I think there may be a tendency for the here-present audience to overanalyze and underpractice.
I think the following information is important for understanding this problem matter:
(1) Anyone attracted to this site will likely be a highly intelligent individual.
(2) IQ is more closely bundled around 100 for girls than it is for guys.
Implication: This here audience is mostly male.
(3) People with IQ differences of more than 2 standard deviations don’t get along that great (aren’t peers).
(4) Socialization with peers at a young age is crucial to social development.
(5) Primary schools bundle together people of all IQs indiscriminately.
Implication: Most of us in this here audience have been stunted in our social development by lacking peers early on, when it’s important.
Implication: Because extreme IQs are much rarer in girls than in guys, we have to either compete for a few highly intelligent, intellectually stimulating females who may share our lack in social skills, OR settle for merely above average IQ females who may lack some intellectual sparkle, but may be easier to find and better socially developed.
(6) You don’t learn to dance by watching videos of people dancing, and you don’t develop social skills by reasoning about them. You need to practice.
Implication: People like us, who need to develop our social networks and social skills at a later age, will necessarily make fools of ourselves in the process. This mustn’t stop us. We are belatedly developing skills that we should have picked up as kids, and practice is the only way to do it.
“Implication: Because extreme IQs are much rarer in girls than in guys, we have to either compete for a few highly intelligent, intellectually stimulating females who may share our lack in social skills, OR settle for merely above average IQ females who may lack some intellectual sparkle, but may be easier to find and better socially developed.”
Oh come now, I doubt the problem is that there are not enough ‘smart girls,’ and more that smart girls go for successful men and not isolated introverts. Actually, some of my more intelligent friends complain that they can’t find a man (that they would consider dating) that isn’t threatened by their intelligence. I’ve also heard the lament that successful men want housewives, but I don’t have much evidence for it. And also, how important is IQ in your mate preference really? It seems from my observations that ‘nerdy’ guys want quirky girls more than intelligent ones- the natalie protmans and junos (gag me with a spoon) of the world.
just to correct a bit here, Natalie Portman apparently has a rather high IQ, her being a multilingual Harvard graduate and all…
Poor example is all I’m saying, not questioning your point (yet)
Actually, some of my more intelligent friends complain that they can’t find a man (that they would consider dating) that isn’t threatened by their intelligence.
Now is this a social narrative, a post hoc justification of a failed relationship fueled by the self serving bias, or something else entirely?
Dating is one area of interest where anecdotage should be taken with a mountain of salt.
One way of testing the hypothesis that (many) men are put off by intelligent women would be to look at all the couples in a social circle. Is it true that none of the intelligent women are in heterosexual relationships?
While that idea is, in my eyes, a good blend of effective and practical, it doesn’t rule out all confounding explanations. If this pattern was found, it would not necessarily prove that their potential mates were intimidated by their intelligence.
Perhaps a way of testing it would be going to a dating service and telling random men that the woman they were dating was very intelligent (regardless of her actual intelligence)?
Reactions to profiles on dating services would be a good general test, though it might be harder to pull out data on particular social groups.
Do you believe that, in general people are bad at telling why they have trouble attracting partners, or do you think that the idea that men are put off by intelligent women is an especially unlikely hypothesis?
The former due to the rose tinted glasses of the self serving bias and the fundimental attribution error.
On a personal note I’m very attracted to intelligent women but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if men in general did find intellectual women intimidating.
Thank you for your input, Laura, but you have not quoted a study that would persuade me that what I know from other study reports is false. As far as I know, extreme IQ’s simply are more common among men than they are among women.
Since this is compatible with my own anecdotal experience, it is hard for me to be persuaded by your anecdotal experience, unless you can point to evidence stronger than that.
I would prefer this to be evidence that doesn’t attempt to disqualify the whole concept of IQ because of discomfort with the findings of IQ studies.
Now, as for the other issues you raise, those are fun to discuss, so I’ll engage, lack of scientific quality regardless… :)
“Smart girls go for successful men and not isolated introverts” is another way of saying “females are attracted to confidence and dominance”, as well as “high IQ does not necessarily mean confidence and dominance”. I would agree with that.
“Some of my more intelligent friends complain that they can’t find a man that isn’t threatened by their intelligence” probably means that those friends of yours aren’t that hot. Their intelligence compels them to find a guy that’s successful and at least as smart, but guys like that can get hot women, and guys prefer hot women to intelligent, but not that hot women.
I would personally not mind an extremely smart partner at all, but frankly, when one person is able to earn enough for the whole family, I do think it’s more convenient for the other person to be someone who is along for the ride, rather than someone whose career will try to pull the partnership, and the family, in conflicting directions. A successful career woman would possibly do better with a stay-at-home husband, which do exist, although it’s not quite the most traditional role.
Spot on, and seemingly obvious. Why a high IQ crowd like this can be oblivious to truths that a truck driver has pointed out to me is an open question.
You know, next time, maybe type “people who end up on LW are probably nerdy”. Faster, conveys the same information, and probably better representative of your thought process too.
And, of course, less reliant on implausible and/or low-status hypotheses chained together, and thus less likely to be nitpicked mercilessly by a rationalist audience even though the actual point only depends on easily-observed demographic trends, and thus is probably right.
I disagree with your blunt formulation of intelligence as ‘IQ’. An example: Lewis Terman (yes the father of Frederick Terman who has a building named after him at Stanford) followed a bunch of kids with high IQs—average of 151. As described in the article, William Shockley (have you heard of him?) didn’t have a high enough to be one of the ’Termite’s. But, as every electrical engineer will tell you, Shockley went onto invent the bipolar junction transistor at Bell Labs. (What’s ironic is that Shockley himself adopted a static (unchangeable) view of human ability, became a racist proponent of eugenics and was shunned in the academia in his late career.)
In fact, Barry Schwartz claims that the success rate of the Termites was as good as a random sample of individuals but I can’t quite find links for this claim. (It’s in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell however.)
A discussion of IQ would take us far afield but I suggest you also check out Flynn effect for instance.
AnlamK, I agree that IQ is the measure of a mere shadow of actual ability. When describing a single individual, their IQ does provide a partial indicator as to their competence, but does not even begin to describe a human being.
In more macroscopic terms, however:
(1) People with an average IQ lower than X will not be able to perform task Z which requires IQ much greater than X.
(2) Having a higher IQ than needed for task Z does not make you much better at it, but may qualify you for another job, Q, which is more demanding.
(3) Contrary to what many people think, average IQs can be compared somewhat across cultures; they can be compared somewhat to a common point of reference; and the resulting average IQ measures can differ greatly across countries. Countries that have lower average IQs do not perform nearly as well, which I attribute mainly to argument (1), above.
There are a variety of reasons I can think of that would cause people with extreme IQ’s (150+) to perform randomly on average. In general, my interpretation is that the higher IQ hurts them more than it helps them. With an extreme IQ, it is hard to find an environment in which to develop social skills, and it is harder to enjoy random company. Meanwhile, there are few occupations that require such a high IQ. Instead, the most high-end occupations can be performed by people whose IQs are less extreme, but are more socially developed, and would thus be preferred for those occupations over the maladjusted extreme ones.
I would be very surprised to learn, however, that a study of subjects with merely above average IQs—rather than extremely high ones—didn’t show them to have markedly improved outcomes over subjects whose IQs are below average.
A mostly static view of human potential is probably correct. If you’ll agree that other animals don’t have the same potential as humans because of their genetic differences, then it is far fetched to assume that there are no differences in potential among humans, too.
A point to consider—isn’t IQ grounded to intelligence via improved life outcomes (wealth, education etc.); so if high intelligence levels start to lose correlation with improved outcomes, wouldn’t that make the extreme end of IQ results less and less correlated with actual intelligence?
The notion that abilities de-correlate at high range is known as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns . A simple analogy from sports: ability to run marathon positively correlates with the ability to sprint, in the general public, but among the world class athletes, you run into genetic variations which trade sprinting performance for marathon performance and vice versa.
Another point is that IQ tests have to be neutral with regards to the background skills or knowledge, which has a very unfortunate side effect of not measuring performance of the mechanisms involved in forming or applying skills and knowledge. By the way, on a Gaussian prior, poor correlation implies very substantial regression towards the mean.
wouldn’t that make the extreme end of IQ results less and less correlated with actual intelligence?
It seems much more plausible that at extreme intelligence, the correlation to life outcomes starts to break down. Once you earn enough money to live comfortably, it probably leads to more life satisfaction to spend your time on leisure, rather than earning more, and in particular, the cleverer someone is the more we might expect them to realize that’s the tradeoff.
I meant that the correlation between life outcomes and intelligence breaks down, but the correlation between intelligence and IQ likely remains strong; it sounded to me like you were questioning the IQ-intelligence link because IQ-life outcome broke down at high IQ levels.
As I said, it was my understanding that the correlation between IQ and life outcomes was well-established, and that IQ tests are designed and adjusted to ensure the correlation remains strong. This is a thing, right?
Thus, the hypothesis that the correlation between intelligence and life outcomes breaks down at high intelligence levels suggests that such adjustment would cease to produce IQ-to-life-outcomes correlation.
(Alternately, this whole system may break down somewhat at high levels anyway—I don’t know how much difficulty the relative rarity of really high IQ ratings has introduced.)
I think there may be a tendency for the here-present audience to overanalyze and underpractice.
I think the following information is important for understanding this problem matter:
(1) Anyone attracted to this site will likely be a highly intelligent individual.
(2) IQ is more closely bundled around 100 for girls than it is for guys.
Implication: This here audience is mostly male.
(3) People with IQ differences of more than 2 standard deviations don’t get along that great (aren’t peers).
(4) Socialization with peers at a young age is crucial to social development.
(5) Primary schools bundle together people of all IQs indiscriminately.
Implication: Most of us in this here audience have been stunted in our social development by lacking peers early on, when it’s important.
Implication: Because extreme IQs are much rarer in girls than in guys, we have to either compete for a few highly intelligent, intellectually stimulating females who may share our lack in social skills, OR settle for merely above average IQ females who may lack some intellectual sparkle, but may be easier to find and better socially developed.
(6) You don’t learn to dance by watching videos of people dancing, and you don’t develop social skills by reasoning about them. You need to practice.
Implication: People like us, who need to develop our social networks and social skills at a later age, will necessarily make fools of ourselves in the process. This mustn’t stop us. We are belatedly developing skills that we should have picked up as kids, and practice is the only way to do it.
“Implication: Because extreme IQs are much rarer in girls than in guys, we have to either compete for a few highly intelligent, intellectually stimulating females who may share our lack in social skills, OR settle for merely above average IQ females who may lack some intellectual sparkle, but may be easier to find and better socially developed.”
Oh come now, I doubt the problem is that there are not enough ‘smart girls,’ and more that smart girls go for successful men and not isolated introverts. Actually, some of my more intelligent friends complain that they can’t find a man (that they would consider dating) that isn’t threatened by their intelligence. I’ve also heard the lament that successful men want housewives, but I don’t have much evidence for it. And also, how important is IQ in your mate preference really? It seems from my observations that ‘nerdy’ guys want quirky girls more than intelligent ones- the natalie protmans and junos (gag me with a spoon) of the world.
just to correct a bit here, Natalie Portman apparently has a rather high IQ, her being a multilingual Harvard graduate and all… Poor example is all I’m saying, not questioning your point (yet)
Now is this a social narrative, a post hoc justification of a failed relationship fueled by the self serving bias, or something else entirely?
Dating is one area of interest where anecdotage should be taken with a mountain of salt.
One way of testing the hypothesis that (many) men are put off by intelligent women would be to look at all the couples in a social circle. Is it true that none of the intelligent women are in heterosexual relationships?
While that idea is, in my eyes, a good blend of effective and practical, it doesn’t rule out all confounding explanations. If this pattern was found, it would not necessarily prove that their potential mates were intimidated by their intelligence.
Perhaps a way of testing it would be going to a dating service and telling random men that the woman they were dating was very intelligent (regardless of her actual intelligence)?
Reactions to profiles on dating services would be a good general test, though it might be harder to pull out data on particular social groups.
Do you believe that, in general people are bad at telling why they have trouble attracting partners, or do you think that the idea that men are put off by intelligent women is an especially unlikely hypothesis?
The former due to the rose tinted glasses of the self serving bias and the fundimental attribution error.
On a personal note I’m very attracted to intelligent women but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if men in general did find intellectual women intimidating.
Thank you for your input, Laura, but you have not quoted a study that would persuade me that what I know from other study reports is false. As far as I know, extreme IQ’s simply are more common among men than they are among women.
Since this is compatible with my own anecdotal experience, it is hard for me to be persuaded by your anecdotal experience, unless you can point to evidence stronger than that.
I would prefer this to be evidence that doesn’t attempt to disqualify the whole concept of IQ because of discomfort with the findings of IQ studies.
Now, as for the other issues you raise, those are fun to discuss, so I’ll engage, lack of scientific quality regardless… :)
“Smart girls go for successful men and not isolated introverts” is another way of saying “females are attracted to confidence and dominance”, as well as “high IQ does not necessarily mean confidence and dominance”. I would agree with that.
“Some of my more intelligent friends complain that they can’t find a man that isn’t threatened by their intelligence” probably means that those friends of yours aren’t that hot. Their intelligence compels them to find a guy that’s successful and at least as smart, but guys like that can get hot women, and guys prefer hot women to intelligent, but not that hot women.
I would personally not mind an extremely smart partner at all, but frankly, when one person is able to earn enough for the whole family, I do think it’s more convenient for the other person to be someone who is along for the ride, rather than someone whose career will try to pull the partnership, and the family, in conflicting directions. A successful career woman would possibly do better with a stay-at-home husband, which do exist, although it’s not quite the most traditional role.
Spot on, and seemingly obvious. Why a high IQ crowd like this can be oblivious to truths that a truck driver has pointed out to me is an open question.
You know, next time, maybe type “people who end up on LW are probably nerdy”. Faster, conveys the same information, and probably better representative of your thought process too.
And, of course, less reliant on implausible and/or low-status hypotheses chained together, and thus less likely to be nitpicked mercilessly by a rationalist audience even though the actual point only depends on easily-observed demographic trends, and thus is probably right.
I disagree with your blunt formulation of intelligence as ‘IQ’. An example: Lewis Terman (yes the father of Frederick Terman who has a building named after him at Stanford) followed a bunch of kids with high IQs—average of 151. As described in the article, William Shockley (have you heard of him?) didn’t have a high enough to be one of the ’Termite’s. But, as every electrical engineer will tell you, Shockley went onto invent the bipolar junction transistor at Bell Labs. (What’s ironic is that Shockley himself adopted a static (unchangeable) view of human ability, became a racist proponent of eugenics and was shunned in the academia in his late career.)
In fact, Barry Schwartz claims that the success rate of the Termites was as good as a random sample of individuals but I can’t quite find links for this claim. (It’s in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell however.)
A discussion of IQ would take us far afield but I suggest you also check out Flynn effect for instance.
AnlamK, I agree that IQ is the measure of a mere shadow of actual ability. When describing a single individual, their IQ does provide a partial indicator as to their competence, but does not even begin to describe a human being.
In more macroscopic terms, however:
(1) People with an average IQ lower than X will not be able to perform task Z which requires IQ much greater than X.
(2) Having a higher IQ than needed for task Z does not make you much better at it, but may qualify you for another job, Q, which is more demanding.
(3) Contrary to what many people think, average IQs can be compared somewhat across cultures; they can be compared somewhat to a common point of reference; and the resulting average IQ measures can differ greatly across countries. Countries that have lower average IQs do not perform nearly as well, which I attribute mainly to argument (1), above.
There are a variety of reasons I can think of that would cause people with extreme IQ’s (150+) to perform randomly on average. In general, my interpretation is that the higher IQ hurts them more than it helps them. With an extreme IQ, it is hard to find an environment in which to develop social skills, and it is harder to enjoy random company. Meanwhile, there are few occupations that require such a high IQ. Instead, the most high-end occupations can be performed by people whose IQs are less extreme, but are more socially developed, and would thus be preferred for those occupations over the maladjusted extreme ones.
I would be very surprised to learn, however, that a study of subjects with merely above average IQs—rather than extremely high ones—didn’t show them to have markedly improved outcomes over subjects whose IQs are below average.
A mostly static view of human potential is probably correct. If you’ll agree that other animals don’t have the same potential as humans because of their genetic differences, then it is far fetched to assume that there are no differences in potential among humans, too.
A point to consider—isn’t IQ grounded to intelligence via improved life outcomes (wealth, education etc.); so if high intelligence levels start to lose correlation with improved outcomes, wouldn’t that make the extreme end of IQ results less and less correlated with actual intelligence?
The notion that abilities de-correlate at high range is known as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns . A simple analogy from sports: ability to run marathon positively correlates with the ability to sprint, in the general public, but among the world class athletes, you run into genetic variations which trade sprinting performance for marathon performance and vice versa.
Another point is that IQ tests have to be neutral with regards to the background skills or knowledge, which has a very unfortunate side effect of not measuring performance of the mechanisms involved in forming or applying skills and knowledge. By the way, on a Gaussian prior, poor correlation implies very substantial regression towards the mean.
edit: cut-n-paste error in URL.
It seems much more plausible that at extreme intelligence, the correlation to life outcomes starts to break down. Once you earn enough money to live comfortably, it probably leads to more life satisfaction to spend your time on leisure, rather than earning more, and in particular, the cleverer someone is the more we might expect them to realize that’s the tradeoff.
Which is what I said, yes.
I meant that the correlation between life outcomes and intelligence breaks down, but the correlation between intelligence and IQ likely remains strong; it sounded to me like you were questioning the IQ-intelligence link because IQ-life outcome broke down at high IQ levels.
As I said, it was my understanding that the correlation between IQ and life outcomes was well-established, and that IQ tests are designed and adjusted to ensure the correlation remains strong. This is a thing, right?
Thus, the hypothesis that the correlation between intelligence and life outcomes breaks down at high intelligence levels suggests that such adjustment would cease to produce IQ-to-life-outcomes correlation.
(Alternately, this whole system may break down somewhat at high levels anyway—I don’t know how much difficulty the relative rarity of really high IQ ratings has introduced.)