[gwern]

> His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary students who went on to be Nobel laureates William Shockley and Luis Alvarez�and rejected them both.Their IQs weren't high enough. Terman concluded: "We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated."

Both just barely failed the cutoff, and given the very low base-rate of Nobelists, it's not surprising that there would be misses. This is the same logic as with terrorism-detecting systems.

> The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. -

Wrong. The correlation doesn't go away in the Terman report, nor does it go away in the later long-term SMPY studies. What happens past 130 or so is that IQ loses predictive value compared to Extraversion (for income) or Conscientiousness and Openness (for discoveries).

> For your surprise an English researcher named Liam Hudson found that average students had much more diverse answers than students with high I.Q.�s.

And yet - to go back to the submission title - when you measure Openness, it's the only Big Five personality to show a correlation with IQ. The correlation is positive and not negligible (r=0.3 or so, IIRC). So why does one sample about divergent thinking matter?