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Medicine is not massively g-loaded, is it? It's mostly memorisation, hence the popular med school anki subreddit. I can't think of anything day-to-day that actually requires reasoning about. I think it's why doctors suck at thinking from first principles and shut down when you ask them about something outside their "training set".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC165701/
This is the best I could find with my Google-fu.
Medicine is usually brutally competitive and meritocratic to get into, or it certainly is in India, so there's a lot of filtering for g going on before people enter the training program.
I would be immensely surprised if IQ didn't correlate well with performance in the profession, as it does with job performance on pretty much anything anyone ever cared to check.
I don't deny that there's a great deal of memorization involved (I did say the same myself), but you have to keep in mind that med school != clinical medicine. As for "massively g-loaded", what's your definition for "massive"?
It certainly rewards tenacity and conscientiousness, especially when you clear the minimum IQ bar, and doctors are significantly above average, on average.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2002-hauser.pdf
(Quoting the person quoting Gwern's post)
How much of that is due to pre-selection, and how much it matters after you're in? Shrug.
I think that the average researcher is way more determined than the average doctor - it's not uncommon for researchers to have been preparing for careers in research since they were in junior high school. I've known researchers who, as undergrads, answered emails and worked on projects from ER hospital beds. Well, one - but the rest of the lab didn't think it was that big a deal that her boss asked her to do work from the hospital bed and mildly reprimanded her for thinking it was a bit much.
Put it this way: plenty of researchers could do the equivalent of passing the anatomy final on day one of medical school. Very few doctors could have done the same.
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I actually believe this isn't the case so much, at least for the median. The reason for this is partially what you already mentioned, extreme pre-filtering. This is then combined with very generous compensation, practically ironclad employment security, limited opportunities for career advancement and a high work load. This strongly incentivices defection on the part of doctors.
I have no doubt that almost all doctors I meet are intelligent, whether they're a good doctor or not depends on whether they're diligent and actually interested in their work, not their relative intelligence within the doctor cohort.
This isn't unique to doctors either, mind you. It happens in all professions with sufficient compensation, status and employment security. People get satisfied and check out.
People get corrupted and intelligence isn't a protection against that. You can't really tell beforehand whose going to be a hard worker either.
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I can believe that doctors average 130 IQ (though it seems a little high), and I totally expect that IQ correlates with performance.
Maths is far more g loaded than medicine. People who study maths will talk about eventually hitting a wall and no longer being able to progress. At a certain level you no longer have the cognitive power to comprehend the ideas.
I've never heard anyone talk in such a way about medicine. In medicine it seems like there is not much to "understand". Is it possible to get stuck on a question in medicine and not understand the answer? My impression is no. Are there 10x or 100x doctors? Doctors who can do things the average doctor can't?
yes, math is probably the highest g-loading, along with physics. This is why months back I argued that Elon is not as smart as top mathematicians and theoretical physicists, which got a lot of rebuke, but I think is still true.
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Unlike programming, doctors don't scale, so the impact of superlative talent is bounded. But in my experience, the best doctors end up becoming super-specialists, especially in surgery, and act as the last port of call when use normies don't cut it. So it's not that they can do everything significantly better than the average doctor, but they cover the cases we can't.
Not particularly, unless you're in research or doing something particularly complicated in neurology or biochemistry.
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