
There is no such thing as EQ (2016) - mpweiher
https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-all-aspects-of-life-a-high-EQ-or-IQ-This-question-is-based-on-the-assumption-that-only-your-EQ-or-IQ-is-high-with-the-other-being-average-or-below-this-average/answer/Jordan-B-Peterson?share=4dd9f059&srid=3ctC
======
bryanrasmussen
There comes a point in these things where someone always comes in with their
thoughts on what the term under discussion must mean.

If there were a thing such as EQ I would suppose it is just intelligence with
a focus on understanding other peoples, their feelings, goals and how to get
them to work together.

Often this use of intelligence is not found in people who have focused their
intelligence on technical mastery of particular non-human areas, although it
is not impossible.

I believe people often neglect areas for intellectual achievement based on
finding those areas difficult or their subjective feeling that those areas are
not important or just not suited to them, thus some intelligent people may
neglect math because they are "not good at math", and some intelligent people
may neglect learning to understand people because they "just don't understand
people", while other intelligent people may not care to read or understand
poetry or programming because that stuff isn't important or is for a
particular kind of person that is not the kind of person they are.

Time and intelligence being limited for any one person that person will in
some way have to choose what they will use them for. I myself have devoted
more time and intelligence to logic than most other people do, and I have
found that in periods where I devote extreme energies to logical analysis that
my skills with humans are diminished by a commensurate degree.

In conclusion, I agree there is no such thing as EQ in the standard
formulation, but perhaps there is a usage of intelligence that would
counterfeit it in practical experience.

~~~
blablabla123
Well yeah, Psychology is an almost empirical science, EQ 2.0 is a hands-on
approach. When you read it, you may acquire skills that otherwise a
Psychologist might teach you.

As you might guess, I read the book. I went through some difficult experiences
in my life, that made it at some point really difficult to make new friends,
feel happy or reasonably successful at work. That book helped me a lot. It's
not answering all questions to life, rather it gives you a set of tools. You
can decide by yourself whether you want to use some of them and which.

Anyways, this book falls into the category business books / self-help. I
assume they are competing with Psychologists except it's not so stigmatizing
maybe. Maybe... if you tell someone in the face which exercise you are doing
from this book, the person will probably think you are completely insane... ;)
But yeah, it's great that non-Psychologists are allowed to write such books.

------
js8
I always had trouble with the term EQ or emotional intelligence, because it in
my opinion confuses (at least) two things.

One is empathy, our ability to read and perceive emotions of other people.

The other is actual social intelligence, that is understanding of how other
people are motivated, what to do in social situations, and so on.

There are plenty good people who have lot of 1st one but little of the 2nd
one, and plenty of psychopaths that have the 2nd one but only little of the
1st one.

These groups of people are completely different.

~~~
ralfn
You didnt have trouble with the term EQ because it tries to suggest it is like
IQ? Eventhough one of them is science and the other is less scientific than a
gossip magazine?

~~~
richmarr
Yes, incentives in scientific publishing, tenure, etc are messed up and have
caused reproducability problems. That problem is systemic and will take a long
time to fix.

There are serious people working on areas such as this; and they don't deserve
the level of scattergun disrespect that you're displaying here.

~~~
ralfn
> they don't deserve the level of scattergun disrespect that you're displaying
> here.

You really consider their feelings more important than protecting actual
scientific facts from something akin to trademark infringement?

The public perception right now is that IQ and EQ are similar in the level of
scientific backing. In world where people stop vaccinating their kids, ignore
global warming, etc. i really don't consider the feelings of any particular
group of people in any field important enough to not, every chance i get,
fight for clarity on just what are reliable scientific facts and what are not,
because it is scientific method itself that is under attack.

And if these 'serious people working on areas such as this' are not full of
shit, working in service of science, i expect them to have the exact same
priority as me.

~~~
richmarr
What units are you using to measure "less scientific than a gossip magazine"?

~~~
ralfn
A gossip magazine will make statements that are often false but falsifiable.
Hence strictly more scientific than statements about EQ. Right now there is no
consensus of what the claims behind the phrase EQ even mean -- which gives
society free game to just speculate or assume that their assumptions are
correct.

The reason for this is actually obvious: an IQ test will ask questions of
which there is a strong consensus as to what the correct answer should be
(like math questions). If you have different teams make different IQ tests
with this rule, the rankings of test subjects will prove to be uniform.
Different test, same test subjects: similar ranking. It is a reproducible
metric. Although none of this proves it measures 'intelligence' as used in
everyday conversation. The name is unfortunate, the metric is quite useful.

People have not succeeded in making a reproducible metric of emotional
intelligence -- it is currently not even well defined. Unlike the statements
in a gossip magazine, which although may not always be factual, they are at
least well qualified and defined statements.

"Celebrity X slept with celebrity Y". There is no ambiguity about what that
statement means and what would be considered supporting evidence to convince
you that the statement is true. Therefore, the gossip magazine is closer to
science than the pop-literature about EQ.

What confuses me, is that to take offense to this, one has to be or know a
scientist that has or is trying to get funding or work published that hinges
on the EQ pop culture buzz, which would be unfortunate, but not damning. One
can do real research and move it away from the magical world of speculation
and anecdotes. But to explain to a person in that position the value of and
importance of the scientific method, is like explaining to a catholic priest
that children shouldn't be raped according to the bible. How is this
perspective on science at all surprising to you? Is this how far academica has
deformed itself? That the core values of science are vague historic details in
a mist of career planning?

~~~
richmarr
> _A gossip magazine will make statements that are often false but
> falsifiable. Hence strictly more scientific than statements about EQ_

So, are you arguing that people not following scientific method AT ALL are
more "scientific" than people who are at least trying to produce scientific
research in this area?

I have a hard time taking that position seriously; I assume I must have
misunderstood. Are you talking about researchers or someone else?

~~~
ralfn
>So, are you arguing that people not following scientific method AT ALL are
more "scientific" than people who are at least trying to produce scientific
research in this area?

No, that wasn't at all what i was arguing. For politeness sake, i'll assume
its a misunderstanding, although that is a bit hard to imagine at this point,
since i'm being extremely explicit. I wasn't attacking the scientific field,
but people using the phrase EQ in a conversion as if it in any way similar to
IQ. It is you taking offense that suggests there may be overlap between these
two groups, which is extremely worrying.

"Trying to produce scientific research" means actively applying the scientific
method. I'm arguing that hasn't successfully happened with the phrase EQ. Do
you have a counter example? And yes I'm arguing that falsifiable statements
about celebrities' sexlives is closer to science than current pop culture
notions about EQ, because at least the statements can be disproven.

HOW TO SCIENCE

Step 1: discard any statement that is not well defined enough that an
experiment could dismiss it

Step 2: test the remaining statements by experiment, and dismiss them if they
fail

Step 3: until new knowledge appears, the remaining statements are considered
reliable scientific facts

Every statement i've ever read about EQ is discarded in step 1. Most
statements in a gossip magazine are discarded in step 2. Hence, a gossip
magazine is strictly more scientific than a book about EQ. As for if this an
attack on researchers in this area: what the hell are you talking about? what
research?

>Are you talking about researchers or someone else?

I'm referring to people who pretend EQ is established science. Those people
would either be misinformed or intentionally fraudulent. I hope this group
does not contain any actual researchers. That would be disturbing.

The phrase IQ is already very unfortunate, considering the common literal
interpretation that it is the definite score of intelligence. To have any new
research refer to EQ, to appropriate both the success -as-well-as the
distorted nature of how IQ is interpreted by the general public, could be
described anywhere from 'pseudo-science' to 'completely fraudulent'.

Things might be different if there was a single example of research
establishing some EQ metric that was reproducible and i'm not the most up to
date person. So, maybe you have an example of scientific research that backs
up the notion that EQ could even exist by having some kind of reproducible
metric? A single example would do. But without that example, the usage of the
phrase EQ in ordinary conversation needs to be consistently corrected so
nobody falsely assumes there are any reliable facts or any consensus even
about what this term means, the way there are with the phrase 'IQ'. It it was
called differently, this misconception wouldn't happen.

This is actually what made the OP on Quora so angry. The question raised
suggested strong misconceptions in the general public. The watering down of
the general trust of people in science because too much unproven soft science
is appropriating the reputation of the hard science. EQ hasn't been proven to
exist any more than it has been proven that water has memory (homeopathy) or
that souls exists. Its quackery.

~~~
richmarr
> _For politeness sake, i 'll assume its a misunderstanding, although that is
> a bit hard to imagine at this point, since i'm being extremely explicit._

By all means do things for politeness sake; I'm fine with that.

It seems you've assumed my discussion of "serious people working in this
field" to mean something other than scientific researchers... and I've assumed
your disrespectful remarks to include researchers, rather than just "people
using the phrase EQ".

> _It is you taking offense that suggests there may be overlap between these
> two groups, which is extremely worrying._

This fresh accusation relies on the assumption that I've misunderstood you but
you understood me perfectly, which is clearly not the case. Slow down; I'll do
the same.

..and FYI, telling you that you're being disrepectful is not the same as
"taking offense".

~~~
robertlagrant
I've understood what he's said just fine, richmarr, and you're definitely
coming across in the way he's interpreting. You _seem_ to have a problem that
you're struggling to define, other than a nebulous issue of "respect" which,
as he's pointed out, should have absolutely no bearing on how scientifically
legitimate something is. (Indeed, objections such as that are often an alarm
bell.)

So: he hasn't assumed that you mean people other than researchers. If there is
actual research happening then cite one example (as he already asked). He's
also explained that any serious researcher wouldn't give two hoots about
respect, and would only want to discover the truth, whatever it may be. Do you
agree with that?

~~~
richmarr
Goleman, Petrides (2001), and Salovey/Mayer (2004) all "make statements about
EQ" so would all fall into ralfn's defined group "people making statements
about EQ" that he accuses of being "less scientific than a gossip magazine".

But, as ralfn already clarified, he did not intend to draw actual researchers
into his dragnet, so the point of dragging out that misunderstanding is what?

------
edem
The "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AZ EQ....." part reminds me of the famous "you
can't parse html with regex" answer on StackOverflow:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-
open...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-
except-xhtml-self-contained-tags)

~~~
marcosdumay
Wait, it that answer famous for completely ignoring the question and
discussing about some completely unrelated problem in a caricature of the SO
community, or is it the one famous by the "you can't parse HTML with regexes"
line?

Because if it is the one famous by that line, too bad. I always expected that
to became famous as an answer about how to parse HTML, not one about how to
decide the kind of a tag.

~~~
edem
The answer is relevant, it answers the question and it is also famous. I don't
know what are you talking about.

~~~
chillacy
It's famous, funny, and a classic, but the original SO question was about
"matching open html tags" with a regex while the answer was about "parsing
[X]HTML" with a regex. So the poster made some assumptions about what the
original question's author was intending to do. Ultimately the choice between
which tool to pick is a tradeoff that has to be made by the author, as hinted
in the (much better) second answer:
[https://stackoverflow.com/a/1733489](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1733489)

------
nmca
He quotes an interesting sounding stat - "In fact, if you could choose to be
born at the 95th percentile for wealth, or the 95th percentile for IQ, you
would be more successful at age 40 as a consequence of the latter choice."

Does anyone know the source?

~~~
cbcoutinho
Restricting your analysis to the US, research indicates that IQ is actually
more beneficial than your parents socioeconomic status in determining future
success. Here's some small articles touching on the subject

[http://spartanideas.msu.edu/2015/04/04/income-wealth-and-
iq/](http://spartanideas.msu.edu/2015/04/04/income-wealth-and-iq/)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/would-y...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/would-
you-rather-be-born-smart-or-rich/281828/)

~~~
tnzn
It's not exactly what it does say. Firstly for some reason the original
research link is broken. Secondly (from your own source):

"Nonetheless, for the teens and young adults of the late 1970s, the economy
seems to have been, in at least some meaningful sense, a meritocracy. Now
about that catch. The unfortunate truth is that, more often than not, the rich
kids are the smart kids. For many years now, the single biggest gap in
American education has been between the well-to-do and the poor. Thanks to the
resources their families can pour into parenting, wealthy students start out
academically ahead the day they walk into kindergarden, and stay ahead through
their high school graduation day."

Lastly I'll add that it only took white non hispanics into account.

------
skywhopper
While I'm certainly willing to accept that "EQ" is unscientific claptrap,
coming at this from outside the apparent controversy, this answer is off-
putting to me partially because I don't have the context this author assumes
(a context which includes enough technical jargon and name drops to make me
wonder who exactly this response is written _for_, as presumably academic
psychologists are not pursuing professional discourse via Quora).

All that said, his slavish devotion to "IQ is king" makes me seriously
question the value of attempting to pursue understanding his point. IQ may
well strongly correlate to societally normative positive outcomes, but
elevating a single quantitative measure to this degree reveals a worryingly
inhuman approach to the field.

I would not want to discuss my health with a doctor who ranted like this about
BMI being the most important measure of health we have. And I don't really
want to learn about the psychological aspects of emotional health and human
interaction from someone who rants this angrily over the transcendent value of
reducing human mental capacity to a number, either.

~~~
uyhso8
I'm a psychologist whose research is close to this area. (Maybe in this area?)

The Quora post is kind of a trifecta of topics that tend to elicit very
internet-y types of controversies for lack of a better way of putting it.

I can't speak for Peterson, to provide some context, I can understand where
he's coming from. There are researchers of all sorts of backgrounds who spend
a fair amount of time studying empirically the contours of human behavioral
and psychological individual differences, and there are certain ideas that
come up in the popular discourse, and persist despite their being a scientific
literature that speaks against them in one way or another. They resonate with
people because they do have variously sized kernels of truth to them, but
somehow the scientific literature never gets injected into public discourse.
This eventually feeds back, though, in textbooks and standardized exams, and
it's like you're constantly fighting a battle for precision of terms.

Here's a small sampling of things that will trigger a response like that of
Peterson on Quora: EQ, grit, Myers-Briggs.

The new MCAT is an example of this--the behavioral sciences section is
horribly outdated in certain sections. I'm not sure how it got the way it is.
But it's a major test, so now you have to teach to it, which then leads to a
distorted perception of psychology and behavioral sciences by who are
interested in the biomedical sciences, which then leads to all sorts of
strawman arguments, and so forth and so on. It's like if the biology section
included a section on intelligent design or something.

Anyway, the problem with something like EQ is that yes, there are non-
cognitive determinants of success: empathy, social perceptual skills,
perseveration, conscientiousness, socioeconomic background, and so forth and
so on. So EQ captures this vague idea that IQ isn't everything.

The problem is that saying "IQ isn't everything" doesn't mean that a construct
like EQ, which basically means "non-cognitive traits", is empirically precise
and contributes something meaningful above and beyond other constructs
mentioned by Peterson. These kinds of discussions create problems, because
they create this false sense that if you argue against EQ, you're arguing
against the idea of non-cognitive determinants of functioning, or arguing that
IQ tests can't be improved, which is a false argument. Rather, what Peterson
is saying is that there are well-characterized constructs like Big Five
Agreeableness, or Conscientiousness, which have demonstrated predictive
validity, and that are empirically coherent and precise enough to be more-or-
less workable for lots of theories. That doesn't mean you can't be _more_
precise; it just means that they represent a certain baseline of precision.

Contributing to this a certain confusion about what's meant by "thingness" in
these literatures. Behavioral scientists are often studying actions, states,
experiences, which are not physical in the sense of being objects (even though
supervenience holds, so physical things underlie them), which is a little more
abstract than what people are used to thinking about. So there's predictably
some offshoot discussion about that issue. It's a bit like arguing that DL
nets aren't things because they aren't instantiated directly in neuromorphic
chips.

You're right to be critical of the idea that IQ is everything. But I can see
where Peterson is coming from in certain respects.

~~~
triplesec
This seems to be the most sophisticated post here, so thank you for the
context. Indeed MBTI is also pants. But what is grit? I've not heard of that.

------
Flenser
> The idea was popularized by a journalist, Daniel Goleman, not a
> psychologist.

Looking at Daniel Goleman's wikipedia page it's clear he was actually both a
psychologist and a journalist:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Goleman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Goleman)

------
Bar_Code
EQ is definitely something that can help one in life, particularly leadership.
He is certainly correct that EQ is not scientifically valid. Goleman took the
valid work of others and "interpreted" it to create/support EI. It probably
should be called a theory, a process, a framework, whatever. After learning
about EQ, and practicing it, my leadership abilities took off. I've taught it
to dozens of engineers who say they are now much more influential, better team
players, and better communicators. Some have said it's changed their careers.
EQ is most certainly a thing, just not a trait. It's sort of like saying being
a good listener (active listening, listening with intent) is not a thing
because you can't measure it.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Any pointers you could give for those of us looking to learn such things?

------
kazinator
> _There is nothing that will provide you with a bigger advantage in life than
> a high IQ. Nothing. To repeat it: NOTHING._

Parents with bags of money.

------
Geee
I think EQ was invented to make those with low IQ to feel better.

~~~
the_cyber_pass
I think pop media needed a phrase to describe someone who was obviously smart
but had a lot of trouble interacting with others. I am sure we all have run
into Bob or Alice the cave troll who for lack of a better word can't pick up
on any of the needs of other people no matter how hard they try. Pop media
isn't going to go for words with academic rigor. They just know IQ = Smart and
Bob is obviously smart, but Bob is also an idiot when it comes to reading
social situations so Bob is also an idiot. People realize that Bob can't both
be smart and an idiot at the same time so society created a way of
differentiating that Bob is both an idiot and genius at different things
aspects of life.

------
mrtinkery
The better title is "EQ is a redundant concept".

------
Cozumel
There's also 'no such thing' as SQ (spiritual quotient) and no such thing as
VQ (varna quotient) although both have been around and in use longer than our
(western) civilisation.

------
ThomPete
There is no such thing as IQ either its also a conceptual model. But agree
there is no such thing as EQ.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
The argument seems to be that there is no such thing as EQ because it is not a
workable conceptual model whereas there is a thing like IQ because it is a
workable conceptual model - definition of workable conceptual model that it
can be used to make good predictions as one generally likes to do with
conceptual models.

~~~
ThomPete
I understand that but it's not a thing it itself.

It's a concept which we use to describe certain abilities in humans but there
is no IQ sitting somewhere. While EQ is definitely close to be "fraudulent"
it's still sitting on a gradient with EQ being the best model we have when
externally accessing someones mental abilities but it's not a thing, it's a
human construct.

~~~
fenomas
This is a bit like saying there's no such thing as the color red, it's just an
arbitrary label for certain wavelengths of light. Why claim "there's no such
thing as" something just because it's a human construct?

~~~
ThomPete
Because it matters. There is no red you cant meassure red we will never
experience red axactly the same way. One of the biggest mistake humans make is
thinking that experience or qualia is what it represents itself as. Its
important to understand that we simulate a reality not the reality.

~~~
fenomas
It matters how, specifically? If one person says there's no such thing as red,
and another disagrees, there's no physical, observable thing about the
universe that they disagree about. They're not disputing how light functions
or how vision works, etc; they only disagree about which set of words should
describe the whole state of affairs. Disagreements like that strike me as
profoundly unimportant.

~~~
ThomPete
It matters because it will influence how we think about the world, what our
premises are. Claiming there is red "out there" vs saying red is a construct
in our brain leads to two very different understandings of the world. Its
unimportant in many cases but important in some very important ones like how
does our brain work and what is reality.

~~~
fenomas
Nonsense. If A says "there's no such thing as red, because it's a human
construct", and B says "there _is_ such a thing as red, because human
constructs are things", that disagreement doesn't stem from different premises
about the world. There's no experiment one can imagine where A and B would
predict different results.

It's just two different ways of using the word "thing" \- each as valid as the
other. Either party could switch to the other's viewpoint without changing
anything about how they see the world, they'd simply be defining a word
differently.

~~~
ThomPete
If one believe it's a human construct and the other doesn't and they decide to
study science based on that they will end up with very different results.
Furthermore depending on how you understand the world you will be encouraged
or discouraged from pursuing various paths.

So no it's not just about defining it differently it's about whether you
believe red is "out there" or whether it's "in your mind" if you can't see why
that's important then that's your problem not mine.

~~~
fenomas
> If one believe it's a human construct and the other doesn't and they decide
> to study science based on that they will end up with very different results.

Give me an example of an experiment they'll predict different results for and
I'll believe you. ;) If there isn't one, then your belief isn't paying rent -
and arguing whether red is "out there" is as meaningful as arguing whether
Wulky Wilkinson is a post-utopian.

>
> [http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_antici...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/)

------
jgh
Jordan Peterson is a bit of a white nationalist, isn't he?

~~~
ac2u
That's a cheap, intellectually-bankrupt addition to the conversation if you
don't add anything to back it up. It's hard to believe you wrote it in any
sort of good faith.

~~~
jgh
Oh please, these guys go on parroting IQ and "race-realism" as if it weren't
intellectually bankrupt itself. The guy's apparent obsession with IQ is
suspicious enough, not to mention any time I hear about Jordan Peterson it's
in the context of alt-right nonsense.

Edit: to make this relevant to the conversation - a white nationalist has a
dog in the race when it comes to the idea that "IQ is above all else". IQ has
long been used as a reason for, e.g., why there is more poverty in the black
community. Why is there more poverty? Simple! Their IQ is low and therefore
they're not able to succeed!

~~~
ac2u
Where in the link is "race-realism" mentioned?

"These guys", who are you talking about?

It seems to me like you took one look at the guys name and decided you were
going to leave a "here be dragons" style comment to sully the conversation.
The only problem is that your comment came across as lazy.

You might not like certain followers that you may have come across, you might
even be right about them, but it's cheap and nasty to lump someone in with
such a disgusting accusation (and done so casually) based on that rather than
his own words.

I doubt you'd like to be held to account if someone of questionable character
liked a blog post of yours and then someone else plastered you with an
identity because of it.

~~~
jgh
I edited my comment above to make my point more relevant.

~~~
ac2u
I don't see how it's more relevant at all. The posted submission simply makes
the argument of invalidating EQ while showing the rigor behind IQ as a general
predictor.

You decided to turn that into "some horrible people use this to back up some
horrible beliefs, therefore this guy is one of them", and then in your edit
you went "here is an example of one of those horrible beliefs".

Not to mention the fact that he specifically addresses in his text that IQ is
not the only predictor, just an incredibly strong one. However, nothing you
said addresses that. Which makes me think that you either didn't read it, or
you hoped that your comment would be enough to influence other people to avoid
reading his quora answer for themselves.

You're basically still lumping him in with horrible people just because some
horrible people might use a subset of his argument out of context to try to
back up shitty beliefs.

It's an incredibly disingenuous practice to take a _subset_ of someone's
argument, correlate it with a horrible group of people and _their_ arguments
and then try to apply that identity to that person.

Again, you'd be disgusted if someone did it to you.

~~~
fenomas
If it makes things any clearer, the author of the quora comment is apparently
a figure in various culture wars, so I imagine GP's opinions about him are
coming from things he's said elsewhere, not just what's in TFA.

(I only know this because there was a brief furore about him the other day -
he got locked out of his youtube account, purportedly for his conservative
views, or somesuch.)

~~~
ac2u
Personally, I'm aware of the debates that he's been engaged in outside of the
scope of the EQ/IQ topic. However, even taking that into consideration, you
have to take an oceanic leap to get from that to branding someone a "white
nationalist".

Also, through self-admission: _not to mention any time I hear about Jordan
Peterson it 's in the context of alt-right nonsense._

...their opinions have more been informed by what they've been told to think
about him rather anything they've claimed he's said or done.

My passioned response to this is to call-out the behavior of how trivially
people like to lob these accusations without any empathy as to how it could
easily be done to themselves.

~~~
fenomas
Fair enough, just checking. I don't think the guy's very widely known, but
from what I saw the other day people who have opinions about him seem to have
very strong ones.

------
jwdunne
Well, if you're a dick, there's gonna be an upper limit on how far you go with
your intelligence. I don't think there's value in quantifying that with some
hokey quotient.

Take, for example, Shkreli. Major dick but pretty clever by the looks of it.
Now found guilty of fraud.

Bill Gates was a major dick. Made tonnes of money but yet reviled and found
himself in the dock because of it.

Steve Jobs. Really intelligent but still booted out of Apple due to sheer
dickheadery.

Now they all found major success, hence why EQ means fuck all. It seems they,
or some, found out they had to do some serious thinking. Bill Gates is
arguably the most redemptive.

Imagine you had average intelligence or just above and you were a major dick?
People like that get asked to leave more often than not.

~~~
oskarth
Have you ever actually met any of these people in real life? Reading headlines
about famous people doesn't mean you actually know them.

~~~
jwdunne
There is enough evidence out there to show they treated people they worked
with less than well. Are you saying that Steve Jobs wasn't a dick to his staff
and to the board? Are you saying that trying to stage a coup in the workplace
isn't a dickhead move?

~~~
ac2u
I think you're arguing past the point a little. From what I've read, what got
him booted out was Apple hemorrhaging money and the board wanting to keep the
Apple II gravy train going and Jobs disagreeing.

My point is that questionable behavior didn't oust him initially compared to
it being a fundamental disagreement over the direction of the company.

I'm sure the behavior didn't help, but if they were still making money hand
over fist, the board wasn't going to turn around and say "you're too much of a
dick so we're ousting you".

~~~
jwdunne
The final straw was Jobs trying to oust John Scully. John Scully said me or
him. Board went with Scully. The point is that a lot of his actions that
directly let up to that made him a dick. In Jobs case, his destructive
behaviours didn't help the bottom line.

Being a dick screws over motivation, colleague happiness/satisfaction,
increases turnover, etc. These things have an economic cost. Being a dick can
cost your workplace lots of money.

~~~
robertlagrant
This is all rather pointless when Scilly drove Apple into the ground and Jobs
subsequently sent it into the stratosphere. I'm no Jobs fan at all, but that
much is obvious.

Look at how badly Jobs treated his subordinates and family for an actual
criticism of him.

~~~
jwdunne
No it isn't. If Jobs wasn't a dick and alienated 90% of people with his
behaviour, he would have had more sway.

------
kevinr
If I was marking this as a student paper, it would go back with demerits for
plagiarism, faulty logic, poorly-structured rhetoric, and, to top it all off,
bad grammar.

...Dude's a professor?

~~~
chrisco255
I doubt people place the same amount of rigor into Quora posts and HN comments
as they do into academic papers.

------
placebo
Wow, so many wrong things with this answer...

Of course, it would not surprise me to learn that measuring IQ as a predictor
for success (or at least what a measurer defines as success) is much more
accurate than "measuring" EQ for the same purpose. It makes sense - IQ is
demonstrably measurable while EQ is some vague concept "popularized by a
journalist". However, to go from this to a broad statement that there is no
such thing as EQ is just silly. You could just as well say that there's no
such thing as beauty because there is no accurate test to quantify it.

For a simple demonstration that EQ is an important quality for prediction of
"success", just think of all the successful people you know and ask yourselves
whether you think they would be as successful if they had the emotional makeup
of an 8 year old.

This Quora answer has too much of a "trust me, I'm an authority" vibe to it

edited: ok, removed stuff that upon reflection does not contribute to the
discussion - my apologies for that. The main point however stands. The
repeated claims of no such thing as EQ should be qualified with "in the field
of psychology" \- in that case, I have no objection to the answer.

~~~
fpig
Did you actually read the answer? Nowhere did he say that those traits don't
matter, or even that they are too hard to measure (although he did say they
are less predictive of success than IQ).

He says the concept of EQ is worthless because it just bundles together
measurements of completely different character traits in a pretty much random
way and creates a less-predictive mess as a result.

It's like summing someone's weight in kg and height in cm and saying that's
their "physical score". This "physical score" is pointless even though we can
measure both components accurately and measuring them is not useless in
itself.

~~~
placebo
I read the answer, and my response is to the repeated "There is no such thing
as EQ" statements which are stressed throughout it. How is anything I wrote
not related to that statement? (edited my reply to be more constructive)

~~~
fpig
By saying EQ doesn't exist he's saying there is no "emotional intelligence"
trait that determines how good you will be at various emotional/social aspects
of life. Instead, testing EQ just looks at those various things and combines
the results. There is no reason to believe that, for example, a person who is
conscientious will also be agreeable. They are separate traits. A test which
tests both (and other things) and combines the results and calls them "EQ" is
not useful.

Contrast this with intelligence, for which they they test something very
specific which you can test even in children, and we know this ability, even
though on the surface unrelated to any real-world skill, strongly correlates
with how they will perform at many different things later in life. It is an
actual trait, not just an average of how good you are at various things.

~~~
chillacy
Okay I don't want to derail too much, but a couple things to note:

1\. IQ is itself a combination of multiple cognitive functions: verbal
comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory and processing speed, etc,
and people might be better or worse on in individual topics.

2\. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness are part of the Big 5 model, which is
itself just a model of personality that has its own share of flaws.

