Two Interesting Studies

Came across two interesting papers which pertain to and agree with some of my earlier posts.

The first: The role of verbal intelligence in becoming a successful criminal: Results from a longitudinal sample. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a free version of this paper.

From the abstract:

Intelligence has been linked with success across a wide array of life domains. To date, however, relatively little research has examined whether intelligence may predict criminal success—that is, engaging in criminal behaviors, but escaping detection and arrest. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by examining the associations among verbal intelligence, criminal involvement, and criminal justice processing (i.e., arrest) using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Our findings reveal that verbal intelligence is associated with criminal justice processing, wherein individuals with higher verbal intelligence scores are more likely to avoid arrest for criminal behavior when compared with individuals with comparatively lower verbal intelligence scores. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research.

and from the sample paper:

Third, it is possible that IQ is related to being a successful criminal because the types of crimes committed may vary as a function of IQ. If criminals with lower IQs commit crimes with higher arrest clearance rates than offenders with higher IQs, then they will be more likely to be arrested. According to the most recent data, there is tremendous variation in arrest clearance rates by crime type (Paré et al., 2007; United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2013). Overall, 46.8% of all violent crimes and 19.0% of all property crimes were cleared by arrest in 2012 (United States Department of Justice,Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2013). There is even significant variation within these two general crime types (i.e., property and violent). For instance, the arrest clearance rates for the violent crimes of murder and rape are 62.5% and 40.1% respectively, whereas the arrest clearance rates for the property crimes of larceny-theft and burglary are22.0% and 12.7%, respectively (United States Department of Justice,Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2013). What that necessarily means is that if IQ is related to the type of crime being committed, then arrest rates and, as a result, criminal success would likely vary across the IQ spectrum.

In the post The Question of Blacks, Whites, and Crime I posit that arrest rates could explain some of the black-white crime gap, in that blacks, by having 8-15 fewer IQ points on average than whites, may be more inclined to commit the type of crimes that either have a higher risk of getting caught, such as violent crime, and or get caught due to poor planning and execution of the crime.

The second paper, which also went viral Wall Street Bets traders are more skilled and responsible than they get credit for, a new academic study finds

In the posts How /r/WallStreetBets ‘Solved’ Wall Street and Further evidence of the positive role of IQ and option trading success I make two claims: that /r/wallstreetbets traders, despite occasional large losses, demonstrate significantly above-average trading and stock picking ability, and that this is due to having higher IQs compared to other investing forums and communities. Although the above paper does not mention IQ, it lends further evidence of /r/wallstreetbets traders possessing skill, and that contrary the common media assumption that /r/wallstreetbets traders are reckless or don’t know what they are doing, that the advice on /r/wallstreetbets is useful.

I agree. Based on my own observations, way more people are making money than losing money or /r/wallstreetbets (and that this cannot be explained by survivorship bias alone), that /r/wallstreetbets traders gravitate to a small pool of consistently profitable stocks (such as large cap tech stocks like Tesla and Amazon) which have outperformed the market, are cognizant of important trends in the economy that are ignored or dismissed by the media (by being smarter, they are more knowledgeable about how the economy works and at predicting it), are good at filtering out noise from signal, and are good at timing (such as buying the dips).