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.

My reading of the behavioral genetics literature is that high intelligence being driven by rare autism variants is looking unlikely.

I haven't looked at this literature, but people with autism and very high IQs might be able to fake being neurotypical. As Steve Hsu told me, we don't know if von Neumann had a normal personality because he certainly had the intelligence to fake being normal if he felt this suited his interests.

von Neumann was noted as being social and extraverted long before he began his lobbying and politicking, and was never described as a second Dirac, so I don't think he was simply acting out of expediency. If high intelligence enabled faking extraversion & social skills, which are useful in almost all contexts*, we would see a noted personality correlation with intelligence and increasing with intelligence, which we don't - extraversion is largely independent of IQ, it's Openness in the Big Five which correlates. High-functioning autistic people are als... (read more)