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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

Just finished questionnaire. The "brain teaser" at the end is full blown IQ test. Which got me an idea. I know its all nice to pretend that everybody is equal and all that jazz, but if you want to make real scientific progress and not just let some code monkey glue couple libraries together and fixing problems on stackoverflow, you need someone really smart. And IQ test is good filter for that. So if I would want to grant money to random people and I have 100'000 applicants, I would just sort them by IQ, keep top 1% and manually sort them and pick a few. If that's your strategy then I'm screwd, I was always too slow on IQ tests.

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> If that's your strategy then I'm screwd, I was always too slow on IQ tests.

Right, this approach would just select those people who are good at completing IQ tests. Which is a pretty common criticism of IQ tests.

Why wouldn't the ability to quickly process information be considered an important part of intelligence? A proper IQ test is very general and just tests processing speed and working memory.

IQ has a higher correlation with future income than parent's earnings. If you had a choice between having 99th percentile IQ and being born into the 1% you'd be better off taking the IQ. The issue is that because IQ is highly heritable many in the 1% tend to be intelligent as well so the rich get richer.

I don't know about you, but if I had the choice between having a 99th percentile IQ and being born into the 1%, there is absolutely no way I'm taking the IQ. The streets and fast food franchises are littered with exceedingly smart people. Dumb kids of the mega-rich are still rich. A lot of things need to go right for success, those things have a better chance of going right if your parents are loaded.

It's important to note here that we're not discussing the well-off, two vacations a year types here, we're talking about the 1%. I would be extremely surprised if the correlation between your future earnings and your parents' earnings (if they are 1%) weren't -a lot- stronger than your having a 99th percentile IQ. Any sources?

> IQ is highly heritable many in the 1% tend to be intelligent as well so the rich get richer.

I'm sorry, do you have a citation for this? I find this highly suspect. Everything I know about money and power and society suggests the reasons the rich get richer are money, power, and society. Nothing to do with IQ. This idea that the poor are poor because they are dumb is something rich people (who don't want you to be rich) want you to believe.

Well, it's rather obvious that an IQ measures how good you are at completing IQ tests. The question is whether IQ is good predictor of success in whatever kind of work you are doing. If it is, then I can't blame them for making you take the test.

That's a common lay criticism of IQ tests, but it's not at all common among clinical practitioners or psychologists. It's also completely at odds with the outstanding literature on the subject[1].

There is broad clinical and professional consensus that IQ tests are both statistically reliable and valid for a number of generally useful measurements of cognitive ability.

I think you can make a compelling case that IQ tests can be misused as a hiring filter - for example, you might not need to hire people who score highly on it. But as a standalone assessment, modern literature doesn't leave much room for debate on its psychometric merit.

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1. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf

While smarts are generally useful, is not creativity a stronger influencer in innovation? But I’m not sure what kind of test could measure creativity.

Creativity, and grit. Sometimes provided by different people.

As long as IQ only means how quick you are able to understand something and not how motivated / how much stamina you have, sorting by IQ is a stupid/ignorant idea.

That doesn't mean sorting by IQ is ignorant. It means that you shouldn't rely on it entirely. Hypothetically speaking, unless there is literature indicating that a population of high IQ individuals is more highly correlated with lack of stamina or motivation than the general population, sorting by IQ alone as a first pass would still provide you with plenty of candidates who have the motivation and stamina you're looking for.

I think there are credible arguments against using IQ for various sorts of job filters. But I don't think your argument is among them. If we're at the point where we're implicitly taking that an IQ can sort people by "how fast they learn something", the only reason not to sort for that (if that's what you're looking for), is if that quality is more correlated with something else you don't want. I'm not familiar with any research suggesting that high IQ individuals are more prone to stamina or motivation problems in a large population.

Which is precisely why we’re not making decisions based on that test for now. We’re just experimenting with it to see what data we get. We’re still going to grade applications manually for now.

We’re trying not to fall into the “just IQ” trap, but learn the broader picture of what makes great Fellows great.

>And IQ test is good filter for that

[citation needed]

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