Which is better: a high IQ or academic success (good grades)?

Hard work trumps talent. Hard workers have changed society. Smart hard workers have changed society. Just smart people change nothing.

Academic success. Loads of people with high IQ never do anything with their lives beyond memorising a ridiculous number of Pi, or something similar.

IQ has absolutely nothing to do with memory.

How many untalented or dumb try-hards have changed society?

I think to do something as grand as "change society", you need the talent (whether that's physical, intellectual, or whatever) and the work ethic.

Seriously? What about Richard Branson? He's not very intelligent on an academic level at all, and yet look at all the success he has had. He's probably changed society and left a large imprint.

Lord Sugar? He developed Amstrad and made many consumer electronics available to many people.

There are a lot of less intelligent people have made a lasting impact on many parts of society, and many more intelligent people who have done nothing.

What!? I'm sure Richard Branson and Alan Sugar are very intelligent guys.

I don't mean just for securing jobs or anything, but in general to society and life.

Which is better (yes I know very subjective): a very high IQ or scoring great academics (so academic intelligence)?

So a comparison may be:

1) A person with a very high IQ and thus able to answer logical, mathematical, IQ-type tests, or:

2) A person with AAA at A-level and a First Class traditional degree from a Russell Group uni, but a significantly lower IQ than the person above.

I know the two do not have to be mutually exclusive, but what do you think?

The "educated" can be some of the must stupid people around with no common sense. They tend to just have one idea or scheme and filter everything through it, therefore have a skewed view of the world that has no relation to reality. Just read some of the posts on this forum.

Richard Branson left school with next to no qualifications. He has dyslexia and was supposedly told by his teachers that he'd make nothing of himself. And yet look at him - incredibly successful.

Alan Sugar also left school at age 16 and was far more interested in entrepreneurial and business activities while at school. He doesn't have anywhere near as many qualifications academically as me even, yet he has definitely made more of a difference to the world than I have.

Just assuming that you have to be intelligent and hardworking to succeed in life is entirely fallacious. You have an advantage if you have both intelligence and a good work ethic, but only one of them is truly necessary (in my opinion).

Isn't this making the argument against grades being better than a high IQ.

Are you seriously telling me you don't think Richard Branson and Alan Sugar are highly intelligent guys? Both of them are clearly entrepreneurs, maybe acadmic stuff just really never piqued their interest. And Branson's dyslexia is probably a pretty big mitigating factor as the support for students with dyslexia was almost certainly worse than it is now.

I can't beleive you're making the argument that Branson and Sugar are not highly intelligent guys.

I don't know anything about their IQ, I know a bit about their academic records. Just being business savvy doesn't give you a high IQ by definition. As people have mentioned, testing IQ to see how intelligent a person is is flawed. Sugar and Branson are fantastic business men for sure, however, they probably know little about many other things. So no, on the whole I wouldn't say they were fantastically intelligent in the scheme of things. However, they are successful and good entrepreneurs, and so they are obviously well versed in the field of business.

You're basically arguing that everyone who is successful is intelligent in some way or another. Well that to some extent is obvious - everyone who is successful is obviously good at what they do. Whether that makes them INTELLIGENT or not is a whole other story.

What about footballers? Hell even the Pope? Footballers are successful and very wealthy, inspire many people and some have changed the world. Are you telling me that every successful footballer has a sky high IQ? The pope has changed the world, every pope has, however their intelligence is highly questionable.

Intelligence and academic success are closely linked, but obviously not synonymous.

I don't see the point of this question; it will just lead to differing people resorting to their inherent biases i.e. those with a high IQ but poor academic achievements will think IQ matters more, and those who excel in academia but have an average IQ will say academic achievement matters more. Of course if you are blessed with both that's cool, although IQ is ridiculously flawed as a measure of intelligence.

I said earlier that hard work alone isn't good enough to be a very high achiever. It need talent as well, whether that's an IQ type of intelligence, athletic ability, performing ability doesn't really matter as long as it's related to your field.

Highly successful footballers obviously have high levels of talent. You could argue that many of them only achieve this talent through hard work but they need it and have it nevertheless.

I think that highly successful businessmen such as Branson and Sugar (who are completely self-made) need to be very intelligent (among other things). And I would say that kind of intelligence would probably give them, at least, comfortably higher than average IQs. The fact that I'm saying they have high IQs and have never been academically successful makes it pretty obvious I'm not saying high IQ and academic achievement are synonymous.