This is an interesting IQ video by Dr. Jordan Peterson:
Some highlights:
-There are many ways to be smart, but only a single way to be dumb. As you go higher in IQ, people tend to have more lopsided subtest results, like being exceptional at quantitative ability but maybe only above-average at spatial.
-There is no way to raise IQ. Brain training can make people more competent at a specific task, but this does not increase general intelligence.
-IQ is the greatest predictor of individual lifetime success, followed a distant second by industriousness.
-IQ is so powerful that even tasks in which it can be assumed that industriousness confers a major advantage, the high-IQ person still comes out ahead, like hypothetically sorting out letters.
-IQ is an unsettling subject because of its predictive power, unequal distribution, and imperviousness to raising it. It rubs the wrong way against society’s notion of fairness and egalitarianism.
-Smart parents tend to have slightly less smart children, due to regression to the mean. This works the other way too. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective for there to always be a lot variability of the phenotype even with strong heritability, in order to adapt to changing environments.
-Ethics and IQ are unrelated. (Not sure about this given that prison populations tend to be lower IQ compared to the general population.)
-Smarter people are not ‘better’ (disagree here). The fact that smarter people tend to earn more money is the ‘free market’ assigning a higher value or worth to smart people. I think Dr. Peterson added this to soften the blow or to not come off as an ‘IQ absolutist’. Revealed preferences show otherwise. Wealthy, well-educated parents in particular care about IQ, and will spend large sums of money to give their child a cognitive head-start at life.
Even young people who know nothing about the intricacies of IQ and despite attempts by academia to downplay or censor IQ research, still correctly intuit that the SATs matter–not only does a mediocre score limit college options–but more importantly, it’s seen as predictive of how much potential one has at life in general, or where one lies on the cognitive hierarchy.
-I’ll also add, IQ tests, unlike personality tests, have a potentiality unlimited ceiling and are much more resistant to training/coaching. Training for IQ has the effect of only raising the mean, so the normal distribution still holds assuming the ceiling is high enough, so it’s still possible to rank order people by intelligence even if everyone studies/practices.
-This is not to say I agree with everything, and I have changed my mind regarding IQ and employment. In other videos, Dr. Peterson says that individuals with IQs below 83 or so have few or no employable skills. I used to believe this, and then I realized that for this to be true would imply that countries which have mean IQs below 90 would effectively have 30-40% unemployment rates, which is false. It’s more like, it’s not profitable or possible due to regulation (minimum wage laws) to employ sub-83 IQ people, not that they are incapable of doing any work. Or, U.S. consumers have higher expectations or less tolerance for errors.
I liken having a high IQ to having a cheat code at life. High IQ is no assurance of success at life, but it sure helps at anything having to do with ‘figuring out how things work’ or having an information advantage. Overall–intelligence matters; it’s real; it’s powerful stuff.