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> " How do you define success?"

Surely you jest. It really doesn't matter how you define success, IQ is a valid predictor of pretty much any definition of success you can think of. Income, academic achievement, you name it.




Defining IQ is tricky to begin with. So is defining success.

Do you really not see the issue?


Under GP’s terms, success is trivial to define — pick a reasonable metric. IQ is also well defined — general intelligence is not, and whether IQ maps to general intelligence is questionable (because the latter is hard to define). But for this argument, you don’t need to define general intelligence, and really even IQ’s definition doesn’t matter as long it’s stable (define IQ as simply the outcome of an IQ test). Regardless of IQ’s definition, or the precise questions posed, it simply needs to (consistently) correlate with your selected definition of success to be useful.

He’s also served the counter argument on a plate: pick a reasonable definition of success, and find little or no correlation to IQ. You only need to agree the definition is “reasonable”, and the study is not flawed.




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