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> Brains aren't so different from muscle fibers ... they can grow and learn anything with enough activation. While this line of thinking has become en vogue, e

by jimmy1 8y ago

> Brains aren't so different from muscle fibers ... they can grow and learn anything with enough activation. While this line of thinking has become en vogue, especially to dismiss the notion of IQ entirely, I think doing so causes more harm to individuals. Yes we all have the same malleable brains with the potential of learning, but it just seems like some people come out way ahead, and over the course of a lifetime, that head start becomes insurmountable, in my opinion, and Psychology 100% firmly agrees. For all the flack the field of psychology gets, one of the most replicated studies in it's history is IQ and it's predictive nature of positive outcomes such as health, school success, job success, mental health, etc First a quote, and then some sources. "IQ doesn't necessarily set the limit for what we can do, but it does give us a starting point. And the truth is some people start ahead." - IQ measured in childhood correlates with important life outcomes, including school success, job success, health, mental health, and longevity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170757/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170757/ - All psychological traits are partially heritable, including intelligence http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Teaching/PhysiologicalPsychology/zCurrDir4200/CurrDirGeneticsTraits.pdf http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Tea... - The Heritability of IQ increases with age https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7a6b/ad93d88b0158d449881e56749d5443b3ff80.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7a6b/ad93d88b0158d449881e56... - One final one, having trouble tracking the source down but particularly relevant here to HN and YComb -- Higher IQ correlates to success of founders

stanfordkid 8y ago
Completely agree. When I say intellectual arrogance ... what I mean is the following: Many coding jobs are equivalent to being a brick layer (intellectually) Most CS degrees teach you how to benchpress 500 lbs. To a large degree you have to be genetically gifted to bench 500 lbs ... but you really don't need that to be a brick layer. So my point is not that you aren't right... you are. But rather, my point is, there is a lot of menial work to be done that involves code... and not all of it has to be done by high IQ people. As "software eats the world" more and more work will be produced. Coding will become more like addition and subtraction. If you went back to the age of the greeks, they were probably sitting there thinking that no one would ever need to use this stuff except for "High IQ people" like themselves.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > Many coding jobs are equivalent to being a brick layer (intellectually) Anything remotely as simple and repeatable as "brick laying" gets automated in the industry. Nobody pays the requisite >$100k/yr in the Bay for something that simple. You complain about "arrogance", but your notion that there's many coding jobs out there that are as mindless as brick laying actually reveals a much sharper bias, and is simply untrue. > Most CS degrees teach you how to benchpress 500 lbs. Right... so you and your CS-graduating friends can "benchpress 500 lbs" intellectually, but fortunately most coding jobs are so trivial they're like "brick laying". Who are you calling arrogant again? In reality, this dichotomy doesn't exist. There's no upper-class/lower-class chasm in any tech company I know. Everyone is competing for the same jobs. Maybe now you can understand why someone who never went to college and just completed a 4-10 month course finds it hard to compete with you Stanford kids.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Running security audits is the kind of highly repetitive task that both pays well over 100k and is directly comparable to laying bricks. Automation happens, but you still need somone to supervise things.
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      I really doubt anyone can be paid a decent salary to do something "directly comparable to laying bricks". Brick laying is completely repeatable iteration, requiring no modification or thinking. Anything "directly comparable" to that can be done by a program. That's not a job - that's a short programming project. More broadly, there's always a set of roles which haven't been automated... just yet. Being a sysadmin, for example, used to be a job. People used to be able to make pretty good living from managing a small custom set of servers sitting in a room somewhere. It was extremely common, too. Almost every company had some of these people on payroll. Must have seemed like a good, secure career. It required a ton more learning, skills, and thinking than brick laying. Yet it got completely automated. Now we have devops, which are programmers who write programs to do what sysadmins used to do. Each devop is effectively replacing hundreds or more of those former sysadmins, by leveraging automation.
Retric 8y ago
I have worked with a few very productive, but also fairly dumb developers. IQ is mostly leverage, someone with a 90ish IQ is going to need to work harder to keep up, but frankly most develops don’t ouch much effort into their jobs.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  How do you know someone has "90ish IQ"? Do you regularly administer standardized tests to your co-workers? To inject some reality into these wild numbers being thrown around so casually: 90 IQ is the bottom 25% percentile. Someone with 90 IQ would be noticeably slower than about 75% of the entire population. Not just "people and you know and worked with". Less intelligent than 75% of everyone in the US. I really doubt you worked with anyone like that. When folks talk about "you don't need to go to Stanford to be a programmer", they mean you can be a programmer with maybe 110 IQ (top 25%, which is still not what most of us here would consider "smart") versus 135 IQ (top 1%, which is what top tech is aiming to hire).
  - Retric 8y ago
    One of them mentioned their actual IQ. I have more or less used that as a benchmark. Guy was plenty well educated and competent, it was only really when he was trying to learn something that he seemed anyway out of the norm. Anyway, I think people vastly over estimate IQ’s of people they work with. Look at the number of 17 year olds in the US compare that with the top schools minus smart people not going to top schools. Now consider each school gets a fraction of that and Stanford students really don’t have that high of a median IQ. Extreme outliers pull the average up, but the bottom 50% at standard are just not that impressive.
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      > One of them mentioned their actual IQ. Very few people had their IQ measured properly. Either way, I doubt you ever worked with a programmer who really did have 90 IQ. Not to put too fine a point on it: such a person would appear dumb and slow. It will take them a long time to understand anything. They'll be disruptive and a drag on everyone else. There's a reason top tech spends billions (!) recruiting a highly intelligent workforce. > Look at the number of 17 year olds in the US compare that with the top schools minus smart people not going to top schools. Now consider each school gets a fraction of that and Stanford students really don’t have that high of a median IQ. Well, I did the math. Per the NCES, there were 16.9m undergraduates in 2016. Stanford had about 7,000 undergrads the same year, which includes all departments, including non-STEM like Art and English. Let's say there are 10 schools at Stanford's level (there aren't). That still means schools at that top level will accept only 0.4% of applicants. That means they could easily pick only candidates with 140 IQ or more. Of course, they don't, but the IQ at these institutions will still be pretty high. > I think people vastly over estimate IQ’s of people they work with. I think you under estimate the IQ of people you work with :) I'll be surprised if you worked with anyone below 100 IQ (population average). In fact I'll be pretty surprised if you worked with any programmer below 110 IQ.

by jimmy1 8y ago

stanfordkid 8y ago

Completely agree. When I say intellectual arrogance ... what I mean is the following: Many coding jobs are equivalent to being a brick layer (intellectually) Most CS degrees teach you how to benchpress 500 lbs. To a large degree you have to be genetically gifted to bench 500 lbs ... but you really don't need that to be a brick layer. So my point is not that you aren't right... you are. But rather, my point is, there is a lot of menial work to be done that involves code... and not all of it has to be done by high IQ people. As "software eats the world" more and more work will be produced. Coding will become more like addition and subtraction. If you went back to the age of the greeks, they were probably sitting there thinking that no one would ever need to use this stuff except for "High IQ people" like themselves.

dunpeal 8y ago
> Many coding jobs are equivalent to being a brick layer (intellectually) Anything remotely as simple and repeatable as "brick laying" gets automated in the industry. Nobody pays the requisite >$100k/yr in the Bay for something that simple. You complain about "arrogance", but your notion that there's many coding jobs out there that are as mindless as brick laying actually reveals a much sharper bias, and is simply untrue. > Most CS degrees teach you how to benchpress 500 lbs. Right... so you and your CS-graduating friends can "benchpress 500 lbs" intellectually, but fortunately most coding jobs are so trivial they're like "brick laying". Who are you calling arrogant again? In reality, this dichotomy doesn't exist. There's no upper-class/lower-class chasm in any tech company I know. Everyone is competing for the same jobs. Maybe now you can understand why someone who never went to college and just completed a 4-10 month course finds it hard to compete with you Stanford kids.
- Retric 8y ago
  Running security audits is the kind of highly repetitive task that both pays well over 100k and is directly comparable to laying bricks. Automation happens, but you still need somone to supervise things.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    I really doubt anyone can be paid a decent salary to do something "directly comparable to laying bricks". Brick laying is completely repeatable iteration, requiring no modification or thinking. Anything "directly comparable" to that can be done by a program. That's not a job - that's a short programming project. More broadly, there's always a set of roles which haven't been automated... just yet. Being a sysadmin, for example, used to be a job. People used to be able to make pretty good living from managing a small custom set of servers sitting in a room somewhere. It was extremely common, too. Almost every company had some of these people on payroll. Must have seemed like a good, secure career. It required a ton more learning, skills, and thinking than brick laying. Yet it got completely automated. Now we have devops, which are programmers who write programs to do what sysadmins used to do. Each devop is effectively replacing hundreds or more of those former sysadmins, by leveraging automation.

Retric 8y ago

I have worked with a few very productive, but also fairly dumb developers. IQ is mostly leverage, someone with a 90ish IQ is going to need to work harder to keep up, but frankly most develops don’t ouch much effort into their jobs.

dunpeal 8y ago
How do you know someone has "90ish IQ"? Do you regularly administer standardized tests to your co-workers? To inject some reality into these wild numbers being thrown around so casually: 90 IQ is the bottom 25% percentile. Someone with 90 IQ would be noticeably slower than about 75% of the entire population. Not just "people and you know and worked with". Less intelligent than 75% of everyone in the US. I really doubt you worked with anyone like that. When folks talk about "you don't need to go to Stanford to be a programmer", they mean you can be a programmer with maybe 110 IQ (top 25%, which is still not what most of us here would consider "smart") versus 135 IQ (top 1%, which is what top tech is aiming to hire).
- Retric 8y ago
  One of them mentioned their actual IQ. I have more or less used that as a benchmark. Guy was plenty well educated and competent, it was only really when he was trying to learn something that he seemed anyway out of the norm. Anyway, I think people vastly over estimate IQ’s of people they work with. Look at the number of 17 year olds in the US compare that with the top schools minus smart people not going to top schools. Now consider each school gets a fraction of that and Stanford students really don’t have that high of a median IQ. Extreme outliers pull the average up, but the bottom 50% at standard are just not that impressive.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    > One of them mentioned their actual IQ. Very few people had their IQ measured properly. Either way, I doubt you ever worked with a programmer who really did have 90 IQ. Not to put too fine a point on it: such a person would appear dumb and slow. It will take them a long time to understand anything. They'll be disruptive and a drag on everyone else. There's a reason top tech spends billions (!) recruiting a highly intelligent workforce. > Look at the number of 17 year olds in the US compare that with the top schools minus smart people not going to top schools. Now consider each school gets a fraction of that and Stanford students really don’t have that high of a median IQ. Well, I did the math. Per the NCES, there were 16.9m undergraduates in 2016. Stanford had about 7,000 undergrads the same year, which includes all departments, including non-STEM like Art and English. Let's say there are 10 schools at Stanford's level (there aren't). That still means schools at that top level will accept only 0.4% of applicants. That means they could easily pick only candidates with 140 IQ or more. Of course, they don't, but the IQ at these institutions will still be pretty high. > I think people vastly over estimate IQ’s of people they work with. I think you under estimate the IQ of people you work with :) I'll be surprised if you worked with anyone below 100 IQ (population average). In fact I'll be pretty surprised if you worked with any programmer below 110 IQ.