I think opportunity is MUCH more important than IQ.

I know lots of intelligent people, some of them that do have measured IQs in very high numbers, that are in really crappy situations right now (example: one friend has a small kid, and both he, and his similarly extremely intelligent wife are unemployed and failing to find freelance work, despite their work quality and speed being quite good, both of their parents families are also having economic problems, and are struggling to support the toddler, with the toddler grandparents selling old properties to pay for basic needs).

Also when I was more "immersed" in startup world, having my own startup and meeting lots of other startup owners, opportunity always was the important factor in success, never intelligence or even motivation, I met funded startups with crappy leaders, and similarly met genius stuff with no funding, frequently the funded ones had as advantage the fact they had some personal tie to someone in a VC somewhere (example: founder mother is friend of VC partner, or founder is cousin of VC person, and so on).

And judging by corruption scandals I've been seeing, that are always tied with rich companies (That you conclude that they are rich BECAUSE they are corrupt), I can conclude that the "equality" that is important would be "equality" in social relations. (even when there is someone "poor" that is self-made rich, if you look closely enough that "poor" person had some past connection that was important)

> one friend has a small kid

How did they get the kid? Stork dropped it off without inquiring about their financial situation?

They made the kid when both were employed, and got immediately fired (for reasons unrelated to kid)

A number of points:

1.) IQ measures certain types of symbolic manipulation. This is a very narrow measure.

2.) IQ correlates with cognitive task skill only for the inexperienced. Chess ability correlates with IQ for novice chess players, but by the master level this correlation disappears.

3.) Even being a narrow measure, it is changeable - even over 20 points in a 3-4 year period. An enriched environments and improvement in diet will do wonders.

4.) There is actually some evidence that people who learn more slowly ultimately learn "more deeply". This is paralleled in the behavior of neural networks - a large learning rate tends to lead to poor generalization.

Ultimately, biology is a lot more flexible than most people realize. For example, there is a gene (ACTN3) that influences muscular force production that is considered extremely important for power athletes like sprinters. Yet even at the national level there are still competitive athletes that have no working copies of this gene! It isn't until you get to the Olympic level that everyone has at least one working copy. Beyond this, the NBA dunk competition has been won repeatedly 5'9" Nate Robinson.

I will agree with the majority of your sentiment, but do note that research work by Carol Dweck (2010) has found IQ to not be as deterministic as most of us had previously accepted it to be the end-all-be-all of your intelligence. This is actually bleeding edge in the field of psychology, and I was lucky to work in her lab before I turned to computer science. [0]

Other research additionally had found that in school, you are essentially being "trained" to solve the IQ test. They found this out when applying alternative tests to Aborigines in AUS and Taxi Drivers in NYC(ironically). Taxi drivers and Aborigines were able to ace the "map/geolocation" IQ test where, even if you or I were to not rely on our GPS for most navigation, we would fail miserably. [1]

[0] This was a good discussion, but you can find her research all over the net: https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-reconcile-Carol-Dwecks-theor... [1] unable to find source at this time. If you're interested let me know and I'll try to keep this thread active.

In my experience, your ability to utilize your relationship with other humans is a better source of success than IQ.

I know plenty of intelligent people that are stuck somewhere in life because they are socially average or worse. Most project I worked that failed didn't because of technical problems but human ones.

IQ may helps, but it can also get in the way.

You know the drill about money not buying happiness but having not enough is a drag ? Kinda the same with IQ and success really.

Being poor is mentally taxing - your doing a lot more work to stay still.

Not to mention that IQ is such a blunt statistic. There's a guy I've known since 1st grade who I'd assert has a way higher IQ than me. When we were in high-school he was 2 or 3 years ahead of me in math and still breezing through. He was helping me install and configure php and apache while we were freshmen.

We enrolled in the same college at the same time, but his mom died. He dropped out and got a job working at Taco Bell. He's worked there ever since. Just a single acute stressor changed his track and now by all accounts he's stuck. His crappy job keeps him working strange shifts and he can never accumulate anything for savings. When you have like 20$ of disposable income after working 40+ hours a week everything seems out of reach. Saying IQ is trending towards correlating to earnings feels like an elitist cop-out. I certainly hope they're right for the sake of all my anecdotal life experiences! I've met a lot of foolish people in fantastically lucrative situations and really smart people on the rocks.

I agree - if you chose the right parents and were born with a high IQ, support, education and contacts, then you deserve to be rewarded with money \s