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comment by ChristianKl · 2020-02-07T18:55:11.698Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Claiming that you can get a dean of Harvard or the chairman of the CCP with an IQ of 100 seems to me a pretty implausible claims and you do nothing to argue why your readers should believe it.

Gwern's summary of the IQ research suggests that IQ generally does correlate with the good things and there's no mention that that stops at 100.

Writing a long article on how intelligence isn't important without engaging with the research literature that supports intelligence being important feels out of place for LessWrong.

Replies from: George3d6
comment by George3d6 · 2020-02-07T20:10:34.538Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Claiming that you can get a dean of Harvard or the chairman of the CCP with an IQ of 100 seems to me a pretty implausible claims and you do nothing to argue why your readers should believe it.

I think you might have taken that to literally, the way I worded the claim is:

Intelligence is not causal for any markers of social status or money, though it is correlated.

I would argue, if you look at his writing & upbringing, that someone like Mao or Stalin were indeed pretty close to the mean of the distribution... but that's besdies the point.

It's likely that people in the 0.0001% of any hierarchy are in the top 1% of intelligent people, but unless that correlation can be bough to 0.0001% to 0.0001%, there's 3 zeros to account for there.

It's clear based on the intelligence research that the most rich people in the world, for example, are not the highest IQ people in the world.

But I didn't want to go on citing IQ research partially because IQ doesn't fully reflect what we think of as "intelligence". So the claim "Warren buffet is not the most intelligent person in the world, because intuitively we see people which seem to be much smarter" doesn't seem to be weaker than the claim "Warren Buffet is not the smartest person in the world because he score 126 on an IQ test"... one invites a subjective judgement of intelligence, the other invites a subjective judgement of how much IQ reflects intelligence.

Finally, I agree I should have present more clear evidence if this was meant as an academic article, but it was not, it was meant as a "Take a look at this perspective". I couldn't have done that if I endeavoured upon a meta-review of IQ research.

If you can site sourced that claim IQ is causal for obtaining status or wealth, as in, more causal than say, the family or country you were born in, I will retract my claim. All the literature I have read indicates it's correlated, but it's correlated up to a point and it acts more like a filter (i.e. all professors have an IQ of over 100, but the professor's IQ isn't strongly correlated with how many citations he gets, what his salary is, or how many grants or nobel prizes he receives)

Replies from: ChristianKl, jmh
comment by ChristianKl · 2020-02-07T22:24:42.113Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Bill Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on his SAT which is an IQ of ~150. From what I read about Warren Buffet's IQ it's in the 150 range as well.

The amount of Jewish Americans is 2% at the same time they make 35% of the top 400 richest people. Higher Jewish IQ seems to me like the best explanation for it. If you don't want to argue for Jewish conspiracy, IQ seems to be the prime causal vector.

Replies from: George3d6
comment by George3d6 · 2020-02-08T00:43:30.715Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hmh, fair enough, I would say SAT scores and tabloid speculations are not necessarily evidence, and the very high ashkenazi IQ + success rate in spite of hostile environments is indeed true.

All things considered, I was talking mainly out of memory, I will probably removed/redact this post and maybe try my hand at it again if I manage to dig through the data and if there's indeed a case to be made that high intelligence is correlated but not causal or required for success on various measurable "social metrics".

comment by jmh · 2020-02-07T22:06:21.592Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Intelligence is not causal for any markers of social status or money, though it is correlated.

Can you unpack that a bit more, particularly on the money side of the claim of only correlation but no causation?

Replies from: George3d6
comment by George3d6 · 2020-02-08T00:48:25.595Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

See my answer to ChristianKl [LW · GW], my understanding was that high IQ on it's own is not a good predictor of equivalent success on any social hierarchy.

That is to say, a high IQ is more likely in people that are successful in societal-terms (money, status... etc), but not required or correlated (i.e. a billionaires IQ is not correlated with his ranking compared to other billionaires, and assuming there's a mean "X" of billionaires IQ, there's likely many more people at "X" that are not billionaires, or even successful in any other particular social hierarchy).

However, as per my reply there, I think I don't have the literature to back up the claim, hence why I've retracted the post. I haven't found evidence to the contrary, but since many people seem to disagree with this, I think I'd be fair for you not to trust that stance unless you find some evidence to back it up or I come up with said evidence at a later point.

comment by Dagon · 2020-02-07T18:55:35.062Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"The brain is the most important organ" says the brain.

comment by Donald Hobson (donald-hobson) · 2020-02-07T19:05:00.213Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A lot of your argument seems to be comparing an artifact of human technology with an evolved system. "is there a way to destroy the moon, given only the ability to post 10k characters to lesswrong.com?"

To make the discussion clearer, lets pick a particular evolved system and technology, say an aeroplane wing and a insect wing. Suppose that the aeroplane wing wins on some criteria, like speed, the insect wing wins on efficiency and it all balances out overall.

To say therefor that intelligence isn't that great is a mixing of levels. There are two intelligences in the game, humans and evolution. Both have produced a great variety of highly optimized artifacts. Both are of roughly comparable power. By comparing two aeroplanes, you can also compare the skill of the designers, but it is meaningless to try to compare an aeroplane to an aeroplane designer. The insect is the plane, not the designer.

Some of your comparisons make even less sense, like ability to survive in extreme environments. Comparing a fish and an untooled human in ability to survive in the ocean is a straight contest of fish evolution vs human evolution. If the human drowns before they have a chance to think anything, the power of the human brain is not shown in the slightest.

Also comparing human intelligence between humans is like comparing the running speed of cheetahs, all your results will be similar. So one human beating another tells you little about intelligence.

So what would a real comparison of intelligence with something else look like? I think the question "Is intelligence good?" is not that meaningful.

What we can do is ask "is there a way to X given only Y" For instance "is there a way to make a fire, given only the ability to contract mucles of a human body in a forest?" or "is there a way to destroy the moon, given only the ability to post 10k charicters to lesswrong.com?" These are totally formalizable questions and could in principle be answered by simulating an exponential number of universes.

We can also ask questions about which algorithms will actually find a way to achieve a goal. We know that there exists a pattern of electrical inputs that win the game pong, but want to know if some gradient descent based algorithm will find one.

We can then say there are a wide variety of tasks and goals that humans can fulfill given our primitive action of muscle contraction. Given that chimps have a similar musculature, but less intelligence and can't do most of these tasks, and many of the routes to fulfillment of the goals go through layers of indirection, then it seems that an intelligence comparable to humans with some other output channel would be similarly good at achieving goals.

Replies from: George3d6, George3d6
comment by George3d6 · 2020-02-07T20:20:04.703Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So what would a real comparison of intelligence with something else look like? I think the question "Is intelligence good?" is not that meaningful.
What we can do is ask "is there a way to X given only Y" For instance "is there a way to make a fire, given only the ability to contract mucles of a human body in a forest?" or "is there a way to destroy the moon, given only the ability to post 10k charicters to lesswrong.com?" These are totally formalizable questions and could in principle be answered by simulating an exponential number of universes.

I agree with the first statement but not the later.

Unless we can ask "Is something good", than why would we consider that subject to be important ?

Most thing that we hold to be of value, we do so because they are almost universally considered good (or because they are used to guard against something that's universally considered bad).

We can certainly ask "Can <manipulation Y of class ABC of T-cell> be <good> ?" and we could get a pretty universal "Yes, because that will help us cure this specific type of tumor and this specific type of tumor, when viewed through the subjective lens of any given animal, is bad".

We can then say there are a wide variety of tasks and goals that humans can fulfill given our primitive action of muscle contraction. Given that chimps have a similar musculature, but less intelligence and can't do most of these tasks, and many of the routes to fulfillment of the goals go through layers of indirection, then it seems that an intelligence comparable to humans with some other output channel would be similarly good at achieving goals.

Again, here I think your analogy suffers of the problem I was trying to tackle, you are taking a human-centric view and assuming that chimps are inferior in the range of actions they can take.

Chimps can do feats of acrobatics that seem fun and impressive, with seemingly little risk and effort involved. I would love to be able to do that ? Would I love that more than being able to, say, not die from cancer since I have chemotherapy ? Or more than being able to drive a car ? I don't know... I can certainly see a valid viewpoint that being able to spend my life swinging through trees in the Congos would be "better" than having cars and chemotherapy and the other 1001 wonders that our brains help produce.

comment by George3d6 · 2020-02-07T20:11:40.133Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Some of your comparisons make even less sense, like ability to survive in extreme environments. Comparing a fish and an untooled human in ability to survive in the ocean is a straight contest of fish evolution vs human evolution. If the human drowns before they have a chance to think anything, the power of the human brain is not shown in the slightest.

I was not though, I was comparing humans + the tools that they build using their intelligence to other forms of life.