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Nanashi comments on Some secondary statistics from the results of LW Survey - Less Wrong
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Let's pretend that each LWer represents a snapshot in the life of one big meta-uber-LWer. Here is the story of hisher life (with my theory in parentheses):
It starts off its life making less money than average, but donating more of their overall salary. (Perhaps an idealistic student who spends a large chunk of its early 20s in school. Since most of school ends up being paid for by Uber-Parents, it has more disposable income to donate.)
Once it reaches its mid-20s, it starts making more money than the average. But, on the downside, it starts donating a lot less both overall and as a percentage of its income. (That college education pays off with a decent job, but the reality of growing up sinks in... Bills must be paid, rent is due, groceries must be bought, and less money is available to give away.)
As it reaches its mid-30s, it advances its career sufficiently, and starts making pretty good money, but not millionaire money. (Now that it has a lot more money to throw around, it's safe to start being idealistic again. After all, it finally made it!)
Despite its success, the Uber-LWer is still making less money than the Uber-HighIQer. (Perhaps people are overreporting their IQ. Or maybe there's some social consequences to rationalism. Or maybe the career paths of LWers tend to be lower paying. Not sure what to make of this one.)
[edit] Incidentally, the US Mean Income shows us why we typically use Median income instead: the mean is dramatically thrown off by the small percentage of very rich individuals.
IQ doesn't change much over the lifetime, being an LW'ler does. Decisions that you made ten years ago might determine your current salary.
The data that you provided doesn't prove that claim. To make that claim you would need to filter for LW'ler who live in the US. Living in the US is correlated with higher income.
I'd have to do a lot more than just filter for USA. There's a strong correlation between age and income, and the LW population is much younger than the average US citizen. There's a pretty decent chance that the gap in IQ-income is more a function of age. I'd have to divide high IQ individuals into age buckets and show that their average income is higher. I don't think that data currently exists, or at least I wasn't able to find it.
Filtering for USA is done in a line of R code. It's not much additional effort if you already have set up the rest.
Oh yeah, it will be easy to do. I'm just mobile right now and don't have access to the computer with the data on it. I'll update tonight though.
I think so. Don't we have quite a lot of people in academia, for instance?
Oh, I guess the other thing is where one lives. Salaries are high in the US, and LW has plenty of people from elsewhere. (I think the difference is particularly large in the software industry, where lots of LW people and lots of high-IQ people work.) Do you fancy taking a look at what happens if you restrict the LW sample to people who live in the US?
[EDITED to add: Oops, I see ChristianKI has already made this observation.]
Updated to include US-only data.
It's interesting how much smaller the difference in salary between all-LW and US-LW looks when you look at data broken down by salary brackets than when you don't. Not very surprising in retrospect, but still interesting.
There are some interesting effects in the charitable contribution figures. For instance, in the first row we see that US-LW contributions in this bracket are way lower than US-general, US-LW income is about the same as US-general, but US-LW contributions/income are bigger than US-general contributions/income. The 100k-200k bracket shows a similar oddity: very similar contributions, very similar incomes, but much larger contributions/income.
My guess is that the contributions/income figures are averages of ratios rather than ratios of averages, so that if you have one person with an income of $1 giving $100 away then that's going to pull your average way up. I guess there are quite a lot of low-income high-relative-giving LW folks and that they explain the low-end figures, and that at the high end there are maybe one or two high-relative-giving LW folks to explain the high-end figures.
Agggh! I'm glad you pointed out that incongruency. When I was reformatting the graph, I only copied in half of the US Mean Contribuions so the first 4 rows of that were incorrect. The graph has been updated. The numbers are in fact a ratio of averages. LW mean contribution is calculated as follows: (Total Contributions of Subgroup)/(Total Income of Subgroup).
However, I am not seeing where you're getting that US-LW income is about the same as US-General; for 0-25k the USA-LW mean income is $11k, the USA-General is $15k.
Sheer hallucination, I think. Sorry.