RichardKennaway comments on [link] The surprising downsides of being clever - Less Wrong Discussion
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If people choose goals according to their ability to achieve them, then ability and success in achieving those goals will be uncorrelated. Where a correlation would be expected is between ability and achievements, not between ability and the difference between achievements and goals.
Intelligence is a puzzle-solving, dealing-with-complexity thing, the measure of how complicated a picture can be broken down to elements (understanding, analysis) and reassembled (model, prediction). At least this is how doing the Raven tests feels like. What puzzles me about intelligence-as-goal-achieving-ability is that is this really the bottleneck in so many goals? In my experience very few goals require dealing with complexity, and the most succesful people I personally know are rather simple-minded, their success lied in choosing a goal and then never, ever ever giving up, having a bulldog-like determination. Complexity was usually not a part of the picture.