Nope. I’d pick more of the less intelligent people, with a few of the more intelligent people. The IQ will take care of itself in the next generation or two, and we’ll be back to our normal distribution. In the meantime, there’s going to be a lot of hard, boring work that needs to be done without argument or delay or people feeling like they’re above that sort of thing.
Every hive needs more worker bees than queens.
No. We need all types, because all types have their down- and upsides. The analytical poindexter may be able to make the latest and greater app, but put him in a nursery with a bunch of two year olds, and he’d be useless. Maybe the daycare center worker isn’t going to win Jeopardy! any time soon, but she knows how to raise happy, healthy chilldren. That counts for something too.
There are so many ways that a person can be useful to society that don’t have anything to do with how high their test scores are.
It might very well be (because boffins can be social morons), or it might not, but again, that is only one very specific context in which value could be ascribed (and crucially, not the context in which we live our everyday lives.
FYI: I wouldn’t say that that study proved that there was no genetic component to intelligence, it just proved that there were no individual SNPs (single basepair mutations) that were extremely strongly associated with educational attainment. (i.e. there is no single PhD gene.)
Since there are so many SNPs to look at, unless your data set is absolutely or the effect size is gigantic, it is very difficult to distinguish a true effect beyond the noise in the system. GWAS studies are like looking for a needle in a haystack, where many of the pieces of hay are needle shaped, and the needle you are looking for may in fact be in a haystack on someone else’s farm. In other words failure to find an association in a GWAS study doesn’t prove that a genetic association doesn’t exist, it just fails to prove that it does exist.
Y’know, I hear arguments like this all the time, but I’m not sure I buy it. I’d argue that intelligent people are better, or at least not noticeably worse, than less-intelligent people at most things, including menial tasks. We want to think that less-intelligent people are harder-working or kinder-hearted or more socially adept because it suits our sense of fairness, but I have yet to see much evidence that they actually are. (And raising happy, healthy children is a complex enough task that intelligence is definitely an asset, even if it requires a different kind of intelligence and a different set of personal qualities than, say, computer programming.)
I’d pick the smart people because they’re likely to be more versatile and learn to do needed things faster. That’s probably more important than having the “right attitude” toward menial labor in terms of rebuilding after a catastrophe.
I mean, I could demolish houses, rebuild houses, work security, get computers working, and learn just about anything you ask of me in a very short period of time. But if you took some guy with a low IQ, it’s likely that he’ll be limited in what he can do, and worse, in what he can learn, or learn quickly. That’ll make the post-catastrophe society less flexible and resilient.
Not everything in life is a catastrophe. At least, the OP didn’t appear to be limiting the question to that context.
I don’t think they’re any of those things. What I do think they are (as a gross generalization) superior at is not getting bored, distracted, challenging authority or inventing “new and improved” methods without authorization.
A couple of examples from my own experiences:
Cleaning. I used to manage a video store. My brightest employees were fecking crap at cleaning the shelves. It was a simple system: Get a damp rag. Pick up cover box and the tape behind it. Wipe shelf, wipe cover box, wipe tape, put cover box and tape back on shelf. Pick up the next cover box and tape. Repeat. The bright employees would get bored. They’d skip shelves to shorten the task. They’d start chatting with one another and miss entire aisles because they’d lose track of where they were. They’d invent “better” systems, like moving a whole shelf worth of cover boxes and tapes at once so they could quickly wipe the shelf from end to end, and then they’d forget or “forget” to wipe the cover boxes and tapes before they replaced them. The cover boxes and tapes would end up out of order and/or mismatched. The dull employees rocked it out. They worked methodically, they didn’t allow themselves to get distracted, and they worked in a rhythm that saw every box, every tape and every inch of shelf clean as a whistle, with all the boxes and tapes matched correctly and in the correct order. Now, *could *a bright person do the same? Of course. But time and time again, I saw that they didn’t. I learned to give them more intellectually stimulating tasks (of which there were not very many, working at a video store) until they got bored and quit the job for something better suited to them.
Weeding. I spent a few years as a teacher and student at a school which included gardening (it was an herbal medicine school). While the brightest teachers and students were best at planning the gardens - assessing and evaluating the environment, testing the soil, matching the type of plant to amount of sun each bed got, etc…they were terrible at weeding. Again, they got bored. They got distracted. They invented “better” systems that weren’t better. For example: instead of simply pulling all the violets that weren’t in the violet bed and tossing them in the compost pile, they’d try to transplant them into the violet bed. We didn’t need more violets in the violet bed, we needed the violet plants that were in the motherwort bed out of the motherwort bed. The not-as-bright students would weed without question, without bizarre emotional attachments to seedlings, and without trying to fix things that weren’t broken.
True, but also feel-good-ism, I think. Yeah, it’s true that we all have our strengths (that’s exactly my point) but I feel like calling all those strengths “different kinds of intelligence” is weak. Intelligence has long been considered a measure of academic potential, and while these “other intelligences” are valuable personal qualities, I think we call them “intelligences” only because we want everyone to feel “intelligent” in some way. It’s like if we grew up in a culture which valued artistic ability above all, and to make me feel better about the fact that I can’t paint to save my life, you called my ability to do math “a different artistic ability.”
Morally better, no but they are more useful to the human race and as a member of the human race they are more useful to me. The reason we are all alive and sitting here debating this issue is because of smart people. They are the ones who figured out germ theory, vaccinations, nutrition, etc. which ensured we would all be alive and healthy enough to be here. Smart people also created the internet, computers, language, etc. So yes those people are more valuable than the people who devoted their lives to more mundane tasks.
Nice people are superior to abusive people. Productive people are superior to destructive people. Smart people are superior to dumb people. Innovative people are superior to non-innovative people. It isn’t like being smart is the only thing that matters, but it does matter. And as a biological species that has to fight the endless onslaught of entropy, people who help bring order and security to life are inherently more valuable.
Sure, smart vs stupid is one* of the dimensions by which people can make themselves more (or less) valuable to humanity, but by far it’s not the only criterion. Reducing the evaluation down to one aspect (when in reality a huge set of variables are at play) is a bit like the same mistake as racism - you can’t reasonably make an accurate determination about an individual.
*(it’s probably not even one dimension - as there are many different ways to be smart, and many ways to be stupid)
If intelligent people are valuable because they materially improve the human condition then the scope should be focused. It should be whether scientists and engineers are inherently better and more deserving of…whatever than most people. Most intelligent people fall outside those circles and aren’t improving jack unless you expand what “improve” means. Like if you want to include the oh so clever script writers of your favorite TV show because they make people feel better. Then you get into whether art and literature improves the human condition and it just gets messy.
Just an example, but many if not most people with famously high IQs don’t do anything particularly notable aside from demonstrating sick logic puzzle solving skills.
Intelligence is a tool that can let you get ahead, like attractiveness, gregariousness, or athletic ability. But it’s not a good in and of itself. Good smart people can be a blessing. Evil or amoral smart people can do tremendous damage.
Y’know, whenever we have threads like this and I read posts like this one, I wonder how the person writing it views their own intelligence. When they say “intelligent people are better”, are they including themselves?
I have no problem admitting that I don’t get along well with people who aren’t on my same intellectual wavelength. But I do have a problem believing I am better than those people. Why? Because I don’t believe I am a worse person than the person who is smarter than me.
Before you yell at me, I know you didn’t say that intelligent people are better in an absolute sense, Fretful. But that’s what the thread is about.
I don’t think dumb people are inherently anything good or bad. It’s just that someone can lack book smarts or analytical reasoning abilities and still be good at something worthwhile.
All people deserve great dignity and respect regardless of disability, talent, etc.
But from a practical standpoint, using the oft-used “You can only rescue one out of two people from burning building; the other must die,” scenario, if there were two people; one with an IQ of 200 and the other with an IQ of 50, I think most people would save the 200-IQ person.
That’s not really what I’m trying to say – I guess I’m trying to say that there’s a certain tendency in our culture to romanticize lack of intelligence, or at least to assume that it comes with some sort of cosmic compensation, in the form of being better at other stuff, or happier, or a kinder and more decent person. (The movie Forrest Gump strikes me as a good example of this attitude.) But I don’t think there’s any evidence that these traits actually DO correlate with lack of intelligence.
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Yeah, it’s true that we all have our strengths (that’s exactly my point) but I feel like calling all those strengths “different kinds of intelligence” is weak. Intelligence has long been considered a measure of academic potential, and while these “other intelligences” are valuable personal qualities, I think we call them “intelligences” only because we want everyone to feel “intelligent” in some way. It’s like if we grew up in a culture which valued artistic ability above all, and to make me feel better about the fact that I can’t paint to save my life, you called my ability to do math “a different artistic ability.”
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OK, fine, screw the “different kinds of intelligence” bit: Intelligence matters when raising kids. Smart people are more likely to take their kids to the library instead of parking them in front of the TV. They’re more likely to notice the early warning signs of a learning disability or a medical condition. They’re more likely to be competent advocates for their child if the school system is doing something that is not in the child’s best interests. Yes, there are nonacademic qualities that matter as well, and yes, there are smart people who are very bad parents and not-so-smart people who are good ones, but all other things being equal, intelligence is an asset and there are very few situations in which it is not an asset. (I take your video-store example, but, on the other hand, I’ve taught special sections of freshman composition for students with low ACT scores, and they generally seem to be more easily bored and more distractable than higher-scoring students – and also worse at stuff that you wouldn’t think would require a great deal of academic ability, such as showing up to class on time, meeting deadlines, stapling their papers before turning them in, not being rude to guest speakers, and so on.)
I don’t. I think most people would assess worth in terms of age, family status, income, and attractiveness. I think the hot 20-year-old mother of two who’s as dumb as a box of rocks stands a much better chance of being saved than the ugly 60-year-old physics professor who writes sternly worded letters to the editor.
As an addendum to my last post, I’m absolutely not trying to argue that intelligent people are “better” in the sense of being more deserving of human rights or anything. Just that, like health, intelligence is a quality that it is pretty much always better to have more of than not. Also that, if I were going to pick, say, a small group of people to colonize Mars, hell yeah, I’d pick the smart ones.
OK, but then that becomes, “Is a hot/attractive person inherently better/more deserving than an old/ugly person?”
The broader point is, people do discriminate on perceived practical value. “Equality,” in many people’s minds, is only theoretical.
You can’t pick a smart person at random and say they are helping the human race, but as a group of 10,000 there will be far more doctors, professors, scientists, engineers, etc. among the smart group than among the dumb group (who will have almost none).
44% of people with IQs of 180 (of that study of 320 individuals) had doctorates in various fields, vs 2% of the general public. Among people with IQs of about 140 something like 23% have a doctorate, again vs 2% for the public at large.
Of that 320, about 90 had graduate degrees in STEM fields and 24 were MDs. Many others had degrees in business or law.
So no you can’t throw a dart at a random smart person and say they are improving the human race. But if you get 1000 you will find they are doing far more for us when it comes to improving health, education, technology, science, energy, etc than a group of 1000 dumb people.
About 40% of billionaires, senators, judges, CEOs have IQs in the top 1%.
I think we all know this, though. People have always discriminated against qualities and attributes that society has deemed “unfavorable”. Even when those qualities were not objectively unfavorable. So, I don’t think you can point to what people in general would prefer at any given moment as a measure of someone’s worth.