Given that limitation, my current median expectation, based primarily on summaries of a reanalysis of the Terman Study, is that above about 135 for men (and 125 for women), high IQ tends to contingently lead to social dysfunction due to loneliness and greater potential for the development of misanthropy. Basically it seems to produce difficulties “playing well with others” rather than superior performance from within an integrated social network, simply because there are so many less intelligent people functioning as an isolating buffer, incapable of understanding things that seem obvious to the high IQ person. This is a contingent problem in the sense that if dumb people were all “upgraded” to equivalent levels of functioning then a lot of the problem would go away and you might then see people with an IQ of 160 not having these problems.
Some subscribe to the ability-threshold/creativity hypothesis, which postulates that the likelihood of producing something creative increases with intelligence up to about an IQ of 120, beyond which further increments in IQ do not significantly augment one’s chances for creative accomplishment (Dai, 2010; Lubart, 2003). There are several research findings that refute the ability-threshold/creativity hypothesis. In a series of studies, Lubinski and colleagues (Park et al., 2007, 2008; Robertson et al., 2010; Wai et al., 2005) showed that creative accomplishments in academic (degrees obtained) vocational (careers) and scientific (patents) arenas are predicted by differences in ability. These researchers argue that previous studies have not found a relationship between cognitive ability and creative accomplishments for several reasons. First, measures of ability and outcome criteria did not have high enough ceilings to capture variation in the upper tail of the distribution; and second, the time frame was not long enough to detect indices of more matured talent, such as the acquisition of a patent (Park et al., 2007).
Dai, D. Y. (2010). The nature and nurture of giftedness: A new framework for understanding gifted education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Lubart, T. I. (2003). In search of creative intelligence. In R.J. Sternberg, J. Lautrey, & T. I. Lubart (Eds.), Models of intelligence: International perspectives (pp. 279–292). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association
Park, G., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2007). Contrasting intellectual patterns predict creativity in the arts and sciences: Tracking intellectually precocious youth over 25 years. Psychological Science, 18, 948–952. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02007.x
Park, G., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2008). Ability differences among people who have commensurate degrees matter for scientific creativity. Psychological Science, 19, 957–961. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02182.x
Robertson, K. F., Smeets, S., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2010). Beyond the threshold hypothesis: Even among the gifted and top math/science graduate students, cognitive abilities, vocational interests, and lifestyle preferences matter for career choice, performance, and persistence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 346–351. doi:10.1177/0963721410391442
Wai, J., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2005). Creativity and occupational accomplishments among intellectually precocious youths: An age 13 to age 33 longitudinal study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 484–492. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.97.3.484
The re-analysis was by Grady Towers, with quoting and semi-philosophic speculation, as linked before. I suggested that increasing IQ might not be very useful, with the first human issue being a social contigency that your citations don’t really seem to address because patents and money don’t necessarily make people happy or socially integrated.
The links are cool and I appreciate them and they do push against the second (deeper) issue about possible diminishing marginal utility in mindware for optimizing within the actual world, but the point I was directly responding to was a mindset that produced almost-certainly-false predictions about chess outcomes. The reason I even brought up the social contingencies and human mindware angles is because I didn’t want to “win an argument” on the chess point and have it be a cheap shot that doesn’t mean anything in practice. I was trying to show directions that it would be reasonable to propagate the update if someone was really surprised by the chess result.
I didn’t say humans are at the optimum, just that we’re close enough to the optimum that we can give Omega a run for its money in toy domains, and we may be somewhat close to Omega in real world domains. Give it 30 to 300 years? Very smart people being better than smart people at patentable invention right now is roughly consistent with my broader claim. What I’m talking about is that very smart people aren’t as dominating over merely smart people as you might expect if you model human intelligence as a generic-halo-of-winning-ness, rather than modeling human intelligence as a slightly larger and more flexible working memory and “cerebral” personal interests that lead to the steady accumulation of more and “better” culture.
Which re-analysis was that? The material I am aware of show that income continues to increase with IQ as high as the scale goes, which certainly doesn’t sound like dysfunction; eg “‘The Effects of Education, Personality, and IQ on Earnings of High-Ability Men’, Gensowski et al 2011” (similar to SMPY results). And from “Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education: A Proposed Direction Forward Based on Psychological Science”, which is very germane to this discussion:
The re-analysis was by Grady Towers, with quoting and semi-philosophic speculation, as linked before. I suggested that increasing IQ might not be very useful, with the first human issue being a social contigency that your citations don’t really seem to address because patents and money don’t necessarily make people happy or socially integrated.
The links are cool and I appreciate them and they do push against the second (deeper) issue about possible diminishing marginal utility in mindware for optimizing within the actual world, but the point I was directly responding to was a mindset that produced almost-certainly-false predictions about chess outcomes. The reason I even brought up the social contingencies and human mindware angles is because I didn’t want to “win an argument” on the chess point and have it be a cheap shot that doesn’t mean anything in practice. I was trying to show directions that it would be reasonable to propagate the update if someone was really surprised by the chess result.
I didn’t say humans are at the optimum, just that we’re close enough to the optimum that we can give Omega a run for its money in toy domains, and we may be somewhat close to Omega in real world domains. Give it 30 to 300 years? Very smart people being better than smart people at patentable invention right now is roughly consistent with my broader claim. What I’m talking about is that very smart people aren’t as dominating over merely smart people as you might expect if you model human intelligence as a generic-halo-of-winning-ness, rather than modeling human intelligence as a slightly larger and more flexible working memory and “cerebral” personal interests that lead to the steady accumulation of more and “better” culture.