Competence does not seem to aggressively overwhelm other advantages in humans:
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g. One might counter-counter-argue that humans are very similar to one another in capability, so even if intelligence matters much more than other traits, you won’t see that by looking at the near-identical humans. This does not seem to be true. Often at least, the difference in performance between mediocre human performance and top level human performance is large, relative to the space below, iirc. For instance, in chess, the Elo difference between the best and worst players is about 2000, whereas the difference between the amateur play and random play is maybe 400-2800 (if you accept Chess StackExchange guesses as a reasonable proxy for the truth here).
The usage of capabilities/competence is inconsistent here. In points a-f, you argue that general intelligence doesn’t aggressively overwhelm other advantages in humans. But in point g, the ELO difference between the best and worst players is less determined by general intelligence than by how much practice people have had.
If we instead consistently talk about domain-relevant skills: In the real world, we do see huge advantages from having domain-specific skills. E.g. I expect elected representatives to be vastly better at politics than medium humans.
If we instead consistently talk about general intelligence: The chess data doesn’t falsify the hypothesis that human-level variation in general intelligence is small. To gather data about that, we’d want to analyse the ELO-difference between humans who have practiced similarly much but who have very different g.
(There are some papers on the correlation between intelligence and chess performance, so maybe you could get the relevant data from there. E.g. this paper says that (not controlling for anything) most measurements of cognitive ability correlates with chess performance at about ~0.24 (including IQ iff you exclude a weird outlier where the correlation was −0.51).)
The usage of capabilities/competence is inconsistent here. In points a-f, you argue that general intelligence doesn’t aggressively overwhelm other advantages in humans. But in point g, the ELO difference between the best and worst players is less determined by general intelligence than by how much practice people have had.
If we instead consistently talk about domain-relevant skills: In the real world, we do see huge advantages from having domain-specific skills. E.g. I expect elected representatives to be vastly better at politics than medium humans.
If we instead consistently talk about general intelligence: The chess data doesn’t falsify the hypothesis that human-level variation in general intelligence is small. To gather data about that, we’d want to analyse the ELO-difference between humans who have practiced similarly much but who have very different g.
(There are some papers on the correlation between intelligence and chess performance, so maybe you could get the relevant data from there. E.g. this paper says that (not controlling for anything) most measurements of cognitive ability correlates with chess performance at about ~0.24 (including IQ iff you exclude a weird outlier where the correlation was −0.51).)