In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things: the Moon landings didn't happen, bizarro political theories that fall apart if you look at them funny, occult mumbo jumbo, Scientology, vaccines cause autism and similar (RFJ Jr. probably has a high IQ), etc.

I wonder if having a high IQ means you can delude yourself better. Whether God can build a mountain he can't climb over may be a paradox, but humans with high IQ can absolutely create traps for their own mind they can't think their way out of.

I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs, with a roughly equal split between authoritarian leftism (Communism / tankie Marxism, technocratic socialism) and authoritarian rightism (race nationalism, fascism, neoreaction, authoritarian traditionalism / theocracy). I think this stems from an intuition on the part of the person that because they seem smarter than average and have trouble running their own life, there's no way an average person can be part of self-governing. I think they're both underestimating other people and overestimating the inherent efficacy of "smart" people.

That being said, the caveat "on average" must always be added. On average, on average, on average. Same goes with anything about average tendencies of different genders. On average, on average, on average, averages across large groups do not map to individuals in that group. Emboss that on a mallet and bash people over the head with it until they get it.

I do wonder if there might be some conservation at play in some individual cases -- which kinda matches what you said. There is only so much brain tissue. If you're hyper-good at some narrow kind of analytical intelligence (coding!) maybe some of that brain tissue is borrowed from other things it might be doing like understanding other meat sacks.

Depends on what you're optimising your life for. Money is very easy to measure, work/life balance, family and other factors are all incredibly difficult to measure and are arguably more important. Plenty of relatively poor people have extremely happy lives.

Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.

The speed with which an individual develops accuracy in their model of something (ceteris paribus) does seem to be captured by an IQ-like score, according to the research.

The thing people that actually causes problems is that people mentally equate 'higher intelligence' with 'better' or 'more valuable' which goes against our desire for humans to all be equal(ly valuable). That is what generally leads people to come up with other forms of 'intelligence' (emotional intelligence, street smarts, etc.), even though that just redefines intelligence to the point where the original meaning is lost and a new word needs to be introduced. Much better imho is to keep the original word intact and use terms like 'emotional competence', which also capture the experience part rather than just the genetic part.

The statistics so far show that the upper median group will do better on average. One might end up in jungle but it does not really matter for our experiment.

For individuals, IQ is sort of statistical proxy for lots of things if your daily life is lived in a first world country.

But it’s insane to hold it as some sort of key indicator of fundamental human potential.

In population statistical situations, like when hiring, however, imho it does make sense to prefer high iq individuals. Not because of what it tells of a single candidate’s potential, but it acts as a sort of maxwells demon for the workforce as total. So you end up with a employee pool closer to above-median group in our experiment which may or may not provide better business outcomes.

I think there is learning ability like what kind of CPU your brain gets. Some people get a super computer that seems to break down at times. Some get an i7, some a Pentium III, and even some a TI-89 chip.

Then there is knowledge, which is what you take the time to learn and is kind of like an external storage drive to continue with the computing analogy. Even if you're not able to learn as fast as someone who is equipped with a better chip, you can outperform them at work if you know a lot more about the subject (you studied hard outside of work) and have taken the time to learn new skills like programming (you added new software programs to continue the analogy).

Then there is wisdom. You have a sort of common sense and ability to see the consequences of certain actions in a way that isn't so common.

Overall Intelligence in my eyes is then the sum total of someone's 1.) learning/processing ability, 2.) knowledge across multiple domains, and 3.) wisdom. Someone with a lot of #1 may be considered by many to be unintelligient if they have little of #2 and #3.

This is just my own stupid view on the subject though. I sometimes think we just haven't invented the vocabulary necessary to discuss this - that or I'm just not educated on the subject.

To accurately test the jungle guy's intelligence you'd need to devise a test that doesn't require reading nor writing (skills he hasn't yet developed). The point is to test how well his brain works, not what he's learned. With physical testing there are similar situations, where two people can have the same strength and endurance but one of them can achieve more with it due to certain skills like dance or being Mike Tyson.