Comment by Pryde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pryde | Hacker News Reader

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I've got to be honest, I initially reacted to this kind of emotionally, thinking that of course external circumstances don't have any bearing on intrinsic merit. I definitely have a bias toward thinking that everyone is more or less equal and that modern workplaces often enshrine a kind of cultural bias towards using inconsequential factors as proxies for merit.

That being said, it's been my impression for a while that IQ scores at least are mostly irrelevant, and not well correlated with economic performance. Is that a mistaken impression? I fully agree with the rest of the factors you bring up as positive influences, it's just the connection to IQ that I have a concern with.

I would argue, also, that the "equal competence" premise could be better stated as "that we all have an approximately equal potential for competence". I'm curious if you think this alternate premise would also be bad for business and society?

Thanks for prompting me to challenge my own assumptions and biases, btw

According to my observations, IQ correlates very well with the person being "smart" in a usual, common sense way.

100 would be an IQ of an average person.

130 is a rather smart person. Remember that guy in your class who could solve the problem in his head before it was written on the blackboard? That's probably him.

IQ of 85 is the lower limits for getting into the US army.

IQ of 70 is the official definition of being mentally retarded.

Does being smart correlate with economic success? Yes, up to some extent. Being too smart? Well, there's a chance most people around simply won't understand you, which is rarely good for career advancement.

It is more correlated to income than wealth:

> each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year after holding a variety of factors constant

From: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960...

Interesting. I don't have access to the full paper, but it appears that the individuals in that study were 28 when the research was conducted. I'll definitely be searching for recent studies conducted on the same cohort when I get the chance, but I do wonder if that correlation holds steady-ish over time, and also if it will be replicated with cohorts of a later generation as other economic climates develop.

I appreciate the information!

>that we all have an approximately equal potential for competence

No one wants to hear it, and with good reason, but there is simply no proof of this, and substantial evidence to the contrary. We know intelligence is strongly heritable, for example.

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

Life is unfair. But our modern academic institutions are beating around this bush, I think because on a base level, empathetic people are fearful of the consequences of scientific research that may effectively justify certain racist ideas. But that makes for bad science and, possibly, bad policy, if different people require different solutions to different problems. It also makes it hard for me to trust academia, because the bias is so entrenched.

Check out Amy Chau's book The Triple Package. Its premise is that 3 cultural factors influence economic outcomes: Superiority Complex, Insecurity, and Impulse Control. It explains why there are subgroups in the US that do better an the average in terms of income: Chinese, Jewish, Indian, Iranian, Lebanese, Nigerians, Cuban exiles and Mormons.

I think you can boil it down to both IQ and culture as being the main drivers of economic success. Culture can be split further into ethnic cultural modifiers and socio-economic cultural modifiers/multipliers. You can do pretty well if you have positive points in 1 of 3 of these areas. We all start relatively equal but having one of these three modifiers can propel you to the top, with few exceptions.

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

I vaguely remember a study in the past that suggested that, at the extremes, high IQ people were more likely to stake out an easy life for themselves in place of a highly successful one.

#1 strongest correlation with lifetime earnings is IQ #2 strongest correlation with lifetime earnings is conscientiousness (which is roughly half orderliness, and half industriousness --- also contains traits of dependability, my word is my bond)

I can't find a reference right this moment. Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot so it should be in 1 of his videos on Youtube.

I’d be very interested to know who was studied for those results.

It’s easy to imagine that people at the highest end simply weren’t available to be selected for the study.

I also don't have a reference right now, but I would assume they've taken a thousand of random people and ran some statistical analysis on that sample.

Chances of someone from this thousand people being among the highest end are indeed pretty small.

Likely not the research referenced by the GP, but this paper: http://web.econ.ku.dk/gensowski/research/Terman/Terman.pdf finds that Conscientiousness, IQ, and Extraversion are correlated with increased income (for men at least) among the Terman survey.

If I'm summarizing correctly, the Terman survey includes a group of 856 boys and 672 girls born around 1910 and selected in 1921-1922 who were followed until 1991.

Looking at that study, the high end simply wasn’t included. It seemed to just cover wage earners and professional salaried workers.

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