Foreword
A few years ago I got into a debate over me having estimated the IQ of Scott Alexander at 133. I still think the estimate is largely defensible. Many found it comical that such an accomplished and talented writer could have an IQ so “low”, when in reality it is possible this is his real score.
I.
I don’t intend to be another idiot who tries to challenge the solid consensus of intelligence research: that IQ tests are highly reliable, rarely culturally biased, highly predictive of academic outcomes, and moderately predictive of life outcomes. Instead, I would like to contest how many implicitly put IQ on a pedestal and don’t realize that IQ tests are not perfect measurements of intelligence, or that intelligence itself may not even be that valuable. This is particularly apparent when people evaluate intellectuals; they uncritically assume that the quality of their thought is dependent on how intelligent they are.
Intelligence and success tend to go together. The following table from Strenze’s 2015 meta-analysis concisely shows this.
The strongest correlation IQ has with any variable appears to be job performance, with a correlation of .53, which has been debated pretty heavily in the academic literature. For what it is worth, I reviewed the literature on this topic and found no reason to doubt it. This means that roughly 25% of the variance in job performance can be naively explained by intelligence.
Oh, and the effect of intelligence on success is causal — analysis that control for SES or use sibling controls show the same associations as those that use no controls (Murray, 1994; Murray, 2002; Hegelund et al., 2018; Hegelund et al., 2019).
II.
Many of the individuals who were criticizing my estimate of Scott Alexander’s IQ were pointing out that his success in writing as a refutation of my estimation of his IQ. In fact, if both the correlation between occupational success and IQ and an individual’s occupational success within a job are known, a crude estimation of intelligence can be made.
The only case where it’s very unlikely that Scott Alexander has an IQ of 133 is if Scott Alexander is an extremely incredible intellectual and if being a great intellectual is also highly g-loaded. As I don’t think either of these things are true, I see no reason to revise my estimate.
How much does IQ contribute to quality as an intellectual?
While it is a little late in the article to do this, I think that a definition for a intellectual quality is in order. I would define it as a composition of the following variables:
Ability to distinguish between truths and falsehoods.
Novelty of said distinguishments.
Rigor of work (e.g. citing and reading sources, willingness to dive in the weeds).
Quantity of work.
(Less important) Aesthetics (e.g. presentation of work, writing style).
From a non-scientific standpoint, intelligence to some degree should contribute to intellectual quality. If you consistently make reading comprehension errors and do not understand mathematics, you are going to have a hard time ascertaining what is and is not true in complex topics. Indeed, Joseph Bronski (2022) [video] has estimated that roughly 75-95% of humans cannot have political agency because of deficiencies in reading comprehension and mathematical understanding. By political agency, he means the ability for a citizen to recognize political problems and advocate for adequate solutions to them, which is roughly what an intellectual is doing in the political sphere.
Beyond this threshold of about 115IQ, I think intelligence would still be predictive of quality as an intellectual. This is because higher levels of general intelligence would enable you to understand concepts faster, reducing the time constraint of creating good output.
III.
To properly accomplish intellectual quality, an individual must have the following characteristics besides intelligence:
Willingness to invest time in research and writing to create good output.
Prioritizing discovering truth over other variables.
Willingness to tackle controversial or inflammatory issues despite potential social pushback.
None of these qualities are highly g-loaded — the rest are either personality traits or are factors of luck. Willingness to invest time is a measure of drive, prioritizing truth is a matter of virtue, willingness to tackle controversial issues is a facet of disagreeableness. That is not to say these personality characteristics are not associated with intelligence, but that they are largely independent from it.
I suspect the time and drive constraints are the biggest filters to intellectual quality. Few people have the time necessary to spend researching a wide range of topics or the drive to do so, cutting off the amount of people who can be a “great intellectual” in a way that goes beyond intelligence.
Besides drive, a nice case study of somebody showing their optimization function is an exchange between The Distributist and Kevin Bird, where Kevin Bird admits to not caring about truth.
(See extended version in Appendix for wider context)
The Distributist: Why do you believe [racial equality and harmony] is possible?
Kevin Bird: I don’t view the historical occurrences as evidence that it’s not possible I just view them as evidence that it hasn’t happened.
The Distributist: You believe it’s possible to do this because the past isn’t an indication abvout how the future behaves.
Kevin Bird: Yes, exactly.
The Distributist: That’s insane. If we didn’t the past wasn’t an indication of how the future operated we couldn’t do science. You’re violating Hume’s inductive hypothesis. It’s like saying the sun rose every single day, you know, but it won’t rise in the future because we can’t induct on observations. How do you do science with this assumption?
Kevin Bird: I do science because I find it intellectually engaging. To be completely honest…
The Distributist: I said HOW would you do science!
Kevin Bird: I just do it with not as much interest in attaining or discovering truth.
The Distributist: So you’re not interested in discovering truth?
Kevin Bird: No, no. Not really.
Emil also highlights that Arthur Jensen has made a similar argument in the past: that genius and giftedness are two different things in his work ‘Giftedness and Genius’. He mathematically models it with this formula:
Genius = High Ability X High Productivity X High Creativity
And before him, Galton advanced the ‘triple event’ hypothesis, that eminence is dependent on three abilities:
The particular meaning in which I employ the word ability, does not restrict my argument from a wider application; for, if I succeed in showing—as I undoubtedly shall do—that the concrete triple event, of ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour, is inherited, much more will there be justification for believing that any one of its three elements, whether it be ability, or zeal, or capacity for labour, is similarly a gift of inheritance.
Empirical evidence suggesting I am correct:
If you thought being a quality intellectual was strongly related to intelligence, then you would expect the most intelligent people to believe in certain political views more than others. In most studies done on this topic, the relationship between cognitive ability and political beliefs isn’t strong, and rarely exceeds r = .3.
Noah Carl’s 2014 data:
Meta-analysis of right wing economic beliefs and IQ:
Kanazawa, Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent:
Some people may bring up the “midwit effect” that is, linear relationships between intelligence and political views may obscure the trends in beliefs that occur in individuals with IQs above 120. I have not seen actual evidence of this happening in any political belief, and I invite those who have it to present it.
Even in cases where there is a definitively true political belief, it can still be negatively correlated with intelligence. I found that in individuals who agreed that the average difference between Blacks and Whites have worse jobs, income, and housing than Whites due to having less-inborn ability to learn were less intelligent than those who disagreed. The difference in wordsum score is large (d = -0.83).
Thinking Black people have worse outcomes in jobs, wages, and housing due to differences in intelligence isn’t necessarily a hereditarian belief, but if you agree with that statement you might as well be half-way down the rabbit hole. Regardless, statistical evidence seems to suggest that a large portion of differences in income between Whites and Blacks can largely be reduced to differences in intelligence between them (Meng Hu, 2022; Jensen & Nyborg, 2001).
If a political belief is true but is negatively correlated with intelligence, it’s hard to believe that intelligence strongly contributes to believing in true political beliefs. Given that being able to distinguish between truth and falsehoods is a necessary quality to be a good intellectual, this suggests to me that this job is not highly g-loaded.
Appendix
Kevin Bird vs Distributist context:
The Distributist: You’re asking me to believe that something (racial equality and harmony) that happened a lot in the past will not happen in the future because something that’s never happened in the past will happen now. That’s what you’re asking me to believe. Would you bet on that happening?
Kevin Bird: If you have good reason to believe that what you are changing is a driving causal force - what is standing between actually producing some level of equality between majority and minority groups.
The Distributist: Well that’s an interesting question and we will get to that, but that’s not the question I just asked. You’re asking me to essentially bet the future of my posterity which you don’t care about but I do on the fact that something that has historically happened won’t happen in the future but that’s never happened in the past will happen now, even though… Is it happening now? Are we ameliorating the differences between the minority groups that are entering this country? I don’t see that.
Kevin Bird: I don’t see it either…
The Distributist: So you’re not even doing what could possibly ameliorate this right now?
Kevin Bird: Well no, the system that we’re participating in is sort of designed not to do it. It’s the way the system works.
The Distributist: And it’s the way every system works all the way back in human history.
Kevin Bird: I mean… so if we want to talk about….
The Distributist: Has any human society done this in the past?
Kevin Bird: I don’t know enough history of groups going back to even more egalitarian periods…
The Distributist: Isn’t that an important question? Because if it’s never been done in human history, which to my knowledge it hasn’t, then why would you bank a lot on it happening in the future?
Kevin Bird: Because I think it would solve the issues… (talking over each other)
The Distributist: is it possible? If it’s (racial equality and harmoney) never happened in the past, and it’s not happening now, wouldn’t you ask yourself if it is possible?
Kevin Bird: Not entirely. I think for the most part we’ve been acting under a very similar framework.
The Distributist: This is an incredibly incurious position for a scientist to take. You’re saying that a phenomenon that has never happened and you’re not wondering if it’s not impossible? That’s the next logical question any scientist would ask themselves.
Kevin Bird: That’s not my thought process behind it. My thinking is that this is a major cause of the issue, so it’s something that should be attempted to be addressed. And I think the extent to which it could solve the problem…
The Distributist: That wasn’t even the answer to the question. I said whether it’s possible to address it.
Kevin Bird: Yes, I think it is.
The Distributist: Why do you believe it (racial equality and harmony) is possible?
Kevin Bird: I don’t view the historical occurrences as evidence that it’s not possible I just view them as evidence that it hasn’t happened.
The Distributist: You believe it’s possible to do this because the past isn’t an indication abvout how the future behaves.
Kevin Bird: Yes, exactly.
The Distributist: That’s insane. If we didn’t the past wasn’t an indication of how the future operated we couldn’t do science. You’re violating Hume’s inductive hypothesis. It’s like saying the sun rose every single day, you know, but it won’t rise in the future because we can’t induct on observations. How do you do science with this assumption.
Kevin Bird: I do science because I find it intellectually engaging. To be completely honest…
The Distributist: I said how would you do science!
Kevin Bird: I just do it with not as much interest in attaining or discovering truth.
The Distributist: So you’re not interested in discovering truth?
Kevin Bird: No, no. Not really.
Well done! I'd been considering an article like this for some time, and this analysis saved me a lot of trouble. Scott has a strong verbal tilt, which makes him good at philosophy (well... for a puny human, anyway), and he has a special interest in social dynamics that allowed him to dominate his particular niche.
But there's just no way anyone who struggles with Calculus I is three standard deviations above the mean, and I have no idea why anyone thinks he's that smart. (No wait I do: the ones who think this are his fans, and the most important characteristic of fans is that they be emotional, not that they be objective.)
Calling it now: Verbal tilt theory has something to do with both the MENSA paradox, IQ fetishism, and IQ denialism. Also likely explains why midwittery only target certain sub-demographics of ~120 humanities degree holders vs ~110 STEM enthusiasts.