Comparing linear and nonlinear effects of cognitive ability on life outcomes
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
Actual title: Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Comparing Linear and Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability on Life Outcomes
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
While being intelligent won't make you successful on its own, anything you want to do is helped by being intelligent.
They quote a bunch of people who say, basically that IQ above 120 hits diminishing returns hard, but they very quickly shift to a different argument, instead proving that rising IQ doesn't actually make things worse. Which is a different thing. So, are they trying to pull a fast one?
I've no great love for Gladwell, I just think that seems a reasonable claim that they could have blown out the water if they had data to disprove it, but they appear to have shied away from it.
With "extincting all predators" and farming being lesser factors than the continual community based purging of more aggressive/intelligent individuals.
But that made claims about size, not capacity or intelligence?
But being a poster child of typical myself I can't help but suspect the most parsimonious result is (statistically) larger cranial capacity affords higher intelligence potential all other things e.g, neuron density, being equal.
Half a moment of cherry-picking web search results for "cranial capacity and intelligence in mammals" turns up "External Measures of Cognition" [1] which "surprise!" agrees.
This study is cursed by circularity. The only thing IQ tests are good for is testing is how you perform on sterile, academic tests which unfortunately underpin our current education system. Even then it explains at best between 2 and 13% of the performance in some tasks. No measure that fails 80–95% of the time should be treated seriously.
But let's assume IQ is an accurate gauge of someone's intelligence - why do some countries have an average IQ of 70? Are we seriously going to assume that entire countries are filled with people that could be classified as having an intellectual disability in the US? Clearly there's more going on here.
Not to mention the effect of IQ they found is smaller than the difference between IQ tests for the same individual. It's a shame that epidemiological psychology get's treated as anything remotely resembling science.
Edit: Small changes for cohesion.
There was significantly more research put into this paper than thought put into your comment. You dismiss the entire paper using a bunch of hand-waving (with a few instances of emotional manipulation like "psuedoscience" and "it's a shame" and "are we seriously going to assume") and no actual arguments. If you cannot actually point to specific flaws with the experimental methodology, you definitely shouldn't accuse the paper of "psuedoscience".
> Starting with the notion that the most complex thing in the universe, someone's intelligence (high dimensionality), can be simplified down to a single number.
That assumption is never made in the paper. The authors use various tests (the Henmon-Nelson Test of Mental Abilities, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the Edinburgh Reading Test, and the Friendly Maths Test) to provide numbers that they use as a proxy measurement for intelligence, but they never state that the two are equivalent. Moreover, just because our cognitive processes are extremely complex does not mean that you can't capture the majority of variance using a small number of measurements (which is, uh, how a lot of modern statistics works).
> Then throw in the effect of IQ being smaller than the difference between IQ tests for the same individual.
The authors do not use IQ as their sole measure of "intelligence", so this isn't relevant. There isn't even a single "IQ test"!
Moreover, even assuming that what you claim is true (because you didn't even provide a source), it's not really relevant - "proportion that measured IQ contributes to a specific kind of a success" isn't comparable with "variance between different IQ measurements for an individual" - operator<() isn't defined on those two types. Plus, all you're claiming is that it's hard to accurately measure IQ - which isn't relevant if the variance is 10% but we're curious about whether the difference between 90 and 110 IQ is significant.
> why do some countries have an average IQ of 70?
I think of at least two plausible reasons - malnutrition stunting intellectual growth at crucial stages in a human's development, and lack of education. Throwing a "Are we seriously going to assume" out there isn't an argument.
> Clearly there's more going on here.
If there is, you haven't pointed to it.
Secondly I'd recommend making an effort to travel to these "low IQ countries". I can assure you the average person is not much dumber than the average American.
I had classmates who were quite smart in interpersonal communication, but really struggled with abstract tasks in mathematics or physics. One of them is a fairly successful businessman now, but still shudders when someone says "Pythagorean theorem" aloud.
Given how heavily do IQ tests lean on geometry and abstract pattern matching, he might score rather low.
First you'd have to demonstrate that intelligence is multi-dimensional, at which point you'd still fail since you can represent any point in any number of dimensions by single numbers. Hilbert curves are a trivial mapping. The entire field of manifold embedding exists as a counterpoint to your claim.
And, as others point out, it's also possible that one or a few values capture increasingly larger and larger amounts of the entire effect.
Claiming high dimensional items aren't describable with a single number is simply mathematically wrong.
If you have two scales and used them to weight the difference in mass of two objects, and one says there is a difference and the other doesn’t, you cannot just conclude that there must not be any difference. Obviously one scale is wrong. So in this case we have to ask which scale is wrong, the collective results of hundreds of well documented scientifically conducted studies or your “gut feeling”.
Yes, but
> lack of education
of intellectual stimula, really.
That thread was shouted down because people basically said "even if that's true, we don't want to talk about it because it's close to scientific racism." That may be fine and I can see how that topic is counter productive sometime but in this case I think it goes to the parent's point, that some populations DID evolve a higher mean intelligence and are reaping the rewards.
Although the study is not an RCT (how would we design one?), I find it convincing that cognitive ability is partially responsible for, e.g., educational attainment, even if this effect is often adulterated by other factors like parental income.
The paper focused on being "too smart." On the other side of the spectrum are folks with dementia. Those who experienced dementia in their lives can attest to how devastating of a condition it is.
If a decrease in cognitive abilities leads to impaired independence (and consequently life outcomes), then it would make sense that an increase in cognitive abilities leads to improved life outcomes. Here, I am assuming that this effect is monotonic across the whole range of cognitive abilities, which the submitted article seems to confirm.
Of course, I am comparing individuals having a medical condition (dementia) with, as far as I understand, cognitively intact study participants, but I think it doesn't meaningfully weaken my argument. If you disagree, I'd love to understand why.
This is exactly why.
Because dementia has specific non-global effects on cognitive ability. It's a disease. The impairments caused by dementia aren't a linear projection down from a non-diseased state. Even if outcomes in terms of how the study defined them end up in a similar place, dementia isn't actually supporting evidence in any meaningful way.