At Quillette “Wael Taji” discusses an interesting, difficult, and troubling issue—differences among individuals in in intelligence:
Having intelligence is what allows us to operate in the world—both on our own, and within the societies we inhabit. Those lucky enough to have a high IQ have an easier time at dispatching the various challenges they face, and thus naturally rise within hierarchies of competence. We can imagine any number of these hierarchies, most of which are unimportant (the hierarchy of Rubik’s Cube solvency speed, for example, is probably irrelevant), but all of which require some degree of intelligence. Furthermore, some of these areas of success—such as friendship groups, romantic relationships, and professional employment—are so fundamental to the individual pursuit of happiness that to be unable to progress in them is profoundly damaging to one’s sense of well-being and intrinsic self-worth.
This means that having a low IQ doesn’t only make you more likely to get killed or fall victim to an accident. It also means you’re more likely to undergo difficulties in progressing up every ladder in life. You’ll often feel permanently ‘stuck at zero’—unable to improve or change your position. Most of us will experience this feeling at least a few times in our lives, whether encountered in school (being unable to break the ‘A-grade’), in our social lives (being unable to establish or maintain a successful romantic relationship), or in comparatively trivial areas. Yet most of the time, it is transient—passing when we switch our efforts to a new endeavor, or after devising a way to solve the problem. Very few of us know what it is like to have that feeling almost all of the time—to have a large proportion of one’s attempts at self-betterment or advancement frustrated by forces that seem to be beyond our control.
The reality, as “Wael Taji” must be aware, is that intelligence in the form of cognitive ability is actually less important to success in life than other forms of intelligence, particularly the ability to work with people, what is called “socio-emotional development”. Nonetheless the question remains. Should we be attempting to compensate people for losing in life’s lottery? For having lower levels of basic ability regardless of how you measure it?
I don’t have a ready answer to that question and can only offer some observations. We should not reward people for doing what they’re going to do anyway. People with the intellectual ability to tackle certain kinds of jobs will have a propensity to tackle them because they can, because of their intrinsic rewards. Additional incentives are unnecessary.
Most tasks can be organized to require individuals with very high levels of cognitive ability or organized so that they may be performed by individuals with more typical levels of cognitive ability. Reality should drive us to put more effort into ensuring that ordinary tasks can be accomplished by ordinary people.
Finally, we need to reconcile ourselves to the reality that some people are, indeed, smarter than others and education alone will never bridge the difference. Some people will have a maddeningly frustrating experience with higher education, so frustrating they can’t really benefit from it. The rush to requiring college degrees for everything is an error.
