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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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IQ vs ability is not linear, so an extra 40 points is not being 40% better than someone with an IQ of 100 but many magnitudes smarter.

Again, i don't think our understanding of consciousness and cognition is nearly as good as we like to pretend it is and and this sort of fetishization of Goodheart's Law sticks out to me as an obvious pitfall.

Is an extra 10 - 20 points over the median result in a significant advantage over said median? Sure. But i would also caution against reading too much into it. My alma mater may not be as prestigious as Oxford or Cambridge but it is reasonably prestigious (im confident that you'll have heard of it) and having pursued a degree and subsequently made my career in mathematics I've had a lot of dealings with both precocious kids and MENSA-types and can tell you that IQ does not neccesarily translate into intelligent behavior or cognitive function. The Sheldon Cooper archetype exists and they tend to be far less fun or functional in IRL than they are portrayed as on TV. I have nothing to base this on aside from my own observation but my impression is that there is an inflection point where (to the degree that IQ is real) the upsides of "number go up" become overshadowed by the downsides of nuerousises, mental illness, addiction, Et Al. I think that the thing set a lot of the "great geniuses" a part is not thier raw intelligence as much as it is thier ability to be botb highly intelligent and highly functional at the same time.

more like 50+ points above the mean , and IQ is necessary but not sufficient

If its not sufficient, how do you prove that it's neccesary?

I'm not the commenter you were replying to, but trivially, if all people with trait C (prodigies, 10x engineers, etc) exhibit both trait A and trait B, while people with only A or B do not exhibit trait C, you could say that trait B is necessary but not sufficient.

In this example, you could say that trait C (prodigy) requires traits A (IQ, intelligence, whatever) and trait B (conscientiousness, focus) or whatever trait D (open-mindedness to explore new research avenues, low neuroticism to avoid some of the pitfalls of high IQ, etc).