Wow, two who did not score high enough to make it into the test group went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics while none with IQs high enough to make the measurement group ever won a Nobel Prize.
Thank God.
170 here and my only claim to “fame” is that I wrote software for the space shuttle. No prizes, no riches and I’m currently unemployed.
I learned a while ago clarity of goals, tenacity, resilience and ambition can lead to sustained success. Whereas, the intellectual capacity to understand theory is useful, but limited if you don’t also possess some of those other qualities.
Average African IQ says otherwise.
I’m a gutter ball in the 300 game of life (sobbing)...
So, The 1700 US professors and 350 Alaskan attorneys have the ability to memorize gobs of legal jargon but don’t have common sense signing an anti Kavanaugh document.
It’s about how God blesses you for using your resources for Him.
I like the 4 categories of people when looking for a good employee
Dumb and lazy
Smart and lazy
Dumb but ambitious
Smart and ambitious
3 & 4 might work out
Bookmark
High IQ pretty well correlates to economic and social success.
Hell they giv Nobels out like tic tacos to terrorist like Arafat, and peace loving mulatos that didn’t do anything but get elected...then starts 5 wars.
Yet Feynman was a Putnam fellow, a top-five finisher in the 1939 Putnam mathematical competition. The Putnam competition is a far more rigorous test of math intelligence than an IQ test. Feynman's biography is titled "Genius" for good reason.
We are all born with varying abilities, talents, intelligence, and determination. Standardized tests are not necessarily that great at measuring these attributes but obviously have predictive value. There is a correlation between ACT/SAT scores and success in college. It is not that great but it has been shown repeatedly that the tests do a better job of predicting success than human interviewers. This is something that was not mentioned in the article.
The tests do the best job of predicting how well you will score on similar tests. When I was trying to get on a larger municipal fire department in the 1980s there were 5,000 applicants for 30 jobs over the next 3 years. 10 of those jobs were reserved for women and minorities(affirmative action). Veterans got extra points for their service. Your written test score plus your veteran’s service points determined your position on the list. The physical agility test was pass/fail.
The written test they had been using previously was thrown out because women and minorities did poorly on it and sued the city. They replaced it with a standardized test that was very similar to an IQ test. They thought that in this way they wouldn’t have to go so far down the list to get people in their target affirmative action groups.
Fortunately, I have always been extremely good at standardized tests. There were 16 of us hired in the first class. There were a couple of us that got near perfect scores and a few veterans who scored well enough to make it into the top ten with their extra points. So I got a job. There were 6 affirmative action hires, 4 women, a black guy and an Asian guy. They still had to go down to something over 650 on the list to hire a black woman which they really wanted. The highest affirmative action hire was around 100 on the list. 6 people mostly the affirmative action hires didn’t make it through our “probationary” year. We lost half of them in the first two months while we were being trained. Despite pulling an unbelievable amount of crap and doing poorly all year the black woman didn’t get fired.
The standardized test that was suppose to keep the city from getting sued “discriminated” against women and minorities exactly the same as the tests that the city had been using previously.
I’ll put my money on common sense any day.
No, I didn’t read the article. Too many words!
I always played around with these tests. I made patterns of my answers to the multiple choice questions.
I would answer A on the first question, then B, then C, then B again and back to A. And I still got a 127! Ha ha!
It was one of the stupidest tests I ever took. But then again, it was 50 years ago.
IQ does matter, but so does hard work and common sense.
High IQ sets one apart from one’s fellow human beings in a major way. Much of one’s intelligence is employed in learning how to adjust to those with a much lower IQ, who can constitute almost all the people one comes in contact with.
Some are better at this than others. The ones who are not good at such adjustment don’t do as well in the world as they might.
IQ helps, but other ingredients are drive, common sense, education, talent, sanity, looks, and other traits.The trick is to use these to your advantage.
It isn’t claimed that IQ is a perfect or total predictor of success. But it is the most persistent associated factor that we have. The highest end measurements among children historically had the most statistical error. The tests has been refined over the decades and of course the exceptions don’t prove the rule.