gwern comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: dvasya 02 September 2011 07:38AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 02 September 2011 05:01:50PM 3 points [-]

Sounds plausible. If anybody finds the citation for this, please post it.

Comment author: gwern 03 September 2011 02:34:35AM *  20 points [-]

How about http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/are-the-wealthiest-countries-the-smartest-countries.html ?

They found that intelligence made a difference in gross domestic product. For each one-point increase in a country’s average IQ, the per capita GDP was $229 higher. It made an even bigger difference if the smartest 5 percent of the population got smarter; for every additional IQ point in that group, a country’s per capita GDP was $468 higher.

Citing "Cognitive Capitalism: The impact of ability, mediated through science and economic freedom, on wealth". (PDF not immediately available in Google.)

EDIT: efm found the PDF: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/rindermann/publikationen/11PsychScience.pdf

Or http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/converging.pdf :

Economic models of the loss caused by small intelligence decrements due to lead in drinking water predict significant effects of even a few points decrease (Salkever 1995; Muir and Zegarac 2001). Because the models are roughly linear for small changes, they can be inverted to estimate societal effects of improved cognition. The Salkever model estimates the increase in income due to one more IQ point to be 2.1% for men and 3.6% for women. (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) estimate that a 3% increase in overall IQ would reduce the poverty rate by 25%, males in jail by 25%, high-school dropouts by 28%, parentless children by 20%, welfare recipients by 18%, and out-of-wedlock births by 25%.

EDITEDIT: high IQ predicts superior stock market investing even after the obvious controls. High IQ types are also more likely to trust the stock market enough to participate more in it

Comment author: gwern 01 October 2012 07:59:02PM *  2 points [-]

"Are Smarter Groups More Cooperative? Evidence from Prisoner's Dilemma Experiments, 1959-2003", Jones 2008:

A meta-study of repeated prisoner's dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5% to 8% more often for every 100 point increase in the school's average SAT score.

Later: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/group_iq_one_so.html

This finding was the first of its kind: In prisoner's dilemmas, smarter groups really were more cooperative. Since then other researchers have found similar results, some of which I discuss in Section III of this article for the Asian Development Review. It looks like intelligence is a form of social intelligence...Does that happen in the real world? If it does, does it mean that there are negative political externalities to low-skill immigration? That's a topic for a later time. Another worthy question: Why would high IQ groups be more cooperative anyway? Isn't cynicism intelligent? Sure, sometimes, but the political entrepreneur who can find a way to sustain a truce can probably skim quite a lot of the resulting prosperity off for herself. And people who are better at solving the puzzles in an IQ test are probably better at solving the puzzles of human interaction.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 20 November 2012 01:56:54AM 0 points [-]

What if higher SAT schools tend to be more prestigious and have stronger student identification?

Comment author: gwern 20 November 2012 02:05:30AM 0 points [-]

Dunno. It's consistent with all the other results about IQ and not school spirit...

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 20 November 2012 04:30:33AM *  2 points [-]

Hm. Looks like going to a public/private school didn't seem to mediate student cooperation all that much, which probably works against my theory.

Comment author: MixedNuts 01 October 2012 08:22:20PM 0 points [-]

They're all US studies. Do we have anything from other cultures?