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.
Pretty 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.
Being smart might help you get a better job, but jobs aren’t a great way to become rich anyway.
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.
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.
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.
This is more like a chart of, “does being smart help you stay above the poverty line?”
Just imagining a world where there’s no antidemocratic inheritance and all income is between 20-230k per year
imagining a world where income is measured in handmade gifts of gratitude per year
Making 180k with that 70 IQ brain
Sports maybe?
no wait
influencerEdit: Nah, no influencers in 2007, a blissful time
Oil rig divers
one half of the rich are rich because they were born rich
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.
IQ only measures someone’s ability to answer correctly on IQ tests.
which is a somewhat useful thing to know, as it indicates performance in similar tasks.
Like what lol
ability and willingness
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.
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.
The core problem here is that “intelligence” as a single thing doesn’t exist, it’s like trying to measure someone’s fitness by just looking at their sprints and deadlifts. People can be good at some things and bad at some things, and even if you’re above average at all the measurable things that doesn’t really matter much if you’re an asshole who no one wants to hire onto their sports team.
IQ is fine as a mesaure of your general performance at some specific cognitive tasks, but for various reasons people basically always ignore that and just treat it like a number that magically summarizes how objectively good your brain is…
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.
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’m asking sincerely, because as far as I can tell the answer is “none.” Maybe you can discuss the weather? Sports? Idk.
I want to stress that Americans, uniquely, are really weird about testing mental ability, probably 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?
Sorry buddy, but “Einstein wasn’t smart” just isn’t something I can take seriously.
– shitpost
It is all vanity and the points don’t matter. I agree with what you are saying, and for the most part, you appear to agree with what I have said. I don’t invest the emotions. I simply don’t have them or understand them as such. It just is what it is. I can’t change it, so I don’t worry about it. I remember stuff like this and contextualize it at my convenience to make myself feel better about stupid people and situations I encounter. That is my only real use; a coping mechanism; a meme.
wealthy families, buy thier children nice private schools, private tutors, Nepotism, and other resources unavailable to othters, also gives them a sense of entitlement, thats why alot of these expensive college produce elitist graduates.
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 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
You will make a little more or a little less than your parents did. That is the biggest determination on your income level.
or a lot less that’s fun too
Yep. No such thing as an IQ, so there’s no way to test for it. I mean, I could test for intelligence on whether or not someone is a socialist, but then people would immediately start objecting—which proves my point haha.
So IQ tests are based on political ideology?
What? No, I was making a point about arbitrary measures of intelligence.
Isn’t IQ based on problem solving or something? Is it really as arbitrary as political ideals? I’ve heard it’s racist, and I’m totally willing to accept that, but I currently have no clue how that would be possible.
Intelligence is not something that can be quantified in any way whatsoever, and I would consider any IQ test to be fully arbitrary—so the answer is yes. I’m sure there’s some problem solving component.
If you ever want evidence of IQ being bullshit, I have a super genius IQ. It’s like 666 standard deviations above the mean. Talk to anyone who has ever talked to me and they will very quickly disagree! 😂
Mind explaining the 666 standard deviations above the mean? I just did a quick google search, and the AI says that’s impossible, but if one standard deviation is 15 points and the mean is 100(which is my new understanding)… Are you saying your IQ is OVER 9,000!!! 10,090, I think. That’s hilarious
Yes, sorry, I was just making a stupid joke!
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.
We are going to put you at about 90
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
We are going to put you at about 85
Every accusation is a confession
Tfw the r ain’t r’in
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
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.
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/
Replication studies reveal important details
Doesn’t provide a source
This would be a bit unprofessional
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
A 2024 study extended the approach of Watts et al and found that “Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.”
Interesting, the follow-ups all together paint quite a different picture than the above quote/blog post
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.
