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Wednesday, October 17. 2012

IQ and Life


It's actually about general intelligence, aka "g," of which IQ is a standard measure. Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life. (h/t hbd* chick).


Unfortunately, g turns out to be highly heritable. Wiki has a good introductory discussion of g. As they say:



The practical validity of g as a predictor of educational, economic, and social outcomes is more far-ranging and universal than that of any other known psychological variable. The validity of g is greater the greater the complexity of the task.



When I applied to medical school, they gave us an IQ test and a personality-oriented interview (along with the usual exams we all took).


For every kind of task, g is the best single predictor of performance. Not the only, but the "best single" predictor for performance in all life settings (but diligence, adaptability, social skills, judgement, emotional maturity, integrity, collegiality, ability to delay gratification, sports skills, appearance, and all the rest of individual traits and talents and psychological traits obviously matter too, to varying degrees).


Related, The 5 Unique Ways Intelligent People Screw Up Their Lives. If you think you're too smart to need this, you're who it's aimed at.


When 90% of people were dirt farmers, or hunter-gatherers, etc., these distinctions did not matter so much.
Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Our Essays, Psychology, and Dr. Bliss, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 17:49 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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I'm not that smart. Smart enough to have doubts about myself, and smart enough to know I have many, many reasons to be modest and humble. And enough memory to remember a number of them.
#1 Sam L. on 2012-10-17 18:34 (Reply)
I agree with Hawkins's article, but his 5 things are essentially two things with different hand gestures, looking like 5. There is also some confusion between the concept of "g" and the belief that one is an intellectual. There's some overlap, but those are not at all the same thing. He also gets the William James Sidis story somewhat wrong. I had a half-dozen posts on him last year if anyone wants to stop by and search "sidis" on the site.

I have been saying for a decade that "g" may have been the key attribute for advancement for the last 2-3 centuries, but adaptability is going to pass it in importance in the next generation. Adaptability includes some measure of intelligence, of course. But the personality factors are going to be just as important.
#2 Assistant VIllage Idiot (Link) on 2012-10-17 19:02 (Reply)
Hawkins' #1 way on that intelligent people screw up makes an excellent point. Except it's not limited to intelligent people. Rather, I've long said that most people who go thru the traditional education system suffer from this liability, for the obvious reason that book learning is the overwhelming education style in schools.

It has a very negative effect on society, because everything is made to seem easy. And every newspaper article, every television docudrama makes it seem like someone is to blame for anything that goes wrong, or rather, anything that isn't done perfectly.

But it's far different to make a batch of brownies than to read a recipe. It's tough to build a car that has perfect safety AND gets 50 mpg. It's hard to run a business and ensure that every new hire was the very best candidate.

We're a nation of complainers with a collective entitlement mentality. And I think much of this comes from believing reading about something is the same as doing something.
#3 DrTorch on 2012-10-18 08:57 (Reply)
And this explains why our educated elites are doing such a wonderful job and we shouldn't cause them so much grief. We should all be socialists now.
#4 chuck on 2012-10-18 11:05 (Reply)

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