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Comment by waterhouse | Hacker News Reader

A guy I know—who basically spends his time around high-IQ kids, seems to be on speaking terms with several Fields Medalists, and has closely studied the lives of lots of great scientists and mathematicians—says that great achievement comes from three ingredients: (a) mental horsepower (roughly measured by IQ); (b) taste, an aesthetic sense that helps one decide to work on the right things or investigate the right hypotheses; and (c) obsessiveness, such that when you encounter a project that truly is worth working on, you're likely to spend enormous amounts of time working on it. (The big-5 trait Conscientiousness may be one way of implementing (c).)

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Anecdotally, I would very much agree with this, with an added caveat: there are diminishing returns on mental horsepower after 2 stdevs (e.g. 130 iq). After a certain point obsessiveness separates the wheat from the chaff, by very wide margins. The long-game is underrated.

You need all three. Picking the wrong thing to work on wastes all of the time that gets spent because of obsession.

> You need all three.

Actually, you don't. It may help to be gifted on all three, but work ethics makes up for any deficit in intellectual potential. For example, MENSA membership does not correlate with intellectual elites in any research field, but you'd be hard pressed to find a leading researcher who doesn't have a strong work ethic.

If you can’t hack calculus you will never be an Engineering professor, likewise close critical reading and an English professor. That puts a floor somewhere between 115 and 120 IQ on becoming a professor at a decent community college no matter how hard you’re willing to work.

I guarantee you MENSA members have higher incomes and educational attainment than non members. I’m equally sure that non-members who are eligible for membership but wouldn’t bother do better because they have better social skills which are helpful for anything.

> If you can’t hack calculus you will never be an Engineering professor, likewise close critical reading and an English professor.

You don't need to score high marks in IQ tests to pass calculus, and there are plenty of fields of research in engineering where a good grasp of calculus is fundamental. Thus, quite obviously you can become an engineering professor eventhough you suck at calculus.

> I guarantee you MENSA members have higher incomes and educational attainment than non members.

Feel free to provide any reference to back your baseless assertion.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-of-IQ-scores...

Graph showing 110 is about the minimum, not for understanding calculus well enough to teach it, but for any job as a teacher.

Source article

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1998generali...

The General Intelligence Factor

82% of American Mensa members have a Bachelor’s or higher. Given that that’s double the rate among the general populace I’m just going to presume they make more money without botering to look it up.

https://www.us.mensa.org/learn/about/demographics/

Your comparison is at best skewed. By definition the general populace has on average an IQ of 100. In the US, over 60% of the population has at least some college. The percentage of MENSA members is small. How do MENSA members fare agains the general population with at least some college wrt income?

The fact that this info is not in plain sight nor is even advertised is a clear indicator that the correlation isn't that favourable. In fact, some sources [1] state that the top MENSA eaeners (top 10%) earn over $57k, which is surprisingly low and a fraction of what the average software developer earns (above $100k).

[1] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/american-mensa--member

> For example, MENSA membership does not correlate with intellectual elites in any research field

It's mostly because MENSA membership is interesting for very small fraction of intelligent people.

If everyone applied to mensa, 150 mln people would get in while only less than 150 thousand are actually in mensa.

Even if every member of intelectual elite was above mensa threshold only 1 in 1000 would be in mensa. It's hard to correlate anything with that.

Mensa membership is actually quite interesting, and possibly relevant to this discussion. It's full if people who are 'smart' (i.e., did well on the mensa tests), yet don't do that well professionally to be around smart people all the time. It's full or primary school teachers and nurses and that sort of thing. Mensa is for people who feel out of place in their day to day lives, they're generally not well understood by their day to day environment. While (most) doctors and lawyers and engineers and academics are already around smart people all the time, and don't need any extra on top of it.

(All this imo, may be observation bias, ymmv, etc)

Yeah, you actually have to investigate two things

1) why people desire to actually become a member of Mensa in the first place

2) the population of people who are eligible for membership (2% of the whole population) yet are not members.

On cursory inspection it would seem if you just talked about the top 2% of the distribution you would likely get a different answer than if you just talked about the people who felt the need to self- select into the MENSA organization.

Ok, so what about the selection bias itself? What would drive you to join MENSA? If you were already "accomplished" to some degree that you felt satisfied with why would you necessarily feel the need to say "I'm in the smart people club". Yes, you've already visibly demonstrated that. So what if you haven't demonstrated that but you find everyone around you mildly maddening to deal with because they just don't get it. Well... you might be inclined to join the smart people club and find some interesting people to hang out with.

Makes sense to me.

I "joined" the mensa shortly after I finished college (masters degree), moved in with my girlfriend and started freelancing. I always thought of myself as having high IQ but I was never formally tested before. I felt that I will no longer be intelectually challenged in my daily life anymore and I will never know if I'm intelligent or not. My aunt was recenly getting into police force and she had IQ test as a part of her recruitment. She had a book of IQ tests I borrowed and went through, in preparation of mensa exam. Mensa test was very easy. There was a lot of time. I solved every question then double checked every question, then triple checked, then finished with half an hour left. I made no mistakes. I left the test with the opinion that every programmer should do it because it's easy morale boost and if you ever done anything with bitwise operations and frame by frame animation, right solutions for some of the questions will be so easy for you.

Results came, I made no mistakes. I got it. Got my plastic membership card (with mistakes on it), email address, mailing list membership and yearly subscription for amateurish mensa paper mag sent to wrong address (same mistake as on the plastic card).

Mag was random (somehow it was finding way to me despite the wrong address), mailing list was random. I did not pay membership fee for second year and that was pretty much it.

I never sought any connection with my "fellow mensans" and felt no connection to them. I came just for the test to validate myself.

My mensa membership was useful for me once. After few years my gf started treating me like an idiot because I didn't immediately knew what she had in mind when she was saying something and was infuriated when I asked questions trying to figure it out.

I said something to the effect "You are treating me like an idiot, when I know for a fact that I'm not one. If I didn't know, at this point I'd be devastated and convinced by your behavior that I am, so please stop behaving like that." ... and she stopped.

She was later diagnosed with brain tumor, so her behavior might have been influenced by that and I don't know if she would be able to stop herself without solid evidence in the form of my mensa membership.

That is a mildly fascinating story.

The fact you had some frame of reference you could use to reason about who was likely right or wrong in the given situation is interesting. I don't need an IQ test or to join MENSA to figure that out but it did take reading about about 10 or so books on politics, philosophy and psychology to figure out "everyones thought process is extremely busted, some more so than others".

Otherwise how the hell do you even get that frame of reference?

People in general have very little understanding how they're more or less a murderous political machine running a large set of very low resolution models on garbage in, garbage out.

If you don't understand that then you have very little recourse on breaking out of an unhelpful program or loop you might be stuck in. Even if you know that, it's still very challenging to break out sometimes.

I'm thinking to get an IQ test lately out of curiosity. Ive known some people personally who I reckon I just can't touch intellectually... like I can feel the difference when I talk to them. So, I've never really thought I was highly intelligent, but I'm starting to get the feeling perhaps I'm not smack bang in the middle of the distribution either. Deeply curious to find out.

>> diminishing returns after 130 iq

There's evidence higher IQ leads to better outcomes all the way up the scale.

The graph below shows scores vs outcomes for students scoring in the top 1% of a maths test. It's not flat as your anecdotal caveat would predict:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4b8ThyfDgzs/U29nQEBAQTI/AAAAAAAAE4...

You're 18 times more likely to get a STEM doctorate scoring at the 99.8th percentile vs 99th.

Or a paper linked earlier in the thread: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41038598?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

This.

It seems like it boils down to IQ, trait conscientiousness and the randomness inherently present in a complex, dynamical system.

I think people understimate or ignore the randomness aspect because you can't measure the way in which it contributes. But it's such an important factor. Randomness can generate circumstances that push and pull people at all ends of the distribution in all different directions. That not a trivial thing.

The detractors seem to want to focus on "well it's not a perfect predictor". Right. And you're not going to get one in a complex, dynamical system such as this.

But in case you were looking for some model that paints a roughly accurate picture in broad strokes, here's one we prepared earlier.

Taste is the interesting one - it is kind of self referential: a paper is important when other scientists think it is important.

Obsessiveness only helps if you're headed in the right direction. That's why YCombinator starts up startups with so little capital - so if they're headed in the wrong direction, they find out fast.

Hence item b.

Isn't that intuition, so Kahnemans criteria [0] apply? This means item b comes down to:

> So all we need is an unchanging environment, lots of practice, and immediate feedback.

[0] https://fs.blog/2012/03/daniel-kahneman-on-intuition/

Only if everybody is equally good at developing intuition from a given set of data. That has not been my personal experience, FWIW.

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