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Comment by dylanjermiah | Hacker News Reader

" it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. "

IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death. This is a topic I rarely see discussed.

A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great degree all possess very high levels of intelligence. Gates, 1590 SAT. Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600 SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison.

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Agreed. But OP's point of neurosurgeons and lawyers needing to finish college whereas programmers don't need to is interesting. Using the IQ argument, one could say that even neurosurgeons don't need to finish med school.

The fundamental difference I believe is that because the Internet is so new(relatively) and ever changing that you don't need experience to build software.In fact,experience may hold you back at times. Also,most of the software is not critical. Someone's life doesn't depend on it. However, human bodies and laws remain fairly stable and can affect life/death and thus,experience matters. You can't trust a college dropout to become a great neuro-surgeon without having performed several surgeries even if their IQ is in the top 0.01 percentile.

I think the big difference is that finishing college is a signal that someone is willing to conform. Important in an employee but not so much in a founder.

Have you ever heard of Emotional Intelligence? EQ is increasingly being seen has a higher determinant for success than IQ.

Is that true in tech or just in "regular" big business? I don't see Gates, Zuckerberg or Jobs being real high in EQ as I understand it, but perhaps I don't fully understand it.

Yes. I don't know if I'd say it's a higher determinant (data to help convince me?), I'd say you need a healthy balance of both, and can't do it with one or the other.

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