3 ms·
It’s tempting to theorise why this might be, but it’s most likely just a simple statistical feature inherent to correlations themselves. I’ve heard it called “t
by fwlr 4y ago
It’s tempting to theorise why this might be, but it’s most likely just a simple statistical feature inherent to correlations themselves. I’ve heard it called “the tails come apart” - in a scatter plot of two correlated variables, the highest y value will not have the rightmost x value, and the rightmost x value will not have the highest y value. Ellipses don’t come to a sharp point at their tips, if you overlay them on a square the tips bulge out past the edges of the square.
This diagram might help http://images.lesswrong.com/t3_km6_3.png http://images.lesswrong.com/t3_km6_3.png
There’s more explanation on the page that diagram comes from, it even talks about this case of intelligence and wealth. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-ta...
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoVery insightful, thanks for sharing. It's always nice to add another tool to the mental toolbox.
- wyager 4y agoAlso, intelligence maybe lets you pick out a pareto isosurface in job-space, of which money is only one dimension. At higher isosurfaces, the relative value of money shrinks, because material needs are met, because of the sublinearity of utility-vs-money, etc. If you condition on people who make $X+/-eps per year (fixing one dimension in the optimization space), probably there will still be a strong correlation between intelligence and other desirable factors (status, fulfillment, etc).
- pcrh 4y agoInteresting, that might explain the fairly low level of income at which cognitive ability and income correlated in the OP (under US$ 57K).