Submitted 16 hours ago by j4k3@piefed.world to [deleted]
https://media.piefed.world/posts/KI/H9/KIH9P0dG4biPlnt.png
No test measures intelligence. A test only measures you relative to the persons that wrote the test. – loosely quoting Asimov.
2007 is ancient history now. It is an interesting graph that one might correlate with a lack of meritocratic structure in society, but I'm on the low end cause I say this without looking up and reading the study. Pretty pictures evoke emotional blabbering bias and all that.
Looks like there’s some other Factor X (in orange) not accounted for in the data.
Y’know, like, rich parents, stable household, access to resources, and opportunities, etc
Reminds me of the marshmallow test:
But the marshmallow test is a tricky one. Replication studies reveal important details that are missing from Mischel’s triumphant analysis. On average, the kids who “fail” and eat the marshmallow rather than waiting and doubling their haul were poorer, while the “patient” kids were from wealthier backgrounds. When the “impatient” kids were asked about the thought process that led to their decision to eat the marshmallow rather than holding out for two, they revealed a great deal of future-looking thought.
The adults in these kids’ lives had broken their promises many times: Their parents would promise material comforts, from toys to treats, that they were ultimately unable to provide due to economic hardship. Teachers and other authority figures would routinely lie to these kids, out of some mix of overly optimistic projection about the resources they’d be given to help the kids in their care, or the knowledge that the kids’ poor, time-strapped, frantic parents wouldn’t be able to retaliate against them for lying.
So the kids had carefully observed the world they operated in and concluded, on balance of probability, that eating the marshmallow was the safe bet. At the very least, it foreclosed on the possibility that the adults running the experiment would come back in 15 minutes and declare that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were taking back the original marshmallow, rather than providing two of them. They were thinking about the future, in other words.
These kids didn’t grow up to do worse in school and life because they lacked self-control: Those outcomes were dictated by America’s two-tier education system, which funds schools based on local property taxes, topped up by parental donations, which means that poor neighborhoods get poor schools. If these kids’ brains show up differently on a scan 20 years later, Occam’s Razor dictates that this is caused by a life of desperation and precarity, whose stresses are compounded by inadequate health-care.
Very interesting. I imagine an even simpler explanation for why poorer kids do less well in school:
You simply can’t focus on abstract thoughts if you’re lacking basic ingredients in your life.
It’s something like the pyramid of needs:
When you’re hungry in school because you didn’t have proper breakfast because your parents had too little time to prepare one or were unable to actually buy proper-quality ingredients, your brain simply can’t focus on geography of the other end of the world or god forbid, calculus.
I guess that if schoolkids were given free meals before school and during midday break, their performance in school-related activity would improve by at least 50% in poorer regions.
I genuinely thought that was the point of this graph. The logarithmic function in blue very clearly shows there is a limit as to what IQ alone will net you.
People will look at the same graph and come up with different explanations. I personally agree with your interpretation.
Not only that, on the other end of the graph it is known that poverty is a great stressor requiring constant mental bandwidth - that therefore can’t see used to “be smart”. So poorer people are not less smart, they allocated their mental resources to take care of their situation first and only later try to look smart in the test.
I’ve said for a long time that intelligence isn’t the number one trait for becoming filthy rich. It’s lack of a moral compass.
Tfw the r ain’t r’in
I’d like to see the same chart done but with EQ (emotional intelligence).
I’d also like to see the chart if it was actually representative of the rich. Populate the chart with individuals reporting >2.5 million in income per year.
This is more like a chart of, “does being smart keep you above the poverty line?”
Same and to include genius IQ
I’d be curious to see a chart like this but with savings or some other form of stored wealth! Because I’d like to believe that smarter people might not earn that much more, but they’re more diligent about saving what they do get
I do not think that would be as correlated as you imagine either. Conservativism is not particularly intelligent. Spotting an opportunity will often evolve and lead down different paths. Many engineers have gained and lost vast quantities of wealth pursuing ventures. Business is hard and it is impossible to constrain all variables.
Fair, there probably isn’t any correlation, I’d just like to believe that I’m smart because I’m good at saving 😆 Although my last IQ test (during my Adhd evaluation last year) wasn’t much over 110 anyways, so I don’t even count as smart on paper haha
I mean, look. While it’s true that IQ tests aren’t a great measure of intelligence, it’s not like all humans are equally intelligent. We all know some people who are clearly smart and some people who are clearly dumb. And I think it’s completely expected that being smarter gives you some advantage at getting money. I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that being smart is generally advantageous in life. This chart seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me…there is a slight correlation, moreso on the low end (how can severely mentally retarded people do most jobs or even have incomes?), and less so on the high end. It makes a mistake in talking about income rather than net worth, which is really the more pertinent thing in “being rich”. I bet we would see a much lower correlation there, because you can be born into having a high net worth. But the correlation isn’t too high, because, as everyone reasonable already suspected, being rich is almost entirely about being lucky. I don’t think this chart really has any import to the many social discussions about meritocracy or wealth or intelligence, except for maybe to disprove someone who believes that we live in a fair world where “if you’re smart and work hard you can make it”. But even then, that would rely on a misunderstanding of what the chart tells us.
We all know some people who are clearly smart and some people who are clearly dumb
I don’t. I thought maybe Elon musk is smart or maybe he is a good public speaker. Maybe he is charismatic or maybe he is just lying really effectively.
With 20/20 hindsight it’s good to reflect and understand it was smart to be cautious about my judgement. I will never be sure if someone is smart or dumb, because there’s so much going on I can’t possibly understand.
Even Einstein who clearly had a lot of very impactful and helpful theories and ideas I wouldn’t say is smart. I would only go so far as to say he is a great physicist.
I also disagree that being smart is generally advantageous in life. All the people who seemed smart to me were deeply depressed at some point in their life, some even still and some even went a bit further with it.
What I’m trying to say is the world is complex, and such generalizations only lead to wrong causal links.
Maybe smart don’t give you money but money helps to learn and become smart. Maybe smarts don’t give you advantages in life but an advantageous life affords you opportunities to become smarter. Maybe being smart is the wrong way to think about it and it’s all just different patterns and behaviors of thinking. Or maybe your thoughts are more profound in some circles and people who think more profound appear smarter to us.
Let’s just take a healthy dose of skepticism to such studies but also to all those “we all know it” ideas. I don’t. I’m fucking stupid but that leads to smarter decisions than the me who assumes a bunch of stuff.
Sorry buddy, but “Einstein wasn’t smart” just isn’t something I can take seriously.
I feel ya, I also generally am very against “it’s just common sense!” type reasoning. But have you ever spent time with, like special education students? Like someone who will need to live with their parents forever because they can’t learn to do things like read or write? It’s nice to believe that maybe if only they had been given the right environment, they wouldn’t have those problems - it’s also just not true. Or perhaps we can take a more extremely example of someone who suffered a major brain injury. It sucks, and it’s unfair, but at the end of the day some people really are definitively less smart than others. And by that same token, those others are definitively more smart than them. Of course, once people are at a certain level, it gets a lot harder to tell, but that dynamic is still in play. Likewise, if you’ve ever had the experience of interacting with a gifted kid, it’s pretty clear that they’re smarter than others.
That’s a good distinction about intelligence being generally advantageous. That is why I said generally - it has some clear disadvantages like loneliness or a deeper awareness of the world’s problems, etc. But most of the time, being smart is advantageous, don’t you think? I mean, what is intelligence other than an ability to correctly understand reality? I do agree that sometimes having a false understanding of reality can coincidentally help you out, but knowing how things really are is certainly the superior strategy. If you think otherwise, it’s always easy to make yourself dumber and reap the rewards. I don’t mean that sarcastically or cruelly. I just mean, there’s a reason we don’t see intelligent people lobotomizing themselves to have better lives.
Agreed the chart only shows correlation and not causation in either direction.
Denying intellectual disparities is denying the vulnerability of people with special needs, not to mention average folks who are easily deceived, swindled, manipulated, propagandized, and parasitized by the rich and powerful every single day.
You don’t know people who are clearly dumb?
The average ACT score for college bound seniors in Florida is 18. The test costs money, which means they’re trying their best. It’s childishly easy. My cat, who is illiterate, can score almost as high (answering at random). Again, the average is 18. What kind of conversations can you have with people who can’t read basic English? I’m asking sincerely, because as far as I can tell the answer is “none.” Maybe you can discuss the weather? Sports? Idk.
I want to stress that Americans, uniquely, are really weird about testing mental ability, probably because of their history of racism. Nevertheless, mental ability is a real phenomenon. Yes, high IQ doesn’t make you a good person, and it clearly has very little to do with accumulating wealth. But it does make life a hell of a lot easier.
In my experience, type A personality has more to do with being able to earn a lot vs anything else. The cake is a lie.
No, you just have to be born rich.
IQ only measures someone’s ability to answer correctly on IQ tests.
ability and willingness
link pls
gwern.net/doc/iq/ses/2007-zagorsky.pdf
Seems to be it.
Just a random image I saved from a 4 chan thread of interesting stuff. Sorry friend. Your search is as good as mine. Single author is already a bad sign, as if 4 chan image and no doi were not cataclysmic red flags enough. It doesn't look malevolent IMO, but solid shitpost territory.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Being rich is pretty fucking obviously mostly about being born to rich parents.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 41 minutes ago
Being smart too.
If your parents are rich you would have gone to the better funded schools with better teachers and better clubs/programs and focus on those with your stress-free lifestyle to grow up smarter.
ignotum@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I thought poor people were poor because they spend all their money on avocado toast, while rich people eat bootstraps or something like that
baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 1 hour ago
i think the rich have seen the avocado toast problem for a long time. that’s why they sell you avocado toast, because clearly it’s making you poor and they have too much of it.