You don't need to be special to do STEM work, but it's possible the attitude that you do is keeping us from learning how to better train the average person in it.

I'm a software developer who comes from a non-STEM (music) background, but before I went into tech I thought there was no way I would be "smart enough" to do what I do now for a living.

Turns out you don't need 4-years of heavy maths/physics/CS education to write React components, but most of my friends (and a surprising number of recruiters) still think you do.

Average person with less intelligence is capable of doing the same thinking, just slower. I believe that the problem is that STEM classes aren't separated by the speed of thinking. Also easier for a person to accept that he/she just doesn't get math, instead of the fact that he/she is thinking slower than other people.

I found myself thinking slower as I get older (and having more health problems), but so far I was able to counteract the disadvantages with better life decisions, so actually I have a happier life.

I'm pretty sure this whole intelligence is merely thinking faster idea is non sense. From my own personal experience, I think quite slowly, I'm bad at mental arithmetic, but I have a very high IQ. Look at IQ tests, our best measure for intelligence: getting the questions right is not about speed, it's about insight. The harder questions do not require more time, it is not simply a matter of enumerating through the different options. One has to "see" the patterns and then apply the rules.

> Average person with less intelligence is capable of doing the same thinking, just slower

Intelligence is not just about the speed of thought. It's also about the depth of memory, the number of associations one has in one's internal model, and numerous other factors.

Consider a computer's memory that's halved. Suddenly it can run significantly fewer programs despite the fact that it rjnd at exactly the same speed.

It sounds interesting, it' s more likely the number of associations than working memory, as I always had very bad working and long term memory compared to other people, still I was the best in elementary class in math without any studying (of course this changed after I went to a school specialized in math).

Because providing a better base eduction lets those who are in that 1 SD above category actually use it. There are probably a lot of people right now who are 1 SD above but can't get the education they need to make use of it.

Everything will be fine when everybody is above average...

Historically, the economic promise has been that everyone who CAN get a job will just get a Different job when new technologies make their current jobs obsolete. Plow-pushers will become welders, for example.

And the usual futurist's question is whether instead the low-skill workers are more like horses in the 1930's, soon to be completely useless. The interesting argument in the article is that, well, even if the low-skill workers aren't completely unemployed, they'll be pushed forever into low-productivity industries that are happy enough paying them serf's wages... Perhaps keeping them just busy enough to avoid open revolt. (perhaps.)

> Everything will be fine when everybody is above average...

That's not at all what I said. What I said is that education opens the opportunity for those who have the innate ability.

Exactly. And those who have the innate ability are not the whole story, by a long shot.

Two things:

1) if you exclude everybody less than 1 standard deviation above the mean in a normally distributed population, you're left with approximately 16% of the population. The tech sector currently employs approximately 4% of the US population, so at most it's employing 1 in 4 people whose IQ is >1 std deviation above mean. Plenty of room to grow.

2) The idea that STEM education is simply beyond the capabilities of people who aren't in that lucky 16% needs support. The correlation of success in STEM to IQ does not mean causation runs from 'having a high IQ' leads to 'capable of being educated in STEM'. It seems equally possible that 'pursuing education in STEM' leads to 'having a high IQ', and that if we push more people through STEM-oriented education, more people will develop high IQs (of course, that would move the average, which isn't how IQ works, but... you get the idea).

Human minds are incredibly capable and flexible, and acting that the current state of practice of the STEM field and IQ is some sort of limiting factor in human capability seems, well, incredibly unimaginative. The standards of education changes over time. If you go back through the decades, the mix of "average" skills is different and arguably lesser in many ways. In other ways though, today we have a wealth of formal analytical thinking, but suffer a poverty of philosophical and creative exploration.

Perhaps the thing that AI may unleash is the power to access STEM techniques, without the same kind of need for formally thinking or operating in them so closely.

Where do you think causality lies here? Maybe being trained to think in ways that IQ tests prefer would raise peoples' scores? An IQ test isn't some sort of measure of inherent capacity, just a measure of how well someone takes an IQ test. People read too much into them.

> Maybe being trained to think in ways that IQ tests prefer would raise peoples' scores?

That question has been tested repeatedly by the scientific community, and the answer seems to be 'no'.

> An IQ test isn't some sort of measure of inherent capacity, just a measure of how well someone takes an IQ test.

That's just not the case. IQ correlates with many interesting phenomena.

Of course, IQ doesn't come close to explaining everything about life outcomes, but compared to virtually every other measure in psychology (or the social sciences more broadly) nothing else comes close to the empirical validity or explanatory power of IQ.

You don't need to be a STEM graduate to grok tech. There's a difference between the science of technology, the engineering of technology and the implementation of technology. You can be productive without being able to pass calculus.

When I started working for a .gov years ago, about 40% of the technical staff where former administrative people (clerks, typists, etc) who were trained and transitioned into technology related jobs ranging from programmers to sysadmins to project managers. They were great.

On another thread, I help with a school club at my son's school where 8-year olds are building Raspberry Pi based gadgetry. They are average kids, and they do very well.

Because IQ is not scientifically proven and is inherently flawed.

What is your evidence? IQ tests undoubtedly measure something, and that something correlates with things like academic performance and certain types of job performance. What’s flawed about that?

The quickest Google search for "flaws of IQ tests" comes back with so many studies showing that IQ is not correlated to intelligence that at this point the burden of proof is on anyone who says IQ is relevant. Even if IQ does measure something, it's not an indicator of anything other than the ability to pass a standardized test. It certainly is not an indicator of intelligence.

In other words: what is your evidence that IQ measures anything actually relevant?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...

https://www.popsci.com/why-iq-is-flawed

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iq-scores-not-accurate-marker-o...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2009/07/the-tru...

https://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligent

I never said anything about IQ tests measuring intelligence. No doubt the “something” that is measured is, at least in part, “intelligence,” at least as it applies in an academic setting. However, for you to dismiss them outright is simply not supported by the literature. For example:

> Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity.[0]

Yes, you can improve your performance on IQ tests with practice and motivation, but that does not make them “scientifically invalid” in any way. The fact is that so many things are correlated to IQ that it’s a useful theoretical construct, even if it’s misnamed and has little to do with what you’d call “intelligence.”

[0]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/04/what-does-iq-really-...

If IQ can be improved through education, then you cannot use it to argue that lower IQ people cannot be educated to be better at STEM jobs as the parent was arguing.

Sure, I'll give you that IQ measures something. The question is, is that something relevant to the argument that you can only be competitive in STEM with a higher IQ and therefore many people cannot be educated into STEM careers? Does IQ make you better suited for those jobs, or does the training for those jobs cause you to score higher on IQ tests?

It's no shock that richer and healthier people do better in school. If you want to call that "IQ" then fine, but saying the correlation goes the other way is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof. Without proof that a higher IQ makes you richer and healthier rather than the other way around, then yes, it is entirely scientifically invalid. Especially if you're not exactly sure what IQ is actually measuring.

If the parent wants to argue that some people can never be trained in STEM careers because STEM careers require too high of IQ, I demand proof that this psuedo-science malarky is defined and that it is proven to be inherent and cannot be trained during the course of STEM education.

> Because IQ is not scientifically proven

“IQ is not scientifically proven” is, at best, an incomplete thought. What claim about IQ necessary for the upstream comment’s argument is unproven?

> and is inherently flawed.

It what manner relevant to the reference in the present discussion is IQ “inherently flawed”?

If IQ isn't relevant to the parent's comment, then it shouldn't have been brought up. If it is relevant, then there should exist some proof that IQ actually matters.

The parent is making the claim that, because of IQ, certain segments of the population are at a fundamental disadvantage when it comes to STEM careers. For this to be anything more than pure poppycock, there needs to be proof that IQ measures anything actually relevant to the success of those jobs. And not only relevant, but measures something that cannot be trained, cannot be explained by differences in education of astronomy majors vs home economics majors, something that fundamentally bars elementary education majors from succeeding in electrical engineering.

Prove that IQ measures anything that says an accountant could not have been otherwise trained to practice chemistry because they're 10 IQ points short. If IQ measures anything relevant to the job you perform, there has to be some proof.

There doesn't have to be absolute proof, just decent evidence. While it's absolutely true that IQ tests aren't perfect (the very idea that intelligence can be measured on a single axis is suspect), there is plenty of evidence that shows correlation between IQ and success in certain fields.

If all good accountants or chemists have relatively high IQs, it doesn't prove that a good IQ is necessary, but it certainly provides some evidence. It's classic causation/correlation, but in this case, there are mountains of evidence of correlation.

The biggest argument against that is the question of "is that IQ score inherent or trained"? Yes, it seems some professions have higher IQ scores. But is that because they're actually smarter? Or is it that they're better educated in the things that score well on an IQ test? It's no coincidence that the professions where people have higher IQs are also professions that are monumentally harder than the ones further down the list. If IQ correlation means STEM causation, we could just as easily flip that around and say that STEM education means IQ increases.

If we are making the statement that certain sections of the population cannot be trained for STEM careers because they don't have the IQ to be competitive, then we'd better be damn sure that IQ isn't something that can be taught. And there is mounds of evidence showing that intelligence is not assigned at birth.

Does IQ measure intelligence, or education? And are either of those static throughout a person's life?