5 ms·

IQ and conscientiousness, as we measure them, are correlated with income. I believe it remains to be shown that "competence" is also correlated with income.

by fwip 7y ago

JohnFen 7y ago
> IQ and conscientiousness, as we measure them, are correlated with income. They are? Do you have studies indicating this?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fwip 7y ago
  They're on the first page of google search results, so I'll let you find the ones you like best.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I was hoping that you had a paper that didn't appear there, as the authoritative ones I see there seem to indicate that there is a minor correlation at best.
    - fwip 7y ago
      Oh yeah, it's minor for sure. Personally, I believe it's more of a "being wealthy means you do better on IQ tests" effect than "IQ measures how much money you will make." I was mainly getting that point out of the way so the poster I was replying to wouldn't get hung up on my evil liberal agenda.
      - challenger22 7y ago
        Considering my characterization of my own point earlier, >Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman. I wouldn't call your viewpoint evil, but I'd like you to characterize where I'm arguing from in your own words. Seems like you think I've jumped into the looney bin. Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful, because people can't change their IQ very much. But conscientiousness is worth advocating for. To me, it seems like the left-leaning opinion is so afraid to make judgements between people's measurable differences that they want to immediately shame people for recognizing those differences.
        JohnFen 7y ago
        > Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful I wouldn't say "distasteful". I'd say "inaccurate". It's not clear what, exactly, IQ actually measures and it's up for debate if it measures intelligence in any meaningful way.
    - challenger22 7y ago
      https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation... The scatter plots show a correlations strong enough that they startled me when I saw them. The higher the IQ, the lower the correlation though.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        Yeah, I saw those plots. I didn't personally find them startling, though. To me, they show a weak correlation (that is stronger as you go lower in income, as you note).
        solveit 7y ago
        That's an incredibly strong correlation by social science standards (seriously, one number correlates that well with something as complicated and path-dependent as income?), which is also weak enough to be completely useless for an individual trying to make decisions. There is no contradiction, because social science is incredibly hard.
challenger22 7y ago
Competence is the ability to do something (a goal) successfully or efficiently. IQ measures the ability to perform abstract reasoning tasks successfully. Conscientiousness measures the willingness and desire to perform one's duties well. Additionally, among people that earned their wealth, the fact that they are wealthy demonstrates that they achieved their goal of becoming wealthy. These all indicate competence to me. Wealth, in general, can also be imagined as a state where one's needs are met, which is (for people that earned their wealth) almost always closely related to having achieved certain goals. I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively. Bear in mind that this is talking about populations as a whole- correlations are something we can tease out via sociological studies, and experiments are few and far between. There are facts about human nature that we will never prove conclusively, but to be an effective agent in the world, you should try to learn things about people that cannot be proven. Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively. The line of reasoning makes sense. My only doubt comes from my own personal observations: I've never personally noticed a correlation between income and IQ.
  - __s 7y ago
    You may have a selection bias towards some level of IQ. Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's? It's hard to say -- I'm basing this on my lifetime experience. Across that time span, the bulk of the people I knew have ranged (at various times) from "dirt poor" to "the 1%". Memory can be a tricky thing, of course, and I'm naturally speaking subjectively (and therefore not with statistical significance), but I never noticed a smaller percentage of high IQ people in the dirt poor group, nor a greater percentage in the wealthy group. The breakdown has always seems pretty constant across socioeconomic levels to me. But it also depends on what you count as "intelligence". I have noticed that the higher you get on the socioeconomic ladder, the more "socially intelligent" people tend to be. But specifying IQ as a measuring stick excludes most of the other forms of intelligence, including social intelligence.

IQ and conscientiousness, as we measure them, are correlated with income. I believe it remains to be shown that "competence" is also correlated with income.

by fwip 7y ago

IQ and conscientiousness, as we measure them, are correlated with income. I believe it remains to be shown that "competence" is also correlated with income.

JohnFen 7y ago

> IQ and conscientiousness, as we measure them, are correlated with income. They are? Do you have studies indicating this?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fwip 7y ago
They're on the first page of google search results, so I'll let you find the ones you like best.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I was hoping that you had a paper that didn't appear there, as the authoritative ones I see there seem to indicate that there is a minor correlation at best.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Oh yeah, it's minor for sure. Personally, I believe it's more of a "being wealthy means you do better on IQ tests" effect than "IQ measures how much money you will make." I was mainly getting that point out of the way so the poster I was replying to wouldn't get hung up on my evil liberal agenda.
    - challenger22 7y ago
      Considering my characterization of my own point earlier, >Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman. I wouldn't call your viewpoint evil, but I'd like you to characterize where I'm arguing from in your own words. Seems like you think I've jumped into the looney bin. Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful, because people can't change their IQ very much. But conscientiousness is worth advocating for. To me, it seems like the left-leaning opinion is so afraid to make judgements between people's measurable differences that they want to immediately shame people for recognizing those differences.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        > Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful I wouldn't say "distasteful". I'd say "inaccurate". It's not clear what, exactly, IQ actually measures and it's up for debate if it measures intelligence in any meaningful way.
  - challenger22 7y ago
    https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation... The scatter plots show a correlations strong enough that they startled me when I saw them. The higher the IQ, the lower the correlation though.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Yeah, I saw those plots. I didn't personally find them startling, though. To me, they show a weak correlation (that is stronger as you go lower in income, as you note).
      - solveit 7y ago
        That's an incredibly strong correlation by social science standards (seriously, one number correlates that well with something as complicated and path-dependent as income?), which is also weak enough to be completely useless for an individual trying to make decisions. There is no contradiction, because social science is incredibly hard.

challenger22 7y ago

Competence is the ability to do something (a goal) successfully or efficiently. IQ measures the ability to perform abstract reasoning tasks successfully. Conscientiousness measures the willingness and desire to perform one's duties well. Additionally, among people that earned their wealth, the fact that they are wealthy demonstrates that they achieved their goal of becoming wealthy. These all indicate competence to me. Wealth, in general, can also be imagined as a state where one's needs are met, which is (for people that earned their wealth) almost always closely related to having achieved certain goals. I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively. Bear in mind that this is talking about populations as a whole- correlations are something we can tease out via sociological studies, and experiments are few and far between. There are facts about human nature that we will never prove conclusively, but to be an effective agent in the world, you should try to learn things about people that cannot be proven. Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.

JohnFen 7y ago
> I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively. The line of reasoning makes sense. My only doubt comes from my own personal observations: I've never personally noticed a correlation between income and IQ.
- __s 7y ago
  You may have a selection bias towards some level of IQ. Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's? It's hard to say -- I'm basing this on my lifetime experience. Across that time span, the bulk of the people I knew have ranged (at various times) from "dirt poor" to "the 1%". Memory can be a tricky thing, of course, and I'm naturally speaking subjectively (and therefore not with statistical significance), but I never noticed a smaller percentage of high IQ people in the dirt poor group, nor a greater percentage in the wealthy group. The breakdown has always seems pretty constant across socioeconomic levels to me. But it also depends on what you count as "intelligence". I have noticed that the higher you get on the socioeconomic ladder, the more "socially intelligent" people tend to be. But specifying IQ as a measuring stick excludes most of the other forms of intelligence, including social intelligence.