We didn’t evolve for the environment we find ourselves in. We evolved to live in small tribes in the wild where some intelligence was necessary, but high levels probably didn’t provide major benefits. Also high IQ is a very energy demanding attribute, other attributes are probably easier to evolve.
IQ is not the key to ‘all’ success. But again, it is one of multiple keys to success.
Supposedly the average IQ of a college graduate is 1 standard deviation above average. The average IQ of a college graduate of an elite college (MIT, CalTech, Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, etc) is 2 standard deviations above average.
Granted, the kinds of people who get into MIT or Berkeley have various other attributes that are important to success in life (high socioeconomic status, a strong work ethic, delaying gratification for long term rewards, etc) and those will also lead to success.
But if you randomly select 1000 graduates from Harvard or MIT, they will be more successful than 1000 people picked at random.
Have you actually read all the thread? If so, please let us know who here or who anywhere says that intelligence is the only thing that matters.
Second, have you ever been in an environment with smart people? If you have, you’d know that your assertions are wrong. And I’m not very interested in what some people post. First, do you know that they actually do have high IQs? Second, I suspect you are suffering from confirmation bias.
Also, the New Yorker article does not mean what you think it means. My daughter works in Judgement Decision Making, and we taught a class together about its application to engineering. Smart people make the mistakes shown there - so do dumb people. It is wired in us. Business students have the endowment effect, but so do chimps. In our classes we did three anchoring experiments, of the type discussed. The students were engineers, but they were certainly not all exceptionally smart. Everyone fell prey to it. Every one. n = 80.
I don’t think it means much. I suspect it correlates with some academic skills like pattern recognition, math and verbal fluency, spatial assessment… and this is a form of intelligence, sure, but I think there is also intelligence in exposure to ideas, general life skills, savoir vivre, emotional intelligence, intellectual curiosity, knowing other languages and cultures, general wisdom and expertise in a focused domain like law, medicine, woodworking or computing. It’s a dated measure.
Do you think that within a field like computing (and I’ve been programming for 48 years) intelligence does not matter?
When I TAed I could sure see the difference between the very smart kids and the ordinary kids.
If you have ever had the chance to hang out with the top people in a specialty, you’d see the difference.
Usually but not always true. I knew people at MIT who got mediocre grades, because they were so smart that they breezed through high school without working at all. When they faced competition at last, their lack of experience with hitting the wall hurt them. They all did quite well in their careers, but not as well as they could have done.
Intelligence is important in most fields. I gave computing as a specific example, and don’t doubt the best are much better than average. But the OP was asking about IQ. It has some correlation to logic and problem solving. But most doctors I know aren’t particularly good at, say, math. I don’t think of IQ as the best or final assessment. I am not sure it is even constant for one person at different times in their life.
My TA experience wasn’t so enlightening. To be sure, the kids who performed well in my class struck me as intelligent. At least more intelligent than the students who didn’t perform well.
But since I don’t know how well the students performed in their other classes, with other instructors, I don’t feel comfortable saying I could pick out the globally smart student from the globally average one. One of my “C-” BIO 101 students could have been an “A+” philosophy major, so on what basis would I judge their intelligence? I am not even comfortable saying I could pick out the kids that were competent in biology from the ones who weren’t, given how broad biology is as a discipline. I had a TA in my first quarter of general biology who advised me to change majors just because I did poorly on a couple of exams. She had written me off as a dumb bunny, when really I just had little in interest in memorizing the phases of mitosis (I prefer biology at higher levels of organization, thankyouverymuch). I doubt she would have told me to drop out if she’d known I was going to graduate with honors and then go on to get a Ph.D. But alas, TA’s only see a tiny snapshot of their students’ abilities and competencies. I don’t blame her for thinking I wasn’t the smartest student in the bunch. But telling me to change majors was pretty daft on her part.
I’ve always been suspicious about any claim that the reason that some particular ethnic group has a higher or lower number of people in professions requiring a graduate or professional degree (or even a bachelor’s degree) is that there is some genetic factor causing it. The reason is that I can look at the graduates of my rural high school. This wasn’t even one where the surrounding population was desperately poor, just lower-middle class to middle-class with no upper-middle-class. It was just that there was very little encouragement for academic achievement. When I graduated in 1970, it was still only grudgingly accepted that the smarter graduates might make it in college (and then teach at the high school level or something). As for graduate or professional degrees, I was surprised when I learned that a graduate of my high school actually made it to a Ph.D. I would estimate that at most ten (and probably less than that) of the perhaps 5,000 graduates since 1950 eventually got Ph.D.'s, compared to 1.77% in the U.S overall. I would estimate that a similar sort of imbalance was true of the number of doctors or lawyers. But the genetic background of the graduates of my high school was mostly English and German. The proportion of people in the U.S. with graduate or professional degrees with English and German ancestry is presumably higher than the overall proportion of people in the U.S. with graduate or professional degrees, so it’s certainly not that we were lacking in genetic potential (if you actually believed in genetics determining achievement). But these are my personal observations, of course. Does anyone have any statistics on the proportion of people who grew up in rural areas and who have northern European ancestry who get graduate or professional degrees?
I’m definitely not claiming to be able to rank order students on the basis of intelligence. But I could pick out the exceptional ones on the basis of understanding and problem solving ability - not memorization.
I took a bunch of philosophy classes along with my math and engineering classes at MIT, and the ability to construct an argument was common across all of them.
I’m also not talking about grades. Some areas, like biology, require a lot more memorization than others, and I’m not at all sure that that ability is correlated to intelligence. Insights once you’ve gotten past that base. So I agree with you about this. (My wife is a biologist, and her description of what she had to do for her classes doesn’t appeal to me at all.)
People also have different talents, and even the exceptionally gifted aren’t good at everything. A friend of mine at school was told that he would be given a pass in his math class if he agreed to never take another class in the department. He became a big time lawyer. Very smart, just not in math.
The difference for doctors would be seen in those doing medical research, as opposed to surgeons and GPs. Who are probably pretty smart also, but for whom exceptional intelligence is not much of a factor. GPs with better interpersonal skills are probably better doctors than obnoxious smart ones. And get sued less.
There is also an EQ, Emotional Intelligence, and it seems to play a role as well. Being liked at work can mean quite a bit to a person’s career.
If we were talking dogs, some breeds of dogs are bigger than others some faster than others, and some smarter than others. Where I think dogs are amazing is how they treat each other. Age, color, sex, size, and IQ seem to matter not. They are just happy to see each other for the most part.
With humans, some groups do better than others on IQ and SATs tests.
I think there might be a degree of selection bias there.
Meaning you are seeing a good coder, and assuming they have a high IQ.
For example, I’m a member of mensa, but frankly just a so-so coder. If you met me at a coding bootcamp or something I’m sure you’d be happy to conclude I was an average coder with average IQ. So I’m glad I’ve finally found a role which combines coding with “soft” skills, that I can excel at.
I even have an anecdote to illustrate this. My first job out of college was very tough for me, working in a cutting-edge software development company.
One day, they gave everyone in the company an IQ test. Yes, I know this is weird, but their excuse was that they needed to test out an exam that they would use for recruitment, and the results would have no effect on existing employees*.
Anyway, I got the number 2 score out of 400+ employees. Which of course made my colleagues virtually choke on their coffees, as I had barely scraped through my probation (and it was the kind of dick company where people would frequently remind you of that fact).
Coding ability had little to do with my evaluation. It is not like we gave out such difficult assignments that IQ was going to make a big difference.
I was basing my evaluation on how quickly they picked up the concepts. I taught data structures, and it was very hard, almost impossible, for some to get the difference between a variable and a structure. The tests I was used to at MIT did not quiz you on memorizable things but on the deeper understanding of the concept. When I tried to write tests like that at the last school I taught at it was a disaster. They did much better with multiple choice questions on sorting methods, not with questions about when one method is better than another.
Just coding ability is not a mark of much. Seeing the structure, being able to bring in methods from other areas, creating the right data structures for a job, defining everything from scratch, that is where the smarts come in.
Why are we moving the discussion from IQ to intelligence?
Intelligence certainly matters in most fields. The issue is that the evidence that IQ actually measures intelligence is a bit sparse. Smarter people tend to get higher scores on IQ tests, but that omits so much information. I went to high school and college with a guy who had a 4.0 average for the entire eight years. His reported IQ was 108. Now, there is no question that he worked his ass off to get those grades and there is also no question that he was not stupid. However, there were topics which he could not grasp as well as other students, although he was superb at sussing out what sort of questions would appear on tests. But those variables, (effort, ability to outguess an instructor on what the instructor wanted to see on a test, etc.), were not reflected in his IQ score.
Does one need to be fairly “intelligent”, (whatever that means), to score well on IQ tests? Sure. Do scores on IQ tests measure actual “intelligence,” (whatever that means?)? That is not proven.
The whole point is that IQ test results are correlated with intelligence.
As for your example, I know some people who got 4.0s at MIT with little apparent hard work. Now that’s intelligence. Someone really good at something makes it look easy. Mozart vs. Salieri (in the play, not in reality.)
As I have said several times before, high intelligence and/or IQ is not 1-1 correlated to GPA or success in life. In fact the person breezing through life thanks to high intelligence might not develop good study skills, and might hit the wall when he or she runs into something really hard. I’ve seen it happen.
We know people are differently gifted in music ability. We know people are differently gifted in sports ability. Why is it so hard to say people are differently gifted with regards to intelligence? And that IQ shows some of this difference.
Because people erroniously conflate the 2 concepts, like you have been doing the entire thread.
The fact that you are even asking this question at this point in the thread indicates to me that you are having severe difficulty fully understanding what half of the posts in this thread are saying.
Actually it seems this thread consists of one side accusing the other of saying that IQ is identical to intelligence (an admittedly fuzzy concept) while the other side says no such thing. Correlation is not the same as conflation.
The charge earlier in this thread was that IQ tests only measure test taking ability. And perhaps SATs only measure test taking ability also. But if that were true a lot if colleges and universities are basing a lot of their admissions decisions on nothing. Perhaps. But I used to work down the street from ETS, and I never noticed them being that powerful.
Perhaps SATs only do measure test taking ability. Perhaps success in college only measures test taking ability. What is a PhD dissertation but a very long essay test, after all, and quals and orals are tests. Much research is just an open ended lab assignment or problem set. If life is one big test, maybe SATs and IQs are useful after all.
I see it similar to trying to measure athleticism, and using, say, the 400m hurdles as your test for athleticism. Like intelligence, I think athleticism is a pretty broad characteristic that encompasses a wide range of attributes (strength, stamina, agility). I think, overall, we’d agree that people who have fast times in the 400m hurdles might generally be more athletic than people with slow times. Sure, knowing someone’s 400m hurdle times may not be the best at assessing whether someone might be good at, say, American Ninja Warrior, but if you were drafting a team to participate in American Ninja Warrior in a year’s time, would you rather know people’s hurdle times, or would you rather pick people at random?
I think ultimately it comes down to how people differently value loose correlations. Some people might say that since the correlation is so loose, it isn’t very useful, while some others might think “Why not take 55/45% odds over a coin flip?” I think most people would agree that if we can develop better methods for measuring intelligence than IQ tests, that would be even better - until then, people will continue to debate the usefulness of the current tools.
I do not know of anyone who claims that there are not differences in intelligence.
I have seen no evidence that there is a1:1 equivalence between IQ scores and intelligence. IQ tests measure the ability to take such tests, successfully–thus measuring the ability of one to take such tests, successfully, which more intelligent people will do more successfully, providing they have the necessary training, cultural background, and emotional wherewithal.