[rkts]

There is a lot of data on this question, and it flatly contradicts Asimov's claims. IQ scores correlate not only with academic performance but also with job performance as well as others' intuitive impression of how "smart" a person is. That's why the army gives intelligence tests to new recruits: high-IQ soldiers (and mechanics and carpenters) do better, on average, than their low-IQ counterparts. Other types of tests, such as the hypothetical test devised by Asimov's mechanic, either have no predictive power or are predictive only as far as they correlate with g, or general intelligence, which is currently best measured by IQ tests. The physiological basis of g is unknown, but it is highly heritable and correlates with a number of physical variables such as brain volume and myelination.

If you want to learn more about the subject, I suggest this book, which concisely disposes of these and other popular anti-IQ arguments:

http://www.amazon.com/Question-Intelligence-IQ-Debate-Americ...

[tokenadult]

I read that book when it came out more than a decade ago. There are newer and better books on the same subject,

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

indeed newer and better books than shown on the link I have just shared. One I particularly like, from a mainstream psychologist of considerable experience, is What Intelligence Tests Miss by Keith R. Stanovich.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

Stanovich includes a huge number of citations to current scholarly literature in his book, and amply makes the case that many important cognitive functions that make up "rationality" are missed by current IQ tests.

[rkts]

I have not read Stanovich's book but it does not appear to be an appropriate introduction to the subject of intelligence. I suspect you recommend these "newer and better" books because they suit your ideological purposes, not because they are better researched or more informative.

[tokenadult]

I suspect you recommend these "newer and better" books because they suit your ideological purposes

I suspect that because you haven't read the book yet (as you forthrightly acknowledge), you don't have a basis of knowledge for knowing why I recommend it. But newer can be better in books about intelligence (not necessarily, but older isn't surely better either) simply because human intelligence is a subject of a very vigorous research program involving hundreds of scientists all over the world. If your claim is that the book you have recommended (which I read, back when it was published) is the last word on the subject, you might at least show onlookers a link to a book review saying so.

I meet in person with the researchers who do the primary research on the subject of human intelligence who happen to be in my town

http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...

and I make sure to keep up with the recent literature (from various points of view) in the huge academic library of my alma mater, the research base of several of the leading scientists in the discipline. I invite onlookers in this thread to access the primary research sources themselves and the see which books are better researched or more informative.

The best introduction to IQ testing, because it was so forward-looking and well researched when it was published, continues to be the Mackintosh (1998) book mentioned in the online bibliography I linked to in my previous reply to you. But Alan S. Kaufman's very new IQ Testing 101 (full citation in another comment in this thread) is also very good, and was published just in the last year.

[rkts]

If your claim is that the book you have recommended ... is the last word on the subject

That would be an audacious claim, considering the book is rather old and only 200 pages. I recommend it because it is a model of concise and accessible prose, good for laymen (like me) who want to get the basic facts with minimal fluff. As far as I know, none of its main points has been invalidated by intervening research. But I can see why its blunt statements of fact might be unpalatable to some.

[rsaarelm]

As far as I understood, Stanovich's thesis is that rational thinking skills are more important than raw intelligence, and high-IQ people can have poor rational thinking skills, and a RQ test for rational thinking skills should be used instead.

This is good so far, but the problem is that rational thinking skills are quite teachable, while there still doesn't seem to be much any success in raising IQ with teaching. So it seems that you'd probably still be better off hiring people with high IQ scores, and training them to improve their RQ if necessary rather than just hiring high RQ score people.

Does Stanovich discuss whether IQ scores correlate with how well people learn rationality skills?

[radu_floricica]

Not "instead". Stanovich is pretty clear that IQ tests measure something real and useful - no debate about that. The trap he's talking about is that in most occasions people live on auto-pilot, and fail to engage their higher cognitive skills. The frequency with which they do this is largely independent of the IQ.

Unfortunately I don't think there is much study into teaching rationality skills systematically. Scientists tend to be rather methodical about such things, and they'll probably want a working RQ test before attempting to do serious teaching. And as Stanovich says, a good RQ test is doable right now - given enough time and money.

[corruption]

The question is, if you include rationality with an IQ test, which I imagine is relatively easily to do, does this correlate even more strongly with "life success" than IQ alone.

Do you know of any research along these lines?

[tokenadult]

Stanovich cites many studies in his book. He would like to produce "RQ" tests to be used alongside IQ tests, but so far no test publisher that I am aware of has taken him up on his suggestion. So except for the (sometimes small-n) studies on specific cognitive abilities that Stanovich cites, there has yet to be validation of "rationality" for occupational counseling or the like. What has been shown, very well indeed, is persistent cognitive illusions that result in irrational decisions, even among persons presumptively selected by high IQ score, such as financial professionals. Behavioral economists have of course been very interested in these issues, and Stanovich cites their primary research papers extensively in his book. Some of those experiments have been replicated by dozens of investigators over thousands of subjects.

[corruption]

What were the conclusions of these studies? It's not my area so would appreciate any insight you can give.

[tokenadult]

Thanks for asking the follow-up question. I'll quote here from a review of the book I wrote for friends on an email list about education of gifted children, and sum up an answer to your question in my last paragraph:

"For many kinds of errors in cognition, as Stanovich points out with multiple citations to peer-reviewed published research, the performance of high-IQ individuals is no better at all than the performance of low-IQ individuals. The default behavior of being a cognitive miser applies to everyone, as it is strongly selected for by evolution. In some cases, an experimenter can prompt a test subject on effective strategies to minimize cognitive errors, and in some of those cases prompted high-IQ individuals perform better than control groups. Stanovich concludes with dismay in a sentence he writes in bold print: 'Intelligent people perform better only when you tell them what to do!'

"Stanovich gives you the reader the chance to put your own cognition to the test. Many famous cognitive tests that have been presented to thousands of subjects in dozens of studies are included in the book. Read along, and try those cognitive tests on yourself. Stanovich comments that if the many cognitive tasks found in cognitive research were included in the item content of IQ tests, we would change the rank-ordering of many test-takers, and some persons now called intelligent would be called average, while some other people who are now called average would be called highly intelligent.

"Stanovich then goes on to discuss the term 'mindware' coined by David Perkins and illustrates two kinds of 'mindware' problems. Some--most--people have little knowledge of correct reasoning processes, which Stanovich calls having 'mindware gaps,' and thus make many errors of reasoning. And most people have quite a lot of 'contaminated mindware,' ideas and beliefs that lead to repeated irrational behavior. High IQ does nothing to protect thinkers from contaminated mindware. Indeed, some forms of contaminated mindware appeal to high-IQ individuals by the complicated structure of the false belief system. He includes information about a survey of a high-IQ society that find widespread belief in false concepts from pseudoscience among the society members."

So Stanovich, based on the studies he cites in his book, concludes that the cognitive strategy of being a cognitive miser (using the minimal amount of information and thinking possible, even if it is too little) is such an inherent part of the human condition that external incentives and societal processes of decision-making are necessary to overcome that weakness. He has a fair amount of optimism about filling mindware gaps through educational processes that would train more thinkers in correct reasoning (as, for example, the kind of statistical training that I recall was part of your higher education). He suggests that actively counteracting contaminated mindware (which is something I have a penchant for doing here on HN) is considerably more difficult, because it is precisely high-IQ individuals who are best able to defend their irrational beliefs.

[radu_floricica]

Do you by any chance know of any good resources about training one's RQ? I've read Stanovich, and the first choice in the bibliography seemed to be Jonathan Baron's Thinking and Deciding - which proved to be both very informative and dry as ash. Anything more practical?

[techiferous]

> academic performance

> job performance

Performance involves achieving goals, which obviously takes intelligence. However, I believe that as your intelligence grows you stop seeing what you are doing in a narrow fashion and tend to think more in terms of systems and many goals that are interrelated. When that happens, you will not optimize for one goal but for many. Someone with less intelligence may outperform you on a measure of one specific goal, but you will outperform overall (overall meaning not at your job, but at your life). So performance has its limitations as a measurement for intelligence.

> others' intuitive impression of how "smart" a person is

This only works for those somewhat close to the mean. People who would be many standard deviations above the mean may be so intelligent that their intelligence would be mistaken for foolishness or others may not be well equipped to measure it.

[zppx]

Last time I checked the data supporting the "IQ is good" had some horrendous lack of statistical information, the same applies to the "IQ is bad" people.

Their papers lack to understand where statistical significance fits in inference which they use, abusing the scope of validity, but I did not read much of them (5 from "IQ is good" and 6 from "IQ is bad"), by the way I understand nothing about biology, being not my area of interest I cannot criticize these papers on these grounds, I only think that's very strange that both sides do not construct their arguments using neuroscience.

[jamesseda]

How can you contradict that the mechanic is better at analyzing car problems and riddles, while being worse at IQ tests?

[crystalis]

> high-IQ soldiers (and mechanics and carpenters) do better, on average, than their low-IQ counterparts.

Note that 'on average'.

[TeHCrAzY]

You are mistaking knowledge and experience for intelligence.

[jamesseda]

What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

[TeHCrAzY]

I don't know, but I see it as distinctly different from knowledge/experience. ie. A surgeon would be much more likely to be able to learn to be a mechanic, than vice versa.

[ars]

A measure of how quickly (and how well) you can gain Knowledge and Experience.