4 ms·

What if instead of actors faking the test, we consider it takes high IQ to reach the top 0.5% of any field?

by Swizec 6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago
Hard to say; it's actually somewhat rare to see very high IQ's even in leadership to elite positions such as "Sales Manager", CEO, politician, ... https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx The people around a set like an actor to be "smart" in the following sense: you show up to work and know your lines, the director or somebody else tells you what to do and you don't need to be told again. You need to be a "quick learner" of the random sorts of skills you need to do your work. As an actor you can outperform the person you become because your lines are written for you, so you can put 100% of your effort into everything else. I have a somewhat high IQ, I'm good at hard math (I'm sure better than Sly Stallone) and abstract thought and my words/minute rate of writing has been legendary at times, but I struggle as an actor. Stallone's success had to do with the breakout success of his movie "Rocky", which he wrote. That in turn had to do with convincing other people to take a chance on him and his script, and that gets you into a whole interpersonal area where the role of IQ is really controversial. If I wrote fiction I'd be dangerously tempted to be like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward I am fascinated with how many "Starship(s)" full of ammonia it would take to fill the atmosphere of a small space colony, what you do with the hydrogen and so forth. Stallone is much better at relating to the average person than I am, and that's what makes him a "genius".
- mcguire 6y ago
  "That in turn had to do with convincing other people to take a chance on him and his script, and that gets you into a whole interpersonal area where the role of IQ is really controversial." What? Essentially all of "success" (which IQ is correlated with) involves the "interpersonal area". If IQ isn't strongly related to successful interpersonal relations, something is broken somewhere.
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    Right, but if you were to test for "successful interpersonal relations" you would inevitably produce something culture bound. There was that time my wife and I got from the airport to the mountains in the Dominican Republic with instructions to use various forms of transport I'd never heard of, ran away from motorcycle taxis, shook hands with a police officer (along with everyone on the bus), walked into what we thought was a bus stop but was really a sports betting establishment, and caught the last bus to Ocoa which was a good thing because the only Spanish I knew I learned from reading half of Don Quixote and shopping at Home Depot -- it would have been awkward to find a hotel and regroup the next day. A person working across a cultural barrier to do a more complex task over a longer time has similar 'knife edges' to performance which will make everything fraught. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling "Based on publicly available government statistics, Asian Americans have the lowest chance of rising to management when compared with African Americans, Hispanics and women in spite of having the highest educational attainment."
    - mcguire 6y ago
      What you are describing there are specific handicaps.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
That was my immediate thought, though I would caveat it as "IQ likely has a statistically significant effect on achieving the top successes of any field and therefore we'd expect the top 0.5% to have a higher than average IQ." Otherwise, it seems like a strange dismissal. For one, the roles that an actor plays, and even the persona they have in public don't necessarily match their private persona where their intelligence might be more evident. For two, while luck and other personality factors surely play a significant role, it would make sense that IQ would be a differentiator amongst any group with similar characteristics. So among good-looking talented actors/actresses with similar demographics, I'd expect IQ to correlate at least somewhat with their success. It seems odd to think otherwise.

What if instead of actors faking the test, we consider it takes high IQ to reach the top 0.5% of any field?

by Swizec 6y ago

What if instead of actors faking the test, we consider it takes high IQ to reach the top 0.5% of any field?

Hard to say; it's actually somewhat rare to see very high IQ's even in leadership to elite positions such as "Sales Manager", CEO, politician, ... https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx The people around a set like an actor to be "smart" in the following sense: you show up to work and know your lines, the director or somebody else tells you what to do and you don't need to be told again. You need to be a "quick learner" of the random sorts of skills you need to do your work. As an actor you can outperform the person you become because your lines are written for you, so you can put 100% of your effort into everything else. I have a somewhat high IQ, I'm good at hard math (I'm sure better than Sly Stallone) and abstract thought and my words/minute rate of writing has been legendary at times, but I struggle as an actor. Stallone's success had to do with the breakout success of his movie "Rocky", which he wrote. That in turn had to do with convincing other people to take a chance on him and his script, and that gets you into a whole interpersonal area where the role of IQ is really controversial. If I wrote fiction I'd be dangerously tempted to be like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward I am fascinated with how many "Starship(s)" full of ammonia it would take to fill the atmosphere of a small space colony, what you do with the hydrogen and so forth. Stallone is much better at relating to the average person than I am, and that's what makes him a "genius".

mcguire 6y ago
"That in turn had to do with convincing other people to take a chance on him and his script, and that gets you into a whole interpersonal area where the role of IQ is really controversial." What? Essentially all of "success" (which IQ is correlated with) involves the "interpersonal area". If IQ isn't strongly related to successful interpersonal relations, something is broken somewhere.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  Right, but if you were to test for "successful interpersonal relations" you would inevitably produce something culture bound. There was that time my wife and I got from the airport to the mountains in the Dominican Republic with instructions to use various forms of transport I'd never heard of, ran away from motorcycle taxis, shook hands with a police officer (along with everyone on the bus), walked into what we thought was a bus stop but was really a sports betting establishment, and caught the last bus to Ocoa which was a good thing because the only Spanish I knew I learned from reading half of Don Quixote and shopping at Home Depot -- it would have been awkward to find a hotel and regroup the next day. A person working across a cultural barrier to do a more complex task over a longer time has similar 'knife edges' to performance which will make everything fraught. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling "Based on publicly available government statistics, Asian Americans have the lowest chance of rising to management when compared with African Americans, Hispanics and women in spite of having the highest educational attainment."
  - mcguire 6y ago
    What you are describing there are specific handicaps.

Enginerrrd 6y ago

That was my immediate thought, though I would caveat it as "IQ likely has a statistically significant effect on achieving the top successes of any field and therefore we'd expect the top 0.5% to have a higher than average IQ." Otherwise, it seems like a strange dismissal. For one, the roles that an actor plays, and even the persona they have in public don't necessarily match their private persona where their intelligence might be more evident. For two, while luck and other personality factors surely play a significant role, it would make sense that IQ would be a differentiator amongst any group with similar characteristics. So among good-looking talented actors/actresses with similar demographics, I'd expect IQ to correlate at least somewhat with their success. It seems odd to think otherwise.