seez comments on How much wealth is produced by high IQ people? - Less Wrong

7 Post author: JonahSinick 14 March 2014 08:23AM

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Comment author: seez 14 March 2014 11:07:08AM *  2 points [-]

Is 145 the right IQ threshold to be looking at? What about IQ ~130 people (98th percentile)?

What do you mean by this? The right threshold for defining someone as high-IQ? Maybe there is a correlation but it plateaus at a certain point.

Also, I'm curious, do you believe you can increase your mentees' IQ?

Also also:

Bill Gates famously scored 1590 on the SAT, at a time when many fewer people scored 1600 than people did in subsequent years. He also solved a notable problem in combinatorics as a a college sophomore.
Jeff Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in computer science Zuckerberg took a graduate course in computer science as a high school student. Drew Houston (Dropbox founder) started programming at age 5 and scored 1600 on the SAT. Steve Jobs tested at the 10th grade level in 4th grade. This is broadly consistent with "top tech entrepreneurs" having IQ ~145+ (99.8th percentile).

How so? Seems like it's only consistent for Gates, Houston, and maybe Jobs... For the rest, that just demonstrates cool but non-standardized facts about their programming prowess. Maybe Zuckerberg's class was easy. Maybe Bezos bribed the dean. Probably not, but right now the argument looks like "they got rich because they were talented computer scientists... and therefore they must be smart... and therefore being smart makes you rich."

Comment author: ESRogs 14 March 2014 11:19:05PM 0 points [-]

It seems like you are responding to a stronger claim than is actually being made. "Is consistent with" is not the same as "proves."