Yes, a ton. I recommend https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

Genetics is a major driver of intelligence, and more intelligent people tend to earn more money.

Here's a book that covers the basics of what we know about intelligence and its correlation with life outcomes: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

I want to call out one of the elephants in the room here, one that I'm sure was a major motivator in the development of this article - racial differences in IQ.

Some people take these measured differences as sufficient cause to declare the entire concept of IQ as worthless racist pseudoscience, despite all the evidence to the contrary [1]. But it's also been shown that, for example, the black-white IQ gap is closing in America [2], a process we also observed the Irish go through [3].

If only racists like Richard Lynn did research on race and intelligence, we wouldn't know this. Lynn claims to have investigated this topic and shown that the gap is NOT closing. Discovering the opposite required less biased researchers to engage tenaciously and scientifically with technical issues, questions of measurement, etc., along with the understanding that IQ is a meaningful measurement worth engaging with.

Would we prefer that anti-racists be scared off this research, and have only racists doing it? Wouldn't that feed a narrative that the racists have the truth the Establishment wants to hide?

I don't think this is a simple and straightforward issue. Moralizing a topic like race and IQ and pre-emptively closing it off to inquiry could really be shooting ourselves in the foot. Instead of preventing science from harming marginalized groups, we could be preventing science from protecting marginalized groups.

And I'm not saying the authors of this article are doing that. But I think we all need to grapple with this backfire risk when we go about applying the principles in this article. Which, as I've said elsewhere, are good as far as general principles go.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2006061...

[3] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the...

It's depressing how conventional it has become for a relatively intelligent population, like the HN audience, to only know about criticisms of IQ and basically nothing about its positive value. But witness the credulous reception for Taleb's slapdash work in these comments, and the hostility to basic technical criticisms of that work.

If you are interested in knowing about the thing itself, and not just criticisms of the thing, I invite you to pick up, for example, Stuart Ritchie's book https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

And before you get upset about the title, the book is from a survey series called "All That Matters". It's not claiming that _intelligence_ is "all that matters".

Are you familiar with modern intelligence research? IQ test is reliable (get the same score when you test multiple times) and valid (correlate with things we actually care about, not just being good at solving IQ test problems).

Intelligence: All That Matters by Stuart Ritchie is a good summary of modern intelligence research. https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc... To quote:

"The scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world's top scientific journals."

The research promoting a growth mindset hasn't proven to be nearly as robust as many had hoped. It's starting to look like there's a very real possibility it's spread so far merely because it's something people want to be true.

Psychology research has had a pretty dismal track record in terms of reproducibility (http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9216383/irreproducibility-resea...) and the growth mindset dogma in particular has been facing more and more robust criticism. Carol Dweck's work is far from the final word on the matter that this blog post portrays it to be.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growt... http://www.amren.com/news/2014/04/yes-iq-really-matters/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Rit...

Ironically, focus on a growth mindset may actually distract people from doing things that actually do have reproducible research showing they lead to more mental horsepower (e.g. regular aerobic exercise).