All of these tests and hoops are proxies for IQ. High IQ tends to lead to better outcomes, but doesn’t guarantee them.
Does typing that not result in a word highlighted with a red squiggly line for you?
You seem to have high expectations of others (i.e.: "not that smart"), but something as basic proofreading seems to be beneath you.
If you have impressive credentials but still communicate poorly and speak ill of your own family, you will fail to impress much.
Iam sorry you dontknow it
"Everyone (including my own family) is not that smart"
It is hard to not get upset with people that go through life with that mindset.
Treat others the way you want to be treated is the way things work over here.
He may not value proofreading but you are poor at reading comprehension.
I have met much smarter and successful people who went into regular technical schools and are much more creative than IIT types.
High crystallized intelligence (memorization, knowledge transfer) gets you through the door but won't make you a leader.
Essentially people who can adapt fast and care a lot about their work?
How do we develop these traits
There is a lot going on in your brain before the age of 3. A kid that is left alone in front of a TV or in a tiny space with plastic toys all the time or lives in a toxic home will develop differently to one that grows playing with other kids, pets, has space to move around, that can go outside and experience nature and has an overall richer childhood experience.
Good nutrition, a healthy childhood, low exposure to pollution (lead, PFAS, phthalates, etc), genetics, etc. have significant impact.
You can train hard but if you had early life experiences that turned you into a neurotic person, your "equilibrium" will always take you back to being a neurotic.
That being said, we had students transfer over from UC Davis to Cal, and I think comparing your wife to a UC Davis graduate, is not as big of a put down as you think. Most UC Davis grads would perform almost the same as an average UC Berkeley grad if they had the same opportunity.
Hopefully she doesn't read Hacker News!
If you care about being "happy"? Sure.
But plenty of things require a bit more than "a surprisingly low threshold". You're not going to be Jeff Dean (for example) if you're just "smart".
So, in response to your first comment, "it doesn't even matter how smart you are" is not accurate unless you specify the context you're referring to.
basically what you are talking about is the difference between someone who is very smart, one in a thousand, that can score well with lots of studying compared to a one in a million type genius capable of winning math Olympiads. Most standardized tests lump these people in the same category
That's probably way too high of a threshold. Many standardized tests lump everyone who is in the top 5-10% of ability, as long as they prepare sufficiently well.
Do you have some source backing this up? A cursory search reveals that more than 850,000 applicants attempted the IIT-JEE exam in 2023. Total available college vacancies slightly more than 16,000. This number would be around 5000 for the OG IITs.
For US medical colleges, for 2022-2023 admission cycle, 22,712 of the 55,188 students who applied to medical school matriculated. Perhaps these numbers belongs to a specific US region?
I would say that attempting JEE is now more or less a cultural thing. 90% of the applicants (pardon the number out of thin air) sit the exam because that's just something you do after finishing school.
This is factually incorrect, or maybe you are referring to JEE-Advanced. The top of the funnel (i.e., JEE Mains), is over 1MM out of which about 25% qualify for JEE-Advanced.
Wouldn't you say the same about most MIT and Stanford grads as well? A lot of eminent people in Tech industry graduated from MIT and Stanford. But, in my experience, the reverse isn't true: graduating from those schools is usually not an indicator of eminence.