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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!
Come on...everyone knows a high Intelligence score isn't the same as a high Wisdom score!
When the GM at my first AD&D game explained the difference between INT and WIS....
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Any RPGer knows that Prof. Stanovich is attempting to correlate INT scores with WIS scores.
Silly scientist. No bonus priest spells for you.
/2nd Edition devotee
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.
As a member of mensa with a rather high IQ (160 on the cattel 3B), I know that my IQ is in at least the top percentile. However, my organisational skills are atrocious, and while I can remember something well short-term, I tend to forget things long-term. This led to my nearly dropping out of university because while I can write a decent essay, I often forgot to do so. Once I understand a mathematical concept I can do it well, but I tend to forget formulae, so I only got a middle-of-the-road grade in maths.
A high IQ means very little, and I'm not saying that because of jealousy; I'd rather be well-organised and "only" average in the more abstract ways of measuring ability.
An 'IQ' is quantitative. The term 'smart' is qualitative. Comparing them at all is like comparing ones 'income' with how 'rich' they are.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Friend of mine, his father is a senior researcher for NIH. One of the smartest fellas you will ever meet, has multiple PhDs, charming and really has his act together professionally.
Came back from a concert one night, there was a note taped to the door. "I owe you a microwave." Inside, the house smells like burning compost, his Dad still forgets he can't microwave food with a fork inside. Has never been able to operate a microwave oven and this is about the tenth time he has done it.
His Dad owns a lot of land in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has made a lot of money off real estate investments. He has had a lot of disasters over the years as well, for things that would have seemed apparent to anyone else. Like not leaving untreated wood lying in pile all winter, not parking a backhoe at the top of a pile of dirt, not purchasing residentail land and trying to have it rezoned for multilevel commercial, etc.
It's not just forgetfulness, he has a hard time processing these realities of life. Without his family, I don't think he could function.
M
For some reason, people have associated high IQs with knowing a lot about everything. Unfortunately, knowledge and IQ is different, as is wisdom and IQ. Sheesh, first year D&D players can tell you this.
Corollary: just because you're smart and know a lot about one subject doesn't mean you're opinion on another subject matters. I'm always astounded by how many smart developers think that because they know ASP inside out that they also know which economic system is better.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There's usually a woman involved.
Based on no research and absolutely no scientific data I have come to measure a person's intelligence by how creative they are and how open to new ideas (especially ideas in conflict with their own belief system) they are.
I am a conservative, white, heterosexual, Christian male (source of all the world's problems according to many) and yet I understand that there are things I am probably wrong about and there are people who have radically different beliefs than I do and I can definitely learn from them. I consider myself pretty intelligent and yet understanding that I can learn from others is very key to my intelligence growing.
People who have closed their minds to new thoughts/ideas and who do not exercise their creative potential get stupid fast. I have met a LOT of them (in my white, hetero, Christian, male society) and I am the first to admit that my peers tend to be pretty dumb. TFL starts off bashing on George Bush and how his IQ is pretty high yet the author has obviously decided Bush is an idiot (an earned reputation) and he fits right into my category of society.
What I feel is important to note is that in American progressive society MY ethnicity/religion/political views/gender quickly get thrown into a category that I really don't thing I've earned. I try not to complain of racism/sexism/whateverelseism but it gets old some times.
Theres also a reason the ability to schmooze is given its own stat. Where else would all the politicians put their high ability scores?
Just like computers, people are susceptible to the Garbage in, Garbage out phenomenon. If you learn the wrong stuff, you're still smart, but you will make bad decisions.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
A real smart person would've known this and disregarded IQ scores long ago, but some people with high IQ scores may have propped up their self-respect with the results and probably neglected to nurture their smarts...
My brother-in-law is one of the smartest people I know. Earned his PhD in optical physics and does some very high-level work with it. Way above the head of anybody he explains it to. He's written some pretty intense C++ programs to handle neural-network computations of extremely complicated mathematical problems.
But I can't count how many cellphones he's destroyed from accidental drops from his shirt pocket into the toilet. And a few times he lost his keys for a week because he left them hanging in the door lock.
He's a smart guy, but sometimes we wonder about him.
/* No Comment */
They're still smart, but even smart people can do dumb things. That's why it's important to be clear with phrases like "You are dumb" and "That was dumb." (I have finger puppets if the /. editors are confused about this...)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Intelligence is a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently. -Larry Niven
IQ measures raw mental abilities. It's a bit like measuring raw CPU power and memory in a computer.
EQ (Emotional Quotient) measures things like self-motivation abilities (including things like optimism), self-control and inter-personal abilities. They're a bit like measuring the quality of the software that runs in a computer and how well it works together with other programs in the network.
[Sorry, no car metaphors]
In real life, even though a large IQ will allow you to solve incredibly complex problems, if you have a low EQ, you might actually be incapable of doing so because, for example:
In the end, a high EQ is much more highly correlated with success than a high IQ.
Simply put, being optimistic means you're more willing to take chances (which might eventually result in a big payout), being self-motivated means that you can keep going even when things are though, having self-control means you can deny yourself a small reward now for a much bigger one later and being good with people means you can more easily find the chances and convince others to work with you.
That said, the good news is that one can change one's own EQ over one's life - most of its component are behavioral traits that can be learned.
My ex-wife had an amazing memory. She could remember names and phone numbers of people she had only met once. She could remember all the SKU numbers when she worked part time at Sears. When she got her RN license, she filled her head with drug information and could spout interactions on request.
... I have a terrible memory but can write code like crazy because I can keep several parts of a program in my head and understand the requirements, interactions, and dependencies. I never memorized math formulas, but the idea behind them.
... there are some battles that just aren't worth fighting. Because even if you win ... you lose.
But she wasn't so good at things like programming a VCR or directions. I noticed that while she had a great memory, she was terrible at spatial type tasks. Where I was just the opposite
Cooking was very telling. I'm a passable cook, but not very inventive. She was a better cook, but had problems when she had to cook more than a couple of items at a time in getting the sequence of the various recipes merged so that everything was ready at the same time. That part, I was very good at.
The telling point came one day when we were talking about taxes. We owed a lot because she had started working part time as an RN and we didn't pay attention to the amount being withheld from her paycheck for taxes. When I did the taxes normally, i.e. married filing jointly, we owed $3,000. She came back to me a few days later and said that if she filed as married, filing separately, she would get $1,000 back. I explained that I always did our taxes both ways and then when we did it that way, she did get $1,000 back, but I ended up owing $5,000. I was never able to get her to understand how the tax brackets worked and why this was the case. So I gave in and took it to HR Block. Guess what, the best way to file was married, filing jointly. For years she thought I was trying to cheat her out of money and refused to increase her withholding to the same percent of income as mine, so I had to withhold even more from mine. Which meant she had to put more into the household account in order to pay bills, so the end result was the same anyway.
As I told my son at the time
I remarried three years ago, and my lovely wife can talk with me about such matters. It's a wonderful thing to find someone that is smart, beautiful, and thinks sex is only dirty when it's done right.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I know a guy in Mensa who was genuinely surprised that I stopped talking to him after he hit on my wife and tried to talk her into divorcing me.
I don't think it's occurred to him yet that she and I actually speak to each other.
I read about this recently, tried it with several of my coworkers, and it really works. Simply lift your keyboard over your head while defocusing your eyes so the G and H keys overlap.
What do you see there?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If the dumb are rich and the smart are poor, why aren't the smart acting dumb to get rich? Are they too dumb to do that? And if they are dumb, then how come they're not rich?
I have a headache now, thanks to you.
It doesn't, however, mean you're observant, grounded, emotionally stable, possess common sense, have even average social skills, or even an interest in using your intelligence for anything of consequence.
TFA references G. W. Bush, stating his IQ is estimated to be at or around 120 but even those close to him had concerns about his decision making skills, and "Bush himself has described his thinking style as "not very analytical"." Seems to me this is connected far more to his personality, shaped by his upbringing and experiences. IQ is an indicator of intellectual potential; if someone tests consistently in the 70 - 80 range, no amount of positive thinking or assistance is getting you through medical school; if someone tests in the 160 - 180 range (let's assume an accepted standardized scale, such as Wechsler), this indicates that academically there is nothing they are not capable of understanding if they applied themselves. That doesn't mean it's reasonable to assume someone with that level of intelligence *will* become a doctor or the like, only that if circumstances are right, they *could*.
It is not unusual for people with high IQs to fall short of their potential for myriad reasons, the one I think is most impactful is the significant difference between intellectually gifted (meant generically) and the average person. To qualify for organizations like Mensa, you need to be 2 standard deviations ahead of the average in intelligence, which is the same difference between the average person and someone considered to be retarded. People who are that far removed from the median (on either side of the scale) experience the world in a very different and often times alienating way. Perhaps the perceived "stupidity" of people with high IQs is simply the manifestation of their inability to communicate effectively with "little brains".
While many people with high IQs are perfectly functional and move among us unnoticed as braniacs,(Mensa members must be in the 98% percentile of the population which sounds lofty, but it means that roughly one in every 50 people are smart enough to make the cut, so you probably have a better shot at getting into Mensa than you do of winning a beauty pageant) some people with high IQs may never learn how to interact successfully with those around them... robbing them of the kinds of experiences that teach the very skills TFA suggests smart people don't manifest in a consistent manner.
Raw brain power isn't enough to guarantee success or even a base level of competence at anything, including living.
Visit a boarding school in Connecticut and then a public school on the south side of Chicago, then try to make the 'same culture' argument.
Apparently you are poor, becuase most of the rich people I know are very intelligent. They earned their money (ie not "Old Money") legitimately (ie not "Celebrity Money") and are not connected with hollywood (ie not actors, directors or writters).
Some rich people are stupid, but so are most of the poor people I know so unless you've got a couple of citations to back up your obviously prejudiced opinions your just a troll.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Well, from what I've seen it seems that the whole "high IQ => fails in the army" thing could be better described as "people who try to think for themselves, are creative and question authority generally have trouble with starting at the bottom of strictly hierarchical organisations where you're expected to just conform and follow orders no matter how stupid the orders may be".
(Most people I've known who started military careers and have risen through the ranks were great at following orders and just doing what others told them to do)
So I doubt it's just an IQ thing, it's more that in the military (any military) you're expected to conform and just do as you're told, someone for whom it comes naturally to try creative "outside the box" solutions to problems or who simply has a higher than average ability to analyze problems and figure out solutions is likely to not fit in, something that is true in any organisation that tries to fit everyone into a Lowest Common Denominator role.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Are you asserting that the rich people you know represent the majority of the rich population? Parent didn't state that all rich people were dumb, only the majority. My life echoes his stance as well. I too know some smart rich people but they are by far in the minority. At least in my experience.
It's a simple fact (at least in the United States) that MOST millionaires are NOT millionaires through inheritance.
What it takes to become rich is not some sort of global all-around, jack-of-all-trades smartness; it's expertise in a single area.
So it seems quite logical that these wealthy people who have focuses so much on one particular thing are not particularly knowledgeable about other things.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
Perhaps when people who don't have PhDs can't work a remote or leave their keys in their car, you don't notice as much because there's nothing in particular about them that creates the expectation of intelligence? The idea that there's an inverse correlation is a very common defensive reaction on the part of people who don't have much of any kind of intelligence, but there's precious little evidence for it in real life. It's more a matter of selection bias: we notice when smart people do stupid things. When stupid people do stupid things, it's business as usual.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
How can you proven something as arbitrary as common sense is a poor decision making tool?
Do you have any links to these studies?
Common sense is just a term used to describe using the most obvious, sensible solution that may have been overlooked in the face of alternative, more stupid solutions. Quite how you can prove that is a poor decision making tool I'd love to know.
It's not exactly a mystery. You tend to mimic the lifestyle of your parents, and they mimic the lifestyle of their parents and so on. So if your parents placed a high priority on schooling, learning, education etc then you are likely to pass that lifestyle onto your kids. So... you might have many generations which have been too busy putting food on the table with multiple jobs or dealing with gangs or drugs or a dangerous neighbourhood and had more things to worry about than making sure their child focuses on school, gets help with homework and stays out of trouble.
And vice-versa. My parents were big on school so I was very limited in my TV/video game time. I had to read a novel each night for an hour and my homework was priority #1 after school. My sister struggled and they got her a tutor. As a result I did well in school and will pass that on to my kids.
Of course, you can have within individual families a radical shift. One parent decides they want 'a better life' for their child and makes a big shift resulting in that family breaking the cycle. But when you are looking at entire societies or segments of the population that kind of change is much slower.
Race or any other 'trait' has nothing at all to do with it other than historically. The "such and such race is inherently smarter than such and such other race" argument is nonsense, and horrendously hard to test because family and societal factors creep into your study if you are looking at a large enough study group (ie - student performance across a state or country).
If it wasn't for obsessive compulsive people, we'd still be living in the Dark Ages. Take Newton for example. He spent almost 20 years plotting, calculating, and theorizing until he arrived at his Gravitational Laws. It's these kinds of people who find discoveries and enrich human knowledge.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
How can you proven something as arbitrary [...]
Easy. You call yourself a psychologist.
1) Because having a lot of money isn't the same as being rich _enough_. You feel rich when you can afford most of the stuff you want. You feel poor when you can't. This is not as highly correlated with the amount of money you have, as many would believe.
:).
2) And a fair number of smart people are more interested in spending their time on other things than spending it on making a lot of money. Life is short after all[1].
Not that having a lot of money is bad - I'd love to have a lot of money too
[1] As for people who believe there's some sort of heaven[2] and eternal life, it would be more logical for them to accumulate good friends (with eternal life) than money.
Eternity is a long time to spend, counting your billions (trillions?) over and over again without any good friends.
[2] But in that heaven somehow the people would have to be made perfect (voluntarily - not against their will) so that they won't get on each other's nerves and make it seem like hell. Eternity is a very long time for the imperfect. Too long.
I will relay a story my scoutmaster told me about a troop of young inner city scouts he led, many, many years ago. They'd never been out of the city, so he took them camping all he could.
One time he took them to a boy scout camp that happened to be next to a girl scout camp. He should have known that would be trouble, because there was one scout who used to go up to every girl he met, and say the same thing: "You wanna fuck?" So the scoutmaster walks into camp, and all the guys are teasing Kid Wannafuck about how his dick is going to shrivel up and fall off, and he realizes his mistake. So he sits them all down and has a long talk about STDs, pregnancy, birth control and condoms, because *these* kids parents aren't going to bother doing it.
One of the many morals of this story is that sometimes persistence counts for more than technique. It really does connect to the whole 419 scam; this kid knew that he had almost no chance with any particular girl, but if he asked *enough* of them sooner or later he'd get lucky.
Getting back to the value of wealth as an indicator of intelligence, I won't argue that intelligence has no instrumental value in becoming wealthy. Obviously it does. But priorities also matter. I know artists -- not quite starving, but not rolling in dough either. If they put the energy and creativity they lavish on art into making money, they'd probably do pretty well. The one thing I've noticed about people who've made fortunes in their lifetimes (sometimes made and lost several) is that they're driven to perform wealth-generating activities. It may be that wealth is the end goal of those activities, or it may be that wealth is a by-product. Personally, I think the people who become wealthy as a by-product seem much happier than people who pursue wealth as its own end. It appears to me there's something puny and pinched in the character of people who are obsessed with wealth as its own end. The difference between wealth and, say, sex is that you can never get enough wealth. But if you are persistent enough in pursuing either of them, sooner or later you'll get some.
I like to think of this thought experiment. Suppose you are a young unattached man with modest prospects, and you have a bit of good fortune above your station: you are about to interview for a job that could mean fame and wealth. As you eat lunch, you strike up this conversation with this amazing woman; she's beautiful, smart and interesting, and as you chat you realize that you're starting to get somewhere with her. You are not quite to the exchange of telephone numbers stage, when you realize for your horror you're about to be late for your interview. You have to leave RIGHT NOW, you don't even have time to say a decent goodbye. What do you go for, the job or the woman?
Well, I can tell you as an older guy who's had both love and money slip through my fingers (then return later), I wouldn't have a microsecond's hesitation. I'd go for the woman. Money is just a proxy for the experiences you can buy with it. And some experiences you just can't buy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Some rich people are stupid
The largest common factors I have noticed between those who are self-made wealthy is this:
The largest common factors I have noticed between those who are poor is this:
Respect the Constitution
Apparently you must be a very successful man then, because you seem to not know the dilemma of the intelligent human:
We can predict every bad outcome that our actions could take. A dozen a minute. Hundreds though the day.
The dumb man just walks up to the hot girl, talking to her, thinking he is the greatest guy on earth. Which funnily draws others, including the girl, into that reality too.
While we just stand around, playing through all the horrible ways that it could go wrong. Oh boy, and do we know many of those! ^^
So I congratulate you on your success and bow to you in envy! :P
P.S.:
That's why alcohol is even better for intelligent people. Seriously.
Of course, just assuming you're great (and then automatically trying to live up to that, celebrating the successes, and not getting pulled down by the failures), is much better in the long run.
I recommend this: If you go out to pick up a girl, plan on the first dozen times you talk to a girl going horribly bad. Make jokes about it. Try to make them even worse, just for the fun of it. Until you simply stop caring. It's all just fun anyway. And then suddenly, you will notice, how, because you just want to have fun, and walk up to girls with that idea, and all your glow of having all that fun, you will get very new, much nicer reactions. Before you know it, you're talking to a really hot girl, and she's the one trying to pick up you! ^^ (Of course: Be realistic though. This will not happen the first time you go out. ^^)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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;
When a smart person does something stupid, it's because he lacks common sense. When a stupid person does something stupid, it's because he's stupid.
Far from it. Pattern recognition, learning and intelligence are all learned and taught. Sure, there are some genetic aberrations, but a lot of those "smart" people just spent crap loads more time reading books and doing homework and learning new things then the other ones. We are all born with the capability, but smarts don't happen magically. You have to have proper education at a young age to keep minds curious.
Self made rich people act a certain way, it has very little to do with IQ. Society looks at all millionaires as investment bankers, entertainment stars, or trust fund babies. The opposite is actually true. Most millionaires are just hard working people that set a savings goal, put that savings goal at the top of their priorities, and stick to it every month. You can call this whatever you want, pay yourself first, budgeting, whatever, but that's what they do.
Thomas Stanley has some great research into how millionaires, and deca millionaires become wealthy, including IQ, inheritances, living expenses etc. I've read the "Millionaire Next Door", and the "Millionaire Mind", and I'll be reading "Stop Acting Rich: ...And Start Living Like A Real Millionaire" when it drops under 10 bucks.
One of my favorite examples in his books was a millionaire giving his wife a huge pile of stock in the company for a present at the kitchen table. His wife said "thank you, this means a lot to me, it really does" and went back to cutting coupons.
As I don't have the book in question (and even if I ordered it from Amazon it wouldn't get here before this discussion would get locked) I'll just ask you: Should I take it that the book defines "first generation rich" as "parents weren't millionaires but they may very well have been upper middle class with a few smart investments, $500k in the bank and an extended family with similar finances"? What I'm implying here is that there's a bit of difference between a "self-made man" who's from a family with a total yearly income of $25k, who's the first person in his/her family with a college education etc. and a "self-made man" from a family with a yearly income in excess of $300k who think it's only natural to pay for college for their children (and of course the mandatory "travel in europe for a few months before going to college", paid for by mommy and daddy).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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
Me, I'd communicate to the woman as an equal human being that, hey, I like where this is going but I need to get to a job interview for a job I'd really like to land. "I'd like to resume this conversation when we can; Unfortunately I can't reschedule a job interview the same way."
Why? Because women aren't jobs, they're people. And I wouldn't want to spend my time forging a relationship with another person who doesn't understand that she's not a commodity I'm supposed to win, but a person with whom I'm hoping to share some nice experiences.
But that's just me.
Sorry - I liked the rest of your comment, I just balk at the ease with which people equate women with things or events rather than simply treating them as other people. Nevertheless, I appreciate the point you were making. (Although I'd also nitpick the idea that you can get enough sex. Some people can. Some people can also get enough wealth. Some people are also happy with limited amounts of power. Others can't get enough of any if not all of these.)
I know you're joking, but I didn't feel like responding to the troll. Two things:
1) A big part of the money thing is personality.
a) Some people (personality types) simply don't care about money. With me, for example, money is how I survive from day to day. More money is nice to have, but what really drives me is working on my projects, solving problems, etc. It doesn't even necessarily matter if I finish my projects. It's the pursuit of knowledge that matters to me.
b) Some personality types are more suited to more money-oriented careers, such as business or management. While I get along fine with people and could do those jobs, I generally have no interest in them and am just as happy (or happier) working alone, half inside a machine and covered in grease.
2) There are different forms of intelligence. Some people are naturally strong in math and/or sciences. Some people are more language or arts oriented. Still others are good at organizational skills and less so at academic subjects. I'm much more math and science oriented than the others, which drives me to somewhat less money-focused careers.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
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/
That is because as I've said for years there is a difference between "book smarts" and "street smarts". I have known guys with a half dozen degrees after their names that were dumb as a stump when it came to common sense, and I've known guys that dropped out of HS that could run rings around somebody with a degree. It all comes down to having that right combo of book AND street smarts.
As you said the 419s prove that having too much of one and not enough of the other is just as bad as being a total dumbass, probably worse, as the "book smart" think that their book smarts will get them through any situation, which of course they don't.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
While I think that the argument that black people are intrinsically dumber than the rest of us is silly, I should point out that your counter-argument is just as silly.
There was an article recently describing the development of a "smart(er) rat" by the change of a single gene. Which pretty much refutes the notion that it requires much larger genetic changes to "think different" than to "look different".
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Dating advice on /. ? What IS the world coming to?
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
If you can't live on $120k/year then you are/were financially irresponsible. Don't worry though, most Americans seem to be the same way these days.
My wife and I are living on less than a third of that and raising a child. I could probably pay off most of my debt in a 2 years if I had your salary and continued living with the budget I have now.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
There was something that was vitally different from your experience to your brothers: you had your brother as a sibling, and your brother had you as a sibling.
Depending on the family dynamics involved, siblings can often take very opposite interests to each other, either to distinguish themselves from each other or in response to parents who, themselves, characterize their children differently. Birth order also has an effect (oldest children and only children tend to perform better in IQ tests, partially because they have more uninterrupted adult attention during crucial developmental years. This means, of course, that cultures and social groups that tend to smaller family sizes will show a higher average IQ than those with larger ones.)
It's funny you cite all those slums and ghettoes. Where are the Italian slums and Irish ghettoes now? Every member of your list is a place. Those Irish, Italians, and people growing up in Appalachia have a significant, definite chance, however small it may be, to work their way out of the ghetto. Black people in America largely do not, or if they do, it is obviously a significantly smaller chance than do other groups of people.
We just elected a black man president.
Change isn't some magical thing where suddenly, one day, everything is completely different. Most people do not even recognize change as it is happening, they recognize it after it has already occurred. For a very, very long time, blacks in America have lived in a country which was either outwardly hostile to them or completely unsympathetic to their situation.
As you said, it's been about a generation "post civil rights and such". Eisenhower forced desegregation of schools in the South in the 50s; exactly what effect do you think that should have? Starting around 1960, blacks finally had an "equal" opportunity for education. I say "equal" because it still obviously isn't quite completely equal, even though it is no longer strict segregation. It's been about one generation, at most -- the people who could go to desegregated schools have grown into adults and have probably had children of their own.
One adult got the opportunity to receive a good education, and with this opportunity comes the potential to take advantage of it or waste it, just like any other. The rates for wasting it are probably slightly higher still because of the quality of education they may receive, as well as coming from a background where it may not be highly stressed, or where it may be completely unaffordable. One pair of adults have one set of children, who receive a similar opportunity. There's still a lot of work to be done, both by the people who sometimes unknowingly support discrimination against blacks, who must recognize their faults and their communities' faults in prolonging the poverty of blacks, and even moreso by the blacks themselves, who must work hard as individuals in order to take advantage of the opportunities presented.
One of the major problems is that the black subculture in America has been so shattered that it has no real ambition. There are very few role models. The role models they do have have often been forced into specific tracts of life. It should be obvious that the "success" achievable for a white man in America aren't as available to black men in America, for a variety of reasons. As such, the underclass tends to focus its skill, effort, and talents in other areas, especially ones which have an emphasis on individual abilities and personal distinction, in part to separate them from the negative stereotypes. Look at the histories of American music and writing in the 20th century, or at cultural phenomena, where many have a very profound impact from black people who managed to be successful and innovative. The blues, jazz, swing, and rock and roll all have very, very distinctive black roots. Blacks are commonly depicted as being better dancers or perhaps better singers. American literature abounds with black poets and writers, with a much greater proportion than could ever be expected normally. Look at sports, especially in the latter half of the 20th century and on to today, where black athletes have practically dominated. Why is this so?
It's one of the few avenues of life where they are allowed to be successful, and everything in their lives is practically constructed to shift them into having a focus in those areas. Remember how I said they are often lacking in role models? Many of the role models they do have succeeded in areas like this. Kids all over dreamt of