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0 pointsinsoluble10y ago0 comments

Consider this scenario (merely hypothetical): Say you want to be a physicist for a living. Then say you find a reputable study showing that the average pre-physics-education IQ for a financially successful physicist is 140, with a standard deviation of 8. In this case, granted the information were accurate, would it be financially responsible for you to invest your education time and money into pursuing physics if your IQ were only 110?

IQ is based on statistics, which is based on probability, and probability is good for finding paths with a positive mathematical expectation. Furthermore, would you really want to work in a field where nearly everyone were substantially brighter than you? I doubt it would be good for one's emotional health.

Just for giggles, here is a (somewhat dated) chart of IQ to profession: http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx

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giaour10y ago

Let's say instead that you want to enter the field of physics. With an IQ of 110, you might be able to excel as a lab manager, an analyst, a lecturer, or any number of prestigious careers other than "physicist," which, to be fair, isn't actually a job title anyway.

If you were to instead aim for a career as a programmer, which includes subfields like "CSS specialist" and "engineer who writes firmware for jet engines," you'd quickly find that there is room both for people of extraordinary as well as below average intelligence. Programming is not a genius-level activity, though some subsets of it are.

The chart you linked to shows that someone working in computer occupations will usually have an IQ between 90 and ~120, which seems pretty close to average.

insolubleOP10y ago

I agree with most of what you've said here. A generic occupation such as "physicist" or "programmer" allows for a broad array of possibilities, many of which don't require more than ~100 in IQ. For example, making Excel spreadsheets to convert test grades into a final grade is quite easy, despite technically being "programming". A huge contrast is found when comparing that with writing a 3D or physics engine. The difference in IQ requirement could be 85 versus 125. My hypothetical scenario were better with a more specific occupation, having a higher requirement, but I didn't find any better data than that on the link I posted.

An important factor to consider with all this is the rate with which a particular person could learn or carry out such a job's activities. There is a reason why retarded people (IQ < 70) are called "slow", and that's because they learn at a much slower rate compared to persons of 100 IQ. If you tried hard enough, you could probably get a person of 70 IQ to remember some physics equations, but (a) it would take a really long time, (b) they would not truly comprehend the nature or derivations of the equations, and (c) they would probably be very poor at recognising when to apply a given equation, let along actually applying it. The point is, they would be completely unable to compete in the job market. And this phenomenon is by no means exclusive to "retards". There are many concepts for which a person of average intelligence would seem retarded at trying to understand, and this could probably apply to persons at any level of intelligence.

A final note is that job requirements, both in terms of education and intelligence, are always changing. Due to advances in technology, some jobs are far easier than they used to be, while others have become much more intellectually demanding. Programming, for example, is much easier than it used to be -- as a result of new IDEs, new programming languages, and more system resources. On the other hand, I imagine being an auto mechanic requires more brains now than in the past. Generally speaking, the easier the task or job is (intellectually), the more likely it is to be replaced by automation and or robotics.

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