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Comment by hgomersall | Hacker News Reader

Or income is a proxy for, say, intelligence.

> Or income is a proxy for, say, intelligence.

It clearly isn't.

In Germany, there is a reason why the term "akademisches Prekariat" (academic precariat/precarity) exists, meaning that people who stay in academia are often in a precarious job situation and are paid quite badly. But these people are very intelligent and well-educated.

It is, if you define intelligence as "how to do well in life" and not as "here are 5 ways how Germany could have won the war in 1943".

> It is, if you define intelligence as "how to do well in life"

"Intelligence" is a term that is defined very precisely in psychology (psychometrics):

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

That doesn't really contradict what I said. This definition of intelligence can be useful in some contexts, but on average neither women nor capital are particularly attracted to people who have it

> This definition of intelligence can be useful in some contexts, but on average neither women nor capital are particularly attracted to people who have it[.]

This is actually a reformulation of the point that I made in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49920421 that income is not a proxy for intelligence. :-)

Was my point really that hard to follow? I'm not saying "intelligence" in the strict psychological definition of the word. I mean, perhaps, the thing they claim was the independent variable was in fact a proxy for something else I hypothecated as "intelligence", by which I really meant some as yet undefined thing that on average leads to higher incomes, which could be intelligence in the colloquial sense, because that sort of has that trait and is pretty influential in attractiveness.

> really meant some as yet undefined thing that on average leads to higher incomes, which could be intelligence in the colloquial sense

What you are looking for are "dark triad traits", i.e.

- machiavellianism,

- (sub-clinical) narcissism, and

- (sub-clinical) psychopathy.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

These are quite correlated to higher incomes and higher-status jobs.

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