Does Self-control Outdo IQ in Predicting Academic Performance? - "Duckworth and Seligman’s seminal work found that self-discipline (self-control) was more salient for academic achievement than intelligence. Very little replication work exists, including in different cultures; the current study addressed these gaps. Data were collected from 6th and 7th grade cohorts of early adolescents (N = 589; age: Mean = 12.34 years, and SD = 0.89; 58% female) over two years. The study tested whether self-control was a stronger predictor than intelligence in explaining academic performance two years later as well as in explaining developmental changes over the course of two years. Path analyses provided evidence that both self-control and intelligence longitudinally predicted teacher-reported academic competence as well as school-reported grades; however, intelligence was a significantly stronger predictor than self-control. In addition, only intelligence predicted developmental changes in each measure of academic performance over time, self-control did not."
What Science Says About Identifying High-Potential Employees - "in forecasting potential to excel in a bigger, more complex job at some point in the future, the question shifts to how likely an individual is to be able to learn and master the requisite knowledge and skill. The single-best predictor of this is IQ or cognitive ability. Learning ability includes a substantial cognitive component but also the motivation to pick up new knowledge and skills fast and flexibly."
Top psychologist: IQ is the No. 1 predictor of work success - "Does a child’s high IQ set them up for career or financial success down the road? According to psychologist John Antonakis, the answer is essentially yes. ″[IQ is] the single most important predictor of work success,” Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior at Switzerland’s University of Lausanne who focuses on leadership and management research, tells CNBC Make It. “It’s a very robust and very reliable predictor.” In 2012, Vanderbilt University psychology researchers found that people with higher IQs tend to earn higher incomes, on average, than those with lower IQs. Past studies have also shown that high IQs are comparably reliable in predicting academic success, job performance, career potential and creativity. Antonakis says high IQs are particularly notable predictors for success in highly complicated, skilled occupations like physicist, engineer or even neurosurgeon. But don’t worry, he adds: You can still be highly successful without being a Mensa member. These five other skills and traits factor into your career success and overall happiness, too:
Ability to be outgoing and friendly
Self-confidence
Being open to new experiences
Organizational abilities
Strong communication skills...
high-IQ leaders get better results than less intelligent leaders. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2013 study found that Fortune 500 CEOs are typically overrepresented among the top 1%, in terms of cognitive abilities."
PhD students aren’t what they used to be either - "The value of a high school degree has collapsed since 1980... It is a rather trivial consequence of the falling human capital levels of people with just completed high school... 'Figure 14 shows that as the number of slots for PhDs increases, the average IQ of the enrolling students falls. This indicates that there is heterogeneous quality of enrollees and expanding slots may draw in a marginal researcher less talented than the average researcher from the existing pool. Thus, even though policy can increase the supply of researchers, there is a trade-off between expanding the pool of PhDs and the average talent of PhDs in the economy.'"
Urban vs Rural Residence and IQ
Someone claimed that country differences in IQ were due to rural and urban populations. But the biggest rural-urban IQ difference reported in the literature is 13. Some studies even find no difference. So even if the country with the highest IQ had a 100% urban population and the one with the lowest IQ had a 100% rural population, the rural-urban difference would not explain this difference
National IQ is the Best Predictor of Economic Growth - "it has a very strong relationship with pretty much every national indicator for success... We find national IQ to be the most robust predictor of economic growth with the largest effect size, compared to +70 variables in the growth literature. And the cherry on top is that it is causally identified... Although our correlation is extremely strong, many plausible rival explanations also work well - natural resources, institutions, culture etc.. Let’s imagine we have 50 plausible explanatory variables to explain economic growth with. The maths of this implies that there are 2^50, or over one ‘quadrillion’, possible models you can test. Which should we test? With this massive ‘model uncertainty’, the early economic growth literature of the 90s was filled with papers with conflicting results, since economists could alter the methodology, time period and variables to find just those models which happened to support their theory by chance. This p-hacking was bad - a 1993 review of the literature on democracy and economic growth found that nearly half of the published studies suggested democracy improved economic growth and nearly another half said the opposite!... Across every single test, national IQ performed the best with on average the largest standardised coefficient and the largest posterior inclusion probability (PIP). Well except for GDP per capita in the starting year, which we forced into every model anyway... we think our estimates very accurately measure a causal effect of IQ on GDP. For one, national IQs can almost be perfectly predicted (r = .9) from polygenic scores (EDU3) designed to estimate educational attainment... More broadly, much of the past literature looking at this question provides good reason to think most of the causation goes from IQ to GDP. Diamond and oil-rich countries are no smarter than their neighbours. Using a reduced sample, national IQs measured before the growth period studied have the same effect size as when national IQs are measured during the growth period. We contribute to the literature using a classic, bread and butter tool of econometrics - Instrumental Variable (IV) estimation... Our instruments were cranial capacity (yes, average brain size in a country), ancestry-adjusted UV radiation, and 19th-century numeracy scores"
So much for "The only thing IQ tests prove is how good you are at taking IQ tests"
The truth about intelligence: Do IQ tests really work? | New Scientist - "Russell Warne has spent many hours scrutinising undergraduate psychology textbooks. As a professor of psychology at Utah Valley University, he wasn’t looking for insight, but for mistakes – and he found plenty. Some of the worst concerned IQ tests. “The most common inaccuracy I found, by far, was the claim that intelligence tests are biased against certain groups,” he says. Yet intelligence researchers are at pains to ensure that IQ tests are fair and not culturally biased. “Another, very common one was the idea that intelligence is difficult to measure.” No wonder IQ tests are often considered controversial and flaky. But that simply isn’t the case. “Despite the critiques, the intelligence test is one of the most reliable and solid behavioural tests ever invented,” says Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico... an individual’s performance on an IQ test can be influenced by external factors such as motivation. And you can “game” the test by practising sample questions beforehand – although the average gain from such tutoring is just four or five points... it is rare for recruiters to test IQ in isolation: candidates might be given a personality test too and a practical exercise to assess job-related skills. They usually also have to name several referees."
Association between intelligence quotient and obesity in England - "There was a negative association between IQ and obesity in the UK population"
Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries? - "For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies."
Weird. I thought IQ was a myth
The impact of low, average, and high IQ on economic growth and technological progress: Do all individuals contribute equally? - "We find that all social classes of IQ play a significant role in economic growth.
• 1 IQ indicates higher economic growth of 2.5–3.8% over the period of 1970–2010.
• 1 IQ of the intellectual class indicates .04% more patents within 2000–2009.
• Average ability and non-intellectual citizens don't contribute to new technologies."
FLynn-effect and economic growth: Do national increases in intelligence lead to increases in GDP? - "National historical changes in IQ were related to changes in GDP per capita.
IQ growth is positively correlated to economic growth."
Bruno Campello de Souza's answer to Is Nassim Taleb right that 'IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle'? - Quora - "I must warn that I am one of those that Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb considers to be pseudo scientific quacks that peddle erroneous ideas to suckers. In other words: I am a cognitive psychologist...
Dr. Taleb's article is wrong in so many fundamental ways that it is very hard to even begin to address it. I'll try to tackle most of them, in no particular order.
1. IQ is NOT a measure of "unintelligence", extreme or otherwise. It is a comparative measure of the ability to solve abstract linguistic and logical-mathematical problems. The results show how far each individual is from the average, both in terms of being above or below it...
3. The observation that IQ explains “only" 13% to 50% of the variance in some tasks merely reflects the fact that performance requires more than just intelligence. Yes, such things include Conscientiousness (which is related to impulse control or the ability to defer satisfaction, i.e., "patience"), but also values, personality, and the way in which all these things relate to sociocultural settings and even physical environment. Actually, one should suspect a "quack" when someone in human or social sciences claims that a single variable alone explains most of the variance of anything. Indeed, the most advanced multivariate statistics in use today were created by psychologists and social scientists in order to deal effectively with such complex problems in their field.
4. The criticism stated by Dr. Taleb involving "fat tails", "via negativa not via positiva" and being a "concave" measure is a series of non-issues and expresses profound ignorance on his behalf. A whole other lengthy thread might be initiated on this alone. The fact that many of the so-called "real-world" performance indexes do not usually show a Gaussian distribution (indeed, most often one finds a Pareto or similar distribution) does NOT imply that the association between a normally distributed IQ (or any Gaussian variable) either "doesn't exist" or "is uninformational". At worst, it just means that such associations are better assessed through nonparametric techniques. The same reasoning goes for nonlinear associations, which can be analyzed through nonlinear methods. It is ludicrous to suggest that a nonlinear association between IQ and the SAT is in any way indicative of the uselessness, inadequacy or fallacy of the first. One must also observe that non-Gaussian distributions can frequently be "Gaussianized" through simple mathematical transformations such as taking a natural logarithm or, with a bit more complexity, a Box-Cox transformation, among other methods. Nonlinear association can also be linearized through usually simple transformations. For example, the graph cited from Frey and Detterman (2004) can be easily turned into a strong linear association if one uses Ln IQ instead of "raw" IQ scores. And since when do nonlinear associations imply in pseudoscience?
5. Of course the correlation between IQ and performance gets smaller as one takes higher and higher ranges of IQ. It is a simple, straightforward, diminishing returns or saturation-effect. Indeed, if one takes a high enough range, the correlation would HAVE to be zero. If someone with a certain level of IQ can solve, say, "17+34=?" at a certain speed, a person with a higher IQ will tend to solve it faster, but, as one takes people with higher and higher IQs, the improvements in time would become more and more negligible, for everyone would be giving nearly instantaneous correct responses (I would expect that, in such a scenario, the physiology of eyesight and visual perception, as well as psycho-motor phenomena, would eventually be more relevant for the differences in response time than differences in IQ). Why is this to be considered any sort of argument against IQ's is beyond me. Its is the contrary that would make me scratch my head.
6. "It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation." To this I simply refer to the saying from Kurt Lewin: "There is Nothing More Practical Than A Good Theory". Abstract thinking, especially the aloof and detached type, is ESSENTIAL for STEM competences, and one is hard pressed to find skills that are more practical and real world-oriented (or that yield greater employability in the job market, for that matter)...
8. "Convexity", as used apparently by Dr. Taleb and his followers alone, is an ill-defined and confusing concept that has most certainly never been measured and tested against IQ scores to substantiate the claim that "IQ doesn't detect convexity".
9 .Dr. Taleb argues that the pattern-recognition element underlying IQ tests is not indicative of "true" intelligence, for "Not seeing patterns except when they are significant is a virtue in real life". Is he saying that one can and should discard a pattern due to its lack of significance BEFORE such a pattern is even perceived? How is that even logically possible?...
In short, it seems to me that Doctor Nassim Nicholas Taleb has no idea what he is talking about not only regarding IQ tests, but also pertaining to Statistics, Probability Theory and the Scientific Method...
The fact that racists and alike used IQ to pseudo-justify their stances is no more of an argument against IQ than pointing out that Hitler was a vegetarian is an argument against vegetarianism. It is simply an ad hominem fallacy and an appeal to emotion...
The similarity between IQ test items and "real-world" tasks is not limited to "some" cases, but to many, including most of the better-payed and most valued activities (e.g., education, clerical work, analyst jobs, STEM occupations, etc.). This is a strength, not a weakness (the opposite might be a weakness).
There are numerous studies showing positive associations between IQ and various measure of socioeconomic success, including not only wealth, but also income, longevity, procreation, job performance, job advancement (promotions), college-level employment, attaining advanced degrees, having no criminal record, not requiring welfare, and so forth.
The existence of "noise" in the associations between IQ and socioeconomic outcomes is simply the reflection of the fact that, in human and social phenomena, the relationship between variables A and B is nearly always mediated or affected by their interactions with C, D, E, and more, so that if one only considers A and B, the impacts of the others will appear as "noise". The greater the number of other variables affecting the relationship, the larger the "noise" will be. Also, there will always be some "noise" in any measurement due to human errors, the observer effect, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, and the fundamental randomness of the Universe. This does not mean that it is useless to measure. Indeed, as George Edward Pelham Box famously said: "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful."...
There ARE numerous standardized measures of "well-being" and even "sleep" that are widely used for various purposes, ranging from clinical interventions to the guiding of public policies. No one, except Dr. Taleb and, maybe, his acolytes, thinks that they are absurd in essence.
The Flynn effect DOES warn us "that IQ is somewhat environment dependent". This is not new. Even the staunchest defenders of a biological basis for IQ still acknowledge that at least some 20% of the variance comes from environmental factors of various types (nutrition, vaccination, breastfeeding, education, use of digital technologies, engagement in social activities, etc.)."
Frontiers | The Measurement of Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review of the Literature and Recommendations for Researchers and Practitioners - "Overall however, there are a number of fundamental problems with ability based measures. First, many personality and intelligence theorists question the very existence of ability EI, and suggest it is nothing more than intelligence. This claim is supported by high correlations between ability EI and IQ, although some have provided evidence to the contrary (e.g., MacCann et al., 2014). Additionally, the common measures of ability EI tend to have relatively poor psychometric properties in terms of reliability and validity. Ability EI measures do not tend to strongly predict outcomes that they theoretically should predict (e.g., O'Boyle et al., 2011; Miao et al., 2017). Maul (2012) also outlines a comprehensive set of problems with the most widely used ability measure, the MSCEIT, related to consensus-based scoring, reliability, and underrepresentation of the EI construct. Also see Petrides (2011) for a comprehensive critique of ability measures."
So much for the claims about EQ being more important than IQ with respect to the outcomes IQ predicts
Using DNA to predict intelligence - "In 10 years, the ability to predict intelligence from DNA has gone from 0% to 10%.
Genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS) are transforming research on intelligence."
What do SAT and IQ tests measure? General intelligence predicts school and life success. - "The SAT does predict success in college—not perfectly, but relatively well, especially given that it takes just a few hours to administer. And, unlike a “complex portrait” of a student’s life, it can be scored in an objective way. (In a recent New York Times op-ed, the University of New Hampshire psychologist John D. Mayer aptly described the SAT’s validity as an “astonishing achievement.”) In a study published in Psychological Science, University of Minnesota researchers Paul Sackett, Nathan Kuncel, and their colleagues investigated the relationship between SAT scores and college grades in a very large sample: nearly 150,000 students from 110 colleges and universities. SAT scores predicted first-year college GPA about as well as high school grades did, and the best prediction was achieved by considering both factors. Botstein, Boylan, and Kolbert are either unaware of this directly relevant, easily accessible, and widely disseminated empirical evidence, or they have decided to ignore it and base their claims on intuition and anecdote—or perhaps on their beliefs about the way the world should be rather than the way it is. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, it’s not just first-year college GPA that SAT scores predict. In a four-year study that started with nearly 3,000 college students, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by Neal Schmitt found that test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year... Test scores also predicted whether the students graduated... A 2007 Science article summed up the evidence succinctly: “Standardized admissions tests have positive and useful relationships with subsequent student accomplishments.” SAT scores even predict success beyond the college years. For more than two decades, Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski, Camilla Benbow, and their colleagues have tracked the accomplishments of people who, as part of a youth talent search, scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by age 13. Remarkably, even within this group of gifted students, higher scorers were not only more likely to earn advanced degrees but also more likely to succeed outside of academia. For example, compared with people who “only” scored in the top 1 percent, those who scored in the top one-tenth of 1 percent—the extremely gifted—were more than twice as likely as adults to have an annual income in the top 5 percent of Americans. The second popular anti-SAT argument is that, if the test measures anything at all, it’s not cognitive skill but socioeconomic status. In other words, some kids do better than others on the SAT not because they’re smarter, but because their parents are rich. Boylan argued in her Times article that the SAT “favors the rich, who can afford preparatory crash courses” like those offered by Kaplan and the Princeton Review. Leon Botstein claimed in his Time article that “the only persistent statistical result from the SAT is the correlation between high income and high test scores.” And according to a Washington Post Wonkblog infographic (which is really more of a disinfographic) “your SAT score says more about your parents than about you.” It’s true that economic background correlates with SAT scores. Kids from well-off families tend to do better on the SAT. However, the correlation is far from perfect. In the University of Minnesota study of nearly 150,000 students, the correlation between socioeconomic status, or SES, and SAT was not trivial but not huge. (A perfect correlation has a value of 1; this one was .25.) What this means is that there are plenty of low-income students who get good scores on the SAT; there are even likely to be low-income students among those who achieve a perfect score on the SAT. Thus, just as it was originally designed to do, the SAT in fact goes a long way toward leveling the playing field, giving students an opportunity to distinguish themselves regardless of their background. Scoring well on the SAT may in fact be the only such opportunity for students who graduate from public high schools that are regarded by college admissions offices as academically weak... The sort of admissions approach that Botstein advocates—adjusting high school GPA “to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates” and abandoning the SAT—would do the opposite of leveling the playing field. A given high school GPA would be adjusted down for a poor, public-school kid, and adjusted up for a rich, private-school kid. Furthermore, contrary to what Boylan implies in her Times piece, “preparatory crash courses” don’t change SAT scores much. Research has consistently shown that prep courses have only a small effect on SAT scores—and a much smaller effect than test prep companies claim they do. For example, in one study of a random sample of more than 4,000 students, average improvement in overall score on the “old” SAT, which had a range from 400 to 1600, was no more than about 30 points. Finally, it is clear that SES is not what accounts for the fact that SAT scores predict success in college. In the University of Minnesota study, the correlation between high school SAT and college GPA was virtually unchanged after the researchers statistically controlled for the influence of SES. If SAT scores were just a proxy for privilege, then putting SES into the mix should have removed, or at least dramatically decreased, the association between the SAT and college performance. But it didn’t. This is more evidence that Boylan overlooks or chooses to ignore. What this all means is that the SAT measures something—some stable characteristic of high school students other than their parents’ income—that translates into success in college. And what could that characteristic be? General intelligence. The content of the SAT is practically indistinguishable from that of standardized intelligence tests that social scientists use to study individual differences, and that psychologists and psychiatrists use to determine whether a person is intellectually disabled—and even whether a person should be spared execution in states that have the death penalty. Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on IQ tests—so highly that the Harvard education scholar Howard Gardner, known for his theory of multiple intelligences, once called the SAT and other scholastic measures “thinly disguised” intelligence tests. One could of course argue that IQ is also meaningless—and many have... But this argument is wrong, too. Indeed, we know as well as anything we know in psychology that IQ predicts many different measures of success. Exhibit A is evidence from research on job performance by the University of Iowa industrial psychologist Frank Schmidt and his late colleague John Hunter. Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers. IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity... IQ is of course not the only factor that contributes to differences in outcomes like academic achievement and job performance (and longevity)... factors like conscientiousness—not to mention social skill, creativity, interest, and motivation—do influence success, they cannot take the place of IQ."
So much for the myth that IQ tests just measure how good you are at taking IQ tests
Too bad the author didn't make the point that since IQ is quite heritable, IQ tests supposedly measure SES because smart parents have smart children
The remarkable persistence of power and privilege - "For Australia, it turns out that if we look at the register of modern-day medical practitioners, we find the privileged names of the nineteenth century overrepresented by a factor of nearly three. In other words, if your ancestor was at the top of Australian society six generations ago, you are three times more likely than the average Australian to be a doctor today... Strikingly, Clark finds persistence even in Sweden, one of the world’s most egalitarian societies. The 1600s and 1700s saw the creation of a set of “noble surnames,” which today have twice their expected share of doctors, five times their expected share of lawyers, and three times their share of members of the top 1 per cent of income earners. This degree of persistence of status across ten generations demonstrates the power of inherited privilege... How do we break the pattern? Part of the answer must lie in a fair tax system, a targeted social welfare system, effective early childhood programs, and getting great teachers in front of disadvantaged classrooms. We need banks willing to take a chance on funding an outsider, and it doesn’t hurt to maintain a healthy Aussie scepticism about inherited privilege. Yet Gregory Clark’s results also remind policy-makers that this is no easy nut to crack. Part of the transmission of social status occurs through genes. On top of this, people tend to marry those with similar levels of education; and researchers have also documented significant differences in parenting approaches among different social groups. Making the system a bit fairer is within our reach – but a complete transformation may prove elusive"
The most important thing you give your children is their genes
Full article: Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry - "In a very short time, it is likely that we will identify many of the genetic variants underlying individual differences in intelligence. We should be prepared for the possibility that these variants are not distributed identically among all geographic populations, and that this explains some of the phenotypic differences in measured intelligence among groups. However, some philosophers and scientists believe that we should refrain from conducting research that might demonstrate the (partly) genetic origin of group differences in IQ. Many scholars view academic interest in this topic as inherently morally suspect or even racist. The majority of philosophers and social scientists take it for granted that all population differences in intelligence are due to environmental factors. The present paper argues that the widespread practice of ignoring or rejecting research on intelligence differences can have unintended negative consequences. Social policies predicated on environmentalist theories of group differences may fail to achieve their aims. Large swaths of academic work in both the humanities and social sciences assume the truth of environmentalism and are vulnerable to being undermined. We have failed to work through the moral implications of group differences to prepare for the possibility that they will be shown to exist."
Simple. Liberals just need to pretend that there is no research showing that intelligence is a thing or that it is inherited, and tar anyone who disagrees as a white supremacist and get him fired
Do IQ Tests Actually Measure Intelligence? - "“(IQ tests) are culturally, linguistically and economically biased against minoritized students, in particular Black, first and foremost, and then Hispanic,” says Ford. “If these tests were not biased, we wouldn’t have different IQ scores along racial and ethnic lines — but we do. It’s an indication that there is something wrong with these tests, not with us.”"
Critical Race Theory strikes again! Straight out of Kendi's mouth: 'When I See Racial Disparities, I See Racism.'
