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Notes -
On (Noticing) IQ (When You're Allowed To)
I was writing a reply to @TowardsPanna 's question in the SSQ thread that got a bit out of control. Large enough that I decided to just post it here too.
For what it's worth, none of these ideas are particularly new, at least they aren't if you compulsively browse LessWrong (or even read a lot of Scott), but the older I get, the more I realize that novelty is often just a nice-to-have.
Yes. Of course?
Humans aren't stupid. We’re expert pattern-matchers. We’re distinctively evolved to be relentless Bayesian updaters, constantly scanning our environment for correlations that offer a survival or status advantage. We’re Noticers™. The problem is that we’ve built a civilization where noticing the most predictive variable for life outcomes is considered a faux pas at best and a moral failing at worst. It’s common now to explicitly state, in corporate policy or legislation, that specific classes of Bayesian evidence are "fruit of the poisonous tree" and have to be ignored.
Like many well-intentioned interventions that hinge on obscuring reality, it doesn't work: when you outlaw the most accurate map, people don’t stop navigating. They just buy worse maps.
In the ancestral environment, we didn't have the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (only the Modern Hunter Gatherer has had the privilege). We did, however, have proxies. We had vocabulary size, wit, speed of learning. In the modern environment, we’ve muddied the waters. We’ve got proxies that look like intelligence but are actually just measuring conformity to the upper-middle-class Blue Tribe aesthetic. We look at credentials, which are increasingly just a measure of "willingness to sit still and follow instructions for four years."
(Please note that I don't think that education is purely credentialism. This is a disease that affects midwits first and foremost. A bachelor's in physics is a stronger signal than one in sociology.)
So when we agree to pretend that "mental horsepower" is a myth, or that it’s entirely malleable via the Growth Mindset, we don’t actually create a flat hierarchy. We just create an opaque one. We create a hierarchy based on the performance of competence rather than the reality of capacity.
This leads to a specific kind of societal gaslighting. The narrative is that anyone can be a doctor or a quantum physicist if they just work hard and acquire knowledge. If someone fails to climb the ladder, the implication is that they stupidly chose not to grow their brain. They lacked grit. They lacked character. In a world where aptitude is taboo, failure’s always a moral deficit.
The obvious analogy is a world where the Paralympics and the "normal" Olympics are wrapped up into a single event. Anyone, including the disabled athletes, who points out that missing a leg makes one very unlikely to win in the 100m sprint is immediately walloped and then piled-upon, with cries of "the Science! Not-Murray et al clearly showed, in their landmark 1998 paper, that the number of remaining lower limbs had no relation to performance in the sleighing, shooting and arm wrestling categories. The 2012 Olympics were studied in great detail, and it was confirmed that Usain Bolt had the same number and arrangement of legs as his closest competitors."
When the person with no legs fails to win the 100m sprint, the commentators nod gravely and say, "He just didn't want it enough. He failed to manifest the victory."
I see three main mechanisms driving this, and why the average person (even the smart average person) underestimates the sheer weight of g.
The "All Men Are Created Equal" Overcorrection:
We’ve engaged in a concerted propaganda campaign for decades suggesting that because moral equality is mandatory, biological identity must also be mandatory. This makes it practically unthinkable to consider that it’s perfectly possible to construct a political system that grants equal rights to all citizens while acknowledging that not everyone can visualize a rotating 3D cube with equal fidelity. But biting that bullet feels dangerous to many. It feels like opening the door to old aristocracies. So instead, we pretend the differences don't exist, which inadvertently creates a new aristocracy of "people who know the right shibboleths."
The Bubble and the Range Restriction:
This is the big one. We live in intense cognitive bubbles.
If you’re reading this, you probably spend your life surrounded by people within one standard deviation of your own IQ. You went to a selective university. You work in a cognitive field. You live in a zip code priced for high-earners.
You can go days, maybe weeks, without having a meaningful conversation with someone significantly below an IQ of 100, or even +- 1SD outside of yours.
This creates a statistical illusion known as range restriction. If you look at the NBA, height doesn't correlate very strongly with points scored. Everyone’s already tall; therefore, the variance in performance seems to come from practice, grit, and shooting form. If you looked at the general population, height would be the single biggest predictor of basketball ability (because the 5’5” guy isn't getting the rebound).
Imagine if the NBA had a rule that you couldn't mention height. You'd still need to pick players, so you'd start using proxies. You'd talk about "reach" and "wingspan" and "vertical leap." You'd notice that certain players had better "court vision" or "positional awareness." And all of these would be real skills, but they'd also be correlated with height, and height would still be determining who made it into the league in the first place. The difference is that now you'd be pretending you weren't noticing height at all, which would make you more likely to mistake the packaging for the product.
In your life as a student or a professional, you look around at your peers. You see that Alice is doing better than Bob. Since Alice and Bob are both roughly equally smart (they both made it this far), you attribute Alice’s success to her conscientiousness, her charm, or her work ethic. You conclude, erroneously, that "intelligence doesn't matter much, it’s all about hard work."
You don’t see the people who were both dumber and less hardworking than you; they’re in a different social class entirely. You rarely see the people who are simultaneously smarter and more hardworking; they’re running hedge funds or solving alignment theory and don’t hang out at the hospital cafeteria. These are far more likely to be acquaintances rather than peers.
The problem is when we generalize from this filtered view. We start believing that because IQ doesn't predict success within our bubble, it must not predict success period. We see a colleague who's a bit slower but works incredibly hard and does fine, and we extrapolate that to everyone. We forget that the slow colleague is still in the 85th percentile of the general population, and that the person in the 30th percentile who works just as hard isn't a doctor at all, they're doing something else, probably something that pays worse and doesn't sound as impressive on a Hinge profile (see proxies re-emerging?).
The Opacity of Alien Competence:
Some professions are more segregated than others. An ER physician arguably sees a more representative slice of humanity than a family medicine specialist, who sees a more representative slice than a Google L10, but the direction of judgment is difficult.
When a patient comes to see me, I’m performing a distinct ritual. I listen to symptoms, I peer at them significantly, I type things into a computer. To the patient, the output seems to appear from thin air. A sufficiently competent doctor makes it look like they never broke a sweat. A less experienced one (like me) makes up for it by projecting confidence and then panic-Googling the interaction effects of MAOIs in the bathroom later.
The patient can't judge my raw processing power. They can only judge my bedside manner, my clothes, and my degree on the wall. They’re judging the paint job.
When I'm on call and a patient is rambling in a disorganized way, using neologisms, showing thought disorder, I don't need to know their IQ score to recognize that something is cognitively wrong. But when I'm in the doctors' lounge, listening to two consultants argue about whether a patient's depressive symptoms are primarily biological or reactive, I also don't need IQ scores to know who's making the sharper arguments. The difference is that in the first case, we're allowed to talk about cognitive impairment. In the second case, we're allowed to talk about "clinical judgment" or "experience" or even "medical education," but we're not supposed to talk about the underlying mental horsepower that makes one doctor better at diagnostic reasoning than another.
(Ideally, the whole point of the medical education system and associated exams is to put the gatekeeping before patient contact. When you see an MD in the wild, you ideally want to not need to bother with asking for a transcript of their grades, nor fear that they don't know the safe limit for paracetamol. The reasons why this idyllic state of affairs doesn't hold are too lengthy to fit on this margin. Be smart about things.)
Conversely, I can't judge the competence of a senior software engineer. I know enough Python to automate a spreadsheet, but can I distinguish between a decently competent programmer and a 10x developer without referencing their credentials or status? Probably not.
This brings us back to the original shower thought. If we can't discuss the engine, we obsess over the trim.
In a "blue" environment where social class is ostensibly "over" and never discussed, it’s actually the primary sorting algorithm. We use heuristics like "do they speak with a Received Pronunciation or General American accent?" or "do they know the current correct terminology for this specific social justice concept?" to decide who’s smart.
This favors the people living and breathing inside the dominant culture. It favors the legacy admission who knows how to dress and speak. It subtly closes out the dissenting voice from the outsider who might have raw supercomputer-level processing power but speaks with a regional accent, wears ill-fitting clothes, and hasn't learned the subtle dance of feigning humility while signaling status.
Some professions, like programming, are comparatively more sane/honest. You can have a perfectly decent career in FAANG if you don't shower regularly and speak with a lisp, assuming you are actually good at your job. Hell, like the dude with the MLP (pony, not perceptron) resume, you can counter-signal by being incredibly eccentric. If you're still drawing a seven figure salary, then you're worth it.
Speaking very generally, I think society (a vague term, can't help it) needs to move in the direction of more meritocracy, not less. In practice, that looks like more standardized testing, with reduced focus on vibes.
The vibes are, paradoxically, easier to fake than the exam results:
Consider the standard critique of the SAT: "It just measures how rich your parents are."
This is statistically false. The correlation between SAT scores and parental income is real but moderate (around r = 0.4). But compare this to the correlation between parental income and "being captain of the fencing team" or "having a polished personal essay about your volunteer work in Peru" or "speaking with the correct sociolect during an interview."
The SAT is a partially gameable metric. "Holistic" traits are entirely gameable products.
If you are a rich parent with a dim child, you cannot tutor them into a 1600 SAT. You can maybe get them from a 1000 to a 1150. But you can buy them a spot in a prestigious internship. You can hire a consultant to write their essays. You can ensure they have the "right" hobbies.
Since this is my soapbox, and you're presumably still reading this far, I also want to speak out against another approach towards modern fetishization of pseudo-meritocracy, or more accurately, aristocracy.
I should probably elaborate on the @2rafa position, since she's the strongest advocate (only advocate?) She's old money. My impression being not "my parents paid for Stanford" money, but "my great-grandfather's trust fund paid for Stanford's new rowing pavilion" money. She'll happily tell you that the problem with modern society isn't that we sort by intelligence, but that we pretend to sort by intelligence while actually sorting by a particularly vulgar form of striving that she finds aesthetically repulsive.
Her critique goes something like this: The modern PMC striver is a grotesque creature. The Tiger Mom. The résumé-padding, LinkedIn-posting, "crushing it" bugman who measures his self-worth in LeetCode problems solved and whether he made partner by 35. This, she argues, is what you get when you tell everyone that anyone can be elite if they just grind hard enough. You don't get equality. You get a soulless arms race of performative busyness, a cargo cult where the striver apes the surface of elite competence without acquiring the substance.
Better, she says, to return to a system where everyone knows their place. Where the sorting happens early, quietly, and permanently. Where you don't try to be elite, you simply are. Where excellence is demonstrated through effortless grace, not desperate optimization. The boarding school accent. The understated wardrobe that costs more than a car. The ability to discuss Proust and quarterbacks with equal nonchalance. The aristocratic assumption that if you have to ask, you're not one of us, and that's fine. It's a system that rewards being rather than becoming.
From her vantage, this is obviously superior. And I get the appeal. If you're already at the top of the heap by accident of birth, a system that freezes the heap in place is very comfortable. You don't have to worry about some brilliant kid from a refugee camp out-hustling your mediocre son for the last spot at Harvard Medical School. Your son's spot is secure, not because he's particularly gifted, but because he's yours. The system can quietly acknowledge his inherited position without anyone having to say the quiet part out loud. The "genteel" facade is the point, it transforms raw inherited advantage into a question of taste.
This is far from the worst approach. The elites are elites for a reason. That reason is often hereditary. Even total regime change and societal upheaval usually has the dispossessed children of nobility (or the elites) almost inevitably percolate back to the top. This is evident in data from places as far-flung as China, where the grandsons of pre-revolution landlords often outperform their peers. The previous status-quo was bearable, in some ways superior.
However, the aristocratic alternative often ends up parasitic on the very meritocratic machinery it despises. You still need high-g selection somewhere. You still need the engineers, the surgeons, the generals who can think. You can dress that up in tradition and patronage, you can recruit them as client talent, you can offer them a place in the court, but you cannot run a technical civilization on inherited gentility alone. At some point, reality reasserts itself, usually via catastrophe.
But here's where the rubber meets the road: I am that brilliant kid's son. My dad did out-hustle the mediocre sons of privilege. He clawed his way out of a refugee camp because somewhere, a grinding, impersonal system looked at his test scores and said: "This one. This one is worth plucking from the mass and polishing." He wasn't sorted by vibes. He was sorted by a standardized exam that didn't care about his accent, his hand-me-down clothes, or whether he knew which fork to use at a state dinner. It cared whether he could solve the problems in front of him, quickly and correctly.
The "genteel sorting" system that @2rafa prefers would have written him off before he started. He didn't have the right pedigree, the right consonants at the end of his name, the right summer internships. He had the wrong everything except the one thing that actually matters for medicine: the ability to hold a thousand variables in his head while making a decision under pressure. The exam caught that. The "holistic" process would have missed it, distracted by his lack of polish.
So yes, I have a personal bias. I believe in meritocracy because meritocracy is the only reason I'm here, writing this, instead of hauling crates in a warehouse or pulling weeds out of a farm. But my bias aligns with a principle: if we're going to have sorting, and we are, because complex societies require it, then let the sorting be honest. Let it be based on the thing that actually predicts performance, not the cultural markers that predict comfort for the existing elite.
The aristocratic approach pretends it's avoiding Goodhart's Law by refusing to articulate its metrics. But the metric is still there: it's called lineage. It's just a metric that can't be improved upon, only inherited. And while it's true that modern meritocracy is imperfectly gamed (that's what this entire post is about) the solution isn't to replace an imperfect but theoretically climbable ladder with a walled garden whose keys are handed out at birth.
The modern PMC striver is indeed a pathetic figure in many ways. But he's pathetic because he's been lied to. He's been told that credentials are everything, then handed a system where credentials are increasingly just proxies for the ability to acquire credentials. He's been told that growth mindset will make him a doctor, then sorted by an IQ test disguised as the MCAT. His sin isn't striving. His sin is believing the official story, and optimizing for the proxies rather than the underlying reality.
@2rafa's genteel system doesn't fix this. It just makes the proxies even more opaque and even more heritable. It replaces the MCAT with the recommendation letter from your Exeter headmaster. It replaces the LeetCode grind with the unspoken assumption that of course you'll summer at the firm your father's college roommate runs. It removes the last remaining pressure points where someone like my father could punch through.
What we need isn't a return to aristocracy. It's a return to honesty. Acknowledge that g exists, that it matters, and that it's largely heritable. Then build a system that finds the people who have it, wherever they are, however they present. Make the exam harder to game, not easier. Make the credentials less important, not more. And stop pretending that the alternative to vulgar striving is egalitarianism. It's very much not. The alternative is feudalism with better manners.
Sadly, none of this particularly matters in the long-run. The AI will "meritocratically" take your job, and will eventually do it better than you can imagine. My kids aren't going to college. Yours probably won't either. I find that reassuring, in some ways, short timelines taken seriously make a lot of squabbling moot. You can stop running so damn hard, the winner has a jetpack. Isn't that oh, so reassuring?
I think the best counterargument is this @daguerrean's post from the latest fun thread. The more meritocracy you have, the more soul-crushing the grind becomes. Personal tutoring can't get you from 1000 to 1400 SAT points, but it can get you from 1400 to 1450. Which means you will lose your spot in Harvard to someone like you who has spent even more time on grinding and got all the way to 1455. The end result is South Korea, which is great to import cars and electronics from, but is a pretty terrible place to live in, no one wants to procreate there.
Yes, examining every single child and sorting them globally is a more efficient use of their brainpower, but is this efficiency worth it? You yourself mentioned that class and accumulated wealth are passable proxies for g. Any significant outliers are usually noticed and get to advance, not to the very top, but if their intelligence is heritable, their children can take the next step. Your subcontinental ancestors probably went too far with the rigidity of jātis, but a more flexible (yet still rigid) European class system works. I'm not saying it's perfect, but turning the dial all the way to the max, East Asian style, is not the best option.
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People say they believe this when they argue IQ is fake, but whenever I try to clarify it I get ghosted. I ask them, so, you believe a student that scores 80 on an IQ test, if they study and work hard, can become a doctor? And you would be happy seeing this doctor?
Nobody ever says yes! On some level they appreciate that IQ tests are measuring something real, they're just uncomfortable with the brutality of the intellectual dick measuring.
and uncomfortable with the implications of the results of those IQ tests when looking at populations rather than individuals.
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It's much more terrifying than that. There were two rough branches of the old eugenics movement, American and European. The European school of thought was that to get more quality people, those people should have more children. Deliberately breed your best specimens to get better.
The American school, OTOH, was more concerned with raising the floor by culling the lowest quality people. Ergo, Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood, inspired by the simple notion that if all the black people have abortions, then in a generation or two there just won't be any more black people. Trawling through American history, you'll occasionally stumble across references like "during this decade, the state of X sterilized 50,000 people, mostly the indigent and feeble-minded". This culminated in the 30's when American progressive eugenicists were quite proud to announce that finally a world leader had embraced the obvious logic of their approach to the selective breeding on the animal Man for the improvement of all society - and I'm sure you can guess who they were talking about, and how quickly they all distanced themselves from those positions and claims after 1945.
Basically, leftists have a cognitohazard blind spot on this topic because if they allow themselves to even consider biological inequality then the superstructure of their belief system goes right back to the stuff of nightmares.
Hmm? I don't mean to accuse you of burying the lede, but the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis. They were European, they were less than left wing, and they practiced both positive and negative eugenics. More Aryan Uber-babies with three blue eyes (more is better), fewer gypsies and schizophrenics.
The Right is hardly over its own hangups in that department.
Yes, that's literally the example I was talking about. Progressives in charge of American Eugenics organizations in the early 30's had very kind words to say about the "fine Mr. Hitler" for finally being willing to try to implement "sterilize all the bad people" on a national level. Then of course, things went a little off the rails, to put it lightly. The right/left divide was... weirder back then. A couple years after that, leftist propogandists were all but begging the US to not get involved in Europe and just let the Nazis and Soviets conquer the place, please bro, remember how much the trenches in WW1 sucked, just stay out. And then Hitler betrayed Stalin, broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and those same propogandists literally had their anti-war books and records recalled to be replaced with paeans to the glory of battle.
But for the overall point, imagine if you believed in HBD and that it was scientifically possible to selectively breed humans just like any other animal and also had a powerful technocratic impulse to run roughshod over democracy and liberty in favor of expert-driven perfection of the masses.
My thesis is that if many progressives allowed themselves to really accept that dumb, violent people have dumb, violent kids, then the same impulse that drives them to ban plastic straws would drive them to support mass sterilization campaigns - rather like it did the last time they considered HBD fit for consideration.
OTOH, they might actually support killing criminals again, so there'd possibly be some upside.
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They're also the primary reason the left distanced itself from eugenics.
The US left still loves Planned Parenthood and Harvard-educated experts; they just like to ignore why Planned Parenthood was started and what Harvard-educated experts said on the topic before the Nazis made the concept verboten.
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One problem with the Nazis is that they were very, very, very bad with eugenics.
Like about as backwards in their biggest focus as you can be. Total unforced error, and extremely ironic given the manpower of the Manhattan Project.
You kinda skipped that detail.
The Holocaust was just plain old ethnic hatred, not eugenics. It was never presented as eugenics. The Jews were not dumb, or inferior, they were the enemy. Secretly controlling the banks and puppeteering the Allies against the Germans. They had to be removed from society in order to safeguard the German people. That was the story the Nazis told. (For a long while they were even pretending to be resettling them, rather than admitting they were killing them.)
Aktion T4 was the eugenics program, it focused on killing the disabled.
Sterilization programs went on after the war, in places like Sweden and Switzerland, until the 1970s.
Man, imagine if the Nazis actually had a categorization scheme by race that informed their views on eugenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_racial_theories
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It's interesting to imagine an alternate history where the Nazis had been mildly pro-Jewish. Like, instead of trying to slaughter Jews, they had recruited Jews to help with the war effort.
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Didn’t they get rid of the Jews because they were too clever and people started to think they did societal harm? Good at inventing tech, but would also financially swindle you or push bad pathologies like Sigmund Freud. It seems like every American pop star (or black rapper) had a Jew managing them and pushing their sexuality at a young age. Onlyfans created by a Jew. Something about Jewishness they seem to excel at those roles.
We can’t help but watch and follow along, but 90% of the time it seems like it’s a Jew that created it. My gut says they were also doing things like creating onlyfans back then.
The irony there is that the vast majority of Jews who were exterminated were not the integrated, typically pretty secular, educated urban elites.
It was the rural devout Jews. They had neither the means to flee or escape easy detection.
Now do Nobel Prizes.
Jews aren't magically pathological for a society. That's just brain worms.
For instance, lots of prominent leftist/communist thinkers were Jews. But so were Hayek and Friedman, among others.
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I feel like one of the pitfalls of eugenics (then and now) is an assumption about what good genes even means (beyond Sydney Sweeney, apparently). There seems to be a lot more agreement about bad genes: see general consent on the borderline-eugenics of genetic counseling for various diseases, or the general acceptance of anti-incest rules.
You're probably right that Nazis lost out by dismissing a bunch of human capital and (over?)valuing blond hair and blue eyes, but I can't avoid thinking that statement is smuggling in some value judgements about what we should consider the ideal human form. Sure, intelligence is generally valued, but I see a rather open-ended question about the relative merit of maximizing
paperclipschess scores, baseball ability, or height that I'd personally prefer to defer answering.I'm not advocating for anything other than not exterminating a particular segment of the population having certain talents.
Height is a funny one because of just how tall many European countries are now without any specific program.
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I wish this was driven by a fear of aristocracy, but I don't think it is. Many of these same people scream for a dictator of the proletariat. They imagine themselves as the rightful aristocracy because they are just heckin' good people, you know? And if they had absolute power they'd show it to you.
No, the fear of noticing is driven by a paranoia of Eugenics. If we abandon people to the consequences of their choices, or heaven forbid their children, then that's nearly the same as putting them on a train to the nearest extermination camp. No, instead the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them and allow them to have as many kids as they want, and just keep giving them more and more and more forever because resources aren't finite. LBJ won a Nobel Prize for inventing the free lunch.
Yes, it is. This is true regardless of whether you have an IQ-aware society. "No human should ever go hungry, cold and homeless, nor be barred from the joy of raising a family; all else being equal it is always more ethical to help a sentient being get these things if it wants them than not to" should be the common-sense baseline of human kindness, and has nothing to do with true meritocratic hiring vs obfuscating credentialism. People like you who think "some people are dumber than others" is equivalent with "dumb people don't deserve to be happy and safe" is precisely what leftists are afraid of when they try to bury any discourse about the biological basis of IQ and you are making their point for them with this kind of cartoonish psychopathy.
I believe every person deserves to be as happy and safe as they can accomplish themselves. I don't understand why anybody should be charged with doing it for them, especially to their own detriment. That just inverts the roles. You want to make those incapable of taking care of themselves (or their families) my master.
And we're right back to what I was saying. Leftist clamor for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Is a volunteer at an animal rescue center a slave to injured puppies? "Should" and "must" are different words, and you're somehow managing to miss the entire concept of morality - indeed, the entire concept of kindness and helpfulness - by confusing them. There are such things as supererogatory moral goods. There are, too, such things as moral duties which it is incumbent on every man to fulfill but which for various practical reasons always go wrong if you try to mandate them by law. Saying "all human beings deserve happiness" is not the same statement as "you have a duty to wear yourself down to the bone to make all human beings happy" and it is a completely different statement from "the state should be an unconstrained human-happiness-maximizer". "Charity is good" is not a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Is the taxpayer, whose earnings are confiscated to pay for it?
My concern is that WhiningCoil does not recognize that all else being equal it is always good, rather than neutral, for sentient beings to have nice things. What trade-offs one is prepared to countenance in the name of acquiring nice things to give to sentient beings is an entirely different question and not the topic of this thread. Many libertarians take the line of "yes, it is good to give to the poor, it's just that it's also wrong to steal, and one doesn't cancel out the other" and I have no beef with that.
Does heroin qualify as a nice thing? Most of the people addicted to it would probably say so.
One reason most people don't think the state should subsidise people's heroin addictions is because consistent heroin use will inevitably kill the user, or at the minimum destroy their life in every meaningful sense.
Once you accept that it's wrong to subsidise someone else's independent decision to destroy their own life with drugs (perhaps because they're too stupid, through no fault of their own, to know better), it follows that the specific drug they use to do so is almost beside the point. Why would paying someone to kill themselves with heroin not be acceptable, but paying them to kill themselves with alcohol would be A-OK? Why not alcohol, but fast food? Why not fast food, but gambling? Why not gambling, but prostitutes?
That giving poor people money so that they can feed, house and clothe themselves and be fruitful and multiply is the kind, decent thing to do sounds sensible enough on paper. The trouble is that it's remarkably difficult to ensure they will use the money to ensure those needs are met, rather than using it to satisfy base urges which will kill them or destroy their lives.
I can respect that line of argument! But I think you're giving WhiningCoil too much credit. What he said (in a mocking, ironic way) was "the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them". I don't think there is any non-strained reading of his post that rounds out to "it would of course be good to actually feed, clothe and house them, the problem is that programs meant to achieve these things will instead have various unintended negative consequences".
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It seems to me more likely that they recognize that all else is, in fact, never equal, never has been, and likely never will be.
Solzhenitsyn figured out how to be happy in a death camp. Some Ukrainians in the Holodomor figured out how to be happy while they and their families were intentionally starved to death. These apparent historical facts appear to me to support @WhiningCoil's model of happiness, and undermine the one you are presenting.
Manic people are often happy as they're starving to death too. But being happy while being subject to genocide isn't the default state, that isn't just postulating a hedonic treadmill, it's setting it to overdrive mode in reverse.
Naming a few intellectuals isn't a very strong argument.
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Eh, some people are so mentally disabled that I've seen academic philosophers in ethics (certainly left-leaning) seriously consider whether they are capable of even consenting to sex (IIRC, concluding that some of them likely are not). See also related questions about whether some people should not be held morally/legally accountable to certain crimes in the same way (and quite the lengthy jurisprudence at this point specifically with regard to the death penalty). This is and should be a true edge case, not "hurr durr, your IQ is 90, we should sterilize you", but these conversations are often still happening in the open in 'respectable society'. My sense is that it's typically left-leaning people pushing ideas that low IQ means different criminal justice, though I'm not sure if there's much of a partisan lean either way on the consent to sexual relations question.
Sure. But that is not an argument about moral weight - it is not a claim that the mentally disabled deserve the joy of parenthood less than geniuses, that it is all, else being equal, less regrettable for them to be deprived of it than for a clever person to be deprived of it. That is what I find ghoulish. What you describe are arguments about whether certain mentally disabled individuals are even mentally capable of tasting that particular joy without instead expe. "Can dogs safely eat chocolate?" is an entirely different question from "Provided you had a dog that could eat chocolate with no ill effects and liked it, would it be better to give a bar of chocolate to the dog than not to?".
I think it is a moral argument, through and through.
Desert is an even more complicated area of philosophy which is kind of neither here nor there, but let's go back to what I was responding to in your earlier comment real quick:
This is sort of just not true, at least given the sort of academic work I've discussed. They do, in fact, think that there exists a person who is not able to morally consent, which, given the conceptual framework, cashes out as "they should not have sexual relations", and it would be morally wrong if they did. Do not interpret this as assigning any particular blameworthiness at this stage; blameworthiness is yet another separate consideration. That said, I think folks would be getting pretty close to assigning some level of blameworthiness to another individual who helped such a mentally disabled person (who is incapable of morally consenting) have sex, even if they wanted to. There's sort of nothing about desert in here.
I don't think this is really the case. IIRC, the academic work was perfectly happy to stipulate that the hypothetical sufficiently mentally disabled person in question was mentally capable of feeling joy from sex. It was the consent part, the morally-important part (especially to those who think that consent is the be all end all of sexual morality, in which camp this philosopher definitely resided), that was subject to consideration.
Since the academic work was confined to the question of sexual relations, specifically, I don't believe it addressed questions about 'the joy of raising a family', but I think it would be at least coherent to similarly assume that such a person may, indeed, be capable of feeling joy from having children and doing whatever it is that they can do to raise them, but I think that's also kind of neither here nor there if we're in a world where they may not be capable of consenting to sexual relations in the first place. Questions may get even harder if one pokes at the content of what it means to 'raise a family' and to what extent they are able to do that. (I am taking no position on this.)
I think this is emblematic of one of the other issues I had with the entire academic project of distilling all sexual morality down to consent. How broadly does one look for possible ill effects? There were multiple different cases (youth for sure, but some of the discussion touched on other cases) where even he couldn't stop himself from turning it into some sort of empirical test. Vaguely something like whether, say, 'allowing' youth to legally/morally consent to sexual relations generally did more harm to them or not. When one goes down this route, IMO, it's no longer an actual investigation into the philosophy and conceptual nature of consent. It's about being stuck to only having one term in your toolbox to use for all things sexual morality and simply trying to slap it on to cases that one finds objectionable for other reasons (some sense of empirical 'harm' in this case). Letting this sort of thing leak through into the conceptual nature of consent and one's ability to consent opens the door to all sorts of other thorny, even hotter-button issues, where many people (especially left-leaning ones) would vehemently object.
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It would help their legitimacy and they wouldn't be smeared that way if the average leftist didn't think there were vast numbers of people that don't deserve to be happy and safe, just defined on other terms.
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Having children and raising a family are two distinct actions: the underclass tends to excel at the former while stumbling over the latter.
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LBJ never won a Nobel Prize. He was nominated in 1964, but even that nomination was for steering American foreign policy toward international cooperation.
You don't say?
Hey, random question, what's the markdown tag for sarcasm?
/s
:) :) :)
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Just picking out this particular area of your comment, it amazes me when intelligent people (like you) actually repeat this odd myth in the year of our lord 2025. What you're talking about as "sane" in the programming profession is exactly what you're decrying elsewhere as opaque vibes based sorting. Programmers acting like slobs might have been rebellion against corporate life, or reflected a genuine lack of interest for social norms, twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. Today, it reflects precisely the opposite, tech-bros compete over who can performatively display their slobbery and betrayal of social norms as evidence of their talent. When professors and executives wore suits, choosing to wear a t shirt meant something. Today, it is just another form of cultural signaling.
Sam Bankman-Fried is our prime example, but there are millions more. SBF's appearance and behavior wasn't based in a natural untutored naiveté, it was a carefully cultivated performance for investors who superstitiously believed that this was what a genius startup founder was supposed to look like. He didn't play League of Legends during investor calls because his professor parents never taught him basic manners, he did it because he wanted to demonstrate to the crowd just how "above it all" he was. And venture capitalists ate it up, believing that the performance of Aspie disdain for social norms could substitute for actual genius. Sequoia Capital put it on their website! as an example of how cool SBF and FTX were, and how Sequoia was the hip company that could understand these kinds of geniuses, who could understand their vibes.
We've seen this for centuries in the arts, where the antisocial behavior of brilliant artists becomes a touchstone for young poseurs and strivers. The artsy kids I grew up with imitated the gay drug addicts in Rent and strived to die of heroin overdoses in New York City, who were written in specific imitation in both art and life of the alcoholic painters of La Boheme and strived towards dying of consumption in Paris gutters, who themselves were based on a novel whose real life examples probably imitated Rabelais or something. A real artist is depressed and deep, so the artsy teen wears black all the time and feigns misery and misanthropy. So many great artists are alcoholics, so young artists drink themselves into a stupor. Great artists abuse their sexual partners so must I!
Legible aristocratic or middle class standards of appearance and action, actually looking good in nice clothing and speaking properly, is much easier to learn and imitate, and a much better test of intelligence and conscientiousness, than is performatively spurning those standards. What suit to wear, and which type shoes to match with which belt, and what color tie, is all learnable and teachable. And learning all that, applying resources to acquire the knowledge, and exercising those skills, are all examples of that skill of "holding one million variables in your head and making decisions." Knowing when to wear tweed and which fork to use and which glass to pour which wine into may be frivolous and wasteful effort, but at least it is legible and trainable, and shows some degree of intelligence and training at a glance.
Excellent comment overall, and I may reply further on other aspects, but this in particular stood out to me, as an example of how Vibes Based sorting is so insidious and difficult to rid the brain of. Humans are very good at striving to imitate the appearance of doing something, even when they aren't.
In what alternate reality besides truly tiny niche examples?
I've been in the programming workforce for close to 30 years and I have never seen actual slobbery nor any betrayal of social norms there. Peoples clothes (including my own) have ranged from shorts and band t-shirt to straight pants and a fancy collared shirts and I've even seen one or two guys wearing a suit (due to intentional personal style). That is to say, people have dressed exactly as other men of similar age in non-public facing (*) office jobs that don't have status games attached to looks.
The only actual flaunting would be to dress in a business suit with a tie (unless you work in the financial sector) because you'd then be essentially signaling that you're trying to hide your lack of technical substance by over dressing .
*: The one time I ended up presenting a product at an industry trade fair my attire was black jeans, black dress shirt and black leather jacket which was chosen because it was my normal style at the time and also happened to blend in perfectly with the other industry people.
You're right, I was probably being insufficiently precise.
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Thanks :*
I am happy to accept that any legible marker for competence (or perceived competence) will be eventually gamed. It's not like turbo-autists are particularly good at gatekeeping or status games. Normies beat autists, normies are beaten by sociopaths, who are in turn kept in check by autists.
I'm familiar with SBF's performative actions. However, I still think it's clear that genuine eccentricity is better tolerated in programming circles. Fursuits, blahajs and programming socks are more prevalent in programming circles.
In other words, I think it's simultaneously true that the world of computers has a higher tolerance for off-kilter behavior and a significant number of people insincerely stealing that culture as their costume!
I'm sure HR and management would prefer someone with people skills who looks presentable, all else being equal. But the sheer tolerance is nigh unprecedented! You'd have to descend to the back of the kitchen with the line cooks before "is warm body" and "can do job" become the prevailing concerns.
Why the initial tolerance? The usual theories that struck me as plausible included a high prevalence of autistic traits, a less client-facing environment, and comparatively legible performance metrics. If you have a code goblin, then the additional latency from running fiber to their segregated basement is worth it. You didn't hire them for their good looks.
But you're right that this creates its own failure mode. When the signal becomes "looking like you don't care about signals," you get poseurs who carefully cultivate dishevelment. The difference, I'd argue, is one of substitutability and testing under load.
In a truly vibes-based profession (consulting, say, or certain flavors of academic humanities), the poseur can coast indefinitely. There's no moment where the rubber meets the road and reveals that beneath the performance there's nothing there. Your PowerPoint looks good, your references are impeccable, and by the time the strategy fails, you've moved on to the next gig.
In programming, the compile button doesn't care about your aesthetic. The production system either works or it doesn't.* Yes, you can hide in a sufficiently large organization, you can take credit for others' work, you can fake it in meetings. But there's still a baseline floor of actual competence required. SBF could fool VCs with his League of Legends schtick, but he still needed actual programmers to build FTX. The fraud wasn't "Sam can't code," it was "Sam is embezzling customer funds." His technical team was apparently quite capable.
The point isn't that programming is immune to status games or that all programmers are autistic savants who only care about code quality. The point is that programming preserves a direct link between competence and output that many other professions have severed. You can fake the culture, but you can't fake the merge request. Well, you can try, but eventually someone has to read your code.
This makes programming comparatively more meritocratic, not perfectly meritocratic. The SBF types are gaming a second-order effect (convincing investors and managers that they're geniuses), but the underlying infrastructure still requires first-order competence (actually building the thing). In contrast, in fully vibes-captured professions, you can game all the way down. There is no compile button. There is no production server that crashes. There's just more vibes, turtles all the way down.
Your point about aristocratic standards being more legible is well-taken, though. Knowing which fork to use is indeed trainable in a way that "act naturally eccentric" is not. But here's where I think we diverge: aristocratic standards are more gameable by the wealthy precisely because they're so trainable. If you have money, you can buy the suit, hire the etiquette coach, send your kid to the right boarding school. What you can't buy (as easily) is the ability to pass a hard technical exam.
The ideal isn't "no standards" or "eccentric standards." The ideal is "standards that correlate maximally with the thing you're actually trying to measure, while being minimally gameable by irrelevant advantages." Standardized testing, for all its flaws, does this better than holistic admissions. A programming interview with live coding, for all its flaws, does this better than "did you summer at the right firm."
The clothing and manners debate is orthogonal to the core question of sorting. I don't particularly care if our elites wear suits or hoodies, as long as we're selecting them for the right reasons. My objection to aristocratic sorting isn't the aesthetics, it's the inefficiency. If your system selects for people who know which fork to use, and knowing which fork to use happens to correlate 0.7 with having rich parents but only 0.2 with job performance, you've built an inherited oligarchy with extra steps.
*I am aware of concerns such as code readability, good practices such as documentation, and the headaches of spaghetti code. But programming is still way closer to the metal than most other professions.
As a very wise friend of mine recently said:
Dressing neatly in a clean and appropriate suit and tie doesn't strike you as a cognitively demanding task, or even really in this day and age an indication of wealth outside of branding, just as a chore to learn and a cultural heritage to pass down. But it does serve as a filter for baseline intelligence and conscientiousness when widely understood as something we can screen for. There are people that are too stupid to dress themselves properly, or insufficiently conscientious to do so neatly.
By building a culture where this is a well known expectation, we create a culture where we can look at someone and (as @pbmonster said in the SSS thread) have their IQ tattooed on their forehead. There's obvious spirals of fashion and veblen goods and in-group signaling that are bad, but culturally expected dress codes don't need to be focused on that. The broad concept of "appropriate" dress. does not need to veer into wasteful or extravagant dress.
Basically, yes, you shouldn't judge a book entirely by it's cover; but damn wouldn't the book store be more convenient if book covers told me more about the content in the book? And this seems entirely within the control of the publishing industry.
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I don't think any of those would be tolerated in any of the workplaces I've ever been involved with. Sure, worn jeans and an old metal band t-shirt don't even get a second look - that was practically a uniform some 10-15 years ago. Same with combat boots and camo pants. Business as usual.
But straight up "WTF is this shit, that guy is weirding everyone out, what is his issue?"-eccentricity? No. The boss would have a Talk with them.
SBF types are basically reverse signaling the same thing the same way that overpaid hype consultanst in fancy suits are signaling to the upper management. Both are trying to use looks and behavior to convince someone who isn't technically competent that "Trust us bro, we're so good that we'll totally deliver you massive benefits".
I've gotten the impression from some older comments here that such gameability was almost the point. That by having the money and acting like you were old money, in a generation or two you'd be considered if not actual aristocracy, at least upper class.
I worked for a FAANG-adjacent company and we did have a programmer who wore a fursuit. Programming socks? Hadn't realized they were called that but I've seen them worn at Google. If "blahajs" refers to the Ikea stuffed shark, you'll definitely find those and similar in software engineering offices.
Yeah, that's very different from just a "programming company". California woke tech-adjacent culture is its whole own microcosm which cannot be generalized to the entire programming profession, particularly in international conversations (what with self_made_human being an Indian in Scotland). To put it slightly less charitably, the vast majority of programming profession isn't filled with cliche autist weirdos to even remotely the same extent as that particular subculture of it is.
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When you think about it, this is a pretty succinct explanation for a lot of the failure modes the current elite drive us into. Educational discipline, homelessness, crime....the biggest failures are from dealing with truly judgment proof. The people who wouldn't be in college, whether because of low IQ or conscientiousness or other such traits.
In places where compulsion is really the main option and people find it distasteful or immoral , things fall apart.
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As someone who is somewhat aristocratic (my family did not pay for Oxbridge's anything, but 200 years ago they probably could have) you are misunderstanding how it works. Think of it as meritocracy with a sliding window and a small momentum factor.
Rather than the intelligent rising to the top after a major shakeup and then camping there until the next revolution, people broadly rise or fall through their lifetimes. My family were long ago pretty influential. They made many bad choices and a few good ones, and went from 'we own a castle and a good estate' to 'we own a farm and a small business' to 'sorry, kid, I gave everything to an exotic dancer' and then back up to 'decent upper-middle class' through the generations.
This results in a society which is marginally less meritocratic but involves considerably less striving. Your brilliant father would have been unlikely to go from hauling crates to owning (a chain?) of hospitals, though it did happen, but would likely have gone from hauling crates to second-in-command of the hauling company, married to a nice girl of a higher class, with children who raised in the style of that class and who would move upwards or downwards from there according to their own ability. Especially since brilliance is more clear when IQ is slightly higher variance in your profession.
I do think of it that way? I meant to gesture at that when I said:
I agree that the reason for this phenomenon is simply innate talent in many spheres. Not even landgrabs and terrorism could keep the genes down (epigenetics is grossly overrated).
I suppose I shouldn't hide that the other side of my family started off much better than my dad. They weren't ever wealthy (wealth in Colonial India often meant landed gentry, merchants etc), but they were part of a chain of well-educated intellectuals. The PMC before it was cool. Sadly for me, this never meant enough generational wealth that their kids could coast, though I haven't anything about squandered inheritance.
I don't disagree that the old system didn't have elements of meritocracy. It had plenty. At the same time, it didn't have the churn or the finding power that standardized assessments or talent screens have today. And we need a great deal more talent, nobody has enough.
That is achingly slow! A hypothetical talented kid from a humble background can do very well for himself in 3 decades because they're on a more even (and relevant) playing field. Med school required good grades. Higher training built up experience and competence. That's a very different place to be.
I'm sure my dad would have managed to make something of himself even in the aftermath of Maoist China. But the system that got him where he is worked out better for him, and for the rest of society, if I squint.
I called the previous system "Basically Fine", the same goes for the one we have today. But that's a low bar, we can do better. As it stands, I'm more focused on eliminating the really bad distortions on meritocracy, such as affirmative action, and I'm not losing sleep over legacy admissions in the best unis.
My apologies, I thought you were describing an essentially static model, with occasional perturbations producing results better than a random shuffle but with no meaningful mobility. I think it's more fluid than that.
This on the other hand is the core of the matter. It is. That's the tradeoff. The positive side is less energy wasted on striving, but more than that, it's having some idea what the future holds. It's as easy to fall as to rise, after all. Parents have no way of knowing if their children are going to have anything like their status, and devote huge amounts of effort to trying to make it so, which is corrosive for the childrens' wellbeing and for the social structures that the parents kick over if they're in the way. Parents aren't even sure they're going to be able to maintain their own social status in a couple of decades. It seems to me that this contributes to a very scrambling mine mine mine atmosphere that is completely unable to make long-term investments because there is no guarantee you're going to be around to collect on those investments.
But as I say, it's a genuine tradeoff and people are going to land in different places on what they want to trade off.
My impression is that historical nobility had a lot of status anxiety too! Not just status, but plain finances to boot.
We're used to the economy consistently growing, at a pace legible to human perception. This is a historical anomaly, and true in the West for maybe 400 years, and mere decades in other places.
Before this, it was very difficult to grow the pie. You were more concerned about slicing it up such that the children didn't starve. Look at the practice of primogeniture, or sending second sons to the navy. The family farm or even ducal holdings never seem to multiply, and if you slice them too fine, you'll be nobility in name alone.
This isn't the case any more! A smart parent, in the 20th century, could start saving and making sensible investments. You can do very well by your kids even if they turn out to be one of the dimmer bulbs in the shed.
While people may feel anxious today, even more so, that's vibes and not based on an assessment of facts or historical reality. Compound interest is a helluva drug, and might even be a better investment than sending your daughter to be an art-ho in Bushwick. The typical worst case scenario is them ending up on SNAP, not starving to death, as might have easily been the case in the past.
I can hardly predict the next decade with confidence, but I believe that money makes everything easier.
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All well and good so long as we remember that "Merit" as measured by IQ is just the ability to do well in school and learn complicated things. It is not some end, just a talent like hand-eye coordination.
As to the rest, the absolute best any non-elite can ever hope for from the universe or a test is blind fairness. Anyone who thinks we can weight things one way or the other to offset "privilege" is just building a privilege generator.
Would be awkward for everyone if IQ positively correlates with other positive traits not immediately connected to taking tests.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/study-links-childrens-eye-hand-coordination-with-their-academic-performance.html
Brain do work gooder faster, affect many thing.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA525579.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Alpha
Most positive traits correlate somewhat. So do most negative ones.
The problem with intelligence is that it makes you retarded. Smart people can convince themselves of anything, and thus lose connection with reality in proportion to how smart they are.
Take Scott's most recent post on child rearing for an obvious example. He's the smartest person I've ever met personally, and he's a tard.
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Just "learn complicated things"?
I'm afraid the "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting! We live in a dazzlingly complex world, it's been several centuries since even the most talented person could have understood every facet of modern civilization and technology. Even Neumann and Tau would die of old age before becoming true polymaths.
IQ is strongly correlated to a ton of good things, moderately correlated to a tonne more of other good things, and then weakly correlated with the metric fuck-ton of everything left. Income, physical and mental health, job performance! Even beauty is weakly correlated (so much for the Halo effect as a true fallacy). There are few things that can be tested as cheaply and easily while offering as much signal for the downstream traits we care about.
A quadrillion IQ brain floating in the void isn't worth very much, but we were never talking about intelligence in isolation. If grip strength was the defining factor for success in life, I'd be working on my handshake right now.
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Indeed, this is the major problem I have with the OPs comment. We're not looking for intelligence and using "performance of competence" as a proxy. We're looking for competence. It could be that intelligence is a better proxy for competence than our current tests, and almost certainly is true that an intelligence test is a better measure of intelligence than our current tests of competence are for competence (because competence is just harder to measure). But intelligence itself isn't usually what we're looking for.
I don't think I disagree. Competence is the most important thing, but it is also devilishly hard to pin down. That only gets harder when you need someone to demonstrate their competence before they get the job.
(And then you see person specifications asking for 5 years of experience in some React-knockoff that's only been out 2 years)
Unfortunately, there is often a massive, unavoidable delay between training for a job and getting a job. We want to know if someone will be a good surgeon before they hold a scalpel. How would you check if a 17 year old pre-med student will make for a good neurosurgeon if he won't do any neurosurgery for another 10 years?
That brings me back to the point that intelligence really is our most robust proxy. It's one of the few things in the psychometric literature that has resisted the replication crisis. It is still a proxy, and thus imperfect, but like democracy, it's the worst option except for all the others. If you want to go back to work-experience and trainability, we're going to need a lot more apprenticeships or internships. Those are much harder to scale than standardized tests.
It helps to throw away the entire concept of pre-med and just have entrance exams to study medicine in university that test both relevant biology knowledge (to be self studied from common reference book(s)) and requisite math and physics ability. It's not perfect but it's better than just sailing in with high IQ score or using some utterly bullshit proxy like freeform essay or having the right after school activities.
Incidentally the same also works for engineering: Entrance exam that tests (highschool plus level) math and physics which, not surprisingly, are exactly what's required to manage almost all engineering studies. Too bad they fucked up that tried and true system in favor of very noisy high school matriculation exam scores here some years ago :(
Say what you will about the inadequacies of the British and Indian medical pipeline, but this is a rather uniquely American stupidity. Pre-med offers nothing that just moving the MCAT forward wouldn't, and wastes several years of your youth on a degree that you likely won't use.
I gave an exam straight out of high school, and that was that. I'll say less about everything that followed.
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Good.
I recognize the point as it applies to top-tier quantum physicists, but in almost every other area of life I don't think we should judge people based on 'capacity' as indicated by raw IQ.
First of all, most careers do not have uncapped potential for improvement. Let's say someone wants to become a physical therapist - they need to learn a variety of details about human physiology, be competent at working with people, and have the capacity to keep up with developments in the field. This is achievable by a 100 IQ person just as much as a 130, the primary difference will just be how much time and effort is required to acquire the knowledge. I put it to you that most fields have this characteristic. The difference between a god-tier PT and a typical one may matter a little on the edge cases but for the most part these people are indistinguishable in what they can accomplish. Meanwhile, other traits like personability and compassion may be more relevant distinguishers for how well this person does the job.
Second, IQ already plays into every sorting algorithm we have. Do you really think that being more intelligent doesn't help you acquire certifications? Or that it won't be recognized by gatekeepers in fields where it's relevant? IQ is general problem solving, it's learning, in other words it already applies to all these systems. But, again, it's not the only thing that applies - you are judged on a variety of personal characteristics, such as willingness to put in work, reliability, trustworthiness, not being weird, etc. These things all actually matter.
Like I said at the top, there are some fields where raw IQ really does determine your effectiveness. Maybe you're in or adjacent to one of these, and are really griping about how the selection methods there are failing to identify intellectual capacity? If so I'm sympathetic. But in all other realms, if you don't produce anything with your big brain then you're no more useful than an idiot. I'd rather have someone conscientious and loyal on my team any day of the week.
Fair point, but occupations such as physiotherapy aren't the point of contention (beyond the usual debate about whether or not they should be gated behind credentials, and if so, how heavily).
Let's talk about medicine: I would pay a sizable premium to have a shrink like Scott see me, instead of the modal kind, even if the latter delivers adequate care, and the returns diminish steeply. Outside of a single niche, better doctors/smarter-and-more-conscientious students go into the most competitive specialities. Within the same category, the truly great tend to become specialists and experts in their given domain.
Of course, the rate of return per IQ point can vary greatly. A 130 IQ janitor is just sensible about reading the signs that say "do not ever switch off the lab equipment". A hypothetical 170 IQ janitor probably won't stay a janitor for long.
On the other hand, a 130 IQ physicist might well be locked out entirely from the sorts of intellectual work a 170 IQ counterpart might produce.
Since we agree that this is heavily context dependent, and there are few/no professions where there's a negative return from IQ, we're baking the same cake, just arguing about the ratio of ingredients.
Medicine is very regimented. A doctor twice as smart as me completes their curriculum at the same pace, I'm not aware of accelerated med school programs of any quality. I think I've done decently enough, and am probably above average as a doctor in certain ways (as per exam results), but I don't delude myself into thinking I'd be a shoe-in at Harvard Med.
This is less personal angst, and more general commentary. I don't think my kids will need a SAT coach, or the need to dig wells.
(The previous situation was Mostly Fine. I think the current state of affairs are Mostly Fine. They could still be better.)
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