1. The author is unfortunately misguided. It is not the society, but market/economics of today that value intelligence more than anything else, mainly because it is directly correlated with economic output. (conscientiousness being the other major factor).
2. On the other hand, Sport teams value speed, strength and agility, eye coordination, height, etc... . basically physical prowess.
You can't blame them, nobody is willing to pay to watch a bunch of average out of shape people playing a sport, but they are willing to see peak performance.
3. Same with music, film/movie, and theatre, we are naturally want to see great performances, art, and/or beautiful things.
#2 and #3 have been historically more important than #1, and now number #1 (intelligence), is becoming more important due to its economic output and not because society started valuing it more.
-- Seems like it was written by a luddite, with no concept of economy output. It like someone from 1910 saying: "We should ban automation in farming and tractors and other machinery should be banned, as where all these farmers will find jobs"...
"We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed. This might even redound to employers’ benefit: Whatever advantages high intelligence confers on employees, it doesn’t necessarily make for more effective, better employees. "
You're (mostly) missing the point. This is, more or less, the point...
"Yes, some careers do require smarts. But even as high intelligence is increasingly treated as a job prerequisite, evidence suggests that it is not the unalloyed advantage it’s assumed to be."
When I was young I tended to equate academic performance & raw smarts with success, but as I've gotten older I've notice that long term success is less correlated with raw intelligence and more with disposition: charisma, grit, and emotional intelligence.
In some ways, in the current academic system, being extremely smart is almost like being able to cheat. You can skip the studying, take a test that others will struggle with, and still ace it. Real life is less like that and more of a slog where having a high IQ gives you a 20% advantage instead of a 150% advantage (these numbers are obviously pulled out of thin air).
> but as I've gotten older I've notice that long term success is less correlated with raw intelligence and more with disposition: charisma, grit, and emotional intelligence.
Actually I think long term success is mostly about luck and starting privilege, especially when you use a globally relevant scale of success.
Charisma, grit, emotional intelligence, work ethic, perseverance, positive attitude, etc. ... these are mostly just feel-good concepts we emphasize so we can try to retrospectively claim that our success “is earned” and we “deserve” it and it’s due to our volition and agency.
But really, many lazy, ignorant, myopic, prejudiced and negative trolls are super successful. And many tough, persistent, high-character, talented people are poor & suffering. The difference is mostly luck.
I think you're both right. I think your mention of luck and starting privilege plays a much larger role than we'd all like to believe or admit, though.
For (a crude) example, if we all drew the same conclusion that being wealthy and [say] a technologist living in a $10M condo in NYC with spending money and travel time was the ideal life style—
many of use were born closer to that, even those born poor here, than say a peasant from the outskirts in Darfur.
That's one hell of a handicap.
Being intelligent, emotionally intelligent, charismatic, and tough will get you farther than if you weren't any of those traits personified. But on your way going about your business you're probably much more likely to be robbed of your acquired wealth and your life in some dangerous parts of those outskirts and so you just need that much more luck.
Luck plays a huge role. But it’s something you can do nothing about. However you can work on your character. Competing against everyone else will oftern result in you finding someone else that’s done better. This is of no use. Compete against your self. Be better than you were. Then it doesn’t matter how lucky or privileged the next guy is.
Sure, but the discussion seems to be more about how to attribute success outcomes to various factors that might have predicted it.
Another way to say it might be that if you want to do a regression of some success metric on a bunch of factors, such as positive attitude or charisma or whether your first name is “John” or what country you were born in, the R-squared of such a model is likely crap — most of the outcome is random even after controlling for volitional factors we think should matter (another way to say this: it’s mostly luck), and factors with large, significant effect sizes might have no volitional aspect (e.g. was born in America).
This is not normative. It says nothing about what you should do. Rather it’s descriptive. What factors correlate with success, and does their correlation result in a meaningful explanation of the variation of outcomes we see?
Of course luck and any inherited privilege matter a ton when considering all factors.
I'm thinking of trajectory, some people keep on advancing in their careers, others get stuck or spin their wheels. Over time this difference adds up, though, as you say, it is not completely fair to the those who never got a shot in the first place because of circumstances.
re: "tough, persistent, high-character, talented people are poor & suffering"
This is covered in the article about how the educational system is failing the poor and points it back to an overemphasis on cognitive ability / IQ smarts.
ex: "Even if we refuse to prevent poverty or provide superb early education, we might consider one other means of addressing the average person’s plight. Some of the money pouring into educational reform might be diverted to creating more top-notch vocational-education programs"
> Actually I think long term success is mostly about luck and starting privilege
From the perspective of a culture/society? No way.
For example you have no choice that you grew up in a single parent household - but society and culture have a huge influence over how likely/often that happens.
Your comment seems to prove my point: a society or culture has a huge influence on e.g. whether you are disqualified from certain education opportunities because of your gender, or whether you experience debilitating anxiety or stress growing up because of the laws your country mandates regarding sexual orientation.
If you are lucky and grow up without those factors, you might realize more of your education potential, and then have a greater labor product output, and then gain more income from better-paying employers, all because of that early luck regarding what country you were born in.
So the characteristic of interest, which country you were born in, plays a dominant role in success metrics of your life outcome, and this characteristic is not something under the control of the individual (as you point out, you have no choice about where you grew up).
So it seems your example proves the point: characteristics we attribute to the volition of an individual (things like charisma, hard work, positive attitude, persistence, etc.) -- these are not nearly as important as factors with no volitional component (your gender, your country of origin, the wealth of your parents, your genetics in terms of height, athletic prowess, attractiveness, and so forth).
So in the end, success is determined by the random assignment of characteristics we don't control for ourselves -- a phenomenon known as "luck."
Particularly in Silicon Valley, people think you throw a bunch of intelligent people together and you'll get good results, but if those intelligent people are lacking social skills they're not going to produce more than an group of average intelligence that has social skills.
> When I was young I tended to equate academic performance & raw smarts with success, but as I've gotten older I've notice that long term success is less correlated with raw intelligence and more with disposition: charisma, grit, and emotional intelligence.
I think it's understandable given that, for example, the US educational system and culture has been inculcated with this false belief that taking tests, memorizing facts and following the rules are the main keys to success. When, in fact, they merely favor compliant, learned helplessness, leadership-dependent workers.
I've noticed most of my friends that would be deemed "successful" by most of society only have 1 thing in common...parents with exceptionally large bank accounts.
I can only point to a couple people that came from middle class and lower families that are now successful (though I'm not terribly old yet), with them they had above average intelligence and above average charisma.
However, being exceptional seems to be a minority factor in being successful when compared to being born with more resources at your disposal.
I mean, you can't really be a billionaire in today's world if your parents weren't millionaires. And it's like this all the way down.
You're absolutely right. And the Big5 factor named "conscientiousness" is another word for grit. (AndI assume ardit33 was using the Big5 meaning.)
I'd further say that emotional intelligence and charisma correlate somewhat with intelligence. They may be developed later, but it's easier for an intelligent person to develop those things.
One college summer I was interning at a sales office, and the sales manager said something that stuck with me: "Often we're selling this product to people who don't really understand it, or don't really understand how it's going to help them. And it's easy to have a deal fall through because of that, and I've seen a lot of salespeople in that situation throw up their hands and say 'bah! The client is stupid, that's why I couldn't sell the thing to him.' But if you're so much smarter, and the client is dumber, then you ought to be able to figure out a way to help the client along and understand the value. Working with a dumb client is no excuse, it's a call to action."
However, to be precise, conscientiousness isn't the same thing as grit. To illustrate the distinction, look at John McCain - he embodies a sort of tenacity and resilience I would call "grit" (thumbs down at 2am), but isn't the most conscientious (didn't vet Sarah Palin).
I'm sure there's studies to say charisma and social intelligence correlate with intelligence, or some academic would argue those are a form of intelligence, etc. The article specifically calls out IQ / test taking intelligence as being overvalued by society in general, which is what I mean in my comment as well. Eg, The SAT doesn't test you for these traits and these traits will not make much of a difference in an academic setting.
Qualitatively: experience, hustle and common-sense best genius almost every time. Having genius with all of the former can be helpful, but it's only a handicap for certain ventures.
I think society values competence, and intelligence is a trait that enables, but does not guarantee, competence. There are a ton of highly intelligent people who do not hold high social status, because intelligence is neither necessary nor sufficient for competence. Highly intelligent people who never apply themselves to socially-valued aims are considered losers and hold zero status in our society; the archetypal example of this being Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.
Yes, this is true. But I think it's more complex than this. Society /relies/ on competence for its continued existence, but it doesn't necessarily value it innately. Kind of referencing back to the person you replied to, the market values competence not society, but it does it out of necessity. Having competent people in all fields helps to accelerate your ability to grow, become profitable, and reduces mistakes.
The bulk of people in the West are apathetic without much care for their work, and care is nearly an inherent prerequisite of competence, as competence is something you develop and are not born with. You develop competence through focused practice and the care to understand. Clearly, while we rely on competence, it's not so highly valued.
>The bulk of people in the West are apathetic without much care for their work
In my experience, most people put a lot of energy and care into their jobs, and most are proud over what they do even when they are not doing especially important or valued tasks.
They also seem to be putting the interest of the company above other concerns.
>It is not the society, but market/economics of today that value intelligence more than anything else
Society has chosen to give the market relatively free reign. Society could also choose to redistribute profits and incentivise companies to act in the interests of society in general, rather than their just their shareholders. You might disagree with that, you might even have a profound moral objection to that, but on a societal level it is very much a choice.
> Society has chosen to give the market relatively free reign.
It's really not much to do with how humans organise society; it's about technology. At the current level of technology we have, smart humans are more productive than less smart humans. The only way to reverse that would be to get rid of a lot of modern technology, which no country can do unless it wants to become backward.
> Society could also choose to redistribute profits and incentivise companies to act in the interests of society in general
If the company still wants to produce good and cost-effective products it'll still have to hire smart people. There's no way round that.
The suggestion that we should redistribute wealth is very different from the author's suggestion that we should provide a disincentive for automation, and make sure we don't tend to hire the best (where best includes intelligence) person available for a given job.
Yup, if we truly valued intelligence then we should recognize the inequality of the American economic system is systematically wasting a lot of human potential simply because it so unevenly gives people the basic resources of clean food, water, shelter, education, medical care.
Yes, I disagree. I lived under communism (in Albania). The society at time (communist/socialist regime), decided that in order to make it up in the society and the ranks of state controlled companies you have had to come from a 'poor or simple' family, and if you were part of the previous bourgeoise, or not communist enough, (i.e. most smart people), you were relegated to crappy jobs, or often interned into education camps.
In resulted in a lot of communist zealots, but dummies, going to top positions. They did what they could, and it resulted in total economic collapse few decades later.
It resulted in food rations, where a family of 4 could only buy a dozen of eggs a week, one pound of meat, and could barely buy bread/milk and other necessities.
Some folks here have really never faced the dire consequences of communism and how it created a poor society across the board.
When I was 11, I had to stay in bread lines so our family could eat. It looked like this:
Could we agree that the level of commitment to society’s well-being can be a slider and not a switch between two extremes?
Also, from what I know, “socialist” societies in the eastern block were closer to socialism-flavored dictatorships resulting from power grabs and nepotism on epic scale.
The Nordic countries have managed to combine socialism and capitalism in a very nice way i think. But now it's on its way to less gloryful days due to massive immigration and the problems it's causing.
That’s the old argument of “they didn’t try socialism right” that many make when they want to give government more power over the lives of their fellow citizens.
I feel torn. Obviously no one with morals wants to see others left behind in a capitalistic society. On the other hand welfare states seem like pyramid schemes and the further left you go with giving more power to government the worse the lives of citizens get.
I found Penn Jillette’s talk on YouTube about why he found libertarianism eye opening.
Still, our entire economic system seems ready to collapse. Many of our best business leaders are starting to agree that we may need to tax corporations that use robots and provide a reverse income tax to give people money to live.
Other choice is to simply shoot dead the thickos. Just bomb the poor areas or force the poor and less smart people to undergo contraceptive surgeries. Yes, those are the choices even though most might abhor it.
And to add to that bears shit in woods.
Note: The point in the sarcasm is that societies have made all those kinds of those choices and have failed miserably and better choices have survived. Markets work because they give maximum possible respect and freedom to individuals without being judgemental. Markets promote peace, brotherhood, co-operation, prosperity and stability. Most other systems meet violent end.
> It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counter-productively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed.
Affirmative action for the stupid?
> This might even redound to employers’ benefit: Whatever advantages high intelligence confers on employees, it doesn’t necessarily make for more effective, better employees.
Uh-huh. Sure, it doesn't necessarily make for it, but it's a good indicator.
It really did read like it was written by a Luddite.
And that was the entire point of the article. IQ is not a direct measure of skill in all arbitrary domains, yet skill is valuable to society in many of those domains.
I've seen a statistician (and not one with advanced degrees, just a bachelors and years of experience with SAS) become a kick ass front end dev in the last few weeks. I'm betting front end devs have a harder time becoming statisticians.
There was this essay by pg where he called this concept "upwind".
Probably all 3 if they lacked the introspection to avoid interviewing for positions in dev work, math, and accounting respectively.
Competence (which is probably closer to what society is increasingly valuing as opposed to intelligence) is always context dependent (although society has also generally respected the idea of the accomplished generalist, see the idea of the Renaissance Man).
If someone is not good at _anything_ then it's a good bayesian guess to say they're stupid. If someone has high-achievement in one or more specialities it's safe to say they're smart.
[edit: Feel free to explain the downvotes! I understand the parent-comment was arguing for a "there are different types of intelligence" kind of theory, but I do think that the "aggregate smartness" is more useful/correct. Think of the smart people you know-- aren't they often kind of polymaths? And even things they're new to, they kind of pick up fast? And think of the really stupid people you know--- don't they kind of suck of everything?]
IQ shouldn't be conflated with human worth. It should be taken as a measure of societal progress, however. Poles and Italian immigrants in the US raised their average IQ scores over the 1st half of the 20th century -- by over 15 points!
Where there has been no progress and backsliding in average IQ scores, this should be taken as an indictment of the policies at play in those times and places.
Here is the hard thing to swallow: Some people are worth more than others.
eg: A beautiful person will have much more options in dating, while an ugly person will not, or have no options at all. I know, it is unfair, but there is a clear case that humans have different worth in a society, and it depends on their abilities.
A top scorer (aka Ronaldo, Messi, or Zlatan) in soccer, will have much higher worth in the market then a mediocre one. Their output is directly measurable, and yes, they have much much different value and they are worth more than an average player. Their presence in a team creates more ticket sales and more viewership into the sport. So, they are clearly worth more to that sport at least. If you think sports are valuable at all to a society, then they are probably worth more to the society as well. If you think sports are useless, then they are probably noise. But it seems that our society values sports and performance.
As I said, IQ is not the only one. Beauty, physical strength, height, prowess, performance in arts, acting ability, creativity are other ones. Yes, a sub-average IQ person, that happens to be a great athlete will do well. So, a person with high IQ, but sub-average athletic ability, or beauty.
The author mentions that it is 'unfair' that companies select their candidates by their IQ, while it is clear case that companies are simply acting on their self interest (IQ is highly co-related to output in today's information age).
And, while I agree we should do more to improve early childhood education, and honestly start at even pre-natal care, to make sure that we do whatever we can to raise IQ.
But I don't agree with his recommendation to resist automation at any cost, and not to value IQ at all. History has shown that societies that did resist progress, the average person suffered for it, (feudal Japan, Russia, or China in the 19th century, are examples where centuries of backwards economic values, and resisting to automation resulted in much poorer societies overall).
> Here is the hard thing to swallow: Some people are worth more than others.
"Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here - close!"
Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross
>> Here is the hard thing to swallow: Some people are worth more than others.
I would add a qualifier here - "in some situations".
As human beings per se we all are "worth" the same.
When acting in a specific capacity, however, your ability to perform in that capacity determines your objective worth in that role. And of course it's pretty obvious that some occupations are better suited for ppl with different abilities. Master programmer will (most likely)be a worthless pro running back and (most likely)vice versa.
The thing is - ppl are very accepting of the physical differences between individuals but contrary to what the article is saying - intellectual differences are way more of a taboo.
Be careful with that idea about some being worth more than others. As we move from one domain to another through the course of a day/week/whatever, we take on different levels of "worth".
As for the dating thing, dating someone far more or less beautiful than you comes with some problems, but sometimes is worth it. There are lots of people at all levels of beauty, so I don't buy the idea that you might have no options due to ugliness.
Your entire point rests on the implicit moral premise that the "worth" of a human should determined by their ability to produce utility for society.
But why should that be? If someone, for whatever reason, is less able to produce utility, does that mean that person deserves less of that which is produced? That they should experience a worse life because of their lesser talents?
And if someone is, for whatever reason, more able to produce utility, do they deserve more? Should we divert resources to improve their life at the expense of others?
You can argue that inequality is necessary to create incentives. I don't personally believe that's true, but I understand the argument as a reasonable moral position. But to argue that some people are morally worth more than others is to discard the very notion of human equality.
Your point isn't "hard to swallow", rather it is the conclusion of a moral framework which many find abhorrent.
>Your entire point rests on the implicit moral premise that the "worth" of a human should determined by their ability to produce utility for society.
If we are to measure the worth of a person the value that they contribute to society is the most obvious way.
A stupid person that contributes nothing deserves nothing. People don't deserve things for existing. They are given a chance to contribute and if they fail to take advantage of that chance they are not rewarded.
The belief that everyone, despite the decisions that they have made over the course of their life should be treated, rewarded, and respected equally is abhorrent.
The ideology you are promoting would have a wife and child beater be treated equally to a doctor.
>And the ideology you are promoting would have the disabled murdered for being unproductive. And indeed, it already has.
Don't put words into my mouth. I don't promote punishing people for not being contributing members of society I promote not rewarding them.
Your ideology promotes punishing success and rewarding idleness and stupidity. The world needs more intelligent people and society should work to reward positive traits.
>I don't promote punishing people for not being contributing members of society I promote not rewarding them.
Punishment and reward are relative in a connected economy. If you think that "A stupid person that contributes nothing deserves nothing." then you are proposing their murder via starvation.
>Your ideology promotes punishing success and rewarding idleness and stupidity.
My moral premise is the society should strive for the creation of the greatest utility for humanity. Withholding utility from some group humans, for whatever reason, directly harms that goal.
It can be argued that an unequal allocation of resources to individuals creates more overall utility by creating incentives, and I'm receptive to that argument, although I don't agree with it.
But arguing that the less productive individuals deserve less means your moral premise is no longer about creating the greatest utility, it's about creating utility for those you deem worthy.
>Punishment and reward are relative in a connected economy. If you think that "A stupid person that contributes nothing deserves nothing." then you are proposing their murder via starvation.
Look I'm not arguing against your imagined dystopia and I'm not a radical like you are. People in society are charitable and do provide basic needs for those that can't earn enough to feed themselves.
>My moral premise is the society should strive for the creation of the greatest utility for humanity. Withholding utility from some group humans, for whatever reason, directly harms that goal.
Your statement is factually incorrect. If we are to say that utility as you say is money then intelligent people are better at allocating resources than intelligent people. An intelligent person that is a good investor will invest in technology that they can leverage to create more.
If an intelligent person is given a significant amount of money because of their contributions to society, and then this person uses that money to create a new technology, utility has already exceeded the case where the less intelligent person and the more intelligent person are given the same amount of money.
>It can be argued that an unequal allocation of resources to individuals creates more overall utility by creating incentives, and I'm receptive to that argument, although I don't agree with it.
Ignoring rewards unequal allocation of resources gives those that can make better use of resources more.
>But arguing that the less productive individuals deserve less means your moral premise is no longer about creating the greatest utility, it's about creating utility for those you deem worthy.
It's not about who "I" deem worthy. I don't promote a central authority ran by me that ranks people and rewards people based on their worth. I promote allowing people to use the resources they have access to as they see fit and if the vast majority of society believes it's correct to give all their money to one person due to that person's contribution to society I believe we shouldn't interfere in that process.
> I don't promote a central authority ran by me that ranks people and rewards people based on their worth.
I'm not talking about the system. I'm talking about your morality. If you say "A stupid person that contributes nothing deserves nothing." then you are making a moral statement that deems that person less worthy.
My premise is that all people are equally worthy of a good life. If distributing resources unequally helps everyone to have better lives through greater productivity then that is a justified utilitarian decision. But calling that pragmatic decision morality, and saying that people are "worth" more or less as a result, is what I object to.
And to address your points about "wife beaters", since you seem to think they are more obviously "less worthy" than others: No, I still think they are equally worthy of living good lives. They should be prevented from harming people, and if that requires a worse quality of life (i.e. as a result of imprisonment) then that is justified. But punishment for punishment's sake is just turning harm into even more harm.
You are conflating IQ with criminality. These people live and exist and breathe and eat and occupy space. Where are you going to put all the bodies when you're done?
Welcome to HN, where you get downvoted for asking for a citation, and then downvoted again because you're not allowed to complain about the moronic retaliatory downvoting.
Please take my comment within the context of the comment I was replying to.
>You can argue that inequality is necessary to create incentives. I don't personally believe that's true, but I understand the argument as a reasonable moral position. But to argue that some people are morally worth more than others is to discard the very notion of human equality.
This statement is a twisted idea of equality. People are born equal but they do not remain equal. A doctor is not equal to wife beater.
Lower than average intelligence does not cause people to become "wife beaters". The lack of emotional intelligence on display in this whole comments section is deeply and painfully ironic.
>Lower than average intelligence does not cause people to become "wife beaters". The lack of emotional intelligence on display in this whole comments section is deeply and painfully ironic.
Jesus christ, are you capable of reading? I never suggested
> Lower than average intelligence does not cause people to become "wife beaters"
We've banned this account for taking the thread into flamewar and incivility. When people create accounts to do this we eventually ban their main account as well, so please don't.
This is what lack of emotional intelligence looks like. If you can't figure out how what you typed could be interpreted in this way by others, I feel very badly for you.
Still waiting. Does your moderation actually have any teeth, or is it just a bunch of hot air like all of the eugenics-loving psychopaths you guys continually coddle on here spew?
> Here is the hard thing to swallow: Some people are worth more than others.
According to whom? Why do they have the authority to say? You can say that person A produces more economic output than person B, but the true worth of that is subjective.
Higher IQ doesn't necessarily mean you're more competent, it means you're better at solving certain kinds of puzzles. Unless it is your job to solve that kind of puzzle you should directly measure what you care about.
I also don't see how a preference for high IQ scores is inextricably linked to the notion of progress.
I also don't see how a preference for high IQ scores is inextricably linked to the notion of progress.
It is the one measurable attribute which is most strongly associated with positive life outcomes, flat out. There are also different kinds of intelligence. This is really just to say that there are different kinds of competence.
The more competent people are at solving problems, fixing things, and getting along with each other, the better life is. That's all it is.
It seems to me that people today are mostly rewarded for passing exams, not "IQ" tests. Being good at passing exams is different from being good at "IQ" tests, and neither of those things necessarily correlates well with being good at doing useful work.
Provided that the candidates have had similar educational opportunities, I would guess that a traditional exam is a better measure of someone's ability to be good at useful work because preparing for an exam requires studying, which is a kind of work. On the other hand, if you have to compare candidates who have not had similar educational opportunities, something similar to an "IQ" test might be better, though you will end up selecting some people who turn out to be good at very little besides solving those kinds of puzzles, and who are perhaps lazy and disorganised to boot.
> Here is the hard thing to swallow: Some people are worth more than others.
This type of rhetoric is what put an incompetent lying reality television star in the White House. Signaling to people they are worth less than others hurts them on an emotional level regardless of veracity. People who are emotionally hurt can and will make problems for you.
People with high emotional intelligence understand this, will avoid pressing that button, and will achieve better outcomes in their endeavors as a result.
Right wing mindset. Inborn attributes should be promoted and the unlucky discarded. Also, ascribe many things to inborn attributes that are actually the result of the environment.
There are also a lot of very boring explanations for this. It turns out that good nutrition and avoiding lead poisoning (two major improvements in quality of life in developed countries in the 20th century) both lead to higher IQ.
Interesting. Do you have any sources where I could read about it?
Flynn effect is fascinating me - if it holds in the future we'll have, in developed nations, an average IQ of 130 (by today's standards) in 100 years. That's a LOT. It'd, roughly, mean that ~17% of people would be capable of graduating from today's Ivy League schools without problems (145 IQ or more). And there would still be the (new) top 0.5%. But whether it will hold is anyone's guess.
Thomas Sowell's survey of the work of Arthur Jensen and others. Basically, the patterns around the Flynn Effect are everywhere, and it shows up in Black populations as well. There is also a mention of a study of Black children raised by white families, which found the average IQ of that population to be 106.
Flynn effect stopped in the 1980s and even reversed since then.
Most probably it was due to the increasing ubiquity of K-12 education and fewer bad childrearing habits (smoking/drinking while pregnant, lead exposure, no vitamins).
I agree. I think a more direct statement of the state of American society is "American society increasingly gives more money to people who know how to make more money by providing goods and services that people are being convinced to pay money for." Or even more simply, those who are adept at acquiring money, will acquire more of it. People fortunately or unfortunately value you based on what you can do for them.
Whether we agree with the goods and services individual people chose to pay for and whether the setup is myopic is another thing. That said, it does seem to be the fairest way thus far until we can figure out a way to base our economy on human kindness. It's better than alternatives of ways of rewarding humans. Basing it on beauty, strength, most weapons, most cruel, etc. seems worse off for society.
I also curiously wonder if some of the extreme income inequality is actually partially due to the fact that most rational people will stop adding more stress to their lives because they realize making more money after a certain point requires more sacrifices then they personally are willing to make (i.e. 24/7 emails, constant travel, etc.)
> It is not the society, but market/economics of today that value intelligence more than anything else, mainly because it is directly correlated with economic output
Unfortunately, I think this is spot on.
Sadly, In the US at least, people are worth to society what they are worth in $$$.
And I think the other major confounder in all of this discussion is also the tendency for US culture to mistake $$$ for intelligence and worth to society.
In addition, in almost every discussion where people say "successful", the implicit assumption is that you understand they really mean $$$.
The idea that intelligence or usefulness to society might negatively correlate with $$$ is so far removed it's almost a culturally forbidden thought.
Let's not conflate human worth with value to society. I hope we can all agree that all human lives are of equal worth. We all have different strengths and weaknesses though, and some of us will have strengths that align more closely with what society needs.
We're lucky enough to live in a society that's (more or less) set up so that people are rewarded proportionally to how much they can contribute to everyone else. Of course it's not perfect, and of course there are assholes and corruption, but in context of history, it's the best deal we've ever had, IMO.
No, we shouldn't put down people who aren't very smart. We should help them. But I think we need to take a step back before we start saying that the (rough) meritocracy we have set up is some kind of dystopia. Can anyone actually provide a better alternative?
> Let's not conflate human worth with value to society. I hope we can all agree that all human lives are of equal worth.
Reminds me of this passage from Sapeins:
"a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture."
The passage describes the benefit of having the ability to hold conflicting beliefs. Interestingly this is not what cognitive dissonance is. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we have when our beliefs conflict. Research in this area shows that people are quite intolerant to this feeling and will tend to alter their beliefs to alleviate it. Cognitive dissonance actually prevents us from holding conflicting beliefs. This is the opposite of what the cited passage describes. Perhaps it is a translation issue as the source material was originally in Hebrew.
They are of equal worth in a spiritual sense. Society doesn't put the same value on them but that's because of economy and the economic output their life generate for society. Value is subjective to who you think puts value to something. If there is a God, he doesn't care about economy. :)
> If there is a God, he doesn't care about economy.
If there is a God (or equivalent deity), he would be worth infinitely more than any other sapient being, thus disproving that all sapient beings are of equal worth even in a spiritual sense.
He'll lose almost all of that phalanx when he leaves office. What does that say about the value of his life? It's the continuity of the office we value, in this case.
Oh, you mean the guy who's the subject of a criminal investigation and has had half of his campaign taken down over money laundering, influence-peddling, and fraud? That guy? Weird example, but okay.
I was with you until the last two sentences. There are many better alternatives for at least parts of our society that haven't been given a chance. e.g. universal healthcare has been demonstrated as a better alternative in multiple forms and all other modern nations.
> People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.
Indeed, people will flip out if you say something negative about people at the lower extreme of the intelligence bell curve, but saying things about people a little higher up (but below the median) is fair game. It's completely nonsensical.
I think the perception is that those with a genetic disorder that causes mental handicaps cannot help it, whereas everyone else is on a level playing field and therefore are at fault for doing something stupid.
That may be the perception, but it's pretty ridiculous to think that perception is consistent with reality. Minds only think what they've been trained to think, and those inputs vary widely across humanity.
>Minds only think what they've been trained to think
That's a pretty forward statement about how every brain works. Who comes up with the training? Clearly new ideas must arise somewhere, and where they do intelligence gets involved.
That's beside the point. So long as it's not a fully-informed individual (which I assume you were not alluding to), then we should no more cast blame on their ignorance than we should someone who is genetically incapable of understanding. What we call intelligent or stupid is little more than the capability of the brain to process information (usually genetically determined) and the information presented to it. The individual is pretty hard to blame for any of that.
I've been on the side that's for automation, for technology, for progress. But I think it's getting way out of hand, way too fast.
Those who are smart have their own biases, and shortsightedness. Because you're smart, you tend to dwell in the complex and complicated stuff. And you think you see all the interactions that happen there. But owing to the number of variables around, there are bound to be some unforeseen second or third order effects that you couldn't account for. Things like, building something for a purpose and society deciding it can be used for something else.
Now I don't know if automation will have these types of effects. But I at least am humble enough to recognise that it could, and that the effects could be devastating. And judging by the speed at which the big companies want to get rid of these manual processes, it doesn't seem they think too much about how this would affect the struggling class.
In general, what people say on dating profiles is completely worthless for trying to understand their actual desires. In all social situations we project an identity we want others to see, but in online dating the trend is extremely exaggerated. You're unlikely to find profiles that don't fit into a very small selection of molds as a result of the filtering process people employ in that medium. At best, identifying as "sapiosexual" on a dating profile is just a way of saying they like a bit of sophistication.
Perhaps those characteristics aren't as valued in today's society as in the past. They may also be difficult to signal and interpret truthfully. Further, in the what-you-see-is-all-there-is Kahneman worldview, it's much easier to see beauty/economic worth; what's easier to perceive receives proportionally more attention.
As a first approximation, you don't need wealth to recognize that someone else is wealthy, but you need to be intelligent to recognize that someone else is intelligent.
A poor person understands that thousand dollars is more than ten dollars, and million dollars is more that thousand dollars. A poor person can recognize an expensive car; for a sufficiently poor person even the fact that someone owns a car already suggests certain level of wealth. Of course there are ways to make yourself appear more wealthy than you are -- the car may be rented, and you may actually be deep in debt -- and there are "invisible" forms of wealth -- no one knows how much you own in stocks or bitcoins -- but when you observe people, there is some correlation between how rich they are and how they live, and you don't need to be rich yourself to see the difference.
On the other hand, levels of intelligence that are above you seem pretty much the same. Not just intelligence, but also education, etc. If you know absolutely nothing about quantum physics, you may listen to Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra, and have no idea which one of them is right. Under specific experimental conditions you may be able to compare levels of intelligence above you, otherwise IQ tests would be impossible to construct for people smarter than the average psychologist -- a person who can solve puzzles 100 times faster than me is probably smarter than a person who can solve puzzles "only" 10 times faster than me -- but in normal life, when you meet two highly intelligent people in different circumstances, when they have different professions and different hobbies, it is difficult to compare them.
I guess what I am trying to say is that a person with IQ 100 and a person with IQ 150 can both be sapiosexual, but it will make the latter much more choosy. In other words, you cannot be a choosy sapiosexual unless you are intelligent yourself. (A person attracted to 50% of population probably would not label themselves as "sapiosexual", if all they mean is pretty much that they are not attracted to retarded people.)
However, I think it is possible for a less intelligent person to identify the most intelligent among 2-3 disagreeing smarter people if all of them is rational and accepts solid evidence/results of thought experiments AND the most intelligent is good at articulating his/her rationale for having a belief.
With this method, the perceiver must have a pretty high threshold of intelligence and rationality themselves in order to identify good reasoning and detect issues with bad reasoning/biases though.
Another method is looking at the results of several predictions in different domains. Assuming roughly equal initial expertise and data, the more intelligent should get more predictions right.
The latter method only requires knowledge/intuition of basic statistics.
This quote caused me to re-evaluate a lot of my thinking when I first read it some time ago:
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
Meritocracy doesn't seem like too bad of an idea at face value. It's far more fair than inherited wealth or class to base a society upon. Yet meritocracy does have some serious problems, as described in this article (and plenty of other places).
But it's a false dichotomy that these two are the only options.
Egalitarianism is an option that the left strongly advocates for. And I believe it to be the only real moral option in the future.
There's some talk about SAT scores here and how they relate to intelligence, and it reminded me of a truly interesting article I read the other day. It presents the idea that perhaps we shouldn't be ranking college applicants by SAT or any other factor at all for determining whether to admit them. Instead, admit qualified (TM) people based on a blind lottery: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/admit-everybody
>Instead, admit qualified (TM) people based on a blind lottery
If people have different aptitudes, and resources are limited, allocating resources randomly, instead of at least trying to optimize long term prospects, will result almost surely result in reduced quality of life for all in the long run.
I don't find that moral. The vast improvements in quality of life, even for the very poor and unskilled, in advanced countries over the last few centuries, is the result of allocating capital (human, financial, material) in better ways than random over time.
The countries and groups that have tried other forms of resource allocation have historically done far worse. Random (blind lottery) allocation seems worse than almost all of those systems.
I think the sense in which GP is using the word is substantially stronger than that--or, maybe, it depends on what you mean by "rights" and "opportunities".
(You could probably find people who think it's egalitarian to have generous state-funded child care and uniformly high-quality primary and secondary school, but competitive university entrance exams, for instance.)
There's a dead comment by u/draw_down below that brings up another good point (and I don't entirely understand why it was killed in the first place): increasingly the APPEARANCE of intelligence is mistaken for human value, not necessarily actual intelligence itself.
I think a lot of commenters here correctly point out the fallacies in the author's practical suggestions while missing the core thesis: American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth.
To paraphrase in simple terms: More and more people value intelligence and this is a bad trend.
To evaluate this thesis, I think it's important to first define what a 'value' is.
To me, values are the measuring sticks by which people quantify success in life. Whether or not we realize it, we constantly measure our actions against our values, and how we 'measure up' determines our self-worth.
So, what makes something a 'bad' value?
That's a hard question to answer in completion, but I think that one of the 'bad' characteristics is if the value is outside of your control.
It's bad to value something outside your control because it's impossible to effect change against it to make yourself feel good about yourself.
Instead, I'd rather value HOW I act. Did I make my best effort towards accomplishing my goals? Did I learn something today? Did I help someone?
These are things that are entirely in my control and will lead to higher fulfillment.
If I measure myself based on intelligence, the days when I'm in a meeting completely surrounded by people smarter than me, I'm going to feel pretty damn shitty.
Would you feel worse about yourself if you woke up tomorrow and lost 30 IQ points?
If it's an abstract idea of right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the idea that an existence should be respected, then yes, all persons are of worth.
But if "worth" is meant in terms of the capacity of an individual to increase my (or your or company X's) share of goods and services than manifestly all people are not of equal worth. This isn't society discriminating, it's reality. And intelligence is only one (albeit important) component of this.
"Worth" in an economic sense isn't fixed. People can (and do) make themselves worth more. But probably they do it less if they are raised with an idea that worth doesn't have anything to do with effort.
Bicycles of the mind are amazing for producing mental leverage. That leverage amplifies the benefit you can gain from intellectual capacity, and the result is that intellectual differences between people which once were minor become vast. Or to use another, more martial analogy, technology is a sword for your mind. In medieval combat, a small difference in strength or agility or training could mean the difference between survival (and wealth) and an early grave. Today it's the difference between life in the 1% and minimum wage.
> help[ing] the unintelligent become intelligent ... is a marvelous goal, and decades of research have shown that it’s achievable through two approaches: dramatically reducing poverty, and getting young children who are at risk of poor academic performance into intensive early-education programs.
I suspect that causing children to be born with more genes that correlate with high intelligence would be a lot more successful, and cheaper to do.
Probably the cheapest thing (per IQ point per child) is to remove lead from the environment, and feed the kids something healthy (doesn't have to be too expensive) or just educate their parents about what is proper food. This would allow the kids to reach their genetic potential.
Reducing poverty kinds correlates with this, but it depends on how exactly the money is spent. A relatively rich person can still feed their child junk food.
(I am suspicious about the claim about early-educational programs. I mean, better educational results are a nice thing, but it is not the same as intelligence.)
This article really articulated something I've felt for a long time when it mentioned how many people would rather drive off a cliff than use a racial slur but will happily call someone stupid.
I plan to reduce my own usage of the "s" word. Reason being is that intelligence is largely dicatated by genes and the environment you grew up in, neither of which you have control over.
The article also makes the claim that "[less brainy individuals are] less likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws." That is literally the Dunning-Kruger Effect [1] which is one psychological study which has been successfully replicated over and over and over. Well not literally. It actually found the exact opposite of what the article claims.
Agreed. Although anecdotally I agree with the statement, I agree with the pretense that those who consider themselves bright but are actually not are in reality the most likely to mock others for being less so. I've never seen a college professor, or a doctor, or an astronaut (all kinds of people I imagine to be actually intelligent) openly mock anyone.
"Increasingly mistakes"? In the article they correlate intelligence with wealth and success, so where's the mistake? I'm not saying that we should or should not value intelligence, just that this article undermines its own premise almost instantaneously.
Youth, beauty, looking rich and being a celebrity are celebrated far more. Intelligence is only pertinent to education and academics whom passive-aggressively call people stupid whom aren't gifted or more. In fact, large swaths of America are vociferously anti-intellectual: GWB, Trump; sports: Nascar, American football, etc. and Hollywood.
This article reads a bit too much like Brave New World. The article suggests to, literally, "...provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy." Preventing technological progress to ensure that we can have the "less brainy" spend their time carrying out tasks that are completely pointless? But it's okay, we can make sure they have plenty of soma - so they never concern themselves with their life's work being completely and absolutely pointless. Or does the author just assume they'd be too dumb to ever consider that? The problem with trying to be so overtly embracing is that it often reveals one's prejudices ever more clearly through implicit consideration of what is said.
I completely agree with the article that the decreasing relevance of individuals who are not all that bright is going to be an increasing problem. And this problem is confounded by really awful demographic issues. Fertility rate is strongly positively connected to low education, low income, and high religiosity. But at the same time trying to reshape society to embrace slower individuals is going to just result in an even greater stratification of society. We're already economically stratified with some implicit intellectual stratification. This would make the shift from implicit quite explicit as those who value intelligence would end up separating themselves even more overtly from the 'new and improved' society that has been, in the words of the article, reshaped "with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority".
I also find the constant social science efforts to link "low" educational spending to decreased academic performance to be very questionable. At least by PISA scores many of the countries now outperforming us academically spend substantially less on education than we do. For instance Vietnam is now ahead of the US in math and science. In fact, they're 8th in the world in science. Their purchasing power parity GDP/capita is $6,925 ($2,305 nominal) and a total of 6.6% of that goes to education. That's $450/capita, parity compensated. In the US we spend 5.6% of $61,687 per capita which is $3455/capita - north of 700% greater than Vietnam's spending, parity adjusted. And even if you just take it in terms of poverty itself, the average income in Vietnam is around $1,800 a year - that's about $5,400 parity adjusted. Poverty is widespread in Vietnam. So is academic excellence. You can't just spend your way to people valuing and embracing education.
- [1] Convenient listing of the 2015 PISA results
- [2] List of nations by percent of GDP spent on education, one click away from conversion to parity adjusted $/capita
> Preventing technological progress to ensure that we can have the "less brainy" spend their time carrying out tasks that are completely pointless?
Why is technological progress ipso fact good? I'm becoming increasingly convinced unguided technological progress is, rather, a terrible plague, and that some "progress" should be stopped altogether if we want our children to have any chance at a happy future.
The one major difference between humanity today and humanity of thousands of years ago is technology. Eras are dictated by technology. And this applies all the way to very recent events. We can really only look back on the world wars of not all that long with bemusement. It seems so surreal that we could have wars of such a scale that 3% of the world's population would be killed. And the reason these wars, which were becoming ever more violent, stopped was technology. Nuclear weapons made all out war between developed nations a thing of the past as the weapons were so brutally effective that they ensure there can never be a winner in any war, only losers.
And going back further in history issues would be things such as starvation, dying from exposure to the elements, dying from basic sickness including run of the mill fevers or basic infections. Today our issues seem laughably petty by contrast. One concern effectively coming down to "I don't like that I only have a tv, air conditioning, internet access, a car, ready access to food, electronic toys of various sorts, ... but somebody else has even more!"
And most importantly - you don't have to participate in all technology. In spite of my evangelizing technological progress above all, my phone is still an old brick (actually they're quite small now - and the batteries last for a couple of weeks at a time) 'dumbphone.' And my kids certainly will be raised Steve Jobsesque, which is to say no mobile devices or other such toys for them. I completely agree not all technological progress is good, and so you're free to step aside from it. Taken to extremes the Amish have turned away from nearly all technological progress and still flourish, at least so much as they can.
With most of our wages today we could purchase large homesteads in 'flyover country' and get back to basics. And I find that extremely appealing and plan to do just that, though not in America. Although 'basics' in my view will include autonomous gardens, autonomous feeders, autonomous mowers, solar energy, and of course gotta have that juicy internet access. Life is what you make of it. And technology is the toolset that you get to draw your choices from.
"increasingly" ? Was there a time when unintelligent people were more protected, and less exploited by private interests ("caveat emptor" and con artists and snake-oil sellers) and government (institutionalization, eugenics, propaganga)?
> hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”
To me, this looks like the 1950s accountant preferred to hire WASPs. (Especially the last three items.) Now that we've mostly agreed this kind of thing is bad, what we're left with is critical skills and eagerness. So intelligence becomes a bigger factor in hiring decisions because the other factors were pretty terrible.
In fairness in the '50s as a man your choices were ad exec, sales rep, auto mechanic, lawyer, accountant, or serviceman. There were no other jobs at all.
Yes and no. Check out Foucault. He was a radical philosopher that discussed the treatment of mental health and was a critic of institutionalization. I don't know enough about him to agree or disagree with him, but he is an influential point of view.
I never quite understood why "y'all" is singled out as being said by "dumb" people. I've said it my entire life, as well as everyone I know. It's a word. It conveys an idea from the person who says it to the listener to hears it, just like every other utterance since the beginning of time. The only reason I can think of people having a negative opinion of it is some form of audible elitism.
Maybe, but the second person plural possessive is way easier with the former. Y'all's vs, what, you guys'? When I lived in the midwest I frequently heard "your guys's", which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Its modern usage is largely neutral, especially in "you guys". I hear both women and men refer to groups of either women or men using "you guys" or "hey guys".
Class absolutely plays a factor. There are plenty of intelligent people who look or act differently than the prototypical white male our society privileges so much who are then written off as stupid and/or unimportant. There are just as many unintelligent people who are nonetheless lionized because they know how to be articulate or charismatic.
2. On the other hand, Sport teams value speed, strength and agility, eye coordination, height, etc... . basically physical prowess. You can't blame them, nobody is willing to pay to watch a bunch of average out of shape people playing a sport, but they are willing to see peak performance.
3. Same with music, film/movie, and theatre, we are naturally want to see great performances, art, and/or beautiful things.
#2 and #3 have been historically more important than #1, and now number #1 (intelligence), is becoming more important due to its economic output and not because society started valuing it more.
-- Seems like it was written by a luddite, with no concept of economy output. It like someone from 1910 saying: "We should ban automation in farming and tractors and other machinery should be banned, as where all these farmers will find jobs"...
"We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed. This might even redound to employers’ benefit: Whatever advantages high intelligence confers on employees, it doesn’t necessarily make for more effective, better employees. "