Are You In "The 1%"?

[Dragline]

At a certain point -- usually late 30s or early 40s, taking care of your health becomes much more important that even saving, because you realize that you effectively have nothing without decent health. But if you do take the time and make the effort, I don't see any reason why most people could not live a good active life well into their 80s.

[guitarplayer]

@J I'd add that people here are 1% in relative terms. They spend a disproportionate amount of resources (time & money) on investing. By aping the 1% you can become wealthier even while not achieving 1% net worth. No, not by getting a better handbag or BMW to ape the rich, but by acquiring assets under favorable conditions.
A mentor of mine (easily a 1%) once said I need to stop acting poor and start behaving like a rich man. What he meant is I wasn't chasing the deal at the time...I had a month to month plan instead of the decade plan. He was discussing how I needed to be a scaled down version of him. After that I shifted my goal to living off investment rather than wages. I feel like a rich goat trader in the third world watching 747s fly over a valley of goat herders. A 1% relatively speaking...but only in my tiny world.
I actually think that is what this whole ERE thing exposes - wealth is relative.

I like the metaphor of a rich goat trader in the big wide world, strikes the chord in its fractal nature. Also related to being a 'big fish in a small pond' vs 'small fish in a big pond' (@jacob referred to pros and cons of it somewhere). Behaving like a rich man is I think an example of what is extensively researched in psychology in the form of the 'self fulfilling prophecy' phenomenon. From my most recent reading of 'the formula' by Barabasi, network science seems to confirm the phenomenon. One's aspirations, all else being equal, contribute to setting life's course. @Ego mentioned elsewhere 'direction follows attention'.

[jacob]

@guitarplayer -

Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

And this can be flipped around asserting that your destiny forms your character (e.g. being born into a role), your character demands habits, your habits decide your actions, your actions require explanations, and those explanations form your ego.

[guitarplayer]

Invert, always invert, ey?*

*Maybe not so much invert as revert, but then 'revert' can be seen as 'invert' in the 'across' dimension.

On a grander scale I really ponder stability of human condition (for example, stability of human traits as given by MBTI or any other personality psychology framework). There was a lively discussion in the field of individual differences about stability of human traits and attributes, I am going to quickly search for it and if I find it I will add here.

ETA: There you go! Walter Mischel was perhaps amongst the more prominent critics of 'personality psychology'.

ETA2: Look, small world, turns out Walter Mischel is the man who invented the marshmallow experiment. I must have learned about it and then forgot it.

[Sclass]

Huh. That’s an old post. Funny how I was thinking in 2012.

I like stock investing because it allows you to enter a scaled down ownership class.

Even if you only have a few dollars your system completely changes if you use those dollars as a tool to make more dollars. I guess it is kind of fractal. Never thought of it that way. Kind of like the Taleb illustration in finding the tallest and shortest people in a stadium. The difference will never be 10, 100, 1000 fold like it is with money.

The way I used to look at it in 2012 was you are a completely different animal using a dollar to make a cent vs. an animal with a dollar who earns cents by working. You’re now harnessing an exponential mechanism vs. a linear system. An no matter how weak it looks the exponential will overpower a linear method especially at the crossover point where they appear equal but where the exponential is actually shooting through the linear curve with an extreme slope…which is oddly another exponential. (One lesson I learned from Calculus 1).

I didn’t think of it as an “act as if and you will become” argument like the PUA crowd espoused. I realized I was just using a different tool. A more powerful tool.

Not like steel vs. stone but more like fire. Fire begets fire. Fire propagation is exponential. Fire consumes and destroys everything eventually.

Using this tool may be more important than actually having 1%er level capital. No matter what the linear animals do the exponential ones will eventually overwhelm them. As a consequence of capital accumulation and increasing ownership to maintain capital accumulation rates the end game is inevitable. You can tax, outlaw lending and even kill, but eventually a new breed of exponential accumulators will rise up and begin eating the middle class again. As long as there is feedstock. They’re simply a more effective aggregator of capital and *control over time. History is our teacher.

Another way of looking at that is seeing how hopeless it is for the middle class to level the playing field with the owner class. An example is me squishing the ants wandering into my kitchen in hopes of exterminating them. Mathematically the endgame is predictable.

I am really glad 99% of the people have trouble bringing in decent ROI. Otherwise the system will consume it self faster than it is as it stands.

Man that was a lot to take. Time for an order of Pad Thai.

*funny how capital and control are coupled in some systems.

[7Wannabe5]

Pretty sure there are more humans with IQ in top 1% on this forum than wealth/income in top 1%. So, kind of clearly marks it as Yellow transition zone.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/arti ... llionaires

OTOH, IRL I know quite a few humans with IQs over 137 who are in the "precariat" class (high cultural capital/precarious wealth/income.) Obviously, this can vary a great deal depending on your realm(s) of focus and or particular flavor of "cuckoo-bananas." (Almost everybody with an IQ over 130 is some flavor of "cuckoo-bananas".)

[Jean]

ere is fighting climate change by encouraging those with the highest productivity potential to not realize it.

[chenda]

Increasingly high IQ people have fewer children than lower IQ people. This may result in a decline in the genetic quality of the species. On the other hand, greater cross-nationality breeding may result in greater genetic diversity, which will strengthen the gene pool. Mixed raced children have a reputation for being very intelligent, although that might be a racist stereotype, albeit a positive one.

I believe there is less genetic diversity in the whole human race than a pack of incestuous chimpanzees (if pack is the correct collective noun) It is theorised that we came close to extinction 70000 years or so ago a rebuilt our numbers from a gene pool of only a few 1000 of us left. Though we may have interbred a bit with other species of humans before probably eating and exterminating them.

[Jean]

This is only a first world problem, where state subsidies will feed kids, making parebts IQ irrelevant toward their survival. Solution is simple.

mixed race people have a iq averaging the same average as their parent's race average. Maybe the positive stereotype comes from interacial couples often forming beetween academics or highly paid expats (which probably have a higher iq)?

also, the whole "race mixing=better gene pool" is a wrong trope. Studies in iceland found that the fertility optimum is when a couple are fourth degree cousins. I think this trope comes from bastard dogs, because many races are severly inbred, so of course mixing will help in those case.

I think that until we have way more data, the best way to find a reproductive partner will be to thrust your instinct, because it has been selected to do that. and avoid taking hormone that mingle with it.

do you have a source for the lack of genetic diversity among humans?

[jennypenny]

Read The Sports Gene from the ERE book club. Epstein points out there is much less genetic diversity in Caucasian populations.

Being in the 1% seems almost pointless now that the .1% have gone hockey stick.

[7Wannabe5]

Humans with highest IQs, especially women, are also much more likely to be in top 1% for promiscuity.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/number-8-in ... less-happy

[Riggerjack]

Increasingly high IQ people have fewer children than lower IQ people. This may result in a decline in the genetic quality of the species.

Or it shows that high IQ is not a desirable trait to a significant portion of our society. And we are collectively correcting the flaws in our gene pool.

My explanation isn't endorsed by our narratives, but it does fit observations.

How one deals with this contradiction between theory and reality is correlated to both high IQ, and fecundity.

[Laura Ingalls]

Pretty sure there are more humans with IQ in top 1% on this forum than wealth/income in top 1%. So, kind of clearly marks it as Yellow transition zone.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/arti ... llionaires

OTOH, IRL I know quite a few humans with IQs over 137 who are in the "precariat" class (high cultural capital/precarious wealth/income.) Obviously, this can vary a great deal depending on your realm(s) of focus and or particular flavor of "cuckoo-bananas." (Almost everybody with an IQ over 130 is some flavor of "cuckoo-bananas".)

I’m inclined to disagree with this assertion. Maybe because I think 1% wealth is personally attainable (if I live a long time) and I know that 1% IQ is not.

Maybe because I have give lots of IQ tests and know how rare outliers are.

My IQ is technically not testable as I spent decades with access to the answer key.

[chenda]

This is only a first world problem, where state subsidies will feed kids, making parebts IQ irrelevant toward their survival. Solution is simple.

Well, thats a whole other issue.

I think its more of a case too small a gene pool is bad, or at least brings risks. Jews and Zoroastrians have suffered genetic problems due to too much inbreeding. Also see the Habsburgs.

I think that until we have way more data, the best way to find a reproductive partner will be to thrust your instinct, because it has been selected to do that. and avoid taking hormone that mingle with it.

Agreed.

do you have a source for the lack of genetic diversity among humans?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

The Youngest Toba eruption has been linked to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution about 70,000 years ago,[31][32] which may have resulted in a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate.[33] According to the genetic bottleneck theory, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000–10,000 surviving individuals.[34][35] It is supported by some genetic evidence suggesting that today's humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago

This appears to be still the subject of ongoing debate and research.

@jennypenny, thanks for the link that looks interesting.

[fiby41]

I am in the 41.5% (not married, at least 5' 5" tall, not obese, earning at least $5,000 per year, 19 to 24 age range) according to stats used by https://igotstandardsbro.com/

[OutOfTheBlue]

Is the word "IQ" being used here as a shorthand for "(intellectual) intelligence"?

Because, otherwise, for all I know, IQ primarily measures… IQ.

[7Wannabe5]

@Laura Ingalls:

I agree if the boundaries are IQ over 137 (one of the 4 brightest kids in your high school graduating class of 400) and will eventually have net worth over $8 million adjusted for inflation (barring global apocalypse.) Not everybody is completely transparent about their current net worth on this forum, but my off the top of my head list of forum members who clearly must have IQ over 137 is longer than my list of those who claim current net worth over 8 million.

I am also not privy to all the information necessary to determine the percentage of forum members with more than 34 lifetime sexual partners, but that number is also likely to increase as snapshot of current forum members ages towards 80, and I think it mightcurrently already be higher than number of forum members who have net worth over $8 million.

Obviously, top 1% for doing Burpees and similar feats might also be well correlated. Dunno.

[chenda]

Networth and even IQ can fluctuate, but your age and number only ever goes up.

[jacob]

Is the word "IQ" being used here as a shorthand for "(intellectual) intelligence"?

It's being used in its original sense to measure raw mental speed by testing one's ability to solve problems w/o prior context(*). As such, an IQ test is almost physiological. Like measuring someone's height, weight, or VO2max.

So it's more analytical than intellectual or experiential.

(*) Raven-g is considered to have the least context of all, but that might be WEIRD.

IQ measures technique-free ability. I was going to compare sprints to marathons, but there's likely a technique for sprints as well. Think of IQ as the hardware platform. MHC is the software running on it. Better hardware allows better software. Adding technique makes it possible to go faster than raw speed because one already owns the thought patterns to do so. No time is wasted to come up with them in the first place (which would detract from the IQ score).

As such, "effective IQ" (the ability to come up with new solutions) can be rather higher than "test IQ" given a study of lattice/renaissance work.

[Ego]

The IQ discussion reminds me of the Twigger quote:

We are lead to believe that all 'top jobs' are occupied by smart people. But really smart people don't have jobs. I mean- why would they? Of course at times they work very hard. But this work is like the work you do on a hobby that really absorbs you.

And those 'really smart' people don't often seem so very smart when you meet them, rather they appear enthusiastic.

There seems to be a sweet spot with regard to wealth. Obviously, too little is not good. Less obviously, too much is not good as well. Contrary to the cliché, it is possible to be too rich and too secure.

One of the many consequences of great wealth and security is that they tend to kill enthusiasm.