Why a High IQ Doesn't Mean You're Smart 808
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the but-not-all-idiots-are-savant dept.
from the but-not-all-idiots-are-savant dept.
D1gital_Prob3 writes "How can a 'smart' person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity — how much information you can hold in mind."
This is news? (Score:5, Informative)
Mensa and testing agencies have been making it clear for a couple decades now that IQ only measures your ability to take tests.
While that's strongly correlated with general intelligence, it means nothing specific for a specific individual.
Re:It reminds me of the old saying (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know, I think a fool reading most of the Discworld books would walk away with more sense than he started with.
The word we're looking for here (Score:3, Informative)
is "wisdom".
The opposite of "foolish" is not "smart". The opposite of "foolish" is "wise".
See also "book-smart" v. "street-smart", INT v. WIS (in D&D et al.), and the role of irrational thinking in decision processes [slashdot.org].
Re:A quick and accurate intelligence test (Score:4, Informative)
What do you see there?
Someone too dumb to cite their source. [xkcd.com]
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Informative)
In most multiple choice tests there are four answers.
Of those answers two are so wrong that if you know anything about the topic you will see that those answers are wrong.
Now you are down to two possible answers. (Statistically you should not ever get less than 50% on a test.)
One of the answers is correct, and the other is usually almost right.
So instead of looking for the right answer look for the wrong answers, and you will almost always get a good score on any multiple choice test you ever take. This has worked for me for the past 25 years or so.
Re:419 Scams (Score:2, Informative)
Some rich people are stupid, but so are most of the poor people I know so unless you've got a couple of citations to back up your obviously prejudiced opinions your just a troll.
You're.
Re:major difference (Score:3, Informative)
Experience is nothing if not processed intelligently.
Smarter people learn more from their experience, IMO.
Re:419 Scams (Score:3, Informative)
Yup. Most rich folks (>$1M worth?) have earned it themselves. You have to have a bit on the ball to make out ahead of average. Besides smarts, you also need drive and people skills. Luck and connections also help
A college buddy of mine is a good example. I was in MIS and he got his degree in construction management. 30 years later, he's now running his own company and is on the board of a local bank. It helps that he's a math wiz and is also very personable. He can get along with drunk construction workers and black tie socialites and seems to have a good time with both.
As for myself, I'm your typical anti-social geek with no people skills and so I'm stilling in a back room remoting in to computers all day long, fixing stuff. Meanwhile, he still calls me for tech help and recommendations. Of course, I'm a lot more laid back (lazy?) than he is so that could be part of it as well.
Re:419 Scams (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to ruin this party but there is an extremely well known and tested correlation between income and IQ. In fact, it is more correct to say that IQ measures income potential than to say that IQ measures "smartness".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient [wikipedia.org]
Re:419 Scams (Score:4, Informative)
Re:419 Scams (Score:1, Informative)
Re:419 Scams (Score:2, Informative)
Re:419 Scams (Score:5, Informative)
Gates, William H III
Buffett, Warren Edward
Allen, Paul Gardner
Walton, Helen R
Walton, S Robson
Walton, John T
Walton, Jim C
Walton, Alice L
Ellison, Lawrence Joseph
Ballmer, Steven Anthony
Detailed Forbes List [forbes.com]
It is also interesting to note that the top two (Gates and Buffett) are pretty much double anyone even close to them.
Re:419 Scams (Score:5, Informative)
Who cares about the "millionaires" - it's the "billionaires" who got it through inheritance that own most of the wealth in the U.S. I couldn't care less about the millionaires. How many of them - the multi-generationally wealthy - do you all know?
Many on this thread need to read a book on the subject or something, cause there are a lot of myths here.
Try "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell and see what really adds up to success. It isn't almost anything that the people on this thread have been shouting, that's for damn sure.
Re:I say this with some knowledge on the matter (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds more like ADHD than a "bad work ethic" to me. I had problems like that. Put me on stimulants, I'm magically better (until I have heart problems and have to stop taking them). Take me off 'em, I'm flaky again.
My brain is flaky enough that I once had a firecracker go off in my hand because, in the two seconds of sparking and hissing between when I lit it and noticed the fuse lighting, and when it went off, I got distracted and forgot I was holding it. That's not a matter of a work ethic.
Re:419 Scams (Score:3, Informative)
Heh! Reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy in college. I always thought this was some kind of ladies man and must have been a smooth talker as he was rather a short guy, and nothing special in the looks department (or so I thought anyway) yet he always picked up at the bar, and had a different girl any night he wanted.
One day he set me straight as to what his Modus operandi was. Basically you need to have patience and be able to handle rejection well. If he wanted to get laid that night, he would just chat up any girl he felt like, the usual BS type of stuff and then ask her to go home with him. The key is he would never spend more then 10min on any one girl. He said if he couldn't convince her to go with him in 10min the odds that she would after that point were infinitesimal and to abandon her and just move on the the next. He said it might take a few tries, and didn't always work, but in the end he would generally find someone willing.
Anyway you can debate if this is ethical, healthy, or whatever, but he bottom line is that it worked.
Re:419 Scams (Score:5, Informative)
Only because you (we) set up "smartness" as something vague and unmeasurable... :-/
The correlation between IQ and income is highly non-traditional (i.e. it's not bivariate normal-distributed, so it requires a more in-depth description than one correlation coefficient; for example, a so-called "copula"). To quote your link: "Some researchers claim that `in economic terms it appears that the IQ score measures something with decreasing marginal value. It is important to have enough of it, but having lots and lots does not buy you that much.'" This contradicts what is usually meant by correlation.
As Warren Buffett said, to get rich all you need IQ-wise is to be about 2 sigmas above the mean (and keep in mind, Mr. Buffett probably has a fairly august standard for "rich"; by commoner-standards, probably 1-1.5 sigmas is enough). The rest comes from personality, &c.
Re:419 Scams (Score:3, Informative)
It's a simple fact (at least in the United States) that MOST millionaires are NOT millionaires through inheritance.
That's a nice theory. Let's try applying facts to it. This obviously isn't representative of all millionaries, but if your theory is correct it should have *more* "earners" than an average sample, as these are the top folk:
America's top 20 Richest people:
That's 9 of the top 20 who inherited fortunes. A bare minority, I'll grant you, but not really much to hang your rhetorical hat on. Someone looking over this could be forgiven for thinking that the only way to get that kind of money in America is to either strike it rich in computers somehow, invest in those who do, or inherit it.
Below this level, I'd expect to see far more inheritance babies, as the very top is where the fortunes should still be fresh and undiluted. If the balance comes out with a majority "earned", I'd be suprised.
Re:419 Scams (Score:4, Informative)
There was something that was vitally different from your experience to your brothers: you had your brother as a sibling, and your brother had you as a sibling.
Depending on the family dynamics involved, siblings can often take very opposite interests to each other, either to distinguish themselves from each other or in response to parents who, themselves, characterize their children differently. Birth order also has an effect (oldest children and only children tend to perform better in IQ tests, partially because they have more uninterrupted adult attention during crucial developmental years. This means, of course, that cultures and social groups that tend to smaller family sizes will show a higher average IQ than those with larger ones.)
Re:Cart and Horse (Score:3, Informative)
Bad analogy.
If group A develops advanced machinery, weaponry, infrastructure, a system of writing, etc., and group B does not develop anything, does that make group A smarter?