this statement is an outlier.
Or you could read The Bell Curve, which is a far more academic book with better research. And much to some people’s chagrin, the APA still has yet to refute any of the major points in the book.
Outliers, by definition, are the exceptions to the rule. Forrest Gump would be an outlier. But probably 99.99999% of the people with IQ’s of 75 are not multimillionaires.
Reading Geo’s post’s from the beginning of the thread, they could have been written by me. I tested very high on an IQ test at around age 5 or 6. I honestly don’t know the actual number, but 135-140 I think. I killed standardized tests all through school. My parents were given the option of having me skip 7th grade, but didn’t want me to for whatever reason. I “struggled” with attention span and with completing assignments, but I tested well above grade level. I think I scored a 33 on my ACT despite needing to take summer classes just to graduate high school. Dropped out of undergrad twice because I never went to class. I spent zero time studying for the GMAT and scored a 700. I actually did well in grad school and was nominated for an award as the outstanding student in the college of management but I didn’t bother to submit an essay. The only reason I did well in the program was that my employer paid, so they got to see the grades. I’ve had some career success, but I’m nowhere close to where I want to be, and I’m repeatedly told by competent people that I interact with that I’m basically a waste of skill and talent in my current role.
The biggest issue I face now when trying to rectify that is that I interview well, I have great recommendations and references, but my resume is full of hacksaw and I’m 32 without a good explanation for the decade I pissed away between 18 and 28. So sure, I have a high IQ, but just about every one of my friends is getting more out of their average to above average intelligence than I am out of my supposedly high intelligence.
EQ > IQ
^As CvM would say, da troof! The one benefit I suppose of being a high IQ is I can finish work insanely fast. At first this meant that I did a lot quickly. Once I realised this, I now see that in 3-4 hours a day I finish more than any of my peers. This gives me substantial time to be generally informed in news, research stocks and, of course, post on AF. I used to think doing 2x as much work would benefit me, but I don’t get 2x the pay. I found that optimally, if I did 125%ish more work than others, I’d be a top performer. I could do this in 4-5 hours per day. Once I realised this, my life became substantially more relaxed. I hit all of performance reviews out of the park, which drives coworkers nuts who put in longer hours. Amusing anyway. Learning new concepts and what not comes very easily to me. Staying focused on long term projects absolutely is a train wreck for me. Really everyone has to play their cards to be successful. Having good focus or tenacity is as valuable or even more so than a high IQ. IQ is one piece of the puzzle. I don’t see myself as any superior person because I have a high IQ, just a different set of natural skills than others. Some people learn quickly, some people are focused, some are sales people, some are athletic. There is no total measure of a superior worker or person.
Yep, you have to have ambition. If you haven’t changed by now, odds are you’re done. I would argue that if you went to a top grade school surrounded by your intellectual peers, you would be a very different man today. You would have thought you were average and that you needed to work to get by. People stop caring about potential pretty quick in the work place and competitive academic programs. You need to be smart and bust your rump.
Going to have to work for yourself or work in an environment that you would be average to see more benefit from your IQ. Your hacksaw background won’t get you into a top firm, so your choices are to continue to coast along, doesn’t sound bad, or go out on your own.
I tested at 147 in middle school. And my life is a complete train wreck.
I’ve some stuff on the side. I may strike out completely on my own once kids are a bit older. I completely agree with you though. When working with top firm guys, its definitely a different feel. That said, there is security in being the big fish among little fishes. Having to bust it just to keep up sounds scary to me.
I think it’s much more important to look at the correlation of penis size to IQ and yearly compensation.
Spoiler alert: Women don’t have penises and they have lower IQs (due to their smaller brains; it’s science) and make less than men (who do have penises).
Hope that clears everything up.
I can’t disagree with the bolded part, although I will say that busting my ass isn’t something I struggle with anymore. Once you have other people depending on your ability to provide, it’s hard to coast in good conscience.
double
STL, you are a sexist and a bigot. Everyone knows women are dominated by their imbalance of hormones, not small brains.
To say nothing of the fact they attract bears when menstruating.
^ I thought they attracted dobermans.
I did some work in this field so here is some random stuff on the topic… First, Intelligence is just pattern recognition , and pattern recognition can be measured just fine. Avg is 100, standard dev is 15. If you score 70 you are dumb, if you score 130 you are smart. There’s no way for a smart person to get 70, nor for a dumb person to get 130. There’s also no way to ever get 160 type questions right unless you are a genius, no amount of coffee or Google will help. For 200 range people there is nobody smarter than you to write the test, so it’s innacurate. Men have a massive amount of outliers compared to women. Women are clustered around the mean. Men have more idiots/geniuses. Once you get to IQ 145, men outnumber women 8 to 1. If you’ve ever worked around a bunch of certified geniuses, you’ve noticed they are mostly men. That’s just the way we evolved, and it makes sense if you think about it. But now for the really fun part – average homo sapien genetic intelligence is NOT increasing. The whole Flynn Effect thing is mostly meaningless. Even Flynn himself acknowledges his theory obviously doesn’t mean genetic intelligence is increasing. All Flynn effect really means is that humans are applying what little intelligence they have left to recognition of abstract patterns (as opposed to reading the stars, tides, animal migration patterns, etc). And people in developed countries aren’t blatantly malnourished anymore – they haven’t really become smarter, they have just removed an IQ impairment. Which isn’t to say that people eating sugar and white bread from birth in the USA don’t have an IQ impairment. Anyhow, aside from Flynn not being real, it is also expected to run out or even reverse, or possibly already has. But actual genetic intelligence is almost certainly decreasing, and there’s just no way to believe this isn’t true. First, cranial capacity has decreased 10% since the upper Paleolithic (correlation with intelligence estimated .4). Across the homo genus brain/body ratio works as a fair measure of intelligence; meat eating goes up, brain size goes up, body size goes up but not as much as brain, ratio increases, intelligence goes up…for 2.5M years. Peaks 10K years ago with Neanderthal/Sapien. THEN, there is a sudden switch from meat to grains, and of course the decline must begin. How could it not? It’s real, it happened. There’s just no reason to assume “well this is different we are losing brain but not smarts”. We ARE probably getting dumber. Second, you’ve got the dysgenic effect of low IQ people making more babies, this is real. Low IQ people are not able to remember to use birth control, and if they do remember, they are not able to use it correctly. When they get prego they do not abort because they are religious. It’s interesting, everyone gives more thought to “ice bucket challenge” than the problem of our decreasing IQ. Reminds me of a movie I saw once. Wrote fast, sorry for any typo/rambling. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/222557600_The_decline_of_the_world’s_IQ
Just came in to say this is redundant. If anyone is wondering what good a liberal arts education can do, you can add “edit incorrect usage of dead languages” to the list.
I don’t suspect I have a meaningfully high IQ, since I went to high school with a lot of geniuses. But I can really relate to this post above and never thought of this 125% before. Perhaps thats what I need to try out, because it is tiring. And in my current role, people look at me skeptically as if they don’t honestly believe I’m so much faster than others while producing the same or higher quality analysis.
The problem is that I don’t lack the focus aspect, though. So I can’t stand idle time and prefer working constantly. But thanks for that post. It’s one of the reasons I’m going to jump ship really soon, hopefully to find a place I’m more average.
purealpha - I am interested in this, why do you suspect the change from meat to grains is a factor in decline in intelligence? Same with cranial capacity. Why do you assume that Neanderthal populations were more intelligent than humans?
Rather, I believe that we are seeing increased selection for intelligence - being really intelligent right now is far more beneficial than it was during hunter-gatherer periods, granted, perversely, these most fit individuals are having less kids.
Are you on the HBD boards?
I spent a year doing macro-historic analysis (I guess that’s a fancy way to say studying anthropology), pulled all the raw data/observations from over the last 2M years, laid it all out on the table, and looked at the whole deal.
The pattern is just so obvious with meat, and it’s not just my theory. It’s the leading theory on how we evolved these brains. If 11K years ago you told me we were going to stop meat, I’d theorize that brain size would decrease, and of course that is what happened. And every way we look at it the theory holds. Today Northern tribes still have higher IQ and larger cranial capacity. Another interesting observation is that the first humans (cro-mag) that traveled out of Africa to Europe (perhaps as early as 60K YA) developed the largest cranial capacity of any humans (between Neanderthal and 2nd wave Sapiens).
Neanderthals had the largest brain, but also thicker bodies, you can calc Encephalization Quotient (a formula that takes into account body size and other factors). I calced it, and got the same number other’s have…according to EQ they would not have been more intelligent. But that’s still being studied.
I don’t see how we are seeing pressure for the intelligent to breed??? The research shows the opposite.