Money for Brains?

There's a teaser survey over at the Guardian that's a little tougher than the advertising-oriented BS surveys you normally see on the web. The salaries are in British Pounds, so divide your salary by 1.75 to convert if you decide to try it.

My results were rather complimentary, and (given my sample IQ of 135) reasonably accurate. It's too bad the whole premise is moronic!

What's not only inaccurate about the quiz, but dead wrong is the notion that we're paid based on our intelligence, or, more precisely, that our employment value and our intelligence should correspond. This is so wrong as to be stupid. Once you factor out supply vs. demand, we're paid based on our effectiveness. It doesn't take a Ramanujan to collect trash for a living, but Simple Simon the Pie Man might not be up to the task. There are many other virtues, such as education, integrity, diligence, ability to schmooze & negotiate, &c., that help determine our effectiveness. Most importantly, it's how hard one's willing to work that really matters.

The corresponding challenge, which needs human interaction of course, would be not how many you get correct, but how many you guessed on. So far as I can see, if you've got a hard problem, and you throw up your hands and guess, that's where the problem comes in. Far too many people just throw things to the wind. But if you try to solve the problem & don't know the right answer, but have a theory as to why your answer might be the right one, now that's important. If your theory is wrong, you can probably be shown how to correct it and get the right answers with enough practice.

Brains? Yeah, they're nice. But ability comes from focus and determination, not mere genetic endowment. Brains are some of what you deploy to get the job done, not the job. Hiring based partially on intelligence makes sense, but pay-scales?! Paying someone based on intelligence is no less stupid than paying a carpenter based on the number of hammers in his truck.

(Followup: SuperBiff scored 25!)