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The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

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Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#11

Post by Nevermark »

sublinear wrote: post #6
madaxe_again wrote: post #3

This study looks only at Swedish men who served in the military, which as the authors observe may well introduce a bias. They also note that a possibility is that higher cognitive ability individuals may more frequently opt for worse paying but prestigious roles, such as academia. I buy it, but I think there’s another factor today, which is that many higher cognitive ability individuals simply are not in the job mark…

How does chasing prestige or avoiding work indicate "higher cognitive ability"?

The relationship of "higher cognitive ability" -> prestige and work avoidance, is not the same as the relationship from "prestige and avoiding work" -> "higher cognitive ability.

If you turn around the direction of implication, you are not talking about the same thing.

But more to point, smart people may avoid jobs by arranging high return passive (non-work/job) income, such as from investments, royalties, etc.

Lots of smart people go into fields like mathematics where the work is interesting, success is rewarded with visibility in the field, and sometimes the public, but the pay is nothing like being a CEO.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#12

Post by boppo1 »

metacritic12 wrote: post #4

It's not a surprise that cognitive ability (the paper seems to define it as relatively close to classical IQ) is not highly correlated with earning ability or even value production for society. I would argue that a much better correlant of both production value and capture value is conscientiousness, or vaguely synonymously, hardworking, diligent, etc. A brilliant world observer who tweets their witty one-liners all…

Just going off the abstract, they did find that cognitive ability correlated strongly with earning ability. The hook is just that it's not a monotonic relationship.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#13

Post by aqme28 »

metacritic12 wrote: post #4

It's not a surprise that cognitive ability (the paper seems to define it as relatively close to classical IQ) is not highly correlated with earning ability or even value production for society. I would argue that a much better correlant of both production value and capture value is conscientiousness, or vaguely synonymously, hardworking, diligent, etc. A brilliant world observer who tweets their witty one-liners all…

I wouldn’t be sure about that. A lot of very smart people go on to great success in academia, earning decent but non-noteworthy salaries

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#14

Post by harvey9 »

Avicebron wrote: post #8
sublinear wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does chasing prestige or avoiding work indicate "higher cognitive ability"?

Or, how does one define "prestige"?

A professorship can be prestigious while paying less than the professor might be able to earn in industry.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#16

Post by matthewdgreen »

metacritic12 wrote: post #4

It's not a surprise that cognitive ability (the paper seems to define it as relatively close to classical IQ) is not highly correlated with earning ability or even value production for society. I would argue that a much better correlant of both production value and capture value is conscientiousness, or vaguely synonymously, hardworking, diligent, etc. A brilliant world observer who tweets their witty one-liners all…

In the rare instances when we've been forced by circumstances to corral truly brilliant people and make them participate in large-scale organized production efforts, we got the atomic bomb, radar and rocketry in a span of less than a decade. Maybe it's good that we don't do this very often.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#18

Post by hiwadaocathliqm »

distantsounds wrote: post #2

oddly this doesn't take into account my extremely low IQ friends who mined a bunch of bitcoin early on

You jest, but maybe you can be too smart. If you can see through an unwise scheme you may not invest in it, even though you would be able to offload your investment on someone else later if you had...

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#19

Post by jononomo »

Extremely high cognitive ability allows a person to find success in life without taking on as much risk. In my opinion this explains why the highest earners and most successful individuals with the most prestigious jobs are drawn from the ranks of those with B+ cognitive ability rather than A+ cognitive ability. The A+ people don’t need to swing for the fences as much, which means they’re less likely to end up with home runs. They’re happy with getting the triples, which makes a lot of sense.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#20

Post by [deleted] »

madaxe_again wrote: post #3

This study looks only at Swedish men who served in the military, which as the authors observe may well introduce a bias. They also note that a possibility is that higher cognitive ability individuals may more frequently opt for worse paying but prestigious roles, such as academia. I buy it, but I think there’s another factor today, which is that many higher cognitive ability individuals simply are not in the job mark…

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