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New IQ research shows why smarter people make better decisions
- scandox 1y agoI think IQ is an incredibly bad measure of anything. So many IQ smart people I know make bad decisions and it's always because they don't judge other people well.
- threatofrain 1y agoOkay but dampen their IQ and you end up with worse. Lead poisoning robs a nation of a generation.
- lostmsu 1y agoHow does it compare to the number of IQ smart people you know who do less bad decisions than you do? How does this rate look like for the IQ stupid?
- api 1y agoIQ is a rough measure of how big the engine is, like horsepower in a car. It says nothing about the quality of the driver or anything else about the car. A car with a huge engine in the hands of a bad driver can ram itself into a tree with great force. In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things: the Moon landings didn't happen, bizarro political theories that fall apart if you look at them funny, occult mumbo jumbo, Scientology, vaccines cause autism and similar (RFJ Jr. probably has a high IQ), etc. I wonder if having a high IQ means you can delude yourself better. Whether God can build a mountain he can't climb over may be a paradox, but humans with high IQ can absolutely create traps for their own mind they can't think their way out of. I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs, with a roughly equal split between authoritarian leftism (Communism / tankie Marxism, technocratic socialism) and authoritarian rightism (race nationalism, fascism, neoreaction, authoritarian traditionalism / theocracy). I think this stems from an intuition on the part of the person that because they seem smarter than average and have trouble running their own life, there's no way an average person can be part of self-governing. I think they're both underestimating other people and overestimating the inherent efficacy of "smart" people.
- billy99k 1y ago"vaccines cause autism and similar" RFK Jr. did win a lawsuit over injuries caused by a vaccine, although it wasn't autism.
- muglug 1y ago> I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs I think that’s just a side effect of being told “you’re very smart” a lot as a kid. You think that you can understand facts about the universe that others cannot, which steers you away from (boring, unthinking) normie positions.
- molticrystal 1y ago>In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things My working hypothesis is that in individuals with high IQ, the brain has a stronger propensity to make connections autonomously. Then there is the exposures to common public information, ranging from unscientific beliefs like home remedies and crystals, and noticing in news articles, through reasoning ability, that there are omissions, inaccuracies, and outright lies. This can be great, the doubts and misapprehension about mainstream or even specialist knowledge has caused many breakthrough and discoveries. But this goes haywire when their brain starts making connections between the nonsense and domains they only have a superficial knowledge of, often overestimating their understanding due to intellectual confidence, often driven by cognitive biases like pattern-seeking or overconfidence. For example, if a high IQ person pursued physics and engineering, they would quickly understand most rocketry and its capacities(moon landings certainly happened), but in less familiar domains, their pattern-seeking can lead to flawed conclusions. The mix of information(pseudoscience,inaccurate news) that is prominent, as described above, combined with personal predispositions or exposure to specific communities, causes some to lose faith in the mainstream and influences whether they become occultists, moon landing deniers, or the like.
- joenot443 1y agoWhich measure would you recommend instead?
- ceoofballin 1y agoPersonally I think IQ and practical intelligence differs for a person. I have know many IQ smart people that can solve complex problems but fail to solve or foresee everyday basic problems
- msgodel 1y agoRight, IQ measures some abstract mental capacity, not knowledge. It's not very useful on its own.
- tptacek 1y agoIt's probably more accurate to say that IQ is a useful indicator of many specific cognitive deficits, and basically unuseful within or above 2SD of the center.
- msgodel 1y agoNo. even within 1SD there are huge qualitative differences in what people are capable of.
- tptacek 1y agoThere are huge qualitative differences between cognitive ability between pairs of people within that range, but IQ stops accurately selecting the more capable of the two. It gets worse as the scores get higher. IQ is not a ranking of cognitive ability.
- msgodel 1y agoMy understanding is that people 75% of a standard deviation bellow average tend to struggle with basic thought experiments. Yeah when you get into the upper tail it starts to get hard to find things to differentiate people.
- kubelsmieci 1y agoMy amateur theory is that basic problems are boring for them and they don't try enough to solve everyday problems
- mrspuratic 1y agoI prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand.
- nunodonato 1y agoInteresting take! But don't you think that smartness would be something that would work across all/many domains?
- nemomarx 1y agoWhich part of smartness? Knowing a lot of things? Ability to research and learn quickly? Fast decision making? I'm not sure you can say that it's a single dimension, and plenty of people who are very educated or have had impressive careers in one field seem out of their depth in some other area. There's definitely some skill under that all that can transfer, but you'd need to cut through a lot of other traits to try and identify it and it might not be 'smarts'. (Persistence or motivation seem like large factors.)
- dgfl 1y agoDecades of research on the g factor seem to imply that most cognitive tasks are indeed heavily correlated.
- seec 1y agoYes and it's not just purely cognitive tasks. In fact, pretty much everything requires you to use your brain, so smarter people tend to do better on pretty much everything regardless of their familiarity/talent for the task at hand. But this is something most people prefer to ignore because the implications are pretty big and we already had a war around that...
- amy214 1y ago>I prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand. Same, but smarts is a tensor and I do a situational cross product for the hypervolume
- bondarchuk 1y ago..because they're smarter.
- TZubiri 1y agoYeah, title is bait by the journalists, the original title of the paper is "IQ, Genes, and Miscalibrated Expectations"
- amelius 1y agoIf this is true, then I suppose that smarter people are also richer.
- s_dev 1y agoHappiness > Wealth Accumulation. Depends on what you're optimising your life for. Money is very easy to measure, work/life balance, family and other factors are all incredibly difficult to measure and are arguably more important. Plenty of relatively poor people have extremely happy lives.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoThat's interesting. So I'd imagine that sharper folks might maximize quality of life, work/life balance, and friendships rather than a simple number.
- lnfromx 1y agoThis. Just look at Math Professors. I think of them as incredibly rich. The compensation of their life enjoyment, fulfillment, freedom and free time is not visible, but could possibly be estimated very high, monetarily. For instance, one estimation of fulfillment could be the price of yachts and other status symbols of super rich people.
- HPsquared 1y agoThere are plenty of unhappy poor people. It's probably the largest category overall.
- owebmaster 1y agothere are plenty of unhappy rich people and probably the % is bigger.
- 010101010101 1y agoI think it’s pretty well understood that the money/happiness relationship is initially very strongly correlated but reaches a point of rapidly diminishing returns once a certain economic threshold is met. i.e. it’s nearly impossible to be “happy” if you’re experiencing food shortages because you can’t afford food consistently, but it’s also possible to be “unhappy” if you didn’t get the right color Porsche for your 16th birthday
- delegate 1y agoIt's interesting how people always try to find some kind of number to race against. Here's a simple theoretical situation. A brilliant mathematician with very high IQ crashes in the jungle, but is unhurt. Not far from the crash site, there's a tribesman who lived in the jungle all his life. He doesn't know how to read or write. The jungle is filled with predators, spiders and snakes. The sun is setting, the night starts soon. Who has bigger chances of surviving ? I guess most people would bet on the tribesman. Why does nature select the person who would most likely score lower on the IQ score ? The point is - intelligence is contextual and circumstantial. It's not one number, like width or length. Not sure why people still try to squeeze some sort of conclusion from it..
- everdrive 1y agoI think a more valid comparison would be that you have two tribesmen who have lived in the jungle all their lives, but one has a very low IQ, while one has a very high IQ. Both crash land in the jungle. Who has the bigger chance of surviving?
- dinfinity 1y agoYou're confusing 'adaptation', 'knowledge', and 'intelligence'. The scientific comparison would be to put the mathematician and (lower IQ for the example) tribesman in the same situation from birth and see which performs better. Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general. The speed with which an individual develops accuracy in their model of something (ceteris paribus) does seem to be captured by an IQ-like score, according to the research. The thing people that actually causes problems is that people mentally equate 'higher intelligence' with 'better' or 'more valuable' which goes against our desire for humans to all be equal(ly valuable). That is what generally leads people to come up with other forms of 'intelligence' (emotional intelligence, street smarts, etc.), even though that just redefines intelligence to the point where the original meaning is lost and a new word needs to be introduced. Much better imho is to keep the original word intact and use terms like 'emotional competence', which also capture the experience part rather than just the genetic part.
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- readthenotes1 1y agoTwo things that strike me about this study are: 1. Comparing the bottom 2.5% to the top 2.5% is a vast range and not really applicable to just about anybody who's able to read. So the effect may be real but irrelevant for 95%+ of humanity. 2. It doesn't look like they controlled the expected longevity to the actual longevity and instead compared it to projected longevity. It seems flawed. 0. Since it comes from sociology type research, odds are that it is pure bunk. I would like to see it replicated before it actually got any air time in any serious conversation. (Yes, I know I have trouble counting but the last one is applicable to almost all modern research)
- jhanschoo 1y agoIf you read the paper they didn't even use formal IQ results from their participants, they were using genetic markers correlated to IQ and educational attainment, etc.
- jhanschoo 1y ago> from a nationally representative English sample of participants aged over 50 (N = 3,946), we test whether IQ is associated with calibration. > In line with MR studies, we leverage the randomness of genetic variants—captured by individual polygenic scores (PGSs) for IQ, a single quantitative measure of an individual’s genetic predisposition to IQ—as a plausibly valid IV for phenotypic IQ. I'm uncomfortable about generating strong generalized conclusions based on such methodology.
- tptacek 1y agoYou should be. This can't possibly work. This is a journal that also published and later defended work premised on psychic ability, though. It's a serious journal, as I understand it. But they take flyers. This definitely seems like one.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoWhile psychic powers have been thoroughly tested and debunked, isn't the point of science to entertain ideas that seem crazy, as long as they are tested scientifically?
- tptacek 1y agoI'm sure there's also a peer-reviewed journal of flat Earth science, too, with papers about the Atmosflat.
- clauderoux 1y agoThe problem of measuring intelligence is that most of these techniques reveal more about what we think intelligence is in a specific cultural context. Which means that individuals who rank higher in these tests are those who conform the most to a society expectancies. High level of literacy, proper nutrition during their childhood, proper education, help foster better IQ. Which of course leads to a better understanding of how your own society works, hence to a better evaluation of probabilities. If you have grown up in a family with money, you have a much better understanding of how to benefit from your investments.
- MrSkelter 1y agoIQ doesn’t measure intelligence. If anything it measures how well a person integrates the educational methodology they have been exposed to. At best - and it’s a stretch - IQ correlates with intelligence sometimes. It’s far from a reliable measure though. The problems in testing are obvious. You can depress someone’s results simply by changing the language used in the questions. I.e. you can make Americans score worse by using British English. That’s nothing to do with innate intelligence.