The possibility that someone as deft with words as Noah Smith or David Brooks is smarter than someone as outwardly competent or accomplished as Elon Musk or Peter Thiel seems absurd, but verbal ability has among the highest ‘g loadings’ of any IQ subtest, more than even fluid or spatial IQ, so it axiomatically follows that being among best in the world at verbal ability implies also being among the smartest.
As I said earlier, most of these people who are in VC, finance, or tech are smart, but not that smart. Their IQs are around 115-135 or so, or about mid-to-high-tier IQ. There are exceptions, obviously, such as researchers in theoretical computer science or top coders, but the smartest people tend to be those who develop the tech, not pontificate about it or work in venture capital.
People whom we can assume to be reasonably smart and accomplished do not write their own books or op-eds. Ands it’s not because of a lack of time–guys like David Sacks and Elon Musk spend hours debating politics on Twitter. That is, outlier verbal ability is so uncommon that even among people who are objectively smart, it’s still in short supply. The ability to compose words effectively selects for an even more rarefied intelligence than being successful at business or having commonsense.
Additionally, the learning curve is really steep, and it’s not the sort of thing that Chat GPT can automate well either, although maybe that will change in time. The proliferation of AI has not put a dent either in the influence of the verbal cognitive elite or elite publications such as the NYTs or the Washington Post, even if smaller publications are struggling. I have seen pundits push this narrative for the past 15 years that big media is struggling more than usual or on the precipice of dying: big media has always faced challenges, yet it endures or hangs on.
A breaking story on the frontpage of NYTs or WSJ packs as much of a punch now as it did 20 years ago–maybe more thanks to social media. If it seems like the media is less relevant, this can be explained by people trusting the media less, not that the media has less reach. People who are pro-Trump are not going to be fazed by the latest hit piece about Trump’s taxes or how he’s an ‘affront to democracy’. But it was like this 30 years ago, such as the many Clinton scandals, which similarly did not dissuade Democrats from still supporting him.
‘Business acumen’ or commonsense, despite being useful or practical is not predictive of outlier intelligence. Perhaps it is correlated with intelligence, but this is only a correlation instead of the actual thing. This is why the best chess players in the world are not necessarily the smartest people in the world, even if they are smarter than average person overall. This is not to say the humanities are not without problems. The humanities are afflicted by a garbage-in-garbage-out problem, such as ‘social theories’ that map poorly to reality yet are treated as dogma among progressives. But people erroneously equate having a high IQ with being practical or industrious, but as Dr. Jordan Peterson says, there is no correlation between the two.
Overall, IQ is a counterintuitive subject. Both sides get it wrong to varying degrees. The left is worse in this regard (e.g. blank slate ), but the same is sometimes seen on the right too. So when the latter say they want a society in which democratic participation is limited to a cognitive elite, as if it’s implied that this means businessmen and other practical-minded people, what they really mean is they want a society run by people with medium-high-IQs, not the actual cognitive elite. This is the society we already have: The majority of policy elites have IQs in this mid-tier range, not the true elite.