IQ Matters Less Than You Think

I don't know...

For example, when I was in graduate school, the chair was discussing how high GRE scores were not very strong indicators of 'success' in grad school (i.e. doing good research, publishing it, and getting out in a reasonable time). However, low GRE scores were much stronger indicators of 'failure' given these criteria.

IQ probably maps pretty linearly to GRE scores (for most of the small subset of the population who would ever take such a test), but with regards to scientific progress there are a series of thresholds that are more important (grad school, faculty hiring, securing funding, etc. etc.). These thresholds are really about opportunity and access.

2) 22 is late for athletic careers.

4) You skipped 3? Ok... so you want 80 year olds who just started marathon running to beat everyone aged 20-30 in their athletic prime? That's actually pretty impressive since those other 80 year olds have probably been running marathons their whole life.

5) I agree. It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice, and few people are willing to do that. Are you upset that only 10% of people can be the top 10% and that the distinguishing factor is often how hard they work?

You should also look at it this way: For most things, you don't need to be the absolute best in the world, nor is there a way to measure who is the best in the world. Who is the best in the world at software engineering?

The IQ content is less egregious than other flaws - his famous "10,000 hours" bit is so oversimplified that the authors of the study he cites have condemned Gladwell's treatment of their work. But even the IQ stuff is quite bad.

The first note would be that the initial statement here is a shockingly strong claim which goes far beyond Hudson's studies. (115 to 130 is the difference between 15% of the population and 2.3%.) And, of course, the followup reference to Einstein seems entirely self-defeating - how does it discount IQ to note that a famous genius was well above three sigma?

I don't have a copy of Outliers to reference, but the paraphrase of Jensen is also extremely surprising since he's widely criticized for over valuing the role of heritable intelligence in success. All I can find outside of his much-condemned racial work is a brief statement that he believed (in 1969) there were many unfilled jobs requiring an IQ upwards of 110. This is basically what I would have expected from his legacy - not a claim that higher IQ is irrelevant, but instead that +1 SD is enough to open many professional doors.

Meanwhile, the high-end claims raise several other questions.

Most damningly, any discussion of 170 and 180 IQs is garbage for the common 15 point SD. 5 sigma (IQ 175, depending on normalization) is a 1-in-1.7M event. No IQ test ever devised has been calibrated on that population; Raven's Advanced Matrices only goes to ~150, and other high-IQ tests are also seen to cap at 4 SD or lower. Test-retest and inter-rater variation are high enough that's it not entirely clear whether IQ tests can be calibrated out to 170+, at least without a massive test population.

I can't find Hudson's actual study, only replications of that quote, but it's a disaster coming and going. IQ 180 cannot possibly be a value he found in accurate studies, and a work on Nobel winners isn't necessarily relevant to high-IQ success anyway. Nobel winners are generally people whose research succeeded in a major way, not just those who did very good work, and often features mixed groups like "the theoreticians who made the theory" and "the experiments who confirmed the theory", where quite likely only one side is exceptional in the field.

Finally, the example of a very high IQ person leading a dysfunctional life fails on several levels. I'll let the Gladwell's use of anecdote slide, because studies on very high IQ children generally do find large rates of non-success, but those outcomes are heavily distorted. First, because childhood IQ testing is heavily age-adjusted, with the result that fast development can produce astronomical IQ scores in children who will be merely quite smart when their peers have caught up, both undermining the relevance of the result and creating unsustainable high expectations. Second, because it ignores the tendency of extreme outliers on one axis to be unusual on other axes also. High IQs might impede socialization, but they're also correlated with mood and anxiety disorders, torsion dystonia, and a variety of other conditions which have obvious negative effects on life outcomes. For these purposes, causation doesn't matter - it's enough to note that without correction, any study of success-by-IQ will be distorted by these conditions. We can imagine a case where success in certain fields is dominated by those very high IQs people who don't get nasty side-effects, while the overall performance for high IQ people is unremarkable.

None of which is meant as an attack on you, or even a claim that the people at the peak of e.g. physics are higher-IQ than the field's average. I just think it's worth noting how fractally wrong Outliers manages to be in even a brief statement like this one.