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Comment by alluro2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the same 150+ group. I really think it doesn't mean much on its own. While I am able to breeze through some things and find some connections sometimes that elude some of the other people, it's not that much different than all the other people doing the same at other occasions. I am still very much average in large majority of every-day activities, held back by childhood experiences, resulting coping mechanisms etc, like we all are.

Learning from experience (hopefully not always your own), working well with others, and being able to persevere when things are tough, demotivational or boring, trumps raw intelligence easily, IMO.

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Why the hell do you people know your IQ? That test is a joke, there’s zero rigor to it. The reason it’s meaningless is exactly that, it’s meaningless and you wasted your time.

Why one would continue to know or talk about the number is a pretty strong indicator of the previous statement.

The specifics of an IQ test aren't super meaningful by itself (that is, a 150 vs a 142 or 157 is not necessarily meaningful), but evaluations that correlate to the IQ correlate to better performance.

Because of perceived illegal biases, these evaluations are no longer used in most cases, so we tend to use undergraduate education as a proxy. Places that are exempt from these considerations continue to make successful use of it.

> we tend to use undergraduate education as a proxy

Neither an IQ test nor your grades as an undergraduate correlate to performance in some other setting at some other time. Life is a crapshoot. Plenty of people in Mensa are struggling and so are those that were at the top of class.

Do you have data to back that up? Are you really trying to claim that there is no difference in outcomes from the average or below average graduate and summa cum laude?

Like they said, it depends, but grades alone are not the sole predictor:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/life-aft...

Actual study:

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fapl0001212

That is moving the goal posts. No one claimed it is the sole predictor. The claim was that there is no relation at all. Your own links say their is a predictive relationship. Of course other factors matter, and may even be more important, but with all else equal, grades are positively correlated.

It’s about trend. Not <Test Result>==Success. These evaluations try to put an objective number to what most of us can evaluate instinctively. They are not perfect or necessarily fair. Many, maybe most, job interviews are really a vibe assessment, so it’s an imperfect thing!

I don’t know my IQ, but I probably would score above average and have undiagnosed ADHD. I scored in the 95th percentile + on most standardized tests in school but tended to have meh grades. I’m great at what I do, but I would be an awful pilot or surgeon.

Growing up, you know a bunch of people. Some are dumb, some are brilliant, some disciplined, some impetuous.

Think back, and more of the smart ones tend to align with professions that require more brainpower. But you probably also know people who weren’t brilliant at math or academics, but they had focus and did really well.

> Places that are exempt from these considerations continue to make successful use of it.

How so? Solving more progressive matrices?

Hiring.

> correlate to better performance.

...on IQ tests.

This isn't the actual issue with them, the actual issue is "correlation is not causation". IQ is a normal distribution by definition, but there's no reason to believe the underlying structure is normal.

If some people in the test population got 0s because the test was in English and they didn't speak English, and then everyone else got random results, it'd still correlate with job performance if the job required you to speak English. Wouldn't mean much though.

Worth reading Re: IQ tests-

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

You're using words like "zero" and "meaningless" in a haphazard way that's obviously wrong if taken literally: there's a non-zero amount of rigour in IQ research, and we know that it correlates (very loosely) with everything from income to marriage rate so it's clearly not meaningless either.

What actual fact are you trying to state, here?

You've never spent a couple of bucks on a "try your strength" machine?

I guess if you're an outlier you sometimes know, for example the really brilliant kids are often times found out early in childhood and tested. Is it always good for them ? Probably not, but that's a different discussion.

For me it was just a coincidence of MENSA advertising their events in my high school and being pushed by a couple of friends to go through testing and join together.

> I'm in the same 150+ group. I really think it doesn't mean much on its own.

You're right but the things you could do with it if you applied yourself are totally out of reach for me; for example it's quite possible for you to become an A.I researcher in one of the leading companies and make millions. I just don't have that kind of intellectual capacity. You could make it into med school and also make millions. I'm not saying all this matters that much, with all due respect to financial success, but I don't think we can pretend our society doesn't reward high IQs.

High IQ alone isn't a guarantor of success in demanding fields. Most studies I've read also show that IQs above 120 stop correlating with (more) success.

That high IQ needs to be paired with hard work.

The intellectual capacity is a factor for sure, but indeed there is more to life than that. Things like hard work, creativity, social skills, empathy, determination, ability to plan and execute are as much factors as high IQ.

Went to the equivalent of a mensa meeting group a couple of times. The people there were much smarter than me, but they all had their problems and many of them weren't that successful at all despite their obvious intelligence.

Really? You don't become a doctor by being smart?

Not particularly. There's a baseline intelligence required to become a (medical) doctor but no it's much more about grit and hard work among other factors [1]. Similarly for PhDs as well IMHO.

Searching and IQs FOR doctors seem to average about 120 with 80th percentile being 105-130. So there's plenty of doctors with IQs of 105 which is not that far above average.

That also means that it's prudent to be selective in your doctors if you have any serious medical issues.

1: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-...

> Searching and IQs FOR doctors seem to average about 120 with 80th percentile being 105-130.

Where are you getting this from exactly ? Getting in to a medical school is very difficult to do in the U.S. Having an average IQ of 105 would make it borderline impossible - even if you cram for SAT and tests twice as much as everyone else there is so much you can do - these tests test for speed and raw brain power. In my country - the SAT equivalent you need to have to get in would put you higher than top 2%, it's more like 1.5%-to 1%, because the population keeps growing but the number of working doctors remains quite constant. So really each high school had only 2-3 kids that would get in per class. I know a few of these people - really brilliant kids, their IQ's were probably above 130 and it's impossible for me to compete with them in getting in - I am simply not exceptional - at least not that far high in the distribution. I was maybe in the top 3-5 best students in my class but never the best, so lets say top 10%, these kids were the best students in the whole school - that's top 1%-2%.

One caveat to all this is that sure, in some countries it is easier to get in. People from my country (usually from families who can afford it) go to places like Romania, Czechoslovakia, Italy etc where it is much much easier to get in to med school (but costs quite a lot and also means you have to leave your home country for 7 years).

Now is it necessary to have an IQ off the charts to be a good doctor - no, probably not, but that's not what I was arguing, that's just how admission works.

> Where are you getting this from exactly ? Getting in to a medical school is very difficult to do in the U.S. Having an average IQ of 105 would make it borderline impossible

I agree it'd be almost impossible, but apparently not impossible with an IQ of 105. Could be folks with ADHD whose composite IQ is brought down by a smaller working memory but whose long term associative memory is top notch. Could be older doctors from when admissions were easier. Could be plain old nepotism.

After all the AMA keeps admissions artificially low in the US to increase salary and prestige. It's big part of the reason medical costs are so highly in the US in my opinion.

Reference I found here:

https://forum.facmedicine.com/threads/medical-doctors-ranked...

> Hauser, Robert M. 2002. "Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success." CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev)

Modern WAIS-IV-type tests yield multiple factor scores: IQ is arguably non-scalar.

Those sub-scores BTW are very helpful in indicating or diagnosing learning disabilities. Folks with autism or adhd can have very different strength / weaknesses in intelligence.

The original theory was precisely that there's a general factor ("g").

If you run anything sufficiently complex through a principal component analysis you'll get several orthogonal factors, decreasing in importance. The question then is whether the first factor dominates or not.

My understanding is that it does, with "g" explaining some 50% of the variance, and the various smaller "s" factors maybe 5% to 20% at most.

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