(08-01-2020, 06:13 AM)The Real Marty Wrote:

(07-31-2020, 07:51 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: Not sure if that's telling... i have a pretty high IQ, and I'm a stay at home dad.

I've known a few people with very high IQs and they run the gamut.  I know one who scored a 160 on an IQ test and he paints houses for a living.  I know another guy, who is undoubtedly a genius- he likes to read books on advanced mathematics- and he is a programmer, but not particularly successful financially or professionally.  I know a few others.  One thing they all seem to have in common is an overwhelming confidence in their own opinion about things.  

If someone is doing advanced mathematics for a living, or is a grandmaster in chess, there is no doubt those people have a very high IQ.  On the other hand, I can think of two people I grew up with that I thought were some of the dumbest people I ever met, and somehow one is now a lawyer and the other is a doctor.   

I've never taken an IQ test.  I have no idea what my IQ is.

In my opinion, there is one talent that is overwhelmingly more important in life than IQ, athletic ability, good looks, or anything else- it is the ability to make the right choices.  Life is an endless series of choices, and some people manage to navigate through, and other people are stymied.

I might be splitting hairs, but I think having a driven personality is separate from intelligence. There are studies that suggest that higher IQ people tend to be more, not less moral, so I am not sure it's about making the right choices (assuming right means moral). My wife is a doctor, and one thing I learned while she was going to med school is that doctors are not particularly smart, they are just really hard workers. I think this holds true for many of these higher tier professions. From what I've read about IQ, you do need a certain level of intelligence to do well in memory based field, like doctors and lawyers. They need to know a lot of information, and they need to be able to pack it in over a relatively short period of time, and you can't do that without above average intelligence. However, this level of intelligence is not insanely higher than the general populace. Anywhere from 115-130 is high enough to be proficient in almost any field. 

I use the following as a general guideline, but, like all things generic, doesn't encapsulate any person fully; there are always exceptions: 

• Below 70 - 5% of population, special needs, don't understand social norms, hard to get any job
  
• 70-85 - 13% of population, struggle to do anything but repetitive tasks, higher propensity of violence, care less about social norms
  
• 85-115 - 70% of population, follow social norms, can do most jobs that don't involve high amounts of wrote memorization, not critical thinkers, but not reckless 
  
• 115-130 - 12% of population, can do most jobs, distinguish themselves from the previous tier through hard work, some critical thinking, especially after having been shown how, they set societal norms
  
• 130-145 - 3.5% of population, can do any job, understand societal norms, but often question them, can can struggle fitting in, natural inside the box critical thinkers, but able to think outside the paradigm
  
• 145-160 - 1.49% of population, can do any job, question societal norms, critical thinkers that see outside the box, and can use known information to deduce new information, willing to change the current paradigm
  
• 160+ - .01% of population, quirky, tend to get fixated/obsessed on topics, don't understand social norms, can potentially understand and create new concepts that weren't previously understood, seemingly out of thin air, like gravity or theory of relativity, can change the current paradigm
  

I am certain the above is flawed in some way. It's been years since I was really interested in IQ, so a lot of this is from memory. Also, like I said above, these are generalizations and won't apply to everyone. If I needed to make a bet on how accurate my assessment was, I'd be reluctant to put down any money, so take it with a grain of salt. I have adopted this metric in my personal life, though, and I feel like it holds up relatively well.

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