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Malcolm Gladwell states in Outliers that there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about

Malcolm Gladwell states in Outliers that there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes. I think that in the future we'll come to realize that IQ is actually a silly metric and that this "understanding" is where it's at. Point of view (understanding) doesn't give you more intelligence (Alan Kay's proverbial 80 IQ points), but instead intelligence can help you to gain understanding.

mynameishere 17y ago
I think it's cute that you believe something that Gladwell put forth to the world. http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-occupations http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-...
- gjm11 17y ago
  Your link doesn't offer any sort of evidence against Gladwell's contention (which isn't original to Gladwell, and which on the basis of negligible evidence I suspect is an oversimplification but not far from the truth). In fact, arguably it offers a little evidence against what Gladwell says. If IQ above ~120 makes no difference to performance, and if "career" and "performance" are close enough to make it worth while citing this thing at all, then you ought to see no little difference between {occupations substantially found among people with IQ ~120} and {occuptations substantially found among people with IQ ~130}. Now, look down the 120 and 130 lines of that plot, and notice that you see quite different things in the two instances. (The foregoing is a bit of a simplification, but it'll do. Anyway, I see no way to read the graph as providing evidence that IQ 120 is better than IQ 110, but IQ 130 isn't better than IQ 120, in terms of likely success/performance.)
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    The estimate that the IQ threshold for adult eminence is about IQ 120 appears to come from Arthur Jensen. It has been repeated by Hans Eysenck and is most frequently written about by Dean Keith Simonton, who cites a specialized study on exactly that issue in one of his latest books. Locally, I'm in an ongoing discussion, partly in person and partly by email, with Thomas Bouchard on this point. I think the additional help of an IQ score above 120 is negligible compared to other factors that are known to be important for adult eminence.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  Your graph only shows that IQ matters up to about 120. I agree that Gladwell wildly exaggerates his case, but your statistics don't contradict it at all.
- larrywright 17y ago
  Malcolm is certainly not the first person to put that idea out there, and I think there's some credence to it. I read something else recently (based on a Stanford study) that said that the greatest predictor of success wasn't IQ, but rather self discipline: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_... Certainly someone with a high IQ AND self discipline could go farther than someone with just one or the other, but IQ by itself is not a meaningful gauge of someone's potential.
sethg 17y ago
The original purpose of IQ tests was not to predict who would go on to the most brilliant career, but to help teachers recognize who would need special help in classes. In that context I think the distinction between 120, 150, and 180 IQ is meaningful.
- cperciva 17y ago
  to help teachers recognize who would need special help in classes As opposed to SATs, which were designed to determine who was most likely to succeed in post-secondary education (which again has relatively modest correlation with career success).
- WilliamLP 17y ago
  The distinction between 150 and 180 IQ is meaningful? Really? If such a difference is reliably measured, and not easily trained by either person (e.g. by devouring a few books on vocabulary and brain puzzlers in the week before the test), then what is the meaningful difference? Both people are going to be bored out of their mind at school and are going to have to be basically self-reliant for their actual learning process for much of their lives. Feynman supposed had an IQ in the low end of that range, and a given person at the higher end probably isn't as smart in any real sense as Feynman was. Whatever the difference is there, it isn't IQ.
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    I don't know if the distinction between a tested 150 and 180 IQ is meaningful, but that between those levels of intelligence is. I'm in the 150 range; I've met some who are probably in the 180 range (IMO gold medalists) and they are noticeably smarter than I am. That said, even a 200 IQ won't overcome a lackluster work ethic, mental illness, or social adversity (internal or external).
    - nkassis 17y ago
      I'm glad I don't know my IQ, I can keep imagining I'm in the 500 range ;p
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
dabent 17y ago
One of my psychology professors pointed out that income and IQ have a positive, but far from perfect correlation. He said we all could probably think of people who aren't the sharpest who've made great money. He also pointed out that those with high IQs often seek careers they think will be intellectually challenging, but not the most financially rewarding ... like becoming professors. This also goes to show how much determination matters for a startup. Yes, being bright matters, but being determined matters more.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  An uglier aspect of it is this: although people with 150+ IQs, contrary to the nerd stereotype, usually get along fine socially, they'll virtually never be selected as leaders, and always be outsiders. People usually aren't comfortable with a leader who is that smart. We evolved in small tribal groups of 20 individuals per generation, so we look to the 90th-95th percentile (6'1, 120 IQ) for leadership, but extremes and "giants" frighten us. 99.5+ percentile is a threat-- possibly some other hominid that is going to eat us.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    Does IQ correlate with leadership ability?
    - pw0ncakes 17y ago
      It depends how "leadership" is defined. By and large, I am a strong believer in rule by the smart, although culture is a lot more important than IQ. Probably 20-30% of those in the ruling class have a high enough IQ (125+) to be there but less than 1% have sufficient culture. Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney come to mind as examples. They're so uncultured they probably eat steak with their fingers; that such louts could rise to such high levels of influence is a serious problem. And our society is such an ugly mess because people like them (uncultured people, with ugly minds) rise to power and remake the world in their image. I think it's also obvious that most business executives are selected for people-pleasing and crude optimizations (next-quarter profits) rather than vision, creativity, and humanity. The traditional two-tier managerial structure (although excruciatingly flawed and less-than-useless in practice) had the right idea. At one degree above the average (110-125) you have the managers, whom the line workers look to for leadership, but who do not alienate them with their intelligence. At two degrees up (125-145) you have the executives, who can lead and mentor the managers, and whose closer connection to "the metal" gives them a strong voice in the decision-making. At 3 and more degrees, you have strategists and academics who present the information and advise the decisions. However, modern corporate society doesn't work this way; the executives are often mediocrities, the "advisor" class isn't really listened-to, and most of what goes on in academia is self-referential bullshit. "Rule by the smart" is not flawless, of course. Bigger problems than a lack of intelligence in our ruling class are the lack of integrity, vision, and compassion... which are also much harder to measure-- although all of these correlate are correlated much more strongly with IQ than with "leadership" as measured by our current selection process. Therefore, an "IQ meritocracy" would be an improvement. Between a set of 140+ IQers (among whom there would be some who are unfit to lead) and the people running the show now, I'd bet on the first class without hesitation.
allenp 17y ago
"On November 2, 1967, at age 4, he solved an advanced stochastic differential equation." ... and then gets a PhD in physics at age 16. Although the IQ score might be outdated/irrelevant - there is something special about this man and if we don't strive to quantify it we won't be able to reliably reproduce it.
- sukuriant 17y ago
  I'm somewhat confused. What does being able to label something have to do with reproducing it? I may be able to label the heart in a person, or perhaps distinguish an exceptional sonata from something that isn't, but that doesn't mean that I can create a hart, or play that song.
  - allenp 17y ago
    Although you could see it as reproducing this human (breeding, eugenics) you could also look at it as discovery and training. Sort of like being able to spot a really great runner at age 5 and getting them to the Olympics by age 18, etc. I think if we can understand (since it probably isn't IQ) the "real" reason this person has such above-average abilities then we can find ways to test for it and help other people with these abilities develop fuller potential, and hopefully humanity gets something back - in both the arts and sciences.
- secret 17y ago
  I sent that quote to everyone in my stochastic calculus class. I couldn't be the only to feel that dumb today!
pw0ncakes 17y ago
After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes. I know you don't mean it this way, but this comes off as very smug. There are lots of reasons why most very-high-IQ people (170+) seem to underperform their potential-- some good, some bad-- but they're a lot more complex than a lack of emotional maturity and innate social acumen.
- aik 17y ago
  Lacking "emotional maturity" doesn't necessitate simplistic. Would you mind expounding upon what other factors there are?
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    First of all, I think that people with high IQs tend to have a stronger tendency toward mental illnesses and related patterns such as rumination, hypersensitivity to rejection, and low self-confidence. I think many of the underperformers have what might be considered subclinical mental illness (but is more accurately described as the normal exaggerated sensitivity of creative people and adolescents). So, they're more "fragile" off the bat, and this is probably neurological in basis. We can provide more support as a society, but there are obvious limits regarding what can be done here. Second, society is generally bad at recognizing talent and connecting it with the resources that could be used to actualize it. Those resources tend to go to people-pleasers and horse-traders rather than to those who can make the most use of them (who are almost always viewed with suspicion). This is true as much in academia as anywhere else. Combine the general stupidity of society and the hypersensitivity of the sharpest intellects, and you have a lot of very smart people who get discouraged and bitter, then lose all desire to play.
    - scott_s 17y ago
      First of all, I think that people with high IQs tend to have a stronger tendency toward mental illnesses and related patterns such as rumination, hypersensitivity to rejection, and low self-confidence. Is that a belief support by anecdote, or have you seen some study supporting it?
Daniel_Newby 17y ago
"... there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes." Carl Friedrich Gauss. General life "performance" at popularity and piling up money may (may) top out at 120, but there are some jobs where performance means being able to see through a brick wall of symbols like it is a window pane.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  Any person with an IQ of 120 can learn and reproduce Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes, especially because most educated people have familiarity with the most elementary number theory concepts (divisibility, primality). Less than 1/10,000 of people with IQ > 120 could have come up with it at that time, keeping in mind that the only language one had to express numbers was geometry-- no algebra or number theory existed as we think of them today. Of course, whether this rare ingenuity shows up on an IQ test is an open question. The same holds for something like Godel's theorem. I'm starting to understand it-- he's encoding a Lisp in number theory-- but there's no way I could have come up with it in 1931.
duhprey 17y ago
For some reason I want to read heavily between the lines of the wikipedia summary, and I find it incredibly sad. I mean in the first place my knee jerk reaction is to equivocate "I'm still good enough, even if I didn't solve diffeq problems at 6. My son's okay even if he still doesn't read at the age of 4." But I don't want to imagine the kind of expectation people put on this kid (when he was a kid). Cynically, I suppose as I read I thought "oh yeah what's he done now? We still have cancer and no unified field theory. Does P=NP?! huh?" and yet under that was the expectation "well this guy should be curing cancer and resolving open problems!" No wonder he escaped to something ordinary (poor Civil Engineers, though, what a bad rap that is ... my profession is the most ordinary!) People haven't changed much since the dark ages (or before). They still expect miracles and magic to cure their woes, they just expect it now from Science. It agrees with me that accomplishment comes after the 120 IQ...heck I'm barely above the marker.. shwoo. But it comes in increments. It comes in mostly in pieces we have to put together. Einstein didn't make the world a better place single-handedly, it was the engineers who came after and created GPS (for instance) that did it. There's no reason this guy should have created miracles with his IQ, we probably don't have enough of the base research to solve that (whichever) problem, yet. Instead, he's improved the world a bit (quite a bit in the sector of civil engineering apparently). Honestly, the universe is miracle enough. The fact that we can make it slightly better by our actions and increase joy in the miracle of existence at all is a good thing. Some people do a better job of that with much smaller IQs.
tomlin 17y ago
I tend to agree. The fact that your IQ metric can be swayed by lack of sleep, bad experience in the day of test, etc. make it an inaccurate way to measure intelligence precisely.
jexe 17y ago
After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes. It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of people like this. He may not be the largest "producer" or whatever your personal metric for being successful is, but even solving a small problem that you or I won't ever be able to will have a unique, lasting, permanent effect on the world.

mynameishere 17y ago

I think it's cute that you believe something that Gladwell put forth to the world. http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-occupations http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-...

gjm11 17y ago
Your link doesn't offer any sort of evidence against Gladwell's contention (which isn't original to Gladwell, and which on the basis of negligible evidence I suspect is an oversimplification but not far from the truth). In fact, arguably it offers a little evidence against what Gladwell says. If IQ above ~120 makes no difference to performance, and if "career" and "performance" are close enough to make it worth while citing this thing at all, then you ought to see no little difference between {occupations substantially found among people with IQ ~120} and {occuptations substantially found among people with IQ ~130}. Now, look down the 120 and 130 lines of that plot, and notice that you see quite different things in the two instances. (The foregoing is a bit of a simplification, but it'll do. Anyway, I see no way to read the graph as providing evidence that IQ 120 is better than IQ 110, but IQ 130 isn't better than IQ 120, in terms of likely success/performance.)
- tokenadult 17y ago
  The estimate that the IQ threshold for adult eminence is about IQ 120 appears to come from Arthur Jensen. It has been repeated by Hans Eysenck and is most frequently written about by Dean Keith Simonton, who cites a specialized study on exactly that issue in one of his latest books. Locally, I'm in an ongoing discussion, partly in person and partly by email, with Thomas Bouchard on this point. I think the additional help of an IQ score above 120 is negligible compared to other factors that are known to be important for adult eminence.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
Your graph only shows that IQ matters up to about 120. I agree that Gladwell wildly exaggerates his case, but your statistics don't contradict it at all.
larrywright 17y ago
Malcolm is certainly not the first person to put that idea out there, and I think there's some credence to it. I read something else recently (based on a Stanford study) that said that the greatest predictor of success wasn't IQ, but rather self discipline: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_... Certainly someone with a high IQ AND self discipline could go farther than someone with just one or the other, but IQ by itself is not a meaningful gauge of someone's potential.

sethg 17y ago

The original purpose of IQ tests was not to predict who would go on to the most brilliant career, but to help teachers recognize who would need special help in classes. In that context I think the distinction between 120, 150, and 180 IQ is meaningful.

cperciva 17y ago
to help teachers recognize who would need special help in classes As opposed to SATs, which were designed to determine who was most likely to succeed in post-secondary education (which again has relatively modest correlation with career success).
WilliamLP 17y ago
The distinction between 150 and 180 IQ is meaningful? Really? If such a difference is reliably measured, and not easily trained by either person (e.g. by devouring a few books on vocabulary and brain puzzlers in the week before the test), then what is the meaningful difference? Both people are going to be bored out of their mind at school and are going to have to be basically self-reliant for their actual learning process for much of their lives. Feynman supposed had an IQ in the low end of that range, and a given person at the higher end probably isn't as smart in any real sense as Feynman was. Whatever the difference is there, it isn't IQ.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  I don't know if the distinction between a tested 150 and 180 IQ is meaningful, but that between those levels of intelligence is. I'm in the 150 range; I've met some who are probably in the 180 range (IMO gold medalists) and they are noticeably smarter than I am. That said, even a 200 IQ won't overcome a lackluster work ethic, mental illness, or social adversity (internal or external).
  - nkassis 17y ago
    I'm glad I don't know my IQ, I can keep imagining I'm in the 500 range ;p

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

dabent 17y ago

One of my psychology professors pointed out that income and IQ have a positive, but far from perfect correlation. He said we all could probably think of people who aren't the sharpest who've made great money. He also pointed out that those with high IQs often seek careers they think will be intellectually challenging, but not the most financially rewarding ... like becoming professors. This also goes to show how much determination matters for a startup. Yes, being bright matters, but being determined matters more.

pw0ncakes 17y ago
An uglier aspect of it is this: although people with 150+ IQs, contrary to the nerd stereotype, usually get along fine socially, they'll virtually never be selected as leaders, and always be outsiders. People usually aren't comfortable with a leader who is that smart. We evolved in small tribal groups of 20 individuals per generation, so we look to the 90th-95th percentile (6'1, 120 IQ) for leadership, but extremes and "giants" frighten us. 99.5+ percentile is a threat-- possibly some other hominid that is going to eat us.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  Does IQ correlate with leadership ability?
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    It depends how "leadership" is defined. By and large, I am a strong believer in rule by the smart, although culture is a lot more important than IQ. Probably 20-30% of those in the ruling class have a high enough IQ (125+) to be there but less than 1% have sufficient culture. Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney come to mind as examples. They're so uncultured they probably eat steak with their fingers; that such louts could rise to such high levels of influence is a serious problem. And our society is such an ugly mess because people like them (uncultured people, with ugly minds) rise to power and remake the world in their image. I think it's also obvious that most business executives are selected for people-pleasing and crude optimizations (next-quarter profits) rather than vision, creativity, and humanity. The traditional two-tier managerial structure (although excruciatingly flawed and less-than-useless in practice) had the right idea. At one degree above the average (110-125) you have the managers, whom the line workers look to for leadership, but who do not alienate them with their intelligence. At two degrees up (125-145) you have the executives, who can lead and mentor the managers, and whose closer connection to "the metal" gives them a strong voice in the decision-making. At 3 and more degrees, you have strategists and academics who present the information and advise the decisions. However, modern corporate society doesn't work this way; the executives are often mediocrities, the "advisor" class isn't really listened-to, and most of what goes on in academia is self-referential bullshit. "Rule by the smart" is not flawless, of course. Bigger problems than a lack of intelligence in our ruling class are the lack of integrity, vision, and compassion... which are also much harder to measure-- although all of these correlate are correlated much more strongly with IQ than with "leadership" as measured by our current selection process. Therefore, an "IQ meritocracy" would be an improvement. Between a set of 140+ IQers (among whom there would be some who are unfit to lead) and the people running the show now, I'd bet on the first class without hesitation.

allenp 17y ago

"On November 2, 1967, at age 4, he solved an advanced stochastic differential equation." ... and then gets a PhD in physics at age 16. Although the IQ score might be outdated/irrelevant - there is something special about this man and if we don't strive to quantify it we won't be able to reliably reproduce it.

sukuriant 17y ago
I'm somewhat confused. What does being able to label something have to do with reproducing it? I may be able to label the heart in a person, or perhaps distinguish an exceptional sonata from something that isn't, but that doesn't mean that I can create a hart, or play that song.
- allenp 17y ago
  Although you could see it as reproducing this human (breeding, eugenics) you could also look at it as discovery and training. Sort of like being able to spot a really great runner at age 5 and getting them to the Olympics by age 18, etc. I think if we can understand (since it probably isn't IQ) the "real" reason this person has such above-average abilities then we can find ways to test for it and help other people with these abilities develop fuller potential, and hopefully humanity gets something back - in both the arts and sciences.
secret 17y ago
I sent that quote to everyone in my stochastic calculus class. I couldn't be the only to feel that dumb today!

pw0ncakes 17y ago

After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes. I know you don't mean it this way, but this comes off as very smug. There are lots of reasons why most very-high-IQ people (170+) seem to underperform their potential-- some good, some bad-- but they're a lot more complex than a lack of emotional maturity and innate social acumen.

aik 17y ago
Lacking "emotional maturity" doesn't necessitate simplistic. Would you mind expounding upon what other factors there are?
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  First of all, I think that people with high IQs tend to have a stronger tendency toward mental illnesses and related patterns such as rumination, hypersensitivity to rejection, and low self-confidence. I think many of the underperformers have what might be considered subclinical mental illness (but is more accurately described as the normal exaggerated sensitivity of creative people and adolescents). So, they're more "fragile" off the bat, and this is probably neurological in basis. We can provide more support as a society, but there are obvious limits regarding what can be done here. Second, society is generally bad at recognizing talent and connecting it with the resources that could be used to actualize it. Those resources tend to go to people-pleasers and horse-traders rather than to those who can make the most use of them (who are almost always viewed with suspicion). This is true as much in academia as anywhere else. Combine the general stupidity of society and the hypersensitivity of the sharpest intellects, and you have a lot of very smart people who get discouraged and bitter, then lose all desire to play.
  - scott_s 17y ago
    First of all, I think that people with high IQs tend to have a stronger tendency toward mental illnesses and related patterns such as rumination, hypersensitivity to rejection, and low self-confidence. Is that a belief support by anecdote, or have you seen some study supporting it?

Daniel_Newby 17y ago

"... there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes." Carl Friedrich Gauss. General life "performance" at popularity and piling up money may (may) top out at 120, but there are some jobs where performance means being able to see through a brick wall of symbols like it is a window pane.

pw0ncakes 17y ago
Any person with an IQ of 120 can learn and reproduce Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes, especially because most educated people have familiarity with the most elementary number theory concepts (divisibility, primality). Less than 1/10,000 of people with IQ > 120 could have come up with it at that time, keeping in mind that the only language one had to express numbers was geometry-- no algebra or number theory existed as we think of them today. Of course, whether this rare ingenuity shows up on an IQ test is an open question. The same holds for something like Godel's theorem. I'm starting to understand it-- he's encoding a Lisp in number theory-- but there's no way I could have come up with it in 1931.

duhprey 17y ago

For some reason I want to read heavily between the lines of the wikipedia summary, and I find it incredibly sad. I mean in the first place my knee jerk reaction is to equivocate "I'm still good enough, even if I didn't solve diffeq problems at 6. My son's okay even if he still doesn't read at the age of 4." But I don't want to imagine the kind of expectation people put on this kid (when he was a kid). Cynically, I suppose as I read I thought "oh yeah what's he done now? We still have cancer and no unified field theory. Does P=NP?! huh?" and yet under that was the expectation "well this guy should be curing cancer and resolving open problems!" No wonder he escaped to something ordinary (poor Civil Engineers, though, what a bad rap that is ... my profession is the most ordinary!) People haven't changed much since the dark ages (or before). They still expect miracles and magic to cure their woes, they just expect it now from Science. It agrees with me that accomplishment comes after the 120 IQ...heck I'm barely above the marker.. shwoo. But it comes in increments. It comes in mostly in pieces we have to put together. Einstein didn't make the world a better place single-handedly, it was the engineers who came after and created GPS (for instance) that did it. There's no reason this guy should have created miracles with his IQ, we probably don't have enough of the base research to solve that (whichever) problem, yet. Instead, he's improved the world a bit (quite a bit in the sector of civil engineering apparently). Honestly, the universe is miracle enough. The fact that we can make it slightly better by our actions and increase joy in the miracle of existence at all is a good thing. Some people do a better job of that with much smaller IQs.

tomlin 17y ago

I tend to agree. The fact that your IQ metric can be swayed by lack of sleep, bad experience in the day of test, etc. make it an inaccurate way to measure intelligence precisely.

jexe 17y ago

After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes. It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of people like this. He may not be the largest "producer" or whatever your personal metric for being successful is, but even solving a small problem that you or I won't ever be able to will have a unique, lasting, permanent effect on the world.