This study not only selected for people who go out of their way to join a society based on high IQ, it also selected for people who open & complete email surveys.
Yes, many practical sampling methods are biased, but it is not difficult for me to imagine that any result here is caused entirely by these biases.
i agree with your criticism in general -- actually it applies to virtually all psychological and medical studies.
but if you think the physical disabilities are better explained by something else to do with this population sample than their iq, you could very clearly publish this theory
This is what my 4th grader just learned is called a "convenience sample" and all the ways it can be biased... :P If he can understand the shortcomings, then so can the rest of us.
how do you randomly sample high iq? by definition the population would have had to have taken a test. so already, even if the study looked at every known high iq individual in the world, it would still be biased -- for those with academic backgrounds, psychological histories, criminal backgrounds, and whatever else leads one to take an iq test. nb i am not advocating for this particular study nor their methodology.
What you meant to say is that IQ tests are biased, not that “any sampling method is biased”. IQ tests are biased, but statistical sampling methods can be unbiased.
Are there any widespread test given in schools that are proxy IQ tests? Mensa accepts older ACT and SAT scores as they consider the current versions to be knowledge tests but older versions to be intelligence tests. Not sure if this is still the case but at one time all high school students in the State of New York were required to take the SAT prior to graduation. While not representative of the entire population, it would have been a good representation of the high school student slice of the population across the entire state. Perhaps that would have been good enough for some uses.
I have long joked that Mensa membership indicates that you passed the IQ test and failed the intelligence test.
More seriously, Mensa membership selects for people whose main accomplishment in life is doing well on an IQ test. So they are at least somewhat smart. But if you look for people who have actual accomplishments, you'll find people who tend to also be smart but are more interesting to be around.
Note, this is not sour grapes. My test scores mean that I'm qualified for Mensa, but I've never been impressed enough by any Mensa member that I met to be interested.
This was sort of my experience with Mensa. Their three purposes supposedly are:
1. to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity;
2. to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence;
3. and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members.
It's not entirely clear to me how anything they do benefits humanity (1), the "nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence" seem to revolve around games for them which is a pretty meaningless measure of any form of intelligence I care about (2) and while I'm not a member so I can't say whether it's stimulating to them, I can certainly say that all the materials I've come across from Mensa have soon bored me(3). So from where I sit, Mensa fails on two of their purposes, and only succeeds in their third because of a technicality in their wording.
Mensa seems to have a pretty bad reputation in the US. I never had much opinion about and didn't know any Mensa members until my sister joined. She meets loads of interesting people there. They have game weekends where they play all sorts of interesting board games, but also in other activities it's nice to be around people who think a bit like you do.
I've never felt the need to join Mensa because I studied CS and AI, and all my friends from there are probably about as smart as I am, so I already have plenty of people to relate to, but she was always very interested in sport, which probably attracts a different crowd (though she's working in IT now).
My test scores meant I was qualified for Mensa too, I could've taken up the membership when offered as a kid but declined at the time.
Eventually I took the quick test which suggested I should take the longer test as a young adult looking to bolster my CV (résumé). Narrowly missed out and before I was able to submit again I had enough on there not to give it much thought again for me. An IQ test was part of the qualification process for the first job I took out of university, something I've not seen since.
I think my eldest son's probably at least as bright as I am, so this sort of thing has been on my mind again. We try and give him a breadth of experience - he does a lot of rugby (completely non-contact at his age), running and other sports, some child adventure centres, music lessons, scouts soon, etc. But I don't see too much wrong with adding Mensa as a small part in the context of a larger picture.
ah yes the lazy way to find smart people: go to mensa. Everyone in there is guaranteed to be well balanced, and surely will not exhibit any narcissism (did they check for narcissism btw?)
Indeed. This study is complete bullshit: https://www.gwern.net/SMPY#fn1 It contradicts every (non-self-selected) longitudinal or cross-sectional study, including far more elite samples (which if their theory was correct would show vastly more dysfunctionality, except of course it isn't and those samples don't), and every genetic study as well, and the reported (self-diagnosis) rates are often orders of magnitude larger than any risk factor ever confirmed and literally unbelievable.
Incidentally, Hambrick's writeup here is also quite bad. Aside from failing to mention all of those reasons why it's BS, he doesn't describe accurately the research he does mention. Consider this paragraph from the end:
> All the same, Karpinski and her colleagues’ findings set the stage for research that promises to shed new light on the link between intelligence and health. One possibility is that associations between intelligence and health outcomes reflect pleiotropy, which occurs when a gene influences seemingly unrelated traits. There is already some evidence to suggest that this is the case. In a 2015 study, Rosalind Arden and her colleagues concluded that the association between IQ and longevity is mostly explained by genetic factors.
How did he miss the fact that the Arden study in question shows, as all such studies show, that intelligence correlates with greater lifespan/longevity when he's written an entire credulous column about how intelligence is bad for you and makes people crazy and increases the rate of mental disorders (some of which, like schizophrenia, reduce your life expectancy by decades)? It's right there in the abstract, it's not hidden away. One would think that would at least merit a brief pause to puzzle over the discrepancy...
Actually, I think it's kinda funny and ironic that in Spanish we use "menso" as an insult for someone that is stupid. Formal (kinda) definition on how we use it in the Spanish section here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menso
I was skimming for a response like this... in my head it was more like
"People who join Mensa are more likely to be part of socio-economic groups that self select to have doctors diagnose physical and mental issues no matter how minor"
I went through a battery of IQ tests as a kid and got a _high_ score (139). But that was when I was seven years old. I'm 30 now, have a master's degree (which was pretty pointless) and make 25 bucks an hour as a temp (more money than I've ever made in my life). I think my life and prospects have dimmed because I haven't been able to get over the anxiety and the depression that impact me every day. Interviewed for jobs for 14 months and didn't get a single offer. Haven't had a girlfriend in 3 years, lazy as shit, can't even look at myself in the mirror. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless.
But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted! I think it's that sort of expectation that is screwing with us (at least those of us that didn't become comfy SWEs).
This may seem like an insensitive question and I don't mean it in that way but why can't you "think your way out of those problems". For example when I noticed myself being quiet as a teen I applied for a job in a shop to shore up my social skills. I had the keen awareness that ultimately no one cares about me having depression and only me alone can make efforts to treat it. How did your analysis compare?
Similar situation. I was terriby uncharismatic and it was killing my ability to make friends and deal with the office well - so I studied charisma and practiced the skills. Lots of social A/B testing (that's a bit of a cold way to look at it) and evolving and now my situation is generally improved.
I started with reading books on basic etiquette and manners as a baseline. I also asked folks who I trusted (my sister, fellow geeky/awkward folks) for genuine feedback which helped identify the issues no book can help - for years I would actually look at someones mouth instead of their eyes and didn't realize this until a girlfriend told me. Like most skills, it's a slow walk up a mountain - just keep taking a step every day, have conversations with strangers, pick up an on topic blog or book as it's useful.
I was able to get better at rock climbing, but some people never get over a fear of heights. I've got borderline personality disorder. Consider a bad social encounter: for you, there might be some shame but your brush yourself off and figure out what to do differently next time. Now imagine instead, when you get home from the party or whatever, someone there follows you and screams at you for hours that you're a pathetic failure, how being social is hopeless, how you'll never make it, dissecting everything you did, until you're on the floor crying. Except that person is inside your own head. You'd probably just try to never go out and socialize again, it's just too painful. If you did, you'd then have double the painful memories, and what good would that do?
So obviously social anxiety in the formal, medical sense is a real thing. I've had friends who have struggled with it, and had very good luck working with therapists. I'm sure that it's still a struggle for them, but at least from an external perspective, they seem to socialize and form relationships just as well as everyone else now.
Outside the formal anxiety sense, most people struggle with the negative feedback loop. The trick is that you can't simply turn it off - even if you're the best socializer in the history of humanity. For me, I set an informal timer (usually while journaling or in the shower) to intentionally introspect my interactions and pick one thing I felt I could have improved on ("I really wish I had said more than 'fine' when So-and-so asked me how my day was") and then move on.
One lesson that's hard, for me and I suspect others, is that while it's very important to be polite, it's not your job to make everyone else feel happy or complete - that's not an excuse to go around being a jerk, but also don't feel you owe anyone else something by default. It's enough to have a conversation about the weather or let the other person complain about their boss some and offer a bit of empathy.
That's usually how smart people get depressed in the first place, by thinking too much. You realize that there's no point to anything you do. You will die. Humanity will die. The universe will die.
This is why people have religion. Regardless of your personal views on the fact, it's a darn good way to avoid getting depressed by this sort of nihilism. You believe the universe will go on; you'll see your family one day and spend eternity in paradise. You may think it's BS, but have to admit it doesn't really matter for most people, it still does the job.
As someone who has been on both sides of that belief, I can agree that it generally has a stabilizing effect on people's mental state. However, once you lose that belief, it is very difficult to make yourself believe it again. And probably even harder for people that never believed in the first place.
And yet millennia of philosophy have also attempted to address it. Epicurus comes first to mind from the materialist camp. Religion is not the only source of solace for existential dread, there are more rationalist approaches that can be viable. I think these have been sufficiently overshadowed by religion that they are only recently re-entering the public discourse.
Another way to deal with nihilism is to embrace it. Once you accept that nothing matters, you can stop beating yourself up for mistakes and failures. You can strip the urgency from your goals. It allows you to proceed with outcome independence. This needs to be paired with some form of motivation too, but I think that's more up to the individual.
Exactly. I personally know people who have become despondent and given up on life. Maybe a few people will take advantage of total freedom to learn and do, but if we're being honest here, most will watch net flicks and eat potato chips. It is still a net positive for _most_ people.
This is me, up to certain a point. I workout regularly, get slowly better at my job, participate in social activities. Just focus on enjoying life and I do. Still, it's all utterly meaningless. Funny thing is, I'm quit sure that the lack of meaning is holding me back. Holding me back in the sense that my satisfaction with life and success within it could be better with the feeling of meaning in life.
There are people who proclaim that death gives everything meaning. Nonsense, death neither gives nor takes meaning, it's as meaningless as eternal life. I'm an atheist to every religion I've ever encountered and couldn't imagine the existence of a god providing meaning, either. (I actually perceive that idea, meaning by higher power, to be even more absurd).
I have the believe though, that the question for meaning is a side effect of having a modern life. Did ancient tribes people think about meaning or did they simply hunt, socialize and view the world as connected in everything (the natural view of the world, as children have it) and never ever even thing about the concept of meaning of life? There are still somewhat "natural" living tribes out there, did someone ask them that question? I'm really curious about their reaction and answer.
Really, to me it seems, that the answer to the question about the meaning of life is to never ask it in the first place.
I read that often, also in this thread. But it isn't working for me. Meaning is not a rational concept, I guess it is a feeling. I say guess, because I've never experienced it. I only know, that the lack of meaning is a feeling.
One day, I might stumble into a life where everything clicks together and the lack of meaning withers away. But that's not going to be a rational decision. "I conclude that this way of life is meaningful. 5 minutes later, I feel meaningful". Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
> Another way to deal with nihilism is to embrace it. Once you accept that nothing matters, you can stop beating yourself up
But because nothing (incl. consequences) matters, it can also be a path to sociopathy, especially if your nihilistic attitude has deprived you of a normal social outlet.
See, I never got how religion solves the problem of 'life not having a meaning'... let's suppose that there is a god, he created everything, and he tells me my purpose is x... well, so what? Just because God created everything, does that mean his choice for meaning is the same as mine? I mean, my parents created me, and if they told me their idea for my purpose, it wouldn't make it mine.
Same with eternal life... how does something without meaning extended forever suddenly have meaning?
I guess I never got the connection with an omniscient creator and a feeing of having purpose.
I have plenty of purpose; experiencing the universe, taking it all in, seeing what happens next, loving deeply, sharing joy, experiencing pain. So much to life.
what if .. the story of there being a god separate from you is just a story. The nondual or advaita insight is that you are divine already, just pretending not to be. It goes deeper than that and should not be made another story but experienced yourself first. This was my own path to unshakeable faith, by own experience with the help of teachings and meditation as the beginning.
I'm not _entirely_ sure of most things, but am unsure how I am to reply with anything of substance if you don't give me a little more to engage with. _Why_ doesn't it make sense? I'm approaching it from a sociological point in this case, rather than a moral or theological one.
Given my only exposure with any depth is Christianity (still superficial) I’m using this as my reference. If you read any of the really well-regarded spiritual authors (like the doctors of the church for example) you will read plenty about how your family (or you, of course) could easily be damned to hell. In fact, seeing relatives in hell is probably inevitable. Something even more discomforting to discuss is that, being that you’ve made it to heaven, your will is united to God’s and you would in fact marvel at God’s justice while you watch your relatives suffer in hell.
But aren't high IQ people predisposed to being atheist in the first place?
I don't like working for adtech companies even when they pay me large sum of money for solving their technical problems.
I am not motivated by money, I've been diagnosed with 150 IQ score when I was 19.
I learned to speak very late and when I learned to write, I often wrote with both of my hands and swapping the hand out when I got tired of writing with one hand.
My best time at school was finding a new benchmark every week and copying their handwriting so by the end of the weak, no one could figure out who exactly wrote that!
Principal summoned me for swapping solution paper based on handwriting and I had to prove to him by writing in that handwriting that I didn't cheat.
I was good at art but not good at music.
I tried programming, I excelled at this stuff and then I moved on to CAD modeling which I found more statisfying but I was still getting inquiries based on my past performance at tech companies.
I often feel I don't like using my intelligence. Yes but throw me in survival situation i am guaranteed to find solutions.
The best thing I enjoyed working for any company was when I was under continuous threat of being fired if I didn't solve the technical challenges they were facing. Other than this, even the problems didn't give me any statisfaction, what did give me statisficaction was working under continuous threats + time constraints.
Insults don't affect me, I don't assign any value to anything other say about me. I work for my own statisficaction.
I had several girlfriends but things slowly faded and I ended up not seeing them anymore because I saw no point in maintaining relationships.
My family is very religious yet I grew up to become athiest.
I read various religious texts and arrived at the situation that it's designed to control people without use of sword
And? If there's no point then there's also no point in not enjoying yourself. Sorry, I'm not trying to be flippant. Just pointing out the fact that there is no point to anything is arguably not a very good reason for not making your life the best it can be.
It's not thinking too much, in that specific instance, that is the source of the problem at all.
The point (value or reason for) to the things they're claiming have no point, are provided by us, not the universe via magic assignment. That is the source of the mistake.
Pretending the value is externally assigned or innate is the source of the premise that there's no point to the big thing (existence, life, work and so on). In the process of being disappointed in the lack of innate value, they're actually mentally assigning low value to the thing in question (which is psychologically the entire point: it's about debasing the value of the thing, it's most likely a revealing indicator about the present state of mind).
For example: smart person thinks too much, they realize there's no point to life because we're going to die (or similar setup). The problem with that is, the point of life is decided by the smart person. They're in fact deciding to assign life less or little value in the act of saying there's no point, in that action they are actively determining the point: they're deciding there isn't much of one. They made a choice (with it being understood of course that a person may be in a mental place where for any number of reasons they can't clearly recognize a positive value to existence).
The old question: what is the point of life? Does in fact have a very obvious and very simple answer: you decide (which simultaneously does not guarantee good results, even if you decide what it means to you or what the point of your life is to be).
I agree, bearing in mind that to decide is a bit more substantial than just saying it or thinking it - it's an interaction between your thoughts and your actions and everything. I'd say it more as you create your meaning - it might involve things outside of yourself or it might be more individualistic, but it's not arbitrary, and you can have incorrect beliefs about the meaning you are deciding on/creating.
This is where readin satanic texts early on in life really set the tone for me.
Summed up they say "There's no point to anything so enjoy life as best you can, while you can". Those texts really focus on you as the supreme master of yourself as opposed to any external entity.
And if i decide it's about punching people in the face, in the end it has as much value as your decision for a grand humanitarian crusade, because it's just as much a choice as the other.
So we're back to needing a point to judge decisions by. The choice isn't enough, or the fact of choosing isn't enough. This is what creates the "whole life is pointless" reaction in the first place, because "you decide" can mean anything, and there has to be something that isn't solely "you decide" to give particular meaning to one choice over the other.
If you decide it's about punching peole in the face either you'll wildly succeed or more likely you'll get punched back and eventually locked up by the community at large who are all pursuing their own meanings and have collectively agreed to stop people punch other people in the face.
I mean you could choose that the meaning of life is to punch people in the face but you'll have to live with the reprocussions of that choice. That feels like you'll quickly come to the rational decision that it was/is a bad choice.
The problem is that pure rationality leads into abyss.
There might be a rational decision not to punch people directly into face but a purely rational psychopath can choose many other profitable avenues that are disastrous to society at large "in the long run" (fentanyl, global warming, etc etc). And we know what happens in the long run.
It all goes back to Ecclesiastes(and Job), you can be an "evil" person and prosper in this world.
If this tiny lifespan is all there is, this is quite distressing. And physically there is nothing else.
Apparently the best solution is to realize there are no rules but live as if they do per Voltaire(not necessarily Pascal).
Life without purpose is... usually not great. I'm sure there's a more poignant way to put that. An intelligent person may even spot the hedonic treadmill more quickly than the norm.
That's pretty subjective. I think there's no point to anything but I'm not upset about it. If anything - it gives me more of a purpose. What can I do before I'm dead and basically don't exist? It's not like any fucking videos games I play have any point. What's the point? Oh - I win and finish the game. Greaaat. Oh I beat someone online - woooow. What's the real point of that in the end? Nothing - it's all hedonism.
I don't think you get depressed by thinking too much - you probably get depressed because you don't have what you want to begin with. You then just think about why you're in your unpleasant position, realize you're too crap to fix it, won't admit fault and change, and so then rationalize that inherently the universe is unfair and there's no point to anything anyway (just to make yourself feel better about how you're doing poorly). It's not that you're a piece of shit - it's the universes fault! I was made this way and there's no point to anything so I can still be a piece of crap human being! I'm too smart to be with the common man! They don't understand my deep intellect!
If you were immortal, would that confer some kind of meaning on your actions? How do you define meaning, and does it make any sense? Philosophical issues like these can have, I believe, substantial effects on a persons mental health. It's an area of thinking that we view in a very dysfunctional way in our society, generally discouraging even exploration of the topics as 'meaningless' (which is a bit ironic since those ideas are how one determines meaning). And if you do wish to investigate the ideas, you're mostly on your own. I personally credit my study of philosophy with a great deal of my general contentment with life, and feel it gave me the tools I needed to address most of the concerns I always wrestled with. Not even any specific philosopher or school of philosophy. Just the process of being introduced to so many radically different viewpoints on life, along with the strong foundation in argumentation and reason, itself seems to have aided my greatly.
If the universe will die, and that establishes that anything which occurs within it has no meaning, perhaps meaning becomes entirely worthless as a concept. It distinguishes nothing. It becomes identical with mere existence.
I think this is where intelligence gets you in trouble. You say this as if it was the whole story, and you trust your own beliefs too much to let them go.
High intelligence may not be as harmful if you use it as a tool where appropriate, and don’t use where it falls short.
I agree with the first sentiment. But I've always been of the mind that, because life is terminal, our actions and behaviors have meaning. If life never ended (at least naturally), what would be the drive to do anything, when it could simply be postponed (without any real consequence) til tomorrow?
FWIW, each living being is connected in an unbroken chain to the original reproducing life form that existed roughly 3.5 billion years ago. Which means that each of us is related, however distantly, to every other living organism on this planet and that we're all playing a part in a grand, cosmic process that has been going on for an unfathomable amount of time. Thinking about that is one helluva cure for my nihilism.
Depression can be due to situational factors or biological factors. If you are smart and your depression is situational, yeah, problem solving can do wonders.
But fixing biologically-based depression is much harder and, even if you try to do it, it's not guaranteed to work. We don't have a solid enough understanding of the biology of biologically-based depression.
And the two things that can generally best help combat biologically-based depression, therapy and medication, also happen to be extremely expensive and probably haven't been readily available as an option for someone who is just now reaching a middle class income.
I think there are complicating factors here that I intentionally chose to leave out of my comment because I get so much flak for thinking I know anything with confidence that isn't "common knowledge."
I was involved with The TAG Project because I was homeschooling my two 2xe sons. I basically believe that people with very high IQs have different nutritional needs specifically to support their weird brains.
My extra smart son gets really difficult to deal with when he's deficient in B vitamins, a vitamin class important to the brain. He easily gets deficient and there is no point arguing with him when he's deficient.
So if you are basically chronically malnourished because of special nutritional needs that are currently unrecognized, there's little hope of getting that issue redressed. It snowballs from there: nutritional deficiency causes poorer cognition and more mental health issues which suppresses your ability to cope and becomes a general downward spiral that the world currently can't even properly diagnose.
(The above is opinion based in part on being sort of a subject matter expert. Please don't ask me to "cite my source." My pro bono professional experience and personal experience is the source of my opinion.
I'm not writing a PhD thesis here. I'm having a conversation. Thank you.)
Most first-line SSRIs are out of patent protection, as are a lot of other medications for mental health issues. My monthly resupply of bupropion, sertraline and methylphenidate comes to the princely sum of $20.
A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right. With treatment-resistant depression, it's like your "happiness muscles" respond minimally or not at all to training. You're trying to light a pile of ashes.
This is similar with many persistent mental conditions. Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food? Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared? And so on.
Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared?
Exposure therapy works for phobias; people exposed to their phobia in a way that increases their anxiety, long enough for their brain to notice they haven't died and recalibrate its fear response, stop being scared.
Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food?
Because they enjoy eating food? Eating food isn't what they want to stop, being fat or sick is what they want to stop. Eating food is delicious, comforting, filling, reassuring, is it any wonder people resist giving that up?
It's not that their eat-less muscle won't respond to training, it's that they won't work their eat-less muscle because that involves eating less, and they like eating.
A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right.
That doesn't say his happiness muscle is broken and won't respond, it says he has unexplored reasons for preferring the status quo more. He gets more benefit from unhappiness than from doing X. Go explore those reasons.
My life has started getting better when I got off my ass and worked to make it better.
I got the job I wanted, started working out, started going out more (still working on that one tbh), went from being single to several long term relationships, etc.
None of it was easy, all of it was and is a struggle.
At some point, I realized that nobody else was going to work on all these things if I did not.
I'm in a similar situation to the OP. For me personally it's really difficult to "think my way out" of these sorts of problems. First they're large intertwined problems, second they're existential in nature, and third as you get older time becomes a huge factor.
It's a vicious cycle really. Everyone has some idea of what they want out of life and whether or not they are "on track" to attain it. The further behind you are, the more this leads to increased depression, anxiety, anger, etc. At that point it's hard to effectively think or do anything at all, so the situation deteriorates further.
Sometimes something works out; you get a girlfriend, you get a good job, whatever it happens to be. You start to feel like you can make a come back, you start making progress turning your life into what you want it to be. The problem is if that initial pillar gets knocked out from under you (break-up, laid off, etc) things can go down hill really damn fast; I know this from experience.
You're right that largely speaking no one cares about a person having depression, or rather people say they care but their actions rarely line up with their words. That can be a very self-destructive realization though, because often times help is what you need.
Some people can push past these adversities seemingly without issue. Others like myself have a much more difficult time with it. Perhaps "thinking through" the problem is the problem, maybe that leads to analysis paralysis. Maybe that's why those with higher IQs have this problem. I honestly have no idea.
As my old therapist would say, “a broken mind can’t fix a broken mind.”
I suffer from pretty intense social anxiety. It turns out I was comparing the way I felt to the way other people appeared, and felt like a failure for a long time. I finally shelved all the old ideas I could shed and wrote my own definition of success. I can’t speak for others but I couldn’t think myself whole because my perspective was all wrong. It took talking through all that garbage and getting to the truth before I started getting healthy and whole.
This is really interesting! You are quite the "doer". I think for a lot of people the problem is that they think and plan a lot, but never do anything. You seem to be able to identify a problem and then proceed to solve it, which is a pretty good quality, I think. You take control of your life and do things instead of waiting for the "right time". Tell me, what do you think about your actions? "I need to do it because nobody else will"? Maybe "It's my responsibility, so I need to get it done"?
> This may seem like an insensitive question and I don't mean it in that way but why can't you "think your way out of those problems"
Because in your mind, motivation follows naturally from logically deduced need. Motivation isn't so connected in most people's minds; it's an emotional thing, which isn't necessarily driven by rational thought.
I'm sure you've seen people doing something wrong even though they know it's wrong.
I don't think it's necessarily emotional. The world does not have set inputs and outputs, and effort can be expended on activities that turn out to be arbitrarily fruitless. Decoupling expenditure of effort from expectation of reward would naturally and logically reduce motivation for even logically-deduced need.
I think trauma and disappointment are far more prevalent than true sloth or vice, if such things as the later two exist at all.
Most IQ tests only go up to 145. Anything very close to 145 may mean you "ceilinged the test." In other words, your IQ could be even higher, but the test can't measure it beyond that.
Very high IQs can only be accurately assessed at an early age by a qualified professional. So many people will never have an accurate score.
How is it possible for anyone to have a valid very high IQ, since IQ is a percentile test and there's no way to know how many very high IQ people were never properly tested?
Very high IQ is fundamentally flawed because IQ is resistant to precise measurement.
Social systems, like kindergarten, can tell if someone is smart or average or very not smart. Society generally only tests those at the outer boundaries to verify and classify them into groups.
You're right, someone who seems average (or totally unknown to social systems), but is actually super genius, might not get tested. It's the "genius in the rice paddy" argument and yes, those exist. Srinivasa Ramanujan was one.
That doesn't mean IQ is fundamentally flawed. You don't need to know if someone is 99th percentile or 99.0004 percentile to know they are probably the smartest in the average room of a hundred people and that's what we use IQ to determine.
Sorry to be nitpicky but this stuff is interesting to me. I would think someone in the 99th percentile would have a 99% chance of being smarter than another random person. In a room full of 100, to be smarter than all 99 other people would be .99^99 or only around a 37% chance of being the smartest in the room. I may be off on this, as I am definitely not in the 99th percentile.
> Most IQ tests only go up to 145. Anything very close to 145 may mean you "ceilinged the test." In other words, your IQ could be even higher, but the test can't measure it beyond that.
This has always bothered me about IQ tests. I mean, how smart is the person who comes up with the test? If your IQ is 120, how could you come up with a question that verifies someone's IQ is 180? Maybe the 180 IQ person would have an answer that is different than yours for reasons that you didn't think of.
1. Time. Each test question have 1 minute to answer. The test author took 4 hours to write the question (before having an organization put it through a battery of tests and analyses to validate it).
2. Group effort. Test authors work in big teams; many brains makes for easier insight.
3. Children's IQ is normalized to their age scale; a 7-year-old with IQ 140 isn't cognitively equivalent to a 35-year-ld with such IQ.
So, when I was involved in this stuff, this was my best understanding:
1. Tests are tools. By themselves, they tell you nothing of real value. They are useful in the hands of a qualified professional.
2. Tests are game-able. They try to keep questions and tests under wraps because studying for the test or memorizing answers invalidates the test results.
3. Bright kids are horrendously hard to assess, especially if they are 2xE. They have trouble giving the canned "correct" answer.
This is something my son calls "guess the teacher's password." In other words "what inane thing do I need to parrot word for word to get the teacher off my back."
Example from email list discussion:
"Who discovered America?"
Teacher's password: Columbus.
Gifted kid's reply:
"I'm not sure. Columbus was trying to find India and thought he had, which is why Native Americans were called Indians. But it wasn't called America until years later when Amerigo Vespucci traveled to the continents now named after him...(blathers on about more history)...um, what was the question?"
4. Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145. They were having trouble developing and validating an updated test for the higher IQs.
5. You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ. Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.
That answer to the America question is just a student being obnoxious and attempting to show off. They should have enough awareness to know the correct response.
In most cases why would you bother trying to accurately gauge a student over 145? A student with an IQ of 145+ has very different educational needs compared to a 100 IQ student. Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
They should have enough awareness to know the correct response.
This was an actual anecdote from a discussion with a parent of the child in question. The child in question was probably between four and seven years old. They were being assessed by a professional one on one, not in a classroom setting. They were neither showing off nor in possession of the social skills you assume they surely had to have.
I will add that imposter syndrome is common among adults because it's quite hard to figure out where we stand in relation to other people, so smart adults frequently feel they must be "average" because this is "normal" for them. Children are at substantial disadvantage compared to adults.
Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
Possibly. The standard deviation for IQ tests is just 15 points.
More importantly, a test that only goes to 145 cannot distinguish 145 from 180. Both will likely score 145 or close to it.
The use of the word teacher had me confused, as I'd normally assume a classroom setting for teaching student relationships.
I know what these kids go through. I was that kid myself. I know I was very aware that I wasn't "normal". You're correct that in the age range 4-7 a child wouldn't know to give the "expected" answer. It won't be much longer though until that child can use his/her intelligence to work out the expected response. At my school, it wasn't socially acceptable to show intelligence so maybe I learnt to hide it earlier than most.
I don't know my IQ. I've had to take tests a few times as an adult for work and every time I land "most likely somewhere in the top 0.1%" according to the psychologists. I don't really feel it matters if my tests show 145 or 160. A large school with 800 kids is only going to have a single child in that range.
You can either move that child up some years, or you can give them a customised workload. A child that is 180 IQ is very different from a child that's 145 but the approach of attempting to find them an appropiate workload would be a good start.
"Guess the teacher's password" is an expression my son uses. It's based on his experiences attending public school for a few years. (I pulled him out to homeschool him when he was eleven.)
Using it wasn't intended to suggest a classroom setting for the story in question, just a standard answer that someone more knowledgeable about history might not spit out as The Answer without being inculcated to do so.
There are more than 10x as many people at 145 than 155, that ratio is larger than between 135 and 145, because the curve is exponential. If we’re talking about how to “best” educate someone who’s abnormally smart, and if we agree with you that someone at 145 needs to be taught differently than someone at 100, it certainly might matter to know if it’s 145 or 155.
> Bright kids are horrendously hard to assess, especially if they are 2xE. They have trouble giving the canned "correct" answer.
Canned correct answers are only required for knowledge questions (like your example), which IQ tests avoid since knowledge and intelligence are different things.
> Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145.
Most modern IQ tests report up to 160; accuracy (as assessed by test-retest consistency) at 145+ isn't great, though, on any.
> You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ.
That's baloney.
> Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.
Smart kids routinely are bored and engage in actual bad behavior in situations not optimized for them, but that doesn't prevent adults of adequate but non-exceptional intelligence from being able to apply intelligence tests to them and get the same results as any more intelligent adult would. IQ tests are not limited by the IQ of the test adminstrator.
IQ tests are timed. IQ test questions aren’t something that normal people can’t comprehend, they’re just hard to do quickly. It’s easy to ask hard questions without being that smart, just like it’s easy to time the winner of a sprint even if the winner can run faster than you.
Because IQ tests are standardised rigorous tests. 145 are three effin standard deviations up, where 130 means 99th percentile. 145 is 99.9. There simply are not enough people up there to make reliable tests. WAIS (the most used one) breaks down around 135.
This isn't how IQ tests work. IQ test results are measured relative to a population. In particular 100 is the mean with a standard deviation of 15. So if you score 115 on an IQ test it doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. It means that relative to the population who took the test you scored better than ~84% of people. An IQ of 130 means you scored better than ~98% of people, and so on.
This is what led to the Flynn Effect [1]. It was the initially extremely surprising observation that raw IQ scores over time were increasing. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1970 was actually scoring substantially higher than somebody who scored a 100 just a few decades prior. Not so fun fact: starting sometime around the mid nineties, raw IQ scores started declining, at a substantial rate, in many and potentially all developed nations. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1995 is scoring worse than somebody who scored 100 in 1975. The reason for this is unknown and controversial (as all things even potentially genetic nowadays), but the effect persists even when controlling for things such as immigration.
They have different tests with better accuracy in different ranges. I didn't know this until relatively recently and never understood why I was given 3 tests in as many months. If they think you're slow instead of bored to death they may start with a test looking for developmental delays.
Per Wikipedia, most IQ tests have a highest-reported standard score of 160 [0]; that's also consistent with the highest range for Stanford-Binet 5th Edition and Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children topping out at 160 (the SB5 top range starts at 145.)
Even if that's the highest achievable, IQ tests designed to be usable for everyone tend to start getting really unreliable above 135 or so. Above that level, you're getting into the territory where test takers basically answer almost all of the reasonable questions right and where those few wrong answers necessarily start having much larger effects on the final score. Because of that, other issues start dominating the results. Random variance, sloppiness, mechanical issues in timed tests, how well you slept, whether there's slightly bad/ambiguous questions, whether you've seen that type of question before, whether you're good under pressure, cultural differences, etc.
For example, one serious official test I did included a timed test where you had to decode a string of symbols to text based on some key. I ended up being fast enough at decoding that I was effectively limited by how fast I could scribble down the decoded texts and turn the page back to the code, not by the mental calculations. I imagine others would have had similar issues, making this particular test at best capable of indicating a wide possible range of mental ability, a range which should be particularly inaccurate around the higher ranges as the ratio mentalTime/mechanicalTime decreases.
There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels. There are no good baselines to compare these people and no real ways of checking whether the differences actually matter in any meaningful way.
> IQ tests designed to be usable for everyone tend to start getting really unreliable above 135 or so.
Afaik, that's not a “designed to be usable by everyone” thing; there's test-retest consistency gets progressively lower beyond that point on IQ tests, period.
> There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels.
If that was true, we wouldn't have reliable information that accuracy breaks down in that area, which we do.
We can study the accuracy in that range, we just haven't found a way to fix it.
Well, intelligence is not a limiting factor for you. But that doesn't mean that it is bullshit; for others I have met, it was a limiting factor and they would heavily disagree.
It is true though, that other factors can sometimes be much more valuable. Charisma, conscientiousness and attractiveness can carry people very far.
> for others I have met, it was a limiting factor and they would heavily disagree
The GP comment isn't really about intelligence - it is about the measurement of intelligence & the impact of parental expectations (societal, self and partner ones too).
And very unfortunately it cuts both ways.
People who measure poorly at 7 years old might be kept out of challenging classrooms where they would actually discover their talents & flourish.
People who measure high are pushed until they burn out of their skulls trying to fulfill their "measured" potential - or alternatively placed in the company of the talented where they end up with an underachiever's ego[1].
As my sister once told me "Society doesn't want you in particular, anyone who will do what you could do will do". I often think about that at work - society can afford to burn thousands of bright minds on optimizing ads and their placement.
[1] - I remember chills watching the setup for Molly's Game.
Help didn't help me, but I am glad it did for you. I spent lots of money but eventually what saved me is reading this article and then the whole book about intelligent people suffering from depression and failures in life:
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/dabrowskis_theory_existential_d...
it related to me more than anything else but everyone is different
> discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless.
Entirely correct. Therapy is effective. Meditation will help. There is a Chinese old saw about "treasures that you carry within you and which none can rob nor destroy but you".
And get yourself a girl friend.
[p.s. when you get your act together, you know discipline, social skills, and making connections, your 139 will put you way ahead of those who merely have those skills, so cheer up.]
I might generalize this to "put yourself in position where you have a responsibility to other people". The expectations that other people have of us can be a burden, but they can also help us pull together enough motivation to get stuff done.
As much as I would love to snap my fingers and make this happen, I really have no idea how to go about this. I met my last serious girlfriend at a bus station in Minsk, just struck up a conversation (in English).
Whereas here in the US, I have been in $BoringTechCity for 3 years, and haven't had a woman so much as smile at me. I'm very much a skinny George Costanza, and I freak people out. I also abstain from dating apps and am at this "squishy" part of adulthood where I enjoy staying in, making Indian curry and playing Red Dead, and can't imagine doing anything social in the evenings after work. (I did, however, perform stand-up comedy twice last week, at two different venues. Both times went pretty well, but I don't feel compelled to do it again anytime soon.)
> can't imagine doing anything social in the evenings after work
So this is key. Start using your God given high voltage brain and start imagining. Then plan. Then implement.
Looks? Effendi, you see the most gorgeous women with the most unlikely males all the time. I wouldn't worry about that even a tiny bit.
> I did, however, perform stand-up comedy twice last week, at two different venues. Both times went pretty well, but I don't feel compelled to do it again anytime soon.
A sense of humor is one of the most attractive qualities in a man to a woman. You are already set. You are smart, you are funny, you have a fucking job.
Have you considered you are ungrateful to the Universe or God or the Spaghetti Monster? :-)
I can relate to your situation, because I was there a few years ago, at a similar age. Please forgive me for offering some unsolicited advice.
I highly recommend meditation. A helpful book I started with is called Wherever You Go, There You Are. I'm now getting into The Mind Illuminated, and I think it is also good. The subreddits /r/meditation and /r/TheMindIlluminated are informative, at the moment.
When you find the time, which can be difficult when you are working a job, try forcing yourself into social interactions. For example, chatting with people at cafe or at the train station, volunteering, and meetups.
Also, I found myself feeling like I've been Tom Sawyered just a little bit with the job thing. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to sweat the job thing so much, I would.
>When you find the time, which can be difficult when you are working a job, try forcing yourself into social interactions. For example, chatting with people at cafe or at the train station, volunteering, and meetups.
I like this advice. I just don't like following through with it because 1) I feel like a creep 2) I can't really tell if people are bothered by me and don't want to inconvenience them 3) I'm afraid I will say something wrong and the whole experience will bite me in the ass, so it's safer to do nothing.
My old therapist (who literally saved my life fwiw) made me go through a series of IQ tests and I also received a similar score (141). At the time, he was attempting to prove that I had intelligence, and that I was smarter than I gave myself credit for. But the thing that I noticed was that it actually spun me in the opposite direction - when I thought I wasn't smart I could explain away the lack of motivation or success or whatever. When it was "proven" that I was "intelligent", I just felt like more of a failure. I had this big brain that I was barely using.
I'm glad I know, because it feels good to know I guess. But I don't think that making me take that test really moved the needle for me in terms of self worth or success or anything like that. I had to figure my shit out via other methods (while working with that therapist). I suppose the point of this message is only to say that I empathize with your situation.
Similar boat for me, but in my case it was that everyone else then raised their expectations. Because if you're "gifted" or whatever term they use these days, clearly you should be accomplishing amazing things constantly and if you don't you're a disappointment to the world at large. That kind of burden is pretty awful for most kids to grow up with.
I was in gifted classes growing up, but it felt like a big fraud. I never really did any of the work, so my grades were always mediocre at best. But then testing came around and I'd score in the top %s, and continue to get placed in classes I wasn't willing to work hard enough to succeed at. It was this treadmill of failure and shame. It was really really awful, but my mom always said if I placed that high I had to take those classes, so I just kept going. It was definitely a pretty damaging process.
A lot of my teachers... and one of my parents... made this mistake with me. "You're so smart, why are you unable to do X ??". Which only made me feel as if I was dumb.
Obviously, my teachers and parents were raising me the best they thought was possible, but I think they were mistaken with this strategy.
I read a blogpost that really spoke to me: NEVER tell a child that they are smart, or dumb. Frankly, it doesn't matter. If they are unable to do X, tell them "You are unable to do X", no if-and-or-buts about it. Tell them you expect them to be able to do X, but in a way that doesn't bring up "intelligence" or "general performance".
Its something I strive for with the next generation: my little cousins or nephews (no kids of my own yet) will be told what my expectations of them are, but I try to avoid the "intelligence trap" when talking with them.
"Mindset" by Dr Carol Dweck is probably the most important book (research) on this topic. A must-read for anyone pretending to educate kids, actually to anyone period.
funny you say that because growth mindset seems to be one of the clearest examples of modern feel-good science.
invariably when a topic about intelligence gets posted we need someone to come around with an IQ around the 140 mark (I have no reason to doubt they are being honest fwiw) to tell us how because they personally failed, genetic intelligence is really unimportant (smarter rebuttals acknowledge that genetics plays a major role in intelligence, but that IQ is a really poor proxy of this, which is debatable).
this ultimately culminates in Almost Everyone Can Be Good At Almost Everything If They Try Hard With A Good Minset, The Growth Mindset. the science is weak. it's baffling how her book can be a "must-read".
edit: this article only addresses MENSA members, so i think this submission is bad. most well-adjusted intelligent people want nothing to do with MENSA. so even the claims of the submission are questionable.
judge the articles based on their merits. they're not hiding their sources, you can go check the study of 5,000 british students if you want to read it yourself.
ironic because you'd think that if buzzfeed was as bad as its reputation, being a left-leaning outlet, it would be reasonable to assume they'd be in favor of growth mindset.
Imagine two worlds. In one world all people are completely and absolutely identical and unable to change themselves in any meaningful way. In the other world people are all completely identical, but able to radically reshape themselves as they see fit.
In one world an individuals actions and decisions would largely determine their outcome. In the other world things completely outside of an individual's control would be the primary determining factors in their outcome.
One of these worlds would imply the need for systems directly subsidizing those who fail to achieve. In the other world, poor outcomes would be attributable in large part to poor decisions. The latter scenario doesn't necessarily preclude a subsidization of those who fail to succeed, but it makes it a much more tenuous proposition.
I had no idea the book was so much of a "thing", its name and principles are basically inexistent here (France and nearby countries). People either feel they "are" smart or not, and believe it's forever. More strikingly it's about logical intelligence (IQ), as if that was the major deciding factor for success (it's really not). Hence why I always try to mention Dr Dweck (especially for kids).
I trust you've done your research so this isn't a rebuttal — merely a surprised observation. You probably have too much of it in the US (and indeed too much of even a good thing can hurt) whereas we have way too little of it in the EU (at least the "Latin" world).
100% agreed on Mensa (we don't have that here but even I know it's almost a scam).
I would almost suggest Josh Waitzkin’s book “The Art Of Learning” instead of Dr. Dweck’s as his speaks through first-hand experience of the two mindsets while being a child prodigy.
I would argue the contrary. France is heavy imprinted with socialism and ideas such as "everything is cultural". There is strong social backlash for even implying that intelligence is (mostly) genetics. The political implications are too strong, in particular for the "vivre ensemble" fantasy.
The whole education system is built around the idea that everyone is the same and could success if they work hard enough, which has seriously bad consequences such as universities filled with people who don’t belong there (this is becoming worth and worth as the bar is lowered constantly in lower education). There is shaming about trade schools in most of the country, despite it being a way to succeed and filling jobs needed by society. There is specialized schools and sections for low IQ people but not for higher ones. You better be average to fit and "succeed" at school.
> France is heavy imprinted with socialism and ideas such as "everything is cultural". There is strong social backlash for even implying that intelligence is (mostly) genetics.
As a french, I would argue that there is "public" backlash - e.g. in newspapers, etc. - but in private life most people would agree with OP.
France is by far not a socialist country - here are the last (2015) regional election results : blue is right-wing, black far-right, pink and red, left-wing :
For Americans it could be called a socialist country, take into account that the parties we call right-wing in most European countries propose economic policies that are to the left of America's mainstream left. In fact, probably even Le Pen is to the left of America's mainstream left in terms of worker's policies.
Exactly. The political landscape is really skewed towards left, but to realize that you need to live abroad and expose yourself to other ideas. All political parties basically are 50 shades of left. Marine Le Pen ideas are qualified as the absolute evil in France while far stronger ideas (the one held by the real far-right, represented by Zemmour & MMLP) are totally normal in other places of the world. Take Japan for instance, where death penalty is approved by 60% of the population, criminals are actually sentenced to jail and immigration is severely restricted. This doesn’t make it a fascist state and it’s actually a really good place to live.
I didn't actually mean to discuss what's normal and what's skewed, and much less what's better or what's worse, but just to state a quite objective fact (that even the rightmost parties in Europe are to the left of American mainstream left) without sparking controversy. But I'll bite.
The Japan example is true (although they do have serious social issues), but the fact is that European countries utterly dominate most list of the best places to live. See for example
where most of the countries in the top ten are European, with special predominance of particularly leftist countries like the Nordic countries. And at least the first two are American sources (not sure about the location of the third one).
> Almost Everyone Can Be Good At Almost Everything If They Try Hard With A Good Minset
The thing here is that many people are convinced that "I just cant learn X at all", so they wont even try. And when they do actualy try, they can become at minimum alright, probably decent and maybe good at X. You see that on both kids and adults.
That is where growth mindset comes from.
Will everybody be next Beethoven, Michelangelo, Knuth or win the olympic? No. Can healthy person learn to play piano, draw a portrait, write a python script or learn to swim? Absolutely yes.
That’s probably quite true, too. I personally found the idea of Mensa the organization unattractive at best, and haven’t much enjoyed the little time I spent with its members.
You weren't dumb, you were ignorant and ignorance can be overcome and more likely so if you are high IQ. In asking, "why can't you do x?" what they were really saying was, "I know this child has the capacity to understand this material but I don't have the power to help them do that." It wasn't about you. It was about them.
Children don't understand that. Children internalize everything. They blame themselves and you blamed yourself.
I would say that compliments can cut both ways. If a gifted student or child is encouraged in a productive way it can have a magnifying effect on outcomes but I think that has to be balanced with the understanding that social, emotional, and physical skills are completely orthogonal. Work ethic is also completely orthogonal.
But you know, we do this too with other natural gifts. My exceptionally tall friends were constantly encouraged to enter sports like basketball. Tall people are built up emotionally through compliments that they receive on a daily basis from people. I would say it's not necessarily bad to compliment smart people for being smart.
I was a short scrawny kid growing up and I was bullied but I definitely took solace in the fact that I had a higher IQ than most people.
Anecdote is not the singular of data and all that, but I am exceptionally tall as well (would be in at least the top third or so of most NBA rosters) and yet was not encouraged to play sports as a child, largely due to my anxiety exacerbated at least somewhat by not having any extra money for luxuries like joining sports teams.
That is to say, I fucking hate having to say "no" every time (and it happens at least once every couple weeks) I am asked if or where I played basketball.
I'm also somewhere around 3 std dev above average IQ (mid 130s if I look at SAT equivalents, ~150 if GRE) and experienced the "but you're so good at school, why don't you like it" stuff.
In both cases, physical and... mental feels wrong, but it's the best word I've got, I feel as though I have wasted huge gifts. I don't take solace in any of it.
And since I'm full of anecdotes tonight, your bullying comment made me remember another. I had a target on my back for bullying due to my size I believe, everyone wanted to take a shot. I once got gang tackled by about 5/6 football players when I was 16 - the resultant slamming of my right knee into the tile floor means it will be my "trick" knee for the rest of my life. So, the size didn't give me a pass - if anything it made me stand out more. YMMV and all that.
Nobody asks me if I play any sports at all, ever. Because I have unremarkable physical traits.
A lot of people will just stream their consciousness in the case that they observe a trait that they wish they had. It's a projection, but it's also a tell.
Is it the anxiety that makes you feel wrong for receiving compliments?
Not on something completely subjective like this, no I'm not going to provide sources. It's my personal opinion from my own personal experience. And no, the existence of an alternative point-of-view in a blog post does not invalidate my personal experience.
If you excel in any other trait, people will acknowledge it and praise you for it, especially visual traits. Beauty, height, strength, speed, endurance, etc. Intelligence, by contrast, is rarely acknowledged. It's not as easily discerned. Confidence is an important part of achieving your best potential. Learning to accept compliments with grace is an important skill for life. Giving yourself such compliments is even more important.
Obviously smart people need to understand that their intelligence does not protect them from being wrong or delusional or failure. That's an important part of growing up and maturing for any human though.
The use of language extends beyond smart/dumb and includes concepts of good/bad.
I found that a lot of concepts of child-rearing overlaps with management, but with different labels. My grad-level Nursing Ethics class discussed qualities of a nursing leader, that employees need to made to feel personal worth. I made the link with ideas expressed by Mr. Rogers and on Sesame Street.
I never got my IQ tested or if I did I never learned the result or didn't care enough to remember it, but I did pretty well on standardized tests (e.g. great scores on SAT and ACT with no prep) and people were always saying I was smart. Usually it was something like this: I was obviously capable of doing the work, so why didn't I? I was an absolutely abysmal student all the way through college, though I did graduate.
To be honest I have been pretty successful despite that, but I don't feel like I'm as smart as people were always trying to convince me I was, or at least I have a different sort of intelligence from the sort of thing they were implying, and I definitely have a complex now where I don't like to expose myself to failure. I guess there was not much else to praise about me except for my apparent general intelligence, but I wish they'd come up with something. I was, I think, a friendly, creative, thoughtful kid? But that's not enough, is it?
This thread made me think. Some of the symptoms of ADD seem to describe much of my behavior to a shocking precision, mostly lack of executive function. But I wasn't hyperactive so I wasn't sure it applied to me. Still, I lose track of time when working on projects I enjoy. That doesn't even invalidate the progress I make on them, but the act of me deciding to work on them on a whim and forgetting everything else until I'm too tired to go on is a very common occurrence for me.
At a young age my parents were told by someone I did not have AD(H)D. I believed them. But later when I was living on my own I felt his methodology lacked credibility. (He was a person who called his treatment "turbo-drive psychotherapy" and dismissed questions about its effectiveness, calling them "pooh-poohing the next generation of technology". Not really someone who would want to hold an intellectual dialogue).
Looking back on it in the present I realized that if my parents were going to tell me I was or wasn't X or Y at that age, I was going to believe them - for as long as they were physically around to assert it. It had always felt wrong to disagree. For various reasons I had internalized that argument was not a means to find truth but instead an unreasonable risk when you could be locked in a closet for it.
I'm not sure what being diagnosed today would do for me since it wouldn't change any of that. Though it could give some more clarity to my past.
I think if I were going to be diagnosed with a mental disorder it would most appropriately be GAD, though it's said to be a common comorbidity of ADHD so who knows. I practice mindfulness, which helps a little when things get bad.
I go back and forth on it, though, because (as I mentioned) I've been successful in "real life" without any kind of psych treatment and looking back on my childhood "bad" decisions that were held up as evidence of my badness and the necessity of medicating me, e.g. neglecting my summer homework in favor of playing outside every day, I have to say that a lot of them (including that one) were great decisions. The worst thing was that the world was unwilling to let me be a child, and the best thing was that I said fuck you to the world and was a child anyway. Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot of people can benefit from them, and I also believe they would have stolen something from me that could never be repaid.
What if the world had simply accepted me for the person I was? There would have been no need, then, to engineer some misguided praise in the hope of turning me into something that I wasn't. I don't practically expect the world to be fair, nor to supply a weirdly-shaped hole for every weirdly-shaped peg, but I'm not sure it's best to reach for the DSM-5 whenever such a peg appears.
Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing
me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot
of people can benefit from them, and I also believe
they would have stolen something from me that could
never be repaid.
Amen. Medication would have made some things easier but would, I think, have robbed me of some things as well.
I had to come up with tons of strategies to work around ADHD and/or anxiety or whatever the hell it was. Because I literally didn't know what those things were, and I went through school before ADHD diagnoses started to really boom. Would I have used ADHD as a crutch? I honestly don't know. I can honestly say I'd have been tempted to.
I wish that childhood had been easier, and I had known that I wasn't "lazy or crazy."
Frankly I wish I could have just had therapy and a life coach for that stuff, rather than meds. Teach me to fish, don't hand me a fish.
I think we're very similar. I've been pretty successful in my life (I'm only 29 so there's plenty of time for critical failure), but the way I observe the value that I add to my workplace and peers is totally different from what I see others doing. I know that I'm smart, that I'm creative, and that I can solve complex problems. I struggle with a lot of "basic" things, like reading a whole paragraph before diving into solving a (the wrong) problem, or speaking so fast I mix up or jam words together.
I also have just a crippling fear of failure, so bad that I just never do anything that really tests my abilities. I failed an Amazon interview 10 years ago and I can't bring myself to give a fair shot to most tech companies.
It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
> I also have just a crippling fear of failure, so bad that I just never do anything that really tests my abilities. I failed an Amazon interview 10 years ago and I can't bring myself to give a fair shot to most tech companies.
Let me give you a kick in the ass. You failed an Amazon interview when you were 19? For me, the difference between 19 and 29 was the difference between being a kid with literally zero practical skills, in college but not studying anything with "computer" in the name, and being an adult with the ability to walk into FAANMG^[1] interviews, pass them, and survive mostly-happily in the caustic environments therein.
Though it will be work, and you may encounter setbacks, you are ready for your next step. I completely relate to the feeling that despite knowing you are smart, creative, and able to solve complex problems, you're somehow still not good enough to get hired, but it's all in your head. You should not be worrying about whether you can get hired, but rather where you want to get hired, if getting hired is even the thing you really want to do.
> It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
I've found that "being vulnerable" can be an effective tool for building rapport, as long as you don't get too weird. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't worry about anything you've said here.
^[1] Not to say I attach any particular value to these companies, but their interviews are generally accepted to be on the challenging side.
Hey Alex. I'm starting a YouTube channel where I do mock tech interviews and then provide feedback afterward, the goal is to show everyone what a hiring manager is looking for and to help you see a clearer perspective about how you present during an interview. Is this something you're interested in? I'd love to set you up with one.
I did pretty well on standardized tests (e.g. great
scores on SAT and ACT with no prep) and people were
always saying I was smart. Usually it was something
like this: I was obviously capable of doing the work,
so why didn't I?
I experienced this as well. I think many did!
Two explanations come to mind. I think both of them are probably true to some degree for many people.
1. High intelligence does not always equate to high executive functioning. Lots of smart people have trouble focusing on things they don't want to do, and that focus is generally a requirement for people who become "high achievers" by society's traditional standards.
2a. Those standardized tests only cover certain sorts of intelligence. My brother did well on those tests, but I did quite a bit better. Yet I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is at least my equal if not my better when it comes to smarts. It's just that those tests tended to cover things that weren't his strengths. In my case I feel like perhaps those tests may have painted a too-rosy picture of my intelligence since they catered to some of my strengths.
I'd like to add to not saying "you're so smart," you should say "wow it looks like you worked really hard at that." Makes the kid realize that's what's important, the effort.
But is it the case in life that effort is always rewarded? No. Look you can invest an incredible amount of effort into constructing a bridge. If it collapses and kills people, nobody cares about how much effort went into it. It was a faulty design.
Human civilization is advanced by working smarter, not harder.
In practice and in the work place, the only thing that matters is if you get your work done or not. You can spend a lot of effort on things and get almost nothing done... I know programmers who spent 2+ years on custom unit-testing solutions (and I guess management never noticed this guy was spinning his wheels on something that has been solved in multiple github projects or something...)
Just because he put a lot of work in doesn't mean that other engineers respected his work or even he got anything done. All it means is that he wasted 2-years on the project.
This therapist had some interesting methods, most of which I think did me a ton of good. We talked a lot about the fallacies of "motivation" and "discipline", which are both just carrot-sticks people use to beat themselves up for not doing things they don't _really_ want to do, but wish they did.
We talked a lot about how literally no one on earth is capable of seeing an understanding your flaws as well as you, but also most humans on earth are infinitely less interested. The lens you view yourself with is totally unrelated to the lens with which the rest of the world sees you; you'll drive yourself insane if you think you and the world interpret you the same.
The point is, I think he did a phenomenal job at blasting my self deprecating brain into reality, but his initial spin of "Stop treating yourself like you're an idiot, because you're not and I can prove it" was just a slight misstep.
After reading both of your posts, are you sure it was a misstep? Maybe realizing that you were intelligent did hurt in the short term, but was a necessary step towards improving your attitude in the long term?
Obviously I'm just theorizing from my armchair and don't know more than you about this, or want to be agreed with, it's just that your post sparked my interest and I'd like to know more because my hunch is that removing excuses to not change oneself is generally a reasonable thing to do, even if it can hurt in the short term. In fact, it kind of worked for me to improve myself in the past (not regarding intelligence or academic/professional achievements, but other aspects of life). Maybe it depends on the particular person and situation?
I'd love to believe it was the right move because I'd love to continue giving this therapist more credit, but I'm not sure.
It' might've helped things looking forward, but looking backward I think it wasn't great. As in, "I am so smart and yet thus far have accomplished nothing." So, maybe that's a debt to be paid, and once paid a person is able to move forward at a better trajectory than before? That might make sense to me.
>We talked a lot about how literally no one on earth is capable of seeing an understanding your flaws as well as you, but also most humans on earth are infinitely less interested. The lens you view yourself with is totally unrelated to the lens with which the rest of the world sees you; you'll drive yourself insane if you think you and the world interpret you the same.
What was the lesson you learned specifically from this?
I would describe myself as destructively critical of myself. My body, my work performance, the things I say, the way I say them, pretty much everything. So, as an example, if you misspoke while talking to someone, the lesson was "Don't spend two days destroying yourself about one minor slip up, for certain nobody noticed and if they did they didn't really care."
You're aware of your flaws because they're a part of you, but that doesn't mean that anyone else notices them.
However good at a given thing you are probably depends on whether you form custom internal imagery or audio that helps you be better at that thing. Maybe a way to think about it is that analytical thinking can do a lot, but it can't do what someone can do when they are visualizing with imagery, internally.
If anyone is into Yoga, or Yogachara, the way they put it is that internal formations (imagination or historic image/sound data/logging ala Parakalpita) represents one type of thinking (which everyone does not necessarily do) and analytical or "thinking mind" represents another type of thinking which everyone does, but may not be their primary mode.
From a few of my interviews about this topic:
- Old business acquaintance can visualize 2D seismic data in augmented reality 3D. He can literally see underground in his mind in front of him in his office.
- Musically inclined acquaintance (singer) can hear all the accompaniment music for performances in her mind.
- Guy who designed my kitchen can see my kitchen in his head.
"You're so smart, why are you unable to do X ??".
Which only made me feel as if I was dumb.
Yeah, I got this a lot. It reflects such an outdated way of thinking about intelligence - that it's just a single number.
You can be superintelligent in general, and bad at lots of specific things. Or even bad at most things! It's not a contradiction in the slightest.
I think that IQ has become less and less emphasized over the years, and that's a good thing. It has some utility, IMO, but a lot of care needs to be taken when it comes to applying it to... well, anything.
My own theory is that really bad decisions often require a degree of intelligence as they are often driven by sheer hubris rather than calm logical thinking.
Just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you're not irrational. Having intelligence is pretty meaningless except in IQ tests and similar puzzles. Applying your intelligence effectively is what it's all about.
Agreed, however those who arent intelligent repeat the same emotional responses over and over. Intelligence gives you the possibility of changing that, unintelligent dont have that possibility.
I'm not so sure high intelligence really protects you from reacting with emotions or act irrationally. Plenty of intelligent people can still react very emotionally or even irrationally. Though I suppose reacting intellectually has a higher pay-off for them than for most.
I liken it to being tall. Some people are tall. They can do things more easily than others. No one says that height is a myth.
People get really defensive around intelligence though. Everyone wants to be at least average if not above average. If they can't claim it in one area, they'll try to redefine intelligence to include themselves. And we do have the habit of mistaking institutional knowledge for intelligence.
I've met people who were more or less knowledgeable in certain areas, yes. I've met people who were more or less skilled in certain areas, yes.
But for people who I would consider as intelligent, it's not a result of just knowledge. Or just skills.
I would trust their ability to "get" concepts they've been previously ignorant of relatively quickly. The wheels just spin faster.
And a lot like height, there's diminishing returns and what not. I can get a step ladder, then being tall is just a fact. Being intelligent can help you get a concept quicker, but once we both understand it, there's no effective difference.
But no one gets defensive about height. Or strength. Or anything with visible qualifiers. Which is funny, because intelligent people are better at thinking in the abstract and intelligence and the results of it are abstract.
> If the results are reward for effort then they are earns.
Too much of that "focus on the effort" and you end up with a generation of bureaucrats - people that are good at miming processes and posturing but not capable of producing anything of actual value. Society doesn't care about the efforts, it cares about results. No matter how much neurosurgery you studied, if a patient dies at your table no family member will reward you for your "effort".
> It too me a decade to undo the damage from always been told I was bright and never learning good habits for studying/persistence.
The issue is not then about being result-vs-effort focus. The issue here is that unfortunately you didn't get people to push you for your best and to get out of your comfort zone.
> Too much of that "focus on the effort" and you end up with a generation of bureaucrats
The best things in life typically reward effort spent with incremental results, which come with their own dopamine rush. It's something I wish I had been made to understand at a much earlier age.
Here's a short list:
- Cooking
- Playing an instrument
- Singing
- Painting
- Drawing
- Writing
- Learning (..a language, a new skill, etc)
- Developing and maintaining valuable social and romantic relationships into adulthood
- Any and all sports
- Crafting
- Raising children
The goal obviously isn't to maximize effort, it's simply to reinforce the link between effort and results and help the child understand that they can coast off their natural abilities (as we all have/do), but if they want to improve or excel in something that they enjoy then it will take real effort.
I don't want us to talk past one another. My only issue with parent's post is that "focusing on the effort as its own reward" is going too much to the other extreme. "Rewarding for the effort" seems to me just as misguided as "praising for being smart", that's all.
I don’t see much wrong with rewarding for outcome. That’s how adults seem to work - your boss praises you for getting stuff done, not for being bright or putting effort in. You have to avoid the trap of only praising for PERFECT outcome, rather than incremental steps towards perfection, but I know I feel best being praised for a tangible thing I achieved rather than intangible intelligence or effort.
(Well, some bosses try to praise for effort but I’ve always found it to be really patronising or a barely-disguised attempt to get you to work overtime.)
> A lot of my teachers... and one of my parents... made this mistake with me. "You're so smart, why are you unable to do X ??"
Maybe I was fortunate that my parents are also smart. My dad once shared that he completely understood that we (his kids) struggled so much with finishing university and finishing the stuff we worked on. He had many of the same problems (though he did finish his PhD). He never managed to teach me that discipline to follow through and get stuff done, though. But at least I wasn't judged and made to feel dumb for it.
My oldest son again has the same traits of high intelligence and extreme laziness. I'm trying to teach him better ways to handle this. I try to emphasize the importance of doing the work, doing homework, finishing projects, focus, and sometimes just doing what is necessary whether you like it or not. I try to de-emphasize intelligence without making him feel dumb. He knows he's smart, and he knows it a little too well in my opinion, but I try to praise him for the things he does, rather than for how smart he is. I try to challenge his intelligence, but also try to steer him towards things that aren't about IQ, like art or sports. (He's not interested though; he mostly just wants to play Minecraft and build beautiful houses and complex machinery there. Close enough, I guess.)
I began to feel guilty for wasting my intelligence. I knew my older brother was at least as smart as me, and fell into an addiction cycle early on, so I was determined to not follow in his footsteps.
Granted, I still went on to slack off and spend 7 years as an undergrad, but it payed off in the end.
To be fair, I work in finance and the people who are successful are often pretty "stupid". (CAs, I am looking at you.) Whatever it is that an IQ test scores, it doesn't score for success in business or in "life".
In order for this not to be a useless post, FWIW: most mathematicians that I know and that are highly regarded would not do well in IQ tests, I would think. The clever ones solve problems and move on; the pioneers are less clever, more committed and more random, idiosyncratic.
Mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, but IQ at age 7 is not indicative of much. And paying attention to it is actively detrimental.
First of all at the tail of the IQ distribution, the normal approximation breaks down. Secondly, we get a big jump in mental development when we hit our growth spurts. So IQ at that age is not massively well-correlated with your IQ a few years later.
But that doesn't get into why it is actively detrimental. It turns out that children are motivated to seek confirmation of what they are complimented on. So a child who is told they are smart seeks easy tasks where they look smart, and tends to avoid hard tasks that might show them not to be so smart. While children who are complimented on their hard work and willingness to learn will seek out challenges to push themselves.
Research indicates that this effect sets in shockingly easily. And the two groups respond very differently to setbacks. The ones who are complimented on what they are gets demotivated. The ones who are complimented on what they do get motivated to tackle it again.
Your personal life is an anecdotal data point, but it fits perfectly. You were identified young as smart. It was drilled in enough that you know exactly how smart. But it sounds like you learned to coast on brains and avoid challenges, and are now suffering the consequences.
Unless you are an outlier on either side of the spectrum (e.g. 80 or 150), IQ isn't very indicative of anything.
And why would anyone believe it should be? Do you really think a test with a relatively small set of questions, written by a biased group of individuals is going to be representative of human intelligence?
It baffles me that IQ is used as any kind of meaningful measurement beyond showing whether someone is mentally retarded or a prodigy.
It's strongly correlated with outcomes in life and better than any psychological test we have.
First we should understand that IQs and life outcomes follow normal distributions and there's plenty of exceptions to the rule...but as a general trend, the relationship is indisputable. This has been studied for over a century. This suggests that IQ tests are fairly good at gaging mental faculties.
Height gives an advantage in many ways across human society. This is a physical attribute that we have little control over, yet it influences outcomes in jobs, social interactions, sports, dating, etc. Height also follows a normal distribution across populations. There is no reason to believe that mental faculties do not have similar physical mechanisms and that a normal distribution does not exist across populations.
It's trivial to study the effect of IQ independent of socioeconomic background. You can segment your study based on these factors. You can also look at outcomes among siblings. IQ is strongly correlated independent of all these factors. It's been studied for over 100 years. It's been sliced every way you can think of.
Says the research. In response to your point a few posts up about explaining correlations with IQ being the parents influence, IQ is also correlated to social mobility.
"Childhood IQ and achieved education level were significantly and independently associated with upward mobility between the ages of 5 and 49-51 years. Only education was significantly associated (positively) with upward social mobility between 5 and 25 years, and only childhood IQ (again positively) with upward social mobility between 25 and 49-51 years. Childhood IQ was significantly negatively associated with downward social mobility. Adult height, childhood housing conditions, adverse events in childhood and sex were not significant determinants of upward or downward social mobility in this cohort."
No one has claimed those facts are irrefutable. They are claiming that they simply haven't been refuted yet.
I can tell you exactly how to refute those studies. Perform a controlled scientific study that disproves those results. Let me tell you, if you really believe in it, you could be a superstar academic and you sell a lot of books. Disproving such a large body of research would be a big achievement, especially one as unpopular as IQ.
No one is arguing that IQ is invalid. It is not the be-all-end-all metric of intelligence and success, nor is it as accurate as people make it out to be. It measures a narrow spectrum of intelligence.
Treat IQ as a blackbox. It doesn't matter what people think it measures or what it actually measures. Those things are psychological not psychometric.
So let's consider it psychometrically:
1. Does it measure something? Yes it does. This something is consistent across time as people's IQs do not vary dramatically. It is "stable". So whatever it measures is not spurious.
2. Ok so we measure an actual thing. Is the thing it measures distinct? Yes it is. It's been controlled for against every conceivable variable like education, socioeconomic background, and family health. Whatever it is measuring, it is definitely an independent thing, not a representation of something else.
3. Is the real independent thing we're measuring even important? Maybe it's just like fingerprints, real but essentially random and inconsequential. It turns out it correlates with all kinds of things. It acts as a predictor in all kinds of outcomes. It is the strongest predictor available in psychometry. If you could only administer one test to a subject, testing this thing is the most revealing test.
So, regardless of what IQ is, we know what it isn't. We know it isn't fake, unimportant, random, or a combination of other factors.
This is deeply unpopular and goes against many people's core beliefs about society and education, but the science is well-founded.
It can be refuted but it has to be refuted with science, not quotes, metaphors, and anecdotes.
Again, no one is arguing that IQ is meaningless. It is less meaningful the closer you are to the middle of the Bell Curve though. And it is not an end-all measurement of human intelligence.
The reviewers shared a 20-point critique of the paper prior to publication that was ignored by the publisher and researchers. In fact, their results clearly showed the existence of a general intelligence until they performed an unnecessary rotation which is mentioned in Appendix B point 7.
Whether or not IQ has human meaning, social value, or is the "end-all" are subjective arguments that are not within the scope of IQ study. Statistically we know that so far out of all the psychometric scores that have been invented it is the strongest one. Better measurements will most definitely be invented, but they haven't so far.
It's not just me. It's 100+ years of psychological evidence. It is the strongest psychological test we have. The military uses similar concepts in the AFQT to determine suitability for recruitment and advancement for certain positions. The military has been using concepts like this since World War I, where it was important to scale up a military quickly. Our survival depended on having smart people with disparate educational backgrounds (remember the U.S. was much more rural and less educated than today) in the right places, rapidly. How do you do this without IQ tests?
'One study on nine groups of soldiers differing in job and reading ability found a correlation of .96 between the AFQT and reading achievement (Sticht, Caylor, Kern, & Fox, 1972)... Another study obtained reading scores for 17-year olds for those same ethnic groups and dates (Campbell et al., 2000) and found a correlation of .997 between reading scores and AFQT scores.' [1]
'Cognitive ability tests taken at age 11 correlate 0.81 with national school examinations taken at age 16.' [2]
Note that .96 and .81 are huge correlations. These results have been replicated across 100+ years of psychological research across cultural boundaries and across multiple disciplines.
Can you make up for lower IQ with higher work ethic? Yes, but like a shorter than average NBA player, you're going to be at a disadvantage. By no means does the existence of shorter than average NBA players suggest that you should expect shorter than average men to be just as likely to succeed as taller than average men.
“It has always seemed to be odd that we like to call the human brain the most complex known object in the Universe, yet many of us are still prepared to accept that we can measure brain function by doing a few so-called IQ tests,” Dr Highfield said.
I wonder, what is your opinion on Murray's and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve?
I don't think it's a perfect measure but it's the best we've got. No other psychological measure has the predictive power of IQ tests. The key to a good experiment is it's predictive capacity. IQ tests are very good predictors of reading comprehension, academic outcomes, and economic outcomes. If a weather forecast 5-20 years into the future were to hit the mark 80-90% of the time we would call that a great model.
If said model only predicted whether it will rain or not.
But not really. You pulled those numbers out of the air, and they aren't very descriptive.
Will someone with a 140 IQ fair better academically and economically than someone with 130 90% of the time?
140 vs 100, sure. But as the # of standard deviations converges, it's less meaningful. And there are still other covariant factors you are failing to consider, as mentioned before.
The point is that no matter which way you slice it, IQ stands out.
On average, people raised in poor environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in poor environments with lower IQ. More likely to be more upwardly mobile, more likely to be more whatever.
And on average, people raised in good environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in good environments who have lower IQ.
If you're a person of color, on average, you're going to do better if you have a higher IQ than if you have a lower IQ.
Same if you're a woman.
And 140 vs 130 is a bit unfair. You're talking about looking for meaningful differences between less than 2% of the population as compared to less than 0.1% of the population.
And just because there are diminishing returns with something like IQ, doesn't make it useless.
100 and 110 you might see more differences in the aggregate.
That's the other thing, you do have to look at the whole. Because there is likely overlap. But the trend of note is that IQ tracks through it.
If you sort people by earning potential, you'll find that as average income goes up, so does average IQ.
When you sort by health outcomes. As average healthiness goes up, so does average IQ.
Even the outcomes that are colloquially contrasted with intelligence actually correlate well. In other words, if you sorted people by EQ, you'll find that better average EQ means better average IQ.
IQ is the aspartame of psychology. So maligned that it's been probably studied more than other things. And just like aspartame is perfectly fine, IQ does what it says on the tin.
> It is the strongest psychological test we have. [...] The military has been using concepts like this since World War I, where it was important to scale up a military quickly.
While I don't dispute that IQ tests correlate with smarts, the argument that "The WW1 military was very motivated, therefore their decisions must have been rational" isn't a particularly good one IMHO - because there are a great many counter-examples.
Figures 1 and 2 of https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2007-zagorsky.pdf strongly support the idea that it's the outliers which have the biggest impact on the correlation between iq and income/wealth; specifically, the low-iq outliers.
Found the 80 IQ who can't live with the fact that he's not special. IQ tests are based on this thing we invented a while ago, the SCIENTIFIC METHOD, there's no bias in it.
You still might be, unintentionally. This "praising kids for effort" is based on "mindset" research by Carol Dweck. Her Wikipedia page highlights a few criticisms of her work, in particular that the research isn't replicable and the interventions (in schools) don't produce results.
Anecdotally, it worked on my kids to ridiculous degree. Complimenting them meant that they will do the thing more and more and get better in the process.
Outright telling them that "you like this" made them like the thing. Opposite made them dislike it. Including food and activities.
Even to a lesser degree of dysfunction, gifted kids often find that they can do reasonably well at a wide array of activities. If you're instantly competent at 10% of everything you try, you quickly have more than enough things to keep you busy, engaged, and interesting at parties. Why would you suffer through anything else?
Which is one of the reasons I studied the board game Go for almost 4 years after I lost all hope of ever being good at it. At the time it was one of the few things I did despite being just good enough to teach complete beginners, but never any better.
The guy I was learning from was a really good teacher and was charitably amused by my lack of progress. I knew I was never going to find a gentler way to fail and be okay with it.
I was tested as a kid and redirected into magnet schools and programs like CTY as a result. I remember my first day in the first magnet school and feeling like I had finally found a group of people "like me". I was 9 years old. I agree with a lot of what you said and especially about the importance of teaching resiliency. But I wouldn't discount the huge benefit to identifying certain outliers early and providing them with gifted education pathways outside of the mainstream.
> But I wouldn't discount the huge benefit to identifying certain outliers early and providing them with gifted education pathways outside of the mainstream.
I think it's useful to substitute athletic talent for intellectual talent when thinking about this stuff. Does anybody discount the value of getting an athletically talented kid into a school with a good athletics program where they can be around peers and coaches who will enable them to be the best athlete they can be? Would anybody argue in favor of letting some kid with the athletic talent to try for the NBA flounder at whatever high school they happen to naturally feed into?
I think the answers to those questions are obvious. And yet we regularly have people arguing that somehow the same principles don't apply to intellectual talent. It's ridiculous. Let the mental prodigies be with their peers. It hurts no one and does them lots of good.
I would argue that, for two reasons. First, kids in those special programs often ends up with harmed bodies way too soon. There is a lot of pressure to perform, it is highly competitive and health is often the price. Only few get that prized career, others get nothing.
Second, non-athletic education and interests get lost in the process. And again, most kids wont end with that career as there are only few slots and many competing kids.
There really aren’t that many sports where you sacrifice your body to achieve a certain level of performance. And I think the academic neglect thing is overblown. You probably have college athletes in mind, but it’s useful to keep in mind that what appears to be academic neglect is probably often just non-intellectual athletes doing as well in college as they would have done had they not been athletes.
I had a high IQ at school so at some point I was flagged as gifted, and they proposed my parents that I should skip a course. They refused, and I'm very grateful that they did so.
It's true that I was better at school than my peers, the pace of teaching was too slow for me and I got bored easily. But it was also true that in other aspects, especially social aspects, I wasn't more mature than my peers. And being smart and having different interests (say, computers, space or philosophy instead of football, etc.) doesn't exactly help socializing at school. I was always relatively unpopular (not marginalized, fortunately, as I did have my group of friends, but I did get my dose of demeaning from many others) and not very good in my advances with the opposite sex (when the age came to be interested in that).
Altogether, I think my school years could be called rather OK (taking into account that, as mentioned, people with "nerd" interests tend to not be too well-liked). But if I had skipped a year, and I had been in class with people one year older, with more social maturity, with everyone knowing that I skipped course, the girls seeing me as too young to even think about considering... I think it would have been hell.
I'm aware it's not exactly what you're talking about. You imply a specific school for gifted kids. Still, I think it wouldn't have been a good idea. When you finish school, or university, there's a point where you have to interact socially with "normal" people. Both at work and social life. I learned those interaction skills at school. I learned, for example, to fake interest when people talked about what I deemed to be trivial maters, like football, TV shows and the likes (or later, even to have some genuine interest and get off my high horse sometimes). I learned when I should switch off nerd mode (for example when trying to interact with the opposite sex, especially at the beginning) and when I could actually benefit from it. I think those skills were vital for my well-being. And I doubt I could have learned them equally well at a school where I weren't able to socialize with "normal" people.
A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above. Significant differences have been noted in the young people’s educational status and direction, life satisfaction, social relationships, and self-esteem as a function of the degree of academic acceleration their schools permitted them in childhood and adolescence. The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated, or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school. Without exception, these young people possess multiple talents; however, for some, the extent and direction of talent development has been dictated by their schools’ academic priorities or their teachers’ willingness or unwillingness to assist in the development of particular talent areas.
The Pygmalion effect contradicts what you wrote. It showed that society's expectation of a student (regarding his intelligence) play a direct role on grades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
This is a surprisingly insightful blog post, which I wasn't expecting, considering the click-baity title. But I think I see now where my parents went wrong in raising me - the self-esteem movement, which the Gen Xers inherited, played too much a role in my rearing, methinks.
I think a lot of what you've said is true with me. I also think there is a "use it or lose it" particularity with IQ, as well. A close friend of mine, who, like me, also has an advanced degree and, like me, also doesn't use it or even know how to get into a job/career situation that would allow for it, also shares the feeling I have of being super freaking mentally stuck, socially isolated, demotivated, left behind, and prematurely burned out. So I'm not saying I blame our parents' generation for instilling arbitrary self-esteem in us, when cultivating discipline would have been far more helpful, and I'm not saying that it's their fault for instilling in us obsolete values and expectations for the future, for a world they never could have predicted, but perhaps I'll look into that e-book. Thank you for your comment.
I also took an IQ test as a child, but I have no recollection of it and my mother never told me my score. I'm grateful for this---I did identify with my intelligence for a long period in adolescence, but I never had any institutional or scientific authority behind it, merely a vague sense that "you're smart."
Now I'm a comfy SWE. I've been spending a lot of time reading to try and give myself the tools to resolve the various neuroses I developed as a teen, and it's going well. I still don't know what my score on that test was and I don't really care.
IQ is not bullshit, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to make your life better or save it.
The article exactly mentions that anxiety and depression are amplified in folks like yourself. You have to overcome them to use your pseudo-superpower to save the world... or not, who knows is it even worth saving? idk
Compound the extra psychological difficulty you face with the improbability of finding someone who understands you, with the counter-intuitive understanding of your situation as desirable by everyone less smart than you are, you're so lucky, I wish I was as smart as you, "no you don't, but you wouldn't understand" ...
It sets you up for a very lonely life. Isolation can lead to insanity.
What I'm trying to say is: What you are experiencing is normal for someone like you.
No! It's not bullshit. It is a measurable human trait that is correlated to a wide range of life outcomes. It might actually be the most correlatable human trait there is.
Yes, some of those life outcomes are good and some of those life outcomes are bad. That doesn't make it bullshit.
What it most often means, if you have a high IQ, is that you have a choice and more often many choices, because you can see more choices and it's overwhelming and it's easy to give up and say fuck it all this is bullshit and SWE (I am so embarrassed to say I had to look up SWE even though I am a software engineer and one of the SWEs was smoke weed every day, ha!)
Which brings me to my point! If you have high IQ, you can be a SWE or SWE.
I appreciate your comment. It reminded me of a quote I heard once (probably on this board) that shed light on my childhood experience and helped me better understand myself:
>When a child is dealing with anxiety/anxious behavior, it's better to treat the parents than to take the kid into therapy.
Something along these lines. It helped me realize or reinforce that, while my father has had and has anxiety/depression for most of his life, his legacy might not be as much genetically imprinted on me insofar that it's of learned behavior.
In other words, I recalled a rather generic memory (which means it probably happened multiple times): I was at home, minding my own business, when it became clear that someone was expected at the house - perhaps the cable guy, a plumber, or someone like that - and I remember watching my father _wait_ for this person. Like, he would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, but would go put on his shoes, then take them off, then pace around the living room, then open and shut the door, pace a little more, and sit down for a few moments, and repeat. And I recall wondering what was bothering him. And I think this was him dealing with his general anxiety and I notice this sort of behavior in myself (or at least the nagging urge to _do something_ in order to feel more comfortable somehow). So now I think I know why I get certain thoughts at certain times (and realize I don't have to respond to them in the way I think my father would).
This is probably the healthy sort of realization people try to discover in therapy. I have had the fortune of seeing a handful of decent-to-great therapists throughout my life, and I have tried to mentally stash away the best gleanings, so as to justify all the time, money, and energy spent talking to these people.
>BTW, what's a SWE?
I thought this was the acronym people used for "software engineer". Maybe I won't use it anymore. What I was trying to express was my, well, feelings of inferiority /slash/sour grapes due to my perceived lack of career/professional success at age 30, a sense which seems to get worse and more bitter as I get older, which I would _really_ like to nip in the bud, because every time I let it take hold, it always leads to bad/negative thinking, prejudice, poor self-image, envy of others, and those sorts of things. Maybe it's Perpetual Late Bloomer Syndrome?
Anxiety and depression are terrible issues, I hope you figure out the key for that lock soon.
The other side of this is 'lazy as shit' - in terms of psychometric measures, you're largely describing conscientiousness, one of the five OCEAN traits. IQ and conscientiousness both correlate with income, but it's their combination that really makes for economic high achievers. Sounds like you have half the triforce, as it were.
You may very well be highly intelligent but not conscientious. There are lots of people like this, it's not a sin, just a personality. I will say that conscientiousness is probably more valuable than IQ in many ways, but IQ is nothing to scoff at. Imagine being in the same situation as you, but being dumb as well.
>But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted!
You can do anything you want. The trick is that 'wanting' here doesn't mean 'I want to have the results of having done that long arduous risky focused effort'. It means 'I want to go through that long arduous risky focused effort'. Most people don't want anything like that, though.
To say "You can go to the gym," is not the same as saying, "You're entitled to be jacked." It just means you're allowed to strive.
I measured a similarly high score as a child (my parents refused to reveal to me the exact number, but told me it was somewhere in the 130-150 range; I guess now as an adult I could ask them if they remember the exact number; but I've never felt it important enough to ask.)
I haven't done badly in life, but I've always felt I could have done a lot better if I had better executive functioning. If somehow I could have traded some of my IQ points for better executive functioning points (is there such a thing?), I'd happily take that trade.
I've observed that high IQ people who tend to function well — certainly not a given — are extremely disciplined.
Basically as I see it, using every bit of rational intelligence to tame and condition the rest of their being (emotions, health, social, will, etc), develop all the other forms of intelligence.
The 'dark path' for most seems to be an ironic world view, which leads to a sarcastic mindset and ultimately nihilism if not contained. Hence a major lifelong requirement is to really learn what self-love means.
I have no idea what my IQ is, I just feel it's too much or too little for my own sake; case in point I finally stopped hating myself and learned self love at 34. Changed my life, like step 1 of a major transformation.
The only recommendation I'm certain helps everyone is Stoicism.
> The 'dark path' for most seems to be an ironic world view, which leads to a sarcastic mindset and ultimately nihilism if not contained.
This is a perfectly fine coping mechanism for big-picture stuff (environ. protection, climate change, genotoxic materials, migration, politics); it only becomes highly problematic when you use it as the coping mechanism for everything.
> Stoicism
Depending on the construction stoicism can come quite close to nihilistic world views, actually.
Disclaimer: the following is opinion, I can't prove it or show data. Merely my personal experience (and observation).
About irony/sarcasm: I used to think exactly like you. I must say it was totally flawed. I don't know how to word this scientifically (and please understand I'm not religious): sarcasm hurts your soul, your heart, your mind, your spirit. It's like drugs: short term good but really bad long term.
It helps for some time and then slowly eats at you. A sarcastic person is in effect trading the possibility of hope for the comfort of accepting things. There is a way where you keep both, through forgiving, through understanding, with humility.
Humor gets a pass when it speaks of bad things, or in a bad manner, because it's a way of denouncing said things/manners. Certainly not to validate it. That's where sarcasm has its place IMHO: as a very bad manner that humor serves to show.
About Stoicism: that's true. Hence why I always preface with self-love, because the Stoic apparatus is quite unable to speak of this in modern terms. In general I agree with Ferris on this though: Stoicism is the best operating system for the human mind. Now that I know, I see it and find it in so many things, people, the good side of life (and it seems quite missing in many a miserable path).
Stoicism seems to help me the most. Marcus Aurelius is my hero. Someone who had all the power in the world to indulge, yet said not me. I wish we had leaders like him today.
> executive functioning points (is there such a thing?)
Conscientiousness, a factor in the Five Factor Model of personality, measures something like this. Specifically, the aspect of Industriousness.
However, it's very hard to measure, because virtually any test that measures a person's planning ability almost invariably ends up measuring IQ instead. Basically, the best way to test this right now is to ask a bunch of people around you how "hard working" you are and average the results. Still, it's accurate enough to be reasonably predictive of a lot of interesting phenomena.
I've tried a lot of things to improve my level of organization and productivity with...modest success. Some things that (I think) have helped me:
- Seek out and take on responsibility (work, family, community, etc.) It's painful adjusting at first, but I get used to it and the satisfaction of being depended upon is motivating.
- When faced with a stressful level of responsibility, remember that you will live through it. I used to procrastinate like mad because of a fear of failure. Keeping that thought in mind ("I will live through this") calmed my nerves somewhat. Now I still worry, and still procrastinate, but it's not as bad.
- Write down what you want your life to be like in 1, 3, 5, and maybe even 10 years. Come back to it every now and then. I did this 5 years ago, and while I haven't achieved everything, I've achieved some of what I wanted. I'll take it as a victory.
I believe intelligence (or whatever IQ supposedly measures) has fairly severely decreasing marginal value once you get above median (it's important to have "enough" but not that important to have "a lot").
Right. The further away you drift from the median, the more difficult life gets in certain aspects. Drift far enough and it becomes impossible to fit in society at large, which is a huge penalty. This is true for all kinds of things, not just IQ. Personality traits, for instance.
The sort of rational/analytical (for lack of a better work) intelligence that people talk about is also just not that well compensated/required: you basically need enough to not get scammed & do skilled work, but the best paid people around are businessmen not nuclear physicists and theoretical mathematicians.
I know for me, finding out I had a high IQ made me more arrogant, which was a major problem for me in elementary school. I was always a jerk about being able to understand things easily, to be able to do well in school without trying.
Learning how to not be a dick about being intelligent was probably the most valuable thing I learned at school.
My parents never told me my IQ. They were afraid I would turn into a monster (and given their parenting skills, that wasn't a bad instinct). I learned it from my spouse after she talked to my mother.
Problem is, I thought I was just 'smart'. If there were things I struggled to understand, it was only natural for others not to get it unless I could unpack it for them.
However I also had this notion that when I understood things immediately that I was just 'faster', that in five, ten, fifteen minutes they would figure it out and we'd all be in agreement and everything would be great. Everything was not great, and I would get visibly agitated with people for not getting these completely obvious things.
These are not realistic expectations and certainly are not attractive behaviors.
You'd think that someone with an IQ of 139 would be able to see why the example of his failure to capitalize on his own intelligence doesn't discount the value of IQ as a measurement of general intelligence.
I wonder if that high score had a negative effect on you somehow by making you feel like you were somehow not living up to it.
In any case I wish you well. I have some similarities in my background including high scores, isolation, and depression, and trust me it can get better.
I think that intelligence tends to make high IQ individuals lazy, for lack of an other word, and afraid to try things that can't be easily mastered.
I remember in school understanding and mastering subjects without much trouble and work but once a subject got too hard it was time to move to something else. So for most of my life that has been my method of operating. Unfortunately,for me, that makes it impossible to get far in any career.
Hard work and the ability to work through adversity is what's needed for a successful life. I wish school and parents would stop using IQ as a measure for future success. It's not a good predictor.
I think K-12 education system makes high IQ people lazy because they don't need to try hard to get through a curriculum that was designed for people who learn more slowly. So this sets in as a habit.
I went through gifted programs and thinking back, I probably could have learned calculus by middle school if my education had adapted to my learning rate, but it didn't. We still had the same text books as every other 4th grader, we just covered more of the material in a year.
This was true for me. Up until college things came so easily that I barely had to do any work to get good grades, so I didn’t.
Fortunately college was a kick in the pants for me. First year I went in with the same attitude as high school, that I can just study the night before an exam and ace it. Didn’t go so well in college and I barely passed first year. I got scared enough that hunkered down and really tried for the rest of college. College grades aside I think that experience of having to stick with it and work through adversity really helped me later in life.
IQ is BS. 25/hour is pretty good in most zip codes. Don’t under estimate just how large the income percentiles are, especially for singles. I’ve probably had fewer relationships than you and I’m more than likely older. Modern society erected some serious issues with interpersonal relationships and formations therein. How are we going to meet when there’s so little time and money left over after we’re done fulfilling our societal or personal needs (chores, self care, etc)?
This is also part of why I would never go anywhere near wrecking a relationship by being someone’s “other guy.” It’s too important to society to respect when two people are able to work through all the hoops society places against decent, healthy relationships to go around affecting them when they occur. Edit- Hell, I donate monthly to a charity that benefits single women and mothers to at least feel like I’m doing something for the women of the world that I’m likely to never share my life with.
IQ isn't BS as much as you may wish it to be. I don't know why people feel the need to deny science just so everyone can be on a more level playing field. it's comforting rhetoric but not supported by the evidence.
I don't think a single IQ test is overly meaningful. I did some IQ tests in my youth, which produced interesting numbers (120-140 range); later I took one during my university time, which came back with a two-digit result.
I have done one of the few respectable IQ tests many times (wife is a psychologist working with the tests in question). Regardless of mental form (hung over,sick, high on life) I have scored in the same ballpark.
Most IQ tests (especially self admi istered ones) are BS.
The proper ones are probably the most studied aspects of psychology there are and correlate with a whole lot of things in significant ways.
When I was 30 (3 years ago) I was in the exact same position as you, to the tee. I decided to go BACK to school and get another bachelor's degree in something I actually cared about even though I already had a master's.
Now I'm in my second year in a PhD program in a biomedical program.
Point is: a lot of us start to feel like we made a mistake and it's too late to fix.
Came from a working class rural background. I was in gifted streams but they finished when I was 12. My high school was more focused on keeping troubled students in line than helping gifted ones. Finished school and got a trade. Never felt happy.
At age 30, started comp sci at uni. Best decision I ever made. It fixed the "mistakes" I made in my life choices
I scored 140 when I was 10 or 11, and today 40+ years later I sometimes would like to be able to wind back time before day one and remix my parents DNA with a chimp so that I could score no more than half of that figure.
Being intelligent can be indeed a blessing, but only if you live in the right context, both at home and school (that's parents responsibility when you're a kid), otherwise people will marginalize/bully you; at school just because you are (talk, act, etc) different, at workplace because being more intelligent makes you faster at identifying problems and solving them. Whether or not this turns out into a higher pay you make some enemies anyway because either some colleagues become envious or they now need to work harder because you set a new standard to follow.
Being intelligent can also ruin your life if you have ideals, that is, you would like to change things for the better also for other people. What kills you from the inside is the awareness about something that is awfully bad or wrong and understanding that you are absolutely powerless at changing it, so that you'd rather want to never have known about that problem from start.
Socially speaking things aren't that different: I've got to the point of faking being "normal", both at work or in social life, that is, I had the solution for a problem or something smart to say or do, but kept it for myself because I didn't want to appear different, and I also sometimes wanted to be invited at parties, so I totally understand your point.
The only thing being intelligent helped a lot was finding the right woman (17 years together with highs and lows, mostly highs) but especially at young age one would rather find a wrong one each week than the right one for life. That's where being intelligent doesn't help at all: if you want to have fun, hide as much as you can that you belong in the right part of that gaussian.
BTW, I've got a bit more luck at finding jobs, but mostly because it was before the post 2k crisis; one morning I sent my (almost empty by then) resume to various companies and recruiters, and by lunch time I had like 12 or 13 job offers. That was just crazy; it didn't last long though.
> , at workplace because being more intelligent makes you faster at identifying problems and solving them.
Don't know my IQ but I grew up with a taste and habit of thinking and trying to solve problems, and in some workplaces people want to complain and not solve problems. Weirder than that, if I offer the solution free, they react half negatively (maybe insulted, or shamed ?), and later they may even complain that I stopped offering solutions.
Been there done that, in some places being good at solving problems makes some people think you're attempting to damage them. That attitude is common among workers who aren't good at their job and have no intention to learn, so they see you as an obstacle rather than an opportunity to ask questions. In sane working environments, should some of them get at war with you that wouldn't be a problem since you're better and if a choice among one of you must be taken the result would be obvious, but I've found and experienced on my own butt that when someone reaches a technical position without having the necessary knowledge it usually means he or she is much more socially skilled than you, or has very strong connections with people who take decisions, both aspects making that "enemy" impossible to beat. When you smell a situation like that, just leave asap: any attempt at fighting the war will consume you from within without giving anything in return, except maybe a better knowledge on how to avoid that in the future.
Not sure if it's worth the pain, though: in one really bad situation I've experienced somatized hemorroids for nearly one month before I finally decided to quit, and two days after taking that decision they were completely gone and never returned.
Then in some other rather corrupt places, money is made by dragging the solution ad infinitum or close to it, because penalties for missed releases are crafted in a way that makes delays still more profitable than finishing in time (easier when supplier and customer are "in the same bed" and money comes from the government), so that if you offer a quick solution you immediately see people looking at you like you were a bank robber. Oh the irony:)
Note that this wasn't an engineering position, just an input operator gig, so they weren't hired for skills nor due to network. It just happen that we were all in an Excel Hell and I happened to VBA myself out of some pits.
There's a weird social dynamic that I don't fully understand.. maybe it's fatigue causing lack of desire to learn how to make your job easier and feel inferior .. who knows
Automating part of the process may reduce the drudgery, but there's an existential fear from some people -- that if a part of their job can be automated, they'll be made redundant. Or the boss will ask them to do more work, faster, for the same pay.
Navigating the social dynamics to influence change should be looked at as just another puzzle to solve. Maybe not a puzzle that is always solvable though. It's probably best to look at your ideas as a poker hand. Playing the hand correctly improves your odds but does not guarantee any particular outcome.
yes it just happened that I didn't run into a similar situation at work (mostly because I didn't work)
that said personal relationships have the same issue, you feel like something could be done but people resist even considering your inputs.. which gives me the idea that most people want to be heard first rather than have solution brought to them
Have you considered that maybe your understanding of the problem is actually incorrect, since your solution of providing input before hearing someone out is not working?
I'm often guilty of this, but in this case we were all assigned similar tasks so I was quite sure it would fit.
People forcing their way into your problems are very annoying, again I know I do that at times but I've stopped doing that almost entirely and basically try to listen more than I speak.
I guess I’m somewhat confused because there was an earlier claim that one had no idea why anyone would be frustrated, but clearly you seem to have a good idea of why someone would seemingly refuse help.
When I said I was frustrated by people's reaction it wasn't entirely about their reasons but the way they refuse too. It's still an odd sequence to hear someone complain everyday then when you say "hey I have this thing" you get a "nono I dont need that". Still appear absurd.
Again we were all doing the same thing and I just suggested using my shit to go faster. One other idea is that there are a few layers of interactions, people prefer suggestions from those they trust, or those they respect. I didn't have that at the time somehow.
"It's still an odd sequence to hear someone complain everyday then when you say "hey I have this thing" you get a "nono I dont need that". Still appear absurd."
I would suspect it's only absurd because of one's personal lack of understanding of the situation. I can only speculate the full situation, but I can imagine a hypothetical situation where a bunch of accountants joke in camraderie about how much their accounting jobs suck, but when someone actually tries to resolve this, the "fixer" is actually trying to fix a non-problem due to lack of social insight and thus the fixer seems absurd.
Can you do me a favor? If not for yourself simply do it for a random guy on the internet. Can you walk at least 15 minutes a day if you are not already? Work up to 1 hour a day. It's fine if you walk slowly. You don't have to run. You don't have to do push ups. Just walk. You'll feel better about everything in about a week.
I walk everyday. I prefer a pair of 1461 Doc Martin over my $170 Asics.
I too tested as highly gifted as a child and have had some difficulty with my career prospects (though that is probably my fault since I quit a good-paying job to strike out on my own and try the entrepreneur life.) I've often thought that my parents did me no favors by constantly praising my intelligence. I coasted through high school and did OK in college due mostly to laziness, despite knowing I should have been working harder. The weed probably didn't help either. At the end of the day though, I'd rather look back on a life of trailblazing with reduced income/"success" rather than holding down some job that I consider bullshit.
I'm reminded of that quote from Good Will Hunting about serving the douchebag Harvard guy's kids fries at the drive thru. "Maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal"
You can test high in anything, but it doesn't automatically convert to practical value - that takes actually doing the work. So your motivations got screwed up, blinding you to the fact you today mostly can do whatever, but with circumstances, belief systems and ego as continuous direction. Believing you are special, even if told so makes you unremarkable, grows into ego, which blocks you from others. Pursue your interests, seek out groups, courses where you get in touch with people reeling you in. Ignore people and circumstances that make you cocoon.
So I have had a very similar experience, with some unique flavoring. I was also quite overweight when I was young, so I experienced a lot of bullying. I missed most classes and graduated high school with truancy, and a 3.8. Ultimately, the thing that installed some hard work and discipline for me was Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
After years of just understanding things with no effort and easily outpacing most peers, I was the worst (by far) person in the room at a mostly intellectual pursuit. I was lucky that this stuck, because a lot of people describe it as decreasing depression (there is a lot of physical content and group dynamic), you meet a lot of people so it helps with enhancing social skills, and the physical exercise goes a long way. Beyond that, knowing how to protect yourself gives you a lot of confidence with strangers, for better and worse.
I hate being the guy that shouts my religion to people who aren’t asking for it, but I really think a lot of people would benefit from this. It’s had such an impact that I donate to some charity that gives free lessons and uniforms to under privileged kids in Oakland. Check out a martial art, it’s a more thoughtful way of exercising, and you may hate being the worst person in the room enough to learn how to get better.
I've not taken an IQ test, but consistently scored in 99th percentile in standardized tests up through high school (Iowa Basics, then SAT & ACT). Work ethic was a problem for me for a long while, mostly because I was bored and school was too easy. It wasnt until college that I was challenged. Went from straight A's in HS to a 3.4 GPA when I graduated college. Didnt have a steady relationship either until I was 36, then got married inside of 2 months (I knew my now wife for over 10 years, though, we just didn't date during most of that time).
I might be slightly on the autism spectrum, but never been diagnosed. Always been a bit of a loner and introvert. Back in high school, when classmates were out partying on weekends, I was hacking. Learning Z80 ASM the hard way with dead tree books and struggling to find info on random local BBS's (not much in Montana and not a long way to go before a BBS was long distance).
I started work on a masters in electrical engineering, but have never finished. Wanted it more than I needed it. Somehow (referral from a friend of a friend) landed a job in finance as a developer a year out of college, and been in the industry ever since. All of my current friends, and even my wife, I have due to working in the industry. Not that finance itself is responsible for it, just where I met everyone.
Also regarding networking, all of my early jobs were acquired via networking. After a decade of experience at a well known hedge fund, recruiters hound me all the time, and if I want, I can get several interviews within a week. Its worth not burning bridges.
A little off-topic, but I've long been highly skeptical of finance, what with light-speed AI-guided high-frequency trading, the massive concentration of wealth, the inability for government to keep apace with the private sector, and the seeming inability for average working people to benefit from the system...it all puts me into a feeling of unease.
Many kids in this IQ range often also have a photogenic memory. This helps them do pretty good academically in many tests. There is obviously more than just great memory in excelling at tests but relatively kids who have entire book searchable at high speed in front of them have a tremendous advantage in a setup that at least used to exist decades ago. Eventually, many of these kids end up in Ph.D. programs because excelling and competing with their natural gift of high-speed high-volume memory pushes them forward. This then usually leads to fairly satisfactory lifestyle despite other issues.
I'm wondering how good you considered yourself in memory and retention? If so, did this allowed you to excel at academic tests?
I’m sorry to hear about some of the difficulties you’ve been through. If you ever want someone to talk to, my email is in my profile. I’m not a therapist and I’m totally not qualified to help people with their problems but I can be a good listener and friend.
Can't disagree. A more powerful processing unit can (and mostly will) dig deeper on the problems it faces. Which is not a good thing. Ask me about fabric of the universe, the meaning of life etc. and I will explain what a panic attack is.
People my age living their life happily while I am looking to the sky with a beer on my hand and wishing to be in the Matrix with no care.
I've been through the same. Grew up being told I could do anything I wanted, but people insisted that I focus on the stuff I was naturally talented at instead of learning the basic stuff I needed but couldn't figure out on my own. Like how to behave in a group.
The upside to it is that i have gotten through it. Somewhat. I've got a decent job, and I'm not worrying about losing it all the time anymore. I've got family, and who knows -- one day I might actually feel confident enough to make friends with someone.
But yes, it can't be said enough. Discipline, social skills, connections AND self-confidence are much more important than IQ.
I did, but I had a period where I moved around a lot, living in different countries and trying new things. Lost most of whatever network I had in the process, but learned a lot about how interact with the rest of the world.
There's a hypothesis I have about the guys who win: at critical moments, they don't fuck around. I've noticed this about all the winners I know. Just that slight voice inside that says, "Let me ease off the throttle a bit here. It's not going to be critical." They ignore it or don't have it.
I do, so I started ignoring it. Up for a corner kick and the ball is headed clear for the opposing forward to only have to clear our one defender held back and 1 on 1 the keeper? I sprint the whole way. Almost every time, I get there from across the pitch in time to help.
It's the same with emails or projects or objectives. There are critical periods and when it's critical you've got to push through. I've realized I've always known when it's critical. I've just not committed in that moment. Now I know.
Interestingly, this means you can spend lots of time off the throttle. I'm pretty sure intelligence is common. There are lots of smart people. I think the combination of that plus this is killer.
Btw if you want to see what this feels like at work, try Adderall.
I recognise so much of this. A lot of my friends are incredibly smart and yet are struggling with life in various ways. Most of them are programmers, which I think is a relatively good place for us, but many have trouble staying motivated when the work isn't quite what they hoped for, and they either fall into a rut of low productivity, or quit/get fired and keep looking for something better. I'm no different, but I've been very lucky to roll into something that works very well for me.
I never did homework in school, and got by on a talent for math and science (until we got to integrations, and I was unable to derive and remember the standard primitives, which saw my grades tumble into failing grades; I graduated with a good grade for math only because geometry (which is very intuitive for me) was a third of the final grade). So I managed to get by with never doing any homework, which meant that in university, I got completely stranded at the many classes that really required serious studying, and I focused mostly on the more intuitive logic/programming oriented classes that I could still ace without any real work. I couldn't graduate without the other classes, though, so I dropped out.
(I've never completed a proper IQ test that I got to see the results of; as a teenager I did one from a book that I didn't finish and still got 136, and I got 139 from one on TV that maxed out at 141, so I assume I'm somewhere near 140. I was tested for motivation problems at school as a teenager, which apparently showed I was smart, but my mother didn't want to share the results with me. Clearly I was smart, just not good at actual work.
So I'm lazy as shit, or possible struggle with motivation, but who can tell the difference? But I've been lucky to roll into a field that I have a talent for (software development), and I'm doing pretty good there. I was single and not dating at all (too insecure to even try) until 32 (yes, virgin until then), when I tried online dating and eventually met my wife, who has been great for me and my career (and I apparently for hers). So convinced me to quit jobs where I wasn't happy and find something better, and the financial stability she provided helped a lot in the step to become a freelancer. I'm still constantly distracted by online stuff (I should be programming as I'm typing this), and I wonder if I would have been an amazing programmer if I could keep my focus on programming for the whole day, but my work is generally good enough to get by. At least as long as I'm interested in the project; on boring, repetitive projects that are no different from any other, I start out great and after a couple of months I lose interest and I need to do something else. My longest job ever was almost 4 years, and that was 2 years too long. These days I work as a freelancer on projects from 6-18 months, and that works about right for me. Team mates tend to love me during the first few months, but get tired of me after about a year.
My current project is more interesting than usual: I set up the first prototype and the team developed around me. I get to focus on the interesting stuff that I care most about, and there's interesting stuff with graph databases, complex data modeling, and I get to refactor the structure on the project simply because I say it's necessary. Other people have recently been added to the project to pick up the more boring stuff, and for the first time I feel like I'm getting recognition for the stuff I'm best at. This is an amazing feeling and I can see myself working here for much longer than usual, but we'll see how things look after another half year (I've been here for nearly a year now).
But again, I know I've been lucky, as I haven't actually worked for any of this; I was just lucky to roll into something I have a talent for, was lucky to meet my wife, and got lucky with some of the projects I worked on. But I could easily see how my life could have ta...
I tested pretty high when I was younger but for various reasons school didn't suit me. I don't think it helps a child at all to be told they are really clever.
I myself not being blessed with any intelligence whatsover can confirm that not thinking so damn much will prove beneficial for you.
That's literally what you need to do. More doing, less bla-bla. Way, way more doing. The Voice is wrong, ignore it. Look at dumb people like me and imitate them. Your depression and anxiety will fade.
When you are healed, dial up the thinking, slowly, until your performance is adequate. No more.
I can relate too much with that.
Too much of earning about being genius while young and even in college, now I'm just lonely, depressed, anxious, and feeling like wasted potential.
>Anyway, what I'm trying to say is IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless
> * Anyway, what I'm trying to say is IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless.*
It’s one of those things where when it’s taken out of context or on its own it’s really useless. Then people assume things based on a single measure and you’re screwed.
You can TRY to do whatever you want but there is no guarantee you will be successful at it. In many cases, your living situation will actively prevent you from even trying. Not everyone is in a situation to thrive. Some people are fortunate to have been born into, or be given a life full of opportunity, but for many that is not the case.
It's not bullshit, but it's not a ticket to paradise either.
It's a challenge with a child with any extraordinary ability. They start getting praised for the simple existence of the gift rather than any work. So the first time something seems like work, the child thinks they're just bad. It then becomes a kind of learned helplessness.
You also learn to not try because trying is the first step to failure.
>You mention anxiety, depression, and that you feel lazy. Is part of the problem that there's nothing you want to do right now?
Yes. On one level _want_ to earn a Security+ certificate or do a coding class part-time. I can't say for certain that they'll change my life for the better, but they seem like the _right_ thing to do for someone who has had 10 jobs but unable to begin a career.
>Of the four qualities you list, you already have the one that's mostly innate. The others you can develop.
I suppose you have a point, but I really lack the confidence and faith that if I keep trying to improve these things, then I'll see results. Because of my warped mind, moving myself in the direction of bettering myself =/= positive results, but rather new FUD, new failures, faux pas, doubts, and decline. Maybe IQ is innate, but I don't really use it, and I think I'm losing it. Depression makes my brain feel swollen and hard to grasp the right word and formulate plans. And yes, I have taken many, many medications. Most recently Buproprion and Fluoxetine. Now I've been taking 40mg Fluoxetine daily for a few months, but it doesn't help with any of the aforementioned problems. I think I continue to take it to show that I'm trying to do _something_ about this. Perhaps I should give therapy another shot. I just feel terrible and selfish spending money on it, when I think just saving a few hundred dollars a month would do more for my mental health than bawling to a shrink about my troubled teen years...
Sorry to ramble. Thank you for your reply. I will try to reconsider what I can develop.
I sincerely wish you good luck. I make my living writing software and find it extremely rewarding. I like the people I work with and I find the job challenging, the domain interesting, and the pay is great. I hope you find something similar.
> It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights.
I did first 2-years undergrad at a CC. My calc course had _2_ people from mensa, 1 failed.
Anyways, the idea in academic literature -- that some super smart psychiatrists know the Right Questions to ask which correlate with _g_ -- is aggravating.
>The thing is, if you look at IQ and ability to pass a math class, they do correlate strongly.
In fact, we actually agree here.
My point can maybe be explained in a different way: So does playing chess at a high level, or I'd bet even probably even MMR in Dota does as well. Once you consider this, you may go the next step and ask what better methods test for ability to pass a math class (perform other tasks successfully). For example, consider that I know someone who has a far greater ability than I to learn a new language; while I have a greater ability with math.
> So does playing chess at a high level, or I'd bet even probably even MMR in Dota does as well. Once you consider this, you may go the next step and ask what better methods test for ability to pass a math class (perform other tasks successfully).
I would agree that playing Chess and Dota are both probably pretty good predictors. What kinds of abilities do you need to play Chess (or Dota) at a high level? Abstract reasoning, mental quickness, and a good working memory.
What about an IQ test? An IQ test is just a random sampling of problems that test abstract reasoning, mental quickness, and a good working memory. If you iteratively give people a series of IQ tests there will be some variation in their score from test to test, but what you will find is that over time the average of their scores converges. This convergence is why researchers believe there is a single main factor of intelligence (g).
Now, there are still things aside from intelligence that relate to the ability to pass a math class (or any class). A big one is Conscientiousness. It's a facet of personality that basically has to do with how organized and hardworking someone is. It is the second strongest single predictor of overall life success next to IQ (although even with both factors combined there's still a lot of the variance in life success left unexplained).
My contention is that Mensa membership tends to select for people who have low conscientiousness.
> For example, consider that I know someone who has a far greater ability than I to learn a new language; while I have a greater ability with math.
So there are different sub-factors of general intelligence[1]. That does not mean that there still isn't a general factor of intelligence, because all of these factors do still correlate pretty stongly with one another. However, I've heard that towards the high end of IQ, there does tend to be a greater distance between the sub-factors.
In other words, a person of average intelligence is likely to be average in all of the categories, whereas a person of high-intelligence is more likely to be especially gifted in one or two areas (though still pretty good in the rest).
Something about IQ which we forget is that people with exceptionally high IQ scores are not necessarily exceptionally intelligent. They are good at answering the types of questions on IQ tests.
I would agree with you that it is likely true that generally intelligent people will generally be generally better at scoring higher on IQ tests.
Are there any formal studies you are aware of which compare IQ tests as a predictor of success with other intelligence tests, or just other tests?
> Something about IQ which we forget is that people with exceptionally high IQ scores are not necessarily exceptionally intelligent.
I don't know that I "forget" that so much as I don't believe that.
I mean, I acknowledge that IQ is not the same thing as intelligence, but it is a very strong proxy. You can avoid the risk people receiving unrepresentative scores by just having them take multiple IQ tests. The more different tests they take, the more their average score will converge on a particular IQ value.
EDIT:
> Are there any formal studies you are aware of which compare IQ tests as a predictor of success with other intelligence tests, or just other tests?
Of life success, or success in a math class? I mean, I'm sure their are for both, though I don't have citations for either at the moment.
WRT to life success, I do know that while in some sense it is not an especially strong predictor, it is the strongest single predictor we have (even more than the socio-economic status they were born into). The fact that even then it doesn't account form more then half the variance in life outcomes makes sense to me. Life's complicated, and many different factors play into success.
why do you think MENSA members are representative of people with high IQs in general? obviously you cannot extrapolate from them. there's a reason that accomplished people who would obviously get a high IQ score don't join, because the organization offers absolutely nothing of value. extreme selection bias at play.
So, I'm fairly sure I'm reasonably smart, and I am reasonably successful at life.
But I am somewhat hesitant to take an actual proper IQ test. Partly because I'm afraid I won't get a "good" score (given my expectations) and partly because I'm worried I'll let my score (whatever it is) distract me from actually achieving more things in life.
The highest score obtainable on an IQ test is achieved by realising it's complete nonsense to project the entirety of human intelligence onto a one dimensional value, and refusing to waste time on it.
no, the iq test is used by some groups as a diagnostic to rank order large groups of people for research and other purposes.
IQ is itself a basically fluid intelligence - how quickly you learn something compared to the average. In jobs were problems are novel this is an indicator of success. In jobs where tasks are repetitive, it is not an indicator of success.
Overall, it one of the strongest if not the strongest statistically backed concept in modern psychology, so if you don't believe IQ means something you should also dismiss all of psychology as unscientific nonsense.
IQ is a model. Models never perfectly match the thing they are modelling. In the case of IQ people seem to have forgotten whatever it was that they were trying to model in the first place and it has been promoted way beyond its station to the very definition of intelligence. The result of this is organisations such as Mensa.
To me, intelligence means one's capability to contribute to human endeavour, whether it be in mathematics, music, art, writing, or anything else that you can apply your mind to.
For example, most people agree that Mozart was a very intelligent individual by virtue of his contributions to music.
Sure, IQ means something, it's just that the thing it means is not intelligence. It doesn't capture the amazing breadth of human capability, and intelligence is not an objective measurable property.
I agree with your contempt for IQ. On this matter:
> In the case of IQ people seem to have forgotten whatever it was that they were trying to model in the first place
IQ was originally designed to determine mental development issues, i.e. sub-intelligence, so that those people could be helped. This is flagged by scores below 80. Ranking intelligence by scores above 80 is bunk. Nassim Taleb has written well on this subject [1], if you are interested.
No. Taleb is saying that IQ is only useful for detecting mental deficiencies. He claims that the while having a low IQ is generally predictive of low life success (income, etc.) having a high IQ is not very predictive of having high life success.
As others have pointed out, the same can be said of height and success in professional basketball. If you come across a short person, you can practically guarantee they cannot make it in the NBA (i.e. height is a strong predictor). For someone who is very tall, You can't really know from that whether they are a successful pro basketball player (i.e. it is not a strong predictor).
This issue here, in both height and IQ, is that people who have more of some capacity have more options. Someone who is smart enough to be a brain surgeon still has the option to be a dish washer. Someone who is only smart enough to be a dish washer does not have the option to be a brain surgeon.
I understand the point you're making but you risk giving IQ credibility by comparing it to height. Height is a real, physical uni-dimensional measure that has a Gaussian distribution. IQ is a made-up measure that pretends to fit a multi-dimensional, non-physical 'thing' (intelligence) that we have a lot of trouble actually defining, onto a uni-dimensional scale with a modeled Gaussian distribution. It's a fraud. Or at least, in this grossly extended use it became a fraud. Testing people for falling below a certain threshold on a test was an ok diagnostic for mental deficiency. But even there it should have just been one tool among many, not a final arbiter of "general intelligence".
> IQ is a made-up measure that pretends to fit a multi-dimensional, non-physical 'thing' (intelligence) that we have a lot of trouble actually defining, onto a uni-dimensional scale with a modeled Gaussian distribution.
I think one of the points of intelligence research is that it seems to confirm intelligence (whatever it is) is largely a unified by a single dimension, even when that wasn't necessarily what was expected by the researchers.
> It's a fraud. Or at least, in this grossly extended use it became a fraud.
Hardly. IQ testing has been vigorously resisted for decades, and yet continues because of it's utility.
But if you're going to take that stance, let me ask you: are you willing to throw out the rest of the social sciences? Because that's the only logical result. IQ research is the gold standard of the social sciences. IQ is fraudulent, then so is the rest.
> Testing people for falling below a certain threshold on a test was an ok diagnostic for mental deficiency.
It is also useful at the higher end. Not all high IQ people are successfully working in complex jobs, but I expect all people who are successfully working in complex jobs are high IQ.
> But if you're going to take that stance, let me ask you: are you willing to throw out the rest of the social sciences? Because that's the only logical result. IQ research is the gold standard of the social sciences. IQ is fraudulent, then so is the rest.
No, the 'logical result' is throwing out psychology, which I'm more than happy to do. Would also throw out 90% of economics. Happy to keep descriptive sociology, descriptive anthropology, descriptive human geography, descriptive linguistics, etc.
The parts you are keeping from sociology, anthropology, etc. aren't really what I would call science.
I mean yes, it is knowledge about our world, and useful knowledge at that, but it really doesn't fit into a Baconian framework.
I will admit that I'm bearish overall on the social sciences. In science you want to be able to make statements that are both a) general, and b) predictive. In the social sciences, generally what is predictive is not general (i.e. "market research") and what is general is usually not in fact predictive (i.e. "hogwash").
I guess I'm just curious why you think IQ is bunk. IQ researchers, perhaps more than any other discipline, have had to endure a considerable degree of scrutiny. Many objections have been raised, and over the decades they've put a lot of work into empirically addressing those objections.
> I guess I'm just curious why you think IQ is bunk.
I could not put it better or more rigorously than Nassim Taleb, so if you are curious I really do recommend a good read of the piece I linked above (and the technical paper he links at the top of that piece).
I've read it a few times now. I'm going to do my best to summarize Taleb's arguments and respond to each in turn.
I: cognitive ability is a multi-dimensional thing. IQ erroneously tries to collapse all of those dimensions into a single dimension.
What are these dimensions? And how are they measured? People who make this assertion hardly ever go through the work of actually making a rigorous, falsifiable claim as to what these dimensions are. There have been theories along these lines (e.g. "multiple intelligences") and they are much shakier ground scientifically than IQ.
This claim is also just plain false, because if you look at the literature, you'll see that intelligence research does recognize the existence of many different types of cognitive ability. It just so happens that performance on tests of such abilities all strongly correlate with IQ! The correlation isn't perfect, which is why you see these different cognitive abilities acknowledged as distinct from each other, but they are still only aspects of some common factor (g).
Now, there are certain mental functions whose performance does not correlate (very much) with IQ. Things like creativity or reaction times. That's not really a problem for intelligence research since those things aren't a form of intelligence.
II: Real world success comes more from wisdom and conscientiousness than intelligence
I would agree about wisdom, although there's no real way to measure that. The way I think of it is: wisdom is where you are going, and intelligence is how fast you will get there. If you're going the wrong way, then speed will only hasten your destruction. That doesn't mean speed is irrelevant.
As for conscientiousness, we can measure how much that impacts life outcomes. Indeed it does have some predictive value, but not as much as IQ!
Also, if you're going to take some arbitrary collection of traits and say "this bundle of traits is more predictive than IQ" then you're engaging in a logical fallacy. It doesn't matter what bundle you choose, what matters is whether IQ is worth adding to that bundle.
III: IQ is only predictive on the lower ends of performance (because of it's use as a means for detecting mental defficiencies) but has no predictive value at higher levels of performance.
I think there's some stuff going on in the statistics that's going to require a lot more digging on my part, but I think the argument I made previously that having a greater intelligence merely gives you more options still holds.
IV: People who promote IQ research are racists.
Ad hominem. And bullcrap to boot. Whatever you think about another person's motives, it doesn't make their argument wrong. What really angers me about this argument is that in the same frigging paragraph he complains about people making ad hominem arguments against him. The lack of self-awareness is truly breath-taking.
V: IQ being "the best measure in psychology" doesn't matter if it's a bad measure
This argument is directed at people who want to cherry pick the parts of the psychology that fit their political preferences. It has no relevance in an argument with someone who's willing to toss out the entire enterprise.
Nonetheless, the limitations on the predictiveness of IQ should be considered. For instance, the fact that IQ correlates with performance in complex jobs by 50% means that it only explains about 25% of the variance in performance (I don't know where Taleb gets the 13% figure, perhaps from some math I'm not familiar with). All that means is that IQ shouldn't be the only tool you use to evaluate a candidate for such a job. It doesn't mean that there's no value in using it.
VI: IQ only measures performance in boring clerical jobs where the work resembles the test.
It does measure performance (to some extent) in software engineering. I presume it also does in medical professio...
Taleb's critique is pretty deep. This will take me a while to parse through.
One thing he tackles that I think is worth digging into is his approach to the claim IQ is psychology's "best measure".
First, I think he does the only logical thing you can do after you dismiss IQ, he dismissed the rest of psychology. However bad (or good) you think IQ, the rest of psychology is worse.
Second, he makes the point that "no measure is worse than a bad measure". I'm not entirely convinced. I mean yes, if you have a measure that only predicts (for example) 30% of the variance in some phenomenon and you treat it as if it explains 100%, then you're going to have a bad time[1]. However, if you recognize the limitations and you combine that with other measures, then you may have a chance at making reasonable predictions.
IQ may be the best psychology has to offer, but that doesn't mean it has to be used alone. And it's true that much of psychology is suffering from a reproducibility crisis, but that does not mean all parts of psychology are suffering equally.
[1] I think there's an interesting connection between this idea and the idea of legibility as touched on in the book Seeing like a State.
> To me, intelligence means one's capability to contribute to human endeavour, whether it be in mathematics, music, art, writing, or anything else that you can apply your mind to.
Do you not think that people who have such capabilities would also have a high IQ?
Everything is a model, but IQ is literally the most statistically significant idea in psychology.
Your strict resolution that IQ doesn't mean intelligence is just your own opinion not really backed by any fact, just an opinion that people are more complicated than numbers.
It's true, people are more complicated than numbers, but nonetheless they can be accurately rank ordered and IQ, as you said, means something. It doesn't say anything about accomplishments, or quality of character. But it does say something about fluid intelligence.
Nobody cares if it perfectly matches some arbitrary thing you decided it needs to match to count for you. The mozart comment doesn't even fit into the conversation. Nobody said anything about contributions to anything.
Fluid intelligence is a measurable property, even if its not measuring it to your personal satisfaction. The question becomes why are you more of an authority than those mathematicians and psychologists who did the research?
You're not. Your opinion doesn't invalidate theirs. It just says you didn't do the research.
IQ is useful in the aggregate. This is because it correlates so strongly to so many life outcomes. It might be useful if we can one day figure out how to improve IQs. However, it isn't useful on an individual level. An average IQ person can surely work hard and make millions running a business, write a best selling novel, etc. even if statistically they might be less likely to do so.
IQ is a measure of how fast you learn things. In jobs where problems are novel, high IQ tends to predict success. In monotonous jobs the ability to learn faster doesn't help you.
And again, its completely true that IQ does not mean success. The world is full of poor geniuses. but as far as psychology goes, its the best predictor available.
I took such a test after one sleepless night, got a 100 - I guess it was the lowest achievable mark in that particular test.
This had an effect on my (back then) still developing self-esteem, which lasted a few months or so.
But after that I bounced back, because college life quickly reminded me that while I may be incompetent and irrational, I wouldn't last that long there on my own if I were of average intelligence.
Scott Adams' use of the word does not seem inappropriate or juvenile to me.
He is describing his impression of Mensa members. His expectation was that Mensa was an "organization of geniuses," which gave him certain expectations, but he what he found was very different.
He observed that Mensa members were financially unsuccessful, unaccomplished, and idle. Describing someone that is financially unsuccessful, unaccomplished, and idle as a "loser" just seems like colloquial English to me.
Adams doesn't express any dislike or hate for the Mensa members; he just describes his impressions. Is there something wrong with using the word "loser?" If we stop using the word will everyone suddenly be richer and more accomplished?
> Scott Adams' use of the word does not seem inappropriate or juvenile to me.
Well then we differ. Given your (by my lights) Jesuitical approach to glossing a common English usage, I don't think we have anywhere further to go here. I personally can't imagine a circumstance where I'd call a brother or sister a 'loser', and certainly not by reference to a trivial superfluity like financial 'success'. And if I did not for a minute do I believe they'd consider the term a neutral descriptor.
But by all means carry on using the term however, and to whomever, you like.
Neither Adams or myself has assigned any more importance or worth to financial success than you have.
He merely observed that he expected a society of geniuses would be very different than they were, and I can’t for the life of me find anything wrong with that.
Remarking that someone with a disabled limb is ”lame” is not offensive; it’s just using a word according to its definition. Look up ”loser” in a dictionary.
I still pay the annual dues, but I never attend the meetings (too busy. And also, I don't want to). Well, sometimes there's an interesting article in the monthly newsletter... but not often.
They do, however, give you a handsome plastic membership card you can "accidentally" fling onto the table at restaurants when reaching for your Amex, so, that's nice.
Using Mensa members as the study group seems fatally flawed.
Mensa seems to attract people who define themselves by their intelligence, instead of by their success. It wouldn't surprise me that they would be more anxious and depressed than average.
Higher rates of allergies could be explained by socioeconomic, racial and cultural biases in those who gravitate towards Mensa.
I remember we received an application from a person whose resume promiscuously explained that he was a Mensa members, "an association for superior IQ people".
Their resume overall was not bad (not top-notch either for the position), but the mention alone of Mensa drove me away from ever wanting to work with such kind of persons that look so full of themselves.
I finally declined to interview this person. The question "Is it discrimination?" was always popping into my mind and I felt uneasy about it for about a week or so.
I find it entirely appropriate that recruiting managers wear their biases on their sleeves, in this manner.
As representatives of the organization, you put its core values and culture at the forefront. You represent what the owners are really all about.
It is important for those with the ability and inclination to be part of "an association for superior IQ people" to not be placed in an unsuitable role, at an unsuitable company, given their rarity. Better for all involved, I would say.
It's not discrimination on multiple levels. Firstly IQ in general is not a protected category; and high-IQ certainly isn't. There might be good reason to assume that an intelligent person might be a poor fit for many jobs (insert joke here).
Furthermore, what you were turned away was how that person presented themselves, and not their actual IQ. Including Mensa membership and framing it in those terms shows poor judgement.
On the other hand, IQ was one of the direct methods of discrimination used in the flagship case establishing the doctrine of adverse impact discrimination (leading to a popular myth that IQ discrimination is itself entirely illegal), and the cases where IQ discrimination (high or low) in employment has been found to not be illegal have invariably involved the employer presenting the kind of business necessity evidence needed to overcome the presumption of adverse impact discrimination that occurs when discrimination has a negative differential impact on a protected class without direct targeting, so discrimination based on IQ (or, for the same reason, factors indirectly associated with IQ that don't happen to completely negate the negative differential impact without transferring it to a different protected class) isn't generally legally safe even though it isn't directly prohibited.
Every decision, on any basis, to differentiate between candidates is discrimination.
Whether it's illegal discrimination is another question (discrimination against people mentioning MENSA membership on applications probably has some measurable differential impact by race or some other protected class, and so could easily, without the evidence necessary to demonstrate business necessity and overcome the presumption of illegality, constitute adverse impact discrimination, but is not otherwise directly prohibited in US employment anti-discrimination law.)
On the other hand, from your description, it does sound a decision that was more self-indulgent than made in faithful service of your employer, which at a minimum is unprofessional in hiring, even if it manages to avoid being illegal.
> it does sound a decision that was more self-indulgent than made in faithful service of your employer
I don’t know about that. A bad culture fit can end up taking a lot of value away from a team. Being self-satisfied enough to join Mensa, and then put it on your CV looks like a big red flag to me.
I probably would have reacted similarly. I don't work well with arrogant people in general, and the only times I've really not worked well with others was times when the person was more arrogant than their knowledge or experience should have allowed for.
That they were a Mensa member on a resume wouldn't have turned me off... explaining what it was explicitly would definitely do so.
That reasoning doesn't really make sense to me. One could also justify discriminating in a racist way with that. I.e. the rule "If your skin is darker than this, you are out." could also be applied to every candidate equally.
Years ago I saw versions of this kind of test at retailers where one of the going concerns is that people above a certain level of intelligence are eliminated not because they are likely to steal but because if they decided to steal from the company they would do so in a way that might not be as easily detected.
> define themselves by their intelligence, instead of by their success
Yep. I experienced it first hand.
Forget about IQ. Did any of the top notch business men/women begged Mensa for approval before going out and building companies (eg showing street smarts)?
If you are into highly biased questionnaires and like mental games go for Mensa. Everybody else should opt for street smarts IMHO.
I request everyone to read Nissim Nicholas Taleb's criticism of this IQ BS. Now, I do not buy all his arguments but I do think his broader point is pretty much valid. At their core IQ tests measure how to answer exams designed by people like them.
I was born dirt poor in a remote godforesaken village in India. Today I work for one of the FANG in bay area.
The most depressing thing about working for this employer is howe dimwitted majority of their tech employees are beyond the core tech skills. Many of them can write complex code with ease and yet they do not understand simple sarcasm or hyperbole.
Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook has huge number of non corporate employees - if you exclude them the FANG club is more exclusive. Nobody boasts that they work as a picker at Amazon or content reviewer at FB.
>The most depressing thing about working for this employer is howe dimwitted majority of their tech employees are...
90% of everything is crap. You should see the shambling ape-men they had in physics grad school. Actually they weren't so bad compared to FAANG ding dongs, but they were still worse than I expected.
Taleb is being a weirdo, but a consistent weirdo. He doesn't believe in basic statistics, so of course he can't believe in the one fairly rigorous result we have from psychology of the last 120 years.
When I was involved with The TAG Project, this was common knowledge in gifted circles online. This is not limited to Mensa at all. Some fairly well-known names in the gifted community referred to issues like OCD and ADHD as "co-morbidities" for lack of a better word.
The higher the IQ, the more likely there are to be other issues and the more likely they are to be severe.
Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews win some inordinately high number of Nobel Prizes and happen to be a population with a high risk for genetic disorders, some of which have been proven to have impact on cognition.
> some of which have been proven to have impact on cognition.
No, they haven't been. There are (still) no confirmed links between Tay-Sachs etc and intelligence. (The most recent study on the genetics of Jewish intelligence, in fact, suggests that any genetic advantage is purely on common variants present in non-Jewish Caucasians as well.) For that matter, there are zero confirmed genetic mutations, common or rare, which increase intelligence by even a few points, and this is despite sample sizes now approaching millions and use of exome sequencing to hunt for rare variants in extremely intelligent cohorts.
If they are known to cause retardation, then they are known to have impact on cognition. That statement was intentionally framed as neutrally as possible.
Are you telling me that brain differences can only ever lower IQ and never, ever raise it (or, more accurately, raise the potential ceiling -- because nutrition and a million other things will impact this)? There is a lot of research out that says, basically, "genius" is, by its very nature, a brain that thinks differently from the norm. It isn't simply "more" of something. It is different and this is often a two-edged sword.
I'm currently failing to find the source I know I saw not terribly long ago linking some genetic disorder to higher IQs and to altered brain stuff of some sort. I don't have the time to keep digging for it.
But, here's a study of people with CF -- a common genetic disorder in the Jewish community -- that says, in essence "Lower IQ scores in this population can be linked to negative health impacts and other negative factors," yet seems to list the average IQ for this group of 89 very, very, deathly ill patients as 102.5. Which sort of implies to me that if they weren't basically dying from their disorder, they would be far above average intelligence.
> If they are known to cause retardation, then they are known to have impact on cognition. That statement was intentionally framed as neutrally as possible.
And there is a difference between an allele present in the majority of the population which lowers the IQ and one which is present in a minority and raises IQ. A Mendelian mutation in <1% of the population which lowers your IQ by 10 points is not the same thing as a mutation which raises your IQ by 10 points. The former certainly do exist. The latter currently do not.
> I'm currently failing to find the source I know I saw not terribly long ago linking some genetic disorder to higher IQs and to altered brain stuff of some sort. I don't have the time to keep digging for it.
I'll give you a hint, you won't find it, and if you do, it'll be a candidate-gene paper from the '00s where the p-values are just barely south of 0.05, not remotely close to genome-wide statistical-significance, and has never been validated since even in the exome GWASes which should have found it.
> But, here's a study of people with CF -- a common genetic disorder in the Jewish community -- that says, in essence "Lower IQ scores in this population can be linked to negative health impacts and other negative factors," yet seems to list the average IQ for this group of 89 very, very, deathly ill patients as 102.5. Which sort of implies to me that if they weren't basically dying from their disorder, they would be far above average intelligence.
You know who else has above average intelligence? Ashkenazi Jews. Including the ones without CF. And it's higher than 102.5.
My Dad was a MENSA member for a couple of years, but he was mostly taking the piss - he put down his "special interest" as "carved Dravidian lapis lazuli", which is not as far as I know a thing. He was an RAF V-bomber captain and never as far as I could see suffered from depression or other mental health issues (which would have affected his security clearance) - much the reverse.
Edit: The lapis lazuli thing is (per Google) actually a thing, but in the early 1960s I don't see how my Dad could have come across it, but obviously he did.
I could have joined MENSA (had the IQ) but thought it was all too silly and didn't. I've suffered a lot from depression.
>From a practical standpoint, this research may ultimately lead to insights about how to improve people’s psychological and physical well-being. If overexcitabilities turn out to be the mechanism underlying the IQ-health relationship, then interventions aimed at curbing these sometimes maladaptive responses may help people lead happier, healthier lives.
Reading between the lines, in these cooling months, sent a chill up my spine.
Late Dr. Oliver Sacks, a famous neurologist, became a neurologist because his brother had schizophrenia. Many of his books contains cases of people with extraordinary abilities, but with mental disorders.
The kind of people that join a club to prove they are high IQ are likely insecure and feel the need to peacock. No wonder there's a higher incidence.
Most high IQ people I know think Mensa is stupid and just want to have normal lives and hate talking about intelligence and think it's irrelevant and a cringe-worthy topic.
As a "gifted child" of the 80's, this is obvious to anyone who was identified as one or had friends who were. Depression, OCD, anxiety, etc. are all very common in that crowd.
Mutation-selection balance predicts the opposite, that more intelligent people would be healthier and saner due to a lower mutation load. (Which, as it happens, is the correct prediction, and why most researchers now think intelligence is under mutation-selection balance.)
How does it predict the opposite for extreme intelligence, or any other extreme trait? It's not always the case; but sometimes what we think of as a single quality is actually the result of several genetic factors.
When you say intelligence is "under mutation-selection balance", how does that relate to extreme intelligence?
To be under mutation-selection balance, mutations affecting a trait must be selected at a sufficient rate to maintain the trait, because it affects fitness. Those with the highest number of mutations affecting the trait must be selected against. The easiest way to affect fitness is to damage health. As it happens, mental illnesses damage fitness enormously. So, for a mutation-selection balance trait, those with the least mutations damaging health and fitness will have the highest trait values ie. extreme intelligence.
In the long run, yes. But it doesn’t mean that on a case-by-case basis we won’t see people with trait enhancing mutations that are maladaptive in other ways — like high intelligence in combination with mental illness.
But the theory does not predict those should be common, and predicts they should be rare or nonexistent. So you can't invoke it as support for these findings: it is in fact a bullet which must be bitten (similar to the bullet they must bite when they admit that yes, IQ does correlate with mental health up to the Mensa level in ordinary samples like Swedish population registry or the Scottish population sample, but then postulate that it magically mysteriously reverses abruptly and mental illness rates shoot up orders of magnitude somewhere within the top percentile where conveniently those ordinary samples just can't spot any reversal).
Mensa-level extremes are not rare at all. They're something like 2% of the population (probably even more when you consider they allow multiple retests and other non-IQ tests).
> What is your theory for how to understand these results?
There is nothing to understand. It is purely an artifact of their sampling process. There is no reversal and no mystery. IQ simply correlates with better performance and health as far up as we can measure it into samples like TIP or SMPY, period, and 100% consistent with mutation-selection balance. Mensa attracts losers, and those losers self-select even further into a survey asking about self-diagnosed problems, and these researchers were too lazy to do a good study and too dishonest to discuss forthrightly all the reasons why one knows a priori their results only demonstrate that sampling from Mensa is a really bad idea (I say 'dishonest' because they do not mention any of the very well known contrary results and I am also told these points were all brought up to them before publication and they refused to address any of them).
>> This theory holds that, for all of its advantages, being highly intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological “overexcitabilities,” or OEs.
On a speculative note, maybe those OEs are a result of maltreatment of some sort (there are many).
Highly intelligent people should be pushed to physical exercise and forced to avoid sugary/processed food. I knew one girl with BPD and PhD and those two things helped her tremendously; every time she slipped her state rapidly deteriorated and it was hell for everyone around.
PhD = doctorate, BPD = borderline according to older DSM-IV. PhD was in cognitive neurosciences, likely with silent goal for her to figure out what was wrong with her.
I always thought that high IQ is correlated with high anxiety, because the smarter a person is, the better he can imagine all possible things to go wrong. On the other end of spectrum are people with IQ comparable to children, who presumably don't worry about too many things - ignorance is bliss.
All this study says is that there's a correlation of Mensa membership to a higher likelihood of certain disorders. It does _NOT_ establish any causal links, or even that Mensa membership is representative of the much much larger population of people who can get a 98th percentile score on an IQ test. Perhaps disorders cause people to join Mensa? Who knows.
Just because correlation doesn't imply causation doesn't mean you should negate it causation. You need correlation to exist to even have causation so correlation is evidence for causation.
when i was in grade school, i was tested and put into the "gifted and talented" program which was mostly just a one hour session once a week with about eight kids. it was mostly just brain teasers but then they literally spent an entire year explaining and stressing the importance of charisma. they also told us that "this is easy for you now, and you may not have to work hard, but you need to learn how to work hard because one day you'll be taking classes that you can't just breeze through and if you don't know how to study you will fail."
they were right on both counts. many times later in college and in working life i've thought back to these moments.
I was in a similar situation... Though, really didn't get that type of advice, we did spend a year when I was in 3rd grade learning German (of which I've completely forgotten). In some ways it was interesting, in others it sucked. I seem to be very lopsided in both how I learn, and what kinds of things I can handle in abstract and concrete concepts.
I do really well with math, and can carry concepts well from reading... but man, I hate reading fiction, I have way too much trouble remembering names vs. events. For comparison 760 math, 580 verbal for my SAT scores, not bad, just lopsided.
I can relate to the social issues many in this discussion have eluded to though. Depression, anxiety, OCD and work really hard to not let myself fall into my own traps.
Noone once gave me any advice anywhere near that and I really wish they had. Not only is it important to know how to work hard (an easy skill to miss when tests are easy), but being able to relate to people is a huge indicator for happiness and success.
While this is a neat surface level study, there's a few issues I see with it.
>No separation of Full Intellectual Assessment or another re-test, simply self reporting the averaged figure. We lack resolution in results.(ex: were people with high verbal IQ more prone to schizophrenia?)
>Subjects were those concerned with their own mental status. All respondents were MENSA members. While I could test into MENSA, I simply don't care. I have a friend who is in MENSA, they are quite proud of this over dinner conversation, but they are also quite neurotic. This observation is anecdotal, but I'd think you're going to get more people who live a lot of time "in their heads" in MENSA. I would love to have another control group to compare results over.
>They understand that self reporting is ripe for error. An online survey is difficult to accurately administer, people will misrepresent things about them, especially if they think it is a reflection of their own personal value.
It's neat, but I don't think it's reliable enough to make any declarative statements about a linear progression of IQ and health disorders.
I’ve had this little pet theory about high achievers and depression for some time. It boils down to:
They apply the same thinking patterns that make them excel at work (= very controlled environments with binary answers, requiring perfectionism and attention to detail - e.g. programming, maths, fact-checking, engineering, arts) to every area in their far less binary lives.
If you have very high standards at work you likely apply very high standards to yourself. How you view yourself is frequently how you view others, which can be destructive for relationships.
If your job is searching for bugs 8h a day you likely develop the thinking pattern to take even the smallest issue very seriously.
I've had similar ideas. Pessimism is a personality trait which make for excellent designing and debugging in that it makes it easier to anticipate and identify problems, but if you can't turn it off outside of work, it can severely hinder your quality of life.
I agree, but I think sneaking the word "high achievers" into the conversation is part of the problem.
"High achievers" shouldn't be people who scored well on tests (IQ tests, the SATs, etc.)
They should be people who achieved things in real life! For example, building something people use (e.g. not "playing house" for investors), reforming our legal system or government, excelling at sports, music, etc.
There's a certain part of the population that I'm familiar with where achievement means "performs well on metrics that somebody else designed".
But I also think there is a large part of the population who "calls bullshit" on that value system. And I would call that "common sense" more than anti-intellectualism.
The former kind of "achiever" lacks agency in the world, and that's probably a major reason why they're depressed (speaking from past experience). It's human nature to be depressed when you're being judged and have to jump through hoops set up by others. It's also natural to be depressed if everyone's telling you that you achieved something, but yet nothing in your life is actually better.
I guess it goes back to the comment about passing the IQ test but failing the intelligence test ...
I've been previously diagnosed with a major depressive episode by a psychiatrist. The psychologist I used to see told me I had very black and white thinking and that I need to work on seeing more areas as grey.
I'm one data sample but I fit your description to a tee.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] threadYes, many practical sampling methods are biased, but it is not difficult for me to imagine that any result here is caused entirely by these biases.
but if you think the physical disabilities are better explained by something else to do with this population sample than their iq, you could very clearly publish this theory
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_(statistics)
More seriously, Mensa membership selects for people whose main accomplishment in life is doing well on an IQ test. So they are at least somewhat smart. But if you look for people who have actual accomplishments, you'll find people who tend to also be smart but are more interesting to be around.
Note, this is not sour grapes. My test scores mean that I'm qualified for Mensa, but I've never been impressed enough by any Mensa member that I met to be interested.
1. to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity;
2. to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence;
3. and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members.
It's not entirely clear to me how anything they do benefits humanity (1), the "nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence" seem to revolve around games for them which is a pretty meaningless measure of any form of intelligence I care about (2) and while I'm not a member so I can't say whether it's stimulating to them, I can certainly say that all the materials I've come across from Mensa have soon bored me(3). So from where I sit, Mensa fails on two of their purposes, and only succeeds in their third because of a technicality in their wording.
I've never felt the need to join Mensa because I studied CS and AI, and all my friends from there are probably about as smart as I am, so I already have plenty of people to relate to, but she was always very interested in sport, which probably attracts a different crowd (though she's working in IT now).
Eventually I took the quick test which suggested I should take the longer test as a young adult looking to bolster my CV (résumé). Narrowly missed out and before I was able to submit again I had enough on there not to give it much thought again for me. An IQ test was part of the qualification process for the first job I took out of university, something I've not seen since.
I think my eldest son's probably at least as bright as I am, so this sort of thing has been on my mind again. We try and give him a breadth of experience - he does a lot of rugby (completely non-contact at his age), running and other sports, some child adventure centres, music lessons, scouts soon, etc. But I don't see too much wrong with adding Mensa as a small part in the context of a larger picture.
Incidentally, Hambrick's writeup here is also quite bad. Aside from failing to mention all of those reasons why it's BS, he doesn't describe accurately the research he does mention. Consider this paragraph from the end:
> All the same, Karpinski and her colleagues’ findings set the stage for research that promises to shed new light on the link between intelligence and health. One possibility is that associations between intelligence and health outcomes reflect pleiotropy, which occurs when a gene influences seemingly unrelated traits. There is already some evidence to suggest that this is the case. In a 2015 study, Rosalind Arden and her colleagues concluded that the association between IQ and longevity is mostly explained by genetic factors.
How did he miss the fact that the Arden study in question shows, as all such studies show, that intelligence correlates with greater lifespan/longevity when he's written an entire credulous column about how intelligence is bad for you and makes people crazy and increases the rate of mental disorders (some of which, like schizophrenia, reduce your life expectancy by decades)? It's right there in the abstract, it's not hidden away. One would think that would at least merit a brief pause to puzzle over the discrepancy...
"People who join Mensa are more likely to be part of socio-economic groups that self select to have doctors diagnose physical and mental issues no matter how minor"
But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted! I think it's that sort of expectation that is screwing with us (at least those of us that didn't become comfy SWEs).
Outside the formal anxiety sense, most people struggle with the negative feedback loop. The trick is that you can't simply turn it off - even if you're the best socializer in the history of humanity. For me, I set an informal timer (usually while journaling or in the shower) to intentionally introspect my interactions and pick one thing I felt I could have improved on ("I really wish I had said more than 'fine' when So-and-so asked me how my day was") and then move on.
One lesson that's hard, for me and I suspect others, is that while it's very important to be polite, it's not your job to make everyone else feel happy or complete - that's not an excuse to go around being a jerk, but also don't feel you owe anyone else something by default. It's enough to have a conversation about the weather or let the other person complain about their boss some and offer a bit of empathy.
Exactly. I personally know people who have become despondent and given up on life. Maybe a few people will take advantage of total freedom to learn and do, but if we're being honest here, most will watch net flicks and eat potato chips. It is still a net positive for _most_ people.
There are people who proclaim that death gives everything meaning. Nonsense, death neither gives nor takes meaning, it's as meaningless as eternal life. I'm an atheist to every religion I've ever encountered and couldn't imagine the existence of a god providing meaning, either. (I actually perceive that idea, meaning by higher power, to be even more absurd).
I have the believe though, that the question for meaning is a side effect of having a modern life. Did ancient tribes people think about meaning or did they simply hunt, socialize and view the world as connected in everything (the natural view of the world, as children have it) and never ever even thing about the concept of meaning of life? There are still somewhat "natural" living tribes out there, did someone ask them that question? I'm really curious about their reaction and answer.
Really, to me it seems, that the answer to the question about the meaning of life is to never ask it in the first place.
One day, I might stumble into a life where everything clicks together and the lack of meaning withers away. But that's not going to be a rational decision. "I conclude that this way of life is meaningful. 5 minutes later, I feel meaningful". Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
But because nothing (incl. consequences) matters, it can also be a path to sociopathy, especially if your nihilistic attitude has deprived you of a normal social outlet.
Same with eternal life... how does something without meaning extended forever suddenly have meaning?
I guess I never got the connection with an omniscient creator and a feeing of having purpose.
I have plenty of purpose; experiencing the universe, taking it all in, seeing what happens next, loving deeply, sharing joy, experiencing pain. So much to life.
Eg http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5094.htm
It’s not clear to me that these are especially comforting things to think about, at least superficially.
I don't like working for adtech companies even when they pay me large sum of money for solving their technical problems.
I am not motivated by money, I've been diagnosed with 150 IQ score when I was 19.
I learned to speak very late and when I learned to write, I often wrote with both of my hands and swapping the hand out when I got tired of writing with one hand.
My best time at school was finding a new benchmark every week and copying their handwriting so by the end of the weak, no one could figure out who exactly wrote that!
Principal summoned me for swapping solution paper based on handwriting and I had to prove to him by writing in that handwriting that I didn't cheat.
I was good at art but not good at music.
I tried programming, I excelled at this stuff and then I moved on to CAD modeling which I found more statisfying but I was still getting inquiries based on my past performance at tech companies.
I often feel I don't like using my intelligence. Yes but throw me in survival situation i am guaranteed to find solutions.
The best thing I enjoyed working for any company was when I was under continuous threat of being fired if I didn't solve the technical challenges they were facing. Other than this, even the problems didn't give me any statisfaction, what did give me statisficaction was working under continuous threats + time constraints.
Insults don't affect me, I don't assign any value to anything other say about me. I work for my own statisficaction.
I had several girlfriends but things slowly faded and I ended up not seeing them anymore because I saw no point in maintaining relationships.
My family is very religious yet I grew up to become athiest.
I read various religious texts and arrived at the situation that it's designed to control people without use of sword
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M
It's not thinking too much, in that specific instance, that is the source of the problem at all.
The point (value or reason for) to the things they're claiming have no point, are provided by us, not the universe via magic assignment. That is the source of the mistake.
Pretending the value is externally assigned or innate is the source of the premise that there's no point to the big thing (existence, life, work and so on). In the process of being disappointed in the lack of innate value, they're actually mentally assigning low value to the thing in question (which is psychologically the entire point: it's about debasing the value of the thing, it's most likely a revealing indicator about the present state of mind).
For example: smart person thinks too much, they realize there's no point to life because we're going to die (or similar setup). The problem with that is, the point of life is decided by the smart person. They're in fact deciding to assign life less or little value in the act of saying there's no point, in that action they are actively determining the point: they're deciding there isn't much of one. They made a choice (with it being understood of course that a person may be in a mental place where for any number of reasons they can't clearly recognize a positive value to existence).
The old question: what is the point of life? Does in fact have a very obvious and very simple answer: you decide (which simultaneously does not guarantee good results, even if you decide what it means to you or what the point of your life is to be).
So we're back to needing a point to judge decisions by. The choice isn't enough, or the fact of choosing isn't enough. This is what creates the "whole life is pointless" reaction in the first place, because "you decide" can mean anything, and there has to be something that isn't solely "you decide" to give particular meaning to one choice over the other.
I mean you could choose that the meaning of life is to punch people in the face but you'll have to live with the reprocussions of that choice. That feels like you'll quickly come to the rational decision that it was/is a bad choice.
There might be a rational decision not to punch people directly into face but a purely rational psychopath can choose many other profitable avenues that are disastrous to society at large "in the long run" (fentanyl, global warming, etc etc). And we know what happens in the long run.
It all goes back to Ecclesiastes(and Job), you can be an "evil" person and prosper in this world.
If this tiny lifespan is all there is, this is quite distressing. And physically there is nothing else.
Apparently the best solution is to realize there are no rules but live as if they do per Voltaire(not necessarily Pascal).
I don't think you get depressed by thinking too much - you probably get depressed because you don't have what you want to begin with. You then just think about why you're in your unpleasant position, realize you're too crap to fix it, won't admit fault and change, and so then rationalize that inherently the universe is unfair and there's no point to anything anyway (just to make yourself feel better about how you're doing poorly). It's not that you're a piece of shit - it's the universes fault! I was made this way and there's no point to anything so I can still be a piece of crap human being! I'm too smart to be with the common man! They don't understand my deep intellect!
If the universe will die, and that establishes that anything which occurs within it has no meaning, perhaps meaning becomes entirely worthless as a concept. It distinguishes nothing. It becomes identical with mere existence.
Sorry for the bad news, but even pretty stupid people can figure this outcome out.
- https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/
- https://meaningness.com/preview-eternalism-and-nihilism
- https://meaningness.com/wrong-about-nihilism
- http://cook-greuter.com/9%20levels%20of%20increasing%20embra...
Might be for you, too.
Many people have realised things will die but aren't depressed as a consequence.
It's not about "I an so intelligent that being depressed is the only state of being I can be in"
But fixing biologically-based depression is much harder and, even if you try to do it, it's not guaranteed to work. We don't have a solid enough understanding of the biology of biologically-based depression.
I was involved with The TAG Project because I was homeschooling my two 2xe sons. I basically believe that people with very high IQs have different nutritional needs specifically to support their weird brains.
My extra smart son gets really difficult to deal with when he's deficient in B vitamins, a vitamin class important to the brain. He easily gets deficient and there is no point arguing with him when he's deficient.
So if you are basically chronically malnourished because of special nutritional needs that are currently unrecognized, there's little hope of getting that issue redressed. It snowballs from there: nutritional deficiency causes poorer cognition and more mental health issues which suppresses your ability to cope and becomes a general downward spiral that the world currently can't even properly diagnose.
(The above is opinion based in part on being sort of a subject matter expert. Please don't ask me to "cite my source." My pro bono professional experience and personal experience is the source of my opinion.
I'm not writing a PhD thesis here. I'm having a conversation. Thank you.)
Therapy is much more costly.
Read : Epigenetics
This is similar with many persistent mental conditions. Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food? Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared? And so on.
Exposure therapy works for phobias; people exposed to their phobia in a way that increases their anxiety, long enough for their brain to notice they haven't died and recalibrate its fear response, stop being scared.
Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food?
Because they enjoy eating food? Eating food isn't what they want to stop, being fat or sick is what they want to stop. Eating food is delicious, comforting, filling, reassuring, is it any wonder people resist giving that up?
It's not that their eat-less muscle won't respond to training, it's that they won't work their eat-less muscle because that involves eating less, and they like eating.
A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right.
That doesn't say his happiness muscle is broken and won't respond, it says he has unexplored reasons for preferring the status quo more. He gets more benefit from unhappiness than from doing X. Go explore those reasons.
This :(
It is a hard truth but chances are that you are the only one that can improve your life.
My life has started getting better when I got off my ass and worked to make it better.
I got the job I wanted, started working out, started going out more (still working on that one tbh), went from being single to several long term relationships, etc.
None of it was easy, all of it was and is a struggle.
At some point, I realized that nobody else was going to work on all these things if I did not.
The tool you're trying to use to fix the problem is itself failing in some way. This is part of the pernicious nature of depression.
It's a vicious cycle really. Everyone has some idea of what they want out of life and whether or not they are "on track" to attain it. The further behind you are, the more this leads to increased depression, anxiety, anger, etc. At that point it's hard to effectively think or do anything at all, so the situation deteriorates further.
Sometimes something works out; you get a girlfriend, you get a good job, whatever it happens to be. You start to feel like you can make a come back, you start making progress turning your life into what you want it to be. The problem is if that initial pillar gets knocked out from under you (break-up, laid off, etc) things can go down hill really damn fast; I know this from experience.
You're right that largely speaking no one cares about a person having depression, or rather people say they care but their actions rarely line up with their words. That can be a very self-destructive realization though, because often times help is what you need.
Some people can push past these adversities seemingly without issue. Others like myself have a much more difficult time with it. Perhaps "thinking through" the problem is the problem, maybe that leads to analysis paralysis. Maybe that's why those with higher IQs have this problem. I honestly have no idea.
I suffer from pretty intense social anxiety. It turns out I was comparing the way I felt to the way other people appeared, and felt like a failure for a long time. I finally shelved all the old ideas I could shed and wrote my own definition of success. I can’t speak for others but I couldn’t think myself whole because my perspective was all wrong. It took talking through all that garbage and getting to the truth before I started getting healthy and whole.
Wise people could figure it out, but there's only a partial overlap between wise and intelligent.
Because in your mind, motivation follows naturally from logically deduced need. Motivation isn't so connected in most people's minds; it's an emotional thing, which isn't necessarily driven by rational thought.
I'm sure you've seen people doing something wrong even though they know it's wrong.
I think trauma and disappointment are far more prevalent than true sloth or vice, if such things as the later two exist at all.
Very high IQs can only be accurately assessed at an early age by a qualified professional. So many people will never have an accurate score.
Very high IQ is fundamentally flawed because IQ is resistant to precise measurement.
You're right, someone who seems average (or totally unknown to social systems), but is actually super genius, might not get tested. It's the "genius in the rice paddy" argument and yes, those exist. Srinivasa Ramanujan was one.
That doesn't mean IQ is fundamentally flawed. You don't need to know if someone is 99th percentile or 99.0004 percentile to know they are probably the smartest in the average room of a hundred people and that's what we use IQ to determine.
This has always bothered me about IQ tests. I mean, how smart is the person who comes up with the test? If your IQ is 120, how could you come up with a question that verifies someone's IQ is 180? Maybe the 180 IQ person would have an answer that is different than yours for reasons that you didn't think of.
1. Time. Each test question have 1 minute to answer. The test author took 4 hours to write the question (before having an organization put it through a battery of tests and analyses to validate it).
2. Group effort. Test authors work in big teams; many brains makes for easier insight.
3. Children's IQ is normalized to their age scale; a 7-year-old with IQ 140 isn't cognitively equivalent to a 35-year-ld with such IQ.
1. Tests are tools. By themselves, they tell you nothing of real value. They are useful in the hands of a qualified professional.
2. Tests are game-able. They try to keep questions and tests under wraps because studying for the test or memorizing answers invalidates the test results.
3. Bright kids are horrendously hard to assess, especially if they are 2xE. They have trouble giving the canned "correct" answer.
This is something my son calls "guess the teacher's password." In other words "what inane thing do I need to parrot word for word to get the teacher off my back."
Example from email list discussion:
"Who discovered America?"
Teacher's password: Columbus.
Gifted kid's reply:
"I'm not sure. Columbus was trying to find India and thought he had, which is why Native Americans were called Indians. But it wasn't called America until years later when Amerigo Vespucci traveled to the continents now named after him...(blathers on about more history)...um, what was the question?"
4. Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145. They were having trouble developing and validating an updated test for the higher IQs.
5. You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ. Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.
In most cases why would you bother trying to accurately gauge a student over 145? A student with an IQ of 145+ has very different educational needs compared to a 100 IQ student. Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
This was an actual anecdote from a discussion with a parent of the child in question. The child in question was probably between four and seven years old. They were being assessed by a professional one on one, not in a classroom setting. They were neither showing off nor in possession of the social skills you assume they surely had to have.
I will add that imposter syndrome is common among adults because it's quite hard to figure out where we stand in relation to other people, so smart adults frequently feel they must be "average" because this is "normal" for them. Children are at substantial disadvantage compared to adults.
Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
Possibly. The standard deviation for IQ tests is just 15 points.
More importantly, a test that only goes to 145 cannot distinguish 145 from 180. Both will likely score 145 or close to it.
I know what these kids go through. I was that kid myself. I know I was very aware that I wasn't "normal". You're correct that in the age range 4-7 a child wouldn't know to give the "expected" answer. It won't be much longer though until that child can use his/her intelligence to work out the expected response. At my school, it wasn't socially acceptable to show intelligence so maybe I learnt to hide it earlier than most.
I don't know my IQ. I've had to take tests a few times as an adult for work and every time I land "most likely somewhere in the top 0.1%" according to the psychologists. I don't really feel it matters if my tests show 145 or 160. A large school with 800 kids is only going to have a single child in that range.
You can either move that child up some years, or you can give them a customised workload. A child that is 180 IQ is very different from a child that's 145 but the approach of attempting to find them an appropiate workload would be a good start.
Using it wasn't intended to suggest a classroom setting for the story in question, just a standard answer that someone more knowledgeable about history might not spit out as The Answer without being inculcated to do so.
There are more than 10x as many people at 145 than 155, that ratio is larger than between 135 and 145, because the curve is exponential. If we’re talking about how to “best” educate someone who’s abnormally smart, and if we agree with you that someone at 145 needs to be taught differently than someone at 100, it certainly might matter to know if it’s 145 or 155.
Canned correct answers are only required for knowledge questions (like your example), which IQ tests avoid since knowledge and intelligence are different things.
> Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145.
Most modern IQ tests report up to 160; accuracy (as assessed by test-retest consistency) at 145+ isn't great, though, on any.
> You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ.
That's baloney.
> Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.
Smart kids routinely are bored and engage in actual bad behavior in situations not optimized for them, but that doesn't prevent adults of adequate but non-exceptional intelligence from being able to apply intelligence tests to them and get the same results as any more intelligent adult would. IQ tests are not limited by the IQ of the test adminstrator.
This is what led to the Flynn Effect [1]. It was the initially extremely surprising observation that raw IQ scores over time were increasing. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1970 was actually scoring substantially higher than somebody who scored a 100 just a few decades prior. Not so fun fact: starting sometime around the mid nineties, raw IQ scores started declining, at a substantial rate, in many and potentially all developed nations. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1995 is scoring worse than somebody who scored 100 in 1975. The reason for this is unknown and controversial (as all things even potentially genetic nowadays), but the effect persists even when controlling for things such as immigration.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Per Wikipedia, most IQ tests have a highest-reported standard score of 160 [0]; that's also consistent with the highest range for Stanford-Binet 5th Edition and Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children topping out at 160 (the SB5 top range starts at 145.)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification
For example, one serious official test I did included a timed test where you had to decode a string of symbols to text based on some key. I ended up being fast enough at decoding that I was effectively limited by how fast I could scribble down the decoded texts and turn the page back to the code, not by the mental calculations. I imagine others would have had similar issues, making this particular test at best capable of indicating a wide possible range of mental ability, a range which should be particularly inaccurate around the higher ranges as the ratio mentalTime/mechanicalTime decreases.
There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels. There are no good baselines to compare these people and no real ways of checking whether the differences actually matter in any meaningful way.
Afaik, that's not a “designed to be usable by everyone” thing; there's test-retest consistency gets progressively lower beyond that point on IQ tests, period.
> There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels.
If that was true, we wouldn't have reliable information that accuracy breaks down in that area, which we do.
We can study the accuracy in that range, we just haven't found a way to fix it.
It is true though, that other factors can sometimes be much more valuable. Charisma, conscientiousness and attractiveness can carry people very far.
The GP comment isn't really about intelligence - it is about the measurement of intelligence & the impact of parental expectations (societal, self and partner ones too).
And very unfortunately it cuts both ways.
People who measure poorly at 7 years old might be kept out of challenging classrooms where they would actually discover their talents & flourish.
People who measure high are pushed until they burn out of their skulls trying to fulfill their "measured" potential - or alternatively placed in the company of the talented where they end up with an underachiever's ego[1].
As my sister once told me "Society doesn't want you in particular, anyone who will do what you could do will do". I often think about that at work - society can afford to burn thousands of bright minds on optimizing ads and their placement.
[1] - I remember chills watching the setup for Molly's Game.
100x this.
I hope you get on top of your personal issues. Seek help: I did, it was useful, if expensive; money only exists to be spent
it related to me more than anything else but everyone is different
Entirely correct. Therapy is effective. Meditation will help. There is a Chinese old saw about "treasures that you carry within you and which none can rob nor destroy but you".
And get yourself a girl friend.
[p.s. when you get your act together, you know discipline, social skills, and making connections, your 139 will put you way ahead of those who merely have those skills, so cheer up.]
I might generalize this to "put yourself in position where you have a responsibility to other people". The expectations that other people have of us can be a burden, but they can also help us pull together enough motivation to get stuff done.
>And get yourself a girl friend.
As much as I would love to snap my fingers and make this happen, I really have no idea how to go about this. I met my last serious girlfriend at a bus station in Minsk, just struck up a conversation (in English).
Whereas here in the US, I have been in $BoringTechCity for 3 years, and haven't had a woman so much as smile at me. I'm very much a skinny George Costanza, and I freak people out. I also abstain from dating apps and am at this "squishy" part of adulthood where I enjoy staying in, making Indian curry and playing Red Dead, and can't imagine doing anything social in the evenings after work. (I did, however, perform stand-up comedy twice last week, at two different venues. Both times went pretty well, but I don't feel compelled to do it again anytime soon.)
So this is key. Start using your God given high voltage brain and start imagining. Then plan. Then implement.
Looks? Effendi, you see the most gorgeous women with the most unlikely males all the time. I wouldn't worry about that even a tiny bit.
> I did, however, perform stand-up comedy twice last week, at two different venues. Both times went pretty well, but I don't feel compelled to do it again anytime soon.
A sense of humor is one of the most attractive qualities in a man to a woman. You are already set. You are smart, you are funny, you have a fucking job.
Have you considered you are ungrateful to the Universe or God or the Spaghetti Monster? :-)
I highly recommend meditation. A helpful book I started with is called Wherever You Go, There You Are. I'm now getting into The Mind Illuminated, and I think it is also good. The subreddits /r/meditation and /r/TheMindIlluminated are informative, at the moment.
When you find the time, which can be difficult when you are working a job, try forcing yourself into social interactions. For example, chatting with people at cafe or at the train station, volunteering, and meetups.
Also, I found myself feeling like I've been Tom Sawyered just a little bit with the job thing. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to sweat the job thing so much, I would.
I like this advice. I just don't like following through with it because 1) I feel like a creep 2) I can't really tell if people are bothered by me and don't want to inconvenience them 3) I'm afraid I will say something wrong and the whole experience will bite me in the ass, so it's safer to do nothing.
I'm glad I know, because it feels good to know I guess. But I don't think that making me take that test really moved the needle for me in terms of self worth or success or anything like that. I had to figure my shit out via other methods (while working with that therapist). I suppose the point of this message is only to say that I empathize with your situation.
Obviously, my teachers and parents were raising me the best they thought was possible, but I think they were mistaken with this strategy.
I read a blogpost that really spoke to me: NEVER tell a child that they are smart, or dumb. Frankly, it doesn't matter. If they are unable to do X, tell them "You are unable to do X", no if-and-or-buts about it. Tell them you expect them to be able to do X, but in a way that doesn't bring up "intelligence" or "general performance".
Its something I strive for with the next generation: my little cousins or nephews (no kids of my own yet) will be told what my expectations of them are, but I try to avoid the "intelligence trap" when talking with them.
"Mindset" by Dr Carol Dweck is probably the most important book (research) on this topic. A must-read for anyone pretending to educate kids, actually to anyone period.
invariably when a topic about intelligence gets posted we need someone to come around with an IQ around the 140 mark (I have no reason to doubt they are being honest fwiw) to tell us how because they personally failed, genetic intelligence is really unimportant (smarter rebuttals acknowledge that genetics plays a major role in intelligence, but that IQ is a really poor proxy of this, which is debatable).
this ultimately culminates in Almost Everyone Can Be Good At Almost Everything If They Try Hard With A Good Minset, The Growth Mindset. the science is weak. it's baffling how her book can be a "must-read".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-grow...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/07/growth-mindset-4-growt...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/what-is-your-mindset
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
edit: this article only addresses MENSA members, so i think this submission is bad. most well-adjusted intelligent people want nothing to do with MENSA. so even the claims of the submission are questionable.
ironic because you'd think that if buzzfeed was as bad as its reputation, being a left-leaning outlet, it would be reasonable to assume they'd be in favor of growth mindset.
In one world an individuals actions and decisions would largely determine their outcome. In the other world things completely outside of an individual's control would be the primary determining factors in their outcome.
One of these worlds would imply the need for systems directly subsidizing those who fail to achieve. In the other world, poor outcomes would be attributable in large part to poor decisions. The latter scenario doesn't necessarily preclude a subsidization of those who fail to succeed, but it makes it a much more tenuous proposition.
I reccommend checking the sources given in the blog post.
I trust you've done your research so this isn't a rebuttal — merely a surprised observation. You probably have too much of it in the US (and indeed too much of even a good thing can hurt) whereas we have way too little of it in the EU (at least the "Latin" world).
100% agreed on Mensa (we don't have that here but even I know it's almost a scam).
The whole education system is built around the idea that everyone is the same and could success if they work hard enough, which has seriously bad consequences such as universities filled with people who don’t belong there (this is becoming worth and worth as the bar is lowered constantly in lower education). There is shaming about trade schools in most of the country, despite it being a way to succeed and filling jobs needed by society. There is specialized schools and sections for low IQ people but not for higher ones. You better be average to fit and "succeed" at school.
As a french, I would argue that there is "public" backlash - e.g. in newspapers, etc. - but in private life most people would agree with OP. France is by far not a socialist country - here are the last (2015) regional election results : blue is right-wing, black far-right, pink and red, left-wing :
http://referentiel.nouvelobs.com/file/13820492.jpg
The Japan example is true (although they do have serious social issues), but the fact is that European countries utterly dominate most list of the best places to live. See for example
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-countries-to...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-r...
https://ceoworld.biz/2019/04/11/best-quality-of-life-2019/
where most of the countries in the top ten are European, with special predominance of particularly leftist countries like the Nordic countries. And at least the first two are American sources (not sure about the location of the third one).
The thing here is that many people are convinced that "I just cant learn X at all", so they wont even try. And when they do actualy try, they can become at minimum alright, probably decent and maybe good at X. You see that on both kids and adults.
That is where growth mindset comes from.
Will everybody be next Beethoven, Michelangelo, Knuth or win the olympic? No. Can healthy person learn to play piano, draw a portrait, write a python script or learn to swim? Absolutely yes.
"It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ."
Children don't understand that. Children internalize everything. They blame themselves and you blamed yourself.
But you know, we do this too with other natural gifts. My exceptionally tall friends were constantly encouraged to enter sports like basketball. Tall people are built up emotionally through compliments that they receive on a daily basis from people. I would say it's not necessarily bad to compliment smart people for being smart.
I was a short scrawny kid growing up and I was bullied but I definitely took solace in the fact that I had a higher IQ than most people.
That is to say, I fucking hate having to say "no" every time (and it happens at least once every couple weeks) I am asked if or where I played basketball.
I'm also somewhere around 3 std dev above average IQ (mid 130s if I look at SAT equivalents, ~150 if GRE) and experienced the "but you're so good at school, why don't you like it" stuff.
In both cases, physical and... mental feels wrong, but it's the best word I've got, I feel as though I have wasted huge gifts. I don't take solace in any of it.
And since I'm full of anecdotes tonight, your bullying comment made me remember another. I had a target on my back for bullying due to my size I believe, everyone wanted to take a shot. I once got gang tackled by about 5/6 football players when I was 16 - the resultant slamming of my right knee into the tile floor means it will be my "trick" knee for the rest of my life. So, the size didn't give me a pass - if anything it made me stand out more. YMMV and all that.
A lot of people will just stream their consciousness in the case that they observe a trait that they wish they had. It's a projection, but it's also a tell.
Is it the anxiety that makes you feel wrong for receiving compliments?
Why? Why to do you think this? Could you provide your sources. Here's a source for the opposite: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the-s-...
If you excel in any other trait, people will acknowledge it and praise you for it, especially visual traits. Beauty, height, strength, speed, endurance, etc. Intelligence, by contrast, is rarely acknowledged. It's not as easily discerned. Confidence is an important part of achieving your best potential. Learning to accept compliments with grace is an important skill for life. Giving yourself such compliments is even more important.
Obviously smart people need to understand that their intelligence does not protect them from being wrong or delusional or failure. That's an important part of growing up and maturing for any human though.
I found that a lot of concepts of child-rearing overlaps with management, but with different labels. My grad-level Nursing Ethics class discussed qualities of a nursing leader, that employees need to made to feel personal worth. I made the link with ideas expressed by Mr. Rogers and on Sesame Street.
To be honest I have been pretty successful despite that, but I don't feel like I'm as smart as people were always trying to convince me I was, or at least I have a different sort of intelligence from the sort of thing they were implying, and I definitely have a complex now where I don't like to expose myself to failure. I guess there was not much else to praise about me except for my apparent general intelligence, but I wish they'd come up with something. I was, I think, a friendly, creative, thoughtful kid? But that's not enough, is it?
At a young age my parents were told by someone I did not have AD(H)D. I believed them. But later when I was living on my own I felt his methodology lacked credibility. (He was a person who called his treatment "turbo-drive psychotherapy" and dismissed questions about its effectiveness, calling them "pooh-poohing the next generation of technology". Not really someone who would want to hold an intellectual dialogue).
Looking back on it in the present I realized that if my parents were going to tell me I was or wasn't X or Y at that age, I was going to believe them - for as long as they were physically around to assert it. It had always felt wrong to disagree. For various reasons I had internalized that argument was not a means to find truth but instead an unreasonable risk when you could be locked in a closet for it.
I'm not sure what being diagnosed today would do for me since it wouldn't change any of that. Though it could give some more clarity to my past.
I go back and forth on it, though, because (as I mentioned) I've been successful in "real life" without any kind of psych treatment and looking back on my childhood "bad" decisions that were held up as evidence of my badness and the necessity of medicating me, e.g. neglecting my summer homework in favor of playing outside every day, I have to say that a lot of them (including that one) were great decisions. The worst thing was that the world was unwilling to let me be a child, and the best thing was that I said fuck you to the world and was a child anyway. Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot of people can benefit from them, and I also believe they would have stolen something from me that could never be repaid.
What if the world had simply accepted me for the person I was? There would have been no need, then, to engineer some misguided praise in the hope of turning me into something that I wasn't. I don't practically expect the world to be fair, nor to supply a weirdly-shaped hole for every weirdly-shaped peg, but I'm not sure it's best to reach for the DSM-5 whenever such a peg appears.
I had to come up with tons of strategies to work around ADHD and/or anxiety or whatever the hell it was. Because I literally didn't know what those things were, and I went through school before ADHD diagnoses started to really boom. Would I have used ADHD as a crutch? I honestly don't know. I can honestly say I'd have been tempted to.
I wish that childhood had been easier, and I had known that I wasn't "lazy or crazy."
Frankly I wish I could have just had therapy and a life coach for that stuff, rather than meds. Teach me to fish, don't hand me a fish.
I also have just a crippling fear of failure, so bad that I just never do anything that really tests my abilities. I failed an Amazon interview 10 years ago and I can't bring myself to give a fair shot to most tech companies.
It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
Let me give you a kick in the ass. You failed an Amazon interview when you were 19? For me, the difference between 19 and 29 was the difference between being a kid with literally zero practical skills, in college but not studying anything with "computer" in the name, and being an adult with the ability to walk into FAANMG^[1] interviews, pass them, and survive mostly-happily in the caustic environments therein.
Though it will be work, and you may encounter setbacks, you are ready for your next step. I completely relate to the feeling that despite knowing you are smart, creative, and able to solve complex problems, you're somehow still not good enough to get hired, but it's all in your head. You should not be worrying about whether you can get hired, but rather where you want to get hired, if getting hired is even the thing you really want to do.
> It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
I've found that "being vulnerable" can be an effective tool for building rapport, as long as you don't get too weird. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't worry about anything you've said here.
^[1] Not to say I attach any particular value to these companies, but their interviews are generally accepted to be on the challenging side.
Two explanations come to mind. I think both of them are probably true to some degree for many people.
1. High intelligence does not always equate to high executive functioning. Lots of smart people have trouble focusing on things they don't want to do, and that focus is generally a requirement for people who become "high achievers" by society's traditional standards.
2a. Those standardized tests only cover certain sorts of intelligence. My brother did well on those tests, but I did quite a bit better. Yet I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is at least my equal if not my better when it comes to smarts. It's just that those tests tended to cover things that weren't his strengths. In my case I feel like perhaps those tests may have painted a too-rosy picture of my intelligence since they catered to some of my strengths.
Human civilization is advanced by working smarter, not harder.
In practice and in the work place, the only thing that matters is if you get your work done or not. You can spend a lot of effort on things and get almost nothing done... I know programmers who spent 2+ years on custom unit-testing solutions (and I guess management never noticed this guy was spinning his wheels on something that has been solved in multiple github projects or something...)
Just because he put a lot of work in doesn't mean that other engineers respected his work or even he got anything done. All it means is that he wasted 2-years on the project.
That's real life.
We talked a lot about how literally no one on earth is capable of seeing an understanding your flaws as well as you, but also most humans on earth are infinitely less interested. The lens you view yourself with is totally unrelated to the lens with which the rest of the world sees you; you'll drive yourself insane if you think you and the world interpret you the same.
The point is, I think he did a phenomenal job at blasting my self deprecating brain into reality, but his initial spin of "Stop treating yourself like you're an idiot, because you're not and I can prove it" was just a slight misstep.
Obviously I'm just theorizing from my armchair and don't know more than you about this, or want to be agreed with, it's just that your post sparked my interest and I'd like to know more because my hunch is that removing excuses to not change oneself is generally a reasonable thing to do, even if it can hurt in the short term. In fact, it kind of worked for me to improve myself in the past (not regarding intelligence or academic/professional achievements, but other aspects of life). Maybe it depends on the particular person and situation?
It' might've helped things looking forward, but looking backward I think it wasn't great. As in, "I am so smart and yet thus far have accomplished nothing." So, maybe that's a debt to be paid, and once paid a person is able to move forward at a better trajectory than before? That might make sense to me.
What was the lesson you learned specifically from this?
You're aware of your flaws because they're a part of you, but that doesn't mean that anyone else notices them.
Thought this was just me...
If anyone is into Yoga, or Yogachara, the way they put it is that internal formations (imagination or historic image/sound data/logging ala Parakalpita) represents one type of thinking (which everyone does not necessarily do) and analytical or "thinking mind" represents another type of thinking which everyone does, but may not be their primary mode.
From a few of my interviews about this topic:
- Old business acquaintance can visualize 2D seismic data in augmented reality 3D. He can literally see underground in his mind in front of him in his office.
- Musically inclined acquaintance (singer) can hear all the accompaniment music for performances in her mind.
- Guy who designed my kitchen can see my kitchen in his head.
You can be superintelligent in general, and bad at lots of specific things. Or even bad at most things! It's not a contradiction in the slightest.
I think that IQ has become less and less emphasized over the years, and that's a good thing. It has some utility, IMO, but a lot of care needs to be taken when it comes to applying it to... well, anything.
See : Modern society
But to make poor decisions on a scale that affects many others, you generally need the intelligence to rise to some level of power.
(There are of course exceptions, like starting a brushfire, etc)
People get really defensive around intelligence though. Everyone wants to be at least average if not above average. If they can't claim it in one area, they'll try to redefine intelligence to include themselves. And we do have the habit of mistaking institutional knowledge for intelligence.
Height is an objective and one-dimensional measure. It measures your ability to do a single thing: reach objects that are farther off of the ground.
I think we really do humanity a disservice if we define intelligence that way. The brain is capable of so many other things.
Surely you have known people who were bright (or brilliant) in some areas and lacking in others.
But for people who I would consider as intelligent, it's not a result of just knowledge. Or just skills.
I would trust their ability to "get" concepts they've been previously ignorant of relatively quickly. The wheels just spin faster.
And a lot like height, there's diminishing returns and what not. I can get a step ladder, then being tall is just a fact. Being intelligent can help you get a concept quicker, but once we both understand it, there's no effective difference.
But no one gets defensive about height. Or strength. Or anything with visible qualifiers. Which is funny, because intelligent people are better at thinking in the abstract and intelligence and the results of it are abstract.
I try never to reward results directly, only effort.
If the results are reward for effort then they are earns.
It too me a decade to undo the damage from always been told I was bright and never learning good habits for studying/persistence.
It’s just damn lucky that I enjoyed programming enough that I stuck with it and it became a career because otherwise I’d be earning a lot less.
Too much of that "focus on the effort" and you end up with a generation of bureaucrats - people that are good at miming processes and posturing but not capable of producing anything of actual value. Society doesn't care about the efforts, it cares about results. No matter how much neurosurgery you studied, if a patient dies at your table no family member will reward you for your "effort".
> It too me a decade to undo the damage from always been told I was bright and never learning good habits for studying/persistence.
The issue is not then about being result-vs-effort focus. The issue here is that unfortunately you didn't get people to push you for your best and to get out of your comfort zone.
The best things in life typically reward effort spent with incremental results, which come with their own dopamine rush. It's something I wish I had been made to understand at a much earlier age.
Here's a short list: - Cooking - Playing an instrument - Singing - Painting - Drawing - Writing - Learning (..a language, a new skill, etc) - Developing and maintaining valuable social and romantic relationships into adulthood - Any and all sports - Crafting - Raising children
The goal obviously isn't to maximize effort, it's simply to reinforce the link between effort and results and help the child understand that they can coast off their natural abilities (as we all have/do), but if they want to improve or excel in something that they enjoy then it will take real effort.
(Well, some bosses try to praise for effort but I’ve always found it to be really patronising or a barely-disguised attempt to get you to work overtime.)
Maybe I was fortunate that my parents are also smart. My dad once shared that he completely understood that we (his kids) struggled so much with finishing university and finishing the stuff we worked on. He had many of the same problems (though he did finish his PhD). He never managed to teach me that discipline to follow through and get stuff done, though. But at least I wasn't judged and made to feel dumb for it.
My oldest son again has the same traits of high intelligence and extreme laziness. I'm trying to teach him better ways to handle this. I try to emphasize the importance of doing the work, doing homework, finishing projects, focus, and sometimes just doing what is necessary whether you like it or not. I try to de-emphasize intelligence without making him feel dumb. He knows he's smart, and he knows it a little too well in my opinion, but I try to praise him for the things he does, rather than for how smart he is. I try to challenge his intelligence, but also try to steer him towards things that aren't about IQ, like art or sports. (He's not interested though; he mostly just wants to play Minecraft and build beautiful houses and complex machinery there. Close enough, I guess.)
I began to feel guilty for wasting my intelligence. I knew my older brother was at least as smart as me, and fell into an addiction cycle early on, so I was determined to not follow in his footsteps.
Granted, I still went on to slack off and spend 7 years as an undergrad, but it payed off in the end.
Sounds like you're smart enough to always find an argument for hating yourself :)
In order for this not to be a useless post, FWIW: most mathematicians that I know and that are highly regarded would not do well in IQ tests, I would think. The clever ones solve problems and move on; the pioneers are less clever, more committed and more random, idiosyncratic.
First of all at the tail of the IQ distribution, the normal approximation breaks down. Secondly, we get a big jump in mental development when we hit our growth spurts. So IQ at that age is not massively well-correlated with your IQ a few years later.
But that doesn't get into why it is actively detrimental. It turns out that children are motivated to seek confirmation of what they are complimented on. So a child who is told they are smart seeks easy tasks where they look smart, and tends to avoid hard tasks that might show them not to be so smart. While children who are complimented on their hard work and willingness to learn will seek out challenges to push themselves.
Research indicates that this effect sets in shockingly easily. And the two groups respond very differently to setbacks. The ones who are complimented on what they are gets demotivated. The ones who are complimented on what they do get motivated to tackle it again.
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/2009... for more on this and some verification that I'm not just making this up.
Your personal life is an anecdotal data point, but it fits perfectly. You were identified young as smart. It was drilled in enough that you know exactly how smart. But it sounds like you learned to coast on brains and avoid challenges, and are now suffering the consequences.
If this is true, I would recommend that you read https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Hurt-Me-Master-Your-ebook/dp/B07... for advice on how to build mental toughness. That can help you overcome life challenges which are in your way.
And why would anyone believe it should be? Do you really think a test with a relatively small set of questions, written by a biased group of individuals is going to be representative of human intelligence?
It baffles me that IQ is used as any kind of meaningful measurement beyond showing whether someone is mentally retarded or a prodigy.
First we should understand that IQs and life outcomes follow normal distributions and there's plenty of exceptions to the rule...but as a general trend, the relationship is indisputable. This has been studied for over a century. This suggests that IQ tests are fairly good at gaging mental faculties.
Height gives an advantage in many ways across human society. This is a physical attribute that we have little control over, yet it influences outcomes in jobs, social interactions, sports, dating, etc. Height also follows a normal distribution across populations. There is no reason to believe that mental faculties do not have similar physical mechanisms and that a normal distribution does not exist across populations.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.h...
Your IQ is correlated with your parents' IQ. But so is your social status, physical appearance and wealth.
IQ is not independently responsible, and it's covariant with other heritable traits.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3248886/
"Childhood IQ and achieved education level were significantly and independently associated with upward mobility between the ages of 5 and 49-51 years. Only education was significantly associated (positively) with upward social mobility between 5 and 25 years, and only childhood IQ (again positively) with upward social mobility between 25 and 49-51 years. Childhood IQ was significantly negatively associated with downward social mobility. Adult height, childhood housing conditions, adverse events in childhood and sex were not significant determinants of upward or downward social mobility in this cohort."
https://heckmanequation.org/resource/i-q-isnt-everything/
Stop falsely claiming that your "facts" are irrefutable.
I can tell you exactly how to refute those studies. Perform a controlled scientific study that disproves those results. Let me tell you, if you really believe in it, you could be a superstar academic and you sell a lot of books. Disproving such a large body of research would be a big achievement, especially one as unpopular as IQ.
So let's consider it psychometrically:
1. Does it measure something? Yes it does. This something is consistent across time as people's IQs do not vary dramatically. It is "stable". So whatever it measures is not spurious.
2. Ok so we measure an actual thing. Is the thing it measures distinct? Yes it is. It's been controlled for against every conceivable variable like education, socioeconomic background, and family health. Whatever it is measuring, it is definitely an independent thing, not a representation of something else.
3. Is the real independent thing we're measuring even important? Maybe it's just like fingerprints, real but essentially random and inconsequential. It turns out it correlates with all kinds of things. It acts as a predictor in all kinds of outcomes. It is the strongest predictor available in psychometry. If you could only administer one test to a subject, testing this thing is the most revealing test.
So, regardless of what IQ is, we know what it isn't. We know it isn't fake, unimportant, random, or a combination of other factors.
This is deeply unpopular and goes against many people's core beliefs about society and education, but the science is well-founded.
It can be refuted but it has to be refuted with science, not quotes, metaphors, and anecdotes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...
The reviewers shared a 20-point critique of the paper prior to publication that was ignored by the publisher and researchers. In fact, their results clearly showed the existence of a general intelligence until they performed an unnecessary rotation which is mentioned in Appendix B point 7.
Whether or not IQ has human meaning, social value, or is the "end-all" are subjective arguments that are not within the scope of IQ study. Statistically we know that so far out of all the psychometric scores that have been invented it is the strongest one. Better measurements will most definitely be invented, but they haven't so far.
'One study on nine groups of soldiers differing in job and reading ability found a correlation of .96 between the AFQT and reading achievement (Sticht, Caylor, Kern, & Fox, 1972)... Another study obtained reading scores for 17-year olds for those same ethnic groups and dates (Campbell et al., 2000) and found a correlation of .997 between reading scores and AFQT scores.' [1]
'Cognitive ability tests taken at age 11 correlate 0.81 with national school examinations taken at age 16.' [2]
Note that .96 and .81 are huge correlations. These results have been replicated across 100+ years of psychological research across cultural boundaries and across multiple disciplines.
Can you make up for lower IQ with higher work ethic? Yes, but like a shorter than average NBA player, you're going to be at a disadvantage. By no means does the existence of shorter than average NBA players suggest that you should expect shorter than average men to be just as likely to succeed as taller than average men.
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[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED101297.pdf [2] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...
“It has always seemed to be odd that we like to call the human brain the most complex known object in the Universe, yet many of us are still prepared to accept that we can measure brain function by doing a few so-called IQ tests,” Dr Highfield said.
I wonder, what is your opinion on Murray's and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve?
But not really. You pulled those numbers out of the air, and they aren't very descriptive.
Will someone with a 140 IQ fair better academically and economically than someone with 130 90% of the time?
140 vs 100, sure. But as the # of standard deviations converges, it's less meaningful. And there are still other covariant factors you are failing to consider, as mentioned before.
On average, people raised in poor environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in poor environments with lower IQ. More likely to be more upwardly mobile, more likely to be more whatever.
And on average, people raised in good environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in good environments who have lower IQ.
If you're a person of color, on average, you're going to do better if you have a higher IQ than if you have a lower IQ.
Same if you're a woman.
And 140 vs 130 is a bit unfair. You're talking about looking for meaningful differences between less than 2% of the population as compared to less than 0.1% of the population.
And just because there are diminishing returns with something like IQ, doesn't make it useless.
That wasn't the point. I would say the same for 100 and 110.
Some MENSA members in this thread seem very attached to their scores.
That's the other thing, you do have to look at the whole. Because there is likely overlap. But the trend of note is that IQ tracks through it.
If you sort people by earning potential, you'll find that as average income goes up, so does average IQ.
When you sort by health outcomes. As average healthiness goes up, so does average IQ.
Even the outcomes that are colloquially contrasted with intelligence actually correlate well. In other words, if you sorted people by EQ, you'll find that better average EQ means better average IQ.
IQ is the aspartame of psychology. So maligned that it's been probably studied more than other things. And just like aspartame is perfectly fine, IQ does what it says on the tin.
100 vs 140 will be a very strong indicator. 100 vs 110 will not; I would not trust 110 to yield a better outcome 80-90% of the time, as GP claimed.
Which is why the comparison of IQ scores at that coarseness is plain silly.
While I don't dispute that IQ tests correlate with smarts, the argument that "The WW1 military was very motivated, therefore their decisions must have been rational" isn't a particularly good one IMHO - because there are a great many counter-examples.
This is the point in the discussion where you should be rolling out some supporting evidence.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=the+problem+with+iq+tests
You still might be, unintentionally. This "praising kids for effort" is based on "mindset" research by Carol Dweck. Her Wikipedia page highlights a few criticisms of her work, in particular that the research isn't replicable and the interventions (in schools) don't produce results.
Outright telling them that "you like this" made them like the thing. Opposite made them dislike it. Including food and activities.
Which is one of the reasons I studied the board game Go for almost 4 years after I lost all hope of ever being good at it. At the time it was one of the few things I did despite being just good enough to teach complete beginners, but never any better.
The guy I was learning from was a really good teacher and was charitably amused by my lack of progress. I knew I was never going to find a gentler way to fail and be okay with it.
I think it's useful to substitute athletic talent for intellectual talent when thinking about this stuff. Does anybody discount the value of getting an athletically talented kid into a school with a good athletics program where they can be around peers and coaches who will enable them to be the best athlete they can be? Would anybody argue in favor of letting some kid with the athletic talent to try for the NBA flounder at whatever high school they happen to naturally feed into?
I think the answers to those questions are obvious. And yet we regularly have people arguing that somehow the same principles don't apply to intellectual talent. It's ridiculous. Let the mental prodigies be with their peers. It hurts no one and does them lots of good.
Second, non-athletic education and interests get lost in the process. And again, most kids wont end with that career as there are only few slots and many competing kids.
It's true that I was better at school than my peers, the pace of teaching was too slow for me and I got bored easily. But it was also true that in other aspects, especially social aspects, I wasn't more mature than my peers. And being smart and having different interests (say, computers, space or philosophy instead of football, etc.) doesn't exactly help socializing at school. I was always relatively unpopular (not marginalized, fortunately, as I did have my group of friends, but I did get my dose of demeaning from many others) and not very good in my advances with the opposite sex (when the age came to be interested in that).
Altogether, I think my school years could be called rather OK (taking into account that, as mentioned, people with "nerd" interests tend to not be too well-liked). But if I had skipped a year, and I had been in class with people one year older, with more social maturity, with everyone knowing that I skipped course, the girls seeing me as too young to even think about considering... I think it would have been hell.
I'm aware it's not exactly what you're talking about. You imply a specific school for gifted kids. Still, I think it wouldn't have been a good idea. When you finish school, or university, there's a point where you have to interact socially with "normal" people. Both at work and social life. I learned those interaction skills at school. I learned, for example, to fake interest when people talked about what I deemed to be trivial maters, like football, TV shows and the likes (or later, even to have some genuine interest and get off my high horse sometimes). I learned when I should switch off nerd mode (for example when trying to interact with the opposite sex, especially at the beginning) and when I could actually benefit from it. I think those skills were vital for my well-being. And I doubt I could have learned them equally well at a school where I weren't able to socialize with "normal" people.
You might find this study interesting. https://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10489
This is a surprisingly insightful blog post, which I wasn't expecting, considering the click-baity title. But I think I see now where my parents went wrong in raising me - the self-esteem movement, which the Gen Xers inherited, played too much a role in my rearing, methinks.
Now I'm a comfy SWE. I've been spending a lot of time reading to try and give myself the tools to resolve the various neuroses I developed as a teen, and it's going well. I still don't know what my score on that test was and I don't really care.
The article exactly mentions that anxiety and depression are amplified in folks like yourself. You have to overcome them to use your pseudo-superpower to save the world... or not, who knows is it even worth saving? idk
Compound the extra psychological difficulty you face with the improbability of finding someone who understands you, with the counter-intuitive understanding of your situation as desirable by everyone less smart than you are, you're so lucky, I wish I was as smart as you, "no you don't, but you wouldn't understand" ...
It sets you up for a very lonely life. Isolation can lead to insanity.
What I'm trying to say is: What you are experiencing is normal for someone like you.
BTW, what's a SWE?
> neither necessary nor sufficient
So, bullshit.
Yes, some of those life outcomes are good and some of those life outcomes are bad. That doesn't make it bullshit.
What it most often means, if you have a high IQ, is that you have a choice and more often many choices, because you can see more choices and it's overwhelming and it's easy to give up and say fuck it all this is bullshit and SWE (I am so embarrassed to say I had to look up SWE even though I am a software engineer and one of the SWEs was smoke weed every day, ha!)
Which brings me to my point! If you have high IQ, you can be a SWE or SWE.
You know what I mean??
>When a child is dealing with anxiety/anxious behavior, it's better to treat the parents than to take the kid into therapy.
Something along these lines. It helped me realize or reinforce that, while my father has had and has anxiety/depression for most of his life, his legacy might not be as much genetically imprinted on me insofar that it's of learned behavior.
In other words, I recalled a rather generic memory (which means it probably happened multiple times): I was at home, minding my own business, when it became clear that someone was expected at the house - perhaps the cable guy, a plumber, or someone like that - and I remember watching my father _wait_ for this person. Like, he would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, but would go put on his shoes, then take them off, then pace around the living room, then open and shut the door, pace a little more, and sit down for a few moments, and repeat. And I recall wondering what was bothering him. And I think this was him dealing with his general anxiety and I notice this sort of behavior in myself (or at least the nagging urge to _do something_ in order to feel more comfortable somehow). So now I think I know why I get certain thoughts at certain times (and realize I don't have to respond to them in the way I think my father would).
This is probably the healthy sort of realization people try to discover in therapy. I have had the fortune of seeing a handful of decent-to-great therapists throughout my life, and I have tried to mentally stash away the best gleanings, so as to justify all the time, money, and energy spent talking to these people.
>BTW, what's a SWE?
I thought this was the acronym people used for "software engineer". Maybe I won't use it anymore. What I was trying to express was my, well, feelings of inferiority /slash/sour grapes due to my perceived lack of career/professional success at age 30, a sense which seems to get worse and more bitter as I get older, which I would _really_ like to nip in the bud, because every time I let it take hold, it always leads to bad/negative thinking, prejudice, poor self-image, envy of others, and those sorts of things. Maybe it's Perpetual Late Bloomer Syndrome?
Thanks again for your comments.
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
The other side of this is 'lazy as shit' - in terms of psychometric measures, you're largely describing conscientiousness, one of the five OCEAN traits. IQ and conscientiousness both correlate with income, but it's their combination that really makes for economic high achievers. Sounds like you have half the triforce, as it were.
You may very well be highly intelligent but not conscientious. There are lots of people like this, it's not a sin, just a personality. I will say that conscientiousness is probably more valuable than IQ in many ways, but IQ is nothing to scoff at. Imagine being in the same situation as you, but being dumb as well.
>But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted!
You can do anything you want. The trick is that 'wanting' here doesn't mean 'I want to have the results of having done that long arduous risky focused effort'. It means 'I want to go through that long arduous risky focused effort'. Most people don't want anything like that, though.
To say "You can go to the gym," is not the same as saying, "You're entitled to be jacked." It just means you're allowed to strive.
I haven't done badly in life, but I've always felt I could have done a lot better if I had better executive functioning. If somehow I could have traded some of my IQ points for better executive functioning points (is there such a thing?), I'd happily take that trade.
Basically as I see it, using every bit of rational intelligence to tame and condition the rest of their being (emotions, health, social, will, etc), develop all the other forms of intelligence.
The 'dark path' for most seems to be an ironic world view, which leads to a sarcastic mindset and ultimately nihilism if not contained. Hence a major lifelong requirement is to really learn what self-love means.
I have no idea what my IQ is, I just feel it's too much or too little for my own sake; case in point I finally stopped hating myself and learned self love at 34. Changed my life, like step 1 of a major transformation.
The only recommendation I'm certain helps everyone is Stoicism.
This is a perfectly fine coping mechanism for big-picture stuff (environ. protection, climate change, genotoxic materials, migration, politics); it only becomes highly problematic when you use it as the coping mechanism for everything.
> Stoicism
Depending on the construction stoicism can come quite close to nihilistic world views, actually.
About irony/sarcasm: I used to think exactly like you. I must say it was totally flawed. I don't know how to word this scientifically (and please understand I'm not religious): sarcasm hurts your soul, your heart, your mind, your spirit. It's like drugs: short term good but really bad long term.
It helps for some time and then slowly eats at you. A sarcastic person is in effect trading the possibility of hope for the comfort of accepting things. There is a way where you keep both, through forgiving, through understanding, with humility.
Humor gets a pass when it speaks of bad things, or in a bad manner, because it's a way of denouncing said things/manners. Certainly not to validate it. That's where sarcasm has its place IMHO: as a very bad manner that humor serves to show.
About Stoicism: that's true. Hence why I always preface with self-love, because the Stoic apparatus is quite unable to speak of this in modern terms. In general I agree with Ferris on this though: Stoicism is the best operating system for the human mind. Now that I know, I see it and find it in so many things, people, the good side of life (and it seems quite missing in many a miserable path).
Conscientiousness, a factor in the Five Factor Model of personality, measures something like this. Specifically, the aspect of Industriousness.
However, it's very hard to measure, because virtually any test that measures a person's planning ability almost invariably ends up measuring IQ instead. Basically, the best way to test this right now is to ask a bunch of people around you how "hard working" you are and average the results. Still, it's accurate enough to be reasonably predictive of a lot of interesting phenomena.
I've tried a lot of things to improve my level of organization and productivity with...modest success. Some things that (I think) have helped me:
- Seek out and take on responsibility (work, family, community, etc.) It's painful adjusting at first, but I get used to it and the satisfaction of being depended upon is motivating.
- When faced with a stressful level of responsibility, remember that you will live through it. I used to procrastinate like mad because of a fear of failure. Keeping that thought in mind ("I will live through this") calmed my nerves somewhat. Now I still worry, and still procrastinate, but it's not as bad.
- Write down what you want your life to be like in 1, 3, 5, and maybe even 10 years. Come back to it every now and then. I did this 5 years ago, and while I haven't achieved everything, I've achieved some of what I wanted. I'll take it as a victory.
Learning how to not be a dick about being intelligent was probably the most valuable thing I learned at school.
Problem is, I thought I was just 'smart'. If there were things I struggled to understand, it was only natural for others not to get it unless I could unpack it for them.
However I also had this notion that when I understood things immediately that I was just 'faster', that in five, ten, fifteen minutes they would figure it out and we'd all be in agreement and everything would be great. Everything was not great, and I would get visibly agitated with people for not getting these completely obvious things.
These are not realistic expectations and certainly are not attractive behaviors.
For many things it makes you less understandable (and vice versa) and this is necessarily going to have a socially ostracising effect.
Which then of course leads to anxiety, and thence mood disorders.
In any case I wish you well. I have some similarities in my background including high scores, isolation, and depression, and trust me it can get better.
I remember in school understanding and mastering subjects without much trouble and work but once a subject got too hard it was time to move to something else. So for most of my life that has been my method of operating. Unfortunately,for me, that makes it impossible to get far in any career.
Hard work and the ability to work through adversity is what's needed for a successful life. I wish school and parents would stop using IQ as a measure for future success. It's not a good predictor.
I went through gifted programs and thinking back, I probably could have learned calculus by middle school if my education had adapted to my learning rate, but it didn't. We still had the same text books as every other 4th grader, we just covered more of the material in a year.
Fortunately college was a kick in the pants for me. First year I went in with the same attitude as high school, that I can just study the night before an exam and ace it. Didn’t go so well in college and I barely passed first year. I got scared enough that hunkered down and really tried for the rest of college. College grades aside I think that experience of having to stick with it and work through adversity really helped me later in life.
So based purely on your personal experiences, your willing to throw out an entire field of study that has mountains of empirical evidence.
This is also part of why I would never go anywhere near wrecking a relationship by being someone’s “other guy.” It’s too important to society to respect when two people are able to work through all the hoops society places against decent, healthy relationships to go around affecting them when they occur. Edit- Hell, I donate monthly to a charity that benefits single women and mothers to at least feel like I’m doing something for the women of the world that I’m likely to never share my life with.
Most IQ tests (especially self admi istered ones) are BS.
The proper ones are probably the most studied aspects of psychology there are and correlate with a whole lot of things in significant ways.
IQ is not bullshit. It's quite good at what it does: measuring intelligence.
Maybe you were referring to the idea that being smart will inevitably make you successful, which is indeed bullshit.
Now I'm in my second year in a PhD program in a biomedical program.
Point is: a lot of us start to feel like we made a mistake and it's too late to fix.
At age 30, started comp sci at uni. Best decision I ever made. It fixed the "mistakes" I made in my life choices
Socially speaking things aren't that different: I've got to the point of faking being "normal", both at work or in social life, that is, I had the solution for a problem or something smart to say or do, but kept it for myself because I didn't want to appear different, and I also sometimes wanted to be invited at parties, so I totally understand your point. The only thing being intelligent helped a lot was finding the right woman (17 years together with highs and lows, mostly highs) but especially at young age one would rather find a wrong one each week than the right one for life. That's where being intelligent doesn't help at all: if you want to have fun, hide as much as you can that you belong in the right part of that gaussian.
BTW, I've got a bit more luck at finding jobs, but mostly because it was before the post 2k crisis; one morning I sent my (almost empty by then) resume to various companies and recruiters, and by lunch time I had like 12 or 13 job offers. That was just crazy; it didn't last long though.
Don't know my IQ but I grew up with a taste and habit of thinking and trying to solve problems, and in some workplaces people want to complain and not solve problems. Weirder than that, if I offer the solution free, they react half negatively (maybe insulted, or shamed ?), and later they may even complain that I stopped offering solutions.
Extremely damaging to my mind.
Then in some other rather corrupt places, money is made by dragging the solution ad infinitum or close to it, because penalties for missed releases are crafted in a way that makes delays still more profitable than finishing in time (easier when supplier and customer are "in the same bed" and money comes from the government), so that if you offer a quick solution you immediately see people looking at you like you were a bank robber. Oh the irony:)
There's a weird social dynamic that I don't fully understand.. maybe it's fatigue causing lack of desire to learn how to make your job easier and feel inferior .. who knows
Automating part of the process may reduce the drudgery, but there's an existential fear from some people -- that if a part of their job can be automated, they'll be made redundant. Or the boss will ask them to do more work, faster, for the same pay.
I don't like to see life as a game of trick.
[0] tbh people also have various emotions so I could have tried to take this into account but I was too ~immatureat the time
that said personal relationships have the same issue, you feel like something could be done but people resist even considering your inputs.. which gives me the idea that most people want to be heard first rather than have solution brought to them
People forcing their way into your problems are very annoying, again I know I do that at times but I've stopped doing that almost entirely and basically try to listen more than I speak.
I guess I’m somewhat confused because there was an earlier claim that one had no idea why anyone would be frustrated, but clearly you seem to have a good idea of why someone would seemingly refuse help.
Again we were all doing the same thing and I just suggested using my shit to go faster. One other idea is that there are a few layers of interactions, people prefer suggestions from those they trust, or those they respect. I didn't have that at the time somehow.
I would suspect it's only absurd because of one's personal lack of understanding of the situation. I can only speculate the full situation, but I can imagine a hypothetical situation where a bunch of accountants joke in camraderie about how much their accounting jobs suck, but when someone actually tries to resolve this, the "fixer" is actually trying to fix a non-problem due to lack of social insight and thus the fixer seems absurd.
I walk everyday. I prefer a pair of 1461 Doc Martin over my $170 Asics.
I'm reminded of that quote from Good Will Hunting about serving the douchebag Harvard guy's kids fries at the drive thru. "Maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal"
After years of just understanding things with no effort and easily outpacing most peers, I was the worst (by far) person in the room at a mostly intellectual pursuit. I was lucky that this stuck, because a lot of people describe it as decreasing depression (there is a lot of physical content and group dynamic), you meet a lot of people so it helps with enhancing social skills, and the physical exercise goes a long way. Beyond that, knowing how to protect yourself gives you a lot of confidence with strangers, for better and worse.
I hate being the guy that shouts my religion to people who aren’t asking for it, but I really think a lot of people would benefit from this. It’s had such an impact that I donate to some charity that gives free lessons and uniforms to under privileged kids in Oakland. Check out a martial art, it’s a more thoughtful way of exercising, and you may hate being the worst person in the room enough to learn how to get better.
I might be slightly on the autism spectrum, but never been diagnosed. Always been a bit of a loner and introvert. Back in high school, when classmates were out partying on weekends, I was hacking. Learning Z80 ASM the hard way with dead tree books and struggling to find info on random local BBS's (not much in Montana and not a long way to go before a BBS was long distance).
I started work on a masters in electrical engineering, but have never finished. Wanted it more than I needed it. Somehow (referral from a friend of a friend) landed a job in finance as a developer a year out of college, and been in the industry ever since. All of my current friends, and even my wife, I have due to working in the industry. Not that finance itself is responsible for it, just where I met everyone.
Also regarding networking, all of my early jobs were acquired via networking. After a decade of experience at a well known hedge fund, recruiters hound me all the time, and if I want, I can get several interviews within a week. Its worth not burning bridges.
I've just started doing that and within a week I have started to feel a lot more energy.
It's a workout without realizing you're doing a workout, and it helps to get some of that good feeling dopamine running around your body.
I'm wondering how good you considered yourself in memory and retention? If so, did this allowed you to excel at academic tests?
Anyways, this makes a good argument why IQ is largely inconsequential in the real life: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
The upside to it is that i have gotten through it. Somewhat. I've got a decent job, and I'm not worrying about losing it all the time anymore. I've got family, and who knows -- one day I might actually feel confident enough to make friends with someone.
But yes, it can't be said enough. Discipline, social skills, connections AND self-confidence are much more important than IQ.
I do, so I started ignoring it. Up for a corner kick and the ball is headed clear for the opposing forward to only have to clear our one defender held back and 1 on 1 the keeper? I sprint the whole way. Almost every time, I get there from across the pitch in time to help.
It's the same with emails or projects or objectives. There are critical periods and when it's critical you've got to push through. I've realized I've always known when it's critical. I've just not committed in that moment. Now I know.
Interestingly, this means you can spend lots of time off the throttle. I'm pretty sure intelligence is common. There are lots of smart people. I think the combination of that plus this is killer.
Btw if you want to see what this feels like at work, try Adderall.
But what you actually said is that IQ is perfectly valid but not magic and that anxiety and depression are serious problems.
IQ is only valuable up to a point, the rest is seduction
I never did homework in school, and got by on a talent for math and science (until we got to integrations, and I was unable to derive and remember the standard primitives, which saw my grades tumble into failing grades; I graduated with a good grade for math only because geometry (which is very intuitive for me) was a third of the final grade). So I managed to get by with never doing any homework, which meant that in university, I got completely stranded at the many classes that really required serious studying, and I focused mostly on the more intuitive logic/programming oriented classes that I could still ace without any real work. I couldn't graduate without the other classes, though, so I dropped out.
(I've never completed a proper IQ test that I got to see the results of; as a teenager I did one from a book that I didn't finish and still got 136, and I got 139 from one on TV that maxed out at 141, so I assume I'm somewhere near 140. I was tested for motivation problems at school as a teenager, which apparently showed I was smart, but my mother didn't want to share the results with me. Clearly I was smart, just not good at actual work.
So I'm lazy as shit, or possible struggle with motivation, but who can tell the difference? But I've been lucky to roll into a field that I have a talent for (software development), and I'm doing pretty good there. I was single and not dating at all (too insecure to even try) until 32 (yes, virgin until then), when I tried online dating and eventually met my wife, who has been great for me and my career (and I apparently for hers). So convinced me to quit jobs where I wasn't happy and find something better, and the financial stability she provided helped a lot in the step to become a freelancer. I'm still constantly distracted by online stuff (I should be programming as I'm typing this), and I wonder if I would have been an amazing programmer if I could keep my focus on programming for the whole day, but my work is generally good enough to get by. At least as long as I'm interested in the project; on boring, repetitive projects that are no different from any other, I start out great and after a couple of months I lose interest and I need to do something else. My longest job ever was almost 4 years, and that was 2 years too long. These days I work as a freelancer on projects from 6-18 months, and that works about right for me. Team mates tend to love me during the first few months, but get tired of me after about a year.
My current project is more interesting than usual: I set up the first prototype and the team developed around me. I get to focus on the interesting stuff that I care most about, and there's interesting stuff with graph databases, complex data modeling, and I get to refactor the structure on the project simply because I say it's necessary. Other people have recently been added to the project to pick up the more boring stuff, and for the first time I feel like I'm getting recognition for the stuff I'm best at. This is an amazing feeling and I can see myself working here for much longer than usual, but we'll see how things look after another half year (I've been here for nearly a year now).
But again, I know I've been lucky, as I haven't actually worked for any of this; I was just lucky to roll into something I have a talent for, was lucky to meet my wife, and got lucky with some of the projects I worked on. But I could easily see how my life could have ta...
That's literally what you need to do. More doing, less bla-bla. Way, way more doing. The Voice is wrong, ignore it. Look at dumb people like me and imitate them. Your depression and anxiety will fade.
When you are healed, dial up the thinking, slowly, until your performance is adequate. No more.
>Anyway, what I'm trying to say is IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless
100% agree.
It’s one of those things where when it’s taken out of context or on its own it’s really useless. Then people assume things based on a single measure and you’re screwed.
People misinterpret what it means, instead of "I can do what I want" it means "nobody knows what you will do, anything can happen".
It's a challenge with a child with any extraordinary ability. They start getting praised for the simple existence of the gift rather than any work. So the first time something seems like work, the child thinks they're just bad. It then becomes a kind of learned helplessness.
You also learn to not try because trying is the first step to failure.
You mention anxiety, depression, and that you feel lazy. Is part of the problem that there's nothing you want to do right now?
> IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless
Of the four qualities you list, you already have the one that's mostly innate. The others you can develop.
Yes. On one level _want_ to earn a Security+ certificate or do a coding class part-time. I can't say for certain that they'll change my life for the better, but they seem like the _right_ thing to do for someone who has had 10 jobs but unable to begin a career.
>Of the four qualities you list, you already have the one that's mostly innate. The others you can develop.
I suppose you have a point, but I really lack the confidence and faith that if I keep trying to improve these things, then I'll see results. Because of my warped mind, moving myself in the direction of bettering myself =/= positive results, but rather new FUD, new failures, faux pas, doubts, and decline. Maybe IQ is innate, but I don't really use it, and I think I'm losing it. Depression makes my brain feel swollen and hard to grasp the right word and formulate plans. And yes, I have taken many, many medications. Most recently Buproprion and Fluoxetine. Now I've been taking 40mg Fluoxetine daily for a few months, but it doesn't help with any of the aforementioned problems. I think I continue to take it to show that I'm trying to do _something_ about this. Perhaps I should give therapy another shot. I just feel terrible and selfish spending money on it, when I think just saving a few hundred dollars a month would do more for my mental health than bawling to a shrink about my troubled teen years...
Sorry to ramble. Thank you for your reply. I will try to reconsider what I can develop.
https://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2006/1...
Anyways, the idea in academic literature -- that some super smart psychiatrists know the Right Questions to ask which correlate with _g_ -- is aggravating.
The thing is, if you look at IQ and ability to pass a math class, they do correlate strongly.
The fact that these folks were Mensa means something else.
>The thing is, if you look at IQ and ability to pass a math class, they do correlate strongly.
In fact, we actually agree here.
My point can maybe be explained in a different way: So does playing chess at a high level, or I'd bet even probably even MMR in Dota does as well. Once you consider this, you may go the next step and ask what better methods test for ability to pass a math class (perform other tasks successfully). For example, consider that I know someone who has a far greater ability than I to learn a new language; while I have a greater ability with math.
I would agree that playing Chess and Dota are both probably pretty good predictors. What kinds of abilities do you need to play Chess (or Dota) at a high level? Abstract reasoning, mental quickness, and a good working memory.
What about an IQ test? An IQ test is just a random sampling of problems that test abstract reasoning, mental quickness, and a good working memory. If you iteratively give people a series of IQ tests there will be some variation in their score from test to test, but what you will find is that over time the average of their scores converges. This convergence is why researchers believe there is a single main factor of intelligence (g).
Now, there are still things aside from intelligence that relate to the ability to pass a math class (or any class). A big one is Conscientiousness. It's a facet of personality that basically has to do with how organized and hardworking someone is. It is the second strongest single predictor of overall life success next to IQ (although even with both factors combined there's still a lot of the variance in life success left unexplained).
My contention is that Mensa membership tends to select for people who have low conscientiousness.
> For example, consider that I know someone who has a far greater ability than I to learn a new language; while I have a greater ability with math.
So there are different sub-factors of general intelligence[1]. That does not mean that there still isn't a general factor of intelligence, because all of these factors do still correlate pretty stongly with one another. However, I've heard that towards the high end of IQ, there does tend to be a greater distance between the sub-factors.
In other words, a person of average intelligence is likely to be average in all of the categories, whereas a person of high-intelligence is more likely to be especially gifted in one or two areas (though still pretty good in the rest).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93C...
I would agree with you that it is likely true that generally intelligent people will generally be generally better at scoring higher on IQ tests.
Are there any formal studies you are aware of which compare IQ tests as a predictor of success with other intelligence tests, or just other tests?
I don't know that I "forget" that so much as I don't believe that.
I mean, I acknowledge that IQ is not the same thing as intelligence, but it is a very strong proxy. You can avoid the risk people receiving unrepresentative scores by just having them take multiple IQ tests. The more different tests they take, the more their average score will converge on a particular IQ value.
EDIT: > Are there any formal studies you are aware of which compare IQ tests as a predictor of success with other intelligence tests, or just other tests?
Of life success, or success in a math class? I mean, I'm sure their are for both, though I don't have citations for either at the moment.
WRT to life success, I do know that while in some sense it is not an especially strong predictor, it is the strongest single predictor we have (even more than the socio-economic status they were born into). The fact that even then it doesn't account form more then half the variance in life outcomes makes sense to me. Life's complicated, and many different factors play into success.
But I am somewhat hesitant to take an actual proper IQ test. Partly because I'm afraid I won't get a "good" score (given my expectations) and partly because I'm worried I'll let my score (whatever it is) distract me from actually achieving more things in life.
IQ is itself a basically fluid intelligence - how quickly you learn something compared to the average. In jobs were problems are novel this is an indicator of success. In jobs where tasks are repetitive, it is not an indicator of success.
Overall, it one of the strongest if not the strongest statistically backed concept in modern psychology, so if you don't believe IQ means something you should also dismiss all of psychology as unscientific nonsense.
I have an iq of 80 yet somehow I published papers in physics, maths and computer science and I'm in the 1% of NY income.
Psychology is used to keep the working class down and disunited the same way religion was used in times past.
To me, intelligence means one's capability to contribute to human endeavour, whether it be in mathematics, music, art, writing, or anything else that you can apply your mind to.
For example, most people agree that Mozart was a very intelligent individual by virtue of his contributions to music.
Sure, IQ means something, it's just that the thing it means is not intelligence. It doesn't capture the amazing breadth of human capability, and intelligence is not an objective measurable property.
> In the case of IQ people seem to have forgotten whatever it was that they were trying to model in the first place
IQ was originally designed to determine mental development issues, i.e. sub-intelligence, so that those people could be helped. This is flagged by scores below 80. Ranking intelligence by scores above 80 is bunk. Nassim Taleb has written well on this subject [1], if you are interested.
[1] https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
As others have pointed out, the same can be said of height and success in professional basketball. If you come across a short person, you can practically guarantee they cannot make it in the NBA (i.e. height is a strong predictor). For someone who is very tall, You can't really know from that whether they are a successful pro basketball player (i.e. it is not a strong predictor).
This issue here, in both height and IQ, is that people who have more of some capacity have more options. Someone who is smart enough to be a brain surgeon still has the option to be a dish washer. Someone who is only smart enough to be a dish washer does not have the option to be a brain surgeon.
I think one of the points of intelligence research is that it seems to confirm intelligence (whatever it is) is largely a unified by a single dimension, even when that wasn't necessarily what was expected by the researchers.
> It's a fraud. Or at least, in this grossly extended use it became a fraud.
Hardly. IQ testing has been vigorously resisted for decades, and yet continues because of it's utility.
But if you're going to take that stance, let me ask you: are you willing to throw out the rest of the social sciences? Because that's the only logical result. IQ research is the gold standard of the social sciences. IQ is fraudulent, then so is the rest.
> Testing people for falling below a certain threshold on a test was an ok diagnostic for mental deficiency.
It is also useful at the higher end. Not all high IQ people are successfully working in complex jobs, but I expect all people who are successfully working in complex jobs are high IQ.
No, the 'logical result' is throwing out psychology, which I'm more than happy to do. Would also throw out 90% of economics. Happy to keep descriptive sociology, descriptive anthropology, descriptive human geography, descriptive linguistics, etc.
I mean yes, it is knowledge about our world, and useful knowledge at that, but it really doesn't fit into a Baconian framework.
I will admit that I'm bearish overall on the social sciences. In science you want to be able to make statements that are both a) general, and b) predictive. In the social sciences, generally what is predictive is not general (i.e. "market research") and what is general is usually not in fact predictive (i.e. "hogwash").
I guess I'm just curious why you think IQ is bunk. IQ researchers, perhaps more than any other discipline, have had to endure a considerable degree of scrutiny. Many objections have been raised, and over the decades they've put a lot of work into empirically addressing those objections.
I could not put it better or more rigorously than Nassim Taleb, so if you are curious I really do recommend a good read of the piece I linked above (and the technical paper he links at the top of that piece).
I: cognitive ability is a multi-dimensional thing. IQ erroneously tries to collapse all of those dimensions into a single dimension.
What are these dimensions? And how are they measured? People who make this assertion hardly ever go through the work of actually making a rigorous, falsifiable claim as to what these dimensions are. There have been theories along these lines (e.g. "multiple intelligences") and they are much shakier ground scientifically than IQ.
This claim is also just plain false, because if you look at the literature, you'll see that intelligence research does recognize the existence of many different types of cognitive ability. It just so happens that performance on tests of such abilities all strongly correlate with IQ! The correlation isn't perfect, which is why you see these different cognitive abilities acknowledged as distinct from each other, but they are still only aspects of some common factor (g).
Now, there are certain mental functions whose performance does not correlate (very much) with IQ. Things like creativity or reaction times. That's not really a problem for intelligence research since those things aren't a form of intelligence.
II: Real world success comes more from wisdom and conscientiousness than intelligence
I would agree about wisdom, although there's no real way to measure that. The way I think of it is: wisdom is where you are going, and intelligence is how fast you will get there. If you're going the wrong way, then speed will only hasten your destruction. That doesn't mean speed is irrelevant.
As for conscientiousness, we can measure how much that impacts life outcomes. Indeed it does have some predictive value, but not as much as IQ!
Also, if you're going to take some arbitrary collection of traits and say "this bundle of traits is more predictive than IQ" then you're engaging in a logical fallacy. It doesn't matter what bundle you choose, what matters is whether IQ is worth adding to that bundle.
III: IQ is only predictive on the lower ends of performance (because of it's use as a means for detecting mental defficiencies) but has no predictive value at higher levels of performance.
I think there's some stuff going on in the statistics that's going to require a lot more digging on my part, but I think the argument I made previously that having a greater intelligence merely gives you more options still holds.
IV: People who promote IQ research are racists.
Ad hominem. And bullcrap to boot. Whatever you think about another person's motives, it doesn't make their argument wrong. What really angers me about this argument is that in the same frigging paragraph he complains about people making ad hominem arguments against him. The lack of self-awareness is truly breath-taking.
V: IQ being "the best measure in psychology" doesn't matter if it's a bad measure
This argument is directed at people who want to cherry pick the parts of the psychology that fit their political preferences. It has no relevance in an argument with someone who's willing to toss out the entire enterprise.
Nonetheless, the limitations on the predictiveness of IQ should be considered. For instance, the fact that IQ correlates with performance in complex jobs by 50% means that it only explains about 25% of the variance in performance (I don't know where Taleb gets the 13% figure, perhaps from some math I'm not familiar with). All that means is that IQ shouldn't be the only tool you use to evaluate a candidate for such a job. It doesn't mean that there's no value in using it.
VI: IQ only measures performance in boring clerical jobs where the work resembles the test.
It does measure performance (to some extent) in software engineering. I presume it also does in medical professio...
I haven't read that yet because the hosting entity wanted to download my google contacts for the privilege of reading it. How despicable.
One thing he tackles that I think is worth digging into is his approach to the claim IQ is psychology's "best measure".
First, I think he does the only logical thing you can do after you dismiss IQ, he dismissed the rest of psychology. However bad (or good) you think IQ, the rest of psychology is worse.
Second, he makes the point that "no measure is worse than a bad measure". I'm not entirely convinced. I mean yes, if you have a measure that only predicts (for example) 30% of the variance in some phenomenon and you treat it as if it explains 100%, then you're going to have a bad time[1]. However, if you recognize the limitations and you combine that with other measures, then you may have a chance at making reasonable predictions.
IQ may be the best psychology has to offer, but that doesn't mean it has to be used alone. And it's true that much of psychology is suffering from a reproducibility crisis, but that does not mean all parts of psychology are suffering equally.
[1] I think there's an interesting connection between this idea and the idea of legibility as touched on in the book Seeing like a State.
Do you not think that people who have such capabilities would also have a high IQ?
Everything is a model, but IQ is literally the most statistically significant idea in psychology.
Your strict resolution that IQ doesn't mean intelligence is just your own opinion not really backed by any fact, just an opinion that people are more complicated than numbers.
It's true, people are more complicated than numbers, but nonetheless they can be accurately rank ordered and IQ, as you said, means something. It doesn't say anything about accomplishments, or quality of character. But it does say something about fluid intelligence.
Nobody cares if it perfectly matches some arbitrary thing you decided it needs to match to count for you. The mozart comment doesn't even fit into the conversation. Nobody said anything about contributions to anything.
Fluid intelligence is a measurable property, even if its not measuring it to your personal satisfaction. The question becomes why are you more of an authority than those mathematicians and psychologists who did the research?
You're not. Your opinion doesn't invalidate theirs. It just says you didn't do the research.
And again, its completely true that IQ does not mean success. The world is full of poor geniuses. but as far as psychology goes, its the best predictor available.
This had an effect on my (back then) still developing self-esteem, which lasted a few months or so.
But after that I bounced back, because college life quickly reminded me that while I may be incompetent and irrational, I wouldn't last that long there on my own if I were of average intelligence.
He is describing his impression of Mensa members. His expectation was that Mensa was an "organization of geniuses," which gave him certain expectations, but he what he found was very different.
He observed that Mensa members were financially unsuccessful, unaccomplished, and idle. Describing someone that is financially unsuccessful, unaccomplished, and idle as a "loser" just seems like colloquial English to me.
Adams doesn't express any dislike or hate for the Mensa members; he just describes his impressions. Is there something wrong with using the word "loser?" If we stop using the word will everyone suddenly be richer and more accomplished?
Well then we differ. Given your (by my lights) Jesuitical approach to glossing a common English usage, I don't think we have anywhere further to go here. I personally can't imagine a circumstance where I'd call a brother or sister a 'loser', and certainly not by reference to a trivial superfluity like financial 'success'. And if I did not for a minute do I believe they'd consider the term a neutral descriptor.
But by all means carry on using the term however, and to whomever, you like.
He merely observed that he expected a society of geniuses would be very different than they were, and I can’t for the life of me find anything wrong with that.
Remarking that someone with a disabled limb is ”lame” is not offensive; it’s just using a word according to its definition. Look up ”loser” in a dictionary.
They do, however, give you a handsome plastic membership card you can "accidentally" fling onto the table at restaurants when reaching for your Amex, so, that's nice.
Mensa seems to attract people who define themselves by their intelligence, instead of by their success. It wouldn't surprise me that they would be more anxious and depressed than average.
Higher rates of allergies could be explained by socioeconomic, racial and cultural biases in those who gravitate towards Mensa.
I remember we received an application from a person whose resume promiscuously explained that he was a Mensa members, "an association for superior IQ people".
Their resume overall was not bad (not top-notch either for the position), but the mention alone of Mensa drove me away from ever wanting to work with such kind of persons that look so full of themselves.
I finally declined to interview this person. The question "Is it discrimination?" was always popping into my mind and I felt uneasy about it for about a week or so.
Furthermore, what you were turned away was how that person presented themselves, and not their actual IQ. Including Mensa membership and framing it in those terms shows poor judgement.
On the other hand, IQ was one of the direct methods of discrimination used in the flagship case establishing the doctrine of adverse impact discrimination (leading to a popular myth that IQ discrimination is itself entirely illegal), and the cases where IQ discrimination (high or low) in employment has been found to not be illegal have invariably involved the employer presenting the kind of business necessity evidence needed to overcome the presumption of adverse impact discrimination that occurs when discrimination has a negative differential impact on a protected class without direct targeting, so discrimination based on IQ (or, for the same reason, factors indirectly associated with IQ that don't happen to completely negate the negative differential impact without transferring it to a different protected class) isn't generally legally safe even though it isn't directly prohibited.
Yeah it is. It's legal discrimination.
So you can do it without repercussions.
The question you should be asking yourself is should you discriminate that way?
I guess it depends on if you got a desirable outcome.
Whether it's illegal discrimination is another question (discrimination against people mentioning MENSA membership on applications probably has some measurable differential impact by race or some other protected class, and so could easily, without the evidence necessary to demonstrate business necessity and overcome the presumption of illegality, constitute adverse impact discrimination, but is not otherwise directly prohibited in US employment anti-discrimination law.)
On the other hand, from your description, it does sound a decision that was more self-indulgent than made in faithful service of your employer, which at a minimum is unprofessional in hiring, even if it manages to avoid being illegal.
I don’t know about that. A bad culture fit can end up taking a lot of value away from a team. Being self-satisfied enough to join Mensa, and then put it on your CV looks like a big red flag to me.
That they were a Mensa member on a resume wouldn't have turned me off... explaining what it was explicitly would definitely do so.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-court-ruled-you-can-be-too-...
Yep. I experienced it first hand.
Forget about IQ. Did any of the top notch business men/women begged Mensa for approval before going out and building companies (eg showing street smarts)?
If you are into highly biased questionnaires and like mental games go for Mensa. Everybody else should opt for street smarts IMHO.
I was born dirt poor in a remote godforesaken village in India. Today I work for one of the FANG in bay area.
The most depressing thing about working for this employer is howe dimwitted majority of their tech employees are beyond the core tech skills. Many of them can write complex code with ease and yet they do not understand simple sarcasm or hyperbole.
I also work at a FAANG and many of my colleagues have excellent interpersonal skills, you cannot disregard that.
90% of everything is crap. You should see the shambling ape-men they had in physics grad school. Actually they weren't so bad compared to FAANG ding dongs, but they were still worse than I expected.
Taleb is being a weirdo, but a consistent weirdo. He doesn't believe in basic statistics, so of course he can't believe in the one fairly rigorous result we have from psychology of the last 120 years.
The higher the IQ, the more likely there are to be other issues and the more likely they are to be severe.
Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews win some inordinately high number of Nobel Prizes and happen to be a population with a high risk for genetic disorders, some of which have been proven to have impact on cognition.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Jews-constitute-20-of-all-Nobel...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligenc...
No, they haven't been. There are (still) no confirmed links between Tay-Sachs etc and intelligence. (The most recent study on the genetics of Jewish intelligence, in fact, suggests that any genetic advantage is purely on common variants present in non-Jewish Caucasians as well.) For that matter, there are zero confirmed genetic mutations, common or rare, which increase intelligence by even a few points, and this is despite sample sizes now approaching millions and use of exome sequencing to hunt for rare variants in extremely intelligent cohorts.
Are you telling me that brain differences can only ever lower IQ and never, ever raise it (or, more accurately, raise the potential ceiling -- because nutrition and a million other things will impact this)? There is a lot of research out that says, basically, "genius" is, by its very nature, a brain that thinks differently from the norm. It isn't simply "more" of something. It is different and this is often a two-edged sword.
I'm currently failing to find the source I know I saw not terribly long ago linking some genetic disorder to higher IQs and to altered brain stuff of some sort. I don't have the time to keep digging for it.
But, here's a study of people with CF -- a common genetic disorder in the Jewish community -- that says, in essence "Lower IQ scores in this population can be linked to negative health impacts and other negative factors," yet seems to list the average IQ for this group of 89 very, very, deathly ill patients as 102.5. Which sort of implies to me that if they weren't basically dying from their disorder, they would be far above average intelligence.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15173473
And there is a difference between an allele present in the majority of the population which lowers the IQ and one which is present in a minority and raises IQ. A Mendelian mutation in <1% of the population which lowers your IQ by 10 points is not the same thing as a mutation which raises your IQ by 10 points. The former certainly do exist. The latter currently do not.
> I'm currently failing to find the source I know I saw not terribly long ago linking some genetic disorder to higher IQs and to altered brain stuff of some sort. I don't have the time to keep digging for it.
I'll give you a hint, you won't find it, and if you do, it'll be a candidate-gene paper from the '00s where the p-values are just barely south of 0.05, not remotely close to genome-wide statistical-significance, and has never been validated since even in the exome GWASes which should have found it.
> But, here's a study of people with CF -- a common genetic disorder in the Jewish community -- that says, in essence "Lower IQ scores in this population can be linked to negative health impacts and other negative factors," yet seems to list the average IQ for this group of 89 very, very, deathly ill patients as 102.5. Which sort of implies to me that if they weren't basically dying from their disorder, they would be far above average intelligence.
You know who else has above average intelligence? Ashkenazi Jews. Including the ones without CF. And it's higher than 102.5.
My Dad was a MENSA member for a couple of years, but he was mostly taking the piss - he put down his "special interest" as "carved Dravidian lapis lazuli", which is not as far as I know a thing. He was an RAF V-bomber captain and never as far as I could see suffered from depression or other mental health issues (which would have affected his security clearance) - much the reverse.
Edit: The lapis lazuli thing is (per Google) actually a thing, but in the early 1960s I don't see how my Dad could have come across it, but obviously he did.
I could have joined MENSA (had the IQ) but thought it was all too silly and didn't. I've suffered a lot from depression.
Go figure.
Reading between the lines, in these cooling months, sent a chill up my spine.
Most high IQ people I know think Mensa is stupid and just want to have normal lives and hate talking about intelligence and think it's irrelevant and a cringe-worthy topic.
When you say intelligence is "under mutation-selection balance", how does that relate to extreme intelligence?
What is your theory for how to understand these results?
> What is your theory for how to understand these results?
There is nothing to understand. It is purely an artifact of their sampling process. There is no reversal and no mystery. IQ simply correlates with better performance and health as far up as we can measure it into samples like TIP or SMPY, period, and 100% consistent with mutation-selection balance. Mensa attracts losers, and those losers self-select even further into a survey asking about self-diagnosed problems, and these researchers were too lazy to do a good study and too dishonest to discuss forthrightly all the reasons why one knows a priori their results only demonstrate that sampling from Mensa is a really bad idea (I say 'dishonest' because they do not mention any of the very well known contrary results and I am also told these points were all brought up to them before publication and they refused to address any of them).
On a speculative note, maybe those OEs are a result of maltreatment of some sort (there are many).
And by BPD, do you mean Bipolor, or Borderline personality Disorder?
I appreciate the irony of this study having been done by people who were being very very dumb.
they were right on both counts. many times later in college and in working life i've thought back to these moments.
also, "overexcitability", yup.
I do really well with math, and can carry concepts well from reading... but man, I hate reading fiction, I have way too much trouble remembering names vs. events. For comparison 760 math, 580 verbal for my SAT scores, not bad, just lopsided.
I can relate to the social issues many in this discussion have eluded to though. Depression, anxiety, OCD and work really hard to not let myself fall into my own traps.
>No separation of Full Intellectual Assessment or another re-test, simply self reporting the averaged figure. We lack resolution in results.(ex: were people with high verbal IQ more prone to schizophrenia?)
>Subjects were those concerned with their own mental status. All respondents were MENSA members. While I could test into MENSA, I simply don't care. I have a friend who is in MENSA, they are quite proud of this over dinner conversation, but they are also quite neurotic. This observation is anecdotal, but I'd think you're going to get more people who live a lot of time "in their heads" in MENSA. I would love to have another control group to compare results over.
>They understand that self reporting is ripe for error. An online survey is difficult to accurately administer, people will misrepresent things about them, especially if they think it is a reflection of their own personal value.
It's neat, but I don't think it's reliable enough to make any declarative statements about a linear progression of IQ and health disorders.
They apply the same thinking patterns that make them excel at work (= very controlled environments with binary answers, requiring perfectionism and attention to detail - e.g. programming, maths, fact-checking, engineering, arts) to every area in their far less binary lives.
If you have very high standards at work you likely apply very high standards to yourself. How you view yourself is frequently how you view others, which can be destructive for relationships.
If your job is searching for bugs 8h a day you likely develop the thinking pattern to take even the smallest issue very seriously.
"High achievers" shouldn't be people who scored well on tests (IQ tests, the SATs, etc.)
They should be people who achieved things in real life! For example, building something people use (e.g. not "playing house" for investors), reforming our legal system or government, excelling at sports, music, etc.
There's a certain part of the population that I'm familiar with where achievement means "performs well on metrics that somebody else designed".
But I also think there is a large part of the population who "calls bullshit" on that value system. And I would call that "common sense" more than anti-intellectualism.
The former kind of "achiever" lacks agency in the world, and that's probably a major reason why they're depressed (speaking from past experience). It's human nature to be depressed when you're being judged and have to jump through hoops set up by others. It's also natural to be depressed if everyone's telling you that you achieved something, but yet nothing in your life is actually better.
I guess it goes back to the comment about passing the IQ test but failing the intelligence test ...
I'm one data sample but I fit your description to a tee.