From Intelligence:
Tobias Wolfram
Volume 98, May–June 2023, 101755
Tobias Wolfram (@_twolfram) has produced a tour de force on the intelligence stratification of occupations
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) April 29, 2023
There's a lot in it, but here's a taste: the occupations with the highest and lowest mean levels of intelligence. Compare physical scientists (114) and packers (87). pic.twitter.com/tOWVt8s60x
This is the first time this kind of table has been published in several decades. I believe Linda Gottfredson published one in the 20th century. If I recall correctly, that one too seemed pretty reasonable in terms of rank-ordering, but also, as you see here, with more compression of IQ range than you’d expect.
This table, for example, is from the U.K. I’m not sure what they mean by “physical scientists”— an American definition includes physicists, chemists, astronomers, and geologists, but here I also see “chemical scientists” by themselves in 7th place. So maybe “physical scientists” are just physicists?
It would hardly be surprising that physicists are #1. But 114 seems low. That’s around the 83rd percentile of the public.
I know several anecdotes told by extremely smart and successful men, such as Jeff Bezos, of them entering top colleges with the ambition of being physicists and then realizing they couldn’t match up to the best of the best of their peers in physics so they’d better switch to something cognitively easier. Of course, these anecdotes exaggerate the challenge since they come from places like Princeton and Stanford and plenty of people are happy to scrape by as an average physicist rather than have Bezos-like ambition to be the best in whatever field he enters (or, in the case of Amazon, invents for himself).
But still…
