In general, cognitive ability matters more tasks that involve analyzing, coordinating, and creating ... and less for tasks that are routine.
My point wasn't that IQ doesn't matter. My point was that high and extremely high IQ are far more common than are the niches my culture provides, requiring high IQ. Substitutes are readily available.
Well, there's more to success than "making money".
I completely agree. As
you define success with all factors included.
But aside from income and wealth, IQ also correlates with low criminality, longevity, health, creativity, and openness to new experiences.
Huh. All that going for them with no bump in happiness, income, or wealth. It's almost like there is some negative feedback that offsets all those advantages.
And yet there seems to be a shortage of these people. Not enough to go around.
Still, each high IQ niche is heavily, deeply competed after. So competed for, in fact, they don't tend to pay well. Or they pay extremely well. That's an odd pattern.
It's almost like the supply is deeply constrained in some way.
Employers get around this by testing by proxy. I think it could easily be argued that a lot of degrees/certifications is such testing. This kind of proxy includes those who have demonstrated an ability via sheer grit, people skills, ... etc. "Requiring a college degree" is however a pretty costly proxy, especially when domain knowledge isn't really required.
Oh, there it is. Let's call this a "grit filter". High IQ individuals are too common, and too volatile. If we put them through a grit filter (consisting of a large bureaucracy containing lifelong political struggles), we'll know who can tolerate the political games and bureaucratic games of the "real world".
Even all those who finish school, many high IQ individuals never find work they can really sink their teeth into. This is also reflected in your averages.
High IQ simply isn't very valued in my culture. We have more than we can use. The most
gritty, we shuffle into academia. The most money motivated get well compensated for making rich men richer. The rest get scattered to industry. The fallout rate from each of those destinations seems to track IQ, though, doesn't it? It's almost like the higher one's IQ, the less satisfaction one can wring from the standard puzzles and rewards.
In general, cognitive ability matters more tasks that involve analyzing, coordinating, and creating ... and less for tasks that are routine.
And jobs that involve analyzing become routine, as do jobs involving coordinating and creating. One develops the routines of the job. Our hierarchies are built on the cog performing it's duty. It can be a sharp, new cog, or an old rounded cog, so long as the cog doesn't slip, the machine keeps turning.
If the cog slips, we have processes for replacing cogs and correcting timing. And increase in the replacement of cogs and timing fixes is not game changing. It is just increased churn. IQ drop in mass, is a shock my culture is
well prepared for.
To bring it full circle to the OP, ERE is a complex task and thus it is more likely than not that a loss in cognitive ability would affect [ERE] materially. Therefore best avoided.
We have come to the same conclusion via different paths. Your path shows a potential catastrophe as highly valued, extremely talented people fade to highly valued, very talented people. My path shows that those people are more common than we can use, and their output isn't valued very highly at all.
If we both believe that cognitive ability coupled to valuable problems will be likely to generate value, which path leads to an actionable conclusion?
Certification is almost irrelevant for most jobs. Look at the hiring process in tech, pretty much all of it is a proxy for IQ. Certification is treated with disdain because it's at best neutral, possibly even a negative signal.
So after many decades, in a field known for explosive growth, enormous fortunes, involving puzzles best tackled by extremely high IQ, the grit filter has less value. Something about the nature of the work, and the potential value of that work allows for a culture that values IQ enough to
actually look for high IQ, rather than simply accepting a proxy.
My culture is so slow,
this is what passes for an innovative, dynamic environment.
But I think you will find this trend goes the other way once the explosive growth phase of your company is over with. High IQ people are often high on someone's hit list, and political gamesmanship is part of making the cut into the future. Some people focus on the puzzle, some on the wrapper. Having seen many, many downsizings, a mentality easily distracted by gift wrap, is clearly a survival trait in hierarchies. Lots of attention available for networking in that one.
I've managed teams where I'm dishing out work based on who I think can handle it. Alice is smart so she can cope with this but Bob isn't so bright so I'll pass him something else. Now that Alice has had covid perhaps I have nobody on the team that can handle the harder stuff. What do you do, hire someone new, drop the work? All these small cuts add up over time.
Sure they do. But
everything cuts. So maybe Alice can't bail you out anymore. You fail. Maybe your company fails. But the next company is starting. Alice's little sister is looking for work, and maybe Alice would be happier doing something else. This, at the macro level just looks like an increase in churn.
Alice is just one more lesson on why we can't depend on high IQ people to bail us out. Too volitile. You just never know when your smart employee is going to burn out. Maybe Bob and his not very bright brother plus chatGPT can fake 95% of what Alice could do. Maybe the smart thing to do is work with what you have, sweep 5% under the rug, and let the next re-organization solve this problem. You know,
manage the problem. Everyone else is.
Will this trend of increasing disability continue? I don't know, but all one really needs to suppose is that what has apparently happened and what is apparently happening simply continues to happen.
This is the way I read it.
I successfully evaded covid for 4 years. And I jumped on the Paxlovid, immediately.
We wiped out a strain of flu with the lockdowns, then decided we would just host covid. Lockdown was too hard.
I expect to go indefinitely into the future without more covid. Wearing a mask, and washing my hands every few weeks doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice. But my lifestyle is my own.
Covid seems worth avoiding for all the reasons you gave, and more.
I agree, but it seems like this usually defaults to "pure bottom-up emergence" vs. Microsoft Project.
Well, one way to understand my 4th person thread is describing the means of bootstrapping pure bottom up emergence. With no "vs. Microsoft".
I've written before about not wasting resources being opposed.
. I recall reading an article by a Silicon Valley C-suite escort. She described “deconstruction” like cracking the code of the stressed out tech executive. Once she learned what they really needed (surprisingly non-sexual) she was overbooked. She retired out early and wrote stories about her work.