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Chinese Company Seeks US Workers With 125 IQ
CWmike writes "A Chinese IT outsourcing company that has started hiring new US computer science graduates to work in Shanghai requires prospective job candidates to demonstrate an IQ of 125 or above on a test it administers to sort out job applicants. In doing so, Bleum Inc. is following a hiring practice it applies to college recruits in China. But a new Chinese college graduate must score an IQ of 140 on the company's test. The lower IQ threshold for new US graduates reflects the fact that the pool of US talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of Chinese talent, Bleum said."
with barely 120 points wouldn't have a chance in that company.
IQ is highly overrated
In practice, it's almost useless...
Google tests are (way) better than IQ, but guess what Google found out: the best performers are the ones who have the lowest scores on their interviews.
IQ is not concerned with
- the candidate knows about the job
- the candidate has good (enough) people skills
- the candidate showers, shaves, etc
Guess they shouldn't bother and go straight here then http://www.kids-iq-tests.com/famous-people.html
how long until
http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/06/29/china.rent.white.people/index.html
What's next -- tall, smart, white people?
blond, slender, blue eyes, and so on.
The usual notion in the US is that US workers are more innovative, smart, and are worth significantly more than workers in other countries. Slashdotters constantly seem to think that a $80K developer in the US is much better the $10K developer in India for example. This is especially surprising because the average slashdotter is doing the same crap that the average developer in India is doing.
In some cases (where IQ's much higher), the worker may come up with solutions radically faster. But otherwise, it is all incremental. Hence it makes sense to link pay to IQ (at the start) and pay to IQ and results as time passes.
This is also true in other fields, banking, medicine etc. Hopefully, the internet will help reduce the disparity in wages.
Because cost of living is much lower in China than in, say, Silicon Valley, American employees working there can still be paid less than if they were based in the US.
the iq test tests very narrow ranges of iq, such as topological intelligence, the ability to manipulate 3D shapes in your head
but it has zero ability to measure something like social intelligence, the ability to manipulate people
i don't know that the ability to play 12 games of chess at the same time in your head is as valuable as the bedrock ability to communicate well, especially in the realm of business. the iq test certainly has its uses, but i think people ascribe way too much significance to it when determining someone's worth. someone with a very high traditional iq score can be quite useless in a business sense. the idea of something being useful is a relative term of course: you can be quite useful to an asocial pursuit that could very well be important to mankind in abstract ways with a traditional high iq
however, in your average business environment, the ability to simply and effectively communicate is a basic need, and pretty much trumps every other area of intelligence, since a business is nothing more than an efficient social organization. the more efficient a business is socially, the more efficient a business is economically, all else being equal. someone who gets well below 100 on a traditional iq test can be quite charismatic, persuasive, and capable of leading people. while someone who scores well above 100 on a traditional iq test can be unresponsive, aloof, distant, and confusing. so for the specific case of a business environment, a high traditional iq would seem not very useful at all
the ability to lead people is perhaps the most important iq of all possible areas of human intelligence, especially in business, but there is no test for it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Teachers in the UK are being hired in China to teach Chinese students English. It doesn't matter what they teach over here; Science, Religion, History, Maths... If they can speak English and have a PGCE, they can go to China and earn a Western wage teaching English in a Chinese school.
To give you an idea of why the "Western" part of that sentence is important, a teacher in the UK will be on £25,000 per year on average. The Chinese average wage is roughly £5200 per year. You'll be earning 5 x a regular person, while paying Chinese prices for consumer goods and services.
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That leaves China with over 4 million with an IQ greater than 140. The US then has just under one million.
Is your IQ over 125? Good! You have shown sufficient intelligence that can help you pilfer company secrets, embezzle funds, lie to us about why you missed work, lie to us about what you did with your expense account and in general cause us trouble because you are so darned smart! IQ will never measure - character, honesty, motivation, drive, creativity and countless other attributes.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Not necessarily. Environmental contamination, particularly with heavy metals has an IQ lowering effect on the populace. Additionally since IQ is set relatively early, and brain damage later on will take off the total score. But more than that having a high IQ really isn't all it's cracked up to be. When you hit a point around 120 or so you more or less maximize it, there isn't really any particular reason to require more than that, and realistically you then have to deal with other problems. It's really hard at times for those of us up in the 140s to conceive of why a lot of this stuff isn't common sense. And hence end up spending a lot of time being misunderstood or explaining what ought to be perfectly obvious.
Although considering 1 in 5 Americans thinks the sun revolves around the Earth, it should be noted that your country's percentages may vary.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
The ghost of Alan Turing is here; he begs to differ. I'm with him.
I live in the US, where human rights are in fact Pretty Damn Good. But it wasn't that long ago that I was guilty of countless felonies for having sex with my boyfriend (before those laws were finally struck down by the Supremes), and I can still be fired in my state for simply having a boyfriend. Having an IQ of 140 hasn't changed that, and I can't imagine it makes much difference at all in countries where human rights are Pretty Damn Bad.
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They also manipulate their currency, direct spending and production at a high level, completely ignoring environmental concerns (to the point pollution is effecting industry) and generally function as a command economy in many ways. Well ok, but I will point out that history shows those don't work in the end. The problems catch up and fuck you over. Will China be different? Maybe, they do have different conditions and their system is an interesting hybrid. However I don't know that I'd bet on it. As I said, history does not have a good track record of what happens in places like that.
The US? Well for all its faults, the system seems to work well. For 200 or so years, it has over all lead to a great economy. It's had rocky spots but that doesn't mean anything. EVERYTHING has problems, the question is how you recover. So far throughout history, the US has always bounced back and grown ever stronger. Could it be changing now? Sure, again things are different. However historical evidence is on the US's side.
So, unless you've an extremely good understanding of the situation (and it is clear the GP does not), and can show how you think indeed things are different and why the results will be different, It think it silly to bet against history. Saying "I don't understand the situation very well but I think it'll turn out way different than the past," is not a very compelling argument.
Maybe but the funny thing is 2 of the worst professors I had in university were amongst the most intelligent people I've ever met. Admittedly one knew he was kind of bad, largely because his english was pretty bad and gave everybody a break. They other guy was obviously super smart and wrote "the" book in his field but couldn't teach at all. (Unfortunately other professors at the school only knew him by his reputation and would say stupid things like "he's really good isn't he?" This guy was so bad he couldn't tell you how he determined your grade. The reason he couldn't tell you is because he didn't even know how he was going to do it. Yes, that's literally true.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
All I see are Chinese bureaucrats developing a middle class that they'll eventually suppress by force.
The citizens of the US can worry themselves with HDTVs and debt because they don't have to worry about a tank wandering through their living room for being a threat to the state.
No matter how powerful China becomes, it's still hobbled with a failed experiment in government. If they manage to turn that around in some sort of coup or civil war, then maybe your
scenario will play out. Otherwise, I don't think so.
There is no such thing as intelligence, only interest. - Richard Feynman (IIRC)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Its indeed changing and its hard to grasp the size of countries like China and India. One interesting fact that I heard in the new a couple of weeks ago is the rate of urbanization in China that gives a good view of how big that country is, at the current rate, in 2025 (or if it was 2020) China will have 219 cities with more than 1 million people, compare to Europe that have around 40 and the US that have 9
China developed an exchange with the US because way back nixon and kissinger decided that helping china develop would be an effective counter to them working with the USSR. they exploited the differences to keep those two nations divided. The offshoot was that to do that they allowed the destruction of manufacturing in the US and transferred it to china, industry by industry. China needed that at the time to develop, because the currency they received they plowed back into the US (and europe) to buy stuff like machine tools, etc, all the things they needed to develop a manufacturing industry.
That's *done* now, it is past tense. Times are changing. They can build anything, in mass quantities, cheap. Hence, they no longer "need" the US market, and they are gradually shifting to their internal billion and half people market and to nations where they get raw materials and energy sources from. It's not an overnight change deal, but that is the basic trend.
I know a couple Chinese expats who would disagree with you. They left China for the US because corruption at the local level of government has become institutionalized to a ridiculous extent in the current Chinese culture. If you want to play within the system and become one of the people who benefit from corruption, sure, it's a pretty sweet gig. If you want to live somewhere that acts as something close to a true meritocracy, where corruption in business and government is actually seen as a problem and occasionally fixed, you're going to have to look somewhere else (for example, the US).
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Thank you to you and the GP, this is exactly it. You learn on your own, but if you want to get the certificate that says I've studied at location X then you have to pay for it. I'm a second semester drop out because of this dawning point, yet I'm still considered one of the best in my field because I'm ready to learn. I'm always staying at the top of my game by studying. There isn't a thing I cannot do in my field that would require me to go to a university. Off/On topic, it's part of the reason I've set my course to retire in a few years, I've averaged $80/hr@60hr/wk pay for the last 4 years. I've paid off my house, assured my child future, I have saved 280,000 aside and when the economy collapsed I invested it (so without doing calculations it has grown almost 5 fold). A couple more years and I'm going back to school for start-to-finish Drs in aerospace engineering. There are certain resources I cannot obtain on my own.
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
I heard a report on NPR last week about China and their One Child policy, a generation later. They started it, "Imagine no sister or brother... not only that, but no cousins, no aunts, no uncles... just you, your parents, and maybe your grandparents." Then they went on to talk about life for the children, since each family has only one. Those kids are PUSHED. Their cited example was a girl, taking her Saturday off of regular school to go to tutoring school - she was going to wind up eating supper there, because the off-day classes lasted that long. Play, what play? I know play isn't everything, but it isn't just fun. Social interactions? What happens when the only social interactions a child gets with peers are in the highly structured environments of classrooms or school lunchrooms? (I would expect that Chinese school lunchrooms are highly structured, unlike their US counterparts.)
Then I thought about an entire generation of an entire population, pushed to achieve most of their lives, spending that time of their lives as the only focus of their parents hopes and affections. Next I put that together with a report on the US, about how "Children being raised with a higher focus on self-esteem wind up being bratty, sociopathic adults." I'm wondering what will happen when this generation is running the country, having had this kind of childhood. They'll clearly be equipped for dominance, have the ability to deliver, and feel that they deserve everything they get. I'm just wondering how this will impinge on the rest of the world.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This is the whole problem with the idea of "intelligence", or someone being "smart". Smart at what?
Different people are smart at different things. Some people are musical geniuses, but they wouldn't have the first clue about partial differential equations no matter how hard they tried. Some people are brilliant at understanding other people and relating to them, but have a hard time working with a computer. Some people are brilliant theoretical physicists, but are basically retards when it comes to social mores and dealing with other people.
I'm not sure if it's true, but I've read that Thomas Edison couldn't even do long division, and had to hire a mathematician to do math for him. He could invent brilliant mechanical contraptions, but couldn't understand higher math. This would explain why his rival Tesla was able to invent so many things involving AC power (transformers, generators, motors, etc.), since that relied on understanding Maxwell's equations well.
More success has been had with programs to ensure other basic needs, such as medical care, child care, etc. that allow people to improve their lives without being burdened by illnesses or family obligations.
That is kind of the point of "citizen pay".
The problem with your "citizen pay" is that it relies on people to spend their money wisely (since it is limited, and only enough to sustain a minimum standard of living as you say).
What would really happen would be many of the non-workers would go to the casino and spend their citizen pay, and then be broke, and their children would go hungry. There was a report about this recently in California with the welfare recipients there. Obviously, many of these people simply can't be trusted to raise their own children properly, which is why it's generally better, if you're going to provide free services, to give out free medical and child care, and not just a prepaid debit card that can be spent on booze and cigarettes.
Imagine how hard it is for us crazies above 150 to conceive of why the sub-150s are even allowed to leave the testing room alive.
The interesting (scary for norms) thing about this Chinese hiring practice is I think it is self-defeating. People will find ways to cheat on the test, and then what ? "You can't fire me, I have over 9000 IQ". A more far-fetched idea is that IQ discrimination could soften the public up to the idea of eugenics. Just like 9/11 opened the door for Americans to get repeatedly assfucked by their own government, having an explicit IQ requirement for a job may eventually spill over to an IQ requirement for subsidized hospital care, or the often-mused birth permit. In the immediate it does imply that higher IQ translates to higher paying jobs, thus segmenting society both financially and intellectually.
-Billco, Fnarg.com