# What things in your experience are often, but poorly, correlated with intelligence?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [May 22, 2022, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892 "2022-05-22T19:48:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/1 "2022-05-22T19:48:03Z")
Things like drinking wine (instead of something else like beer). I like wine. I just don’t think of it as more “intelligent” than other choices.
People recommending wines want to know what you are going to eat it with. Show off their vast knowledge of lore. Hot Pockets. Sun Chips. Pepperettes. So they have nothing to recommend. (Kidding. Mostly.). But which wine does go best with Taco Bell? When was the last time you even had Beef Wellington?
Beer is freer from such pretensions.
This is not a super serious thread, but…
**What other things, in your view, do people wrongly consider to be intelligent things, acts, markers, hobbies or yada yada?**
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### Author:  [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/2 "2022-05-22T19:52:23Z")
And if you like wine, tell us your insights into Taco Bell with their spiciest salsas.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/3 "2022-05-22T19:57:20Z")
I don’t think wine is associated with intelligence; I think it’s associated with wealth.
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### Author:  [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/4 "2022-05-22T20:03:56Z")
Wearing glasses. I suppose not wanting to walk into stuff does demonstrate some kind of sense though.
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### Author:  [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/5 "2022-05-22T20:08:52Z")
Reading books. I don’t know very many people who still read books.
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### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/6 "2022-05-22T20:09:00Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> I don’t think wine is associated with intelligence; I think it’s associated with wealth…
I was about to post something similar. Intelligence is correlated with income, but there’s evidence that it actually does not correlate with wealth. This strengthens your underlying point - it means intelligence is correlated with spending.
So you’d expect anything causally related to spending resources (fancy wine rather then beer) to be at least weakly _correlated_ with intelligence, but perhaps without any direct causal connection.
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### Author:  [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/7 "2022-05-22T20:11:43Z")
Reading serious literature, watching artsy films, and generally being a snob about stuff. Some of the smartest people I’ve known have been avid consumers of cheesy sci-fi, popcorn movies, and cheap beer. And some people I’ve known have been snobbish about all that stuff, and not nearly as sharp as the less snobbish people.
I mean, you like what you like. If you like Taco Bell, white zinfandel, Bud Light, and watching Dwayne Johnson movies, it doesn’t make you dumber or less intelligent than people who want haute cuisine, Chateau Haut Brion 2012, Pliny the Elder, or to watch The Bicycle Thief.
And in a broader sense, intelligence and career/financial success aren’t that tightly correlated either. Some people are VERY successful without necessarily being super-intelligent. I mean, I have a friend who was always a lackluster student, may have had learning disabilities, and generally had more of a reputation as an athlete than a scholar. Now he’s the CFO of a mid-sized medical products firm- he worked his way up through the banking world, and then moved laterally into corporate finance. By all metrics, he’s wildly successful. Yet nobody would have described him as “smart”. Meanwhile, I know lots of us who were all gifted class kids, and while none of us are necessarily _unsuccessful_, we’ve got jobs like librarian, various sorts of middle managers, architects, etc… VERY few of us are actually what the gifted expectations are, which seems to have been working in cutting-edge academia or being executives of some sort. I’m not sure if that number is more or less than the usual number in any school though.
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### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/8 "2022-05-22T20:18:01Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#):
>
> What other things
An interest in astronomical images is _very_ strongly correlated with intelligence.
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### Author:  [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/9 "2022-05-22T20:24:09Z")
You’d be amazed how many people I’ve known who think that just because I’m an avid reader I must be smart.
What is their idea of smart? It seems to be whatever their idea of common sense is. My idea of common sense is to learn from past mistakes. Unfortunately that makes me somewhat below average.
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### Author:  [@EastUmpqua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EastUmpqua)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/10 "2022-05-22T20:36:13Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> Intelligence is correlated with income
Not sure if this is true. Can you send a link on this?
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### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/11 "2022-05-22T20:37:58Z")
> [@EastUmpqua](#):
>
> a link on this
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219)
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### Author:  [@GreysonCarlisle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreysonCarlisle)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/12 "2022-05-22T20:41:08Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#):
>
> Things like drinking wine (instead of something else like beer). I like wine. I just don’t think of it as more “intelligent” than other choices.
Sadly, I can’t drink the stuff anymore. It’s the sweetness or something, but it really messes with my blood sugar. But even when I could drink it, I rarely had time for wine snobs.
> [@](#):
>
> **What other things, in your view, do people wrongly consider to be intelligent things, acts, markers, hobbies or yada yada?**
Big words or jargon. They just sound pretentious to me. It’s like, I know what a vagina actually is from a biological standpoint, but I also know what people mean when they use the word. No point in (heh!) splitting hairs.
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### Author:  [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/13 "2022-05-22T20:44:45Z")
Speaking with a British accent.
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### Author:  [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/14 "2022-05-22T20:46:36Z")
Which Brit accent? There are many, and many do not make the speaker sound smart.
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### Author:  [@EastUmpqua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EastUmpqua)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/15 "2022-05-22T20:48:25Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219)
By intelligence, do you mean IQ?
A quote from this article:
“Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth.”
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### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/16 "2022-05-22T20:48:35Z")
I hope it’s not off-topic to bring up this pet peeve. It’s a very common trope in TV & movies to signal that someone is extremely smart by having them state a numerical result or estimate to a ridiculously inapproprate level of precision. The archetype being Mr Spock - “Captain, I estimate the probability that we will evade the giant floating space head that we have never encountered before and know almost nothing about is 17.234 %.”
In reality, intelligence (in the narrow sense of numeracy) is correlated with understanding the concept of false precision.
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### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/17 "2022-05-22T20:49:14Z")
> [@EastUmpqua](#):
>
> A quote from this article:
The abstract says what I noted above - a correlation with _income_, but not with wealth.
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### Author:  [@GreysonCarlisle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreysonCarlisle)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/18 "2022-05-22T20:50:37Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> In reality, intelligence (in the narrow sense of numeracy) is correlated with understanding the concept of false precision.
In my experience, the most intelligent would say Dude, we don’t have a fuckin’ clue!
Knowing how much you don’t know, how much you can’t possibly know, is (to me) the truest measure of intelligence.
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### Author:  [@EastUmpqua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EastUmpqua)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/19 "2022-05-22T20:55:51Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> The abstract says what I noted above - a correlation with _income_ , but not with wealth.
I stand corrected. I found this article: [The Relationship Between Income and Wealth](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/relationship-income-and-wealth/).
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### Author:  [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2022, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-in-your-experience-are-often-but-poorly-correlated-with-intelligence/964892/20 "2022-05-22T20:56:16Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> I don’t think wine is associated with intelligence; I think it’s associated with wealth.
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> So you’d expect anything causally related to spending resources (fancy wine rather then beer) to be at least weakly _correlated_ with intelligence, but perhaps without any direct causal connection.
Preferring wine over beer is a sign of intelligence and means, especially if you name some fancy French wine like Chateau Déchets. It’s an idea largely created and reinforced in the media which needs to characterize people by their habits. They don’t want to spend valuable commercial time explaining that you’re looking at a free spending and upwardly mobile couple about to buy a hot tub they’ll only use twice, they’ll simply show them in the hot tub drinking wine and you’ll get the idea.
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