That is not a problem. The problem I see is touting the value of hard work to people who may not have the requisite IQ to go along with it for their desired outcome (Best in the world in their field, for example).
You said, Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general".
I think it's actually understated in general. Telling people who don't have the mental horse power to, "work harder", is cruel.
Would you tell someone with an IQ of 100 to "work harder" if they wanted to be a Software Engineer/Lawyer/etc?
While I agree there is a certain threshold of skills below which one can't really function as a lawyer/software dev, after passing that threshold your IQ matters less.
There is the top 1% or even 0.01% of performers out there and then there is the rest of us. The difference between a software dev with an IQ of 115 or 125 doesn't sound that big to me. A lot in their careers will depend on their people skills and work ethics more so than on their IQ.
This is especially true for jobs like lawyers or even doctors, but if we go back to software development - a lot of it is quite repititive and actually favors well people with strong work ethic. Unless you work on cutting edge algorithmic computer science stuff (which isn't really software development), we all keep building classes and models and glueing libraries together; or we gain some deep knowledge in some mobile platform or even some embedded programming. Even stuff that sounds super complex to a web developer like Kernel development probably gets repititive after awhile.
Wow, I expected broken money systems to twist people's minds but not to this extent.
Of course, in a broken money and work system there is a cutoff point for IQ at which corporations decide who to hire.
The inverse position is that money isn't wealth. It's work and the product of our work that is wealth. Therefore willingness to work should be proportionally rewarded with work. Of course, since corporations hire whole individuals no such thing happens. Instead, work that could have been allocated to two people fairly is allocated to one person.
Now employers have to think of hard to cheat measures to determine the person who the work will be allocated to. The IQ cutoff point is the result. The chosen one then gets to feel superior because he both has the intellectual, moral and financial upper hand while he simultaneously gets to chastise the lazy, stupid, poor hobo. It is so easy to rebrand this process as "personal responsibility".
This is not really what I meant or how I view this, though I completely agree with this:
> The chosen one then gets to feel superior because he both has the intellectual, moral and financial upper hand while he simultaneously gets to chastise the lazy, stupid, poor hobo. It is so easy to rebrand this process as "personal responsibility".
Regardless of whether companies have their own cutoff point, competition amongst people will create a natural cutoff point.
If there are a limited number of jobs, people will have to compete for those jobs. Sought after jobs will attract more people and have fiercer competition. More intelligent people will generally outcompete less intelligent people for these jobs, and so a natural IQ cutoff will form.
There is no requisite IQ, and I absolutely would tell someone with a definitionally average 100 IQ to "work hard" to become a software engineer/lawyer, as they could be in the absolute top of their field if they did.
There's probably a limit to how much "work hard" can make someone competent/successful in any field, and it'd guess it's around 85, or 1 standard deviation lower than average.
If IQ is important to you, I think you'd be quite alarmed by the number of successful doctors and lawyers who don't meet the 100 IQ bar you're setting here.
Sources + people's estimates place the average IQ of a doctor well above 100.
You seem very out of touch if you think that there's a large proportion of doctors and lawyers who have an IQ below 100.
IQ isn't important to me, it's just reality. The difference between 100 IQ and 120 IQ (For instance) is palpable and you can't overcome that with hard work.
There is no universal ranking of doctors, you can't really claim "percentile of success" for doctors or lawyers, and it's weird you're trying to do so.
Why is it so important to you that you have to be "smart" to be a doctor/lawyer?
You said: "I think you'd be quite alarmed by the number of successful doctors and lawyers who don't meet the 100 IQ bar you're setting here".
The number of doctors and lawyers who do not meet that bar appears to be slim to none, so I'm not at all alarmed...
> There is no universal ranking of doctors, you can't really claim "percentile of success" for doctors or lawyers, and it's weird you're trying to do so
I'm not claiming percentiles of success, it's IQ percentiles across all doctors and lawyers.
Regardless of how you define success, a very small proportion of doctors and lawyers don't meet the 100 IQ bar. And if you define success as anything other than having the job, that proportion gets smaller.
There are way more than "slim to none" doctors/lawyers who are at or below 100 IQ.
Your citation is not accepted (it's from nearly 30 years ago, is a sample of men over 30 in Wisconsin, cites research from many years even older [50s and 60s], there's no accounting for correlation -- maybe doing harder work makes you better at taking IQ tests).
It's only doctors, who happened to be the folks who ran the study, that are substantially higher than every other group listed. I wonder why.
IQ is a predictor of success, but it is not an exclusive predictor. Unless you have a mental disability, you can be literally anything you want to be, and even if you have a mental disability, you can still be nearly anything you want to be.
Hard work is astronomically more important than IQ. The literal article you're commenting on is written by someone with one of the highest IQs in the world.
You're in disagreement with all these "high IQ" people you think are worthy of studying other humans, and given the option, I'm going to listen to them over you.
You said, Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general".
I think it's actually understated in general. Telling people who don't have the mental horse power to, "work harder", is cruel.
Would you tell someone with an IQ of 100 to "work harder" if they wanted to be a Software Engineer/Lawyer/etc?