In his post, 'Why Are We so Obsessed With Improving IQ?', Jonathan Wai of Psychology Today noted:
"I think that the reason the desire to improve intelligence has always been popular is because as a society we really care about smarts. The recent article in The New York Times 'Can You Make Yourself Smarter?' along with Hambrick’s latest opinion piece shows that trying to make ourselves smarter has become something of a societal obsession."
In a society that rewards smartness, the juiciest of jobs are reserved for the smart. In another post, 'Of Brainiacs and Billionaires', Wai further observes, 'In the age of big data, the biggest brains will increasingly set the country's course and become top earners in the process.'
Where does that leave you and me? To get a better picture, half of us are just average! This is not a devastating shortcoming. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. But for curiosity's sake, how can some of us go up against the super-smart? Can we beat the IQ challenge?
Welcome to the laboratory. If you are in the top 15% of intelligence (IQ of 115 or higher) you are an eligible candidate! Better still if you are in the top decile (at least IQ of 120). According to The Bell Curve, you are capable of engaging in any profession. The assumption is that you have good work ethic and harmless personality traits. A paper uses Swedish conscript data to examine characteristics of CEOs of large and medium sized companies. It looks like large company CEOs are roughly +1 and +1.5 SD on cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability respectively!
On the Nobelist, Richard Feynman's reportedly "low" IQ of about 125, the educational psychologist, Arthur R. Jensen, admitted "...the outstanding feature of any famous and accomplished person, especially a reputed genius, such as Feynman, is never their level of g (or their IQ), but some special talent and some other traits (e.g., zeal, persistence). Outstanding achievement(s) depend on these other qualities besides high intelligence". He continued, "However, there is a threshold property of IQ, or g, below which few if any individuals are even able to develop high-level complex talents or become known for socially significant intellectual or artistic achievements. This bare minimum threshold is probably somewhere between about +1.5 sigma and +2 sigma from the population mean on highly g-loaded tests."
Can you beat the IQ challenge? Probably. You have to be above average in intelligence with a ton of creativity.
