IQ Matters Less Than You Think | Hacker News Reader

IQ Matters Less Than You Think

nautil.us

260 pointsdnetesn323 comments

The title is a bit misleading. The study is basically comparing the path of the top 1% to the top 2% of the IQ distribution and arguing that it doesn't matter that much in term of extraordinary achievements (nobel prize, etc).

If you compare the top 20% to the bottom 20% of the distribution I bet there will be a strong correlation to professional sucess.

And there's also probably a big difference between the top 0.01% percent and the top 1%. The difference between the top 1% and top 2% isn't very important for most types of talent. Being in one of those categories for athletic talent, for instance, wouldn't get you into a professional sports league of any kind.

True but you are assuming the IQ test is inifinitely precise which I doubt it is. It is only a measure of intelligence.

they are very not precise. Most give a 80% confidence interval of +- 8 Points (or 1/2 STD). Also the different tests measure slightly different types of intelligence/put emphasis on other things. There's only ~0.8 correlation between modern IQ tests.

I'm not really assuming it's very precise. It's more that there's a huge difference between 99th percentile levels of talent and 99.99th percentile levels of talent. For instance, I am easily better than 99/100 males at basketball. I'm 6'6", reasonably athletic, and I played semi-competitively when I was young. But I am nowhere near being better than 9,999/10,000 males. And no amount of hard work or persistence is going to change that.

The objection was that you can't reliably tell apart the 99 from the 99.99 percentile with a common IQ test.

The difference between 99th and 99.99th percentile is 1.4 standard deviations, a common IQ test ought to be able to be accurate to that. Otherwise it couldn't measure the difference between 100 and 120 IQ (0 to 1.4z) which it clearly can.

> a common IQ test ought to be able to be accurate to that

Accurate to what, even? The very notion of IQ is fuzzy, so naturally any test trying to measure the value would inherit that fuzziness.

The difference between 100 and 120 may be statistically identical to 99 and 99.99, but the practical difference is vastly different. At a certain point, the IQ test is "defeated", and any value above a certain threshold is nose.

Sorry, I don't understand: how do you know the percentile difference in terms of standard deviations but not know if a test is accurate enough?

By assuming that it's a normal distribution.

I don't think your reasoning is valid. A test might be unable to discriminate accurately at the extremes not because it's uniformly too inaccurate but because it doesn't have enough range.

Toy model: the test consists of one question that everyone in the top 1% can do and no one in the bottom 99% can do; one question that everyone in the top 2% can do and no one in the bottom 98% can do; ... one question that everyone in the top 99% can do and no one in the bottom 1% can do. This test discriminates very nicely and accurately throughout its range of applicability, but it will do no good at all from distinguishing a top-0.01% person from a merely top-1% person.

(Just as a tape measure 2m long will let you compare people very accurately by height provided they're no taller than 2m, but will be much less useful for people taller than that.)

Modern tests are delivered by computer and typically are adaptive. This means that as you answer questions correctly you get asked increasingly difficult questions until you get some wrong.

This means that you aren't limited to asking the same questions to everyone so you can have appropriate discrimination through the range.

An answer, by analogy-

If you yell into a microphone, the recording will come out distorted and inaccurate. Yet if you speak normally into one, the recording will sound rather true to life. This is because the microphone has been tuned to a certain level of sensitivity, and when that threshold is exceeded, what it records is clipped.

A similar principle holds for many types of human tests in education, psych, etc.

Yes, in fact, because it's generally calibrated to the whole human population and is defined on an assumed bell curve, the differences in scores in the outliers are somewhat meaningless

Well, yes. Comparing top .01% to top 1% is akin to comparing top 1% to general population - NOT akin to comparing top 1% to top 2%. So a big difference should be expected/not surprising at all.

Surprisingly, many findings show there is not. Malcolm Gladwell explains this well in his book Outliers.

https://www.honorsociety.org/articles/trouble-geniuses-malco...

“Gladwell cites studies done by Arthur Jensen that indicate the IQ level needed to successfully attend and graduate from undergraduate college is 115, after which Jensen believe IQ becomes relatively unimportant. For comparison, Albert Einstein, a well-known and commonly agreed upon genius, had an IQ of 150. Studies by Liam Hudson indicate that, ‘a mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180.’”

He gives the example [paraphrasing from memory] of an individual with an IQ of 170 who was so intelligent it impaired his ability to relate to normal people and hold a job.

Gladwell generally badly oversimplifies and mischaracterizes.

While I agree with the intentions of your comment, it fails to be a persuasive rebuttal. Not saying you’re wrong, just saying a more productive comment would have responded to the specific claims of Gladwell’s in the comment, versus an ad hominem dismissal.

> He gives the example [paraphrasing from memory] of an individual with an IQ of 170 who was so intelligent it impaired his ability to relate to normal people and hold a job.

High IQ doesn't do that (in fact, it makes it easier to understand other people, including those of average intelligence, if you are so inclined), though people with high IQ and a problem that does impair their social interactions may be inclined to prefer to attribute the social difficulty to their strength (IQ) rather than some problem.

Some of the problems that do that may be loosely correlated with IQ, despite being distinct from it, though.

Humans do seem to generally prefer the company of those with a sufficient degree of shared traits, interests and preferences. Being an extreme outlier in IQ, as in any other area, may just make it statistically harder to find such company.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...

You sure?

Relating to somebody has two parts: understanding them and empathizing with them. The empathizing part is largely built on feeling similar to them, which could be hard with a big IQ difference.

It makes understanding people easier - much easier, in fact - but it doesn’t necessarily help you use that understanding any better.

Firstly, as others have observed, it makes it hard to relate to others when the majority of people you meet seem to have the intellect of a child - I don’t mean this unkindly, rather more that one ends up looking at most folks as making grievous and avoidable errors incessantly, and almost as overgrown children. You want to help, but you can’t, because nobody likes being patronised or made to feel inferior, but if you don’t help, they resent you for not having helped. It isn’t intractable, but it’s most readily avoided by avoiding interaction in the first place.

Secondly, intimidation. Ties back to making people feel inferior, and generally stymies social interactions. It’s tough, even in a marriage, as they either know you’re playing dumb, or feel like you’re beating them over the head with your intellect. Either way you end up hurting their self worth every time you notice something or think of something and unwisely decide to share it.

Thirdly, overshoot. I tend to assign far more intelligence and cunning to others than there is, and resultabtly second, third, fourth guess their mind-state, as it’s hard to comprehend the disappointingly facile motives behind behaviour.

Finally, expectations. Once you let on that you can solve the intractable while half-asleep, you’re expected to do it day in, day out, and find that the world beats a path to your door with their petitions and demands, which feeds more than a degree of misanthropy.

I’ve met maybe three people in my life who I’ve felt on a level with, and one of them is my brother.

The expectations part is the brutal one for me. Did it for years. Only started trying to not in the last year. Lost a few folks I thought were friends, but turned out to just be folks who were outsourcing their problemsolving to me.

150 IQ is extremely high ~1/1,125 relative to the general population and that score may or may not be that accurate. Which seems to disagree with your suggestion.

Winning a Nobel prize is a highly random process as someone needs to be in an 'open' field ripe for major discovery.

That's what I was thinking. Nobel prize is like a lottery that requires a high IQ and a desire to work in academia and research among other factors in order to buy a ticket.

You also have to be lucky enough not to have contemporaries with equally impressive work in more popular fields.

If the standard is "likely[ness] to win a Nobel Prize" that makes sense. The Nobel Prize is not purely meritocratic, to say the least.

I don't think there would be too much disagreement if I said von neuman was one of the smartest 10 guys to live in the last century.

But he seemed to relate to people just fine.

>I don't think there would be too much disagreement if I said von neuman was one of the smartest 10 guys to live in the last century.

Obviously there won't be much disagreement on a platform dominated by computer scientists. If you went to forums for other fields they would also pick their favorites and see no reason to disagree that they are not only the best and brightest in the field, but also the best and brightest in general.

And to be clear I'm not saying he isn't. I don't really know.

von Neumann was a lot more than a computer scientist though...

He's huge in computer science, legendary in mathematics, and contributed significantly to nuclear physics.

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

He should make top 10 for anyone in math or science at least.

I don't think we're at the point of having a strict definition of 'smart' let alone a system for ranking by it.

If multiple Nobel Laureates say things like

"I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man"

that's a pretty good indicator that the man was beyond brilliant and I think it's fair to say that they have the better authority than any of us here to make that classification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Cognitive_abi...

Or George Pólya's quote "Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper."

> Teller also said "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." [1]

Teller is best known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Cognitive_abi...

Gladwell has a real problem with appealing-but-unsubstantiated claims, and Outliers is perhaps his worst offense.

The IQ content is less egregious than other flaws - his famous "10,000 hours" bit is so oversimplified that the authors of the study he cites have condemned Gladwell's treatment of their work. But even the IQ stuff is quite bad.

The first note would be that the initial statement here is a shockingly strong claim which goes far beyond Hudson's studies. (115 to 130 is the difference between 15% of the population and 2.3%.) And, of course, the followup reference to Einstein seems entirely self-defeating - how does it discount IQ to note that a famous genius was well above three sigma?

I don't have a copy of Outliers to reference, but the paraphrase of Jensen is also extremely surprising since he's widely criticized for over valuing the role of heritable intelligence in success. All I can find outside of his much-condemned racial work is a brief statement that he believed (in 1969) there were many unfilled jobs requiring an IQ upwards of 110. This is basically what I would have expected from his legacy - not a claim that higher IQ is irrelevant, but instead that +1 SD is enough to open many professional doors.

Meanwhile, the high-end claims raise several other questions.

Most damningly, any discussion of 170 and 180 IQs is garbage for the common 15 point SD. 5 sigma (IQ 175, depending on normalization) is a 1-in-1.7M event. No IQ test ever devised has been calibrated on that population; Raven's Advanced Matrices only goes to ~150, and other high-IQ tests are also seen to cap at 4 SD or lower. Test-retest and inter-rater variation are high enough that's it not entirely clear whether IQ tests can be calibrated out to 170+, at least without a massive test population.

I can't find Hudson's actual study, only replications of that quote, but it's a disaster coming and going. IQ 180 cannot possibly be a value he found in accurate studies, and a work on Nobel winners isn't necessarily relevant to high-IQ success anyway. Nobel winners are generally people whose research succeeded in a major way, not just those who did very good work, and often features mixed groups like "the theoreticians who made the theory" and "the experiments who confirmed the theory", where quite likely only one side is exceptional in the field.

Finally, the example of a very high IQ person leading a dysfunctional life fails on several levels. I'll let the Gladwell's use of anecdote slide, because studies on very high IQ children generally do find large rates of non-success, but those outcomes are heavily distorted. First, because childhood IQ testing is heavily age-adjusted, with the result that fast development can produce astronomical IQ scores in children who will be merely quite smart when their peers have caught up, both undermining the relevance of the result and creating unsustainable high expectations. Second, because it ignores the tendency of extreme outliers on one axis to be unusual on other axes also. High IQs might impede socialization, but they're also correlated with mood and anxiety disorders, torsion dystonia, and a variety of other conditions which have obvious negative effects on life outcomes. For these purposes, causation doesn't matter - it's enough to note that without correction, any study of success-by-IQ will be distorted by these conditions. We can imagine a case where success in certain fields is dominated by those very high IQs people who don't get nasty side-effects, while the overall performance for high IQ people is unremarkable.

None of which is meant as an attack on you, or even a claim that the people at the peak of e.g. physics are higher-IQ than the field's average. I just think it's worth noting how fractally wrong Outliers manages to be in even a brief statement like this one.

Great writeup. I admire your dedication.

Worth noting in this discussion: Einstein never took an IQ test, at least none that historians know of. Pretty much any time I see a claim about a historical figure's IQ, it turns out to be an invented figure made on the basis of a totally unscientific "estimate." The tendency of pop writers about intelligence to use these invented historical IQs as a measuring stick makes me doubt the whole enterprise (though I'm not singling out Gladwell here, whose books I generally like).

There may be a big difference between the top 0.01% of g and the top 1% of g (or there may not). But IQ is only a loss abstraction of g, and it almost certainly lacks the resolution to say how top 1% of IQ and top 0.01% of IQ actually correlate with g.

(In contrast, you can be relatively certain that someone in the top 1% of IQ has a higher g than someone with bottom 50% of IQ).

That correlation does not mean that people's IQ caused their success or lack thereof. I would bet both are caused by economic circumstances, among other things, especially access to resources like good education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan high IQ, but still might be a total crank and crackpot.

What does success mean?

It's well understood that IQ is linked to academic achievement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G_factor_(psychom...

I genuinely wonder sometimes if no one on HN has actually bothered to go through and take a full intelligence test.

You get a multi-page report back with measurements of all types of cognitive functions. An IQ number is given, but it quickly becomes apparent that number is just a summary measure. Just as a 3.95 GPA doesn't tell what subjects a student is good in, a high IQ doesn't tell you what areas of mental strengths and weaknesses someone has.

That 3.95 GPA student may have had to spend 4 hours a day studying math, while being able to write beautifully structured long form English essays in half that time.

Maybe that student did great in stats and had a horrible time in discreet mathematics. Or vis versa.

Summary numbers are useful in that large variances can indicate overall trends, that 4.0 GPA student did better all up, but that student with a 3.0 GPA may very well be better in a given subject than the 4.0 GPA student.

Likewise, someone with a high IQ can still have weaknesses, it is just that to get the really high score, any weaknesses will have to be offset by strengths in other places.

If you are reading this an are interested in finding out an objective scientific measurement of what you are good and bad at, pay for a full psychological intelligence evaluation. It takes a long time, the testing is long enough that you probably want to do it over multiple days, insurance won't cover it, and it is rather expensive (I think I paid around $1500 for mine, maybe more).

At the end of it all you'll get an IQ number, and a better understanding of why one number does not represent a person's capability.

Don't follow. I didn't say that personality, or intelligence, is a single-dimensional variable.

I am more railing against the discussion of IQ as the definitive way to measure intelligence. Everyone down thread is arguing "Yes IQ! No IQ! Confounding factors!"

It is as if people argued about someone's GPA in college while not paying attention to the subject's major, study habits, or natural abilities.

There is no other measure we have that tracks as well with intelligence.

There is no single, easy to post about online, number.

Intelligence is not single faceted. Posting and interpreting an entire psych tests worth of numbers is possible, but it is harder to have silly Internet arguments over subtly and nuance around a topic that requires research and education.

The level of discourse talking about "IQ" reaches is the same as discussing a new vehicle by saying it has 300 horse power, and not mentioning if it is front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, or how many wheels the vehicle even has.

Sure if the delta is large enough then it doesn't matter, but there is a serious trees/forest problem that happens with these topics of discussion.

I feel like the only person confused is you. You're talking about trees (IQ isn't intelligence) when everyone else is talking about the forest (IQ and outcomes).

"Intelligence is not single faceted."

Intelligence is not single-faceted. However the evidence is overwhelming that those facets are far from uncorrelated. If you know that person X is very good with mathematics, you can guess with reasonably high probability that any given other facet of intelligence you may care to name is also likely to be high.

People are diverse and brains are complicated and you can always find someone who is generally very intelligent but can't string three words together in writing, or someone who is generally incredibly stupid but has one particular measure very high ("idiot savant"). But in the general population all the intelligence measures are highly correlated, which means that something like an IQ number can exist and have significant, if not necessarily totally definitive, truth to it.

There's an excellent rant somewhere about the pattern where people at the extreme margins of a trait proudly declare that the trait doesn't really matter for success.

It's the rocket scientist saying he knows lots of people smarter than him, and obviously hard work and precision are what really matter in rocketry - never mind that estimates put the average IQ in the physical sciences around 125. Or the pro basketball player saying that it's not enough to be the biggest, they key is to train hard and work as a team - never mind that the person saying it is the NBA-average height of 6'7". What these people are actually seeing is that once you have lots of a key trait, other traits gain relevance.

Or to take a less quantifiable example, we can look at something like musical skill. 10,000 hours of practice will (in)famously make you an expert, but Ericsson et al actually found that "time to expertise" is fairly constant in some fields, and massively variable in others. (I seem to remember examples varying by a factor of four?) Skill at a musical instrument can be learned by almost anyone, but some people will see vastly better return on their time investment than others. And if we're looking at professionals, then "just practice harder" ceases to be an option.

None of which means most people are excluded from most roles, or that success is tightly correlated with IQ. But there's a distinct pattern of assessing the importance of some trait after applying a hard filter on that trait, and it does everyone a disservice to pretend that's comparable to a population-level result.

I think that the filters you mention are an important mechanism here. These continuous variables like IQ or test scores get mapped onto binary ones (filters/gates) as you make it, or don't, into schools or jobs or other opportunities. It's not necessarily a linear or symmetrical mapping, either.

For example, when I was in graduate school, the chair was discussing how high GRE scores were not very strong indicators of 'success' in grad school (i.e. doing good research, publishing it, and getting out in a reasonable time). However, low GRE scores were much stronger indicators of 'failure' given these criteria.

IQ probably maps pretty linearly to GRE scores (for most of the small subset of the population who would ever take such a test), but with regards to scientific progress there are a series of thresholds that are more important (grad school, faculty hiring, securing funding, etc. etc.). These thresholds are really about opportunity and access.

> IQ probably maps pretty linearly to GRE scores

For native english speakers, you mean? When i participated, GRE had 2 sections on english language: 1. about vocabulary(may not be relevant depending on your discipline) 2: reading comprehension(certainly useful). I don't think it maps that well to IQ. I certainly had to work on my vocabulary, which i don't have any use for and don't remember much at all.

>>It's the rocket scientist saying he knows lots of people smarter than him

Well, that much is probably true: the very nature of his/her profession surrounds him/her with similarly smart people, some of whom are going to be smarter.

I think another way of stating it is that often times, IQ is necessary but not sufficient.

the pattern where people at the extreme margins of a trait proudly declare that the trait doesn't really matter for success

I just noticed yesterday for the nth time a girl on facebook posting her pic with a caption saying how true beauty is on the inside. Can't help noticing it's only the most beautiful girls who do that, which I've always found puzzling. You've shed some light on why for me, thanks. I'll think twice before again writing on here how unimportant talent is in music! (I'm a musician.) I just don't know about that. My favourite story about talent, from Kevin Spraggett:

"I remember fondly one conversation I had a few years back with Boris Spassky. We were discussing 'THE' Victor Korchnoi...Boris and Victor had been bitter adversaries for more than 40 years at the time of this conversation, and they had played more than 60 times in official competitions..(including 2 candidates finals)... Boris [said] that Korchnoi had every quality necessary to become world champion but lacked one very essential quality...and it was precisely this quality that prevented him from attaining chess' highest title. I coaxed Boris on...He began to list Korchnoi's many qualities: ...Killer Instinct (nobody can even compare with Victor's 'gift')...Phenomenal capacity to work (both on the board and off the board)...Iron nerves (even with seconds left on the clock)...Ability to Calculate (maybe only Fischer was better in this department)...Tenacity and perseverance in Defense (unmatched by anyone)...The ability to counterattack (unrivaled in chess history)...Impeccable Technique (Flawless, even better than Capablanca's)...Capacity to concentrate (unreal)..Impervious to distractions during the game...Brilliant understanding of strategy...Superb tactician (only a few in history can compare with Victor) ...Possessing the most profound opening preparation of any GM of his generation...Subtle Psychologist...Super-human will to win (matched only by Fischer)...Deep knowledge of all of his adversaries...Enormous energy and self-discipline...

'But, Boris, what does Victor lack to become world champion?' Boris' answer floored me: "He has no chess talent !" And then he roared with laughter..."

You should write this rant up as a blog post! I'd read it.

One factor doesn't seem to me to get mentioned enough in these discussions - call it "agreeability" or "sanguinity." Basically, ability to successfully cope with neuroses and other social/behavioral challenges that seem to be more common among intelligent people.

I put some thought into the people I've met who seemed to me to be the greatest outliers in terms of intellectual achievement. One is a famous writer, another is a classics professor, and another is a math prodigy turned neuroscientist. The commonalities between the three are a combination of 1) high g, 2) obsessive focus, and 3) the aforementioned happiness/agreeability/ability to cope with neuroses. All three of the people I have in mind are neurotic in some ways, but can channel it toward constructive channels. Haven't looked into the research on this but I would be curious if you could recommend any study that addresses this component. I agree that the Gladwellian "just practice a lot" view doesn't seem to hold a lot of weight, but anecdotally it seems to me like raw intellectual ability isn't the determining factor either.

Well, I like to think persistence matters more but getting into top 1% of everything requires more than determination.

1. Going from bad to good requires x amount of effort/persistence.

2. Going from good to best requires 1000x amount of effort.

When you've put 800x amount of effort, you'll realize this harsh bitter fact. You have already given up on your hobbies, family, social life, ... and you are still considered as "good+" not "best-". To bypass being-best-barrier you need more than persistence.

Things like IQ, family wealth, great coach, ... matter when you are approaching near top of the hill.

Very much this - average genes, hard work, and sacrifice can generally guarantee upper middle class (barring accidents). Basically, all you need to get there is being a good cog in the machine. That is to say - you come in groomed, you do your job, you study or take night classes, you don't spend your money on having a life, you don't make mistakes which come with fun. Eventually, you will get to your $100,000/year and your 1 mil networth.

The sad part is that I have met some really low IQ people who are unable to even prep for a college exam, or the SAT, ACT, MCAT, whatever. So, their innate intelligence or upbringing denies them even the shot at an average comfortable life.

Do you have any research backing up this position? It seems to fly in the face of every reputable study I've seen, which suggests the opposite is true - average genes, hard work, and sacrifice is not enough to "guarantee" anything.

It seems a bit nieve to think that you need to have an above average IQ to make it into Middleclass society.

IQ is a garbage measurement that isn't predictive of future results, yes. It's more the hard work and sacrifice part I'm disagreeing with.

IQ is highly predictive of future outcomes. Where are you getting you data from?

IQ is highly predictive of the outcomes of future IQ tests, and to a degree academic performance (though much of academic measurement is based on similar theories, so this is unsurprising)

There's much less corellation when you consider "future success" in terms of things like job performance, financial success, happiness, et cetera. IQ is obviously measuring something, because IQ tests are quite reliable, but the thing it's measuring does not seem to show a strong corellation with a lot of real-world goals.

It's one of those measurements that people _want_ to use a lot, and so it sees a lot of use, but the idea that you can boil general intelligence down to one number is fallacious to begin with, so many of the things it's used for are not useful.

This is literally one of the things the post we're commenting on is saying. High IQ people are not automatically successful and whatever effect high IQ may or may not have on future success is easily lost in other, more significant, factors.

> whatever effect high IQ may or may not have on future success is easily lost in other, more significant, factors.

IQ correlates with income more than any other factor. When you take away the correlation between socioeconomic situation and IQ (which admittedly there is), it correlates even more.

High IQ people are not automatically successful in the same way that tall people are not automatically basketball players.

You're making a lot of claims contrary to generally accepted research. It's invaluable, and not in the good way.

The comment you are replying to was not saying that.

A person who manages to accumulate a million dollars is far beyond middle class and a wage of 2x the median household income is well beyond middle class.

It's common sense. I did say barring accidents and having an actual life. The below is conservative.

1. Pick practical degree, because you are poor and anything else is luxury.

2. Work in college, because you are poor. End up with 30k of debt because you are dumn and didn't get a scholarship.

3. Make 40k a year. (22% fed, let's say 4% state), 30k net. -10k rent, -10k expenses, 10k left.

4. Pay off college by 25.

5. Save up 50k by 30.

6. Masters degree by 32 with no debt.

7. Increase income to 100k by 45.

8. Congrats middle class pleb. (Which I am, though this isn't my story)

I can tell that that isn't your story, because there's a lot of conjecture in there that isn't supported by the data. Even just starting with #1, the ability to pick a degree at _all_ is a privilege not automatically afforded to everybody. Should you be able to do so, then working during college is strongly linked to worse outcomes, as you have less time to dedicate to learning - thus making #3 harder as you're competing against people who have had better chances than you. If you can't do 3, you can't do 4, 5, 6, or 7, and 8 is predicated on that.

It might be "common sense" to you, but it's directly contradicted by all the data.

"the ability to pick a degree at _all_ is a privilege not automatically afforded to everybody."

I completely agree that this is a huge issue. A large problem for kids from "bad" families is not having any idea what they "should" be doing, and by the time they figure it out, they may have already ruined their life and missed opportunities.

Nothing in life is guaranteed, but some things sure stack the deck. Average skills, hard work and a bit of ambition will greatly increase your chances of a comfortable life.

"Increase your chances" is not the same as "guarantee."

$100,000/year salary and $1M net worth are incredibly specific numbers, where are you getting them from?

It's a tautology to claim "average genes, hard work, and sacrifice can generally guarantee upper middle class" because if someone isn't upper middle class you can just claim they don't have average genes, they didn't work hard enough, or they didn't sacrifice enough. None of those things are measurable.

That's realistic income at 45 with a 4-year degree in some engineering discipline. You can save a mil at that income in 15-20 years.

Sure, but what does that have anything to do with the "average person with average genes who works hard and sacrifices?" Most people aren't engineers and most people can't become engineers, the market can't sustain a 200%+ increase in engineers.

You seem to merely be saying engineering is a good career. Everyone already knows that.

It takes more than hard work to stick out engineering for 20 years, its not a job for everyone, you're going to burn out if you absolutely hate the work. I personally know two mechanical engineers who were both straight A students but hated it once they got to the job. Both didn't even make it to 5 years as engineers.

The median full-time wage in the US is near $50,000 now. That median is a person with two years of college or less.

If you have a four year degree with ten years or more of experience (eg you're around 35 years old), in almost anything to do with eg engineering, getting to $100,000 or close to it, is not difficult.

The average salary for a person with a bachelor's degree, in the engineering field, first year out of school, is around $65,000 for 2018. Emphasis that that's the first year income. Petroleum engineers with a bachelor's degree earn an average of more than $80,000 their first year out of school.

The parent's premise isn't very far out of line, even if it glosses over that the effort required is considerable, and a lot of people simply do not want to be engineers (with the best six figure alternatives for volume being healthcare and sales/biz-dev).

You could come up with some loose measure for each of those. Genes: IQ, hard work: educational attainment, sacrifice: hours worked. Someone with ~110 IQ, college degree, and willing and able to work 60 hours a week is going to have an extremely high probability of achieving upper middle class. The biggest obstacle for that person is going to be health issues.

You seem to be assuming there isn’t any genetic component to hard work.

Willpower can be trained: https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/willpower.aspx

But what if I can't be bothered?

(Seriously. Training willpower takes willpower. If someone has some kind of executive disfunction or something, they literally can't 'just choose the right thing'.)

Very few people have absolute 0 willpower.

Excepting those with a medical condition, low willpower individuals can invest that willpower in developing more willpower and get to average levels over time.

I've seen this many times working with the homeless and in addiction recovery. It's just like compound interest with investing.

Just because you start with a very very small amount doesn't mean it can't grow over time.

This is embarrassing as hell to admit, but in high school my ADHD was so bad the only thing I enjoyed was World of Warcraft. I would commonly play for more than 24 hours and couldn't get myself to stop for anything. It completely dominated and ruined my life. You can say video game addiction isn't a thing if you want, but I was definitely acting like it was. Tried alcohol, cocaine, etc.. and never had a problem, but I could not control myself with certain video games.

When I started developing my Willpower it was literally with 5 minute breaks every 4 hours. And it was extremely difficult. After a week, I extended those to 15 minute breaks, and it was 6 months before I got my total WOW time to less than 8 hours in a day. But I did it.

I'm in my 30's now, and this new World of Warcraft expansion is the only one I haven't played at all. Hoping to keep it that way.

There are still plenty of fields where you can start late in life and not come from wealth but still be the best in the world. It's only the most popular and rewarding fields that require a life optimized to be the best to actually be the best.

>There are still plenty of fields where you can start late in life and not come from wealth but still be the best in the world.

Such as?

Stuff from Guiness World Records?

https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-some-world-class-...

It's entertaining to note that many of the "late in life" switches were still in their teens.

What?

1) Quora is a garbage site

2) All those examples minus one (which I'll get to) people started before the age of 22. That's not "late in life."

4) The example of the person who started running marathons at 84 has broken records "for his age group." Big deal, there's like, what, less than ~5 people in their 80s running marathons in the world?

5) Just because a few people can do it (and that hasn't even been demonstrated) doesn't mean everyone can with a little work.

1) Lol. Not really relevant.

2) 22 is late for athletic careers.

4) You skipped 3? Ok... so you want 80 year olds who just started marathon running to beat everyone aged 20-30 in their athletic prime? That's actually pretty impressive since those other 80 year olds have probably been running marathons their whole life.

5) I agree. It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice, and few people are willing to do that. Are you upset that only 10% of people can be the top 10% and that the distinguishing factor is often how hard they work?

You should also look at it this way: For most things, you don't need to be the absolute best in the world, nor is there a way to measure who is the best in the world. Who is the best in the world at software engineering?

Not exactly what you were looking for likely, but Tim Ferriss (author of the 4 hour work week) became the national champion in Sanshou kickboxing, with almost no experience. He exploited loopholes that other competitors hadn't considered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss#personal_life

+1. The method of getting from good to best also matters a lot. A coach definitely helps. You can't become the best of anything, in isolation. Deliberate practice also helps. I was not a believer in deliberate practice but once I started it, I am seeing good results. For instance, I can retain at least 30% more of what I have studied or coded or even just casually read. However, deliberate practice takes a toll. It's excruciating to do it even for 4 hours a day. Maintaining consistency is even harder. I have probably been able to do it for a week over the last couple of months.

One can enter the top 2% of almost any field in one year, especially with the help of nootropics. It doesn't take much to cross the threshold. If not among the top 2% in such a time, then there was usually zero aptitude. Being the best or getting that much better tends to take more effort.

Hmmmmm, in case you are a middle eastern immigrant tackling a Ph.D. in the US, it takes around one year (including security check) to take a visa just to get into the US. :D Meanwhile your German rival has arrived 11 months before you and probably had applied for an internship by the time you arrived.

I can't stop myself comparing people. :D

A Ph.D. in what? Top 2% of that field is usually accessible within a year.

I wasn't opposing you. I just tried to mention, how easy it is to loose to your rivals by just being born in a wrong country.

Yes, agreed. Combination of determination/persistence, belief/self-confidence that success is possible and thus will to continue even in doubt, intelligence, and also interest/passion in a particular area. Align those things and generally some flavor of success is possible for an individual. But why though? Because in general, your "competition" (that is, other people trying to do that same thing) will often lack that trifecta in some shape or form.

I do agree with others mentioning comparisons about the top 0.01% and top 1% and top 1% versus top 2% and all that. At a certain point of achievement, virtually everyone at that level possesses that trifecta to some degree or another and then, in those cases, often luck and a little happenstance play a big part in which opportunities emerge and create significant value and success for only a small few individuals.

Intelligence doesn't matter much when you have it. It matters quite a lot when you don't.

Like in basketball - being 2.50m tall doesn't mean you'll beat everyone on the court. But being 1.50m pretty much guarantees you're out of luck.

> But being 1.50m pretty much guarantees you're out of luck

1.60 m, though, is apparently good enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggsy_Bogues

Bogues is really the exception that proves the rule. He had to be incredibly talented and athletic to make up for his lack of height, but even then he was only a good, not great, NBA player. If you are 1.60m tall and your dream is making the NBA, well, unless you are literally one of the most athletically talented people on the planet, you should probably give it up.

Enough with - i suppose - lots of other gifts. I would assume anyone with his height is less likely to even try basketball.

You're really just reaching the edge of where his analogy breaks down. There are actually advantages to being shorter in basketball, but his analogy did not account for it.

Then perhaps a test that measures intelligence better than the IQ test which is known to not be the best would be better at evaluating the situation.

And a billion dollars doesn't really matter when you have a billion dollars. Also, red shoes are red when they are red.

Funny how HN is full of people with >120 IQ claiming that IQ doesn't matter. If that's really true, than why is pretty much everyone here in the top 10-15% of the population? Where are all the <100 IQ people here claiming to have successful careers in the tech industry despite their IQ scores? Remember, the average IQ is 100 by definition, so roughly half the general population is <100. What are the odds of this happening by chance if IQ is truly irrelevant?

a) Most people here probably don't actually know their IQ scores, and claiming that most of the people here are >120 iq is silly. No one has any way of knowing that.

b) Most people here also probably know people who are every bit as intelligent as they are who have repeatedly had really shitty luck and zero success. Similarly, most people know someone who is successful, but at the end of the day is pretty stupid. Regardless of IQ, I think most people here recognize intellect as really helpful, but also as neither necessary nor sufficient for success, wealth, happiness, etc.

a. Most people here are programmer or programmer-types. Assuming there's a strong correlation between "could attend college" and "could be a programmer," that likely implies an IQ of 115 or more.

b. Those instances tend to stand out (especially the people smarter than you with miserable outcomes), but also tend to not be statistically relevant.

Average IQ among intuitor types (xNxx; MBTI) is said to be one standard deviation above the norm (115+ SD15). They are also very overrepresented online.

Having an IQ 2 standard deviations above the norm (130+ SD15) tends to attract problems/difficulty/friction in corporate environments. That is, companies are biased toward Te users (xxTJs) and extroverts + judgers (ExxJs) with IQs in the 115-125 range.

Synthesis usually starts at 130+. Companies either don't like it, or want it cheaper.

115-125 is also most common among students enrolled in big-name universities. They also get an edge in high school, as they are smart enough to be better, and yet, not smart enough to get bored or be seen as a threat.

Have any sources?

Posted above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18143595

> Average IQ among intuitor types (xNxx; MBTI)

Please stop giving MBTI mind share, it has repeatedly been proven to be non-scientific. The creators of the test had minimal to no training in psychology, the underlying basis of the test are not based on sound theory, and test results for a given person are not stable across multiple retakes over medium periods of time.

MBTI was sold to corporations as a psuedo-scientific way to make employment decisions. It explains everything in a nice, simple way, that makes everyone feel good about their "strengths".

> Synthesis usually starts at 130+. Companies either don't like it, or want it cheaper.

MBTI doesn't represent people's actual personality. I am supposed to be INTP, yet I enjoy managing teams of people, I am capable of standing up and entertaining a room full of people, and I am able to play long term internal politics to help ensure the project I am on can stay on track.

I also haven't seen MBTI used, anytime recently, by companies as a management tool. I have seen other pseudo-science hackery in place, but they almost always has the same attitude towards results MBTI does, all positives, no negatives.

Actually a friend's company did recently go through a corporate psych test that was brutal in its results. People got results back that said things like "you try to control and manipulate other people around you to get results" and "you are insecure in your work and that causes you to lash out at others."

It was hilarious to see honest results being given to people in a corporate setting, not what people are used to. :)

For an actual scientific measurement of personality, Big5 is where to go right now.

I'm also asking for sources here.

I'm really hoping you have some, because intuitively this seems very true for me.

Posted above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18143595

Do you have citations for the things you have said here? I am not being accusative. You seem to know what your talking about and I want to read further.

The intro paragraph to the wikipedia article about MBTI is nothing but citations about how bad it is.

Aside from that, the standard sources of psuedoscience woo debunking all have long articles

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221

and finally https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/the-personality-test-tha... has a brief bio on Katharine Cook Briggs

> Funny how HN is full of people with >120 IQ claiming that IQ doesn't matter. If that's really true, than why is pretty much everyone here in the top 10-15% of the population

Everyone here probably isn't.

People who have a near-average (on either side) IQ are less likely to have it tested, and those with an average or below IQ less likely than those above the average to talk about their score.

Consequently, people who talk about their IQ score tend to have a higher than average score.

Moreover, our industry has a questionable habit of describing all kinds of human accomplishments as "brilliant" "innovations" done by "geniuses".

Being a competent professional engineer requires some raw intelligence, true, but also determination, interpersonal communication skills, organizational skills, time, training, resources, access to the infrastructure you want to work with, and no small amount of luck. Those all interact in complicated ways, and most can be used to buttress the others depending on where one's personal talents lie.

There's probably some minimum necessary raw intelligence necessary to become a hacker, but I suspect that bar is much lower than HN would like to admit. And I am very sure that there's no maximum past which the rest of the list ceases to matter.

> Funny how HN is full of people with >120 IQ claiming that IQ doesn't matter

I’d assume a similar distribution to the general population, actually. Why would I think otherwise?

My IQ is quite low, maybe 85 or less. I'm not smart enough to understand why a bunch of smart people would argue about how unimportant it is to be smart.

It's funny, the article says that none of Terman's Termites became examplars of genius, but Lee Cronbach is definitely in the top 1% of most influential psychologists.

To name a few accomplishments..

* If wikipedia is correct, he was the "48th most cited psychologist as of 2002".

* He has an extremely popular metric named after him (Cronbach's alpha)

* President of American Psychological Association.

Maybe what he is missing to the author is the popular media appeal Feynman has. However, I'm not sure that's a good criterion for genius, since I'm not sure it's something Cronbach wanted.

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

Yeah, the article talked about "only" becoming Stanford professors... maybe the author doesn't realize how incredibly hard and rare it is to be a professor at a tier 1 research institution, not to mention being as prolific as Cronbach. The kids didn't become Nobel laureates but... so? That's an insane expectation for high achievement.

I believe that Shockley just missed the cutoff for this study. Because it had a fairly high weight on verbal score.

I know a few people with >130 IQ and they all have executive disfunction and anxiety problems.

So yes, the best CPU doesn't help if the IO is constantly blocked.

I wonder if there is an online community focused on dealing with this issue.

MENSA?

They work mostly with children in my country.

Meh. Not really, at least not in the US. I mean, I suppose you could treat it as sort of a support group if you want to, but for the most part, it's a big social club and not much more. I stayed in for two years, and then didn't bother to renew. But then, I already have a group of friends, and a family, so there really wasn't anything for me there.

I'm not at the level required for MENSA (140 in the UK) but all I heard when I looked into it is it's a bunch of pretty dysfunctional people trying to one-up each other. I already have Reddit and HN for that :-D

Couldn't have thought of a better description

There are essentially two types of people in Mensa: those who think they're smarter than everyone else and decide to take a Mensa IQ test to prove it to everyone, and those who took an IQ test for some other reason and then decided to check what's all this Mensa thing about.

You don't need Mensa to meet some smart people, but it's an easy place to find them, for better or for worse (both of which can be interesting experiences, BTW).

I was in Mensa for a few years but wasn't getting much out of it so I dropped it. I would have dropped it sooner, but my mother liked doing the puzzles in the newsletter. I have had the good fortune to have smart friends and work with a lot of very smart people so I have never been starved for intellectual stimulation. But not everyone is so lucky, and it soon became clear to me from letters in the Mensa newsletter that it was a godsend to bright people living in small, rural communities who had no one around who understood them. We now have on-line communities that can provide similar companionship for isolated intelligent people, without having to join a formal society like Mensa.

When I looked (decade ago), your description would have characterized their online haunts but not IRL meetings.

Maybe being online turns anything into Reddit/HN.

On the other hand, word was most members are inactive and only a small percentage turn up at IRL events at all, i.e. strong (self) selection effects.

Maybe being online turns anything into Reddit/HN.

See if you can find some old usenet discussions about "prior art".

As far as I can tell, it's a boardgaming club. I only went to two or three meetings before lapsing, though.

Extending the computer analogy, what would be ideal characteristics for the software architecture of a successful scientist?

I have no idea, haha.

I also know 2-3 people who are very smart AND don't have anxiety/executive problems, but they have social issues. They tend to burn out themselves and the people around them because they think their intelligence and work ethic is the base-line and the rest of the world is just dumb and/or lazy.

> I know a few people with >130 IQ and they all have executive disfunction and anxiety problems.

Title of the article isn't

"High IQ always makes you successful"

Correct examples for claim in the title would be low IQ ppl becoming very succesful. Anyone know any low IQ successful ppl ?

This seems like a classic Simpson's paradox.

Suppose that people associate with people of roughly equal "success in life". And suppose both IQ and executive function correlate positively with success. Then, at a given level of success, IQ and executive function would be negatively correlated, and so it would appear to an individual surveying their "peer" group.

Basically, consider what would happen if those high IQ individuals you knew combined their intelligence with an even mental keel and extreme conscientiousness. Lucky people like that do exist, but in rarified heights (financial/professional/whatever they choose to optimize for) rarely encountered by us mortals, and so you likely wouldn't have had the chance to meet them

Yes, exactly. The car analogy I've always heard is that a huge engine is good, but how much horsepower can the car actually get to the rear tires?

I think the way we can measure "outcomes" is also highly debatable. Is becoming a wise monk with no possessions good or bad? What about a successful and influential CEO who is miserable?

Yes, I often heard people complain about stuff like "If they are so smart why are they doing such useless stuff?"

The answer to that is often "Well, go on and tell a person who is much smarter than you that you know better what they should do with their time!"

I know a few people with >130 IQ and they all have...

No, those are just the ones you know about. You know, the kind that tell people that they have a high IQ. You probably know more people with IQs > 130, you just don't know that you do because they're well-adjusted, and they don't feel the need to tell you about their high IQ.

You're probably right.

On the other hand, almost all of my friends have anxiety, depression or executive disorders, but I know the IQ of a few of them.

That's interesting. Why do you think most of your friends a psychological disorder? Are they self diagnosed? Is this a case of "birds of a feather flock together"?

lol, you're the second person today that told me that idiom.

I don't know...

Just a quick calc. 130 is on the 97 percentile. So if you know 300 people then you know about 9 people with IQs >= 130. Probably more assume you tend to interact with smarter than average people.

Not exactly a scientific analogy, but it reminds me of rolling for stats in D&D or similar, where points in one area usually mean less points available for other areas.

It also seems like there's variance in the amount of "points" available normally. Dolph Lundgren for example seems to be playing with higher stats than most people.

Acquired Savants like Jason Padgett who seemingly become able to use dormant brain areas and Phineas Gage who's personality went in seemingly the opposite direction make me wonder if there might be some way to manipulate those odds-to make sure the IO doesn't wind up being a chokepoint.

I don't think it's like in D&D, because I could imagine these people to be highly successful.

I think the environment they grew up in is the problem.

People they had around them just handled them badly because of their intelligence. Sometimes because of envy, sometimes because of high-intelligence leads to being bored with most stuff rather quickly. If people around you think you are bored with everything they wanna do, they think you're a hater and don't want to be around you or even haze you in one way or another.

One of the few things we actually know for sure about iq is that it has a protective function when it comes to mental illness.

Source? I'm seeing both that it has a protective effect and that high intelligence is associated with mood disorders.

Do you have a citation for that?

On the surface it seems like an absurd statement, since IQ isn't a "thing", like for example, sickle shaped blood cells, which are protective against malaria.

It's a human devised statistical metric, which says nothing about what actually causes a particular score.

Even if there is a population wide correlation of higher IQ to better mental health, it would be heavily confounded by other huge factors affecting mental health, like income, education, health care access, family conditions during childhood. To prove this you'd have to control for at least those factors, and possibly many others.

The studies of high iq and correlation to mental illness all seem to be pretty bad (like, "let's survey a bunch of mensa members"), whereas the studies of correlation of childhood IQ and later mental illness are generally better studies. One of the better examples is https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/lower-child...

The better studies of high IQ and mental illness seems to only show a slightly higher occurrence of bipolar disorders.

But this could easily break down for outliers while still maintaining the general trend

I think many of us grew up in very bad social situations. The public school system I went through did not stratify children by intelligence (lets say) until 7th grade. I didn't have many friends until 7th grade.

I started to write a much longer response but don't have time. My IQ was tested at 142 some decades ago and, from what I've read, would be higher cause the tests have changed.

I was always very successful in my jobs but, when it came to starting my own business, I needed a lot of active encouragement or I would give up too quickly. However, in two cases, a business clicked with me, for some reason, which made me excited and driven. While others commented on my innovative approach to those businesses that made them successful, it was the enthusiasm that kept me going, followed by the excitement of success. You might say it's the difference between being a good player on a bad sports team versus a good player on a first place team. My IQ, perhaps, helped me see things most did not but it's the enthusiasm that keeps me going and, especially helpful, encouragement and support from others, not my IQ.

Disclaimer, I'm not a psychologist. I think IQ is a measure on how good you are manipulating abstractions and detecting patterns. For this other part

>> when it came to starting my own business, I needed a lot of active encouragement or I would give up too quickly

For that abstraction and patterns doesn't help, this is about your temperament, I'd look on how you score in the big five of personality traits. If you don't want to rely on being encouraged all the time. I think you could learn a set micro skills to compensate for those aspects that your natural temperament falls into 'need encouragement' pattern. Note there might not be known micro skill for some of traits, but at least you will have a model that explains your tendencies.

Someone successful enough could just hire an employee for encouragement. In fact lots of people do that, with executive coaches etc. Lots of others steal that service from their firms, by demanding lots of ass-kissing from subordinates.

> and, from what I've read, would be higher cause the tests have changed.

That doesn't sound right - the Flynn effect causes IQ tests to get harder over time.

Also, I believe IQ reliably deteriorates with age.

The Flynn effect is misunderstood to be some sort of general humanist truth (because psychology classes generally present it as such), but the existence of a reversal in the Flynn effect in recent years may indicate that it was just a circumstance of the 20th century and not something that we can assume will continue forever.

Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused (2018)

https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/0...

People are definitely reluctant to retract that bit of gospel and it's not a good look. IIRC Flynn himself was circumspect and the memory is uncertain but I thought he pointed to the recent reversal too.

This sort of collective amnesia happens often if you look out for it and this makes me suspicious of other conventional wisdom I see peddled here and on Reddit. Is it probably true because a lot of people think so or is it true because it chimed with a story. The mind warping powers of politics are well known but maybe the conceit every person shares is that we feel there ought to be a nice coherent story like a box to put things into - meanwhile Reality/Nature/God gives zero fucks about all that.

Iq is standardised on a population level, where age is an important parameter.

Talent is a trap. It has taken me years to see this, but because "talent" is really how easily you can accomplish at a high level, it can be a shock when you run into an area where you need growth.

I was limiting myself from growing in important areas because I gave up too easily when my "talent" didn't shine through. I should have realized at some point that it's all work in the end, and sometimes you have to slug through it.

You are almost 3 standard deviations up, meaning you the distance between you and the average is the same as between average and someone with what used to be called "mild mental retardation".

If it was something like WAIS you did it is actually a pretty comprehensive test including many different areas of mental performance (working memory, abstract verbal reasoning, visual spatial comprehension, inductive reasoning, attention encoding, auditory processing, quantative reasoning, associative memory, processing speed among others.).

A high score on something like WAIS is a pretty good predictor of work performance.

> My IQ, perhaps, helped me see things most did not but it's the enthusiasm that keeps me going

You need a sufficiently high IQ to seek out and achieve the higher things, such as productive sources of enthusiasm. Those with lower IQ will be less inclined to figure out how to become self-actualized.

That is unsubstantiated speculation. "IQ" doesn't mean "anything that makes a person ideal".

What is speculative about needing a high IQ to solve problems? This is simply a specific version of that.

The smartest people I know discover what is important to them in life and set up their life to pursue those interests. They may or may not be interests that make them famous in their fields, but if you define success as living a happy, satisfying life, they are succeeding at their top capacity.

I appreciate this little nugget of wisdom

There's an unspoken assumption in this discussion that ability, however it is defined, leads inevitably to success, whatever that means. Then you're looking at whether IQ is a good measurement of ability in the first instance (is it often wrong in what it is trying to measure it not?) And whether it is trying to measure the right thing or is ability elsewhere unmeasured?

Nowhere in all of it is dumb luck considered a factor. Lottery winners are successful. What can you infer about their personality attributes? It's obviously risible.

At the other end of the scale is there ability so profound that considering the role of luck is uninteresting? Or are there N others with comparable ability who weren't so fortunate and did not succeed? How big is that N? Is it possible to answer such questions with anything more than prejudice? Do you have to get lucky with your research to get a Nobel? Eg would Feynmann have got one for something else if QED was published by someone else a couple of years before he got there? Don Bradman was lucky to achieve what he did in sports, really?

My own prejudice is that IQ is total bullshit. I believe in my ability and was once told as a child that my IQ was impressive (whatever that meant - I don't know). I know I mirror my parents reaction to that news: "We think you're clever and always did, just not because of this nonsense."

Maybe I'm not super remarkable too and who cares? Life is too short. All of us should rise early, work hard and strike oil.

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

― Calvin Coolidge

Depends in what field.

Being persistent will never give you the facial features to become a male model.

you could be the before picture

I laughed way too hard at this

"But why male models"

But at this day and age of modern cosmetic surgery, yes it does. (At least you need persistence to get the money to afford it)

Because they're obedient!

>>> Being persistent will never give you the facial features to become a male model.

>> Yes it does!

> Okay. nods

Plenty of not-handsome actors out there, even historically.

Being persistent while 3 feet tall will never get you into the NBA. So you find something else to be persistent with.

Conversely, being 7 feet tall isn't enough on its own. You still need persistence to get into the NBA.

Those born with the right skull shape still need persistence and discipline with diet and exercise to make it as a model.

Persistence is still critical to rise above the crowd with most things.

Every successful person always ascribes that success to their dominant attribute. And coins an aphorism about it.

- Bryan Rasmussen

Dominant attribute? Or simply the one they want people to believe about themselves. The dominant for at least some seems to be being able to tolerate their own excessively vile behaviour.

maybe, however the parent quote was from Coolidge, and when I read it I thought - what the hell else would you expect Coolidge to say? He's not going to suggest liking people, being clever and listening, being willing to look at things in a new way etc.

> Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

People who persevere but fail are also very common, so this does not prove its claim.

Perhaps it is necessary but not sufficient?

There are instances of success without perseverance. For instance, the guy who invented GANs did it in one evening, more or less on a whim. One could argue that education and probably IQ were the dominant enablers there.

Maybe he attained the skills necessary to invent GANs in one evening through years of persistent learning?

Right but if you postulate that "perseverance" is prerequisite for "education" then why would Coolidge list it separately, as an argument that "it's not enough"?

Also, there are other examples of success without perseverance. Obvious ones are inherited success: e.g. just being born as king makes one - well, a king. No perseverance necessary. FWIW, I do think it's a game of probabilities - all these traits (education, IQ, perseverance etc) increase your odds of success to certain degree - and none of them guarantee it.

Gotta define success first. Seems we're ascribing it to mean power and wealth. Which is different from invention and technological innovation, or athletic achievements, or happiness, or longevity, or health, or lived experiences, or total percentage of time spent laughing, or comfort, or number of children, number of romances, sexual prowess, etc.

I feel our culture currently holds a strange definition of success, that of wealth mostly. So in that sense, ya, IQ might not matter that much.

Well, if you want to be very precise about it, and start excluding dictionary definitions ([1] "success = the attainment of wealth, position, honors, or the like.") - then I'd argue it's more important to define "perseverance". Do we define "perseverance" as "keep doing something for a (somewhat longer) while"? If yes, it's absolutely required. Do we define it to require "in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement."? Then, it's far less obvious. Sure, there are always some obstacles... but in my experience, perseverance is more often caused by success, than the other way around. It builds up - you have some success, do the thing some more, have more success, do it even more, and so on until you're really, really good at it - and what looks from outside as excruciating effort & grit is in fact a work of love and passion, sometimes even a way to relax. You don't grit your teeth & keep doing a PhD that you hate until you discover GANs; you simply do the thing that you love until you reach a level of expertise where discovering GANs is inevitable. I think those who do their PhDs with pure grit, despite disliking the domain, will be far less likely to produce world-changing innovations.

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/success

That guy has a B.S., M.S. and a Ph.D and works for Google. It's just a hunch, but I suspect he is very perseverant. Indeed, I'm not sure it's possible to even complete a Ph.D without being off the top of the bell curve on that trait which is why they're so revered.

“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“But, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

That is the quote I most remember from the movie, the founder. I did not know Calvin Coolidge was originally the guy who said it.

With the danger of sounding conceited: I have lived this.

Me and my sister are polar opposites in everything, I’m lazy. She’s motivated. I tended to be above average when tested. She tended to be below average when tested. She wanted nothing more than being outside in nature and I wanted nothing more than being inside and messing with my computer.

Hell. Even down to the fact she has a boys name and I have a girls name (I’m a guy) and that I was skinny and she was not.

She is now a barrister, something that I could never have become. I was close to being a shelf-stocker at the UK equivalent of wal-mart but ironically they wouldn’t have me. If not for the fact that this industry is a huge bubble I would be on my arse. And why? Because I’m lazy and smart. And she is persistent and dumb.

I have tremendous respect for my sister, but it’s a fact that her success is down to her persistence. She never gives up. Even when people dump all over her for being slow or sounding thick. She’s awesome. We could all learn something from her.

The question is, is she a good barrister? Not trying to play down her achievements, but in the end, anyone can graduate in law if they put in enough time and effort.

As an example: I once had a tax dispute where I was represented by a lawyer who I felt was not very sharp. We were losing / going to lose the case.

Realising the mistake I had made retaining him, I swapped to a senior lawyer of a named tax law firm. He was extremely sharp and experienced, and would think 10 steps ahead. He was also a bit lazy though (which is fine, so am I at times). But he's hands down the best professional I have ever worked with -- the only person I would ever trust without having to double check his work.

I prefer the smart lawyer, as opposed to any person with a law degree. The fact that the first guy in my example persevered and got a law degree says absolutely nothing about his ability.

Like all quotes, on first glance it appears insightful and impressive, but a closer second look reveals it to be nonsense.

> Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.

Luck and circumstance can.

> Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

The world is also full of persistent failures as well.

> Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

The Axis powers in ww2 were as persistent and determined as the allies. You could argue they were even more persistent and determined. They failed. Has there been a more persistent and determined presidential candidate than Hillary Clinton? She failed twice. If persistence was all it took, Hillary would have been president.

People love to pat themselves on the back for their successes. If coolidge was born into a black family in the 1800s rather than into an elite new england family, I wonder how much persistence and determination would have mattered.

Persistence is an important characteristic in life, but there are far more to success than persistence.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Preparation comes from persistence.

> “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

"Your parents have funny names for their genitals"

I think that luck is the only one you can't replace.

Not true. Luck is just random, preparation allows to spot more opportunities, but no amount of preparation will make up for a lack of them.

That does ring somewhat true, but I think there's more than just determination and intelligence that could affect success.

Things like charisma, gravitas, luck / right place and time, attractiveness, height, inherited wealth or relationships, etc.

Shortfalls in any of these can be made up by excesses in others.

If unrewarded genius proves that genius is not the thing, then unrewarded persistent person should prove persistence is not the thing either. And there are plenty of unrewarded persistent people.

Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent, but also, there are plenty of persistent people around who are unsuccessful.

> Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent

That’s arguable. I would hazard a guess that unsuccessful men without talent may be a larger group.

I was quoting parent at that point.

I love the opening statement:

"People too often forget that IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old."

Yeah, because other metrics of human mental performance, or any kind of psychological property of humans for that matter are so much older than a century, right ? A century in psychometrics, is 13.5 billion years in physics, to make the "dog-years" analogy.

Reality: IQ is the oldest, best, and most solidly established predictive metric of success. In fact it's pretty much the oldest metric anyone bothered keeping at all (presumably exactly because it works, it seems very unlikely to me that it just happened to be the first one they tried. I remember studies that tried to quantify "nobleness" and "noble blood" in people and correlate that to intelligence for example).

Back to the article. The source for all this wisdom ?

https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Checklist-Paradoxical-Become-C...

(This book essentially makes the point that there is a lot or variability at the extreme outliers of genius. Even then, it is forced to conclude that while those extreme outliers weren't the very top geniuses at a young age, they were very smart. The just weren't top of the top early in life, even though they did become the top of the top later in life. It points out the corollary: genius increases the odds of success, which is very different from guaranteeing it)

I wonder how many IQ test misclassify intelligence? Feynman had a score of 125 and many people here have a high score than that. I bet no one here with a higher score of 125 are actually smarter than Feynman though. I think this is just one of many possible such examples where IQ test miss the purported people they were suppose to capture. Feynman’s score wouldn’t even qualify him for MENSA.

I wonder how many IQ exams misclassify the intelligence of smart people with disabilities of some sort or high functioning autism. Not saying any of this applies to Feynman, he is just an example of where the test didn’t accurately capture his intellect.

I think it´s fairly well accepted that Feynman deliberately blew off his IQ test.

Your comment doesn’t address my question of how many people are misclassified by IQ test. I suspect smart people with high functioning autism and the like are not accurately measured. Not saying any of this applies to Feynman by the way. Just used him as an example of where an IQ exam underestimated someone.

It´s fairly well known that people from impoverished backgrounds get lower grades for several reasons - not ever having practiced similar questions and vocabulary issues: there have been some quite notorious questions, especially over in England that were dependent on different social classes having different vocabularies, etc.

It is relatively easy for a good IQ year to deliver a “false negative” — that is, a significantly lower score than a theoretical true score. This could be as simple as something like not sleeping well the night before or just simple ambivalence.

It is relatively difficult for a good IQ test to deliver a false positive — that is, a significantly higher score than a theoretical true score.

I personally don’t think that this issue is taken into consideration enough when discussing IQ.

Right. My boys all achieved tests in grade school that varied from 100% to 3%. My wife worried that something was 'wrong' with them. I assured her by noting, its easy to not care about a test and get 3%. Its essentially impossible to accidentally get the 100% score

Furthermore, most IQ tests are not meant to measure intelligence past a certain point. A person with an IQ of 160 is not inherently smarter than someone who has an IQ of 150 in the same way someone with an IQ of 100 is inherently smarter than someone with an IQ of 90.

There can be measurement errors, like with any metric, but statistically speaking, a person with an IQ score of 160 will be more intelligent than somebody with a score of 150. And significantly so. 10 IQ points is a big deal (2/3rds of a standard deviation). Increasing the average IQ of any population by 10 points would be a total game changer.

Are you really arguing that most IQ tests have replicable sensitivity above 130-140?

Because that is very different than what I’ve heard. My impression is that most (perhaps not all) IQ tests are stable and highly replicable for results up to that range (assuming consistently motivated test takers, a very big assumption, particularly for bored smart people), but test scores above that range are mostly noise.

In another part of this thread[0], Bartweiss says that Raven's Advanced Matrices is valid up until about 150 IQ. So I was close. And my bigger point is that, though the measurement lacks precision at that level, if you lined up a bunch of 150 IQ people and a bunch of 160 IQ people, there are probably some aggregate group differences. Anecdotally, I've spent a lot of time around really smart people. There are gradations even at the top (just as there are in all other areas of talent; there's only one Lebron James, after all)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142638

my guess is that a well designed IQ test actually tests what it tests for with good accuracy/precision. i am skeptical that the IQ criteria are very close to what we consider "intelligence".

I'm around 150, and I don't consider myself smarter than Feynman. And I'm no savant, am socially well adjusted, and not on the autism scale. This, among many other data points, has led me to question the entire concept of IQ.

The measurement of IQ borders on pseudo-science. It measures something, but what exactly? Everyone has a different answer. Ok, sure, intelligence. Now try to define "intelligence" empirically. What isn't a particular IQ test measuring that is relevant to intelligence? Different IQ tests often yield different results. And I'm not talking about online tests, but proctored tests administered by professionals.

How do you account for that amorphous quality known as "intuition"? You can't measure it or quantify it. You can barely define it. It is a finicky, inconsistent beast. Yet it has a profound effect on one's problem solving ability.

If the factors that determine IQ are individually difficult to define, differentiate, and measure, what does that say about the score itself?

In the broadest terms, IQ matters, but not in a way that makes one's score relevant for any practical purpose. You don't need an IQ test to measure competency in a specific task or occupation.

You don't need to "define" it in some philosophical sense to use it.

Compare "mass". What is mass? Can you really define it? You can say what it does, but what "is" it? Well, nobody can define it, except in terms of the things that it does. Because those are all we see of it. We can measure it, we see those measurements let us predict other outcomes. So we can use our knowledge of mass in practical, predictive ways to build things and accomplish things. Physicists still don't know what it "is" and they don't have to.

Now intelligence. You can measure it. The measurements stay stable on a given person over time and between tests. The measurements predict a wide variety of outcomes - both of a large life scale (income, longevity, criminality, etc) and on an individual task scale (this person can learn X in Y time). It's the most solid, repeatable, predictive result in all of psychometrics - more than personality traits or anything else we can measure about the mind. but what "is" it? It's the thing that predicts all those outcomes. No practical use for it requires that it be anything else.

The whole "what is intelligence anyway" thing is a giant red herring; it's a specific case of a general-purpose counterargument that can be used to attack literally any statement about anything by demanding endlessly more rigorous definitions of the terms involved.

I never claimed that intelligence is nothing. I said that the IQ measurement is itself not worth much except as a general guide in fairly broad ranges.

Intelligence is certainly something. It is relevant. But it is not precise, and is useful, as I said, only in the broadest strokes. And like all psychometrics, the manner in which it is measured is itself not stable.

But comparing intelligence to mass or any other physical measurement is a non sequitur. Mass is precisely measurable with perfectly repeatable results, and has perfectly repeatable interactions.

> I said that the IQ measurement is itself not worth much except as a general guide in fairly broad ranges.

IQ predicts about 30% of a whole host of life outcomes (mostly related to job performance, educational attainment, earnings, etc.). That might not seem like a whole lot, but it's the best single predictor of life outcomes that exists, aside from looking at a person's parents and siblings.

But IQ itself is predicted by parental earnings and parental educational attainment (and, IIRC, mostly by the sheer volume of reading for pleasure during childhood.)

There's a chicken/egg thing here that I think is a cart/horse thing.

Education doesn't have as much effect as you might think. It seems that nutrition has a very significant effect on IQ: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886990...

It has roughly 30% predictive power after controlling for the most obvious confounding factors (like the ones you mention).

As someone who does research in this area, broadly defined, I think you're on to something, but I also think there are some misleading things about this article (which I nevertheless think is interesting) and caveats to what you're saying.

Lots of thoughts:

1. Intelligence is a broad construct. It is by definition, and it is not the only cognitive construct. It does have a lot of utility for certain purposes though, such as in identifying pervasive neurological disease.

As others are noting, this is relevant to the article in that we tend to focus on extremes when making these kinds of comparisons, when the full spectrum is really what's important sometimes. We tend to fixate on whether someone went to some prestigious university or less prestigious university, or whether our incomes are in the upper middle class or upper class, but in the sense of outcomes, compared to all outcomes, these can be relatively minor distinctions and hard to predict.

2. There are other variables that are relevant, like conscientiousness, ruthlessness, and so forth. This is certainly true.

3. There are still other variables that have nothing to do with the individuals involved though. The elephant in the room are societal and other random factors that prevent any individual attribute from mattering as much as they could. The article starts out by dismissing prediction among females out of hand because of societal limitations, which is reasonable. But there are lots of other variables involved, random and nonrandom societal and environmental forces at play. The hidden story is that there are limits to predicting outcomes at all from the individual at hand, meaning that other variables in the environment are working.

4. Measurement of intelligence is fuzzy and imperfect as you're alluding to. It's stochastically imprecise, in the sense that giving the same test twice, or two different tests, will give you somewhat different answers. But it's also imperfect in that the thing it's measuring isn't really what we probably want to measure in an ideal case. Even if the tests were giving the same answer all the time, it wouldn't really be intelligence in the way we want to talk about intelligence.

5. I'm not sure that we really want cognitive functioning measures to be perfectly stable, because I don't think cognitive functioning is actually perfectly stable. It probably varies across the day, for example.

6. Physical measurements are certainly more precise. But the objects systemically are much less complex. It's easier to talk about measuring the mass of a cubic meter of oxygen than it is to talk about measuring climatological variables; something analogous is in play with things like intelligence.

Also, even physical measurements at a certain level become fuzzy and highly interdependent. Measuring mass "precisely" depends on your scale and other variables.

I think it's worth separating out different tasks in terms of how g-loaded they are (that is to say how much they require intelligence).

General life success is g-loaded but not to an extreme degree. As many have noted, it's certainly possible to have success without great intelligence by working around one's limitations and finding other strengths.

But consider other tasks like "invent a new theorem in particle physics and get it published in a top journal" or "improve a mature database/load-balancing system to save a million dollars a year for a large computing company". These are extremely g-loaded tasks. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, is an absolute requirement to be able to do these things at all in my opinion. My sense is I don't think anyone could ever do such things without scoring 120+ IQ at absolute minimum and probably much more, though I'd be happy to hear counterexamples.

That's an example I'd say where intelligence as a concept and measure is useful in narrow strokes: When you need such a task to be done and done well, you can use intelligence measures to filter who does it (the same way you'd use stature to filter who you put on your basketball team).

In any case, however useful intelligence is, it's the most useful of all psychometric measures. Everything else is worse. That makes it not a great tool necessarily, but the most generally important among the tools we have.

I can agree with that.

You're not measuring; "intelligence". You're measuring someone's ability to perform well in a very contrived test. A test that no one could even take without a very specific education experience.

So in that context, I'm sure the results are robust. But I don't think that means much

> You're not measuring; "intelligence". You're measuring someone's ability to perform well in a very contrived test. A test that no one could even take without a very specific education experience.

You're not measuring; "mass". You're measuring an object's ability to attract other objects in a very contrived test. A test that no object would even undergo outside a very specific physics experiment.

The difference being that an object's "mass" has very broad implications for all the theories that incorporate the notion of an object's "mass", all of which have been tested to high precision. (In tests that range from being contrived to not at all.) You can't say this for "intelligence" in anywhere close to the same way.

But it seems more HNers are dead set on believing that there is a genetic factor that can make certain people more "superior" than others, to justify existing social hierarchy.

Does it also bother you that tall people are statistically more successful basketball players? Or that wiry people are statistically better marathon runners? If no, then why does it bother you that intelligent people are statistically more successful in positions that require complex mental work?

The intelligence trait is real, not imaginary. Sure, it's a lot more complex than a simple, well-defined concept like mass. But then again, that applies to everything related to the human mind.

> [...] to justify existing social hierarchy.

What a weird attitude... Would you prefer that someone's position in the social hierarchy is even more strongly determined by their parents position or money? As was the case in medieval Europe?

You can quantify mass identically for humans, for other animals, and for inanimate objects. Intelligence-as-measured-by-IQ-tests apparently only works for humans. I would like to see intelligence measurement procedures that work alike for corvids, humans, and digital computing systems. I don't know if they exist. It appears that ordinary IQ tests cannot be applied that way.

My main grievance with IQ as "general" intelligence is its human parochialism. It does not generalize much at all. "The most solid, repeatable, predictive result in all of psychometrics" sounds like very faint praise to someone with a background in the natural sciences.

> I would like to see intelligence measurement procedures that work alike for corvids, humans, and digital computing systems. I don't know if they exist.

Of course these objective psychometrics exist, but it's usually only referenced in fields like information sciences, xenology, or speculative futures studies. The obvious reason is because IQ or g factor is only relevant as a barrier to entry in human societies for eliminating potential revolutionary competition against the higher incumbent echelons, pseudoscientific justification of persecution and political subsidy gerrymandering by fracturing demographics into enclaves of special interests to play off each other, or simply as a cultural shibboleth to identify peers for collusion and enemies for swindling.

To start with, there's metrics like the encephalization quotient which are still empirically based (read: gimmicks to support a pre-defined conclusion) curve fitting of anthropocentric expectations of how a genre of organisms should be judged relative to how humans perceive themselves in ability. Yes it's an improvement from IQ or g because it simplifies what was a constantly changing, completely opaque, and wholly arbitrary metric into something that at least measures one physically real property, namely brain volume. But I guess you could say the same about things like phrenology or any other quackery.

There's further refinements to metrics like the sentience quotient based on the density of computational matter or surface area of the I/O boundary of an organism against its environment. Even metrics like this still have incredible assumptions on the nature of intelligence as if we should prioritize the bandwidth or latency of interconnect, I/O, or memory among many other considerations such as algorithmic efficiency -- a whole other can of worms because that means you now need to define the relevant sources and sinks of information and that mapping essentially implies the "purpose of life" which is still a tricky thing to classify. Maybe it's the ability to minimize the time required to maximize the diffusion of an energy gradient? It's unclear.

And that's pretty much the crux of all this that has been stated before on this site[0]: "Metrics, even if not quantified, are always goal-oriented in providing an explanation or use."

Sometimes that use could be nepotism, mental masturbation to relieve some angst brought on by realizing a life wasted in pursuing nonsense like psychiatry, or maybe it's just to survive when the only source of funding demands you to tailor a patch of woven bullshit to mend the emperor's increasingly tattered clothes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017451

Would you please stop creating accounts for every comment or two you post? This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it, for reasons explained at length here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW, IQ is not pseudo-science. The research around IQ is some of the most robust psychological research that exists. In fact, it is one of the few areas of psychology that has basically been unscathed by the replication crisis.

Some of the most robust psychological research, as long as you define intelligence as the ability to do well on an IQ test.

IQ significantly predicts real world performance in a bunch of areas.

The measure is not pseudo-science, but the attempts to draw sweeping conclusions from it at the individual or societal level are pure nonsense.

Ethical psychologists don't consider IQ in isolation the way that pop culture and many in forums like HN do.

You have to engage in some really convoluted thinking to have something like IQ, which significantly predicts a whole bunch of important life outcomes, and somehow convince yourself that it doesn't have sweeping implications at the individual and societal level. It would be like convincing yourself that height had nothing to do with success in basketball. Surely it's not the only important factor, but it makes a huge difference.

Why are you so sure that IQ isn't just a useful fiction that masks a large number of underlying factors that we don't fully understand? Why are you so sure that it is the best predictor of success in these fields. Perhaps other traits are equal or better predictors of success in a particular field, like tenaciousness, or conscientiousness, and perhaps IQ doesn't matter as much if one of those aren't present.

Perhaps you have some citations to share?

The comparison to height is quite weak, because height is a far simpler and more objectively verifiable measurement, and the causal mechanism that connects height and success in basketball is plain as day simple: proximity to the hoop.

> Why are you so sure that IQ isn't just a useful fiction that masks a large number of underlying factors that we don't fully understand? Why are you so sure that it is the best predictor of success in these fields. Perhaps other traits are equal or better predictors of success in a particular field, like tenaciousness, or conscientiousness, and perhaps IQ doesn't matter as much if one of those aren't present.

Because the study of human intelligence is a well established scientific discipline with a lot of well-regarded research that replicates and provides explanations of real world phenomena. And it all points to there being this (not yet fully understood) thing called g that is the strongest known predictor of tons of things related to life outcomes.

Here's a blog post by Razib Kahn about an episode of his podcast, The Insight, with guest Stuart Ritchie, a researcher in human intelligence. The podcast episode is a good start.

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/04/11/the-insight-episod...

Thanks for the reference.

FWIW, from the Wikipedia page[1] for g:

"However, critics of g have contended that an emphasis on g is misplaced and entails a devaluation of other important abilities, as well as supporting an unrealistic reified view of human intelligence. "

Interesting discussion all around.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

>I'm around 150

Good old HN: 1 out of 200 people in the population have an IQ of 140+, but half the people in this thread do.

Can't wait for the ironic "But HackerNews is filled with such smart people!" comments.

> 1 out of 200 people in the population have an IQ of 140+

What is that, 25 million?

Not only is HN full of smart people, people with high IQs are likely drawn to articles about high IQs.

If it makes you feel any better, my IQ wasn't as high as I hoped it would be. Not high enough to brag about, for sure.

Feynman is a notable exception to the trend. Using a single exceptional result as evidence for decrying a trend is foolish.

IQ tests obviously do not account for __every__ variable which we cumulatively call "intelligence", but IQ is heavily correlated with the ability to succeed at tasks society classifies as "smart people stuff". The difference in intelligence between two individuals is much less pronounced if both individuals are already two standard deviations above the norm. But if you were to compare two individuals, one who is one standard deviation below, and the other one above, you would observe a clear difference in 'intelligence' between the two. Even in this comparison, there will be outliers, but the outliers are not statistically significant.

> IQ is heavily correlated with the ability to succeed at tasks society classifies as "smart people stuff"

Or, more precisely, IQ is heavily correlated with the ability to succeed at taking IQ tests.

>Or, more precisely, IQ is heavily correlated with the ability to succeed at taking IQ tests.

...and succeeding at taking IQ tests is also predictive of an individual's potential to succeed at, using the Feynman example, physics.

Lets say you were to gather two pools of individuals, one pool with IQ test results of 2 standard deviations below, the other with results of 2 standard deviations above, and provide them with the necessary materials and instruction to understand physics 101. Incentivize the participants by offering a $2000 cash reward for demonstrating the knowledge they were tasked with learning, lets say by answering X questions presented to them in whichever format would be optimal for their success.

How many from group -2 SDs do you think would receive the $2000, compared to group +2 SDs? -1 SDs compared to +1 SDs?

The choice of physics was arbitrary as well. You could assign almost any field of study, and you would still get almost identical results in performance.

>Feynman is a notable exception to the trend. Using a single exceptional result as evidence for decrying a trend is foolish.

You missed my question. I am concerned with how many smart people with disabilities IQ exams misclassifies. I am not using Feynman to say he had a disability or anything, I was using him as an example of a case where his IQ score doesn't match his actual intelligence, and I am in no way claiming why that may be. I am merely stating IQ exams aren't perfect. If you are interested in replying, then reply to the question I posed. I think IQ test potentially misclassifies people with high functioning autism and other highly intelligent people with mental disabilities, showing they have lower intelligence than they actually have.

Feynman took one test, in ~1930 when he was ~12 years old. Maybe it was a problem with the test, and Feynman actually had a much higher IQ.

I always tested in the 99th percentile, went to gifted and talented classes, was a merit scholarship semi finalist, etc. I think by any measure I had a high IQ. I also barely graduated high school, flunked out of junior college and spent most of my 20s going to raves instead of accomplishing anything worth while.

Meanwhile my sister, who had an utterly average iq by any measure has a masters degree and is a hospital executive.

The answer is she just worked harder than me. I gave up as soon as anything was difficult for me because I was so used to learning everything easily. She assumed that learning was supposed to be hard and put the work into it.

Talent without effort will get you nowhere.

Effort without talent will get you somewhere.

Effort with talent will get you anywhere.

Sounds a bit cliché, but screw it, that's going on my desktop background.

Talent with little effort will get you close to anywhere.

It sounds different from that: she worked at all. It didn't take particular persistence after all - you can get a degree by simply showing up.

Similar setup albeit perhaps a different (or just earlier?) outcome.

Failed a bunch of classes in high school and flirted with dropping out. Two misdemeanor arrests for underaged drinking and pot. Graduated in bottom quintile of my high school class, one failure shy of being held back. Managed to get into a far away college with a scholarship on the basis of a letter of recommendation from one of those once-in-a-lifetime teachers for whom I'll be forever grateful.

Did fine in college, got a 1600 on the GRE, went into dev work at startups and have since had a quite successful career.

I feel like being smart saved my butt multiple times over. I don't think I would have gotten that LOR if I hadn't made an impression on that HS teacher, wouldn't have been able to self-teach CS as a non-programmer as easily without smarts to fall back on, etc.

Maybe being smart was not a prerequisite for getting where I did, but I think it was a prerequisite for taking the winding path I took.

And also a gigantic, heaping helping of luck as well.

IQ measures intellectual ability. Intelligence is a necessary, not a sufficient condition for success.

Absolutely. It's not that complicated.

Usain Bolt obviously has incredible sprinting talent. But if he sat around at home playing video games and eating potato chips all day, nobody would expect him to be an amazing sprinter. Everyone knows this.

Yet for some reason there's this weird idea that intelligence without effort can yield results, where the same obviously doesn't apply to any other kind of natural talent. It's strange.

I always like to point out that a problem here is that people don't always recognise it when intellectual effort happens. Most people talk about someone being intelligent because they can get good grades without studying or similar. But not studying doesn't mean there's not an intellectual effort. In fact, most intelligent people are intelligent or stay that way because they are constantly listening, analyzing, learning and thinking in their day to day. Then maybe they don't need to separately study a subject that much. They are used to learn and they already got it. (you get the point)

So, I don't think it's strange, it's usually very different to the "physical training" example, because people don't see it directly.

> weird idea that intelligence without effort can yield results

In my experience, that 'weird idea' comes from early schooling. Highly intelligent (gifted?) kids generally don't have to exhibit any effort on school work, at least up to a certain time. I can tell you that, in my case, I coasted up until around 11th grade, then I hit a bit of a mental wall. I'm sure other physiological changes impacted, but at core, I didn't know how to study or exert effort in 'learning' - everything had just fallen in to place for so long that I didn't have the skill or experience to learn how to get better. This was a confounding factor in college as well.

I've shared this with other folks, and had more than a few people share similar experiences.

If Usain just ran really fast, and people said "wow, you're fast", but he wasn't trained at how to get better, he probably wouldn't have become a world champ. But with 'raw intelligence', that often doesn't receive the same sort of coaching and support as specific sports or other identifiable talents.

It's all because schools generally focus on the common denominator and more talented children are lost to boredom and lack of challenges. This doesn't apply everywhere, but it certainly applied to my pre-university education.

I skipped a grade, but even that wasn't enough. Parents indicated later that there was thought of skipping 2 grades, but the social/age difference might have been too great, so it was nixed at the time, then never revisited.

FWIW, Usain Bolt trains about as much as a motivated amateur athlete (roughly 90 minutes a day). The big difference between the two being that motivated amateurs have day jobs, whereas Usain Bolt does not. His success is almost entirely talent, in other words.

Intelligence is not necessary in many endeavors including business.

I think it measures a subset of "intellectual ability".

I have a fairly high IQ, but there are things I'm terrible at, like music and art. I put a lot of effort in, and get no results.

Anyone who knows that their D&D Character with a 20 INT isn't invincible. You have to have a combination of scores in all of the attributes to succeed. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't apply this to real life.

That being said, I often find that I over-think tasks, and end up never completing them because I try to make them perfect, and find out at some point that I can't.

What's more important than "perfect" is "good enough", and sometimes a high IQ won't allow you to accept that.

It's one of the things I hate about myself at times.

It's possible to play a 20 INT character if the rest of the cast is adjusted accordingly.

I have a theory that a lot of highly successful people have either a partner or a team that is willing to do the grunt work. They basically have/created a surrounding that allows them to focus on what they do best. The media will picture how that person is so smart and great, but without the proper environment they wouldn't be able to thrive.

Smart people have a tendency to think they can do everything on their own because they are so smart, which is quite stupid actually.

The brilliant mathematician Erdos was famously incompetent at the basic requirements of life. There are many exasperated stories from the colleagues who hosted him throughout the years, but it was worth it for the insights he could provide on their work.

>Anyone who knows that their D&D Character with a 20 INT isn't invincible.

Isn't this some kind of circular logic? A character with high intelligence is just that a charade of the user playing it. So it doesn't matter if the INT is high, if the player is a moron bad things will still happen.

IQ tests have been plagued with controversy including cultural markers and yet many continue to be obsessed with attaching more meaning to them that they can deliver.

How can we design tests and make definitive judgements about the best way to test intelligence when we do not fully understand it or even define it? What about things like curiosity, passion, emotional intelligence and team work?

Are we testing abstract thinking, visual thinking, language skills? What do they measure and how exactly do the scores translate into the real world? Without any comprehensive studies, data or evidence this quickly becomes a pseudo science.

Is there any guarantee and precision that a person with IQ of 140 is more 'intelligent' than a person with an IQ of 120? In what? In the IQ tests yes, but beyond that in what? The real world is much more than a single test in a controlled environment.

This is like claiming a student scoring higher than classmates in an english test will write a better novel or compose better prose. Does not follow, in the same way ascribing value in the real world to an IQ test does not follow.

I think maybe a better way to think of "smarts" leading to success is to not look only at IQ, but also attention

An oversimplified example from electrical engineering:

Watts are units of power. Amperage * Voltage = wattage.

Amperage refers to how much current (width of the pipe) and voltage refers to the speed of the current (how fast the water flows).

I think that we focus so much on intelligence testing, but neglect to focus on attention. I think that making use of your smarts, intelligence, or whatever term you want to give it needs a combination of intelligence and attention.

If you are very smart (180 IQ) but can't focus for long, you will be outdone by the woman or man who "only" has 130 IQ but has persistence.

IIRC studies of Nobel winners (a good measure of "smarts" and achievement) confirm my theory - finding that after a certain cutoff, there are diminishing returns for IQ alone in terms of obtaining a nobel.

Of course IQ isn’t a measure of success. Success is a measure of success.

This remark is either really smart, or really dumb, depending on how you interpret it.

I think that this comment refers to Goodhart's Law[1], so I would place my money on smart.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbFABnst8LsidYs5Y/goodhart-t...

Right, but IQ is still one of the best predictors of success.

But what is the best predictor of IQ?

Off-the-cuff, I'd probably say either a stable and supportive family environment and/or above-average family wealth, in which case one could just cut out the IQ middleman and say those are the best predictors.

Your parents' IQ, maternal IQ more so.

Success is an abstraction, not a measure (or even unambiguously measurable.)

I want to believe that my perhaps above average IQ won't matter and I could be in a league of PhDs. But practically it seems very difficult and there is a glass ceiling which seems too difficult to break. A feeling that there is something which my mind cannot probably grasp.

PhD is almost never about high IQ, its about perseverance.

If you're smart enough to get a bachelors or masters in a subject, you're smart enough to get a PhD in the subject. What will make or break you is your tenacity and willpower and not giving up when it becomes a dull hard slog.

And realistically the difference in quality/difficulty level of work people do to get their PhD is massive. Some people revolutionize their field for decades to come and some do a slightly more drawn out bachelors level thesis. Yet they both end up with the same degree.

>difficult >cannot probably grasp

I think a lot of PhDs find their study very difficult too, and simply have to persist.

I personally know a number of people with PhDs who never did well on IQ tests, but simply persevered and did their thing.

It's all about learning more things, which in turn expands what you could possibly think - the human mind's ideas are limited to what it already knows or has experienced.

Learning new things expands that, allowing you to make new and unique connections between ideas.

Knowing more will help your future learning too - many ideas from separate fields are similar. Once you have learned one, your brain can easily learn the other ones, as it just maps the concept.

Many people have said it's about perseverance, My take on that is that it is perseverance in learning. I don't know what the IQ fuss is about. It's about as useless as all the other categorisations such as the Myers Briggs Personality Types.

Don't let yourself be categorised by a made up number, based on the ideas of the 1900s that have nowadays been mostly proven wrong or, at the very least, unreliable at best.

Learning and doing will break any glass ceilings you may think there are. The people who are at the top of their fields got there by years of excruciatingly hard work that is often forgotten. (forgotten not as in that it didn't matter, but as in people looking at them often think they just became top of their fields in a fortnight, and forget their actual life's journey that led them there)

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that birth geography, parental income/wealth, health, luck, and temperament all contribute to success.

Given how often we've been told that IQ tests don't measure anything but the ability to take tests, the title is obvious bullshit. I think it is fair, though, to say IQ tests tend to become less accurate as the test takers approach the intelligence of the test designers. An they're when the test takers are much smarter than the test designers, the tests are really no good at all at determining how much smarter.

I have an interesting take on this article. I had an IQ > 150 when I was originally tested when I was a teenager. Later in my teenage years, I experienced trauma that resulted in my IQ dropping by 20+ points, permanently. This means that my IQ is currently in the higher end of the normal range. Here is what I noticed:

1. I feel less "sharp". By this I mean I feel slower to react to things and it takes longer for me to formulate thoughts. Words "caught on the tip of my tongue" happen more often.

2. It takes longer for me to learn. This applies to things like reading comprehension all the way up to learning new technologies. I need to read more slowly and practice more often before I can master a topic.

3. My concentration has decreased. I have ADHD, even as an adult, but following the trauma, it became worse.

What it didn't affect:

1. My motivation. I've always considered myself an entrepreneur. If anything, I am more motivated to be successful - even if I have to work harder.

2. My dedication to lifelong learning. I am a strong proponent of learning new things is important to being successful.

TLDR; IQ has its advantages, but it isn't the only factor.

Very interesting piece. Really shows standardised testing is not beneficial, especially as it usually narrows the scope of teaching anyway.

There's supposedly some correlation between high IQ and mood/social disorders. One example article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-...

Perhaps that accounts for some of this.

Related, I have (had?) an above average IQ, am on the spectrum, and have many symptoms of ADHD...then I had a transient ischemic stroke.

Everything calmed down after.

It sounds like you're saying your quality of life is better on the whole post stroke. Is that right? Pretty interesting if so.

I'll offer that many of those with a high IQ are not all that interested in becoming "highly successful" or obtaining "professional or graduate degrees".

Those are really only importance to those who are inclined to hold value in those and they're not necessarily something everyone with a high IQ values.

So, the results they're measuring don't account for what the subject group (high IQs) deems important to them. For example, if your family is struggling to make ends meet one might work hard to solve that problem by doing what's necessary, including digging ditches if that's all they can find to make ends meet. If you follow them you might find they come up with a way to make digging ditches much easier, faster, and better. And you'll most likely find that they didn't get any credit at all for that, and that they didn't care.

I know plenty of people for whom their high IQ is actually a hindrance rather than a help. So even for them it matters (greatly) but not in a positive way.

The best determinants for being successful, in spite of a high IQ or lack thereof are the ability to focus and to have stamina.

I see luck (family you're born into, being in the right place at the right time, etc.) as far more of a determinant than focus or stamina.

Its important of course - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell were all the same guy - family situation, education, opportunity.

Yet there were thousands just like them, that didn't succeed. The difference? Persistence, I think.

Is there any way to train focus and stamina?

The general advice is: know when take breaks. Small + often.

High IQ Low Focus is going to be better than Low IQ Low Focus. Where it is going to be unclear is High IQ Low Focus vs Low IQ High Focus. Unfortunately, focus and IQ generally correlate, so the genetic winners get even more inherent advantage.

It is well earablished that iq tests don’t work that well until adulthood. E.g. identical twins raised seperately have very different iq test scores during childhood but the scores converge in early adulthood.

The discussion here is interesting, and I think it might be worth it to consider that despite any real differences in IQ, everyone is suffering from the same miserable dysfunctions that are rooted in systems that affect your life. For example, there's another post on the HN front page today about a Nobel laureate who sold his medal to pay his medical bills. At the end of it, there's seems to be an ingrained futility to anything. It seems luck is a more important factor than genetics.

The key is not to confuse IQ as an isolated effect, but rather study it as an interactive effect, e.g. taken together with grit / perseverance, IQ likely becomes one of the best explanatory variables for success.

IQ is not a definitive 100% accurate predictor for intelligence, people expect that, and it doesn't work like that. But it doesn't mean it's not a predictor.

i.e. a lot of people say 'Feynman had an IQ of 125, I had an IQ of 140, but I'm not smarter than Feynman, thus I question IQ as a predictor for intelligence'. But that's a bit like saying 'Tyson was a small heavyweight boxer, but he's a more successful boxer than I am while I'm twice his size, thus I doubt size as a predictor for boxing success'.

Same with things like getting a college degree, and comparing your degreed success with that of Bill Gates who dropped out. It doesn't rule out education as a predictor.

Similarly, you can look at BMI and say that it is a predictor for being overweight (e.g. as a proxy for health, having too much fat, dietetc). But bodybuilders have high BMIs, the proxy doesn't work for them.

The key to all these edge-cases are interactive effects. Education works, but not when interacted with forgoing a billion dollar entrepreneurial opportunity like Gates or Zuckerberg. BMI works, but not interacted with a low-fat, high-muscle training goal. Size as a predictor works in combat sports, but can be overcome when low size is interacted with talent factors. Similarly, IQ works, but not in isolation, and not in every single case, but it is one of the more useful predictors with a lot of explanatory powers.

Lastly, estimating any predictor for a small subset of geniuses (the focus of this article), is hardly an effective metric when it's based on an IQ test that is designed for the general population.

Lastly, some bayesian perspectives... the article's premise is based on: how many high-IQ people go on to become a genius. Well, very few. Perhaps that's not because IQ doesn't matter, but rather that there's just very few geniuses. Instead if you look at geniuses and look at what their IQ is, it's virtually all substantially above average.

Insomuch as he's speaking to a rare strawman individual who holds the belief that IQ is the end-all metric of being a genius then yes, IQ doesn't matter as much as he thinks. Most other people however are much more nuanced about IQ and understand you can be unsuccessful with a high IQ and successful with a low IQ, but that it's a very strong predictor for success nonetheless.

Do they make the assumption that everybody want to be eminent? I mean, the way I interpret the article is that IQ is not the only thing you need to achieve success. Of course, you have to want success in the first place isn't. So I guess I would be more interested in a study done on determined people (for example YC founders). I bet suddenly IQ will play some big role but who knows.

Headlines like this are tedious. The obvious question without even reading the article is "for what". Obviously IQ does only matter in some contexts. If you don't see that you might lack some of it.

Can someone do a test for willpower/hardwork?

I think that would be a useful indicator. I was a B student, but I've accomplished more than A students now that I'm approaching my 30s.

I just started one for you. Now it's up to you to figure out, what has to be done and do it.

Let me know when you think you have finished the test, and we will evaluate it.

Interesting.

I have no incentive to do the test, so I wont.

My willpower is based on consequences?

The evaluation of the test is simple. Your willpower is measured by the amount of hard work you dedicated to the problem of your own choice during the time interval of the test (which is your choice as well).

So if you truly have no incentive to do the test, then you have no incentive to do anything that you choose to, and zero willpower.

Even though it's controversial, I think this comes close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

Willpower has a standard test, at least in kids: put a sweet in front of them, tell them to not eat it, leave them alone with it, and see how long it takes them to eat it anyway.

For adults, I propose giving them a mobile phone and a Twitter account, and seeing how long it takes for them to “just check it one more time”.

Geez,I guess I’ve always had infinite willpower. /s

I wasn’t a fan of sweets as a kid, and I don’t have a Twitter account.

That said, I think that these, or some minor variation thereof, are fairly good and simple tests of willpower.

I've never liked the marshmallow test. I think it is fundamentally flawed as others have found.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impu...

hard to tease out when people have very different motivations.

rationally, i understand the importance of education, but emotionally, i found it a bit odd that i was paying to do work. so i always did the minimum required to get a B or low A, except on programming assignments where i wanted to prove to myself that i was the best. i usually had the highest project average in the class.

once i got myself into a position where i actually get paid to work, i didn't have much trouble getting motivated.

There have been willpower studies in young children. The findings were something like:

- Willpower at some point (age 4?) actually goes down for some period of time.

- Willpower at (I believe) age 8 was highly predictive of future success. Higher than IQ, but

- Willpower (I think here measured as focus) tends to increase with IQ.

The real fallacy is thinking that it is ONLY one factor and hoping that by isolating that one fact that you can prove and predict all things.

That is foolish in my experience.

I'm starting to suspect that society is set up to make IQ matter less than we think.

I agree that it matters less. One thing is to have a high IQ, the other is to apply that IQ to your every day life. However, it is not sufficient to base your success on IQ alone, effort matters too and those who have a high IQ tend to put less effort into things

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

"If you think your IQ is 160 but it's 150, you're a disaster. It's much better to have a 130 IQ and think it's 120."

- Charlie Munger

Could you please explain the meaning of that quote to me?

Don't think you're smarter than you are.

I don't know what the meaning is, but I'm pretty sure that's not it.

People with really high IQs get themselves into real trouble because they think they're capable of handling it. This makes me think of Long Term Capital Management and geohot with his self-driving cars.

It's about expected necessary effort vs actual necessary effort. It's better to wrong that you needed more effort than be wrong that you needed less effort.

Thank you! I misread the quote and thought it talked about having a lower IQ than one thinks in both cases. This cleared everything up.

AKA diminishing returns. Unsurprising.

There's a cutoff around 135. After that point, most people will squander any additional intelligence.

The author should have a chat with Jordan Peterson

damn

It's purely socioeconomic factors.

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