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Why a High IQ Doesn't Mean You're Smart
D1gital_Prob3 writes "How can a 'smart' person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity — how much information you can hold in mind."
Mensa and testing agencies have been making it clear for a couple decades now that IQ only measures your ability to take tests.
While that's strongly correlated with general intelligence, it means nothing specific for a specific individual.
I can see the fnords!
I don't know, I think a fool reading most of the Discworld books would walk away with more sense than he started with.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Sorry to ruin this party but there is an extremely well known and tested correlation between income and IQ. In fact, it is more correct to say that IQ measures income potential than to say that IQ measures "smartness".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I would have to agree that most millionaires make the money on their own. That being said, a look at the top ten in America shows that half of those people inherited their fortunes (the Waltons).
Gates, William H III
Buffett, Warren Edward
Allen, Paul Gardner
Walton, Helen R
Walton, S Robson
Walton, John T
Walton, Jim C
Walton, Alice L
Ellison, Lawrence Joseph
Ballmer, Steven Anthony
Detailed Forbes List
It is also interesting to note that the top two (Gates and Buffett) are pretty much double anyone even close to them.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Who cares about the "millionaires" - it's the "billionaires" who got it through inheritance that own most of the wealth in the U.S. I couldn't care less about the millionaires. How many of them - the multi-generationally wealthy - do you all know?
Many on this thread need to read a book on the subject or something, cause there are a lot of myths here.
Try "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell and see what really adds up to success. It isn't almost anything that the people on this thread have been shouting, that's for damn sure.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Sounds more like ADHD than a "bad work ethic" to me. I had problems like that. Put me on stimulants, I'm magically better (until I have heart problems and have to stop taking them). Take me off 'em, I'm flaky again.
My brain is flaky enough that I once had a firecracker go off in my hand because, in the two seconds of sparking and hissing between when I lit it and noticed the fuse lighting, and when it went off, I got distracted and forgot I was holding it. That's not a matter of a work ethic.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Only because you (we) set up "smartness" as something vague and unmeasurable... :-/
The correlation between IQ and income is highly non-traditional (i.e. it's not bivariate normal-distributed, so it requires a more in-depth description than one correlation coefficient; for example, a so-called "copula"). To quote your link: "Some researchers claim that `in economic terms it appears that the IQ score measures something with decreasing marginal value. It is important to have enough of it, but having lots and lots does not buy you that much.'" This contradicts what is usually meant by correlation.
As Warren Buffett said, to get rich all you need IQ-wise is to be about 2 sigmas above the mean (and keep in mind, Mr. Buffett probably has a fairly august standard for "rich"; by commoner-standards, probably 1-1.5 sigmas is enough). The rest comes from personality, &c.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky