[rowanG077]

This was not undergraduate math in my case, but I still don't agree.

I don't think anyone of average intelligence can excel at undergraduate math. It of course depends on the degree and the school. Can anyone with average intelligence excel at an undergraduate math course in community college for their psychology degree? Probably yes. But an undergraduate math course at oxford as part of a maths degree? Not for sure not.

I think you are severely underestimating how much intelligence factors in how fast and even what at all you can learn. Take the opposite end of the spectrum. The US army rejects candidates with an IQ of ~85 or lower. Because they have found this group cannot contribute meaningfully. Let that sink in. Just a drop of 15 IQ points means the US army has decided you cannot be effectively taught anything to a minimum degree of competence. Now consider that the average IQ of a mathematician is 130 (https://realiqtest.webflow.io/posts/iq-by-occupation-a-compr...).

[somenameforme]

I'm speaking of math majors, or fields with a heavy math requirement, of course. Diff eq is not required anywhere, as far as I know at least, for non-technical majors. As for the army, I wouldn't just hand-wave away soldiering. You're talking about people being put in high pressure situations with ever-shifting dynamics, potentially against a human adversary, where lives are at stake. And they think everybody except the bottom ~32% of society is fit for this task.

I'd certainly expect an average person who dedicates his life to mathematics to end up with a higher than average IQ largely because while IQ is a useful measure, it's not an independent g factor. Studying mathematics is going to absolutely help train your brain in many areas that are also beneficial for performance in IQ exams. So for instance, some studies have shown that each additional year of education, relative to a fixed base, can causally contribute 1-5 additional IQ points. [1] So our person in question would almost certainly expect to see a significant and measurable IQ increase.

And FWIW I'm rather on the opposite extreme of those who argue for some sort of tabula rasa. I fully acknowledge dramatic innate differences between individuals, but I'm largely arguing that such differences only become major factors for people who approach their genetic potential in something, which most people will never get even remotely near, simply because the amount of dedication and sacrifice it takes is something that very few people are willing to accept.

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088505

[tptacek]

The data on this site is extremely dubious.

[kasey_junk]

Well the central post that the commenter made about the army’s iq requirement is trivially fact checked to be untrue. The army doesn’t administer iq tests as part of screening. They do asvab which tests _knowledge_ which you can study for. They have correlated outcomes in that a high IQ usually means a high asvab but they aren’t identical (you can for instance top out an asvab test and practice shows meaningful improvement whereas there is no top iq and if you can practice for it the test is flawed.)