Cite?
I mean, IQs of 135-145 (or whatever I specified in the OP) are hardly “to the extreme”. That’s somewhat above the average IQ of a Harvard student, which is pretty darn smart but we’re not talking about super-off-the-scale-geniuses who can never find anyone near their level to talk to. Certainly at Harvard (or any other such place) you’ll find people who run the gamut from artistic to not, creative to not, nice to not, hardworking to not, etc.
How you arrived at that from what I said, I have no idea. A great chef will, likely, have the creativity to create something new and interesting that no one ever thought of before. A great artist will create something new and interesting that no ever thought of before. A great scientist will create something new and interesting that no ever thought of before. A great programmer will create something new and interesting that no one ever thought of before. A great race car driver will create something new and interesting that no one ever thought of before.
Creativity isn’t bound to any particular human endeavor, nor is it required for most. To become a person whose name is left in history requires creativity, but I think you’ll find that there are famous names in every profession.
First, note in my post I said it was cite free, so several points off your score for poor reading comprehension.
Second, did you not note that my next point was about idiot savants? Those certaintly appear to me examples of extreme talent that comes at a cost of other abilities. Which was my main point.
And, thirdly, did you not note that in the end I noted that I did NOT think if you had some mental advantage, but not to an extreme level, that I did NOT think it cost you on a one to one basis by being less skilled at something else?
Did you note that I did not say just artist? I said artistic. And not only that, I said creative/artistic?
What, does the SDMB have a 4Chan live feed now?
I think a major factor in making the average person leery of claims for the efficacy of such testing is its poor track-record of its being used to support all sorts of pseudo-science of the most unpleasant sort, from scientific racism to eugenics.
I get the point that this is hardly the fault of the science that it has been misused, but there it is.
And again, I’m confused. Are you just making an interesting observation about idiot savants? Or do you think that whatever effect you are describing applies to the thought experiment in question? That is, do you think a bunch of smart-but-not-unique-genius people are likely to be sufficiently higher in various bad qualities that their smartness is more than compensated for?
And I guess I don’t see your point about idiot savants. Certainly there are some people whose brains are bizarrely warped. But there are plenty of people who are really really really really smart and are in no way idiot savants at all.
I’m going by the work of Torrancehere, which was drawn to my attention in Sternberg’s Handbook of Creativity [COLOR=“DimGray”](Not to be confused with Handbook of Creativity - Perspectives on Individual Differences, edited by Glover et al. Although that agrees with the Sternberg-edited volume as to Torrance’s work.)[/COLOR] I’m not completely convinced by Sternberg’s own triarchic model yet, but Torrance’s work on creativity testing certainly made an impression on me.
Yes - I’m claiming that the MOST creative people will fall under the high-IQ threshold for Jane’s people. While I don’t agree with the author 100%, I think the main illustration inthis article best illustrates things. If we see the “B” dotted line as representing Jane’s group (well above the 120 threshold where the correlation breaks down), see how that excludes the most creative “C” group entirely?
ETA: this isn’t from some egalitarian imperative. It’s based off both studies of scientists and Torrance’s extensive development of creativity tests (initially for the military, I believe.)
As far as I can tell, the money quote is this: “Above point A there is no systematic relationship between IQ measurements and creativity for individuals.” You seem to be saying there’s a negative correlation.
Furthermore, if creativity goes up as IQ approaches 120, then levels off, then Jane’s group WILL be more creative than Bob’s group, as well as more intelligent.
I hope I don’t seem like I’m harping on what is obviously just a silly thought experiment here, but I’m really not getting exactly what point it is you’re trying to make. Are you saying:
(1) Bob’s group will be MORE creative than Jane’s group
(1a) and specifically, so much more creative that the difference in creativity will exceed any advantages Jane’s group gets from higher IQs?
or
(2) Bob’s group will be AS creative as Jane’s group, and IQ doesn’t matter, so Bob’s company will be just as successful, or nearly as successful
or
(3) Bob’s group will on average be AS creative as Jane’s group, but will be much larger, so the single most creative individual in it is likely to be more creative than the single most creative individual in Jane’s group?
or
(4) You agree that Jane’s company will do better than Bob’s company, and are making a point about something else entirely?
I’ve said on many threads that IQ tests are overplayed, and in this scenario I think it’s a tougher pick than some would believe.
How much intelligence do the roles in this company actually require? In many of the roles listed I suspect that a genius could get bored and would either become distracted, or could start planning over-ambitious strategies just for the sake of having something creative to do.
Then there’s the question of whether such intelligent people can work together and happily be subordinate to others. Deep thinkers might arguably value autonomy more than the average guy.
Is Jane a genius?
She may have problems if her employees can talk over her. I’m not saying a boss needs to be as smart as her staff, but when all of the employees of a company can quickly grasp something that the boss has great difficulty understanding, it’s going to impact on her ability to manage.
I think it’s rather like having a workforce entirely of “go-getters” – every employer think it’s what they need, but the reality could be chaos. You’d have no stability.
Just looked at OP again.
I should say that I agree that IQ tests measure more than just performance on IQ tests.
They measure some quality but I don’t think it’s necessarily intelligence or that intelligence can be boiled down to a single number.
And I really doubt they measure career aptitude.
A lot of people are having a reaction like this, and I must say it strikes me as a bit odd. I mean, I guess I wasn’t all that precise in the original question, but the implication was not supposed to be that we’re going and finding a bunch of people who are geniuses and forcing them to take jobs that are beneath them. Rather, we’re finding people who want jobs and giving them jobs. There are plenty of smart people who need jobs for various reasons, and unless we add some weirdness not originally intended where we’re chaining these people to these jobs for years at a time lest the terms of the original thought experiment be violated, there’s no reason to think that smart people aren’t willing to do jobs that you pay them for, at least for a while. And of course some smart people are just not hugely motivated to become doctors and scientists, and others are writing the great american novel and happy to have a crap job to pay the bills while they do, etc. Am I saying that someone with an IQ of 130 will, due to their higher IQ, be a better receptionist than someone with an IQ of 100? No, and you might even convince me that the opposite is somewhat true. But to think that a smart person is utterly incapable of doing a low-challenge job that they’re being paid for, and will do such a terrible job it will significantly negatively affect the whole company’s performance, strikes me as just bizarre.
They might. Or they might not. Beats me. Do you have any reason to think that’s the case, other than an underlying desire for the universe to be a fair place?
A 2005 meta-analysis of 21 studies with a total of 45,880 participants (Kim, 2005) found : “In conclusion, the negligible relationship between creativity and IQ scores indicates that even students with low IQ scores can be creative.[…] In contrast with the threshold theory, neither IQ 120 nor different levels of IQ scores explained variation in the correlation coefficients.”
This study was published in the Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, volume 16, 2005.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not talking about individuals at all. I’m talking about aggregate or group creativity - where the *group *with the *highest *creativity is found in a different IQ area from the highest IQ people.
No - that’s the point. Did you *look *at that graph? Remembering that there are bounds to IQ, especially average IQs.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying by choosing such a high cut-off as 135, rather than, say, 120, you’re excluding the highest creatives. And by the skillsets the OP chose to emphasise, high “creative intelligence” and other factors will matter much more than the analytical intelligence IQ tests chiefly skew towards.
No. I’m saying Jane’s group specifically excludes the highest creatives as a group, while Bob’s group has a chance of including them. It’s not a large chance,though, given the low standards for Bob’s people. But the high end of Bobco is still in that part where IQ correlates to creativity, whereas for Jane’s group there is NO correlation. It’s a crapshoot, and you can’t assume because they have high IQs they’ll also have high creativity. They are as likely to have less creativity than the bulk average.
Bob’s group is the same size as Jane’s. But yes, he will have a much larger pool to choose from, and there’s no stipulation on how he interviews his pool. If I were Bob, I’d choose the top end of my IQ pool (the 105s) exclusively, and *then *pass them through Torrance’s tests and select the ultra-creatives for relevant positions. I’d also pass the entire 95-105 pool through an Emotional Intelligence test for positions where *that *matters, given the correlation between EI, IQ and performance proposed by Cote and Miners(pdf).
Nope
I’m dubious as to the value of meta-studies of that sort (r is just not a robust enough measure to draw definitive conclusions from, IMO), especially one that admits that the creativity tests studied often weren’t conducted in the recommended way (Kim in JSGE v.16(2/3), pg 64) and that also admits that for 82% of the CCs reported, there were no usable IQ data.(ibid., pg 65). I don’t agree with Kim, that there is no significant intelligence component to creativity. Yes, people with low IQs can be highly creative, but I think further study will show them as statistical outliers. I don’t think this one study completely overturns threshold theory.
It’s not one study. It’s a statistical summarization of 21 studies. That’s why it does have greater value than just one study. Further, to be precise, there was no individually identifiable IQ data. But meta-analyses do not have to have individual data to still be valid.
Also, whatever do you mean that r is not “robust enough”? r is the correlation coefficient. It is what it is. Robustness don’t enter into it, mate.
You ought to be more convinced by meta-analyses than by individual studies, but if not, we can simply start adding on individual studies. These two were published after the above meta-analysis, as well.
Personality and Individual Differences
Volume 40, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 159-170
The Journal of Creative Behavior, Volume 39, Number 2 / Second Quarter 2005 Pages123-136
You’ve misunderstood me here.
I’m not saying they don’t want the jobs, I’m saying that people with a high IQ might get bored / distracted if they’re doing a job that doesn’t task them sufficiently mentally.
I’m not suggesting that there’s a set personality that people with high IQ have, just that if they’re having to put pegs into holes all day, they might not be completely satisfied, and someone who’s unsatisfied is unlikely to be the ideal employee.
Well, personal observation.
I’ve worked with many intelligent people, but the really smart ones only seem to go so far in a company. For a long time I thought it was because of people being threatened, and those at the top promoting people that speak the same language as them.
But being a good manager requires certain attributes, and a high IQ isn’t one of them IMO. When I think about it, none of the very smart people I’ve worked with would have made good managers.
I have a high IQ according to formal tests, and to be honest, I’ve never had a job where I’ve really thrived. I often start very well – the first 3 or 6 months, then I find I increasingly can’t be bothered.
In my case, it’s not so much that I find the job too easy, it’s that I find it uninteresting. I’m not bragging – it’s fucked up, I wish I could get beyond it.
I think you are mistakenly incorporating multiple qualities into one. Intelligence and ability to maintain focus are two different things. For instance, an intelligent person may or may not also have ADHD. Similarly, people of average intelligence aren’t guaranteed to enjoy menial and tedious jobs.
A manager who is able to conceive of multiple solutions to problems faster, able to retain and recall information faster, able to more rapidly put components into proper sequence, able to more fully identify similarities and identify missing components is going to perform better than one who is not. This just should not be controversial.
Now, if two people can do all of those things equally well, but one is a dick or one is prone to being bored or disinterested or prone to narcolepsy or to abuse heroin or to run home every two hours to check on his or her cats, then yes, obviously those differences will impact their overall performance.
Hentor, you’ve exaggerated what I’ve said. I clearly was not talking about ADHD, let alone people going home to check on their cats, or the other straw men.
I’m saying that someone good at finding complex solutions to complex problems might get bored in a job that requires simple, pragmatic solutions to everyday problems. They don’t require a psychosis for this to be true – it’s simply that people are happiest doing jobs that challenge them mentally. This is pretty self-evident, but if you want a cite, here’s one.
First, wikipedia is not really a good “cite.” Secondly, there’s nothing I saw on the wiki page that said that there are no individual differences in “flow.” Third, ADHD is not a psychosis. Psychoses are disorders like schizophrenia. ADHD is not like schizophrenia.
Finally, and most importantly, you have failed to grasp my point. My point is that individual differences exist that will moderate the relationship between intelligence and job performance. One such individual difference is ability to attend to a tedious task without experiencing significant decrement in performance. Some people are going to be better staring at a radar screen looking for that little blip among the static, some aren’t.
I’ve grasped your point and agree: of course there are personality / psychological differences that affect how well a person will perform at work, including tolerance to tedium. I’ve said this.
For some reason, you are failing to grasp my point, which was simply that whether a given task is even considered tedious or challenging depends on the individual’s aptitude. IOW I’m not saying smart people have a low tolerance to tedium, I’m saying that they are more likely to find a given task tedious, because it is so comfortably within their ability.
Finally, I’m aware that wiki is not a peer-reviewed journal, but it’s a useful start point; I was just trying to indicate that there is a concept in psychology that relates interest in an activity to ability.
Of course there are supporting studies, but I saw no reason to start with those, particularly as they are listed on the wiki anyway.