> Ed, Good for you. > > Bill Ward > > I concluded that there is a strong positive correlation between IQ and > the size of the ego. > > > > Ed Weick > >
I've meant to respond to this for sometime and take a somewhat contrary position to my original one. There are indeed many clever people who have large egos, and who use their cleverness to aggressively work their way up whatever ladder they happen to be on, so my original point has some validity. However, some clever people behave very differently. Some months ago there was a program on TV or something in the papers (I forget which) about what happened to American kids who recorded some of the highest IQs of all time, probably as measured by Stanford Binet. One of the highest, about 200 or more, belonged to a kid who lived in rural Wisconsin or Minnisota. As a middle aged man, he is a muscle bound bouncer somewhere in the US southeast. When he is not bouncing or muscle-building, he is working on a theory that will unify the human psyche with the laws of the universe, or some such thing. His genius is not unappreciated. His girl friend is a Ph.D. Another very high child IQ became a biker. His genius is also not unappreciated. Younger bikers gather around him to listen to what he says because "He knows a lotta things". We've all known very clever people who could have risen to the top of the corporate ladder, but who didn't really want to do that. When, after two years of being a drop-out, I returned to high-school in a small town in upcoast British Columbia, I met a kid who kept recording phenomenal IQs, but who simply was not academically inclined. His teachers berated him and banged books off his head to try to get him to take his lessons seriously, but he simply wouldn't do that. All he wanted to do was to buy a fish boat and become a commercial fisherman. And that is what he did. While working as a logger, I met a young man from far northern Alberta who had no more than six or seven years of schooling, but who had memorized everything Shakespeare had ever written. He would ask us what we wanted to hear while eating lunch. Julius Ceaser? Othello? Perhaps some of the Sonnets? Well, let's try A Midsummer Night's Dream today. And away he'd go. I have no idea of what happened to him. I'm sure all of us have also known rather stupid people who did rise to the top, their only real abilities being manipulation and strategic aggression. I ran into quite a number of people like that in my career in government and the oil patch. So, Bill, if you're still interested, I don't withdraw my original point, but it seemed just a little too simple. Intelligence is a very complex thing. Given the intricacies and perversities of human personality, there is no telling where it will take one. Regards, Ed Weick
