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I don’t see her as an outlier. Dartmouth Engineering as I’ve repeatedly said is a perfectly fine high 2nd tier credentials to work from (MIT/Caltech/Harvard being tier 1). 29 isn’t that young. OpenAI wasn’t OpenAI when she joined. That’s like joining Jane St in 2005. Dartmouth engineering still puts you in the top .3% intellectual ability so sociability and lookism doesn’t seem to be crazy to get you a little jump to executive. She might not be Bill Gates smart but there aren’t really that many people at his level. She would only be jumping ahead of people marginally smarter. She’s well within the ability cohort and not in a nepo category.
Sure not many make the executive ranks anywhere. But if she has executive traits she’s also clearly smart enough to play at that level. There’s not that many people in the world a clear step function higher in intelligence than Dartmouth engineering.
And I think this is an absolutely balls to the wall insane claim, to the point that I struggle to think you even understand statistics or intelligence. A .3% puts you at 141 IQ, which is genius level. Dartmouth has what like 7k students, any of the ones who are admitted get to study their specialty without any further sorting. Dartmouth has a 6% admission rate, which is already 20x less than 0.3%. You are stating that every classroom in Dartmouth engineering is filled with geniuses. Where are all these geniuses? There should be ~300 of them every year according to current Dartmouth engineering numbers. Looking through Dartmouth Alumni lists, I'm seeing very little in the way of groundbreaking inventions that would accompany genius tier alumni.
If you are in finance, I get the weird IQ fixation and the inclination towards prestige as the metric of excellence. Everyone in your field seems to have it. But I've never seen evidence that it is justified on any metrics other than an attempt to be status-obsessed elitists.
I can tell you that in engineering circles, Purdue is considered significantly more prestigious than it's reputation among the general populous (which is to me evidence of your location) which tend to consider Ivies as the height of academic prestige.
To state the obvious why would you compare Dartmouth admit rate to % IQ score? Most people don’t both applying to Ivy schools because they have no chance at getting in.
Not sure how you can be quanty if you don’t see that immediately. A quick grok tells me 51% of high schoolers take the SAT…let’s use 50% for easy math. Dartmouths median SAT score is 1500-1570. I asked grok where does a 1530 SAT score fall within SAT score distributions? It told me top 99%. But only half of students take the SAT. Asked further and 1530 is the exact cut-off for 99%. So the median Dartmouth student is the top .5% of high school graduates based on SAT scores. It’s top 1% of SAT takers and half don’t take the test.
For her specifically we know she did a less competitive dual degree program with Dartmouth. So maybe didn’t get in or perhaps other reasons. We know she is white so no affirmative action. She’s also English as a second language which may have hurt her verbal SAT scores. She majored in Engineering which tends to have higher IQs. She was able to get into hard firms to get into which if anything should give a positive Bayesian assumption for her IQ.
If the median Dartmouth grad is in the top .5% of IQ then guessing she’s top .3% seems reasonable to me.
So Yes on IQ testing there is strong evidence she is in the top .3% of people. Potentially a little lower, but almost certainly top 1%. Top .3% people can generally learn almost anything when they are passionate about it. I wouldn’t call top .3% genius level as there is a clear gap between those people and Bill Gates/Terrence Tao.
I feel like you don’t realize that people in that grouping can learn as they go and get involved in things. And a top .3% IQ plus attractive and social would definitely get promoted quickly. This isn’t nepotism since there is strong evidence she is very high skilled.
But again you made a very basic math mistake of using admittance rate to measure competitiveness. It would be fun to be a Navy Seal, but I never applied because I know they would never take me.
Also I wouldn’t expect a true genius to end up at Dartmouth unless American higher ed is that broken. Those 50-100 people are hopefully still getting selected into Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech and University of Chicago. Unless the filters are really broken now.
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Would you say that Dartmouth applicants are a nationally representative sample? If not, why assume it?
The 25th-75th percentile SAT scores of Dartmouth students are 1500-1570. The 99.5th percentile among test takers is around 1560 and extrapolating to a nationally representative sample they estimate the 99.5th there at around 1520.
Self-selection is also a form of sorting. The latest ED table had prospective engineers' SAT scores averaging 1174, vs 1028 for all students
His claim may be wrong (the data is a little sparse) but there is nothing "balls to the wall insane" about it.
.3% of the US is the top 900,000 Americans. Are you expecting groundbreaking inventions from most of them?
Even if this had been justified it would have been against the rules here.
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