The article that you link shows a researcher supporting single digit percentage heritability doesn't actually show what you claim it shows. The article says that a polygenic score for patients with neuroimaging data (with only 27k samples) explained 7.6% of the variance in g.
PGS variance explained != heritability! That's like reporting benchmark results for your machine learning model before its finished training.
The low IQ heritability estimates you do find in the literature such as https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6411041/ all seem to have the same issue: they estimate SNP heritability based on UK Biobank's fluid intelligence test, but they fail to account for the fact that the test sucks! Gold standard IQ tests have a test-retest correlation of >0.9. UK Biobank's is short, so the test-retest correlation is 0.61. This is massively deflating estimates of SNP heritability, and thus broad sense heritability!
They calculate SNP heritability of 0.19-0.22 when actual SNP heritability (after adjusting for the crappy test) is about 0.3.
But that's just SNP heritability. A good portion of the variance in IQ comes from rare variants (population frequency <1%), and about 20% of it comes from non-linear effects that are going to be very hard to capture without much larger sample sizes.
I have yet to find a credible IQ heritability estimate that's lower than 0.5
The biggest thing I took away from my Instrument Development class in grad school was that an instument is only valid when used for it's intended purpose. The IQ test was originally created to classify French orphans with cognitive delays into categories that could be used to group their educational needs by the program supporting them. Taking IQ measurements outside of this context automatically makes them invalid; the context has changed and the instrument for deciding what an individual's IQ is is no longer applicable. Sure, we can acknowledge that defferent instruments have been designed and used over the years to try to quantify intelligence - we certainly aren't using the same test the French orphans were given- but we've completely shifted the purpose of IQ from grouping students with similar abilities to recieve education suited to them, to making IQ a predictive measure of mental ability and success! And how can a body of research be considered solid on such a shifting foundation?
False. A measurement can be valid for a variety of contexts, particularly when it's measuring something primary. Besides which mere correlation is sufficient for it to be predictively useful.
Validity does not lie in the measurement. It lies in the inferences and arguments we make about the measurement. The same test can be wonderfully reliable, while the conclusions draw are completely non valid. A conclusions drawn from good IQ test (smart student) typically have strong validity when predicting academic outcomes (including SAT scores). The predictive valid those same conclusions (smart student) increasingly decline as they move further and further from academic performance, (e.g., college completion, career success, earnings, social success). That’s because those things involve intelligence, many other personality and social variables, and the interactions between all those variables. IQ tests are a wonderful tool when used correctly, but in the wrong hands, it can do real damage… like an ax in the hands of a woodsman verses an ax in the hands of a murderer.
There are three factors; a) your raw general intellectual ability - IQ, b) what you choose to spend it on, c) what your society allows. Having the ability to be great is only the first step. Society must also not get in your way and enable you.
IQ is a good predictor of outcomes -- on aggregate, and the larger the sample, the more accurate the prediction. Unlike beauty, for an individual chosen at random, correlation is weak.
I haven't seen any good studies showing that high IQ is compensated for by low EQ, and vice versa. It's the old fallacy of implying "all" when "some" is correct. EQ seems to be fairly evenly distributed across the population, as are other personality factors like charm and selling ability.
Great piece, thank you! I just got drawn into a big rabbit hole of IQ discourse on my own Substack(partially my own fault). Arguing with the most hardcore race essentialists is like debating phrenology in the 1900s. At the same time complete IQ denialism is counterproductive, as you note. Your article is useful and I'll link it next time I write about this!
That educational attainment is often taken as a factor for measuring IQ speaks volumes about the inherent lack of repeatability and objectivity of intelligence research. What is the logic behind correlating academic success to intelligence? Beats me. Furthermore, what«s never discussed is that the higher the intellectual intelligence, the lower the emotional intelligence - high IQ scores predict low EQ - lack of empathy and lower capacity for emotional processing. The narcissistic or self-interest tendencies are evident in most so-called "intelligent" people scoring high in the IQ tests. Just look at Elon Musk for an example of high IQ-low EQ individual to see my point. What does high IQ serve for if it comes at the price of flaws in emotional processing?
(For the record, I myself am one of those high-IQ-test-scoring people - but at least I am able to acknowledge my own shortcomings in understanding and processing emotions, both mine and others', and capable of recognizing my high levels self-interest.)
Well as you see in Elon's case( and Zuckerberg, Thiel, etc.), the modern economy provides a lot of opportunity for high IQ - low EQ people, so there is definitely *some value to possessing that cognitive configuration. I do agree about that correlation you mention, though more from personal observation than studies I've seen( there might be some studies out there I haven't seen).
I would like to see your source for associating high IQ with low EQ? (My understanding from factor-analysis is that "emotional intelligence" turns out to basically just be agreeableness x g-factor, in the same way that "grit" is just Big-5 conscientiousness. Most aspects of personality are only very weakly correlated with IQ, aside from curiosity/openness.)
My source is my personal experience + knowledge, so I can share that. From neuroscience, specifically from the models like Free Energy Principle and Active Inference predictive processing or Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 , we know that "emotional" and "rational" decision-making involve different hierarchical levels of processing stimuli.
I'll first explain Active inference briefly but if you're familiar with it then you can skip to the reasoning section below.
Active inference naturally accommodates the hierarchical differences between emotional and rational decision-making through its multi-level architecture:
Lower hierarchical levels (or System 1) process immediate sensory-motor contingencies and tend to operate on faster timescales. These levels are more closely associated with what we might call "emotional" or "intuitive" responses - they deal with basic homeostatic regulation, threat detection, and immediate approach/avoidance behaviors. The prediction errors at these levels often manifest as bodily sensations and emotional states.
Higher hierarchical levels (or System 2) maintain more abstract, temporally extended models of the environment and self. These levels correspond more closely to "rational" deliberation, they can integrate information across longer time horizons, consider multiple possible futures, and engage in complex planning. The precision-weighting of predictions at these levels can be modulated by attention and cognitive control.
Now, healthy decision-making involves appropriate precision-weighting across levels - neither completely suppressing emotional input nor being entirely driven by it, but rather integrating information across the hierarchy in context-appropriate ways.
In humans, rarely are the predictions in these levels exactly balanced, meaning that our cognitive architecture, and our decision making, differs from one another. Some people's cognition places more weight on lower hierarchical levels and immediate/emotional predictions, while others consider their decisions more thoughtfully, placing more weight on deliberate reasoning on the higher hierarchical levels. So, if we equate higher level inferences as involving IQ, and lower level inferences to EQ, we notice that they are anticorrelated, meaning they cancel each other out in decision-making. A person whose brain architecture is heavily biased towards decision-making in higher hierarchical levels is unlikely to make emotionally charged, impulsive decisions, indicating high IQ. In contrast, a person with brain heavily biased towards lower-level decision-making is more unlikely to make reasoned/thoughtful decisions and will more often resort to decisions based on their emotions and feelings, indicating high EQ. Therefore, the more our cognition is biased towards either of these levels, the less we are able to use the other level. More IQ means less EQ, and vice-versa.
From psychological standpoint, we can use the Big Five as you suggested. In my opinion, high EQ might be correlated with high Agreeableness, low Neuroticism, and moderate Openness (due to lower openness facet Intellect). In contrast, Openness to Experience and especially its "Intellect" facet has the strongest positive association with intellectual intelligence, while Neuroticism is negatively correlated with high IQ. Here the picture also seems clear: people who score high in Openness/Intellect are usually not high on emotional intelligence, and vice-versa.
> "So, if we equate higher level inferences as involving IQ, and lower level inferences to EQ"
That's an interesting structural hypothesis, but the bulk of the literature seems to indicate that correlations in either direction are either very small or non-significant. (I don't want to presume too much about your personal experience, but I'd also wonder how much of the purported tradeoff is just down to high-functioning autism and/or male-typical cognition?)
> "From psychological standpoint, we can use the Big Five as you suggested. In my opinion, high EQ might be correlated with high Agreeableness, low Neuroticism, and moderate Openness (due to openness factor Intellect). In contrast, Openness to Experience and especially its "Intellect" facet has the strongest positive association with intellectual intelligence, while Neuroticism is negatively correlated with high IQ."
Well... if I'm getting this right, you're saying that EQ breaks down into some combination of A - N + O within OCEAN/Big 5 terminology, and high-IQ individuals are statistically likely to be higher in openness and lower in neuroticism? Wouldn't those both predict higher EQ?
To score high Openness requires high scores in both of its facets: Intellect + Openness to experience. And I suspect that high-EQ people can't score high on Intellect, because there is a trade-off between Agreeableness and Intellect. And vice-versa.
However there are no conclusive studies against their anti-correlation either, even the linked article is a psychometric study not neuroscience. This lack of evidence is expected for once because psychologic studies are self-reported and selective making them vulnerable to subjectivity bias while neuroscience can actually offer measurable insights. Beyond the Big Five, in Jungian personality typology, the existence of hierarchical cognitive functions stack also indicates that decision-making functions Thinking and Feeling are anticorrelated, which could be correlated with IQ and EQ.
Nevertheless, there is not any real consensus on the defining criteria for EQ and IQ anyway, so who knows how well they translate to objective reality. I'd say it’s entirely possible for a person to have both high IQ and high EQ, though whether this occurs depends on a mix of neurological, psychological, and developmental factors.
But we are talking about patterns here, and how common it is to have similar EQ and IQ. So the bottom line question is: what is the likelihood for having positively correlated IQ and EQ scores? The available data is inconclusive, the definitions are poorly defined, it can go either way. Therefore I can only rely on theoretical reasoning and lived experience. Which tells me that there is a pattern of anticorrelation between them.
> "And I suspect that high-EQ people can't score high on Intellect, because there is a trade-off between Agreeableness and Intellect. And vice-versa"
I think this would imply an anti-correlation between the sub-factors of openness, which more-or-less contradicts the definition of being sub-factors?
I'm not sure that analytical/cause-effect thinking is unrelated to EQ in any case- I can imagine situations where 'person X feels Y, causing them to say Z to person W' is relevant to navigating the social landscape, or where 'statement A has implication B, which would embarass person N' feeds into what you'd say to N. (*Maybe* being visually attuned to facial microexpressions is more of a System 1 thing, and helps in picking up another person's emotional state, and *maybe* that's anti-correlated to System 2 analytic reasoning, but I suspect that's not the sole component of EQ.)
Frankly I'm a little skeptical that System 1 and System 2 are even anti-correlated in the first place, given how reaction times, visual-spatial and math skills are all g-factor correlated, even if Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in at very high levels of ability.
I think the facets (or subfactors) are not anticorrelated within the the dimension (e.g. Intellect and Openness in Openness to Experience), but instead facets collectively contribute to the overall score of the dimension. What I meant was that facets of different dimensions (e.g. Openness and Agreeableness) can be anticorrelated. For example, it's highly unlikely that a person could simultaneously score high on Intellect (one facet of Openness to experience) and Trust, Morality and Compliance (facets of Agreeableness), because these facets kinda cancel each other out. In my mind, it's not a sign of high intellectual intelligence to have high trust on others, strong moral values, or to be compliant, as these would override critical thinking which is indispensable for high IQ. Does this make sense?
I always remember Ian Deary's studies tracking whole populations across a lifetime showing that tests taken at teenagehood predict who'll do better in school, in life and on a later test when the participants are in their 70s.
I'd say IQ research has its landmines, but it is useful as a whole. Even without any tests, it is possible to identify different levels of intelligence in people you know well, and also what specific disciplines they are good at. Of course, this doesn't guarantee financial success, as seen in how income in 95th percentile has the lowest correlation to high SAT score in the chart in the article.
Human intelligence being multifaceted is not some original discovery. The fact that these facets all correlate with eachother is how Spearman came up with the notion of g-factor back in the 1920s.
Thanks for publishing this article, it could not have done a better job at filling gaps in my understanding of the topic. Really shifted the way I think about things.
Come on, there's a difference between raw intellectual capacity and artistic talent or looks. Few people possess high scores on all 3 of these, thought they do exist!
I enjoyed the article as someone who has a pop-sci understanding of IQ.
>If medical tests, like tests for cancer, had the same reliability as IQ tests, they’d be throwing up false signals to the point of being unusable.
Disagree. We send out tons of low sensitivity and specificity tests. Physicians, like other professionals, often operate in a bayesian manner. The more severe (and unexplained) that the patient looks, the more likely we are to send long shot tests.
Billions of dollars of policy interventions is sufficiently impactful that it should merit consideration of all useful, even if imperfect, information. It is all the more important in that setting to know its limitations, as you are writing about.
This is a good reminder to not be satisfied with a pop-sci view of IQ. Do you have any recommended books?
You have shown that the SMPY has some limitations. But you seem to be implying that we should take this as evidence against the claims that prodigies destined for greatness can be identified early, and that there is no plateau of ability. It isn't. You seem to have an unreasonably low prior on the existence of innate prodigies and super-geniuses
IQ is definitely heritable but remember how heredity looks in four siblings. Or ten siblings. We don’t all inherit the same.
Environment matters a ton. But everyone knows realistically that some people are born with a head start others born with a deficit varying by area and naturally people are drawn to areas where they more easily excel and turned off by areas that are more difficult
I think creativity matters as much as intelligence. Are they connected? To an extent. Creativity can likely be measured to a degree but I suspect people would find it offensive even more than many find iq tests offensive. I just look at it as a set of averages that may not be accurate for any individual for a variety of reasons.
Just bc most people who contribute are high iq doesn’t mean most high iq people even super high iq will make significant contributions though it likely means they’ll make a decent living
In terms of success social behavior matters too. Maybe not for figuring out a new theorem but it matters a lot in the business world
Supposedly Terence tao had advanced tutoring. But for all the aristocratic models you could name many times more people who didn’t have that advantage though many eventually had the privilege of top schools.
When I was a kid they promoted grades pretty easily. Now it’s like a hard reverse. Your kid could be years ahead they won’t even push them up a year which is unlikely to have social repercussions.
The article that you link shows a researcher supporting single digit percentage heritability doesn't actually show what you claim it shows. The article says that a polygenic score for patients with neuroimaging data (with only 27k samples) explained 7.6% of the variance in g.
PGS variance explained != heritability! That's like reporting benchmark results for your machine learning model before its finished training.
The low IQ heritability estimates you do find in the literature such as https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6411041/ all seem to have the same issue: they estimate SNP heritability based on UK Biobank's fluid intelligence test, but they fail to account for the fact that the test sucks! Gold standard IQ tests have a test-retest correlation of >0.9. UK Biobank's is short, so the test-retest correlation is 0.61. This is massively deflating estimates of SNP heritability, and thus broad sense heritability!
They calculate SNP heritability of 0.19-0.22 when actual SNP heritability (after adjusting for the crappy test) is about 0.3.
But that's just SNP heritability. A good portion of the variance in IQ comes from rare variants (population frequency <1%), and about 20% of it comes from non-linear effects that are going to be very hard to capture without much larger sample sizes.
I have yet to find a credible IQ heritability estimate that's lower than 0.5
The biggest thing I took away from my Instrument Development class in grad school was that an instument is only valid when used for it's intended purpose. The IQ test was originally created to classify French orphans with cognitive delays into categories that could be used to group their educational needs by the program supporting them. Taking IQ measurements outside of this context automatically makes them invalid; the context has changed and the instrument for deciding what an individual's IQ is is no longer applicable. Sure, we can acknowledge that defferent instruments have been designed and used over the years to try to quantify intelligence - we certainly aren't using the same test the French orphans were given- but we've completely shifted the purpose of IQ from grouping students with similar abilities to recieve education suited to them, to making IQ a predictive measure of mental ability and success! And how can a body of research be considered solid on such a shifting foundation?
False. A measurement can be valid for a variety of contexts, particularly when it's measuring something primary. Besides which mere correlation is sufficient for it to be predictively useful.
Validity does not lie in the measurement. It lies in the inferences and arguments we make about the measurement. The same test can be wonderfully reliable, while the conclusions draw are completely non valid. A conclusions drawn from good IQ test (smart student) typically have strong validity when predicting academic outcomes (including SAT scores). The predictive valid those same conclusions (smart student) increasingly decline as they move further and further from academic performance, (e.g., college completion, career success, earnings, social success). That’s because those things involve intelligence, many other personality and social variables, and the interactions between all those variables. IQ tests are a wonderful tool when used correctly, but in the wrong hands, it can do real damage… like an ax in the hands of a woodsman verses an ax in the hands of a murderer.
There are three factors; a) your raw general intellectual ability - IQ, b) what you choose to spend it on, c) what your society allows. Having the ability to be great is only the first step. Society must also not get in your way and enable you.
IQ is a good predictor of outcomes -- on aggregate, and the larger the sample, the more accurate the prediction. Unlike beauty, for an individual chosen at random, correlation is weak.
I haven't seen any good studies showing that high IQ is compensated for by low EQ, and vice versa. It's the old fallacy of implying "all" when "some" is correct. EQ seems to be fairly evenly distributed across the population, as are other personality factors like charm and selling ability.
Great piece, thank you! I just got drawn into a big rabbit hole of IQ discourse on my own Substack(partially my own fault). Arguing with the most hardcore race essentialists is like debating phrenology in the 1900s. At the same time complete IQ denialism is counterproductive, as you note. Your article is useful and I'll link it next time I write about this!
https://darbysaxbe.substack.com/p/on-being-owned-by-the-deep-left
Chris langan is a con man
That educational attainment is often taken as a factor for measuring IQ speaks volumes about the inherent lack of repeatability and objectivity of intelligence research. What is the logic behind correlating academic success to intelligence? Beats me. Furthermore, what«s never discussed is that the higher the intellectual intelligence, the lower the emotional intelligence - high IQ scores predict low EQ - lack of empathy and lower capacity for emotional processing. The narcissistic or self-interest tendencies are evident in most so-called "intelligent" people scoring high in the IQ tests. Just look at Elon Musk for an example of high IQ-low EQ individual to see my point. What does high IQ serve for if it comes at the price of flaws in emotional processing?
(For the record, I myself am one of those high-IQ-test-scoring people - but at least I am able to acknowledge my own shortcomings in understanding and processing emotions, both mine and others', and capable of recognizing my high levels self-interest.)
Well as you see in Elon's case( and Zuckerberg, Thiel, etc.), the modern economy provides a lot of opportunity for high IQ - low EQ people, so there is definitely *some value to possessing that cognitive configuration. I do agree about that correlation you mention, though more from personal observation than studies I've seen( there might be some studies out there I haven't seen).
I would like to see your source for associating high IQ with low EQ? (My understanding from factor-analysis is that "emotional intelligence" turns out to basically just be agreeableness x g-factor, in the same way that "grit" is just Big-5 conscientiousness. Most aspects of personality are only very weakly correlated with IQ, aside from curiosity/openness.)
My source is my personal experience + knowledge, so I can share that. From neuroscience, specifically from the models like Free Energy Principle and Active Inference predictive processing or Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 , we know that "emotional" and "rational" decision-making involve different hierarchical levels of processing stimuli.
I'll first explain Active inference briefly but if you're familiar with it then you can skip to the reasoning section below.
Active inference naturally accommodates the hierarchical differences between emotional and rational decision-making through its multi-level architecture:
Lower hierarchical levels (or System 1) process immediate sensory-motor contingencies and tend to operate on faster timescales. These levels are more closely associated with what we might call "emotional" or "intuitive" responses - they deal with basic homeostatic regulation, threat detection, and immediate approach/avoidance behaviors. The prediction errors at these levels often manifest as bodily sensations and emotional states.
Higher hierarchical levels (or System 2) maintain more abstract, temporally extended models of the environment and self. These levels correspond more closely to "rational" deliberation, they can integrate information across longer time horizons, consider multiple possible futures, and engage in complex planning. The precision-weighting of predictions at these levels can be modulated by attention and cognitive control.
Now, healthy decision-making involves appropriate precision-weighting across levels - neither completely suppressing emotional input nor being entirely driven by it, but rather integrating information across the hierarchy in context-appropriate ways.
In humans, rarely are the predictions in these levels exactly balanced, meaning that our cognitive architecture, and our decision making, differs from one another. Some people's cognition places more weight on lower hierarchical levels and immediate/emotional predictions, while others consider their decisions more thoughtfully, placing more weight on deliberate reasoning on the higher hierarchical levels. So, if we equate higher level inferences as involving IQ, and lower level inferences to EQ, we notice that they are anticorrelated, meaning they cancel each other out in decision-making. A person whose brain architecture is heavily biased towards decision-making in higher hierarchical levels is unlikely to make emotionally charged, impulsive decisions, indicating high IQ. In contrast, a person with brain heavily biased towards lower-level decision-making is more unlikely to make reasoned/thoughtful decisions and will more often resort to decisions based on their emotions and feelings, indicating high EQ. Therefore, the more our cognition is biased towards either of these levels, the less we are able to use the other level. More IQ means less EQ, and vice-versa.
From psychological standpoint, we can use the Big Five as you suggested. In my opinion, high EQ might be correlated with high Agreeableness, low Neuroticism, and moderate Openness (due to lower openness facet Intellect). In contrast, Openness to Experience and especially its "Intellect" facet has the strongest positive association with intellectual intelligence, while Neuroticism is negatively correlated with high IQ. Here the picture also seems clear: people who score high in Openness/Intellect are usually not high on emotional intelligence, and vice-versa.
> "So, if we equate higher level inferences as involving IQ, and lower level inferences to EQ"
That's an interesting structural hypothesis, but the bulk of the literature seems to indicate that correlations in either direction are either very small or non-significant. (I don't want to presume too much about your personal experience, but I'd also wonder how much of the purported tradeoff is just down to high-functioning autism and/or male-typical cognition?)
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=126458
> "From psychological standpoint, we can use the Big Five as you suggested. In my opinion, high EQ might be correlated with high Agreeableness, low Neuroticism, and moderate Openness (due to openness factor Intellect). In contrast, Openness to Experience and especially its "Intellect" facet has the strongest positive association with intellectual intelligence, while Neuroticism is negatively correlated with high IQ."
Well... if I'm getting this right, you're saying that EQ breaks down into some combination of A - N + O within OCEAN/Big 5 terminology, and high-IQ individuals are statistically likely to be higher in openness and lower in neuroticism? Wouldn't those both predict higher EQ?
To score high Openness requires high scores in both of its facets: Intellect + Openness to experience. And I suspect that high-EQ people can't score high on Intellect, because there is a trade-off between Agreeableness and Intellect. And vice-versa.
However there are no conclusive studies against their anti-correlation either, even the linked article is a psychometric study not neuroscience. This lack of evidence is expected for once because psychologic studies are self-reported and selective making them vulnerable to subjectivity bias while neuroscience can actually offer measurable insights. Beyond the Big Five, in Jungian personality typology, the existence of hierarchical cognitive functions stack also indicates that decision-making functions Thinking and Feeling are anticorrelated, which could be correlated with IQ and EQ.
Nevertheless, there is not any real consensus on the defining criteria for EQ and IQ anyway, so who knows how well they translate to objective reality. I'd say it’s entirely possible for a person to have both high IQ and high EQ, though whether this occurs depends on a mix of neurological, psychological, and developmental factors.
But we are talking about patterns here, and how common it is to have similar EQ and IQ. So the bottom line question is: what is the likelihood for having positively correlated IQ and EQ scores? The available data is inconclusive, the definitions are poorly defined, it can go either way. Therefore I can only rely on theoretical reasoning and lived experience. Which tells me that there is a pattern of anticorrelation between them.
> "And I suspect that high-EQ people can't score high on Intellect, because there is a trade-off between Agreeableness and Intellect. And vice-versa"
I think this would imply an anti-correlation between the sub-factors of openness, which more-or-less contradicts the definition of being sub-factors?
I'm not sure that analytical/cause-effect thinking is unrelated to EQ in any case- I can imagine situations where 'person X feels Y, causing them to say Z to person W' is relevant to navigating the social landscape, or where 'statement A has implication B, which would embarass person N' feeds into what you'd say to N. (*Maybe* being visually attuned to facial microexpressions is more of a System 1 thing, and helps in picking up another person's emotional state, and *maybe* that's anti-correlated to System 2 analytic reasoning, but I suspect that's not the sole component of EQ.)
Frankly I'm a little skeptical that System 1 and System 2 are even anti-correlated in the first place, given how reaction times, visual-spatial and math skills are all g-factor correlated, even if Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in at very high levels of ability.
I think the facets (or subfactors) are not anticorrelated within the the dimension (e.g. Intellect and Openness in Openness to Experience), but instead facets collectively contribute to the overall score of the dimension. What I meant was that facets of different dimensions (e.g. Openness and Agreeableness) can be anticorrelated. For example, it's highly unlikely that a person could simultaneously score high on Intellect (one facet of Openness to experience) and Trust, Morality and Compliance (facets of Agreeableness), because these facets kinda cancel each other out. In my mind, it's not a sign of high intellectual intelligence to have high trust on others, strong moral values, or to be compliant, as these would override critical thinking which is indispensable for high IQ. Does this make sense?
I always remember Ian Deary's studies tracking whole populations across a lifetime showing that tests taken at teenagehood predict who'll do better in school, in life and on a later test when the participants are in their 70s.
Iq research is terminally flawed because human intelligence is a mosaic not a monolith. Emotions are equally important in determining smart behavior
I'd say IQ research has its landmines, but it is useful as a whole. Even without any tests, it is possible to identify different levels of intelligence in people you know well, and also what specific disciplines they are good at. Of course, this doesn't guarantee financial success, as seen in how income in 95th percentile has the lowest correlation to high SAT score in the chart in the article.
Human intelligence being multifaceted is not some original discovery. The fact that these facets all correlate with eachother is how Spearman came up with the notion of g-factor back in the 1920s.
Thanks for publishing this article, it could not have done a better job at filling gaps in my understanding of the topic. Really shifted the way I think about things.
Watching the followers of IQism argue small details is about as amusing as watching people argue about horoscopes, or theology.
Not as entertaining however. The astrology crowd tends to be better looking and the theology crowd has better music.
What I am saying is if you are going to have faith in mitcholodrians---sorry G you should at least be easy on the eyes or able to sing Amazing Grace.
Come on, there's a difference between raw intellectual capacity and artistic talent or looks. Few people possess high scores on all 3 of these, thought they do exist!
The simple truth is that nature sets the range of possibilities and nurture/circumstance determines the actual outcome. It is not rocket science.
I enjoyed the article as someone who has a pop-sci understanding of IQ.
>If medical tests, like tests for cancer, had the same reliability as IQ tests, they’d be throwing up false signals to the point of being unusable.
Disagree. We send out tons of low sensitivity and specificity tests. Physicians, like other professionals, often operate in a bayesian manner. The more severe (and unexplained) that the patient looks, the more likely we are to send long shot tests.
Billions of dollars of policy interventions is sufficiently impactful that it should merit consideration of all useful, even if imperfect, information. It is all the more important in that setting to know its limitations, as you are writing about.
This is a good reminder to not be satisfied with a pop-sci view of IQ. Do you have any recommended books?
>Do you have any recommended books?
Hmm people who are followers of IQism might enjoy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries
If you are looking to leave your religion I would recommend this good (and very funny) primer on it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds
A book from the 1800s and a fictional piece from a white nationalist in the 70s. Unserious recommendations.
IQ discourse remains unhinged.
You have shown that the SMPY has some limitations. But you seem to be implying that we should take this as evidence against the claims that prodigies destined for greatness can be identified early, and that there is no plateau of ability. It isn't. You seem to have an unreasonably low prior on the existence of innate prodigies and super-geniuses
Very interesting - I had no idea that the SMPY was anything but a longitudinal study, observing outcomes through the years.
IQ is definitely heritable but remember how heredity looks in four siblings. Or ten siblings. We don’t all inherit the same.
Environment matters a ton. But everyone knows realistically that some people are born with a head start others born with a deficit varying by area and naturally people are drawn to areas where they more easily excel and turned off by areas that are more difficult
I think creativity matters as much as intelligence. Are they connected? To an extent. Creativity can likely be measured to a degree but I suspect people would find it offensive even more than many find iq tests offensive. I just look at it as a set of averages that may not be accurate for any individual for a variety of reasons.
Just bc most people who contribute are high iq doesn’t mean most high iq people even super high iq will make significant contributions though it likely means they’ll make a decent living
In terms of success social behavior matters too. Maybe not for figuring out a new theorem but it matters a lot in the business world
Supposedly Terence tao had advanced tutoring. But for all the aristocratic models you could name many times more people who didn’t have that advantage though many eventually had the privilege of top schools.
When I was a kid they promoted grades pretty easily. Now it’s like a hard reverse. Your kid could be years ahead they won’t even push them up a year which is unlikely to have social repercussions.
And Justin Bates being a young man became Master Bates 😆😁