cm2012 7 hours ago

I would never ask for them since its so cringe. But SAT scores correlate to IQ at .81, and IQ is one of the few things that strongly correlates to knowledge work performance positively. There is probably a lot of alpha from knowing candidates SAT scores. Its more useful than knowing the college they went to.

▲

Balgair 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's r = 0.81 right? so R2 would then be ~.66. Meaning that 66% of the variation in IQ scores can be statistically explained by variation in SAT scores.

It's really high for psych stuff. If you even get r=0.5, you've got a great result there.

But it is important to note, I feel, that SAT maps to only about 2/3 parts of the IQ score, and IQ score is also a quite fuzzy measure here for things like knowledge work job performance.

I do agree though, you get quite a bang for your buck just reporting these numbers.

But, if you explicitly tie money and compensation to the SAT score, man, that is setting up some very perverse incentives around it. If it adopts widely to do so, then you're gonna get some really strange interaction effects there.

▲

TMWNN 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I would never ask for them since its so cringe. But SAT scores correlate to IQ at .81

The combination of these two phrases is the equivalent to "I hate Trump, but ..." in another context.

▲

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

tg180 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

▲

doctorpangloss 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> and IQ is one of the few things that strongly correlates to knowledge work performance positively

i think you mean that it correlates to pay. nobody knows what you mean by "knowledge work performance." reviews of your peers also correlated with pay. often it is not the smartest person who is the most popular. so... do you see how you said something kind of meaningless?

▲

margalabargala 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> nobody knows what you mean by "knowledge work performance"

I actually was pretty easily able to deduce what they meant by "knowledge work performance".

It's understandable to be frustrated by not knowing something, but to claim "I don't understand that and therefore no one does and you're being nonsensical" is a bad look.

Consider responding with curiosity rather than defensiveness.

▲

cm2012 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nope, I meant what I said.

A very good metastudy is "The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology" (by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter). It summarizes 100 years of research on predicting job and training performance. It makes a very strong case that General Mental Ability (GMA, their word for IQ) is the single most valid predictor of employee success on the job, not just income.

	▲	tptacek 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's not what that paper says. Work sample tests are more valid than GMAs; the paper just presumes they're too expensive. Meanwhile, we don't have to axiomatically derive any of this: we know that relying on general cognitive assessments to prospective software developers wouldn't work. That's why almost no firms use them. If you exclude work sample testing from your analysis, all this paper is really saying is that active examination of candidates beats subjective interviews and resume scans. Well, obviously.