3 ms·
After reading your comment, I was surprised to take a look at the paper and find that it does, indeed, appear to support conclusion that IQ is less important th
by hsitz 10y ago
After reading your comment, I was surprised to take a look at the paper and find that it does, indeed, appear to support conclusion that IQ is less important than many people think. Neither the paper nor the linked article argue that IQ is not a factor. But both say that other factors are more important, this is clear from both the abstract and the first paragraph of the article, where it says, "Personality is generally more predictive than IQ on a variety of important life outcomes."
Of course, personality+IQ will be more predictive than either alone. But the "innumerate" journalist seems to me to have done a better job of capturing the gist of the paper than you. (Whether the paper's methodology and analysis are sound is a different question from whether the journalist reported its findings correctly.)
- yummyfajitas 10y agoI don't know what "less important than many people think" means. It's true that the article suggests people think 50% of variance is explained by IQ, and it turns out that literally nothing in this paper explains even 25% of variance. On log-wages, IQ explains 30-50% of the explained variance depending on whether you go by figure 4 or 5. It does a similar job for education and welfare usage. So it seems that if people have any misconceptions, it's merely about how much of the variance in log wages at age 40 is explainable by early life measurements.