[gwern]

> You are assuming that a person with a phd is inherently smarter than a person running a hot dog stand.

I'm assuming that if I pick random PhDs and hot dog vendors, I will get a higher average IQ from my random PhDs. Are my PhDs strictly greater in IQ than my hot dog sellers? Maybe, maybe not. But will, say, 99% of my PhDs have a higher IQ? I'd bet on that number or something like it.

> No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me.

No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.

The environmental causes alone are legion: lead plumbing, no formal schooling (worth something like 5-10 IQ points), rampant parasitic diseases of every conceivable sort, irregular or poor nutrition with nutritional deficits (protein deficiency damaging early neurological development - low myelination of nerves, iodine deficiency, etc.), medicine that would kill most patients...

Your only valid points are that IQ is not perfectly correlated with success and that it varies within every group. This is not news to anyone who has done even a little reading on the topic.

[fmora]

I think you and me are using different definitions of smart. You think a person is smart only if he goes to school. That is not what I mean by smart. So that you understand I'll use potential education ability as my definition for smart. A person from a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as anybody else. A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time. Now, what is the potential for a dog. Its potential is that he can learn a couple of hundreds of words during his life time. You cannot increase your potential to learn when you are born the same way that a dog cannot increase his potential to learn so that it matches that of a human. I would say the majority (99%) of the human population today as with those of 2000 years ago have the potential to earn a phd.

Please read this article: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/08/09/beyond-the-10000-hour-...

A person with far more education than you and me and by your definition much more smarter than you or me pretty much agrees with me. If you want to become great- i.e. get a phd and do great research - you have to work harder than the other person. Notice how much "work" is emphasized.

Honestly if you still don't agree with me after this than I give up. Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart. You cannot convince the person that simply refuses to see.

[gwern]

> You think a person is smart only if he goes to school.

I have never said this. It is a well-established fact that schooling is not just correlated with IQ, but actually causes an increase (Husén & Tuijnman 1991).

> A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time.

...and you ignore my environmental arguments entirely.

And yes, I've read Hamming's lecture several times. Hamming was a great scientist. However, he was both not a social scientist, and he was addressing a room full of scientists at Bell Labs, one of the most effective research institutes in the 20th century. No one mentioned IQ because everyone there already had all the IQ they needed! Bell Labs was one of the brainiest places around! It was on par with MIT, where even the secretaries used and programmed early Emacs!

It'd be like discussing how to become a great programmer, and mentioning that you need to be alive. It's a prerequisite that's already met; discussing it is an utter waste of time and balmy.

Nowhere does Hamming say, 'and btw it doesn't matter if you score a 60 on an IQ test and can barely dress yourself in the morning, you just need to follow my suggestions and you have a shot at the Nobel!' Because that would be idiotic. Rather, Hamming at the very beginning states:

> "I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done."

He assumes from the beginning that he is discussing 'very capable' people and why some accomplish great things and some don't.

> Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart.

Hey, why give up? Doesn't Hard Work Conquer All?

[fmora]

>>Hey, why give up? Doesn't Hard Work Conquer All?

very funny

[scotty79]

> I'm assuming that if I pick random PhDs and hot dog vendors, I will get a higher average IQ from my random PhDs. Are my PhDs strictly greater in IQ than my hot dog sellers? Maybe, maybe not. But will, say, 99% of my PhDs have a higher IQ? I'd bet on that number or something like it.

Are PhDs dominated by technical types? Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?

> No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.

Not everyone could write a book back then. Not every book from back then survived. You can't tell how many ancient Ramanujans left no trace. Ingenious concepts of later ages often cropped up multiple times centuries earlier only to be dismissed and forgotten.

That said you are spot on environmental factors. Here http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_... it is said that thing as simple as deworming might increase very significantly children spend on learning and training their intellectual capacities.

[gwern]

> Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?

Yes, and yes for the latter. Philosophy is my own field, and while I would be much more comfortable making this assertion of analytic philosophers, post-modern (I'll assume you really mean 'continental') philosophers are still very smart people.

Since you aren't doing any research, I will do just a little, and point out that philosophy PhDs tend to have been philosophy majors, and philosophy majors tend to have extremely high GRE scores, and the GRE is extremely correlated with IQ; philosophy majors are #1 and beat every other major when it comes to the Verbal and Analytic Writing sections - surely not the work of people of average intelligence - and rank 15th out of 50 in math scores (ahead of majors such as biology, accounting, architecture and others; being beaten by various engineering, physics/astronomy, and math majors): http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...

> Not every book from back then survived.

Yes, but many catalogues (the Suda eg.) and quotes have survived. The survival rate and biases introduced by history can, and have been, estimated. (The latest one I heard about used statistics about the survival of works of the Venerable Bede, but I can't find the citation in a quick google.) The bias is not orders of magnitude, though it hits some authors badly (Sophocles's prize-winners, eg.) as one would expect from a random process.