I think at a minimum you have to take law off your list. There's obviously some extremely bright lawyers but I'm fairly positive there are a non-trivial # of lawyers in the 90-110 range. Depends on how you define succeeding I guess, but some of them are gainfully employed.

As for the rest - if you took 10,000 non-wealthy teenagers with 90-110 IQs and guaranteed each of them $20 million if they received a PhD in Math or Physics, how many of them do you think would end up succeeding? Suppose for the hypothetical that it's impossible for them to cheat, pay off teachers, etc. I have no idea what the answer is, but I think it's more than 0 even with those stipulations.

Basically, I think your view is almost correct, but it ignores the 100-ish IQers with outlier levels of interest/determination.

Nah, the biggest wastes of resources in the country (I'm assuming you mean the only country that matters economically) are copywrite/trademark laws and other laws and regulations that create artificial moats that don't have any real benefit for society.

In this regard, China sometimes does this quite a bit better. If you can't take advantage of first mover advantage, then **** off.

I also believe that the average person (within one standard deviation of the mean and without specific deficits) can train to be 1 SD above the mean in strength and agility. It is quite rare for anyone on the job to have to do something that is actually difficult to learn from a competent trainer, if that helps. You just have to start young for many tasks - no one my age is learning calculus, despite it being somewhat less cognitively taxing to learn than learning how to bake pastries.

The reason you are right is almost exclusively because 90-110 includes 108, 109, and 110.

I would've guessed a lot higher for math and physics PhD's.

Test-retest reliability coefficients don't support that fine of a view. A person's IQ varying by +/- 5 points from day-to-day isn't even remarkable. Over longer periods, +/- 10 points is not even close to a big deal.

Is Brian's intelligence quotation immutable or is it increasing over time with each post.
Is your IQ high enough to answer such a question. Is your IQ high enough to devise this question, or is your IQ high enough to notice that this question may not be a suitable replacement for any one question on a standardised IQ test. If not, should it be made a bonus question.

I was talking about theoretical IQ rather than test scores. I doubt that there exists an IQ test such that if you trained for it you wouldn't outscore an untrained person whose theoretical IQ is ten points higher than yours.

How to quantify one's 'theoretical IQ' practically? If we can't, forget points.

I didn't mention training for a reason. +/- ten points is no big deal when there are no experimental conditions (training) attempting to raise/decrease IQ. It just happens on its own.

I'm curious about your "theoretical IQ." Is it the same sort of thing as my "theoretical weight"? I'm actually quite thin and fit if you don't put me on a scale or grab a measuring tape to get my waist size. I also do a 5k in under 18 minutes despite what the time keeper says about me not actually finishing it.

Quantify your IQ by solving these
http://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/...ME_II_Problems

You're being silly, because you have a bug up your ass about IQ. Everyone knows what we're talking about. But if shorthands bother you, let me give you a guide:

<100 IQ means "the bottom 50% in terms of actual cognitive capacity"

Even people who have Hardons of Hate for the notion of IQ believe g is a real thing and largely unchanging.
Again you're being silly. IQ tests are like an old somewhat unreliable set of scales, that vary 5-10% between weighings. Or timings of your fastest 200m, which varies according to physical condition that day.

Pour some ice water on your IQ hate-hardon and realize that we're talking about averages, not the result of one test, which obviously has a variance, and g, not IQ as such. IQ is just a convenient shorthand for g. IQ doesn't measure exactly what we want, but it's a reasonable proxy and good enough for our purposes.

"Cognitive ability" in IQ terms means things like how good your vocabulary and verbal reasoning is, how good your arithmetic is, how good your visual pattern recognition is, and how good your secretarial skills are. Those are the things of "actual cognitive ability."

These are all things that you should expect to vary significantly across time, just like your weight and 200m time. Changing your "actual cognitive ability" is, in fact, one of the reasons why we send children to school.

You're either confused or being intentionally dense.

Intelligence can be split into two components:

- Fluid intelligence: ability to learn and create and grasp complex, useful patterns
- Crystallized intelligence: The mental models that you've learned.

They're obviously very strongly related, since the first creates the second.

That we can measure fluid intelligence imperfectly, and often via crystallized intelligence, doesn't mean it's not a very valid concept. Fluid intelligence is what I'm referring to as "cognitive ability" and what any good faith commenter understands that I mean.

There is a large amount of data that indicate that your view is absurd. Schooling has only a small effect on IQ scores, which is incredible considering the cognitive training and knowledge that schooling imparts.

As an example, China has for decades (along with much of East Asia) had a higher average IQ than the US. This is despite very low levels of schooling in comparison:



The numbers get even more absurd when you compare, say, African Americans with 13 years of schooling vs dirt poor rural Chinese with 3 years of schooling. The Chinese wipe the floor with those US citizens.

You really don't have a leg to stand on; just like your views on gay people being completely inborn, you are strongly anti-science in your opinion here. Most cognitive ability is inborn and untrainable using known current methods. IQ tests can be somewhat trained for, but not enough to make them invalid or even a poor measure of ability.

Which makes sense if you think about it. A 90 IQ cannot learn advanced concepts no matter what they do; it is completely beyond them. Slightly lower IQs than 90 aren't allowed in the US army; their deficit in cognition is so profound they can't even learn to be reliable soldiers.

That would be interesting if we actually had data for the average IQ of Chinese people. We don't.

ToothSayer knocking his head against a wall itt. Keep it up and HIS IQ will be damaged for a while.

Your theoretical 5K time is around 20 minutes. By theoretical IQ I mean the score you would get if you spent years studying how to think in the areas IQ measures.

In any case the reason 100 IQs are going to fail in many endeavors is not because they are average. There is a more precise reason. Look at the questions that they get wrong. The questions that 100s get wrong while 120s get them right are ridiculously easy. And their not seeing the answer means that their brains have defects that will often translate into an inability to understand or analyze stuff that comes up in many jobs.

I work in IT maintenance. The average people have computerized tools that tell them "green" or "red". That is all they know, and it takes them at least twice as long to turn red into green, no matter how specific the tool is. Significantly above average is to understand the symptoms of the malfunction, and take way less time to repair, often solving more than one cause of malfunction. This dynamic will only continue as jobs become more and more technical. An average IQ person needs other skills, such as "people skills" that can serve them well, and even work better in low/middle management than the smarties that often lack same. This is my anecdotal experience.


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FWIW, IQ tests and SATs were originally believed to be untrainable.

Those people must have had low SAT scores.

Yeah, ummm, we don't have a measure of that. We'd also have to eliminate infectious disease and suboptimal nutrition to get your hypothetical IQ.

If it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. I generally prefer to deal with the actual universe.

Ummmm. Knowing the definition of "ennui" isn't hard, and that is the sort of thing that IQ tests involve.

Exactly. Vocabulary is a birthright.

I learned about the nefarious word ennui* reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau. This was about age 13, I think. My Italian friend was reading Kafka at age 9. This still does not beat John S. Mill who was reading Plato, in Greek, at age 5 or so, I think. A more sure way to screw up a life, I can't think of at the moment.

The only thing I recall about testing when young was the funny name at the top of the test: Stanford-Binet. Always thought that was a silly name for a person to have. We were given these test yearly for awhile. It was always a gloomy day when tests where given.

My verbal SAT score was so astronomical it had to be scored by God. He had to work overtime on it because God only knows Dog Greek (that's an H.L. Mencken joke for those that can't get the reference).

* The word ennui does not appear in the KJV of the Bible. Nor in the American Standard Version. Wise that God began speaking American at the proper time. Also the word ennui does not appear in Walt Disney comic books about Donald Duck, which I kept right next to my Bible. I was reading both religiously by age 7.

Like Sklansky said, not knowing it is the tell. But still. You're on criticizing a subset of IQ tests. Does Raven's Progresive Matrices test for 'ennui'?

You're being willfully dense. High g loaded tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices correlate very well with other, stupider IQ tests which are more a measure of crystallized intelligence. Why do you think that is?

Maybe you're right though, this is overflowing with vocabulary and 'ennui'!

Crystalized vs. fluid is a completely different conception of intelligence than g vs. specific intelligences.

Raven's doesn't correlate well with other measures of intelligence and is primarily a measure of the extent to which you have been exposed to puzzles (aka, same issue as knowing specific vocabulary words). You need to know three different things to look for to solve Raven's puzzles and it doesn't take a lot of computational power to complete them. It measures a learnable skill, not innate ability. It would be great if we did have a measure of individual innate ability, but we haven't developed one yet. People who do puzzles are weirdos who need to be eliminated from further analysis.

Also, the between-test correlations would only impress a social science person as being "very well."

And, my main point is that the scores aren't stable within an individual across long periods of time. "But there are other tests" doesn't address this in any manner.

Just the low level management huh? Yes, I'm sure Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson spent hours and hours languishing over calculus and computer science textbooks. (Sigh)

Get a clue man. Countless entrepreneurs have understood that you can get far richer understanding how to exploit the dumb masses then you ever could trying to impress other high IQ's with specialized, technical knowledge.

Simple to understand movies and entertainment gets gobbled up by the masses. People buy "People" magazine. They don't buy trade journals.

Nerds get a raw deal in society.