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.
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.
i think the lack of moral compass is just an enabler, what actually causes someone to amass such obscene wealth is wanting that much money. An even remotely normal person outright has no actual desire for it, they’d reach a level of wealth that will comfortably support the lifestyle they desire and just live off of that.
These turborich shits have some reason to desire the obscene wealth, either they simply have no actual end to the luxuries they desire or they feel that wealth is straight up equal to value as a person, or somesuch.
Just imagine having a billion dollars, a thousand million dollars. Why the fuck would you keep putting in any sort of work to get more money? Investing a tenth of it would give you a constant income that most people can’t even dream of. Any person with a billion dollars should never even think about the concept of money again, they can buy anything they want save most countries and never ever ever ever have to worry about affording it.
Yeah, I agree. I always thought if I could ask a billionaire one questions it would be, “How much is enough?” Then I realized, I know the answer to that question. There’s never enough. What a real shame. They could live so extravagantly and still do so much good with the rest, but they would rather spend it crushing people and looking down on them for some ridiculous notion that they’re world builders or something.
Bezos said in an interview that he had so much money the only thing he could really spend it on was space travel. I’m like, how about paying your employees a living wage and letting them use the toilet you asshat!
I mean, 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.
Basically, I’m not sure what you’re getting at with this.
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.
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, so they’re trying. It’s childishly easy. My cat, who is illiterate, can score almost as high (answering at random).
What kind of conversations can you have with folks who can’t do arithmetic or read simple sentences?
I want to stress that Americans, uniquely, are really weird about testing mental ability, because of their history of racism. Nevertheless, intelligence is a real phenomenon.
A 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. It enables you to do second order reasoning and engage in abstract deliberation, which is indispensable for ethics and science. Or do you think it’s a coincidence that average IQs rose 30 points in the last 100 years exactly in tandem with moral progress?
