[DaniFong]

For the most part, life in latin america seems a lot happier than in more bureaucratically encumbered states. So I don't really buy that argument.

My main point is that truly excellent thought doesn't depend on the same skills that would allow scoring highly in an IQ test. In many cases such skills would inhibit it. In an IQ test it helps to rapidly adapt to the assumed constraints of the problem and come quickly to the closest, most linear answer. If you have a mind compelled to bring questions back to reality, to challenge assumptions or think of things from many different angles, you'll do, on the whole, more poorly than if you had not. But these behaviors are sometimes precisely what you'd want!

[byrneseyeview]

For the most part, life in latin america seems a lot happier than in more bureaucratically encumbered states. So I don't really buy that argument.

The millions of immigrants from there to here don't seem to buy your argument. Which Latin American countries do you mean?

"... truly excellent thought doesn't depend on the same skills that would allow scoring highly in an IQ test."

I happen to agree with you! One thing that's bugged me for years is that you can't design a test that distinguishes, in advance, between cleverness and original stupidity. So that means that whole lot of time-consuming activities can only be measured after the fact if at all. The difference in our views, I think, is that I would argue that IQ tests measure the kind of raw data-processing skills that are useful in any situation (the military tests people heavily, and for all tasks they've found that IQ correlates positively with results -- I think for some technician jobs, it explains about 60% of the variance in individual performance). There just aren't any studies I know of showing that people with low scores on IQ tests go on to succeed in any measurable way. It would be convenient, to say the least, if you argued that the success-deficit among low IQ people is more than compensated for by a success-surplus that happens to be impossible to measure. So I'd like to know if you can find some way to quantify your argument. It would change my thinking on a lot of subjects if I found that doing poorly on an IQ test predicted doing well at some other task.

[DaniFong]

In happiness surveys, Latin America does pretty well -- I think as a region it comes out on top.

This is contentious, but for most of the immigrants, they didn't move because the culture was more enjoyable here. Most of the Latin American immigrants had ther livelihood strip from them in two stages: one, from general industrialization pressures that have affected practically every country, forcing specialization into cash crops to compete, two, increasing competition from the USA and other countries, coupled with crop failures endemic to semi-arid areas.

The few areas in which modestly educated Latin Americans could reliably compete were in illegal cash crops (for which they had less competition in the USA), which continues to cause economic distruption and criminal activity, and manual labor. Those forced into either business might have better chances in the USA, but on the whole they're happy countries. When you're there, you can feel it.

As for success and low IQs, if I recall correctly, someone got the bright idea of testing Caltech professors while Feynman was there -- this may have been prompted after he won the nobel prize, and found out his score from highschool was 125. When they tested the professors, the scores were surprisingly low. I forget who it was, but someone got to make a big deal of his 105 score, since it was three points higher than Feynman's.

My point is that these measures can be stunningly irrelevant, and, if so, while they might have some utility for, say, selecting an undergraduate class, they are often best ignored by an individual when it comes time to decide what one is capable of.