Pilots and g-Force
29th July 2009
Steve Sailer is always worth reading.
As I’ve mentioned, one of the rules of polite journalism in discussing testing firefighters is to assume that paper and pencil tests must be irrelevant to the obviously moronic job of spraying water on burning buildings. Never refer to the voluminous data assembled over the decades by the Pentagon on the relationship between performance on paper and pencil tests and performance on similarly physical jobs.
When researching my 2004 article on John F. Kerry’s and George W. Bush’s IQ scores judging from their performance on the Officer’s Qualification Tests they took in the later 1960s (Bush 120-125, Kerry 115-120, which turned out to fit with their GPAs at Yale), I read a lot of studies from the 1960s by the military’s psychometricians documenting the predictive validity of these exams. I then tried to track down the authors to help me understand Kerry’s and Bush’s scores.
Don’t suppose you’ll read about that anytime soon on CNN or MSNBC.
The psychometric expert said something that seemed puzzling to me. He said that the General Factor of intelligence completely dominated job performance as a pilot to such an extent that it really wasn’t worthwhile to give multiple intelligences tests of specific piloting skills, such as the one George W. Bush took in 1968 to measure his 3-d visualization skills.
I remember that test. It was very odd.
I’ve wondered about this expert’s finding over the years, and I think I’ve finally started to figure it out: People with high IQs who would be bad pilots generally figure out for themselves that they would be bad pilots; so, they never take the tests to be pilots. Thus, the high correlation between the g Factor and pilot performance: high IQ individuals are already selected for having pilot-specific skills.