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> This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons of soci
by FussyZeus 7y ago
> This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons of society, irrespective of the resources available to rich kids to attend the best colleges. Reality is somewhere in between.
You're talking about two different metrics there, intelligence and achievement. Ideally the former would lead to the latter, but in practice, I've seen myself and read in numerous places how the most clever people rarely ascend into management, because management doesn't want them in management, they want them doing the work. They do it best.
There's a reason "failing upward" is a concept.
- steve_gh 7y agoYeah - I have come across this on a number of occasions. The CTO of am company I was contracting for once described it to me as "The Technical Ghetto" - he had been pulled in of CTO of the division from CEO of another division. Basically, tech skills are in high enough demand that good tech people are too valuable to be allowed into management
- wool_gather 7y agoA very cynical but funny take on this premise can be had in Venkatesh Rao's series of essays ["The Gervais Principle"][0]. He posits three groups: Sociopaths, Losers, and The Clueless. Here the Sociopaths are the intelligent but ruthless C-levels who build and oversee organizations. The Losers are the ones who actually get the day-to-day work done, at the expense of their own progress in life. And the Clueless are moved "up" from the ranks of the Losers by Sociopaths into middle management, where they insulate the two productive groups from each other. [0]:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
- poilcn 7y agoFor me the problem is that it's considered an established truth that one could somehow manage to spot intelligence by reducing its dimensionality to some calculable metrics. If one is good in some tests, he or she is good in these tests, nothing more.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoIntelligence has dimensionality, but it seems intuitively obvious that there's also a general factor which SAT scores are correlated with. The common-sense concept of "smart" isn't just a made up thing.