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Tag Archives: Lion of the Blogosphere

Bill Gates & Executive Functioning

25 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

autism, Bill Gates, executive function, IQ, Lion of the Blogosphere, nerdiness, petals around the rose

Like many of the greatest minds in STEM, Bill Gates has been accused of having a touch of autism by armchair psychologists. Others argue he is simply a nerd.

While some argue that nerdiness is a mild form of autim, others, like LOTB, argue that the two concepts are distinct.

I have not done enough research to have a strong opinion either way, but a key deficit in autism involves executive functioning.

What is executive functioning?

Executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals. Executive functions include basic cognitive processes such as attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Higher order executive functions require the simultaneous use of multiple basic executive functions and include planning and fluid intelligence (e.g., reasoning and problem solving)

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions (2019-11-24)

What does any of this have to do with Bill Gates? My subjective impression is that Gates is relatively weak at EF. Perhaps not compared to the average person, but certainly compared to his super IQ matched peers. In support of this impression are three (admittedly weak) pieces of evidence.

1) He sucked at petals around the rose

If you’ve never heard of this game please check it out and record how many dice rolls it takes you to get six consecutive correct scores.

Then compare your performance to Gates’s.

This game strikes me as very similar to the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (a common measure of EF) in that it requires you to infer a rule based on repeated feedback. I infered the rule simply from the name of the game even before any feedback.

In Gates’s defense, he thought the game was called “pedal around the roses”, so this may explain his poor score.

2) He can’t control his hands

Anyone who has watched Gates in interviews knows how erratically his hands move around when he talks. I’m no neurologist, but this strikes me as an inability to inhibit certain responses, a lack of cognitive control or self-monitoring, and poor communication between the left and right brain. I tend to overuse my hands when I talk too so I see a bit of myself in Gates but I was insecure enough about it to stop.

I also have a problem where whenever I wave to someone, I also say “hi” even though they’re often too far away to hear me. I think this relates to the huge gap between my verbal (left-brain) and performance (right-brain) IQs. In extreme cases this can lead to unbuttoning your shirt with your left hand while simultaneously buttoning it up with your right-hand, thus never getting undressed.

3) He’s not that articulate

Despite the fact that Bill Gates’s verbal SAT score equates to a spectacular verbal IQ of 157, he’s not an especially impressive impromptu speaker. As commenter ” caffeine withdrawals” noted, he’s clearly above average, but not much more than that.

A professor of linguistics informed me that based on factor analysis, linguistic ability is actually three different abilities: vocabulary, working memory, and executive functioning. We know from Gates’s sky high verbal and math SAT scores that he’s likely extremely high in the first two, so only the third factor could be dragging down his speaking skills.

How does EF affect speaking skills? EF is all about planning and if you can’t plan your sentences and paragraphs in real lime, they wont be especially succinct. EF also relates to fluency because a certain amount of flexibility is needed to find the right word to express a given thought. People who perseverate too much on one word, or one type of word, will not be smooth talkers.

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Lion of the Blogosphere discusses the IQ’s of CEOs

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

CEOs, IQ, IQ floors, IQ thresholds, linear relationships, Lion of the Blogosphere, U.S. presidents

The wildly popular Lion of the Blogoshere is the latest blogger I’ve seen commenting about a study showing that Swedish elite CEOs have a mean IQ of 115. He writes:

These findings are consistent with my previous speculation that most career tracks have cognitive floors, and once you are above the cognitive floor, having additional higher IQ isn’t of much use. The cognitive floor for management positions in corporations seems to be around 110 or so. After that, getting promoted requires personality traits that are correlated with “fitness for the military” rather than higher IQ.

This idea that IQ is quite important below a certain threshold, but quite unimportant above that same threshold is very popular and potentially true, but I’ve always preferred a simpler model that splits the difference: IQ is mildly important across virtually all levels.

I don’t know if my simple model is true, but the paper seems to show that minor CEOS have a mean IQ of 108 and major CEOs have a mean IQ of 115. Now the paper defines minor CEOs as CEOs running 8 figure companies ($15 million or less) and major CEOS as running a 10 figure company (more than $1.5 billion USD). From here, we can speculate, that for every tenfold increase in company size, the average IQ of the CEO increases by 4 points. So:

Million dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 104
Ten million dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 108
Hundred million dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 112
Billion dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 116
Ten billion dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 120
Hundred billion dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 124
Trillion dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 128
Ten trillion dollar companies: Average CEO IQ 132

Of course there’s no such thing as a ten trillion dollar company, however the sitting president of the United States is often described as America’s CEO. The United States has a GDP of about 17 trillion and preliminary data suggests that U.S. presidents have an average IQ around 130, about what you’d expect from the CEO of a company the economic size of America.

So I don’t necessarily agree that the importance of IQ suddenly drops beyond a certain threshold; instead I see IQ as mildly but equally important across virtually the full range, but I could be wrong because comparing presidents to CEOs is not exactly an apples to apples comparison, and an economist could probably come along and rip this analysis to shreds.

The Lion of the Blogosphere also writes:

The problem here is that while an IQ of 110 to 115 is high enough to get promoted through the corporate ranks, it’s not smart enough to make smart decisions about the direction of the business. This explains why most corporations are so poorly run and continually make costly business mistakes.

I agree with this 100% but I would go a lot further and say that an IQ of 130 is not smart enough to be president of the United States. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been terrible presidents with IQ’s way above 130 and excellent presidents way below 130, but the lower IQ great presidents were probably great in spite of their lower IQ’s, not because of them; or because of certain personality traits correlated with lower IQ, rather than the lower IQ itself being beneficial. In fact I think the job of an American president is so complex that none of them have been smart enough for the job, and that’s probably why the correlation between IQ and job performance among presidents is so low. When everyone is in over their heads, success and failure will be largely determined by luck.

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The dark side of success

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

IQ, Lion of the Blogosphere, politics, sociopathy, Steve Sailer

Influential blogger Steve Sailer has a recent post questioning the popular feel-good idea that bullies are low self-esteem losers. While this stereotype might be generally true, many bullies are probably high self-esteem winners, who go on to achieve great success in life. Sailer cites the following quote from sociologist Robert Faris:

On average, the future for bullies is bleak. They tend to come from homes that are problematic, and then end up having long-term problems. But there’s a caveat to that: another category of kids who are highly aggressive, kids who come from good homes, kids who are often quite popular. Those children are probably more skillful in the way that they use aggression. They often have high social skills, and do quite well in later life. There are probably a number of politicians and successful business leaders who fall into that category.

Upon reading that, I immediately thought of Chris Hargensen, the attractive rich female bully with a tested IQ of 140 from Stephen King’s novel Carrie. I was also reminded of blog commentator Santoculto’s assertion that many highly successful people are sociopaths. But the corollary is that many extreme losers (i.e. people living in abject poverty) should have towering morality; and indeed many spiritual teachers vow to give up all material possessions.

I would think that sociopathy would be even more advantageous in politics than business because politicians often have to make decisions of war and peace for political reasons so it would help to have a cold-blooded personality that wouldn’t lose much sleep over such moral dilemmas. This may help explain why U.S. presidents appear to have an average IQ around 130, which while incredibly high, seems kind of low for people who, for many years, were arguably the most powerful person on the planet and typically attended extremely elite schools while young. In fact, an IQ of 130 is not much beyond the average Ivy League student, so U.S. presidents are probably not much brighter than the elite college kids they went to school with, despite the fact that they are light-years more successful than the average elite college grad. Although I disagree with the Lion of the Blogosphere‘s claim that high IQ is only useful for getting credentials, and after that virtually irrelevant to success, when it comes to politicians, his theory looks quite accurate.

However I suspect that high IQ is actually a huge competitive advantage, even in politics, but sociopathy is also a huge advantage, and since sociopaths have lower IQ’s, this drags down the IQ’s of elite politicians. So instead of comparing elite politicians to their typical Ivy League classmate (IQ 128), we should be comparing them to the average sociopathic Ivy League classmates (probably IQ 118, since criminal and delinquent types typically have IQ’s 10 points lower than demographically similar counterparts). So the average U.S. president (IQ 130) cognitively towers over his sociopathic elite college classmates (IQ 118), once again confirming the importance of IQ.

Of course not all U.S. presidents went to elite schools, and many most certainly are not sociopaths. Obviously I don’t know any of these men personally so I have no way of judging their true character, but President Jimmy Carter, for example, is considered a man of outstanding morality in his unwillingness to use military force and President Barack Obama has been praised as a good father and faithful husband who fought tirelessly to bring health care to working-class Americans.

It’s interesting that scholar Charles Murray said the following about Jimmy Carter:

The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government. Probably the smartest president we’ve had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.

Perhaps high IQ people make bad presidents because they’re not sociopathic enough for such a tough job.

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