No test measures intelligence. A test only measures you relative to the persons that wrote the test. – loosely quoting Asimov.
2007 is ancient history now. It is an interesting graph that one might correlate with a lack of meritocratic structure in society, but I’m on the low end cause I say this without looking up and reading the study. Pretty pictures evoke emotional blabbering bias and all that.
Making 180k with that 70 IQ brain
Sports maybe?
no wait
influencerEdit: Nah, no influencers in 2007, a blissful time
Oil rig divers
You will make a little more or a little less than your parents did. That is the biggest determination on your income level.
I’m doing fucking great then.
or a lot less that’s fun too
Just imagining a world where there’s no antidemocratic inheritance and all income is between 20-230k per year
Pretty well backs up the a statement I’ve been making for years. You don’t have to be smart to be rich. You just have to lack decency.
Rich people aren’t even in the graphic, they’re way off the top of the scale. The top of this graph doesn’t even get you into the top 5% in my state.
Being smart might help you get a better job, but jobs aren’t a great way to become rich anyway.
one half of the rich are rich because they were born rich
I now use the “Likes AI Test” to measure IQ. The premise is that AI can only be average because it consumes everything on the internet indiscriminately. So, people with greater than average critical thinking and knowledge hate AI because its dumber than them and useless. Conversely, people with less than average critical think and knowledge love AI because it seems smarter than them. So if we measure someones like or dislike of AI we can infer the general range of their IQ.
Given this above test, this means my boss is a fucking idiot and gets paid a lot of money to be an idiot.
AI because its dumber than them and useless.
I am much better at washing dishes by hand than my dishwasher. I still mostly let my dishwasher have a crack at things to spare me from usually having to bother.
It’s a bit trickier with AI, as it’s more obnoxiously screwing up when it screws up, but at least upon occasion it’s able to spit out a few mind numbingly obvious lines of code that would have taken me longer to type myself, because I can only hit keyboard buttons so fast.
If you’re using AI because it’s smart, you’re dump. However AI holds imo way more value in knowledge and speed for simple tasks.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are, AI has more knowledge than you. Maybe not in a specific field but its a valuable tool in getting knowledge for a lot of different topics.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are, AI is faster in simple tasks like creating a python script to parse hex data and visualize it.
So even though I hate AI like the next person I think this IQ measuring you proposed is bullshit.
Congrats you’re dumber than AI
Being rich is pretty fucking obviously mostly about being born to rich parents.
Being smart too.
If your parents are rich you would have gone to the better funded schools with better teachers and better clubs/programs and focus on those with your stress-free lifestyle to grow up smarter.
I thought poor people were poor because they spend all their money on avocado toast, while rich people eat bootstraps or something like that
i think the rich have seen the avocado toast problem for a long time. that’s why they sell you avocado toast, because clearly it’s making you poor and they have too much of it.
I’ve said for a long time that intelligence isn’t the number one trait for becoming filthy rich. It’s lack of a moral compass.
Ya got a source though? Like everyone knows sociopaths are great at CEO and other executive roles, but what does the same plot look like for ethics
Nope. But if I believe it it’s true. That how it works now right?
Seriously, no chart but there seem to be plenty of examples and few exceptions. There are something like 2700 billionaires in the world. I certainly am not familiar with all of them.
But also I have seen opportunities to improve my financial standing in ways that are not ethical. I did not take them. I assume others do.
So in conclusion, it’s just observation. Do you disagree with the assessment or are you looking for proof?
Also in my defense, I said it was something I said, not something I could prove.
I have a counter anecdote!
Worked for a rich family as the sysadmin at their business. They would refuse to make unethical decisions. First manager’s meeting I sat we had a choice of screwing our clients, just a little, thereby making up on some money we were losing. Or, we could leave things as they were. VP looked around the table, “Well. Guess we have to do the right thing.”
I always got tickets to a charity ball at the beach. The family was top donors and wouldn’t show up. They were true believers in the Biblical admonition to STFU about your charity and just do it.
ask them how their family got rich
Guess there exceptions to every rule.
Anecdotes aren’t evidence, and we all have anecdotes, but a counter anecdote would be I have seen people who take unethical choices experienc reduced income due to loss of job offers, dismissal from existing jobs, criminal penalties, loss of contacts and relationships.
How about the gobs and gobs of people who have been fucked over by billionaires?
Let me phrase it this way: do you think Elon Musk is worth 40000 times the value of the median Tesla worker (2019 numbers by the way, he’s worth more now)? Gates? Bezos? Are they really worth more than the value they extract from their employees?
No? Great, we agree — there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
That’s a different argument. We are talking about whether ethics is a direct factor in income. Billionaires are outliers. In a population study of millions of people, or even a survey of hundreds, billionaires aren’t going to have any bearing on the outcome.
Yeah, agreed.
Even America’s sweet heart Taylor Swift. She’s a billionaire and her groupies wind up paying $1300 to see a show. Then I heard she’s writing a book. I mean how much do you need? She could be doing world tours for free, subsidizing ticket prices, I don’t know, starting up a competitive company to Ticketmaster.
Elon Musk levels of income could friggin cure diseases or hunger or something or at least make a huge dent. Think about it. If he liquidated his entire net worth and gave up on his Nazi empire building he could use $490B on a good cause and STILL be a billionaire.
There was one guy though. I forgot his name. He signed that pact that Warren Buffett created where those who signed, pledged to give away all or most of there wealth. I think like two did it after they died but this one guy gave it all away while he was (is?) alive.
Billionares would have no bearing whatsoever on the same type of research being discussed. See my other comment.
Yeah, I disagree with your assessment. You’re acting like oh there are only a few of them, but they control like 90% of the wealth in the world. How many billions of dollars do you think go into a single research topic? I’d also like to point out that it’s uber rich people who also make the decisions. I can’t prove that corporations prefer NOT to have a cure for diseases, because they make more money treating them, but I’m pretty sure IF they do, it ain’t a poor person making that decision.
Looks like there’s some other Factor X (in orange) not accounted for in the data.
Y’know, like, rich parents, stable household, access to resources, and opportunities, etc
Reminds me of the marshmallow test:
But the marshmallow test is a tricky one. Replication studies reveal important details that are missing from Mischel’s triumphant analysis. On average, the kids who “fail” and eat the marshmallow rather than waiting and doubling their haul were poorer, while the “patient” kids were from wealthier backgrounds. When the “impatient” kids were asked about the thought process that led to their decision to eat the marshmallow rather than holding out for two, they revealed a great deal of future-looking thought.
The adults in these kids’ lives had broken their promises many times: Their parents would promise material comforts, from toys to treats, that they were ultimately unable to provide due to economic hardship. Teachers and other authority figures would routinely lie to these kids, out of some mix of overly optimistic projection about the resources they’d be given to help the kids in their care, or the knowledge that the kids’ poor, time-strapped, frantic parents wouldn’t be able to retaliate against them for lying.
So the kids had carefully observed the world they operated in and concluded, on balance of probability, that eating the marshmallow was the safe bet. At the very least, it foreclosed on the possibility that the adults running the experiment would come back in 15 minutes and declare that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were taking back the original marshmallow, rather than providing two of them. They were thinking about the future, in other words.
These kids didn’t grow up to do worse in school and life because they lacked self-control: Those outcomes were dictated by America’s two-tier education system, which funds schools based on local property taxes, topped up by parental donations, which means that poor neighborhoods get poor schools. If these kids’ brains show up differently on a scan 20 years later, Occam’s Razor dictates that this is caused by a life of desperation and precarity, whose stresses are compounded by inadequate health-care.
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-marshmallow-longtermism/
Very interesting. I imagine an even simpler explanation for why poorer kids do less well in school:
You simply can’t focus on abstract thoughts if you’re lacking basic ingredients in your life.
It’s something like the pyramid of needs:
When you’re hungry in school because you didn’t have proper breakfast because your parents had too little time to prepare one or were unable to actually buy proper-quality ingredients, your brain simply can’t focus on geography of the other end of the world or god forbid, calculus.
I guess that if schoolkids were given free meals before school and during midday break, their performance in school-related activity would improve by at least 50% in poorer regions.
Replication studies reveal important details
Doesn’t provide a source
He usually has a companion piece on his blog for anything that goes into Locus. There, he linked to the wiki page about the marshmallow test, which has a section on follow-up studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment#Follow-up_studies
Interesting, the follow-ups all together paint quite a different picture than the above quote/blog post
A 2024 study extended the approach of Watts et al and found that “Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.”
This would be a bit unprofessional
I genuinely thought that was the point of this graph. The logarithmic function in blue very clearly shows there is a limit as to what IQ alone will net you.
People will look at the same graph and come up with different explanations. I personally agree with your interpretation.
Not only that, on the other end of the graph it is known that poverty is a great stressor requiring constant mental bandwidth - that therefore can’t see used to “be smart”. So poorer people are not less smart, they allocated their mental resources to take care of their situation first and only later try to look smart in the test.
Tfw the r ain’t r’in
I’d be curious to see a chart like this but with savings or some other form of stored wealth! Because I’d like to believe that smarter people might not earn that much more, but they’re more diligent about saving what they do get
I’ve always said the rich have to be somewhat intelligent to hang onto the money. Worked for a fairly rich family and scammers and salesmen were constantly after them.
I do not think that would be as correlated as you imagine either. Conservativism is not particularly intelligent. Spotting an opportunity will often evolve and lead down different paths. Many engineers have gained and lost vast quantities of wealth pursuing ventures. Business is hard and it is impossible to constrain all variables.
Fair, there probably isn’t any correlation, I’d just like to believe that I’m smart because I’m good at saving 😆 Although my last IQ test (during my Adhd evaluation last year) wasn’t much over 110 anyways, so I don’t even count as smart on paper haha
There might not be any single correlation, but if it were possible to measure “productive output” in some normalized manner over a career, there would decidedly be a correlation I imagine
I’d like to see the same chart done but with EQ (emotional intelligence).
I’d also like to see the chart if it was actually representative of the rich. Populate the chart with individuals reporting >2.5 million in income per year.
This is more like a chart of, “does being smart help you stay above the poverty line?”
Same and to include genius IQ
Actually it should show net wealth, not income, as the truly wealthy avoid income tax by taking out loans on their (appreciating) assets. The loans have a very low interest rate, much lower than their assets appreciate, so they are always ahead and can pay off the loans with more loans. The wealthiest people don’t really have jobs or need jobs for income, they use jobs for power and manipulation.
I mean, while it’s true that IQ tests aren’t a great measure of intelligence, it’s not like all humans are equally intelligent. We all know some people who are clearly smart and some people who are clearly dumb. And I think it’s completely expected that being smarter gives you some advantage at getting money. I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that being smart is generally advantageous in life. This chart seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me…there is a slight correlation, moreso on the low end (how can severely mentally retarded people do most jobs or even have incomes?), and less so on the high end. It makes a mistake in talking about income rather than net worth, which is really the more pertinent thing in “being rich”. I bet we would see a much lower correlation there, because you can be born into having a high net worth. But the correlation isn’t too high, because, as everyone reasonable already suspected, being rich is almost entirely about being lucky. I don’t think this chart really has any import to the many social discussions about meritocracy or wealth or intelligence, except for maybe to disprove someone who believes that we live in a fair world where “if you’re smart and work hard you can make it”. But even then, that would rely on a misunderstanding of what the chart tells us.
Basically, I’m not sure what you’re getting at with this.
We all know some people who are clearly smart and some people who are clearly dumb
I don’t. I thought maybe Elon musk is smart or maybe he is a good public speaker. Maybe he is charismatic or maybe he is just lying really effectively.
With 20/20 hindsight it’s good to reflect and understand it was smart to be cautious about my judgement. I will never be sure if someone is smart or dumb, because there’s so much going on I can’t possibly understand.
Even Einstein who clearly had a lot of very impactful and helpful theories and ideas I wouldn’t say is smart. I would only go so far as to say he is a great physicist.
I also disagree that being smart is generally advantageous in life. All the people who seemed smart to me were deeply depressed at some point in their life, some even still and some even went a bit further with it.
What I’m trying to say is the world is complex, and such generalizations only lead to wrong causal links.
Maybe smart don’t give you money but money helps to learn and become smart. Maybe smarts don’t give you advantages in life but an advantageous life affords you opportunities to become smarter. Maybe being smart is the wrong way to think about it and it’s all just different patterns and behaviors of thinking. Or maybe your thoughts are more profound in some circles and people who think more profound appear smarter to us.
Let’s just take a healthy dose of skepticism to such studies but also to all those “we all know it” ideas. I don’t. I’m fucking stupid but that leads to smarter decisions than the me who assumes a bunch of stuff.
Sorry buddy, but “Einstein wasn’t smart” just isn’t something I can take seriously.
I feel ya, I also generally am very against “it’s just common sense!” type reasoning. But have you ever spent time with, like special education students? Like someone who will need to live with their parents forever because they can’t learn to do things like read or write? It’s nice to believe that maybe if only they had been given the right environment, they wouldn’t have those problems - it’s also just not true. Or perhaps we can take a more extremely example of someone who suffered a major brain injury. It sucks, and it’s unfair, but at the end of the day some people really are definitively less smart than others. And by that same token, those others are definitively more smart than them. Of course, once people are at a certain level, it gets a lot harder to tell, but that dynamic is still in play. Likewise, if you’ve ever had the experience of interacting with a gifted kid, it’s pretty clear that they’re smarter than others.
That’s a good distinction about intelligence being generally advantageous. That is why I said generally - it has some clear disadvantages like loneliness or a deeper awareness of the world’s problems, etc. But most of the time, being smart is advantageous, don’t you think? I mean, what is intelligence other than an ability to correctly understand reality? I do agree that sometimes having a false understanding of reality can coincidentally help you out, but knowing how things really are is certainly the superior strategy. If you think otherwise, it’s always easy to make yourself dumber and reap the rewards. I don’t mean that sarcastically or cruelly. I just mean, there’s a reason we don’t see intelligent people lobotomizing themselves to have better lives.
Agreed the chart only shows correlation and not causation in either direction.
You don’t know people who are clearly dumb?
The average ACT score for college bound seniors in Florida is 18. The test costs money, which means they’re at least trying. It’s childishly easy. My cat, who is illiterate, can score almost as high (answering at random).
What kind of conversations can you have with folks who can’t do arithmetic or read simple sentences?
I want to stress that Americans, uniquely, are really weird about testing mental ability, because of their history of racism. Nevertheless, intelligence is a real phenomenon.
A high IQ doesn’t make you a good person, and it clearly has very little to do with accumulating wealth. But it does make life a hell of a lot easier. It enables you to do second order reasoning and engage in abstract deliberation, which is indispensable for ethics and science. Or do you think it’s a coincidence that average IQs rose 30 points in the last 100 years exactly in tandem with moral progress?
Denying intellectual disparities denies the vulnerability of people with special needs, not to mention average folks who are constantly being deceived, swindled, manipulated, propagandized, and parasitized by the rich and powerful.
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In my experience, type A personality has more to do with being able to earn a lot vs anything else. The cake is a lie.
