I imagine it’s because the attributes that IQ measure could be the same as we use to measure success.
Effectively if your test is based on the skills needed for STEM, and the STEM fields have jobs with high pay and respect, then you’re likely to be considered “successful”. But the same person could be awful at communication, politics, the arts, and just be ignorant at large to how the world works. They may even be hyper specialized to their field but lack the flexibility in their intelligence to understand other STEM fields (I hear physicists are guilty of this).
Another, simpler answer, could just be that already wealthy people have better access to stable education, so they were already successful in many ways.
Just to continue to throw wrenches into the preconceptions, let’s not forget that a huge part of what we consider success in the modern world can be attributed to emotional intelligence as much as spatial awareness and logic.
A lot of CEO’s and people who climb high in the world are excellent at understanding how others feel and using emotion to communicate, share and inspire people to follow. Sometimes it’s the only thing leadership figureheads even know how to do. It’s also very, very hard to manage teams effectively if you don’t have a good understanding of how people feel at different times, how best to address those feelings and an idea how to manage the emotional atmosphere in a workplace. Yes, having good logic and reasoning is massively important, but rarely alone.
can be attributed to emotional intelligence as much as spatial awareness and logic.
Even though popular culture likes to equate intelligence with lack of social intelligence and even outright autism, it’s more likely that an intelligent person is intelligent in all of these things.
Yep, I’m starting to see how useful studying psychology would have been.
I’m 15 years into a tech career and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the hard problems are not usually tech problems…
I don’t know, I think there’s more to be said for actual experience and someone’s attitude more than education. Having a deep understanding of psychology can only help with analyzing issues and understanding people’s motivations, but there’s still going to be a disconnect from academic understanding of a subject, and actual experience and connection with a challenging area of learning.
Or to put it more simply, in my last job as a manager I hired two people who had psychology degrees or majors for a technical/data position on a team, hoping for the very same kind of understanding and empathy with each other that you would think an education in human psychology would provide, and those people turned out to have the most issues with others because of their own lack of real-world experiencing socializing and maintaining relationships with others.
