Why is the diagonal of a square not "2"

[Aidoneus]

("DrStraw")But IQ is not correlated with success. Well, it is, but not in the sense you mean. I have no figures but I doubt the correlation is higher than 0.5, but based on observation. No arguments that more people with high IQs will be successful, but there are a lot of successful people with average IQs. As I said above EQ is very important, as is simple perseverence and street smarts.

That question came up in one of my undergraduate courses. Studies indicated that IQ was positively correlated with income (IIRC, to take a common measure of success), but only up to an IQ of 125 or so. Among people with higher IQs there was no correlation between IQ and income.

I thought we were talking about success, not income. The two are not at all the same. Success is, in my opinion, a measure of happiness. Many people with high incomes are not happy, and therefore not successful, because they spend too much time acquiring that income.

Oh, I quite agree that income does not equal success.

As for any correlation between IQ and happiness, my guess is that there is a small negative correlation. Ignorance is bliss.

SAT scores have been criticized as not good predictors of college success (http://www.fairtest.org/sat-i-faulty-in ... ge-success), though their use may make administrators happy. And I have known many Mensa members who were not particularly successful when measured by income or awards. Hell, I have never been motivated by money beyond what was necessary to supply my basic needs. Or to quote Erasmus, "When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes." (Well, there is my wife's needs...)

As for ignorance being bliss, to quote H.L. Mencken, "A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier." An observation that might be updated by a reference to Fox News.

Edit: limited internal quoting!

[quantumf]

I carefully avoided subjective measures like "happiness" or "contentment" because they are very difficult to meaningfully measure, and stuck to precise items such as income, status and longevity. In that regard, IQ is, according to my research anyway, better correlated with success than any other single measure. I'm not sure how you measure EQ, or if there is a widely agreed upon way of testing it, but if there is, I don't expect it will be as well-correlated with success (as per my definition above) as IQ. The Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence does describe some measures, but also notes its limited predictive power.

No real disagreement on some of the other points, e.g. I agree that that it usually takes a lot more than IQ to be successful, and that IQ is no guarantee of happiness, and that success does not necessarily equal happiness.

I also found this article, which is of some relevant interest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits