The mechanism is likely to be that a smarter researcher sees solutions intuitively, whereas a dumber one has to try lots of things that don’t work before getting to the correct solution; this would produce super linear speedup I think, because as you get smarter you avoid more and more wasted effort. There’s also the issue of status producing more motivation, which produces more achievement, which produces more status. This adds a significant nonlinearity.
Miscommunication. My point was only that I expect the function that describes the relationship to be a smooth curve. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the relationship between IQ and research productivity is stronger at the high end than in the middle.
Sounds unlikely to me too, but it could explain the phenomenon underlying glm’s quote (that above a certain threshold intelligence doesn’t make much of a difference in “effectiveness”), assuming that the result is valid (which I would want to know how “effectiveness” was measured).
Your question about how they measured “effectiveness” is right on.
My guess is that marginal benefits to IQ depend on the task, and the IQ range. For tasks of medium difficulty, the marginal benefits of IQ will probably increase as one goes from the low-IQ to average, flatten out and then decrease as one gets to a very high range. But higher IQ allows you to efficiently attempt more much more difficult (and arguably important) tasks.
What sort of mechanism would produce a step function? Sounds highly unlikely to me.
Added: I would expect the curve to be smooth.
The mechanism is likely to be that a smarter researcher sees solutions intuitively, whereas a dumber one has to try lots of things that don’t work before getting to the correct solution; this would produce super linear speedup I think, because as you get smarter you avoid more and more wasted effort. There’s also the issue of status producing more motivation, which produces more achievement, which produces more status. This adds a significant nonlinearity.
Miscommunication. My point was only that I expect the function that describes the relationship to be a smooth curve. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the relationship between IQ and research productivity is stronger at the high end than in the middle.
Sounds unlikely to me too, but it could explain the phenomenon underlying glm’s quote (that above a certain threshold intelligence doesn’t make much of a difference in “effectiveness”), assuming that the result is valid (which I would want to know how “effectiveness” was measured).
Your question about how they measured “effectiveness” is right on.
My guess is that marginal benefits to IQ depend on the task, and the IQ range. For tasks of medium difficulty, the marginal benefits of IQ will probably increase as one goes from the low-IQ to average, flatten out and then decrease as one gets to a very high range. But higher IQ allows you to efficiently attempt more much more difficult (and arguably important) tasks.