untenable enough, even these methods will appear ludicrous from the outside.

You can, therefore, be an excellent doctor and even develop new methods for brain surgery while being simultaneously unwilling to drop absurd beliefs inculcated into you during childhood. Yes, you sound stupid to everyone else, but if you've extended and reinforced these beliefs over your entire lifetime you may be so unwilling to drop them that ridicule isn't enough of a push.

Have you ever seen people you know personally do live events / media on that scale? Carson did an amazing job considering his background.

I have a relative who is a TV news reporter. I have personal acquaintances who have done live TV interviews, and I have done a couple of those myself (on Fox News). Does that count?

And what exactly is it about Carson's background that makes you rate his performance as "amazing"? He seemed amazingly bad to me. I've even watched some of Carson's performances as a motivational speaker before he got into politics and he still seemed to me like (how shall I put this?) not the brightest light in the firmament.

Getting rich is doing instead of thinking.

Smart people tend to overthink to much.

No, unfortunately it's not. I know this from first hand experience. I've been doing my whole life, but the most money I ever made (by a huge margin) came from a stroke of dumb luck.

EDIT: That should have read, "I've been doing startups my whole life"

Getting rich is having instead of being. Dumb people underthink.

no, being rich is having. in order to get rich, you must do.

many smart people overthink, constantly, and to a fault. it usually manifests in the form of 'what if something goes wrong???' and spirals from there.

any rich person will tell you, things go wrong constantly, and at the worst possible time. the only important thing is your confidence in your ability to fix things when they break.

> it usually manifests in the form of 'what if something goes wrong???' and spirals from there.

That is because we compare to the successful rich only, not all those who tried to become rich and utterly failed.

This is just masculine vs feminine thinking. Or VC versus slow growth. Or the way we nurture children in the West vs cats, or in Africa. Or quality vs quantity.

You never hear about all the times people prayed to $diety and it didn't help. You never hear about all those people who went to Stanford and didn't graduate. You never hear about all those people who made a startup and failed. OK, you do (on the latter, here), but it takes courage, shame, and selfishness.

PS: You might wanna use some capital letters at the start of a sentence.

i swear all you trolls read from the same exact playbook. "nobody hears about the failures"?

really? i hear about plenty of failures all around me. i see restaurants shutting down left and right. i see people having mental breakdowns, public freakouts, people drop out of school. marriages fall apart, houses get repossessed, stock markets crash, people go bankrupt, even commit suicide.

startups failing and people not getting rich is honestly the least, most insignificant of all of life's failures.

but so what? so just do nothing with your life? never try anything? grow up.

> so just do nothing with your life? never try anything?

That's not the point. The point is that many fail, the success / failure ratio is low. Period. No need to be judgmental past that. Or resort to namecalling.

If you think someone is trolling. Don't reply. Ignore them. Heck, report them.

Sounds a bit like,

http://www.shenlanguage.org/lambdassociates/htdocs/blog/bipo...

I can add that academia is generally equally part of the same order. The game gets quite annoying after a while, since you realize one is basically doing the same x + delta thing and calling it the next great coming.

Interesting. I'm a 1%er and I have a piece of paper that says I'm pretty smart, but:

    > a personality trait marked by
    > diligence, perseverance and
    > self-discipline

I see myself as pretty lazy, impulsive, and slap-dash, and tend to use my brain to brute-force lazy solutions to problems.

I am too lazy and don't have the concentration span to pay attention much in meetings, but can generally utter something profound near the end which makes it look like I was paying attention the whole time.

I have always assumed I'm just coasting by on a pretty useful brain.

IMO everybody is lazy.

The difference is that some people are lazy to do, some are lazy to think, some to interact socially, .. I'm yet to know a person that is not lazy. By observation, I consider that people tend to be lazy in areas where they are not naturally good.

I can definitely relate. I'm not rich, but I do alright. I have a high IQ (according to "official" tests available), but I don't feel I'm smarter than anyone.

I however do feel that I'm lazy, and have "cheated" my way through life by cunning rather than legitimately solving problems the way they're "supposed" to. I guess that's a skill in its own right, but it's made it harder for me to actually learn new stuff because my brain wants to get by with as little work as possible.

Hate to hijack the thread, but a lot of that speaks to me.

    > I have a high IQ, but I don't
    > feel I'm smarter than anyone.

Quite. My recently acquired particular piece of paper puts it beyond any shred of doubt, objectively, but it's only recently I've really acknowledged it. I suspect this has been immensely annoying for people around me.

    > it's made it harder for me to
    > actually learn new stuff
    > because my brain wants to get
    > by with as little work as
    > possible

Yes! A related symptom for me was assuming that people who were good at stuff I'd never bothered to learn were a lot smarter than me.

That's not a hijack, so it's quite alright. I replied simply because I recognized a similarly typed human :)

It is possible for you to overcome your laziness and impulsiveness and direct your attention toward things that help your long-term goals. There are a lot of little pieces to doing this. One of them that I'm doing right now is reading "The Willpower Instinct" and trying out the stuff in it. If you want a more expensive, harder to ignore way to do this, you could try going to a CFAR camp.

I'm not affiliated with CFAR or anything, this is an option I am seriously considering though.

I have looked at CFAR before, and have inhaled any amount of self development literature.

The only thing I don't struggle to find intrinsic motivation for is programming. I am yet to find a long term goal that resonates at all. All success so far in my life feels entirely attributable to getting bored and saying "what else is there?" and/or seeking external validation. I earn just enough to fly business class whenever I fly because I enjoy the comfort aspect and the external validation that comes with it. The next financial jump is likely to come from wanting to fly private, because why not?

It seems self evident to me that this is deeply unhealthy, but ironically I'm yet to find a solution.

Oh, alright. This is a bit different from my experience. I've pretty consistently had long-term desires but been pretty bad at enacting them.

Earlier when I didn't really want anything I thought it would be nice to make a bunch of money so that my future self who had a better idea about what he wanted would have that. This turned out ok, currently a lot of what I want is to know that I won't have to work if I don't want to.

>I'm a 1%er

Are you self-made or did you inherit it? No offense intended either way, I just mean that anyone can be "lazy, impulsive" etc. and be a 1%er if they have a trust fund. If you're self-made, odds are that you see yourself this way but actually aren't (similar to supermodels that call themselves fat or ugly), or you got this way after you made the money and now have the freedom to act any way you choose.

Self-made. Father was an expat civil servant so very expensive secondary education was paid for, though.

    > odds are that you see
    > yourself this way but
    > actually aren't

Certainly possible. I just see such a gigantic gap between how hard I could be working and how hard I actually am. I'm not sure how it relates to other people.

Epic honesty.

I'm not addressing the claim of this article, just the methods.

IQ has a misleading (and factually inaccurate) name. The Q stands for quotient, but an actual IQ is not a quotient at all. IQs are ordinal ONLY. They allow you (to the extent that IQ tests measure intelligence) to rank people, not assign numerical values. It is not possible from IQ scores to say "Alice is x% more intelligent than Bob", only "Alice is more intelligent than Bob".

Due to the non-cardinal nature of IQ scores, the correlation with income as reported in the article isn't something that you can really do. To do this, we would need a cardinal measurement of intelligence instead.

Also, IQ tests become less accurate in the outer deviations. Just about impossible to test for a difference between 140 to 150 IQ, or 60 to 70. How much sleep a person got and their diet can change a brain's plasticity by more than that number of points.

IQ tests aren't a great measure of plasticity in the first place - they're just the best thing we have to measure on a wide scale. Plasticity is a far more personal attribute. Many IQ tests just repeat the same problems, and a person can improve their score without really learning anything but how to take an IQ test.

Throw someone something entirely new and you may get real insight into their mental plasticity.

For some more details, I bookmarked this page that explains "IQ", so that I can post it in forums whenever the subject comes up :-)

http://www.michna.com/iq.htm

Relevant paragraph quoted:

Misconception: The IQ is a direct measure of brain performance. For example, somebody with an IQ of 120 can do 20% more mental work in the same amount of time than somebody with an IQ of 100.

In truth the IQ is a purely statistical measure. It has no direct relation to brain performance, is not proportional to it, and doesn't even have any linear or otherwise straightforward relation to it. The only thing you can say is that somebody with a higher IQ will show higher scores on most other brain performance tests as well, but the IQ doesn't say how much higher.

To clarify: My comment is in support of the parent. Could the downvoters please explain what they think is wrong that I add MORE information and a link to an extended explanation??

I think many people here just don't like it when people tell them that IQ is not as important as they think.

I also got downvoted in the following comment sometime ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7977021

where I quoted researchers saying basically that creativity tests are the "...best childhood predictors we have of future real-world achievements..."

Much is luck, yes. But also, much seems to be doing the right thing.

I know a bunch of founders of smallish IT companies. If I talk to them, they don't seem too smart. But they did a company, and kept it running for many years. So they learned stuff about running a company.

Knowing how to run a company is a rather important skill if you want to get rich. And you can get this skill, even if you aren't smart. You probably won't make millions but more than a senior dev or something.

At one point you can even do it with a low skill level. Because you can employ many smart people who keep the company running even if you don't know what's going on anymore.

What angers me is that you often need money to get started and almost all people with rich parents I knew did it with their parents money. Yes they failed a few times, but who cared, they were young and their parents would help them out. By the time they were 30, they had 10 years of founding experience.

I was thinking when I read the headline "having rich parents is a bigger factor".

The actual paper, available on sci-hub, does not agree with this innumerate journalist's interpretation of it.

http://www.pnas.org.sci-hub.ac/content/113/47/13354.short?rs...

In fact, the paper shows that IQ is a great predictor. Personality is a much worse predictor on highly g-loaded tasks, and a good predictor on some others (e.g. wages). But (IQ, personality) pairs are an even better predictor than IQ or personality.

The only way you can draw the conclusion that IQ doesn't matter much is if you compare to predictors of the form (IQ, personality, achievement, grades) (and a few similar ones). Shockingly, using achievement to predict achievement yields a more accurate predictor than using (IQ, personality).

(I really do not understand this paper's methodology of graphing r^2 values. I don't get how this was published, but lets assume that was a reasonable way to go.)

This paper also ignores the fact that IQ, grades, and many personality traits are correlated. Insofar as these metrics are correlated, it completely invalidates this analysis; some of what the authors attribute to personality or grades is actually just the explanatory power of a second IQ measurement.

After reading your comment, I was surprised to take a look at the paper and find that it does, indeed, appear to support conclusion that IQ is less important than many people think. Neither the paper nor the linked article argue that IQ is not a factor. But both say that other factors are more important, this is clear from both the abstract and the first paragraph of the article, where it says, "Personality is generally more predictive than IQ on a variety of important life outcomes."

Of course, personality+IQ will be more predictive than either alone. But the "innumerate" journalist seems to me to have done a better job of capturing the gist of the paper than you. (Whether the paper's methodology and analysis are sound is a different question from whether the journalist reported its findings correctly.)

I don't know what "less important than many people think" means. It's true that the article suggests people think 50% of variance is explained by IQ, and it turns out that literally nothing in this paper explains even 25% of variance.

On log-wages, IQ explains 30-50% of the explained variance depending on whether you go by figure 4 or 5. It does a similar job for education and welfare usage.

So it seems that if people have any misconceptions, it's merely about how much of the variance in log wages at age 40 is explainable by early life measurements.

Check Fig. 4 and the discussion:

"Column 1 in Fig. 4 in the first block of columns (corresponding to wages) shows that IQ predicts wages, but the predictive power is small (around 1% [Adj. R squared of 0.02 in Fig. 4). Column 2 in Fig. 4 shows that self-esteem, locus of control, antisocial behavior, and neuroticism, taken together, are more important determinants of wages [R sq. Of .05]. Both IQ and personality remain as important predictors in wage equations when both are included in a regression (column 3 in Fig. 4). The fourth column in Fig. 4 shows that achievement has more predictive power than IQ and personality alone. When IQ and personality are also included in a regression (column 5 in Fig. 4), achievement test scores remain an important predictor of wages, and IQ and personality also remain important predictors of wages. After controlling for scores on achievement tests, IQ loses around 60% of its predictive power. When grades are included, instead of achievement tests, the effect of IQ becomes negligible. A similar pattern arises across the other outcomes studied."

The achievement measure is from a test (of learned facts and skills?) at age 10 (IIUC).

Further, the paper seems to go to some effort to decompose the raw data into IQ, grades. See table 2. The correlation between iq and personality is fairly weak.

The problem is that achievement tests and grades are a measure of IQ.

Imagine I have a direct relationship, y = g. Now I measure compute a noisy data set, (x,y) with x = g + noise. Depending on the size of the noise I'll discover that y is correlated with g with some R^2. My regression coefficient will come out to be approximately y = 1x.

Now imagine I made a new noisy data set, (x1, x2, x3, y). Here x1 = g + noise, x2 = g + noise, x3 = g + noise. Here x1 might be IQ, x2 might be SAT or other such g-loaded test, x3 grades, etc. My new regression coefficients are y = (1/3)x1 + (1/3)x2 + (1/3)x3. Suddenly x1 has lost 2/3 of it's predictive power!

The problem is that my measurements are correlated, that's all. And as you note, table 2 shows a pretty solid correlation between IQ, personality, achievement and grades.

If you actually want to draw the conclusion that the article is trying to draw, you need to decouple IQ from the other measurements.

In order for them to be directly related as you suggest, all high-iq participants need to memorize lots of facts and learn lots of skills and no low-iq participants can do similarly. It seems that, by citing them as separate factors, the authors are saying this is not true for the population they considered.

Table 2 shows it is true.

Table 2 shows the pairwise correlations. The highest is between iq and achievement: 0.4-0.7 on different datasets. The correlation between iq and grades is between 0.1 and 0.5. That's strong, but not 1.

My critique doesn't require a correlation of 1, I just used that as a simple example where I could work out the math in my head.

I would add that the procedure of using a plain multivariate regression to draw quasi-causal conclusions is definitely wrong because of the fallacy of controlling for intermediate variables (IQ causes education, so an estimate of the form log(wages) ~ IQ + education is not estimating what you think it is estimating and a small estimate for IQ is expected), and they seem to be very casual about the measurement error though they know it's driving a lot of the results:

"For example, in the NLSY79, IQ is a better predictor of log wages than personality, but in the BCS and the MIDUS data, personality measures are better predictors. The better and more comprehensive personality measures in the BCS and the MIDUS data compared with those available in the NLSY data likely explain why personality is more predictive of outcomes in those data."

Not to mention that correlations with income tend to increase when you look at multi-year averages and unbin & untruncate the single-year income data to boot.

If they did a more meaningful SEM (like Education ~ IQ, Wages ~ IQ + Education), with correction for all the measurement error, I would expect that, in line with the rest of the literature (I have collected some links on the topic in http://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection#iqincome-bibliograph... ), they would find that IQ outpredicts the rest of the variables, followed by whatever corresponds to Conscientiousness.

They are testing whether personality and IQ are correlated to success. R-squared is a measurement of dependence. So basically they are graphing this correlation on a scale from from 0 being "this variable is independent of success", to 1 being "success is perfectly correlated with this variable".

The actual measurements are in a separate appendix, so I'm not sure how the calculated all this.

I haven't read the paper yet, but I'd be genuinely surprised if PCA or factor analysis wasn't performed.

I just skimmed it, but I don't see them doing that anywhere.

This doesn't deserve to be the top comment.

I think, as a Bayesian, you're putting too much weight on your priors about the importance of IQ and are not interpreting the paper correctly. "Achievement" in the context of the paper refers to scores on achievement tests, whereas the thing of actual interest is 'life outcome', and the analysis of that starts on page 3.

I always retell this story when this subject comes up:

When I was 17 in 1989 I was desperate for a job in 'computers' as it was all I knew, I was damn good at programming etc, but had the usual experience trap - no experience equalled no job.

Being naive I paid attention to one of those adverts in the back of the weekend newspapers. I don't know if they were a UK only thing but they had a puzzle and stated that if you could solve it within 1/2 hour you could be a member of Mensa, which if anybody doesn't know is a club for those with a high IQ.

I completed the puzzle then got posted back another one, if I could complete this within an hour I would be invited back to a proper, invigilated exam. Passed both, paid my dues and became a member of the clever club, along with people at the time like Sir Clive Sinclair. My mum was very proud.

I went to one of their meetups shortly afterwards in a bad cheap suit hoping to meet some other clever person who'd recognise my skills and give me a big wad of cash and a job.

It didn't turn out that way. There were 30~ men at one side of the club all staring at their drinks, with 3 woman at the other side about 20 metres away keeping away from the fellas. One woman came in by mistake to the side with the men at which point they all swarmed her. The only topic of conversation they had went like:

"What's your IQ?"

"x"

"oh, mines <x+10>"

When it came to IQ these people were the top of the pile, with social interaction however they were abjectly hopeless. They'd be able to build you a nuclear bomb, but they wouldn't be able to sell or explain it, or even go to the shop to buy the parts for it.

This encounter came at a good point for me - it made me relax a bit about being 'clever', and showed the importance of other indicators. I let my membership lapse and wince when I occasionally see 'member of Mensa' on a CV.

I was a member about 5 years ago. I also left the club soon, but my experience was pretty different from yours. I never went to the "official" meetings, but I did go to two of the "Mensa youth" (I was around 20, others there seemed to be 25-35) weekend gatherings in the countryside.

The gender ratio was around 60/40 men/women. I don't think anyone even mentioned the term "IQ". It was mostly like a student group outing with people drinking, talking, playing board games, going to sauna (this was in Finland), swimming, flying around in a inflatable boat someone had converted to an ultralight floatplane and such.

Interesting. My experience was a while ago as I said, 1989, so maybe it was just different then as it just seemed like a club for middle-aged socially men really.

One of the members of our team is in charge of a Mensa group in our city, and he always tells us how difficult is to agree on basic organizational issues, just like in a condo.

I think your parents socioeconomic class has a big influence on your likelihood to be 'successful' (http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...).

Social/networking should also play a big role.

My anecdotal observation is, having both of the above (from upper class family and good at networking) is the biggest determinant of success. It sort of makes sense, the upper class bit gives you access to other successful/wealthy people (through private school, parents network), and the social skills the ability to leverage this access.

Also, having loads of money from family makes it very easy to succeed. In the UK you'd just buy as much real estate as possible, farm off the management to an agency, and just sit on your arse while the assets gain in value.

> The study found that grades and achievement-test results were markedly better predictors of adult success than raw IQ scores. That might seem surprising -- after all, don’t they all measure the same thing? Not quite. Grades reflect not just intelligence but also what Heckman calls “non-cognitive skills,” such as perseverance, good study habits and the ability to collaborate [emphasis by me] -- in other words, conscientiousness.

I would consider myself as quite conscientious - but working together with people who have less of this trait always ends/ended in a tragedy. So I would rather assume that there are also reasons for the hypothesis that conscientiousness rather hinders your ability to collaborate.

> University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth found that IQ scores also reflected test-takers’ motivation and effort. Diligent, motivated kids will work harder to answer tough questions than equally intelligent but lazier ones.

When I was at school I took multiple IQ tests (I don't know what their exact scores were, but they were really high). At that time I found the problems in the IQ test really exciting. A few years ago I had to solve some "logic puzzles" (what image in a 3x3 or 4x4 box with one missing fits by the hidden rules). 15 years ago I would have considered them as really easy (though "formally" they were not). I would say that since I finished studying mathematics, I find these puzzles much harder. Did studying mathematics make me worse in logic? Surely not (quite the opposite). Did studying mathematics make me worse in solving "logic puzzles" in IQ tests? I'm very sure it did.

> but working together with people who have less of this trait always ends/ended in a tragedy.

If by that you mean you were then unable to collaborate with them, perhaps you have less of this than you imagined?

> If by that you mean you were then unable to collaborate with them, perhaps you have less of this than you imagined?

I am not an English native speaker, so perhaps I misunderstand some subtleties that exist in the English language, but not in the German translation of the word "conscientiousness". The dictionary translates "conscientiousness" to German "Gewissenhaftigkeit" and "Pflichtbewusstsein". I tend to work hard - thus I am conscientious. But I also expect other people to do so - so I don't tolerate loafing on my behalf; again a trait of "conscientiousness", but exactly what leads to difficulties working together with other people who are less conscientious.

The assumption here is that everyone sees the accumulation of wealth as the most important goal in life. I don't think that's accurate.

I see money as freedom. My ultimate goal is to save enough so that I don't have to work. Eventually, that will be the case, hopefully not on my deathbed.

If the majority of the population thought that way, we'd have an economic collapse though, so forget what I said.

> If the majority of the population thought that way, we'd have an economic collapse though

...or a much better society.

I don't believe economic collapse will yield a better society. If we can get from the consumeristic society we have now to a much less consumeristic one without the economic collapse, perhaps.

But I enjoy work. I'm happy that I'm well compensated for the work I do, but even without that I fundamentally enjoy my work.

In fact work is preferable to how I spend a lot of my free time. Would I like to work more flexible hours and get paid the same to work 30 hours instead of 37.5 a week then sure, but otherwise what would money be buying freedom from?

I suppose owning a house out-right would be freedom from worrying about security of housing, and having a large cash reserve in a few currencies would be security from political instability.

Perhaps that I only have to worry about these "big" things means I already qualify as rich from my existing income, but "not working" is definitely not a goal I align to (yet).

I enjoy work as well. Eventually you will work at a job that was great, but through acquisition or whatever, it turns terrible and you will feel trapped because it pays well but the people you work for are less than ideal for many reasons.

Most of the work we have to do is not life changing or world changing, or even makes the world a slightly better place for anyone other than the ownership.

One day you might want to fully explore a new technology or framework, but your current work environment isn't interested and you aren't well versed enough, or there aren't any jobs in your area related to that technology. Spending time after work is an option, but when you get older and have a family, the harder that is.

To me money is freedom to not have to work, or be able to work on what I want to work on, explore what I want to explore, etc.

Holding cash on purpose is a pretty terrible idea in just about every political environment. Nobody who's rich actually does this, unless is specifically earmarked for an upcoming purchase or an emergency fund. You're better off with stocks and metals.

How is holding large amounts of cash bad? I don't understand, could you elaborate on that?

Cash doesn't grow and is generally devalued through inflation.

A diverse portfolio is better protected against inflation, cash ought to make up some of a diverse portfolio but not a large proportion of it. Bonds are a better way of having cash-denominated assets since they still have returns while not being particularly risky (in the general case).

Cash is still useful however because it is easy to access quickly without losing value to having to sell quickly and doesn't incur fees.

You are losing them to inflation.

At a very slow rate, at very low risk. There are always tradeoffs. I think bad about cash.

There's enough of compound effect to make your cash worth a lot less by the time you retire. E.g. here in Norway you'd lose 50% value of your savings over 20 year period.

If you stuff the cash in a mattress and sit around for 20 years. But if you do that, inflation isn't your biggest risk.

And Bitcoin.

Not having to work meaning you will stop working or not having to work giving you freedom to stop but you most likely will not? If the former, what is the thing you will do that you cannot start doing today? I am not rich (in the US sense) and my goals when I was young were to not leave anything until 'pension' (as that is kind of what you decribe but probably at a younger age than typical) so I set up everything so I could do all I want (and those things are modest anyway) before I turn 50. By 42 I did mostly all of them without being rich and while working at the same time (which is also a hobby) and while developing other hobbies and side projects.

A friend of mine told me the same thing. He considers money as freedom, and he will retire next year at the age of 42. I agree that money is freedom, but for the last 15 years or so he worked his ass off getting up at 5am in the morning working for other people. 15 years of your most productive time as an adult is a lot, and there is something to be said for just doing what you want to do during that time instead of earning money for afterwards.

Accumulation of wealth may not be the ultimate goal, but it shortcuts your way to achieve the goals of other pursuits.

I think you will find that, in general, it does not. Often it actually detracts from your ability to pursue other goals. People think, "I need money" to do X. They put off X until they "have money". All along the way they intend to do X, but the prerequisite of getting money consumes their time and energy. The funny thing about money is that it's a bit like computer memory. No matter how much you have, you can always find use for more. I'm not going to tell you that nobody needs more than $640, but there is a point at which you have "enough money" and "enough" is usually a lot less than people imagine. Probably you have "enough money" to start now. In that way money is not a short cut -- it's a long cut.

I think for a lot of people, they don't want to compromise. So if you are thinking "I need X so I can live in the wilderness and write books without having to worry about a job", then they put off writing books until they are rich. And by the time it happens (if it ever does -- which is rare), they find that they don't like writing books, and their spouse, who was attracted to them because they are rich, refuses to live in the wilderness.

Compromise is the true short cut. It allows you to start now, with less resources than you would like. It then allows you to build your life so that the thing you wanted is part of it. Even if you need a lot of money to achieve your ultimate goal, remember that it needn't be your money that you spend.

P.S. Even if your dream is to sit on the beach every day and get drunk, I assure you that this is very common amongst the poor ;-)

For most of my twenties, I lived in Hawaii for some years pursuing exactly this agenda. I was very poor, but by the beard of Zeus I had a mighty fine time.

But at what cost? Certainly you could work at a Biglaw firm in NYC (or whatever) and get rich if you're willing to trade your youth and your health. But is that smart?

You're making several very large assumptions.

1) That you have to trade your health. I wonder if lawyers at Biglaw live longer than the bottom 75% of income earners. My opinion is that they very likely do.

2) Smart isn't applicable to the context you set up. It's dependent on what you want out of life, these are personal life choices. If I prioritize money over life expectancy, and I get rich but die at 63 years of age (due to the work lifestyle I undertook to get rich), that was my subjective choice - smart doesn't enter into it.

3) Most people with careers trade their youth for work to some substantial degree. The exceptions are extremely few, and extremely far between. Just working 35 to 60 hours per week, from the age of 20 to 67 (the soon to be social security retirement age), is heavily trading your youth for work.

1) You very much do in some jobs. You can't work 70 or 80 hours every week for long stretches and maintain your physical and mental well being. People really do that, and the ones that can maintain the pace for a few years make boatloads of money. A guy I knew like that was able to afford the best medical care when he had his first heart attack at 43. He may in fact live longer than the bottom 75% of income earners. I doubt it.

2) The article makes the assumption that because wealth doesn't correlate to IQ very strongly it must mean IQ doesn't help you become rich. My point is that doesn't necessarily follow and it may be that smart does enter into it - maybe nearly every smart person could get rich and decides there are better ways to live.

3) There's trading your youth and then there's trading your youth. I would say a guy who works 40 hours a week and has other interests does a lot less of it than a guy who works 60-70 hours a week and does nothing else.

Your point 2) is not correct, I think. The article does not really say that: it says that high IQ is one of the drivers of wealth, but it is not a sufficient condition to determine wealth, because other factors are at play in a meaningful way.

Yes, the article says that, but offers no evidence.

There is a difference between healthiness and life expectancy.

Let's not pretend that many folks in startups aren't doing just that.

The person working at a concreting factory for 60 hours a week to try and save is in the exact same position.

My biggest concern isn't that you can work away your youth and health like that, it's that a lot of people of my generation have no idea that's what they are doing and were gently coerced from a young age to imagine the house/car/work triad as the three ticks of success in life.

Except the Startup is "glamorous" and the concrete labour is not. And the concrete worker doesn't think about making concrete after he clocks out.

almost everyone is doing that.

Money is just a trading medium. There are an awful lot of things that it can be traded for so there's an awful lot of people with different wants and values where "acquire money" is a necessary step. Those things can then make other things, that money couldn't buy directly, easier.

I agree, the underlying assumption is faulty (and common).

this so much. I never cared about aquiring wealth, i want to be able to enjoy most of my life which is usually a different path than the one that brings in most money.

I think that smart or smarts and your definition of wealthy play into it; smart I find being able to do what you set out to do all the time without money holding you back. For some people that means you need to be rich for others (like me) it does not.

Could be the case yeah. For me wealth means just to have enough so i dont have to care. Which IMO is rather easy as software engineer in switzerland, or digital nomad in south east asia.

Most non-exceptional things depend on character. Extreme intelligence only manifests its value in areas of extreme complexity.

When I hire programmers for a job I'm looking for characteristics like consistency, patience, memory, organisation skills, attention to detail, a touch of pendantry and a reasonable analytical mind. I don't actively avoid extremely intelligent people, but given the work at hand I certainly don't care if someone is or not.

So in the world of non-exceptional development, character is king.

Likewise in business, except at times of revolutionary change, character always wins out. Persistence, focus, a dash of greed, people skills...Brains are right at the bottom of your priorities.

Pedantry, not pendantry.

You're hired

I can answer the headline question very easily: because being smart isn't all that's required.

As someone who comes from a family that has a few successful traditional businesses, luck and who you know plays a big part of your success.

It's hard for people who haven't been in business to understand. They have been told that a great product at a fair price with fantastic customer service is what it takes. While that plays a role it is does not even amount to 50% of the formula.

In my experience business luck and knowing the right people can at least partially be the result of hard work.

Can you give a breakdown of what you've found to be the percentages "the formula?" I'm honestly curious.

Is it required at all? Perhaps... if by 'smart' you mean 'able to exploit opportunities to personal benefit'.

I'd expect that there are a number of factors that help improve your odds, and that being "smart" will be one of them. But so would being born into a wealthy family, or just bing born in a developed country, and be of good health, and any numbers of other factors.

As well as a huge amount of chance - e.g. my first company got funded because one of my co-founders ran into a guy in a bar that happened to be in the country for a week or two. Maybe we'd have found other funding if that didn't happen. Maybe not. We'll never know.

It certainly helps.

From the study,

> Both IQ and personality remain as important predictors in wage equations when both are included in a regression

The low correlation of IQ and future wage is surprising to me given what I've seen elsewhere. For example https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Sternberg2/publi... finds that IQ predicts 15% of the variance in income and 25% of the variance in socioeconomic status.

Also See http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... where IQ tests predict future job performance measurements across many studies as well as job interviews and only slightly worse than work sample tests.

Although I did look at the original study and that number comes from a linear regression of log wages and IQ percentiles. I'm not convinced that the R^2 number you get out of those two numbers really means much, the correlation is highly significant at least.

Why do these studies primarily look at wages? Personal autonomy might be a better metric, just more difficult to quantify.

Perhaps that study looks at wages because I specifically looked for another study that also measured IQ-wage correlation. There are studies measuring other things, I was just looking for something to compare to the study the article mentions.

And I would argue that personal autonomy is just another proxy. If you're trying to measure if IQ is helpful, perhaps what you really want to look at is life satisfaction.

A truly smart person will have a very impressive, convincing answer to this question.

Having a rich daddy is probably the largest influence in someone's chances of being rich themselves, at least in the US.

There is a good correlation between the wealth of the parent and the wealth of the children in many countries, including the US.

In economics this is called "social mobility" and it is measured to analyze the success of economic and social policies, whereby, generally, it is considered that having a high social mobility index is a desirable thing in a country. That's because a country with high social mobility is a country where the American dream is happening more often...

Social mobility works both ways: in a country with high social mobility, it is more likely that a child will be much poorer, or much richer than the parents.

There is a paper by the OECD analyzing by how much different factors (family wealth, education, etc.) affect wealth of children across different countries: http://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf

http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

This is a common misconception. Most (balance sheet, not "appear to be") rich people are self made, and first generation rich. Kids of rich parents tend to just blow their inheritance away quickly.

This is a common misconception. Most of the self-made / "first generation" rich came from households that weren't poor to begin with. Bill Gates, for example, had a trust fund from his grandfather that gave him a cushion in case he failed. That gave some freedom for him to take calculated risks.

What you find is that you need the freedom to be able to take a risk and fail. If you come from a household living paycheck to paycheck and just barely scraping by, you start off with a very risk averse mentality and never really escape it. When the big opportunity shows up, if you were risk averse your entire life it is unlikely that you will take the shot.

https://despair.com/products/overconfidence sums it up best: "Before you attempt to beat the odds, be sure you could survive the odds beating you".

> Bill Gates, for example, had a trust fund from his grandfather that gave him a cushion in case he failed.

Do you happen to have a source? I'd not heard this and was curious as to the amount.

William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.[1]

However:

Several writers claim that Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates. A 1993 biographer who interviewed both Gates and his parents (among other sources) found no evidence of this and dismissed it as one of the "fictions" surrounding Gates's fortune. Gates denied the trust fund story in a 1994 interview and indirectly in his 1995 book The Road Ahead.[2]

So I'm inclined to think it's not true, although it does seem a fairly wide-spread story.

But at the same time, Bill Gates did come from a rich family, so he wasn't going to starve if Microsoft didn't work out.

[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

[2] https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/link-suggestion/wpcd_2008-09...

Is the existence of a trust fund actually relevant for the story? Whether there was one or not, as you already said, Gates didn't have to fear failure. I doubt the family would have let him live in poverty on the street if he had failed. I don't think it changes the narrative. But it's bad that - if you are right - the wrong story is out there because it gives a convenient escape to get sidetracked and be able to ignore the actual message.

No single guy with no family to support has to fear failure though. It only becomes a fear once you have a wife and children to support - but that's why it's generally accepted that you first get financial stability before starting a family. Some people choose differently as people are always free to make terrible life choices - but they need to face the consequences then.

Even someone with a $1mil trust fund can make terrible enough choices to end up homeless.

You are very, very confused about what is likely vs. what is merely possible.

He discussed the whole plan with his family, and they agreed on it. Secondly, he studied in Harvard, so his family had at least decent amount of money by default.

And then, the thing is that family who was struggling the whole time, won't agree on dropping the best university with wonderful perspectives for some kind of crazy (at the moment it was very "crazy").

People are not "just risky" by default, they are influenced heavily by their life, and as someone mentioned here already, a lot of rich guys came from pretty decent living families, who can afford to fallback if something. For instance, a lot of world travellers, who try to live differently, actually have some passive income, property of just loads of cash, just in case something will go wrong.

I haven't heard this before either, but I found this reference to millions of dollars: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

No, only about 10% of billionaires are self made, as in not having inherited wealth or come from wealthy families. And even this is a record high up from a more typical 3%. (and remarkably, these are numbers that forbes feels excited about)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-a...

>In 2004, we had 59% of the Forbes 400 having made their own fortune, as opposed to 41% who inherited it.

Quote from your own source...

The article explains that they rank the level of "self-made-ness" out of 10, with 10 being from a poor family with no advantages. Then it says " A total of 34 billionaires, or 8.5%, scored as 10s".

So given 10 possible rankings, it is pretty well distributed then?

Well distributed for what metric? Their backgrounds clearly don't match the normal population, since the normal population isn't 7% billionaires.

Maybe a rich person has the answer ? :)

Breaking HN policy to say this is the correct answer to this question.

It's "easy" to make money if you aren't super concerned with the means through which you acquire it.

Like cooking meth and such? :-)

Please elaborate!

It is so nice to see that Money is now the only criteria for success.

By that logic J.K Rowling is a more successful author than the Hemingway, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Tolkien and the entire Beat generation plus several others put together.

I know right? We jump from

> how much of the difference between people’s incomes can be tied to IQ

> So if IQ is only a minor factor in success, what is it that separates the low earners from the high ones?

The second doesn't follow at all. Lots of evidence suggests that beyond a certain baseline, income is almost uncorrelated to happiness, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the highest income earners are less happy for the life they've chosen. I would not categorize that as success. If you're smart, and not crazy, your goal isn't to maximize your income.

Exactly. Many intelligent people I know don't even care that much about money, past a certain point.

I have to point out that this question functions as a classical reference to the life of Thales (born 624 BC) - touted as the first philosopher. In the apocryphal story, he proved he could be wealthy if he wanted to and- according to one version - grew rich by predicting that the olive harvest would be good and investing accordingly. Having information others do not has always thus ruled the markets :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus

Similarly, philosophy grads today tend to have higher lifetime earnings than other humanities majors.

(Though I think it's because the degree eventually confers the wisdom that an advanced degree in a different, marketable field would be a good idea. That's how it worked for me anyway.)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/11/20/surpri...

H = Σ p log p

Huh, did the title on HN get changed? It's now "IQ is only a minor factor in success" which doesn't match the Bloomberg article title "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?". It makes some of the comments that were written before the change seem a bit strange.

And isn't the current title an editorializing of the article's title, against HN guidelines? I don't find the original too linkbaity.

Moreover, it appears to me that the paper

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/47/13354.short?rss=1

was already discussed here?

In the book 'Outliers', M. Gladwell talks about this very subject and suggests that a persons social upbringing has a lot to do with how you can navigate through the world and have it work for you.

A high IQ is surely a good thing to have and will make it easier for one to become successful, but if you totally lack the skill of 'getting your way' in the social maze that surrounds our daily lives, it will probably be a lot harder.

Stopped reading this comment after "Gladwell".

There are many parts to this. We're talking about IQ and these same people may not necessarily be emotionally intelligent, for one.

A lot of people with high IQs may also be very rational / logical in their approach towards life. They might think objectively, and that's the point. They're right - they don't need the excess wealth at all. They've accounted for everything they needed to - their life, their security, and that of their children, spouse, parents, etc. They're for the most part content with their personal lives, their success, their jobs and most importantly their income. They're I assume, smart enough to know what could make them more money, and how they need to behave and interact. It's not ignorance; it's sheer conscious choices.

On the other hand, there are those who aren't smart / wise enough. They'll make much more money, but may not be as nearly satisfied, no matter how much they make.

We might be mistaking intelligence / business-sense with wisdom, which is a higher domain - it's got more to it, than just IQ.

This is a narrative, it's not what happens in reality.

I don't understand why people so often say "success" when they mean "income". Those are different concepts.

In my psych classes they always explained IQ as a measurement of success in western culture. That it didn't really measure intelligence, because it is way to complex to measure that easily. But IQ was shown to correlate with basic success which is why it was useful. So if that is not the case it sounds like IQ is of no value.

> After following some 1,000 New Zealanders for more than 30 years, researchers concluded that tests of language, behavioral skills and cognitive abilities taken when children were just three years old could predict who was most likely to need welfare, commit crimes, or become chronically ill.

Whether this is true or not, this is going to have huge ramifications as people believe it and try their various notions of pre-crime and their latest "save humanity" scheme.

And if it is true, it has the potential to disrupt society as certain groups - by ethnicity, socioeconomic, geographic, religion, etc - tend to fall in or out of this bucket: the idea that "[group X] is always/never on welfare and therefore..."

Without even knowing the rest of the "therefore" it's fascinating and scary to consider.

Hmm, I was thinking... being ambitious, maybe a little greedy, should be a great factor for "success" in terms of importance and money.

I mean, many intelligent people I know don't care much about this kind of success anyway, so I think it's clear that it's more correlated to personality than IQ. Some personality types will have greater success, simply because they are searching for it.

IQ is still correlated simply because, in our society, we came to think that this kind of success is desirable, so many people want it, even if they are not that ambitious. So if you have a high IQ, you will probably have a decent income and moderate success, even if you don't want to be rich or something like that.

In broad terms of course emotional intelligence is very useful when interacting with other humans.

to pick at the 1-2% numbers a bit the impact of IQ depends on the individual; physical size/height is only profoundly important for the success of certain people - athletes primarily. however, both also have correlation with success. I'm sure the paper was more careful than this article.

IQ is often used as a proxy for intelligence, when in fact it's just a set of standard metrics that nobody thinks is that good beyond a certain point - after all the term comes from early attempts to quantify developmental delay. Leaving that aside for a moment.

Becoming successful in lot of fields appears to be less about doing challenging stuff (where raw intelligence is perhaps most applicable) and perhaps more about scaling an organization to manage other people doing the challenging stuff.

Most of the brightest people I know have either no interest in, or an active aversion to, "managing" people in any sense whatsoever.

How much of a factor is mental health in success?

Someone could be a 4th standard deviation IQ genius yet be debilitated by anxiety, depression, or some other condition.

On the flipside many successful people have credited drugs with some part of their success by boosting ambition, endurance, creativity, confidence, etc. If a Cocaine substitute was discovered that had no negative side effects, could this positively affect scientific progress?

Occasionally a mental "disability" can seemingly be related to success. So many great scientists have been on the Autistic spectrum, or suffered from severe OCD. Can the success of the person be separated from the disorder? Could "cures" for Autism and OCD actually negatively affect scientific progress?

I like to think of IQs using a car analogy.

You can have someone with an 8000 HP motor for a brain cranking away like a nitromethane dragster. These people don't have a ton of practical utility, but if you point them in the right direction and let 'em rip, they shred through certain problems like chainsaws through logs.

Then you've got Jeeps. Much more practical they are. They cover lots of terrain, but they're not as optimized on the street as typical sedans, and not as good on rough terrain as Humvees.

If you want to be successful, be a Porsche. Optimize for driving well on the most practical terrain that can take you the most places.

Contentiousness is a ~50% heritable personality trait, only slightly less than IQ.

A good lse lecture about the role of luck in success and failure, and how people interpret it asymmetrically (my success was due to hard work and talent vs I failed due to bad luck/didn't get a break), with some interesting social experiments that showcase this:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/InternationalInequalities/Videos-Podcas...

If we consider that there are different types of intelligence, say logical/analytical, artistic, physical (dancers, crafters) etc. Then the answer to the question becomes more complex. You may know the answers to most questions, or solutions to most problems, but that doesn't mean you will act on solving those problems, that requires will, passion, commitment, etc. There are a lotta factors that play into making money, including being at the right place at the right time.

Most of the cash-rich people i know are not smart at all. They are just conservative and can withhold themselves from impulse spending, and introverts, so they don't need to spend much to hang out with friends, which allowed them to build decent savings and build passive income (mostly by buying residential and commercial property, while that will be different in developed countries).

Most income-rich on the other hand, are smart.

"Don't eat the marshmallow" (willpower / delayed gratification) is more important or at least as important a predictor of success as IQ. It's not always about books smarts, but real life smarts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

But is it because we reward (unjustly) those that score well and go to prestigious schools? Society is certainly not a blind test; we cannot conclude that these 'predictors' will actually help an employer choose a high-functioning employee. It only predicts who an employer will pay more. Heck, for the best predictor that, we only need to look in their pants.

So, the takeaway is... hard work > IQ in influence. Sounds like shitty science wrapped up in nice language... booooooo

IQ is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for success.

If you aren't smart, you get through life in a walking haze, as others continually take advantage of you, and you are never truly aware of what is going on.

For example, you'll mismanage your money, or forget crucial details, or you'll make the wrong decisions.

IQ and education level are well correlated. It would be odd if that did not also correlate with success.

If I were to guess I'd bet a low IQ is a stronger predictor for failure than a high IQ is a predictor for success.

Presumably, once you have "enough" capability for abstract thinking for what we consider success, then other factors, internal and external, will decide.

High IQ here too.

Used an algebra to rotate and combine equations back in school to solve them. Never knew what they were really about until the uni times.

Playing puzzles with the rest of the class was quite boring.

Discipline however plays the important role for success, I agree, so does the environment and DNA.

But it should be a major factor (assuming motivation is at an acceptable level). It not being relevant is more telling of issues with politics, corruption, favoritism, etc than of intelligence being irrelevant.

Does it not require intelligence to understand how to be fulfilled without wealth?

I think most of the smartest people have figured out that there are more important things in life than becoming as rich as possible.

IQ is only a minor factor in intelligence.

Hampshire, A., Highfield, R. R., Parkin, B. L., & Owen, A. M. (2012). Fractionating human intelligence. Neuron, 76(6), 1225-1237.

Why measure an "Intelligence Quotient" with methods of examination that have been shown to be a pseudo-science? People should be measuring "Intelligence Potential" using proper scientific methods with less subjectivity involved, and more objective evidence used as a way to get closer to true, justified beliefs.

Mostly, it's about perseverance, and luck.

Willingness to cross the line between crime and honesty appears to be the major factor behind success, to me.

Every successful company has a dark side.

TL;DR: correlation vs causation.

as an idiot I support this.

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