[mrh0057]

Your statement immediately has a problem. How do you define success? Then you have a second problem when you state a person taking one test is also good on a different test.

Going much over 100 has little correlation with wealth which is what most studies use. Then you run into correlation doesn’t equal causation problem too.

[inglor_cz]

"How do you define success?"

Let us look at the USA of today and its social ills. Quality of a random person's life is undeniably better if they manage:

* to avoid going into jail/prison, * to always have a home, * to be drug-free, or at least drug addiction-free, * to be fit (= not obese), * to be employed or self-employed, * to finish their high school education at least.

Those points might sound modest, but if someone can tick off all of them, they are already sorta successful, especially compared to someone who can only tick off one or two.

A nation of people who could tick off 5 of 6 would probably be much happier than contemporary America.

Do all those points correlate with IQ? I would guess yes, but IANA Social Scientist.

[JPKab]

Great points, and one item that should be added is "not having children in your teens and with an absent partner."

The activists who talk about inequities at the population group level, and ignore the statistics on teen birth rates and single parent family rates above 70% isn't being honest.

Across all ethnic groups, isolating for income level, males raised without fathers commit crimes at dramatically higher rates, drop-out of school at dramatically higher rates, and are more likely to engage in violence. I grew up in a poor county that happened to be mostly Black, but with a significant population of poor whites as well. The common denominator of kids dropping out of school, or getting arrested for hitting their mom when they were 14, 15 years old wasn't race, it was absentee fathers. Incarceration rates aren't remotely high enough to explain the absent fathers in the United States. The vast, vast majority of absentee fathers are not in prison, they are just not around.

[JPKab]

IQ is the single most studied, and statistically proven, quantitative measure in all of social science and psychology.

The US military developed it not as a tool to exclude, but to INCLUDE as many males in the draft as possible during World War I and after.

The determination was that anyone below 85 IQ is literally a net drag on performance in the battlefield, and is unable to add value without a quantity of supervision that is detrimental to a fighting unit.

The harsh realities of IQ go against the grain of both of the major US political parties:

The GOP myth of everyone working hard to uplift themselves simply can't apply to about 10% of the population. There is simply nothing a person born with an 85 IQ can do to succeed in the modern world without a lot of help and assistance that almost certainly needs to come from some form of collective, probably the government.

The Democratic myth is that, given enough help, and with obstacles such as racism removed, everyone can succeed. Therefore, they believe that unequal outcomes are evidence of some form of systemic discrimination. There is no level of discrimination you can remove that is going to help the 10% of the population at or below 85% succeed in the modern world. Cash payments to this population are simply not going to ever yield any form of self-sufficiency in a post-industrial economy.

It's a miserable reality that I hate to think about, and simply makes me sad. Any one of us reading this comment could have been born with this affliction, and I think we should be extremely hones when assessing how to correct this injustice of birth and give these human beings a life that is as meaningful and happy as possible. The lies we tell ourselves do them no favors.

[livinginfear]

> " How do you define success?"

Surely you jest. It really doesn't matter how you define success, IQ is a valid predictor of pretty much any definition of success you can think of. Income, academic achievement, you name it.

[chillwaves]

Defining IQ is tricky to begin with. So is defining success.

Do you really not see the issue?

[setr]

Under GP’s terms, success is trivial to define — pick a reasonable metric. IQ is also well defined — general intelligence is not, and whether IQ maps to general intelligence is questionable (because the latter is hard to define). But for this argument, you don’t need to define general intelligence, and really even IQ’s definition doesn’t matter as long it’s stable (define IQ as simply the outcome of an IQ test). Regardless of IQ’s definition, or the precise questions posed, it simply needs to (consistently) correlate with your selected definition of success to be useful.

He’s also served the counter argument on a plate: pick a reasonable definition of success, and find little or no correlation to IQ. You only need to agree the definition is “reasonable”, and the study is not flawed.