Which part of smartness? Knowing a lot of things? Ability to research and learn quickly? Fast decision making?
I'm not sure you can say that it's a single dimension, and plenty of people who are very educated or have had impressive careers in one field seem out of their depth in some other area. There's definitely some skill under that all that can transfer, but you'd need to cut through a lot of other traits to try and identify it and it might not be 'smarts'. (Persistence or motivation seem like large factors.)
It's interesting how people always try to find some kind of number to race against.
Here's a simple theoretical situation.
A brilliant mathematician with very high IQ crashes in the jungle, but is unhurt.
Not far from the crash site, there's a tribesman who lived in the jungle all his life. He doesn't know how to read or write.
The jungle is filled with predators, spiders and snakes. The sun is setting, the night starts soon.
Who has bigger chances of surviving ? I guess most people would bet on the tribesman. Why does nature select the person who would most likely score lower on the IQ score ?
The point is - intelligence is contextual and circumstantial. It's not one number, like width or length.
Not sure why people still try to squeeze some sort of conclusion from it..
I believe you're confusing knowledge and intelligence. This is effectively like saying intelligence is circumstantial because Mike Tyson could punch through the mathematician's head in the boxing ring. You're comparing an ability (intelligence) to a skill (jungle stuff).
To accurately test the jungle guy's intelligence you'd need to devise a test that doesn't require reading nor writing (skills he hasn't yet developed). The point is to test how well his brain works, not what he's learned. With physical testing there are similar situations, where two people can have the same strength and endurance but one of them can achieve more with it due to certain skills like dance or being Mike Tyson.
I think a more valid comparison would be that you have two tribesmen who have lived in the jungle all their lives, but one has a very low IQ, while one has a very high IQ. Both crash land in the jungle. Who has the bigger chance of surviving?
You're confusing 'adaptation', 'knowledge', and 'intelligence'. The scientific comparison would be to put the mathematician and (lower IQ for the example) tribesman in the same situation from birth and see which performs better.
Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
The speed with which an individual develops accuracy in their model of something (ceteris paribus) does seem to be captured by an IQ-like score, according to the research.
The thing people that actually causes problems is that people mentally equate 'higher intelligence' with 'better' or 'more valuable' which goes against our desire for humans to all be equal(ly valuable). That is what generally leads people to come up with other forms of 'intelligence' (emotional intelligence, street smarts, etc.), even though that just redefines intelligence to the point where the original meaning is lost and a new word needs to be introduced. Much better imho is to keep the original word intact and use terms like 'emotional competence', which also capture the experience part rather than just the genetic part.
> but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
In a hostile environment a lack of prior experience or a lack of guidance with prior experience can mean death in a few days. The mathematician has no time to update priors. A nutritional deficit or a lack of adequate shelter will result in a rapid cognitive decline.
IQ as a predictor of health seems like the most relevant point in the research to this hypothetical situation.
The applicable experiment for IQ would be to take two ”equal” populations (say,1000 ppl with middle-class background each), sort by IQ, cut the sample set at the middle to lower than median, and higher than median group.
The statistics so far show that the upper median group will do better on average. One might end up in jungle but it does not really matter for our experiment.
For individuals, IQ is sort of statistical proxy for lots of things if your daily life is lived in a first world country.
But it’s insane to hold it as some sort of key indicator of fundamental human potential.
In population statistical situations, like when hiring, however, imho it does make sense to prefer high iq individuals. Not because of what it tells of a single candidate’s potential, but it acts as a sort of maxwells demon for the workforce as total. So you end up with a employee pool closer to above-median group in our experiment which may or may not provide better business outcomes.
In this case you're talking about some information that the professor doesn't know. We don't know if he would or wouldn't have naturally excelled at that if he had been born in that environment.
I think there is learning ability like what kind of CPU your brain gets. Some people get a super computer that seems to break down at times. Some get an i7, some a Pentium III, and even some a TI-89 chip.
Then there is knowledge, which is what you take the time to learn and is kind of like an external storage drive to continue with the computing analogy. Even if you're not able to learn as fast as someone who is equipped with a better chip, you can outperform them at work if you know a lot more about the subject (you studied hard outside of work) and have taken the time to learn new skills like programming (you added new software programs to continue the analogy).
Then there is wisdom. You have a sort of common sense and ability to see the consequences of certain actions in a way that isn't so common.
Overall Intelligence in my eyes is then the sum total of someone's 1.) learning/processing ability, 2.) knowledge across multiple domains, and 3.) wisdom. Someone with a lot of #1 may be considered by many to be unintelligient if they have little of #2 and #3.
This is just my own stupid view on the subject though. I sometimes think we just haven't invented the vocabulary necessary to discuss this - that or I'm just not educated on the subject.
I could care less. If it isn't intelligence, it's net worth, or body count. People like to gloat what they have, and then complain about those who have what they don't.
Depends on what you're optimising your life for. Money is very easy to measure, work/life balance, family and other factors are all incredibly difficult to measure and are arguably more important. Plenty of relatively poor people have extremely happy lives.
> If you have to work to survive you are working class, simple as.
While the working class always have to work to survive, it is also possible for someone in the middle class and even the upper class to also have to work to survive.
In both the middle and upper class cases, if the capital portion of one's position is insufficient to cover one's survival needs, then the labor component remains necessary to their survival. In other words, they have to work to survive even though they have capital to take them out of the working class.
If someone needs $40,000 per year for survival while making $30,000 per year from capital investments and $10,000 per year from labor, they are upper class[1], but need to work to survive. Sure, long term, a talented hire might be able to transform that capital from earning just $30,000 per year into much, much more. But, in the interim the need to work to survive would only intensify.
[1] Some might call it upper-middle class instead, but the concepts remain the same.
I think it’s pretty well understood that the money/happiness relationship is initially very strongly correlated but reaches a point of rapidly diminishing returns once a certain economic threshold is met.
i.e. it’s nearly impossible to be “happy” if you’re experiencing food shortages because you can’t afford food consistently, but it’s also possible to be “unhappy” if you didn’t get the right color Porsche for your 16th birthday
This. Just look at Math Professors. I think of them as incredibly rich. The compensation of their life enjoyment, fulfillment, freedom and free time is not visible, but could possibly be estimated very high, monetarily. For instance, one estimation of fulfillment could be the price of yachts and other status symbols of super rich people.
1. Comparing the bottom 2.5% to the top 2.5% is a vast range and not really applicable to just about anybody who's able to read. So the effect may be real but irrelevant for 95%+ of humanity.
2. It doesn't look like they controlled the expected longevity to the actual longevity and instead compared it to projected longevity. It seems flawed.
0. Since it comes from sociology type research, odds are that it is pure bunk. I would like to see it replicated before it actually got any air time in any serious conversation.
(Yes, I know I have trouble counting but the last one is applicable to almost all modern research)
I think IQ is an incredibly bad measure of anything. So many IQ smart people I know make bad decisions and it's always because they don't judge other people well.
IQ is a rough measure of how big the engine is, like horsepower in a car. It says nothing about the quality of the driver or anything else about the car. A car with a huge engine in the hands of a bad driver can ram itself into a tree with great force.
In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things: the Moon landings didn't happen, bizarro political theories that fall apart if you look at them funny, occult mumbo jumbo, Scientology, vaccines cause autism and similar (RFJ Jr. probably has a high IQ), etc.
I wonder if having a high IQ means you can delude yourself better. Whether God can build a mountain he can't climb over may be a paradox, but humans with high IQ can absolutely create traps for their own mind they can't think their way out of.
I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs, with a roughly equal split between authoritarian leftism (Communism / tankie Marxism, technocratic socialism) and authoritarian rightism (race nationalism, fascism, neoreaction, authoritarian traditionalism / theocracy). I think this stems from an intuition on the part of the person that because they seem smarter than average and have trouble running their own life, there's no way an average person can be part of self-governing. I think they're both underestimating other people and overestimating the inherent efficacy of "smart" people.
> I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs
I think that’s just a side effect of being told “you’re very smart” a lot as a kid. You think that you can understand facts about the universe that others cannot, which steers you away from (boring, unthinking) normie positions.
>In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things
My working hypothesis is that in individuals with high IQ, the brain has a stronger propensity to make connections autonomously. Then there is the exposures to common public information, ranging from unscientific beliefs like home remedies and crystals, and noticing in news articles, through reasoning ability, that there are omissions, inaccuracies, and outright lies. This can be great, the doubts and misapprehension about mainstream or even specialist knowledge has caused many breakthrough and discoveries.
But this goes haywire when their brain starts making connections between the nonsense and domains they only have a superficial knowledge of, often overestimating their understanding due to intellectual confidence, often driven by cognitive biases like pattern-seeking or overconfidence. For example, if a high IQ person pursued physics and engineering, they would quickly understand most rocketry and its capacities(moon landings certainly happened), but in less familiar domains, their pattern-seeking can lead to flawed conclusions.
The mix of information(pseudoscience,inaccurate news) that is prominent, as described above, combined with personal predispositions or exposure to specific communities, causes some to lose faith in the mainstream and influences whether they become occultists, moon landing deniers, or the like.
Personally I think IQ and practical intelligence differs for a person. I have know many IQ smart people that can solve complex problems but fail to solve or foresee everyday basic problems
Intelligence isn't one dimensional, but the parameters do tend to have a correlation on average. Higher IQ usually means higher other forms of intelligence -- on average.
That being said, the caveat "on average" must always be added. On average, on average, on average. Same goes with anything about average tendencies of different genders. On average, on average, on average, averages across large groups do not map to individuals in that group. Emboss that on a mallet and bash people over the head with it until they get it.
I do wonder if there might be some conservation at play in some individual cases -- which kinda matches what you said. There is only so much brain tissue. If you're hyper-good at some narrow kind of analytical intelligence (coding!) maybe some of that brain tissue is borrowed from other things it might be doing like understanding other meat sacks.
It could also be that their brain is somehow just more optimized. Some extreme outliers (e.g. Von Neumann or Tao) don’t seem to have any significant gaps in their abilities. Although Von Neumann did die of a brain-related issue, so perhaps what was gained in efficiency was lost in reliability. Kind of like tuning an engine.
But this is biology after all. Most likely, plain improvements with zero downsides, very narrow improvements at the expense of something else, and improvements at the expense of life expectancy, are all possible mutations.
I prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand.
Interesting take! But don't you think that smartness would be something that would work across all/many domains?
Which part of smartness? Knowing a lot of things? Ability to research and learn quickly? Fast decision making?
I'm not sure you can say that it's a single dimension, and plenty of people who are very educated or have had impressive careers in one field seem out of their depth in some other area. There's definitely some skill under that all that can transfer, but you'd need to cut through a lot of other traits to try and identify it and it might not be 'smarts'. (Persistence or motivation seem like large factors.)
Decades of research on the g factor seem to imply that most cognitive tasks are indeed heavily correlated.
It's interesting how people always try to find some kind of number to race against.
Here's a simple theoretical situation. A brilliant mathematician with very high IQ crashes in the jungle, but is unhurt.
Not far from the crash site, there's a tribesman who lived in the jungle all his life. He doesn't know how to read or write.
The jungle is filled with predators, spiders and snakes. The sun is setting, the night starts soon.
Who has bigger chances of surviving ? I guess most people would bet on the tribesman. Why does nature select the person who would most likely score lower on the IQ score ?
The point is - intelligence is contextual and circumstantial. It's not one number, like width or length. Not sure why people still try to squeeze some sort of conclusion from it..
I believe you're confusing knowledge and intelligence. This is effectively like saying intelligence is circumstantial because Mike Tyson could punch through the mathematician's head in the boxing ring. You're comparing an ability (intelligence) to a skill (jungle stuff).
To accurately test the jungle guy's intelligence you'd need to devise a test that doesn't require reading nor writing (skills he hasn't yet developed). The point is to test how well his brain works, not what he's learned. With physical testing there are similar situations, where two people can have the same strength and endurance but one of them can achieve more with it due to certain skills like dance or being Mike Tyson.
I think a more valid comparison would be that you have two tribesmen who have lived in the jungle all their lives, but one has a very low IQ, while one has a very high IQ. Both crash land in the jungle. Who has the bigger chance of surviving?
You're confusing 'adaptation', 'knowledge', and 'intelligence'. The scientific comparison would be to put the mathematician and (lower IQ for the example) tribesman in the same situation from birth and see which performs better.
Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
The speed with which an individual develops accuracy in their model of something (ceteris paribus) does seem to be captured by an IQ-like score, according to the research.
The thing people that actually causes problems is that people mentally equate 'higher intelligence' with 'better' or 'more valuable' which goes against our desire for humans to all be equal(ly valuable). That is what generally leads people to come up with other forms of 'intelligence' (emotional intelligence, street smarts, etc.), even though that just redefines intelligence to the point where the original meaning is lost and a new word needs to be introduced. Much better imho is to keep the original word intact and use terms like 'emotional competence', which also capture the experience part rather than just the genetic part.
> but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
In a hostile environment a lack of prior experience or a lack of guidance with prior experience can mean death in a few days. The mathematician has no time to update priors. A nutritional deficit or a lack of adequate shelter will result in a rapid cognitive decline.
IQ as a predictor of health seems like the most relevant point in the research to this hypothetical situation.
The applicable experiment for IQ would be to take two ”equal” populations (say,1000 ppl with middle-class background each), sort by IQ, cut the sample set at the middle to lower than median, and higher than median group.
The statistics so far show that the upper median group will do better on average. One might end up in jungle but it does not really matter for our experiment.
For individuals, IQ is sort of statistical proxy for lots of things if your daily life is lived in a first world country.
But it’s insane to hold it as some sort of key indicator of fundamental human potential.
In population statistical situations, like when hiring, however, imho it does make sense to prefer high iq individuals. Not because of what it tells of a single candidate’s potential, but it acts as a sort of maxwells demon for the workforce as total. So you end up with a employee pool closer to above-median group in our experiment which may or may not provide better business outcomes.
In this case you're talking about some information that the professor doesn't know. We don't know if he would or wouldn't have naturally excelled at that if he had been born in that environment.
I think there is learning ability like what kind of CPU your brain gets. Some people get a super computer that seems to break down at times. Some get an i7, some a Pentium III, and even some a TI-89 chip.
Then there is knowledge, which is what you take the time to learn and is kind of like an external storage drive to continue with the computing analogy. Even if you're not able to learn as fast as someone who is equipped with a better chip, you can outperform them at work if you know a lot more about the subject (you studied hard outside of work) and have taken the time to learn new skills like programming (you added new software programs to continue the analogy).
Then there is wisdom. You have a sort of common sense and ability to see the consequences of certain actions in a way that isn't so common.
Overall Intelligence in my eyes is then the sum total of someone's 1.) learning/processing ability, 2.) knowledge across multiple domains, and 3.) wisdom. Someone with a lot of #1 may be considered by many to be unintelligient if they have little of #2 and #3.
This is just my own stupid view on the subject though. I sometimes think we just haven't invented the vocabulary necessary to discuss this - that or I'm just not educated on the subject.
I could care less. If it isn't intelligence, it's net worth, or body count. People like to gloat what they have, and then complain about those who have what they don't.
If this is true, then I suppose that smarter people are also richer.
Happiness > Wealth Accumulation.
Depends on what you're optimising your life for. Money is very easy to measure, work/life balance, family and other factors are all incredibly difficult to measure and are arguably more important. Plenty of relatively poor people have extremely happy lives.
If you have to work to survive you are working class, simple as. Life's much happier without survival struggle
> If you have to work to survive you are working class, simple as.
While the working class always have to work to survive, it is also possible for someone in the middle class and even the upper class to also have to work to survive.
In both the middle and upper class cases, if the capital portion of one's position is insufficient to cover one's survival needs, then the labor component remains necessary to their survival. In other words, they have to work to survive even though they have capital to take them out of the working class.
It is not so simple at all.
Well, in upper class you simply hire someone to manage your money, making sure that you have a high return on investments.
If someone needs $40,000 per year for survival while making $30,000 per year from capital investments and $10,000 per year from labor, they are upper class[1], but need to work to survive. Sure, long term, a talented hire might be able to transform that capital from earning just $30,000 per year into much, much more. But, in the interim the need to work to survive would only intensify.
[1] Some might call it upper-middle class instead, but the concepts remain the same.
Working class life can be happy if you love your work.
Maybe that's what many smart people choose and why they are not rich.
There are plenty of unhappy poor people. It's probably the largest category overall.
there are plenty of unhappy rich people and probably the % is bigger.
I think it’s pretty well understood that the money/happiness relationship is initially very strongly correlated but reaches a point of rapidly diminishing returns once a certain economic threshold is met. i.e. it’s nearly impossible to be “happy” if you’re experiencing food shortages because you can’t afford food consistently, but it’s also possible to be “unhappy” if you didn’t get the right color Porsche for your 16th birthday
That's interesting. So I'd imagine that sharper folks might maximize quality of life, work/life balance, and friendships rather than a simple number.
This. Just look at Math Professors. I think of them as incredibly rich. The compensation of their life enjoyment, fulfillment, freedom and free time is not visible, but could possibly be estimated very high, monetarily. For instance, one estimation of fulfillment could be the price of yachts and other status symbols of super rich people.
On average, they are
It's a factor, but to a lesser degree than greed and selfishness.
And sheer luck.
Smart people know what enough is.
Two things that strike me about this study are:
1. Comparing the bottom 2.5% to the top 2.5% is a vast range and not really applicable to just about anybody who's able to read. So the effect may be real but irrelevant for 95%+ of humanity.
2. It doesn't look like they controlled the expected longevity to the actual longevity and instead compared it to projected longevity. It seems flawed.
0. Since it comes from sociology type research, odds are that it is pure bunk. I would like to see it replicated before it actually got any air time in any serious conversation.
(Yes, I know I have trouble counting but the last one is applicable to almost all modern research)
..because they're smarter.
Yeah, title is bait by the journalists, the original title of the paper is "IQ, Genes, and Miscalibrated Expectations"
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I think IQ is an incredibly bad measure of anything. So many IQ smart people I know make bad decisions and it's always because they don't judge other people well.
Okay but dampen their IQ and you end up with worse. Lead poisoning robs a nation of a generation.
Which measure would you recommend instead?
How does it compare to the number of IQ smart people you know who do less bad decisions than you do? How does this rate look like for the IQ stupid?
IQ is a rough measure of how big the engine is, like horsepower in a car. It says nothing about the quality of the driver or anything else about the car. A car with a huge engine in the hands of a bad driver can ram itself into a tree with great force.
In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things: the Moon landings didn't happen, bizarro political theories that fall apart if you look at them funny, occult mumbo jumbo, Scientology, vaccines cause autism and similar (RFJ Jr. probably has a high IQ), etc.
I wonder if having a high IQ means you can delude yourself better. Whether God can build a mountain he can't climb over may be a paradox, but humans with high IQ can absolutely create traps for their own mind they can't think their way out of.
I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs, with a roughly equal split between authoritarian leftism (Communism / tankie Marxism, technocratic socialism) and authoritarian rightism (race nationalism, fascism, neoreaction, authoritarian traditionalism / theocracy). I think this stems from an intuition on the part of the person that because they seem smarter than average and have trouble running their own life, there's no way an average person can be part of self-governing. I think they're both underestimating other people and overestimating the inherent efficacy of "smart" people.
> I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs
I think that’s just a side effect of being told “you’re very smart” a lot as a kid. You think that you can understand facts about the universe that others cannot, which steers you away from (boring, unthinking) normie positions.
>In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things
My working hypothesis is that in individuals with high IQ, the brain has a stronger propensity to make connections autonomously. Then there is the exposures to common public information, ranging from unscientific beliefs like home remedies and crystals, and noticing in news articles, through reasoning ability, that there are omissions, inaccuracies, and outright lies. This can be great, the doubts and misapprehension about mainstream or even specialist knowledge has caused many breakthrough and discoveries.
But this goes haywire when their brain starts making connections between the nonsense and domains they only have a superficial knowledge of, often overestimating their understanding due to intellectual confidence, often driven by cognitive biases like pattern-seeking or overconfidence. For example, if a high IQ person pursued physics and engineering, they would quickly understand most rocketry and its capacities(moon landings certainly happened), but in less familiar domains, their pattern-seeking can lead to flawed conclusions.
The mix of information(pseudoscience,inaccurate news) that is prominent, as described above, combined with personal predispositions or exposure to specific communities, causes some to lose faith in the mainstream and influences whether they become occultists, moon landing deniers, or the like.
"vaccines cause autism and similar"
RFK Jr. did win a lawsuit over injuries caused by a vaccine, although it wasn't autism.
Personally I think IQ and practical intelligence differs for a person. I have know many IQ smart people that can solve complex problems but fail to solve or foresee everyday basic problems
My amateur theory is that basic problems are boring for them and they don't try enough to solve everyday problems
Right, IQ measures some abstract mental capacity, not knowledge. It's not very useful on its own.
Intelligence isn't one dimensional, but the parameters do tend to have a correlation on average. Higher IQ usually means higher other forms of intelligence -- on average.
That being said, the caveat "on average" must always be added. On average, on average, on average. Same goes with anything about average tendencies of different genders. On average, on average, on average, averages across large groups do not map to individuals in that group. Emboss that on a mallet and bash people over the head with it until they get it.
I do wonder if there might be some conservation at play in some individual cases -- which kinda matches what you said. There is only so much brain tissue. If you're hyper-good at some narrow kind of analytical intelligence (coding!) maybe some of that brain tissue is borrowed from other things it might be doing like understanding other meat sacks.
It could also be that their brain is somehow just more optimized. Some extreme outliers (e.g. Von Neumann or Tao) don’t seem to have any significant gaps in their abilities. Although Von Neumann did die of a brain-related issue, so perhaps what was gained in efficiency was lost in reliability. Kind of like tuning an engine.
But this is biology after all. Most likely, plain improvements with zero downsides, very narrow improvements at the expense of something else, and improvements at the expense of life expectancy, are all possible mutations.
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