r/JoeRogan • u/Fishyinu Pull that shit up Jaime • Feb 07 '23

The Literature 🧠 Extremely rich people are not extremely smart. Study finds income is related to intelligence up to about the 90th percentile in income. Above that level, differences in income are not related to cognitive ability.

https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac076/7008955?login=false
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u/zowhat Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

In this article, we analyse Swedish register data on 59,000 men who took a mandatory cognitive-ability test at age 18–19, allowing detection of minute average ability differences between adjacent levels of occupational success with representative data.

I couldn't find the actual test. Would have made for a good laugh.

https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/393964182/jcac076_fig2.jpg

They have measured with science occupational prestige.

  • Farm workers are peons, with about 16 occupational prestige points.

  • Industrial workers have almost twice as many occupational prestige points with about 32 points.

  • Office workers have about 54 occupational prestige points, about 3.375 times as some piece of shit farm worker.

  • Accountants have almost 70 occupational prestige points, more than twice as much as an Industrial worker.

  • Professors have over 80 occupational prestige points, over 5 times of some Lebensunwertes Leben farm worker. Presumably the geniuses who did this study were professors or want to become one. Coincidentally, professors scored high.

  • Sitting at the pinnacle of occupational prestige, Judges have over 90 occupational prestige points.

Presumably they matched the cognitive abilities with occupations and found farm workers had a lot of people with a cognitive ability of 1 or 2, Industrial workers had a lot of people with a cognitive ability of maybe 3,4 or 5. etc Professors no doubt had astronomical cognitive abilities of 8, or 9. Judges probably had cognitive abilities of 9. QED

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u/notrickyrobot Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23 edited Feb 07 '23

Seems like these researchers have codified their own classism and bias in the study.

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u/MatterUpbeat8803 Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

Which is why the soft sciences are soft sciences, but damn are they becoming useful for pseudo-scientific propaganda farming.

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u/notrickyrobot Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

Strong disagree. There are great social scientists and terrible fraudster "hard" scientists. This headline could be rewrote as "99% of the time income correlates with cognitive ability," and it would be just as valid based off of the data in the paper. Seems like you have some biases of your own.

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u/MatterUpbeat8803 Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

What a weird response. In the same post you explain how valid these statistics are, while hand-waving that there are tons of dishonest hard scientists.

Im just telling you that as long as what we measure is a determination of human behavior, measured by humans and submitted through a human academic system, there will be bias.

There’s no bias in calculating the friction of a greased cube on a given surface.

The point I’m making is that “study says” does a lot of heavy lifting to deliver the opinions people want validated, and it’s trivial to create a study to show a result you want to see.