[projektir]

> Truthfully, I've found that the real difference in intelligence between people isn't so large as many people think it is.

Well, I've read many very convincing arguments that it is (including statistics pertaining to how children perform in school, with which I have my own problems, but which nonetheless need to be accounted for), how have you found that it is not?

[CuriouslyC]

First off, IQ has been shown to potentially change quite significantly over long periods of time. Second, IQ is a very specific measure, it basically only deals with how good you are at performing symbol manipulation in working memory. Creative intelligence is far more important in my opinion but that isn't measured because we don't really have any idea how to do so.

We all have a fairly similar brains, some people's are organized slightly more efficiently for certain tasks, but that doesn't mean they're more efficient for everything, in fact it is quite like likely the opposite. Additionally, the brain is incredibly plastic, so you're not completely stuck with the architecture you have.

[projektir]

> First off, IQ has been shown to potentially change quite significantly over long periods of time.

Do you have a source on this? There's the case of childrens' IQ varying over time, but it appears to stabilize once people reach adulthood. Are there actual records of adults' IQ going 110 -> 120 -> 90 without some highly botched test involved?

> Second, IQ is a very specific measure, it basically only deals with how good you are at performing symbol manipulation in working memory.

This is not really informative without expanding on IQ's correlation to other things and how important something like this is to a given person when multiplied on their entire lifespan. IQ seems to be fairly relevant to being able to quickly solve certain styles of problems - I would say that's pretty significant.

> We all have a fairly similar brains, some people's are organized slightly more efficiently for certain tasks, but that doesn't mean they're more efficient for everything, in fact it is quite like likely the opposite.

If there's such a thing as being more or less efficient at something, there's enough variation that there will be cases where one is efficient in a good combination and one is efficient in a bad combination. Such a difference will matter for a sufficiently competitive environment.

Unfortunately, I generally found that while there's a very large amount of people who don't believe that IQ is important, most of the good and sourced arguments seem to be on the other side and I'm scrambling to find any solid rebuttal on the subject.

I.e., https://www.gwern.net/iq

[CuriouslyC]

I don't have the study handy and I don't feel like digging, but I seem to recall longitudinal comparison of IQ scores over long periods of time (something like 30 years) showing a correlation of around 0.7 or so. That's more than a standard deviation, though given the nonlinear scaling of IQ scores I couldn't say exactly how many points it equates to. One study in a shorter period showed swings as high as 21 points on tests performed by the same group. Clearly IQ can change, we just don't know how to control the process.

To the extent that you end up deriving your pleasure and livelihood from abstract symbol manipulation, IQ is important. IQ does matter a lot when you're first learning to do something, but as you master tasks the importance drops. A study on the correlation between chess performance and IQ showed that IQ only predicted chess ability in novices.

I agree that some people have natural proclivities that better match the structure of society. That is an unfortunate side effect of diversity under a fixed system.

I am not arguing that IQ isn't important, but is possible to improve it (regardless of our knowledge as to the process) and beyond a certain basic level it is much less important than creativity - a fact that is only going to become more true with computer automation.