Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Innumeracy in Gifted Education Advocacy

Good link, kmbunday, it's nice to know Terman was aware of the problem with the wagging tail.

To illustrate part of this numerical problem with an IQ, SB5 used a normative sample of 4800 people. Which gives about a 50% chance of the sample including 1 person with an IQ of 150 or above. And to make the sample even more hardly relevant for HG+ kids, it includes a full range of ages from 2 to 85.

How are you defining "productive"?

What is your proof of this claim?

Intelligence would not be so highly valued if it did not make people more productive. Here is a paper documenting my assertion.

http://www.unc.edu/~nielsen/soci708/cdocs/Schmidt_Hunter_2004.pdf
General Mental Ability in the World of Work: Occupational Attainment
and Job Performance
Frank L. Schmidt
University of Iowa
John Hunter
Michigan State University
The psychological construct of general mental ability (GMA), introduced by C. Spearman (1904) nearly
100 years ago, has enjoyed a resurgence of interest and attention in recent decades. This article presents
the research evidence that GMA predicts both occupational level attained and performance within one’s
chosen occupation and does so better than any other ability, trait, or disposition and better than job
experience. The sizes of these relationships with GMA are also larger than most found in psychological
research. Evidence is presented that weighted combinations of specific aptitudes tailored to individual
jobs do not predict job performance better than GMA alone, disconfirming specific aptitude theory. A
theory of job performance is described that explicates the central role of GMA in the world of work.
These findings support Spearman’s proposition that GMA is of critical importance in human affairs

Having looked at that study, it seems that by "productivity," you mean "job performance as rated by supervisors." Not the same thing, in my book!

I think this paper harkens us back to earlier points made in this thread about the danger of making inferences in the tails of statistical distributions from statistics derived about the sample mean. The highest median "IQ" for a profession is 128, and ranges for all the professions included capture the ~140+ spectrum at the upper end.

Aquinas spitballing...

If I may, can I please restate what I think your underlying (unspoken) thought process is? I come from an economics and business background, so human capital theory is dear to my heart.

I get where you're coming from. From your posts, it sounds like you're attributing an aggregate theory of diminishing marginal returns to human capital to a specific subset of the population, namely gifties. But, the correlations and concavity of earnings in ability (loosely proxies by educational attainment and/or profession) from that literature are derived from the broad calibration sample. They carry no meaning for particular population subsets because they weren't derived *in entirety* from those subsets.

ETA: Per ultramarina's point, I've had average job evaluations by an old boss who didn't understand my work. I wouldn't say perceived productivity is a good proxy for actual productivity, especially when the group of interest is one whose expected ability outstrips the average ability of managers.

Here's a link to a FAQ about company hiring procedures that includes a reference to the Schmidt and Hunter paper, along with more recent literature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

Note that because most companies do NOT hire on the basis of IQ (especially so in the United States), it is often not the case that the highest-paid persons are the smartest persons, even in the same company and the same job classification. There are definite individual advantages to having higher rather than lower IQ, and the secular increase in IQ scores over the last century

http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/news.13.htm

has probably been good for all the countries that have enjoyed it, but that's not at all to say that IQ cannot be swamped by other factors in setting the income of particular families, especially the younger members of those families whose well being is influenced by the choices of their elders.

That article confirms my assertion that IQ and income are positively correlated:

Finding no link between IQ and wealth (rather than income) when controlling for educational attainment and type of work is not very meaningful, because IQ is a major determining factor of educational attainment and the type of work one does.
Yes, if you have a drop out of high school and work your whole life in a low-skilled job, you probably won't be wealthy, but high-IQ people tend not to be high school dropouts working their whole lives at low-skilled jobs.

Some management consulting and financial firms ask candidates for SAT scores, a proxy for IQ. The most prestigious colleges stay that way by using the SAT/ACT filter. The most prestigious law schools use the LSAT, and law firms that hire only from certain law schools are using the LSAT filter. Companies that require candidates to have a bachelor's degree are screening for IQ and persistence. So do companies that require a high school diploma, at a lower level. The U.S. military, a big employer, screens out the bottom 1/3 of the IQ distribution using the AFQT:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/04/almost-100-million-people-arent-smart.html
Almost 100 million people aren't smart enough to enlist in the military
by Steve Sailer
April 10, 2013 .

No. The finding is HIGHLY illuminating, because it shows that individuals with divergent IQs but similar SES backgrounds make the same amount. This shows that SES matters more than IQ. You're just ignoring this because it's inconvenient to your argument, and repeating an assumption you have been unable to support.

It's not like we needed a study, though, because this point is self-evident on this site. Raising high-IQ children is EXPENSIVE, and failure to provide certain interventions can set these children up for failure. For a family that can't afford the investments in time and resources...

Career track matters more than IQ.

Ideally, you want to be a dermatologist and you don't need to have a top 2% I.Q. to be a dermatologist.

I'm filing this under "things that are obvious."