
Why IQ matters more than grit - wslh
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligence
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CuriouslyC
The frustrating thing for me with IQ as a measure is that realistically, it
conflates a couple of factors. Specifically, it is testing both the efficiency
of your thought process (which is _extremely_ trainable) and the speed and
error rate with which your brain executes that thought process (which is
probably somewhat less trainable). The IQ test should really be re-designed
into separate extremely challenging un-timed problems, and extremely simple
timed problems. Problems should also be timed separately rather than as a
group, and we should look at the average deviation from mean solution time;
this would avoid penalizing people with poor test-taking strategies (i.e.
spending an inordinate amount of time on one problem in a timed test,
resulting in less time for other problems).

As for IQ being more important than grit, IQ probably explains more variance
in success for the average person. On the other hand, if you look at the
extreme outliers in terms of success, I would confidently wager than extreme
grit is much more common than extreme intelligence.

~~~
naveen99
Isn't efficiency one of the things that allows you to go faster (at the same
effort level) ?

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CuriouslyC
Yes and no. A useful analogy is to think of software and hardware. You have a
general purpose CPU that runs software designed to solve a particular type of
problem. The CPU (your brain) probably has a fixed frequency (you might be
able to "overclock" it slightly, but not much). On the other hand, you can
completely rewrite the software (your thought process) using better algorithms
and get a MASSIVE speed increase.

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bko
> [in response to the idea that IQ doesn't change over time] Think about how
> it would it be if it was the other way around; there might actually be some
> bad outcomes. Because then parents would be able to totally control their
> kids with bad parenting, and wreck kids’ IQs for the rest of their lives.
> Governments could have big influences on people’s IQs by enacting different
> policies toward different sets of people in the country.

I can't quite put my finger on why I find this assertion so loathsome. As
though having autonomy over your intelligence is somehow a betrayal to what I
imagine is the interviewee's sense of societal "fairness" or "equality".

~~~
Bartweiss
One thing that put my eyebrows up is that the claim seems so contradictory to
what we actually observe. Governments and parents do have big influences on
IQ. Unleaded gasoline is the obvious winner, but there's fairly solid evidence
that iodized salt, childhood nutrition, acute childhood stress, and traumatic
brain damage all cause substantial changes in IQ.

Far from seeing some kind of discriminatory eugenics from all of this
(anywhere, even in dictatorships), we see the Flynn effect. Things have gotten
better across the board, and continue to whenever we track down a new way to
modify IQ.

The suggestion that "controlling IQ would be horrifying" seems so unsupported
that it's purely ideological.

~~~
rrobukef
One of the most horrifying things I ever read was the first(second?) chapter
of A Brave New World. The thought of not helping a person is bad. Fysically
stunting someones growth makes me sick. To just do it to escape the ethical
debate at a later point is horrifying.

~~~
Bartweiss
I've always held with the claim that BNW is far more interesting and
applicable to our world than _1984_. Totalitarianism is out there, but it's
not absolute and it's largely understood as evil. The sort of glib, "everyone
is happy" moralism of BNW presents much deeper questions.

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hexane360
This is really surprising to me. It seems the popular narrative is much
different from that found by actual researchers. I do have some reservations
though. Do all of these correlations (happiness, job success, EQ, general
intelligence, etc.) hold up at the higher and lower end of IQ (e.g. 130 -> 150
or 60 -> 80) Does the vast amount of data near the middle cloud what's
happening at the ends?

Also, on the age 11 versus age 90 distribution, there appears to be a lot of
funneling of the residuals. Lower age 11 IQs seem to have a lot less
correlation with later life than higher age 11 IQs. I wonder if this has to do
with late development or behavioral problems that cause artificially low IQs.

Either way very interesting article.

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Smeevy
That guy seems to put an awful lot of stock in a test that can only correctly
identify whether or not you're developmentally disabled.

"Congratulations on your high IQ! You're _REALLY REALLY NOT_ developmentally
disabled!"

Outside of identifying developmental disabilities, IQ testing is pretty
useless. What's more loathsome is all of the pseudoscience that's crept up
through overinterpretation.

~~~
gmarx
That's the kind of thing laymen always say. Whenever I read reports of what
the social scientists say it sounds like intelligence testing is one of the
few sub fields with consistently reproducible and meaningful results. Even in
this short article they contradict your point by stating the military finds it
correlates with success. The military filters out those with developmental
disabilities.

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naveen99
I thought you can improve reaction times, performance on sats, other iq tests
using adrenaline or other stimulants. I have never taken them, but so I read
in another hacker news discussion on drugs recently.

Seems to me, you can control intelligence within a day. Get better rest, take
some coffee be smarter. Be tired, drink some beer, get dumber.

read all of hacker news, get smarter. Follow links from hacker news to
youtube, Reddit, wikipedia, github, etc for more goodness.

Watch lifetime, the shopping network, 5 day cricket match, get dumber (or
atleast no smarter during that time).

You give me an iq test, I will show you improvements on it over time in myself
and any trainee. You give me someone too dumb. I will give them a computer
peripheral brain / hardware to help them.

You can write a program to get good at iq tests, go, image classification. I
don't see why I can't train people to get smarter. I do it with my kids all
the time.

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k__
I have an higher than average IQ and I can't say that it helped me more than
grit.

When I was lazy, I failed.

On the other hand, I don't know if I would have failed with a low IQ and not
being lazy.

~~~
nibs
I think a high IQ leads you to know what to quit when and when to persist. In
my experience, smart people quit bad things sooner, and persist through good
things longer. Stupid people quit the job of a lifetime or break up with a
great person when they should have endured, and/or stick with the same
horrible job/person through everything even though giving up would have
improved their life. Or so the thinking goes.

~~~
cylinder
This is interesting and helpful. Trying not to beat myself up for quickly
realizing certain opportunities aren't for me long term.

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gmarx
I wonder why people assume accepting IQ implies a dystopian eugenics future. I
see it as an argument for a lot of progressive policies. If everyone is in
control of their mental abilities then it follows that lack of success is down
to personal laziness and success is all about how diligent a person is. People
"deserve" their fates.

On the other hand if some people are born with an advantage, they won the
genetic lottery, it seems to me more justifiable to have government policies
which prevent the clever from taking advantage of the dim. Today in the US the
principle is if you are clever enough you deserve all the money and screw the
people who didn;t have the good sense to be born smart.

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sbardle
Wow. Intelligence is actually linked to short-sightedness, apparently. I
thought that was an urban myth.

~~~
randomgyatwork
I figured it was related to reading, which might also be correlated with
intelligence.

~~~
sbardle
Or acts of self-pollution? (that is an urban myth, right?)

