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Around and past an IQ of about 135, work boredom is a chronic risk and sometimes a disability. (...) Past 135 (much less at 140, 150, or even 160) even 8 hours

by gone35 12y ago

Around and past an IQ of about 135, work boredom is a chronic risk and sometimes a disability. (...) Past 135 (much less at 140, 150, or even 160) even 8 hours per day of grunt work is impossible, much less 17. Interesting. I went to a rather old-fashioned school with a strict IQ cutoff of 125-130+ (Stanford-Binet LM, I think, because some scored above 160), and my impression is the opposite: the higher they scored, the more they valued career paths like (non-quant) finance, medicine or corporate law --tracks with plenty of grunt work and long hours but well-defined, steady payoffs. I asked many of them about this because, to me at the time, it seemed counterintuitive and a tragic waste of human talent. It often turned out, however, that they chose those careers precisely because they lavishly reward grunt work, which they can do with such incredible (almost infuriating) ease that, to them, it doesn't feel like work at all! That is not to say they do not have rich intellectual lives outside of work: but that, for them, corporate work is more like a generous sinecure that doesn't substantially impede their other pursuits. In fact, it was those of us with the "lowest" IQs who tended to be more freaked out about the prospects of mindless corporate work, and who were more likely to go for more "intellectually stimulating" careers like academia or applied fields.

michaelochurch 12y ago
That is not to say they do not have rich intellectual lives outside of work: but that, for them, corporate work is more like a generous sinecure that doesn't substantially impede their other pursuits. In fact, it was those of us with the "lowest" IQs who tended to be more freaked out about the prospects of mindless corporate work, and who were more likely to go for more "intellectually stimulating" careers like academia or applied fields. Your thesis is interesting. I suppose I thought that the grunt work of those careers was like the grunt work of programming, e.g. maintenance of bad code, learning "how we do things here" idiosyncrasies with little general value: mentally taxing (and, at an IQ above 130, mind-crushingly boring) but not intellectually difficult.
- gone35 12y ago
  I would have thought so too, but perhaps one key difference for IQ outliers is that, to them, inordinate detail-orientation and extreme repetitiveness does not appear to be mentally taxing at all --so their cost-benefit calculus might seem completely foreign and unintuitive to the rest of us!

by gone35 12y ago

michaelochurch 12y ago

That is not to say they do not have rich intellectual lives outside of work: but that, for them, corporate work is more like a generous sinecure that doesn't substantially impede their other pursuits. In fact, it was those of us with the "lowest" IQs who tended to be more freaked out about the prospects of mindless corporate work, and who were more likely to go for more "intellectually stimulating" careers like academia or applied fields. Your thesis is interesting. I suppose I thought that the grunt work of those careers was like the grunt work of programming, e.g. maintenance of bad code, learning "how we do things here" idiosyncrasies with little general value: mentally taxing (and, at an IQ above 130, mind-crushingly boring) but not intellectually difficult.

gone35 12y ago
I would have thought so too, but perhaps one key difference for IQ outliers is that, to them, inordinate detail-orientation and extreme repetitiveness does not appear to be mentally taxing at all --so their cost-benefit calculus might seem completely foreign and unintuitive to the rest of us!