Yes, and the relative shift, whatever the quality, is still very apparent. Given that we are a relatively older population I suspect that if matched our educational level distribution by age to the general population our tendency to be more highly educated than age matched peers would be more dramatic. And again broader in majors and degrees.
The selection bias to this site I think is not so much smart per se but having persistent intellectual curiousity. That is part of what I was referencing with habits of mind earlier and it facilitates us doing the most with what we’ve got. In terms of testing lexicon, we’d tend to score higher on achievement and fund of knowledge tests than on intelligence tests is my guess.
@Spice_Weasel please keep updating us on your child’s progress!
I was tested in 4th grade as part of the "what is going on with my daughter " evaluation. I tested at 137, just a few points shy of genius. Story of my life, always not quite making it.
Years later I applied to Mensa, and my SAT scores qualified me. (Decided not to join though)
With my psych degree, I learned about IQ and the tests. When “IQ” tests started popping up on the internet, I took a bunch of them. There might have been one or two that got close to measuring IQ.
Um … I have the feeling that, because I never catch those fish, it means a creature with a brain the size of a pea can outsmart me on a consistent basis. I think I’m depressed.
I think you are on to something there. I would say that trait usually exists in people with high IQs but it’s not limited to people with high IQs.
I think IQ tests (the real ones) can be useful in certain situations, but we have a tendency to extrapolate, high IQs must mean stand-out success. I was listening to an episode about Sam Bankman Fried on the If Books Could Kill podcast. It was a takedown of Michael Lewis’ book on him, where Lewis attributed anything Sam did, however obnoxious, to just being so far above anyone else intellectually that he couldn’t be bothered. As they discussed his long history of rejection of anything he couldn’t quantify, his lack of consideration for others, and his dysfunctional levels of risk tolerance, one of the hosts pointed out that he is a good illustration of the limits of genius. Like Elon Musk tweeting that chess is just too simplistic of a game to interest him. At a certain point it just gets silly.
While I suspect there is some correlation I’m not even very sure it is all that strong. I suspect that the trait is more learned (from those around us of strong influence and exposures) and not as biological and intrinsic in origin as IQ is. Maybe this question deserves its own thread, not sure, but I do believe that it, along with what gets labeled as grit, are major factors for reaching our potentials. And that the former is well represented here.
To return to your child as an illustration - his IQ, his unevenness, his autism… those are biological givens. What you as parents are doing as parents, encouraging his curiosity by trying to answer and enable his questions instead of dismissing the curiosity about the largest object, the examples of tenacity you model, so on … that is I believe more where the having a lifetime of sustained intellectual curiosity and grit will come from, and is how he may be more enabled by the specifics of who he is than limited by them. Maybe even become a Doper someday!
My mom said I was tested when I was 5 years old at 155. Nobody told me till I was in my 50s. Probably dropped a few points over the course of my life. School was hell, with no gifted classes and no support for my probable undiagnosed autism. Bored and bullied, and burned out at 17. I’m a lot happier now that I’m old and I don’t give a rat’s ass about other people’s opinions about me.
Just some perspective on IQ:
I believe the board has a reasonable number of 130+ and even 140+ posters though. Having more than 1 or maybe 2 posters with 150+ is very unlikely.
150+ are 04 in 10000; 99.96th percentile
140+ are 38 in 10000; 99.62th percentile
130+ are 200 in 10000; 98.00th percentile
I think there may be some innate differences in how comfortable one is with recognizing that one doesn’t know something; although I think there’s also an environmental component to it.
And in order to have genuine intellectual curiosity it’s necessary to recognize, all the time, that there’s lots of things you don’t know; and that some of the ones you think you do know you’re wrong about. If your reaction to this is glee – hey I get to learn something new! – that’s going to lead to different behavior than if your reaction to this is fear or defensiveness. But I think that for a lot of people there’s a fear of being wrong, either because it makes them uncertain about everything else they know or because it seems to them like an accusation that they’re a wrong person, not that they’re wrong about something – which results in their actually being wrong more often, because they’ll hang on to and double down on whatever they’re wrong about instead of admitting they were wrong and learning more.
I’m certain I’m somewhere between 100-119, so average or a little above average. I’ve always gotten very high scores on those tests, but I don’t believe them one bit. I’ve always just been really good at taking tests.
Upper quartile general intelligence may be an advantage in many spheres, may be a prerequisite for some, but it is insufficient for success in many spheres.
I’ll illustrate with my part of the world. I highly doubt very many people succeed in getting in to medical school with general intelligence under the 75%ile, maybe even 90%ile(IQ 120). And I suspect the correlation of successful career and good doctoring is zero above that.
We are social creatures and we have a group intelligence. Good doctoring requires communication skills and especially the ability to utilize the knowledge and intelligence of others. This is generalizable I think to us as a species. Knowing when we do not know and who does, accessing that information when needed, is far more important than higher individual intelligence or fund of knowledge, once a threshold is reached. The Dilbert world is full of characters who may have high intelligence but who do not have those skills.
I had a list somewhere, I think I’ll dig it up, which showed the average intelligence of people in various professions. I think you’re about spot on for doctor.
What prompted that list was Jordan Peterson’s claim that people are always going to be poor because there are no jobs for people with an IQ of 80, which is demonstrably false. Jordan Petersen makes a lot of demonstrably false claims that people believe just because he’s a psychologist. He is the bane of my husband’s existence.
In grad school one of our professors gave us a thought experiment along these lines. He asked what we estimated the typical medical doctor’s IQ to be…like you, most of us estimated scores in the 120 range and above. Asked if we believed some doctors were merely above average, i.e., 110-120, yes that was also likely. Doctors in the upper average range of IQ? OK, possible, but maybe just a few.
Now, how about a successful doctor with an IQ in the low 90’s, even the 80’s? Were we to insist that such an individual could not exist?
The point I took away is that non-intellective factors play a huge role in an individual’s career success and we should never come to believe the result from a single test score is determinative of anyone’s vocational opportunities.
I do believe I was given one in school at a young age but I was never told the score. If they told my parents they never told me.
As extra credit for a psych class in college a grad student gave me an IQ test. Afterwords I was told I did really well but the purpose wasn’t to give out scores. They were testing what how the environment around the test affected people. I was part of the “treat them nice group.” That was only a visual-spatial test so no idea how accurate it could be.
Years after I went through it I was able to see the results of my pre-employment psych test. It said I had a normal IQ but no score. I know I didn’t take an IQ test so it must have just been the opinion of the shrink. The psych test had questions like, “Would you rather go to the dentist or pop your friend’s blister?”
I believe you are assuming that the distribution of IQs here matches that of the outside world. That’s not likely to be true.
Would you say the same if the population was a dining hall at MIT?
I tend to agree, but it is more complicated than that. The psychologist for our school district said that the extremely gifted tended to concentrate on specific topics, and be less generally intellectually curious. (The topics may change over time.) So you could see a kid not caring about lots of things but going very deeply into the things that interest them.
