Article on IQ: The Inappropriately Excluded

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I saw an article on high IQ people being excluded from elite professions. Because the site seemed to have a particular agenda related to the article, I wanted to check here for other independent supporting evidence for the claim.

Their fundamental claim seems to be that P(elite profession|IQ) peaks at 133 and decreases thereafter, and goes do to 3% of peak at 150. If true, I'd find that pretty shocking.

They indicate this diminishing probability of "success" at the high tail of the IQ distribution as a known effect. Anyone got other studies on this?

The Inappropriately Excluded

By dividing the distribution function of the elite professions' IQ by that of the general population, we can calculate the relative probability that a person of any given IQ will enter and remain in an intellectually elite profession. We find that the probability increases to about 133 and then begins to fall. By 140 it has fallen by about 1/3 and by 150 it has fallen by about 97%. In other words, for some reason, the 140s are really tough on one's prospects for joining an intellectually elite profession. It seems that people with IQs over 140 are being systematically, and likely inappropriately, excluded.

Their fundamental claim seems to be that P(elite profession|IQ) peaks at 133 and decreases thereafter, and goes do to 3% of peak at 150. If true, I'd find that pretty shocking.

They indicate this diminishing probability of "success" at the high tail of the IQ distribution as a known effect. Anyone got other studies on this?

The Inappropriately Excluded

By dividing the distribution function of the elite professions' IQ by that of the general population, we can calculate the relative probability that a person of any given IQ will enter and remain in an intellectually elite profession. We find that the probability increases to about 133 and then begins to fall. By 140 it has fallen by about 1/3 and by 150 it has fallen by about 97%. In other words, for some reason, the 140s are really tough on one's prospects for joining an intellectually elite profession. It seems that people with IQs over 140 are being systematically, and likely inappropriately, excluded.

Yikes. If your lunatic sensor didn't go off reading this, you should get it adjusted.

From a theoretical standpoint, democratic meritocracies should evolve five IQ defined 'castes', The Leaders, The Advisors, The Followers, The Clueless and The Excluded.

If that doesn't bother you, notice that this guy is putting a lot of weight on really simplistic statistics about the edge cases (the half-percent or less of the population which is very smart and/or is "successful in" one of his preferred "intellectually elite professions"). Oh, I see Gwern actually commented about this in a comment.

Basically, this is a lovely irony of a presumed-high-IQ author jumping to a pretty ridiculous conclusion because he's not willing/able to try to dissolve his questions and do the hard work to be rigorous in his research.

If your lunatic sensor didn't go off reading this, you should get it adjusted.

A funny comment at LW.

Even lunatics can be right.

Gwern said

The assumption here is that both the general population and elite professions are described by a normal distribution (N(100,15) and N(125,6.5), respectively)

Is it? I didn't see that. assumption stated. Problem is, they didn't explicitly specify where they got their distributions. At least I don't see it.

Looking again at some of their conclusions in the preceding paragraph, it does look like they're assuming gauss... (read more)