“We are the cards we are dealt, and intelligence is the unfairest of all those cards. More unfair than wealth or health or home country, unfairer than your happiness set-point. ”
I hope you were just exaggerating to make a point ^^; Otherwise this comes off as a fairly privileged comment that assumes a lot about how fair the world is when it comes to wealth, health, and country...
I suppose we could taboo “intelligence” and see if we really disagree, but you’ve already excluded health and wealth so I suspect we really do have approximately similar ideas in mind. Certainly, it seems a not uncommon tendency to put raw intelligence on a shrine in rationalist communities, but I’m still surprised to see it here, and especially from you.
Whether you were exaggerating or not, though, thank you for saying it, because I’m finally, finally free of that meme myself now :)
Re-reading the text, I’m not actually sure where I got this, but last time I read this I parsed that bit as referring to how intelligence and rationality affect so many different aspects of life, and often in a multiplicative or exponential rather than additive way—if person A is 10 IQ points smarter than person B, person A might be able to learn twice as many useful, relevant concepts, and gain 10 or 100 times as much utility from the same situation by applying those concepts. It doesn’t imply that A is a better person than B by any other metric, but intelligence has that potential in a way that health or home country or happiness set point mostly don’t.
Hmmmm, I’ve never really seen a suggestion that the actual, applied benefits from intelligence scale exponentially like that. Certainly, I don’t think I know a thousand times as much as the average person, nor get a thousand times as much utility from my intelligence. I’m not sure I could even comfortably agree to a ten-fold increase, unless we bias in favour of my knowledge (which happens to be science and math) rather than sports trivia and how to fix a car.
A common thread here is that the bar to actually win because of rationality, because of applied intelligence, is reallyabsurdlyhigh. Looking at the world, people with an IQ of 130 or 160 may have an advantage in a few areas, but “winning at life” really doesn’t seem to be one of them. By contrast, wealth, health, and even birth country all seem to be very, very powerful metrics for winning at life.
I suppose if I assume intelligence is a really really crappy source of utility, this could actually be true! But at that point, it’s such a minimal factor in the whole of my life, that I’m not sure why I’d be so put out to be dealt a bad hand there :)
That said, I have as of last night begun to suspect that this may very well be true, that we seriously, seriously over estimate how intelligent we really are, and how much it really affects our lives.
Looking at the world, people with an IQ of 130 or 160 may have an advantage in a few areas, but “winning at life” really doesn’t seem to be one of them.
I suspect you will find a correlation between the two. Certainly, if you examined the world’s 100 richest people I would be very surprised if the average IQ wasn’t well above 100. The question is, why does intelligence not reliably lead to winning.
I’d suggest that the people on top are the ones who are on top of all metrics: Healthy, Rich, born to an affluent country, and intelligent.
This is because, even if intelligence only makes up 1% of your “winning at life” skill, it still gives you a 1% edge over those who are merely healthy, rich, and born to an affluent country.
The research I’ve seen suggests intelligence does nothing for happiness, that national IQ seems to influence national wealth, but that individual IQ doesn’t really influence individual wealth. I’ll admit I’ve not seen anything on IQ vs health. does a quick Google search Well, alright, apparently IQ does positively correlate with life expectancy :)
Still, I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that a high IQ correlates with success/winning. Success->High IQ is a different correlation, and can be explained by other causes, as I pointed out above :)
but that individual IQ doesn’t really influence individual wealth
Really!
Can you link me to the data you have for this. It seem so counter-intuitive that I’m tempted to defy the data. It seems to me there are so many mechanisms by which an intelligence advantage turns into a wealth advantage. Ignoring billionaire businessmen as a tiny proportion of the population, what about doctors or lawyers, those both require above average intelligence (I think) and pay better than the average job.
Edit: Just my personal two cents, but having gone through the job searching and raise process a lot, I’d agree that there’s very few companies that actually hire/promote based on intelligence/performance. One’s ability to look credible and impressive on an interview is far more important, and it’s quite easy to do that with a lower IQ. So, while I’d expect that intelligence would correlate with wealth in a perfect spherical society, it makes sense to me why there’s a much less significant correlation in our actual, existing society.
Winning at what? Maybe highly intelligent people are happy in unremunerative occupations such as writing or academia. Since they are smarter than us, they might well be right.
Well, health, wealth, and location are all things that usually can be fixed or improved in some way. Intelligence is pretty much set though, which makes it more unfair on average.
Well, health, wealth, and location are all things that usually can be fixed or improved in some way.
I’d agree that they can sometimes be fixed, but I don’t think I’d say usually. That might be true here in the “civilised” world, but thousands die from entirely preventable diseases like malaria (apparently 881,000 people a year! source)
So, the thing about health and wealth, is that once you have enough of ithem you can leverage that to help preserve it—once you’re healthy enough to live to adulthood, you can take responsibility for your life and build a fiscal empire. Once you’re wealthy enough, you can afford a few health issues.
I don’t see anything that suggests that the actual, practical gains from intelligence are of a different nature. You might not be able to improve your IQ, your raw cognitive speed, although even that seems a questionable assumption. Certainly, though, you can learn a vast set of skills that improves your “applied” or “functional” intelligence. And, just like health and wealth, the people who already have an advantage, get an exponentially larger advantage because they can take advantage of resources like a university or LessWrong.
I agree that they’re all very unfair, and I take back what I said about “usually”. However, I still think intelligence (IQ, not functional intelligence) is the most unfair because one isn’t going to be able to change it.
I agree that they’re all very unfair, and I take back what I said about “usually”. However, I still think intelligence (IQ, not functional intelligence) is the most unfair because one isn’t going to be able to change it.
People who die from malaria or starvation in third world countries don’t tend to live through intelligence explosions, either in corpsicle or meat sack forms.
That is unfair. I think we’re talking around eachother though, because I’m not trying to say that intelligence has the most unfair consequences, I meant that one can’t change it no matter how much one wants to or needs to or whatnot. Yes, the other ones can’t always be changed, but on average intelligence is the most unchangeable .
“We are the cards we are dealt, and intelligence is the unfairest of all those cards. More unfair than wealth or health or home country, unfairer than your happiness set-point. ”
I hope you were just exaggerating to make a point ^^; Otherwise this comes off as a fairly privileged comment that assumes a lot about how fair the world is when it comes to wealth, health, and country...
I suppose we could taboo “intelligence” and see if we really disagree, but you’ve already excluded health and wealth so I suspect we really do have approximately similar ideas in mind. Certainly, it seems a not uncommon tendency to put raw intelligence on a shrine in rationalist communities, but I’m still surprised to see it here, and especially from you.
Whether you were exaggerating or not, though, thank you for saying it, because I’m finally, finally free of that meme myself now :)
Re-reading the text, I’m not actually sure where I got this, but last time I read this I parsed that bit as referring to how intelligence and rationality affect so many different aspects of life, and often in a multiplicative or exponential rather than additive way—if person A is 10 IQ points smarter than person B, person A might be able to learn twice as many useful, relevant concepts, and gain 10 or 100 times as much utility from the same situation by applying those concepts. It doesn’t imply that A is a better person than B by any other metric, but intelligence has that potential in a way that health or home country or happiness set point mostly don’t.
Hmmmm, I’ve never really seen a suggestion that the actual, applied benefits from intelligence scale exponentially like that. Certainly, I don’t think I know a thousand times as much as the average person, nor get a thousand times as much utility from my intelligence. I’m not sure I could even comfortably agree to a ten-fold increase, unless we bias in favour of my knowledge (which happens to be science and math) rather than sports trivia and how to fix a car.
A common thread here is that the bar to actually win because of rationality, because of applied intelligence, is really absurdly high. Looking at the world, people with an IQ of 130 or 160 may have an advantage in a few areas, but “winning at life” really doesn’t seem to be one of them. By contrast, wealth, health, and even birth country all seem to be very, very powerful metrics for winning at life.
I suppose if I assume intelligence is a really really crappy source of utility, this could actually be true! But at that point, it’s such a minimal factor in the whole of my life, that I’m not sure why I’d be so put out to be dealt a bad hand there :)
That said, I have as of last night begun to suspect that this may very well be true, that we seriously, seriously over estimate how intelligent we really are, and how much it really affects our lives.
I suspect you will find a correlation between the two. Certainly, if you examined the world’s 100 richest people I would be very surprised if the average IQ wasn’t well above 100. The question is, why does intelligence not reliably lead to winning.
I’d suggest that the people on top are the ones who are on top of all metrics: Healthy, Rich, born to an affluent country, and intelligent.
This is because, even if intelligence only makes up 1% of your “winning at life” skill, it still gives you a 1% edge over those who are merely healthy, rich, and born to an affluent country.
The research I’ve seen suggests intelligence does nothing for happiness, that national IQ seems to influence national wealth, but that individual IQ doesn’t really influence individual wealth. I’ll admit I’ve not seen anything on IQ vs health. does a quick Google search Well, alright, apparently IQ does positively correlate with life expectancy :)
Still, I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that a high IQ correlates with success/winning. Success->High IQ is a different correlation, and can be explained by other causes, as I pointed out above :)
Really!
Can you link me to the data you have for this. It seem so counter-intuitive that I’m tempted to defy the data. It seems to me there are so many mechanisms by which an intelligence advantage turns into a wealth advantage. Ignoring billionaire businessmen as a tiny proportion of the population, what about doctors or lawyers, those both require above average intelligence (I think) and pay better than the average job.
Is there really no correlation!?
http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html and http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/higher_intellig.html were the posts I checked to confirm the cached belief, and provide significantly more detailed and nuanced claims. The short version is that education, not intelligence, influences wealth; intelligence does seem to give one an edge in getting that education, but certainly an education isn’t outside the reach of the average person.
Edit: Just my personal two cents, but having gone through the job searching and raise process a lot, I’d agree that there’s very few companies that actually hire/promote based on intelligence/performance. One’s ability to look credible and impressive on an interview is far more important, and it’s quite easy to do that with a lower IQ. So, while I’d expect that intelligence would correlate with wealth in a perfect spherical society, it makes sense to me why there’s a much less significant correlation in our actual, existing society.
Winning at what? Maybe highly intelligent people are happy in unremunerative occupations such as writing or academia. Since they are smarter than us, they might well be right.
Case in Point
Home country grants a potential in a way that the others mostly do not too. I would argue a far more useful one.
Well, health, wealth, and location are all things that usually can be fixed or improved in some way. Intelligence is pretty much set though, which makes it more unfair on average.
I’d agree that they can sometimes be fixed, but I don’t think I’d say usually. That might be true here in the “civilised” world, but thousands die from entirely preventable diseases like malaria (apparently 881,000 people a year! source)
So, the thing about health and wealth, is that once you have enough of ithem you can leverage that to help preserve it—once you’re healthy enough to live to adulthood, you can take responsibility for your life and build a fiscal empire. Once you’re wealthy enough, you can afford a few health issues.
I don’t see anything that suggests that the actual, practical gains from intelligence are of a different nature. You might not be able to improve your IQ, your raw cognitive speed, although even that seems a questionable assumption. Certainly, though, you can learn a vast set of skills that improves your “applied” or “functional” intelligence. And, just like health and wealth, the people who already have an advantage, get an exponentially larger advantage because they can take advantage of resources like a university or LessWrong.
I agree that they’re all very unfair, and I take back what I said about “usually”. However, I still think intelligence (IQ, not functional intelligence) is the most unfair because one isn’t going to be able to change it.
People who die from malaria or starvation in third world countries don’t tend to live through intelligence explosions, either in corpsicle or meat sack forms.
That is unfair. I think we’re talking around eachother though, because I’m not trying to say that intelligence has the most unfair consequences, I meant that one can’t change it no matter how much one wants to or needs to or whatnot. Yes, the other ones can’t always be changed, but on average intelligence is the most unchangeable .