That brain surgeons aren’t more intelligent is not surprising. The job really doesn’t require much thinking.
Obligatory disclaimer that IQ tests are bullshit, though
we’re too busy making fun of the surgeons to do much that’s smart
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But I think the implication here is wider than just brain surgeons and rocket scientists (and those rocket surgeons, too). It reveals something important about our general division of labor under a capitalist society. Certain jobs are lionized so much that people get the impression that people who do them are good at everything else, too. And the people who do them come to believe that, too, because of how much they are paid and how much they are seen as the smartest of the smart. It’s the engineers disease writ large, if that makes any sense.
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The whole premise of IQ is based on the meritocratic bullshit of justifying why some people have so much more than others. It doesn’t test innate abilities, and career success rarely depends on innate intelligence anyway.
In personal experience, the main traits that makes people successful in science and medicine are access to education and diligence. Intelligence, creativity, and problem solving are all selected for much less than who works the hardest on whatever they’re told to do (among the few lucky enough to be there in the first place). I imagine that is just as true for other fields.
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Sure, but I wasn’t really talking about IQ, which is and always have been racist, classist, misogynistic bullshit. I’m talking about our general attitude towards labor, and how that labor is divided up.
Well, yes and we generally know who has the former (meaning access to education) and it’s white men. These are more prestigious jobs, and considered to be the domain of the “smartest” people in the ideology of metriocracy, but the barriers to those jobs tend to rest on our social structures far more than anyone’s “innate” intelligence.
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Anyone who has been through med school can testify that, while there is a certain baseline intelligence required (mostly centered on being able to read and retain information rapidly), most of success there is based on being too stupid to quit. Seriously, when I was there (I seriously doubt it has changed much) a NEJM study found that between lectures, labs, supplemental activities and required reading it came to about 46 hours per day, before allowing for eating and sleeping. Like any of us did that!! In fact, I hold to this day that, much like cops, excessive intelligence is probably detrimental to completing medical education.
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I love much that Mitchell and Webb have created over the years, but it is their pronunciation of the words ‘normil’, ‘petril’, and ‘metil’ which have stuck with me permanently.
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I will never forget being told by an epidemiologist that they don’t believe in physics.
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There are some caveats to this study:
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-067883
As the authors note:
The control group was mainly white, had completed secondary school, and had a university degree.
And the rocket scientists and neurosurgeons seem to have been recruited through linkedin profiles, which selects for people who get ahead by spending their time job hunting rather than doing their current jobs well.
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Some are dumber than the rest…
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Agreed IQ is such a crude measure that it is essentially useless for comparing people who are not severely neurocognitively delayed.
That being said it does have some utility when defining severe developmental disorders (IQ << 70). Admittedly, we usually measure many additional scores to actually define the domain of the developmental delay. But IQ has some utility there (and only there IMHO).
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I think Ben Carson made that pretty clear, even before he tried to treat his Covid infection with oleander on the advice of Mike Lindell. When Carson claimed the pyramids of Giza were made by Joseph to store grain it became clear that neurosurgeons could actually be dumber than the rest of us…
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We also have the obligatory “surgeon vs medical doctor” jokes. “How do you hide something from an orthopedic surgeon? Put it in a book.”. “How do you hide something from a medical doctor? Put it under a dressing.” 
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Doctor, would you care to assist me in performing surgery on a torpedo?
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One cousin is a rocket scientist, another a retinal surgeon. I was only a lousy software engineer and they’re still dumber than me.
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That explains why they have the shit jobs.
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May I recommend to you Who Gets To Be Smart? by Bri Lee
Whose conclusions, I suspect, will not surprise you in the slightest.
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These are people who have dedicated large chunks of their lives to studying something very particular. Those years of hard-won knowledge and experience have great value, much moreso than the kind of general intelligence that is being tested for here.
Good hardware won’t get you far without taking the time to install software. And you can do a lot with an average machine running good software.
ETA: Just to clarify, what I am trying to get at is that “intelligence” is overrated, and what matters is how one applies one’s mental faculties, regardless of their abundance.
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