The dirty secret of perceived intelligence is that, in practice, mental acuity (or however you want to characterize IQ) matters less than passion for the subject matter. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you aren't motivated to immerse yourself in the subject matter. Of course, there's no reason a single person can't have both, but on balance I'll take a passionate person with moderate intelligence over an intelligent person with moderate motivation.
Yes. I've always seen IQ as a predictor for how fast you can learn material and make connections. So it saves time. Which makes people with high IQ look superhuman during school: new topics are introduced every month, and the smart kids breeze through.
After school, when 99% of jobs (even the ones for those smart kids) don't require constantly learning progressively harder concepts, IQ matters less. The time it saves for a disinterested person can no longer compete with the time an interested person can spend.
By the time you meet kids in CS at good schools they have all been heavily selected. Most kids at michigan or berkeley or wherever were easily top students with minimal effort their whole life. A decent number were genuinely outstanding. Id like to see top programs accept random students and see what happens.
> This is what we call being talented for something, it's not necessarily related to the one's IQ.
I think you’re just playing word games here.
My slightly different short definition of IQ is that it is an indicator of the capacity to learn, extend, and expand on new ideas (with exceptions for mental blocks, which exist even in higher IQ people). That is, it is not just speed and/or quantity.
When you take two people with a large IQ difference and have them learning, extending, and expanding in a wide range of unfamiliar domains, the high IQ person will consistently do more and better.
IQ by official definition measures reasoning and problem solving capacity in people. In some domains (science, engineering) it's a crucial factor for success, while in some like learning a foreign language or music or art it's not. High IQ certainly contributes positively in any activity, but when you have a child gifted for music or visual arts or sport or languages, it's just that, a talent. And when that child with time becomes really good in it, it's again usually thanks to a lot of hard work and practice on their part. IQ plays little effect in that process - as long, of course, as the person is not below some threshold that would make the activity too hard for them.
> while in some like learning a foreign language or music or art it's not
You absolutely must be joking.
This tells me that you have never learned a foreign language to a high level of proficiency, and that you know very little about art.
Regarding the rest of your post, talent certainly exists, and things like motivation and talent are better predictors of success than IQ, but IQ tests don’t claim to predict success (even though IQ scores and success might be mildly correlated).
As I mentioned in another reply (please read it), folks seem to think that IQ tests claim to predict success. They don’t. It’s an unfair onus to put on IQ tests.
> This tells me that you have never learned a foreign language to a high level of proficiency, and that you know very little about art.
Well, I've obviously learned English well enough to fool you :P
Anyways, I might have misunderstood you, dunno... my impression was that you're saying exactly that - that IQ is the main predictor of academical success - which is something that I both strongly disagree, and have a plenty of anecdotal examples around me that prove it wrong.
> Well, I've obviously learned English well enough to fool you
Cheers. I walked straight into that. That said, I imagine that there is more to that story.
Fwiw, IQ is mildly correlated to a lot of things, including academic success. But as I said and strongly believe, success in academics has much stronger predictors than IQ.
I have personally trained many groups of “low performers” and “less smart people” to run circles around high IQ people. I have a mountain of (unfortunately proprietary) data that shows how much certain types of training can accelerate learning.
All that said, the toughest and most abstract ideas/areas are pretty much limited to the high IQ people. I will add that this comes with baggage — they are often frustrated that their peers don’t see or understand what they see and understand.
Just keep in mind that it’s correlation you’re talking about. You can have a high IQ and none of those capacities. You can have a high IQ and be severally autistic. Etc.
You can also test normal but be very high functioning. So there is no necessary or causative connection between IQ and effective capacity.
Robots like ChatGPT May test substantially in some IQ tests and have no intelligence or agency at all.
IQ is not a measure of low functioning or high functioning or “effective capacity”. I certainly have never claimed that it is.
I think many people put the onus of predicting success on measures of IQ, and most/all good IQ tests don’t claim to do this. There would be a face validity issue, and there are much better tests that can predict success (however success is measured) than IQ tests. I think that this is grossly unfair to IQ tests.
Will AI be able to do well in IQ tests? Maybe, but I don’t think that it will be relevant.
My stance has been and is that IQ tests measure the capacity to learn, extend, and expand on new topics (in humans). Nothing more, nothing less.
Some other points:
- IQ tests are not a measure of effectiveness. Many, many more variables go into that.
- IQ tests are biased, and pretty much have to be. That said, good IQ test designers try to minimize the bias for their target audience. I think that this has been more or less effectively done in the US for folks in the middle class or higher.
- Related, any give score on an IQ test should be seen as an IQ floor rather than an IQ ceiling. There are many reasons why someone may not score their maximum score (or even close to it) when taking an IQ test. Anxiety and fatigue are simple examples.
- IQ is correlated to income, but is this is a very broad correlation. Specifically, average income goes up with IQ up to about 135 or so (can’t remember the exact number) and then starts decreasing (possibly due to being in lower paid fields like academics, possibly due to social dysfunction). But these are all aggregated numbers. The individual results vary wildly within any narrow IQ band.
- As you alluded to, effectiveness and/or success is predicted by many other things other than IQ, and in many cases IQ may only be a weak predictor. IQ tests don’t claim to predict success. Things like social skills, socio-economic status, access to resources, physical health, and mental health can be much better predictors of effectiveness/success depending on the task.
- IQ tests are quite good at finding people at the extremes (very low and very high), but actually does a fairly poor job of differentiating folks at those ranges. On a personal level, I think the main use of IQ scores would be to identify these folks early and get them the resources they need.
To close, here is a decent article that discusses one view on how IQ and “success” are only loosely related:
Not necessarily the true passion for the particular subject, as much as being highly motivated to pass it. I know some folks who were absolutely average IQ and not truly passionate about anything Uni related (except the idea of finishing it), but simply had firm self-discipline and work-habits instilled into them by parents, as well as this crazy level of competitiveness and ambition that they have to be the best in everything... and frankly they were killing it in all subjects.
Sure, motivation can be internal (I'm doing this because the mere act of doing it gives me joy) or external (I'm doing this because I expect to be rewarded by others), even if the former is harder to "fake" than the latter. At the end of the day, what matters is that you really and truly Give A Fuck, capital G, capital A, capital F.
Maybe "smart" people have learned how to be passionate and/or motivated about topics, rather than have some increased capacity for learning.
And maybe "great" leaders have figured out how to make a boring topic interesting for their ICs.
One thing I've learned over my time in tech is that it's a lot easier to tap into someone's ego than it is to tap into their inherent interest in their job. People might be interested in preserving their ego more than they like the actual work involved in building/maintaining a random service.
Reading through The Neuroscience of Intelligence it seems there's some evidence in support of the efficient brain hypothesis, which from what I took away indicated that there were physiological differences in the amount of energy used by the brain in a given task, and the general principle being that this differential modulates the amount of time individuals are willing to engage in the task and this leads to cumulative differences over time.
I feel like the Tetris study[0] in section 3.2 kind of goes against what you're saying here, but that's not really what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about, all else equal, good learners and good leaders can "tap into" passion at will, either in themselves or in others, to gain an advantage in practice consistency, which leads to improved fluency in the task. A learner's IQ ends up being a wash; if they have this skill, they can learn better than someone with their same IQ (or higher) without this skill (and I do suspect it to be a skill, as people modulate over their ability at learning over their lifetimes).
The Neuroscience of Intelligence is a comprehensive overview of the state of the art understanding of the field of intelligence research. The paper you linked is, as I understand it, not research on intelligence but rather expertise and/or skill acquisition. I say this because The Neuroscience of Expertise talks about results of exactly this nature in Chapter 1.
The rest of what you say is too poorly defined to be a well reasoned model of how reality works at a fundamental level.
I got that paper from The Neuroscience of Intelligence, it's the study cited in section 3.2, so if you don't think its relevant, Dr. Richard J. Haier seems to disagree.
And if you can't be specific about what I'm saying that's wrong, I might start to suspect you don't know what you're trying to say.
No, I don’t think so. I have seen plenty of smart people who have no interest in a subject and find it utterly boring still able to rip through an assignment in 20 minutes that would take many hours for another student who is passionate about the subject. Some people are just crazy smart and they can rapidly understand complex mathematics. Other people essentially have no hope at all of understanding these things.
Well yeah, because they had passion, got to a certain level of skill, then lost that passion.
Sounds like it fits perfectly both with what I've said and what the submission is about, and again has nothing to do with "crazy smarts". Just practice.
This. Not to deny that some people are just smarter, a lot of "innate talent" has somethings going for it - early exposure, initial success and some sort of mentoring. This tends to make people passionate towards the thing - they're chasing the domaine from the success. Do it enough, they'll get better than most peers.
