Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Bachelor's degree as a proxy for intelligence is disintegrating, given ~37% of Americans 25-35 have degrees. The unfortunate reality is that we don't have any standardized measure to judge intelligence or a clue how to go about it.

As with democracy, IQ is the worst measure except for all the others that have been tried.

Yes. IQ is not a throwaway concept; it's been very useful for identifying e.g. pollutants & nutritional deficiencies that impact cognition. But it works best as a population-level tool, and it has some real weaknesses

More importantly, applied on the individual level it can be a pernicious red herring. Raw cognitive ability is usually not an intractable bottleneck for people pursuing what they want to pursue

If you can solve certain kinds of rule-based puzzles or run certain pattern-finding procedures 30% faster than I can, you'll probably do much better on an IQ test, but that doesn't mean we can't both be top-notch innovators/entrepreneurs/scientists

Yeah, but you have a significantly above-average IQ (presumably). The fact that someone who is significantly smarter than you isn’t necessarily destined to be more successful than you doesn’t show that “raw cognitive ability is usually not an intractable bottleneck for people...

...pursuing what they want to pursue.” It shows that, as long as you have a significantly above-average IQ, it doesn’t necessarily matter how far above average it is.