Like I said, I don’t agree with everything Towers says. I only linked to the article for the illustration of how a Twisted Pear correlation would look, not for any actual numbers. That is not a scientific paper, and Grady was not a scientist. He was a security guard.:dubious:
One 1953 study that used a small, highly-skewed sample population, no creativity testing of the sort Torrance developed, and a load of pseudoscience such as Rorschach Tests instead. Yeah, I wouldn’t trust those numbers.
We’re not. I just used it for the pretty picture, since people didn’t seem to get what I was saying without visual aids.
Errr, no, I don’t. But since Bob has a correlative sample, he might as well use the correlation to net the best creatives from his pool.
There *are *jobs where high IQ is doubtless the better selection criterion in-and-of itself - say, computer programmer or mechanical engineer. But they are hardly the jobs that would make or break a new Widget startup, IMO. There, it’s the inventiveness of the widget concepts and the creativity of the marketing.
I do not strongly agree. I don’t believe there is a necessary link between plain analytical intelligence as measured in IQ tests, and business success. Not when the jobs described call for all sorts of skills that, IMO, just aren’t strongly linked to IQ.
Let’s clarify, because in your last, you used the term boring. Is X equivalent to boring, or do you mean something different from boring?
I do agree that there is no relationship between IQ and x, and I mean this to be identical to saying that there is no relationship between IQ and finding an unchallenging task to be boring or tedious. I’ve also used the term proness to boredom in the same fashion. Assuming you accept this term to mean the same thing, then to put it another way, hopefully for clarity, a person of high intelligence and one of low intelligence are equally likely to be high in proness to boredom.
In that case, if your claim is that people with IQs of 105 are, on average, not just AS creative but MORE creative than people with IQs of 135-145, the onus is on you to provide any support for that claim, as it’s pretty counter-intuitive.
I am not disputing that at all. But again, unless those skills are actually NEGATIVELY correlated with IQ, then Jane’s group will have just as much of those skills as Bob’s group.
I can think of several not-prima-facie-ridiculous reasons to disagree with my initial reaction to the thought experiment (that Jane’s company will do better than Bob’s). I’m unclear on which one your objections are closest to:
(1) IQ is basically a big hoax/joke/self-sustaining-fraud. It measure how good you are at taking IQ tests and nothing else. Therefore the two companies should do equally well.
(1a) IQ means something but not very much, so Jane’s company will do only slightly better than Bob’s (this seems to be the view of several posters in the thread)
(2) There are one or more traits other than IQ that are crucial to business success, and which are more important than IQ, and these traits are actually negatively correlated with IQ. Therefore Bob’s company will have more of these traits than Jane’s. This will offset or more-than-offset any advantage Jane’s company gets from high IQs, so BoB’s company will do as well as Jane’s, or better
(3) People with high IQs will, on average, be better at some of the jobs the company will need, ie, technician or inventor. BUT, people with high IQs will do a WORSE job of various other less-intelligence-oriented jobs, due to boredeom, lack of interest, etc., sufficient to drag down the performance of Jane’s company.
(4) There are one or more big drawback to having a high IQ… it makes people, on average, hard to manage, or likely to come up with overcomplex over-though-out solutions to problems that end up being impractical, etc. This will drag down Jane’s company and it will not perform any better than Bob’s company.
(3) seems to be the issue that Hentor et al are furiously arguing about, and frankly I can’t say I care too much. Because if (3) is correct, then IQ does, in fact, mean something other than just ability-to-take-IQ-tests, and I’m happy and can move on with my life.
So, which of (1),(2),(3),(4) or (none of the above) describes your position?
Unable to do them as well as a lasting job as someone for whom they are just the right level of challenge? Yes. Because …
Moreover, I suspect that people with IQs within the top 1% of the population (as presented in this op) are going to find many of the company’s lower level jobs to be unchallenging and will be frustrated that they are stuck in them. Job satisfaction may be low indeed and job performance may suffer when workers are extremely unhappy with what they do. OTOH people whose IQs are in the range of what, the middle third roughly? will be find a smaller range of those tasks to be menial. If the same percent are bored with jobs that are cognitively unchallenging (and unless you are saying that geniuses are less likely to get bored by unchallenging work, that is the case) then more of the high IQ people will be unhappy.
You still failing to grasp the clear meaning of what’s been said, eh? Again, the point is that what task is “menial” and what task is “just right challenge” and what task is “overwhelmingly difficult” varies according to individual ability. A group that homogenously in the top 1% will likely have a high percentage of people who are not satisfied staying as a janitor forever and not happy with that job. If allowed to leave for another job they will and if not allowed for whatever reason they will bristle: “I am smarter than the vast majority of people in this country, as smart as our engineers and designers and CEO and CFO but here I am pushing the broom.”
So MaxTheVool where exactly are you coming across someone on these boards claiming that IQ tests literally have no correlation at all with any ability other than the ability to take the IQ test? Can you point me to those comments in context please? Because that position would be silly. And this thought experiment was not needed to disprove that silly statement.
Yes, and we now have enough assertions that you implicitly agree with my argument.
The assertions are:
People will differ in how challenging they find a task, and this will be influenced by their level of intelligence.
People may find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring.
A person of high intelligence and one of low intelligence are equally likely to be high in proness to boredom.
OK, so now to the OP. Bob hires a group with IQs 95-105. Jane hires a group with IQs 135-145.
We’re completely staffing the company with these groups. So that includes jobs / tasks that are relatively mentally unchallenging.
Now, will the two groups differ in the proportion that find those tasks mentally unchallenging? You betcha – that’s assertion (1). So let’s say 40% of Jane’s group find them unchallenging vs 20% of Bob’s group.
Is that a problem? Yes; because people may find unchallenging jobs boring (2). And the chance of that happening is the same in both groups (3). Let’s say 50% of people get bored when doing unchallenging tasks.
So…we have 50% of 40% of Jane’s group that are bored (that’s 20%), and 50% of 20% of Bob’s group that are bored (that’s 10%).
20% > 10%
So, more of Jane’s group are bored. That’s it.
@ MaxTheVool, yes I’m a number 3 in your list. The only reason I’m “furiously arguing” is because for reasons I can’t fathom a simple point I made is being misunderstood and repeatedly attacked.
When I joined this thread I made a pretty frank confession and thought I’d be called on it and asked to elaborate.
Instead the focus has been on something not even worthy of debate IMO.
I think it is important to note that the most widely accepted IQ test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is normed on a mean of 100, and a Standard Deviation of 15. As such, 68% of the population fall above (34%) and below (34%) 1 SD of the mean (85-115), another 28% fall between 1 and 2 SDs (14% 70-85, 14% 115-130), and only 4% fall between 2 and 3 SDs from the mean (2% 55-70, 2% 130-145). That leaves about 0.1% of the population falling beyond 3 SDs (below 55 or above 145). IQ scores do not go much higher on the WAIS (version III or IV).
Any test that is based on a standardized scale requires a normative group, which means that the score of the person taking the test is compared to a group of people who took the test in the past. That group may not be representative of the person taking the test (e.g., a gifted kid from a rich suburban family being compared to a demographically and geographically diverse population). So, any test is only a good or representative as the norm group it utilizes to convert raw scores into standard scored.
A test must be validated to measure what it intends to measure. I am not sure how one measures “creativity” or how one validates such a test. I would be curious to know the concurrent, predictive, and construct validation of such a test.
As has been discussed, correlation is not a causal relationship. Many other factors are related to intelligence (e.g., education, SES, parental education) which are then related to other “factors” such as creativity.
All that said, IQ tests are merely collections of puzzles, questions, and tasks that measure verbal reasoning, non-verbal processing, and attention/concentration. Raw scores are compared to scores obtained by relatively small norm groups (e.g., only 2200 adults cite) that are poorly stratified.
While IQ tests can measure decrease or improvement in cognitive function after a known or suspected neurological insult, they have little utility in the classification of people into groups, and no utility in measuring abstract constructs such as creativity.
So if I change the thought experiment to be something like “Jane can hire from a pool of one million random people with a representative distribution of IQs” and “Bob can hire from a pool of one million random people with IQs 95-105” then you would think that Jane’s company would, likely, be more successful?
OK, a completely different thought experiment: let’s consider a completely non-Western human culture… pre-Western-contact Miwok Amerindians or pre-Western-contact Maori or something. My utterly-unsubstantiated wild-ass guess is that in every culture which has ever existed, people will make observations about each other… “Joe over there is really good with a bow”, “Bob over there is good with kids”, “Charlie is lazy and lies a lot”. And one of them will be something like “Dave has clever ideas”. Just about no matter what the culture, there will be situations in which creativity and problem-solving skills are useful, and there’s no reason to think people won’t notice if certain people have an aptitude for that kind of situation.
So my supposition is this: If 100 people from one of these societies moved simultaneously to our modern US culture, and spent 10 years acclimatizing and learning English and so forth, and then we gave them all IQ tests, there would be a correlation between which of those 100 scored the highest and which of those 100 were viewed by their peers as the smartest/cleverest/best problem solvers (if polled immediately before moving here).
(Note that I’m 100% on board with the idea that comparing their IQ scores with those of native English speakers who grew up in the same US society which produced the IQ test would be pointless, but I’m only talking about comparing those scores within the group of 100.)
Yep.
As long as we control for other factors (e.g. Jane and Bob are equally skilled at interviewing, have similar selection criteria blah blah).
So, I do agree that IQ tests measure “something” beyond just how well you do on the test.
And, I’d add, that there are some roles where that “something” is particularly useful. If you were to give a bunch of theoretical physicists an IQ test, I’d be shocked if any of them did not achieve an above-average score.
But we don’t. I will be clear as to where you are building in unagreed upon assumptions.
Your most obvious assumption is a rate of 50%. That’s not particularly important.
The most important assumption: Please state where we said that being bored is a function of unchallenging tasks? In fact, we haven’t stated any relationship between X and unchallenging tasks, have we, other than one is not excluded from being bored by an unchallenging task? Do our assumptions say anything about being bored by a challenging task or being bored by a perfectly matched task?
The problem all along, and the assumption that you keep making, is that being bored is a necessary function of an unchallenging task.
Can you please confirm for me that you recognize this assumption is missing from your list, or please point out where it is in your list?
@ MaxTheVool, yes I’m a number 3 in your list. The only reason I’m “furiously arguing” is because for reasons I can’t fathom a simple point I made is being misunderstood and repeatedly attacked.
When I joined this thread I made a pretty frank confession and thought I’d be called on it and asked to elaborate.
Instead the focus has been on something not even worthy of debate IMO.
[/QUOTE]
While I am still curious as to where you’ve heard someone claiming that IQ test results had no correlation with any other skill set or outcome other than performance on that test, I will respond to your thought experiment.
Now that is an interesting question. I do not expect that there would be any one to one correspondence between that which was viewed as “clever” in the aboriginal culture and that which is considered “intelligent” in the Western society. If the sorts of problems considered salient by each culture are different, and I think they would be, then different sorts of intelligences and skill sets will excel in the different societies. And this reveals me to be of the camp that scoffs at the concept of a general fluid intelligence. Intelligence is always relative to what the salient problems are. And the sorts of problems that are salient are culturally specific.
Honestly I do not even need to go outside of our own society for examples of that. Consider the case of the boy who has no interest in sports at all, can’t memorize batting averages or who’s traded to where to save his life, who is shy, who is gifted at math and logic, and who lives in a very redneck town. His peer group never experiences his math and logic giftedness - that intelligence is not salient to that which is considered salient to them. The bright kid, the cleverest kid, is the kid with the social smarts, the verbal skills, and who has a knack for understanding the issues of sports. But put them in another environment, say a math and science academy, and the roles may be reversed.
And I’ll speak of many in my field: physicians held in high esteem by their peers and by society at large - but if you put them in an aboriginal setting, I don’t think they’d be highly respected or necessarily have the sort of intelligence needed to excel. They are just lucky to have born when and where they were.
Well it’s not really an assumption; it’s clearly a number used for illustrative purposes. If you prefer, substitute algebraic variables for the concrete numbers I’ve used.
Nowhere; I don’t know where you’ve got that idea from.
Assertion 2 OTOH, which states that unchallenging tasks may cause boredom, is all that is required for my argument. And you’ve agreed with that assertion.
Well, up until this point your whole objection has been the erroneous belief that I was saying people with high IQs are more prone to being bored.
Now you’ve implicitly dropped that, and are saying that the “problem all along” is something new, and it’s another thing I haven’t said.
But in any case Hentor why am I trying to please you? The OP asked for opinions, I gave mine, and (s)he seems to understand it perfectly well. The only person claiming my argument doesn’t work is you.
Again, you’re introducing an unstated assumption that wasn’t there before. You’re now saying that the unchallenging task causes boredom, whereas before you were saying that people may find an unchallenging task boring.
First, if people “may” find a task boring, then they may also not find it boring. Thus, the task cannot cause boredom - or at least there must be some conditions under which it does not. You’ve continued to introduce unstated features of this relationship.
On the other hand, if, like I’ve said all along, a completely independent factor causes boredom, then some people, independently of how intelligent they are, will be more likely than others to experience boredom with tasks, whether mentally challenging, perfectly calibrated, or mentally unchallenging.
My model has the benefits of fitting with the assumptions as agreed to, rather than requiring modification, and also has the benefits of being supported by the empirical literature. Yours has neither.
Mijin, when you find yourself engaging with someone who is seriously trying to parse out a difference between “People may find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring” and “unchallenging tasks may cause boredom” it is time to back away slowly and walk on the other side of the street. Seriously, let it go. He’s dug himself in too deep. And it doesn’t matter. Your point was made and everyone else gets it, even if not everyone else agrees that it is true.
So what is your take on the new thought experiment proposed? Are the same people held to be “clever”/“intelligent” (ie, skilled at finding novel solutions to salient problems that they face) in one society necessarily going to be held as “clever”/“intelligent” compared to their same group of peers in a very different society once acclimatized? IOW IS there as true fluid general intelligence, or is intelligence relative to the particular sorts of problems that are salient, which can vary between cultures?
That’s not my claim. Jane’s possible pool might have one or two high creatives. But the actual pool of people with >135 IQs in a population of one million is small. But from a pool of a million, Bob has a greater chance of netting more high creatives than Jane. She has a pool of, at best, 9,800 people based on WAIS IQ (a 15σ test), which is the most common test. Bob has 630 000+ people to choose from. And odds are high, given the nature of the pools, Jane is likely going to be choosing from a pool of 1349 and Bob from a pool of 369000+. Yes, the most creative people have high IQs as a group, but there’s no correlation past 120, remember? So, even if Jane is then also sifting her [del]pool[/del]puddle for the most creative people, she’s not got the same chances of netting a creative genius outlier like Bob has. Because cognitive diagrams have an enormous amount of scatter (which is why I don’t buy using meta-analysis on them, BTW - that’s what I meant by r not being robust the other day.)
And anyway, if Jane is also sifting her pool for creatives in subsequent formalized tests, my point has already been made. IQ alone isn’t sufficient.
IME, genius and social skills do not go hand in hand. But that’s anecdotal. There’s been some work on links between high IQ and higher rates of some mental illnesses. However, there’s also been similar work on links between creativity and mental illness, so I’d call that a wash.
But no, Jane’s group won’t have as many people with those skills - because Jane’s group pool is piddling compared to Bob’s.
Not exactly., I do think the way IQ tests are used is mostly bunk (or a lazy replacement for proper testing), but they’re not entirely useless as a measure of some specific sorts of cognitive ability strongly tied to culture.
No, I don’t agree with this.
This is the closest, but there doesn’t have to be a negative correlation for the scenario to work. All that really matters is that Bob’s pool dwarfs Janes by two orders of magnitude.
I don’t really think this is the case with most jobs beyond the menial. But I think of you’re only employing genius-level janitors, don’t expect clean floors, yes. But are clean floors going to make or break a widget company? I doubt it.
No, I don’t think this would be the case. University faculties don’t seem any harder to manage than factory floors, IME.
2 comes closest, but doesn’t require there to be a negative correlation between IQ and other skills. Scattering, population size, twisted pear correlation - all these work in Bob’s favour in netting those other skills that aren’t IQ.
I think IQ tests do measure how good you are at taking IQ tests, but I also think society is so structured that that those tests also measure how good you are at both fitting in in that society, and succeeding in that society. So they are more than just a test-taking test. *But *it’s not intrinsic to what the tests measure, and I think IQ tests would be useless as a measure of success in some other societies.
Well, I think it’s pretty clear in this scenario that the two groups will not necessarily be the same since how intelligent someone comes across and how well they do at an IQ test are two different things.
(I worked at a company where everyone was given a standardized IQ test. We showed each other our scores when they came back, though we weren’t supposed to, and there were a number of shocks – everyone was surprised such-and-such got X, no-one could believe A did better than B etc.)
But more to the point I think that IQ tests only measure one facet of intelligence. And it’s a facet that is less valued in less civilised nations. So I think that there may well be differences between who the societies consider clever for that reason.
And I’m not saying that for touchy-feely “everyone is equally smart” reasons.
It could well be the same people that are smart in both societies, but if you look at phenomena like the Flynn effect I think there’s reason to doubt that IQ tests directly measure “g”, rather than something correlated with it.
That said, I haven’t completely made up my mind on this issue. There’s a debate going on right now in my head
Please do me the favor of parsing these two statements:
Children who are vaccinated may develop autism.
Being vaccinated causes autism.
Next, please identify any meaningful difference between those two statements and the ones in your effort to mock above.
As to your appeal to popularity as argument - even the poster least knowledgeable about statistics knows that correlation does not imply causation. I’m confident most will recognize the same principle even when it is not framed as a cliched chant.
Mr Dibble I had not understood your point before, but it is a good one. Assuming that they each can identify the other useful attributes to some degree, and to the same degree, Bob is more likely to find individual with other less common but necessary abilities, such as creativity, because the size of his potential choices is orders of magnitude larger. Indeed, if creativity, for example, is evenly distributed, then many more of the creative have IQ’s in the 95 to 105 range than have IQs over 135.
To rephrase:
Given a two individuals one with an IQ of 95 to 105 and one with an IQ of 135 to 145, each is as likely to be creative. Both given a highly creative person (s)he is much more likely to have the IQ of 95 to 105 than be 135 to 145.
If the statement: “People may find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring” is true, then the statement " People may not find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring" is equally true.
Do you understand that?
If the statement “People may not find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring” is in fact also true, then explain how this statement supports a conclusion that being mentally unchallenged causes boredom.
You are either playing games or are unable to grasp simple logic. In either event, it’s clearly not something I can help you with.