If they were contributions to open-source projects, that would be one thing.
Open-source contribution is even more gameable than patents: at least with patents there's a human involved, checking to some degree that there is at least a little new stuff in the patent, while no one and nothing stops you from putting a worthless repo up on Github reinventing wheels poorly.
But people doing work that generates patents which don't lead to higher income - that raises some questions for me.
The usual arrangement with, say, industrial researchers is that their employers receive the unpredictable dividends from the patents in exchange for forking over regular salaries in fallow periods...
Is it possible that extremely high IQ is associated with a tendency to become "addicted" to a game like patenting?
I don't see why you would privilege this hypothesis.
Let me put it this way. Before considering the Terman data on patents you presented, I already thought IQ would be positively correlated with producing positive externalities and that there was a mostly one way causal link from the former to the latter. I expected the correlation between patents and IQ. What was new to me was the lack of correlation between IQ and income, and the lack of correlation between patents and income. Correction added: there was actually a fairly strong correlation between IQ and income, just not between income and patents, (...
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