IQ (moved subtopic)

I would imagine selection bias also plays a role if we're only looking at the results of those who have taken some sort of standardised IQ test and not extrapolating out to the whole population. I've never taken one, and I wouldn't know how to go about taking one.

Eh, I think you are pretty smart even though you have been known to play pool for money against sharks without getting sufficient odds.

Funny you say that actually, a lot of people I know (IRL) think I'm pretty dumb for very similar reasons. If I had a penny for every time someone called me "the dumbest smart person [they] know"...

Anyway, we're not counting addictions against intelligence. I'm sure there are plenty of intelligent heroin addicts. I don't think they're dumb for shooting heroin even though they know it's bad for them.

couldn't possibly be heavily influenced by this could it?

i was confused as well until i learned he's euro twice over

Most Ph'Ds are nowhere near 135+ IQ, which is top 1%. I have a PhD FWIW, and have never taken an IQ test, but there is no way I have a 135+ IQ. Above average educated/intelligent people definitely skew liberal/Democrat. But the vast majority of these people are not top 1%. And I dont know one way or another, but I would not assume the top 1% generally default to "Democrat good"

also, i'd be interested to see if someone with a phd had greater iq than those without if you compare them to their undergraduate class - ie take the 5 people who went on to get a phd in philosophy or physics and compare them to their graduating class of philosophy and physics majors

i would say the single strongest correlation to advanced degrees is not intelligence but rather whether the parents have an advanced degree and their socioeconomic status as few can reasonably afford to just not take on a full time job until they are in their 30s without strong familial support

for many children growing up it's as much a given that upon graduation they are going to be entering the workforce as it is that they are going to college in the first place

ie a college professor is 25x more likely than anyone in the general population to have at least one parent who has a phd themselves

yeah anecdotally, my undergrad was a major feeder school to graduate degrees and phds

i personally know a whole lot of them as a result

it is also regularly among the schools ranked as having the wealthiest student bodies in america, often #1 - i don't think that's a random coincidence

there were obviously some outliers who were just academic allstars, clearly smarter than the general student body - and nobody was ever "omg kevin is so smart, he'll surely go on to get a phd"

and nearly everyone i spoke to who chose to pursue a higher degree directly out of undergrad usually mentioned familial pressure (not saying they were forced or unwilling but that it was what they've been urged to do) whereas that's not something most undergrads go through unless their parents did it themselves and see the value in it as well as have the desire to further financially support their child another x many years into adulthood

i'm not anti advanced degrees - i'm literally the only member in my family of 6 who doesn't have one and that's probably only because i was abroad - i have also on multiple occasions applied for and then deferred admissions to various grad school programs in my 20s - currently revisiting that and seriously considering getting an mba right now

but the idea that people with phds are smarter than people with a standard college degree doesn't fly anecdotally so i'd like to see if there's been any studies on the manner

It's a meme dude. Obviously if the real distribution was like that, then dems would never win an election. It's probably closer to the top portion is Democrat, the bottom portion is democrat, and then a lot of the midwits are right wing. Then of course sprinkling in some really smart people on the Republican side.

Basically a bimodal distribution for dems and a normal distribution for Republicans.

I have absolutely nothing to back this up I'm just hypothesizing based off the data. When you think about the college educated with 4 years+ being only slightly in favor of dems, that's pretty crazy when you see how much more skewed it gets when we control for having a postgrad.

But then we would have to control even more for higher IQ post grad vs relatively lower IQ post grad degrees to see if the lean remains the same. So it's absolutely not conclusive at all of course.

I don't know how you're defining progressive elites, but yeah, a lot of people tend to believe in blank slatism, not just progressives. Look at GWB with No Child Left Behind, which was actually generally opposed by many on the left for trying to give a prescription for all students assuming that they all had the same ability to do the same thing. Also the blank slate theory was a big component of classical liberalism (John Locke).

Almost nobody actually thinks that people can easily overcome challenges that start in pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood. So the implication here that it's somehow smart and super intellectual to reject any sort of environmental influence on intelligence is going to be very hard to overcome. However even with controlling for those factors my a priori assumption is that people will have a large percentage of heritability in IQ. What society should try to do is maximize the potential IQ of each individual, starting with family planning services, infant and childhood nutrition, early language acquisition, cleaning up environmental issues that can lead to lower IQ and DNA damage, etc etc etc. What we should not be doing is trying to force the 92 IQ individual to be a doctor, a programmer, a scientist, etc and instead find ways to enable them to be productive, healthy, non-criminal members of society.

Meh. I think being a Dr. is a little over-rated in this respect. I have doctors in my family and peer group, so I have some inside perspective. I actually dont have a problem with admitting less competitive black, Hispanic and native American doctors and funneling them into underserved communities. Which I think would be +EV for everyone involved.

I think where we get into trouble is when society accepts bad behavior in the name of DEI; which serves no one. There was a medical program/hospital in Los Angeles called Drew Hospital which was generally designed to funnel prospective doctors form minority communities to serve said communities. However, the program went off the rails and was forced to shut down in scandal because there was a lot of internal corruption and dysfunction that everyone was turning a blind eye to for political correctedness reasons.

To change the subject slightly, there is a good reason why it tends to be better if the president's IQ is higher than just above average even though he has "experts" advising him on complex subjects. Because his experts often disagree. And even though the president won't know as much about the subject as any of them, if his IQ is high, he is more likely to identify any logical fallacy that one or more of those experts might invoke (because they are knowledgeable but not necessarily smart) leading him to choose the other side's experts who use fallacy free arguments even though they may, on the surface, seem less persuasive'

Of course the exception to the above would arise if the higher IQ presidential candidate is more evil. or has lousy values. or thinks he doesn't need to consult any expert. I hear that candidates like that have been known to exist.

or in trumps case, he is so ubermensch that he doesn't bother sifting through the fallacies of the argument but just makes his decision on who explained it using the least words while also wearing a wardrobe he approved of

ITT Sklansky discovers what a project manager does.

As usual, replies don't address the main point. Which is that it is not actually OK if the president is merely a 130 IQ type.

I mean 130 IQ is pretty far above average. But yeah, having a smart president seems good actually.

In my experience 130s fall for fallacious arguments that 150s don't. Nor are they good at crafting arguments that are both correct and that 120s can easily understand.

i agree though, i wish there was some sort of cognitive test that one would need to pass in order to run for government

problem is then you get accused of being a eugenics obsessed nazi - see my closed thread on "people who look stupid"

Ironically this is a fallacious argument

do you have test receipts on all these anecdotal experiences of 150s vs 130s vs 120s?

my guess is you are just assigning them in your mind based on what arguments they go for / don't based on your personal take of the arguments

Yeah, the information we're missing is what IQ Sklansky assigns to himself, so we can introduce an appropriate error correcting term. I suspect once we do this, the 150s and 130s will turn into 115s and 100s.

Sklansky has a long and illustrious history of shooting himself in the dick when pointing out logic mistakes others supposedly make.

It's hard to know. Of course representatives are going to say their school is a meritocracy. I was going by some figures argued by the pro affirmative action side of the recent debate over the huge lawsuit against Harvard. I don't recall precisely but the percentage of people juiced into the Ivies was surprising even to me. And if people are still getting in that way then Yale is going to partake more than its share.

If nothing else, they screw up the arguments in their own mind that cause them to answer questions wrong on IQ type tests that the 150's get right. 130 is about a 30-1 shot. while 150 is about a 1000-1 shot.

As to examples of specific arguments that the 130s sometimes fall for that 150s don't where I have personal involvement, we have things like "dealing it twice", "avoid blackjack tables where other players hit stiffs against a small card", "never bet the river unless you might fold a better hand or get called by a worse hand", and "limping first in is always wrong" All arguments that 150s rarely fall for. Of course120s are even more likely to fall for this stuff (along with myriad non gambling examples) because it is usually the 130s who are misleading them rather than the 150s who have come up with clever ways to explain it to them.