> But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
It's easy to think this is some weird quirk of police recruiting, but the concept of "overqualified" candidates is common across many job roles. I've heard plenty of hiring managers talk about candidates that they've rejected because they thought they'd get bored quickly and move on.
It sucks for people who have had an impressive career trajectory (or in this case high test scores) but want to shift gears a little to focus on other things like family, hobbies, or just want to avoid burnout.
There's an implicit assumption on the part of these hiring managers that everyone should be working at 100% of their capacity, and that flexibility shouldn't be given to those who want a different balance in life.
Its also not even inefficient. Jet pilot courses reject people for arbitrary reasons. Because they have a limited number of jets, and a surfeit of applicants. At some point you 'weed out' even good applicants, if you have more than enough of them.
That would be nice, because it wouldn't leave rejected candidates thinking they did something wrong. The whims of a panel of interviewers isn't necessarily different from an rng anyway.
I generally support this- as a FAANG employee I sometimes think an RNG would be a much better signal than a lot of our interview voodoo. At least then we wouldn't be hiring unlucky people!
The issue here is that the stated motivation, 'overqualification' is likely a justification to obscure the real motivation: ensuring obedience and conformity within the force, especially when it comes to the day to day reality of ignoring or colluding with corruption, participating in unnecessary and biased use of violence, and facilitating enforcement of systematic oppression (e.g.: destroying homeless encampments).
This is an excellent point. People with high IQ can become a liability as they understand better the situation and may refuse to obey orders that are counter to their values. Or they could raise in rank and interfere with how the whole force is being operated: they could change things from the inside
If you want people to do what the rules say you're not looking for more or less intelligence, you're looking for Compliance.
For example British mainline railways require Compliance as a (psychologically tested) trait of train drivers and the lack of such a requirement was cited as a contributing factor to a death on a light rail system in a report I read years ago.
Why? Because Compliance says: This speed restriction says 45mph, I personally think 60mph should be safe but there's a speed restriction so I shall limit to 45mph even though I don't understand why.
Whereas without that some drivers will say "In my judgement 60mph seems fine here so I'll disregard the 45mph limit" and when they kill somebody and investigators ask "Why were you going too fast to stop?" their answer is that they didn't realise that would happen.
Compliance is probably a completely reasonable thing to want from regular cops, maybe even all your cops. On a TV show breaking the rules is often portrayed as admirable, but those rules are usually there for a good reason. In particular rule-obedience is very important for a community's perception of police as members of that community subject to its rules, rather than as oppressors.
OTOH, optimizing for a highly-compliant police force could set you up for trouble if they end up executing orders that a less compliant force would refuse to follow on moral grounds.
Writing qualified candidates off as "overqualified" is a form of corruption and is very common in tech. It's far easier to cover up with the boredom-mitigation argument, than to admit low IQ/experience is easier to "manage".
I don't think anyone is trying to cover that up. Many teams are responsible for boring and low-impact work, so they need to hire people who are easy to manage or the work won't get done.
Some things need a human touch. Interacting with other humans is one of those things. See any automated customer service bot ever to see how absolutely terrible an idea that would be.
Probably because these are not rote tasks being performed but rather new dev projects driven by new demands, priorities, and business requirements. You can’t automate that type of work.
Ruling out skilled folks for their skills Kate a poor way of being for those teams. Motivation is something entirely different than aptitude.
I hire engineers to work on internal tools. It’s far from the most “glamorous” roles in the SWE world and a lot of great engineers would not want to be working with Salesforce or Oracle. However, it’s very important and strategic to our business.
I don’t reduce the qualifications when hiring though. I actually add another. They must be motivated by this type of work. I find people who care about efficiency of teams and are motivated by having a revenue impact more than being able to point to a widget on the main site and say “I did this”.
I’ve been quite successful at it for the last 7 or so years with slightly lower turnover than the rest of the org or industry averages.
How would this be "a form of corruption?" Lots of stories get posted to HN about the brilliant asshole being a net negative, and hiring people who are all-around easier to work with seems reasonable.
That's probably the reason at least one interviewer in tech interviews covers HR-type questions. Yes, you want someone smart, but you also want someone who's not an asshole.
The striking thing about most of those "brilliant asshole" stories is that by and large, they clearly weren't all that brilliant, they'd just managed to convince a bunch of people (including the story writer) that they were.
I remember that one of them even mentioned that the asshole was so brilliant that he wrote code sometimes even the asshole couldn't read.... the manager didn't seem to twig even after writing that that this was a glaring klaxon warning signal that he was an extremely mediocre coder.
IME the most toxic behavior in this profession derives from insecurity, not intelligence, and most of those "brilliant assholes" were actually assholes because they were hoping that their mediocrity wouldn't be uncovered.
I worked with a colleague who had... 'interesting' ideas about software development. He'd put together a 'web framework' before joining the company, but was redeveloping a new one. It was... bizarrely weird, and was missing some 'normal' things like session management, authentication, etc.
I didn't care much, cause I didn't have to use it, but... reviewing it, it didn't make sense. People using it were having to take a lot of time to do basic stuff, and ... people were constantly waiting for the main guy to 'finish up' the next bit that would save everyone 'lots of effort'.
Some of the other 'sr' people there fawned over it - "he's a genius! this code and system is amazing. it's so hard to understand the brilliance, but that's because he's such a genius" (near exact quotes from his internal fans).
Again - wasn't on that team, didn't care. Then... I was told to use it. For a project that needed things well beyond what it had in place. We needed session mgt, authentication, caching, solid XML support, etc - everything this 'framework' didn't have. I criticized it, saying we shouldn't use it for this new project.
What complicated this is that I'd put together a framework before I'd started working there (with a team of other folks). It was far more feature complete (not great but functional). I was accused of being jealous, and wanting to use my system, etc. Well, yeah, I'd like to use my stuff, cause it checked the boxes we needed, and I'd used it for several years, and could be productive in it. But... I said "take my code off the table - it's not about me. System X is just not usable for our project needs - we need to plan to build something new, or spend time building out all the missing stuff."
What a shitstorm that became. Internal fighting between people who'd never looked at the code, but insisting it was fine, and that I didn't understand 'enterprise' work. I left - turned in my two week notice (not 100% over this, but it was a factor). The day after I left... the "genius" quit the company, without telling anyone, no notice, just... left a voicemail saying he quit.
I can relate. I worked at a temporary position for a few months last year and I experienced this a lot. There were a couple of "brilliant" coders who convinced their coworkers they were the smartest by using their personality, the way they talk, etc. but when I talked technical with them, it was apparent that they didn't know in any depth what they were talking about.
I've been turned down on several occasions for being "overqualified" or "too experienced". While I don't know the real reasons, I think in most cases there was a) the concern (from the employer) that I'd be too expensive and b) an unwillingness on my part to put up with BS (which is true).
True, I studied in a fairly reputed institution and the first company(famous IT services & consulting company) which comes to the placement hire in bulk, but the best among the lot get hired in 2-3 other companies and goes on to the one which pays the highest; So we were advised not to answer correctly for all questions in the placement test of this company as they filtered out over-performers.
But guess what? Recession struck(2008) and they selected ~10% of they usually do & that too at random. Only couple of other companies came for placements that year & only few of them respected their offers.
PSA: I assume this is going to repeat this year, so any student reading this shouldn't be choosy when it comes to placements, getting a job should be the utmost priority if you/family are dependent on it.
> PSA: I assume this is going to repeat this year, so any student reading this shouldn't be choosy when it comes to placements, getting a job should be the utmost priority if you/family are dependent on it.
You can even skip that last part. The first job really is the hardest, so if you find something that's in a location you want and there's a internal or external path to a role you'd rather have, that job's a winner. There's also a lot of value in trying different things in the space, even if you think something isn't for you.
* Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges
* Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation
* Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes
* Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive
And we haven't even gotten to actual detective work and the complexity of solving crimes.
On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force. Yes, there is obviously a danger/risk element, and physical requirements, both which would lose some viable applicants. But by and large it SHOULD be a job that attracts interest from highly intelligent members of our society.
It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population dominating the forces.
It can be fixed, but it's probably a generational project.
One aspect of policing in America that your post doesn't capture is that a lot of police aren't paid well. Generally, police in large forces in large cities are paid well, but there's an indredibly wide variance that trends steadily downward the further you get from top-tier cities. Rural cops are often paid less than teachers; even in cities like Columbus, OH, or Milwaukee, WI, it's common to see police moonlighting as security guards.
Like teaching, there's always a lot of rhetoric around how police are valued, but pay scales frequently don't reflect it, and the result is a lot of poorly qualified police who fail the rest of your checklist
I don't think it needs to take all that long. The Camden, NJ police were disbanded and reorganized less than a decade ago and are now recognized as a model force. All that's necessary is the political will to use the tactics that can destroy toxic police officers' unions: establish a new law enforcement bureau under all-new leadership and slowly reassign duties away from the old police force. There's no need for armed police to enforce parking meters and bus fares, so start there. Do not permit, as a rule, lateral transfers from the old police department to the new one. Make everyone come in through the front door like any candidate. Require public disclosure of disciplinary record as a condition of hiring. Require local residency for the first ten years of service. Have a written and enforced use-of-force policy. Don't patrol city centers in cars.
These aren't deep mysteries; police reform advocates have written volumes on these topics for decades.
In my state in my home country, the police force is divided into traffic, patrol, crime, detective work and so on. Different roles require different qualifications and as such attract different people. Bribery is common. Detective work is the least lucrative and is a form of punishment for upstanding officers. The consequence of that is it’s the least corrupt of all the branches, it’s genuinely interesting work and the morale is high. Traffic is the most corrupt but it has the least consequence anyway.
"With a crime rate of 47 per one thousand residents, Camden has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities." [1]
To make an actual comparison, you’d need a before/after of crime rates there and also a comparison to rate of change in similar towns which didn’t reorganize their force.
Luckily we have the FBI uniform crime report to inform us. In 2018, Camden had 16 violent crimes per 1000 residents. Ten years earlier, it had 23 per 1000. Murders fell from 54 to 23.
In adjacent Philadelphia, violent crime fell from 14 to 9 per 1000, the same ratio as Camden enjoyed. Therefore it stands to reason that Camden's violent, corrupt police force was not necessary to reduce crime. This is consistent with other evidence that aggressive, violent police tactics are not associated with lower crime.
> Require local residency for the first ten years of service.
This is a popular idea, but it seems like a bad one. It limits the pool of highly qualified applicants, which we badly need to expand. I've seen arguments in favor of this rule that take the form of "why would you privilege nonresidents in the hiring process?", but that is a non sequitur: not requiring residency isn't a way of privileging nonresidents.
In addition, police officers sometimes point to the difficulty of policing in the places that they live. This seems to me like a secondary consideration, but perhaps one that also merits attention.
And that's what they're advertising as an aspirational possibility! Even a first-year engineer will earn more than that.
You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.
> You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.
I really don't believe your typical mid-level engineer is making $500k at any company in the world, let alone that it's just a given if you make it into big tech.
FWIW, I have received offers for senior positions from FAANG before.
I don’t think l6 is a good definition of typical. Only 10% of SWEs are at 6 and above. 50% are at least L5, making that the median grade, and therefore a pretty good definition of “typical”.
I hire engineers at a large Bay Area tech company, and this is way off. According to https://levels.fyi, even a Senior SWE at Google pays ~$343k annually including stock. And that’s a FAANG salary. The majority of firms are not paying that.
New York City is an outlier in combining low pay and high cost of living. Baltimore (Freddie Grey) officers start at $55k, in a city where a nice townhouse costs $250,000. In Minneapolis starting salary for new officers is $55-70k depending on qualifications. Chicago PD officers start at $72,000 after the probationary period. Generous benefits add $20k+ to that figure.
Note the median starting college graduate salary is about $50,000. Median mid-career college graduate salary is $80,000.
This is a very rosy presentation of police work, it's hard to believe you've known many police who felt comfortable enough to open up about the pitfalls of their work.
>Pays well
Not for the amount of danger and emotional baggage involved.
> Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges.
> Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation
Which is why you will frequently be following established procedures relevant to the situation at hand and deviating from procedure will often be frowned upon without a defensible reason. Further, you'll often have to suppress your insight because of political reasons. Police frequently know in advance what places are gang hangouts and who's selling drugs or sex, but having the information and having it collected in a format you're allowed to act on are different matters (and that's before getting into whether you're even allowed to try and collect that information).
>Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes.
This is just a progressive way of saying "High tolerance for eating other peoples shit while staying focused on doing your job." There is almost never a real 'resolution' to a domestic dispute for example, there's you getting screamed at and threatened not only by an abuser but also by their victim who will probably lie on their behalf because it was a neighbor who made the call. Then, if nothing immediately actionable is happening, you get to leave for the third time in a week after making a few notes and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not doing anything again.
>Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive.
Being a cop earns you hero points with some groups but in the mainstream will get you villified or at least distrusted. Worse, you will often see people advocating procedural changes in that either increase your personal risk (as if they have a bottomless resevoir of disposable LEOs available) or which reduce your ability to police effectively (but they'll still criticize you for failing to clean up problem neighborhoods). This is a major factor behind why police and their unions almost always stand by each other even when it looks bad, because the public will often demand you fall on a sword or turn on you the instant your optics leave even a little room for doubt.
>On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force.
Rare exceptions aside, smart people realize the risk isn't worth the reward and emotionally intelligent people realize the job frequently destroys LEOs emotionally. Both groups likely believe that the job is important for a functional society if they're not blinded by cynicism but they'll also understand that the majority of their energy is going to be spent primarily on dealing with beuracracy, paperwork, and simply enduring the situations they'll be placed into. This is far from catnip for these people.
>It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population dominating the forces.
This is attitude is another reason people who can do the math decide not to be police or cease being police. Because people assume most cops ("the system") in the present are just meat heads. But if you try to introduce tech-centric solutions, like cameras, to cut down on the number of necessary meat heads in an area you get accused of trying to create a dystopian surveillance apparatus. If you try to explain why a proposed change is a bad idea you get accused of everything from being racist to being a sadist who just likes how easily you can abuse the current system. And if you implement new sensitivity policies the public forgets within five minutes anyway because a cop in a totally different part of the country did something bad. This isn't to say that no cop enjoys their work or finds it worth it, but the idea that there's a massive untapped market of uber cops being kept away because of the old guard is just wishful thinking that holds appeal because it makes the problem seem much simpler than it is.
I participated in my local explorers program because my mom was a dispatcher. Go on enough ride alongs to see that 90% of the job is dealing with domestic disputes or drunk and disorderly people and you’ll never want to be an officer
It is not often that I read a post that illuminates and informs the way your comment has. Everything you said should be obvious but I only came to that after reading your comments. Yet again another validation of the value and wisdom of listening to different perspectives. My thanks.
90% of the job is dealing with drunk and disorderly people or descalating domestic disputes. That knocks a lot of High IQ/EQ people off the list.
My mother was a dispatcher for 15 years. I was in our local areas explorers program. It’s exactly what you see on Live PD. Traffic stops, drunk and disorderly people, drug busts, or domestic disputes. Cops do almost no detective work. Investigators do that.
The test involved is called the Wonderlic Personnel Test, and is a different matter from IQ although the creator of the test claims comparability. A Wonderlic score of 20 is intended to be equivalent to an IQ score of 100 (e.g. the median), although it's questionable how well it aligns with IQ which is tested using a pretty significantly different methodology - most significantly, completion time is a major factor in the Wonderlic (it is designed to be too long to complete within the short allotted time and the number of questions the candidate completes is a major factor in scoring), which is much less the case for IQ tests.
The use of the Wonderlic is actually surprisingly widespread if you haven't been exposed to the world of industrial psychology. It's supposed to be a good way to screen people for suitability for all kinds of jobs, and there is research to show that people with higher Wonderlic scores are generally more successful in their careers. I do not know of any research suggesting that individuals with a "too high" Wonderlic score are more likely to turn over, although there's certainly a strong cultural belief that this is the case.
The Wonderlic has been subject to quite a bit of criticism. First, it is available in a set of multiple test forms and it is well-known that some of the test forms are more difficult than others, so you cannot really compare scores between test forms like you would expect. There are probably still employers doing this even though the vendor now recommends against. Second, several of the questions are specifically related to uncommon vocabulary, and the questions further date back to the 1940s so a couple of them are somewhat archaic. This creates a strong preference against non-native English speakers. More generally, the Wonderlic is thought to emphasize literacy over numeracy or other areas of intelligence.
Intelligence measurement is a complex topic as many ways have been tried to measure intelligence and it's not always understood how they relate to each other, as they do not necessarily correlate across people. The Wonderlic correlates well with certain intelligence measures and poorly with others, as is often the state of affairs.
"OKs" is such a terrible word to use for a court case. The court isn't ruling on "what's okay" it's ruling on what is and is constitutional. Cheating on your girlfriend is not OK. It's also not unconstitutional. Here, because high intelligence people are not a protected class, courts apply something called "rational basis scrutiny." Under this extremely lax standard, so long as the government can articulate a plausible rational principle in support of a policy, it passes Constitutional muster under the equal protection clause.
A better headline would be something like: "Court rules that the Constitution does not require unelected judges to overturn the policy of a politically accountable police department to not hire people with high IQs."
I have a friend who is quite obviously way smarter than anyone else around. As in: I don't usually explicitly notice how smart people are, but when I first met him it was so plainly obvious to me like few things are.
Anyway: at some point this friend decided all he needed for happiness were books and water, so he quit his law job and spent a year reading. Once that got boring, he decided to hire on as a tram driver, which they were desperately looking for at that time.
He was rejected for this very reason. They have apparently seen quite a few people on this sort of career trajectory, and since the training is quite extensive, it hurt them financially.
A year later, their need had grown even worse, or maybe my friend's dedication made them change their mind. In any case, he was accepted and, after six months of training, became a driver on his own local tram line.
I was fairly surprised by it. I've tested well on standardized tests and IQ tests my entire life, so I assumed I would also test well here. Especially since I saw the test was also biased towards verbal understanding, which is my strong suit.
Not so! My score was fairly low. The questions, individually, are trivial, but I ran out of time fairly early on in the test. I think you'd have to be a quick reader and good at mental calculations to score highly on this test.
Ditto. I score 98+ percentile on SAT, GRE, etc., but only 50th percentile on this. Ran out of time on question 34 of 50.
I didn't take advantage of scratch paper and pencil, which would have helped. Or pay much attention to the timer. I'm sure I could get my score up, with some work, but not that much.
Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I've always tested well and score around 120-130 on most online IQ tests. Going in knowing that the test was designed not to be finished, I prioritized speed over accuracy. I answered 49/50 questions and got a score of 39, which is quite a bit higher than I expected going in.
While I did well enough, there were a couple questions that brought me back to my horrors in engineering school. Specifically, 'if you fold this, what touches what.'. I'm completely incapable of doing this, and don't know why. I quit classes in my mech Eng course because they'd ask to take an abstract shape, transform it somehow, and draw it. I couldn't and it's probably the first time I'd felt helpless. Luckily I haven't needed that skill again, until now!
I wonder how much of success on this test is knowing when to take educated guesses or skip questions? Since I saw you say you ran out of time, I made sure to make a quick guess at the ones that seemed a bit more complicated so that I could finish the test. I did pretty well (38/50, or 90% "LIKELIHOOD OF JOB OFFER").
More importantly, though... I don't understand why anyone is hiring based on this test. It's incredibly hard, and I don't know what it really shows about a person.
Yeah I had the same experience. It is really strange because speed is one thing people can practice for. Thus, many intelligence type tests try to give you more time per question so that speed isn't that much of a deciding factor.
But, yeah if anyone needs to take this test for an important job keep in mind that if you practice a lot, your speed will improve significantly.
Yet it makes one wonder why they will give out an intelligence test that depends so much on practice. Say you are an NFL team trying to select a QB ... do you want to give credit to the QB that spent most time practicing for the wonderlic?
I think perhaps, the company that offers the test has decided to make the most money from training people to take the test and thus have crafted a test that depends so much on practice.
There is a more insidious reason why employers shun people with high IQs for blue collar jobs. High IQ people may become natural leaders and can start unions or organize workers against management in other ways. High IQ people may find ways management is screwing up or quietly breaking some law or regulation or lying to customers and may make a stink. So it is not only a wholesome desire to keep geniuses from getting bored.
Although I shouldn't badmouth those high IQ exclusionary policies. They saved me a lot of grief back when I was young and dumb. You see, once I actually ended up in a Navy recruitment office. Luckily I was not too dumb and "failed" the IQ test upwards.
> High IQ people may become natural leaders and can start unions or organize workers against management in other ways.
Maybe you should take the dogma goggles off ? Public sector unions are pretty common without the "genius leaders" and from what I see police unions are often reported covering for the police officers caught in despicable wrongdoing and obstructing disciplinary measures - they are pretty much the worst example of a union you want to support, along with prison unions lobbying for more incarceration and so on.
During my ARMY service, my Sargent told me there are two types of people: hardworking and dumb, or smart and lazy. He said the ARMY wants its officers to be smart and lazy so they'll get the job done in the least amount of effort, but they want the grunts to be dumb and hard working so they won't question.
> The German World War II general Erich von Manstein is said to have categorized his officers into four types. The first type, he said, is lazy and stupid. His advice was to leave them alone because they don’t do any harm. The second type is hard-working and clever. He said that they make great officers because they ensure everything runs smoothly. The third group is composed of hardworking idiots. Von Manstein claims that you must immediately get rid of these, as they force everyone around them to perform pointless tasks. The fourth category are officers who are lazy and clever. These, he says, should be your generals.
First and foremost, I have a very high regard for the british coppa.
Right. Onwards. I don't know how coppers think. I appreciate they are engines of the law and officially can't pick and choose (though in fact they can and do, when they can, quite wisely IME). But I could not do a job where I believe arresting someone for something harmless like various drug-takings is causing more harm than not arresting them.
A bad law causes damage by being bad. I could not enforce that. Ergo I could not do that job.
I use drug taking as an example and of course it's not a simple situation, but another one which is perhaps even simpler is - going back quite a few years - institutionalised legal discrimination against gays.
This isn't about drugs or gays, but about enforcing bad laws against your own conscience. I don't accept the view that it's the law so it must be enforced. Until we get better laws this friction must exist. So how do brit cops deal with it? Any here to illuminate?
I suspect one of the things that people with high IQ are bad at is listening to orders and issues with authority.
Their theory that people with high IQ will get bored is plausable until you think of them progressing to detective. This is a very strange thing. Never imagined there would be a job where you get rejected for having high IQ.
Independent thinking doesn't gel well with hierarchical, procedure based organizations.
If anything being a Cop these days seems more like herding cattle through a slaughterhouse. They just get people who will to turn the crank of the mincer.
Agreed, I was listing what I think being a good cop should entail, but being successful in the current system probably rewards group think much more than independent thought.
> Some historical and scientific issues related to research on emotional intelligence
> In the past decade, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has emerged as a potential new construct for explaining behavioral variance not accounted for by traditional measures of general academic intelligence or personality. EI researchers credit E. L. Thorndike as the first to propose such a construct when he suggested that social intelligence is independent of abstract or academic intelligence. The current paper traces the historical roots of social intelligence and the current scientific status of emotional intelligence. It appears that emotional intelligence, as a concept related to occupational success, exists outside the typical scientific domain. Much of the data necessary for demonstrating the unique association between EI and work‐related behavior appears to reside in proprietary databases, preventing rigorous tests of the measurement devices or of their unique predictive value. For those reasons, any claims for the value of EI in the work setting cannot be made under the scientific mantle.
Yes. The Bell Curve actually has a passage on this question, when the NYC police department used a cognitive test in 1939 as the major part of its application process. Those officers attained higher ranks and had fewer disciplinary problems. It doesn't mention the attrition rate, though.
The problem is not generally IQ. It's that police officers in the US are such a poorly-trained bunch while simultaneously being equipped with deadly force as a nearly default option. They do not get practice at what they would have to do if they didn't have the weapon, or if their weapon were ineffective at dealing with the problem.
Any new / uncertain situation is to be approached with the technique "pull trigger until thing in front of you falls on ground". Which produces the exactly the stupid result that you think it would. Combine it with the lack of experience (and fear) of most officers in any really serious situation = the first time ends up being their last.
If you look at police officers who are selected from soldiers who returned from Iraq/Afghanistan, where they've seen some real shit, they don't default to opening fire nearly so often as with suburban never-seen-anything officers. Funny how people who've been to war are less twitchy than someone who's only sat in a car all day for the last year. [1,2,3]. Of course, there are opposing observations / opinions also [4].
Even in other countries, when officers are trained to finally shoot someone (and maybe never have to do it in the end), they do it in a targeted way, stop, see what happened, and decide whether another shot is needed to control the situation.
I always suspected police hiring in America targeted idiots, likely idiots with a penchant for violence. Now we have undeniable proof. I wonder where else such anti intellectualism is codified into law.
"New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27", and "The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average."
Shouldnt the UN condemn what is going on in the US? Police ramming protesters, shooting people filming from their own property, and so on reminds a lot about HK protests. Rohynga, Uyghurs, Black Americans, Native Americans are tortured in these 3rd world countries and the UN does NOTHING.
> But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
It's easy to think this is some weird quirk of police recruiting, but the concept of "overqualified" candidates is common across many job roles. I've heard plenty of hiring managers talk about candidates that they've rejected because they thought they'd get bored quickly and move on.
It sucks for people who have had an impressive career trajectory (or in this case high test scores) but want to shift gears a little to focus on other things like family, hobbies, or just want to avoid burnout.
There's an implicit assumption on the part of these hiring managers that everyone should be working at 100% of their capacity, and that flexibility shouldn't be given to those who want a different balance in life.
Its also not even inefficient. Jet pilot courses reject people for arbitrary reasons. Because they have a limited number of jets, and a surfeit of applicants. At some point you 'weed out' even good applicants, if you have more than enough of them.
Surely you could use a random number generator to do this?
That would be nice, because it wouldn't leave rejected candidates thinking they did something wrong. The whims of a panel of interviewers isn't necessarily different from an rng anyway.
I generally support this- as a FAANG employee I sometimes think an RNG would be a much better signal than a lot of our interview voodoo. At least then we wouldn't be hiring unlucky people!
The issue here is that the stated motivation, 'overqualification' is likely a justification to obscure the real motivation: ensuring obedience and conformity within the force, especially when it comes to the day to day reality of ignoring or colluding with corruption, participating in unnecessary and biased use of violence, and facilitating enforcement of systematic oppression (e.g.: destroying homeless encampments).
This is an excellent point. People with high IQ can become a liability as they understand better the situation and may refuse to obey orders that are counter to their values. Or they could raise in rank and interfere with how the whole force is being operated: they could change things from the inside
If you want people to do what the rules say you're not looking for more or less intelligence, you're looking for Compliance.
For example British mainline railways require Compliance as a (psychologically tested) trait of train drivers and the lack of such a requirement was cited as a contributing factor to a death on a light rail system in a report I read years ago.
Why? Because Compliance says: This speed restriction says 45mph, I personally think 60mph should be safe but there's a speed restriction so I shall limit to 45mph even though I don't understand why.
Whereas without that some drivers will say "In my judgement 60mph seems fine here so I'll disregard the 45mph limit" and when they kill somebody and investigators ask "Why were you going too fast to stop?" their answer is that they didn't realise that would happen.
Compliance is probably a completely reasonable thing to want from regular cops, maybe even all your cops. On a TV show breaking the rules is often portrayed as admirable, but those rules are usually there for a good reason. In particular rule-obedience is very important for a community's perception of police as members of that community subject to its rules, rather than as oppressors.
OTOH, optimizing for a highly-compliant police force could set you up for trouble if they end up executing orders that a less compliant force would refuse to follow on moral grounds.
Writing qualified candidates off as "overqualified" is a form of corruption and is very common in tech. It's far easier to cover up with the boredom-mitigation argument, than to admit low IQ/experience is easier to "manage".
I don't think anyone is trying to cover that up. Many teams are responsible for boring and low-impact work, so they need to hire people who are easy to manage or the work won't get done.
What is that work? Why can't it be automated?
Probably because it’s still cheaper to throw people at it.
Some things need a human touch. Interacting with other humans is one of those things. See any automated customer service bot ever to see how absolutely terrible an idea that would be.
Good luck automating fixing bugs and implementing weird customer requests in an old legacy application.
Probably because these are not rote tasks being performed but rather new dev projects driven by new demands, priorities, and business requirements. You can’t automate that type of work.
Ruling out skilled folks for their skills Kate a poor way of being for those teams. Motivation is something entirely different than aptitude.
I hire engineers to work on internal tools. It’s far from the most “glamorous” roles in the SWE world and a lot of great engineers would not want to be working with Salesforce or Oracle. However, it’s very important and strategic to our business.
I don’t reduce the qualifications when hiring though. I actually add another. They must be motivated by this type of work. I find people who care about efficiency of teams and are motivated by having a revenue impact more than being able to point to a widget on the main site and say “I did this”.
I’ve been quite successful at it for the last 7 or so years with slightly lower turnover than the rest of the org or industry averages.
> low IQ/experience is easier to "manage".
How would this be "a form of corruption?" Lots of stories get posted to HN about the brilliant asshole being a net negative, and hiring people who are all-around easier to work with seems reasonable.
That's probably the reason at least one interviewer in tech interviews covers HR-type questions. Yes, you want someone smart, but you also want someone who's not an asshole.
The striking thing about most of those "brilliant asshole" stories is that by and large, they clearly weren't all that brilliant, they'd just managed to convince a bunch of people (including the story writer) that they were.
I remember that one of them even mentioned that the asshole was so brilliant that he wrote code sometimes even the asshole couldn't read.... the manager didn't seem to twig even after writing that that this was a glaring klaxon warning signal that he was an extremely mediocre coder.
IME the most toxic behavior in this profession derives from insecurity, not intelligence, and most of those "brilliant assholes" were actually assholes because they were hoping that their mediocrity wouldn't be uncovered.
I worked with a colleague who had... 'interesting' ideas about software development. He'd put together a 'web framework' before joining the company, but was redeveloping a new one. It was... bizarrely weird, and was missing some 'normal' things like session management, authentication, etc.
I didn't care much, cause I didn't have to use it, but... reviewing it, it didn't make sense. People using it were having to take a lot of time to do basic stuff, and ... people were constantly waiting for the main guy to 'finish up' the next bit that would save everyone 'lots of effort'.
Some of the other 'sr' people there fawned over it - "he's a genius! this code and system is amazing. it's so hard to understand the brilliance, but that's because he's such a genius" (near exact quotes from his internal fans).
Again - wasn't on that team, didn't care. Then... I was told to use it. For a project that needed things well beyond what it had in place. We needed session mgt, authentication, caching, solid XML support, etc - everything this 'framework' didn't have. I criticized it, saying we shouldn't use it for this new project.
What complicated this is that I'd put together a framework before I'd started working there (with a team of other folks). It was far more feature complete (not great but functional). I was accused of being jealous, and wanting to use my system, etc. Well, yeah, I'd like to use my stuff, cause it checked the boxes we needed, and I'd used it for several years, and could be productive in it. But... I said "take my code off the table - it's not about me. System X is just not usable for our project needs - we need to plan to build something new, or spend time building out all the missing stuff."
What a shitstorm that became. Internal fighting between people who'd never looked at the code, but insisting it was fine, and that I didn't understand 'enterprise' work. I left - turned in my two week notice (not 100% over this, but it was a factor). The day after I left... the "genius" quit the company, without telling anyone, no notice, just... left a voicemail saying he quit.
I can relate. I worked at a temporary position for a few months last year and I experienced this a lot. There were a couple of "brilliant" coders who convinced their coworkers they were the smartest by using their personality, the way they talk, etc. but when I talked technical with them, it was apparent that they didn't know in any depth what they were talking about.
I also came upon this form of corruption before.
Often in situation when the boss is insecure.
It also shows misunderstanding of boredom as a process that is not subjective, and does not depend on persons' personal interests.
I've been turned down on several occasions for being "overqualified" or "too experienced". While I don't know the real reasons, I think in most cases there was a) the concern (from the employer) that I'd be too expensive and b) an unwillingness on my part to put up with BS (which is true).
True, I studied in a fairly reputed institution and the first company(famous IT services & consulting company) which comes to the placement hire in bulk, but the best among the lot get hired in 2-3 other companies and goes on to the one which pays the highest; So we were advised not to answer correctly for all questions in the placement test of this company as they filtered out over-performers.
But guess what? Recession struck(2008) and they selected ~10% of they usually do & that too at random. Only couple of other companies came for placements that year & only few of them respected their offers.
PSA: I assume this is going to repeat this year, so any student reading this shouldn't be choosy when it comes to placements, getting a job should be the utmost priority if you/family are dependent on it.
> PSA: I assume this is going to repeat this year, so any student reading this shouldn't be choosy when it comes to placements, getting a job should be the utmost priority if you/family are dependent on it.
You can even skip that last part. The first job really is the hardest, so if you find something that's in a location you want and there's a internal or external path to a role you'd rather have, that job's a winner. There's also a lot of value in trying different things in the space, even if you think something isn't for you.
Police work:
* Pays really well
* Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges
* Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation
* Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes
* Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive
And we haven't even gotten to actual detective work and the complexity of solving crimes.
On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force. Yes, there is obviously a danger/risk element, and physical requirements, both which would lose some viable applicants. But by and large it SHOULD be a job that attracts interest from highly intelligent members of our society.
It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population dominating the forces.
It can be fixed, but it's probably a generational project.
One aspect of policing in America that your post doesn't capture is that a lot of police aren't paid well. Generally, police in large forces in large cities are paid well, but there's an indredibly wide variance that trends steadily downward the further you get from top-tier cities. Rural cops are often paid less than teachers; even in cities like Columbus, OH, or Milwaukee, WI, it's common to see police moonlighting as security guards.
Like teaching, there's always a lot of rhetoric around how police are valued, but pay scales frequently don't reflect it, and the result is a lot of poorly qualified police who fail the rest of your checklist
I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana, and his family qualifies for SNAP even with his wife working part-time.
I don't think it needs to take all that long. The Camden, NJ police were disbanded and reorganized less than a decade ago and are now recognized as a model force. All that's necessary is the political will to use the tactics that can destroy toxic police officers' unions: establish a new law enforcement bureau under all-new leadership and slowly reassign duties away from the old police force. There's no need for armed police to enforce parking meters and bus fares, so start there. Do not permit, as a rule, lateral transfers from the old police department to the new one. Make everyone come in through the front door like any candidate. Require public disclosure of disciplinary record as a condition of hiring. Require local residency for the first ten years of service. Have a written and enforced use-of-force policy. Don't patrol city centers in cars.
These aren't deep mysteries; police reform advocates have written volumes on these topics for decades.
In my state in my home country, the police force is divided into traffic, patrol, crime, detective work and so on. Different roles require different qualifications and as such attract different people. Bribery is common. Detective work is the least lucrative and is a form of punishment for upstanding officers. The consequence of that is it’s the least corrupt of all the branches, it’s genuinely interesting work and the morale is high. Traffic is the most corrupt but it has the least consequence anyway.
"With a crime rate of 47 per one thousand residents, Camden has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities." [1]
Seems to have worked out very well...
[1]https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/nj/camden/crime
To make an actual comparison, you’d need a before/after of crime rates there and also a comparison to rate of change in similar towns which didn’t reorganize their force.
so I guess this is the lies, damned lies, and statistics part of the thread.
Because the question should have been what it was like before, hey
https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...
you're right! It looks like it did work our rather well.
Luckily we have the FBI uniform crime report to inform us. In 2018, Camden had 16 violent crimes per 1000 residents. Ten years earlier, it had 23 per 1000. Murders fell from 54 to 23.
In adjacent Philadelphia, violent crime fell from 14 to 9 per 1000, the same ratio as Camden enjoyed. Therefore it stands to reason that Camden's violent, corrupt police force was not necessary to reduce crime. This is consistent with other evidence that aggressive, violent police tactics are not associated with lower crime.
Lazy post on my part, saw the current terrible numbers and didn't bother looking at the past.
> Require local residency for the first ten years of service.
This is a popular idea, but it seems like a bad one. It limits the pool of highly qualified applicants, which we badly need to expand. I've seen arguments in favor of this rule that take the form of "why would you privilege nonresidents in the hiring process?", but that is a non sequitur: not requiring residency isn't a way of privileging nonresidents.
In addition, police officers sometimes point to the difficulty of policing in the places that they live. This seems to me like a secondary consideration, but perhaps one that also merits attention.
> Pays really well
How much do you think police are paid?
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be...
> Starting salary: $42,500
That's in New York City. Ouch.
> may potentially earn over $100,000 per year
And that's what they're advertising as an aspirational possibility! Even a first-year engineer will earn more than that.
You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.
> You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.
I really don't believe your typical mid-level engineer is making $500k at any company in the world, let alone that it's just a given if you make it into big tech.
FWIW, I have received offers for senior positions from FAANG before.
> I really don't believe your typical mid-level engineer is making $500k
Including stock? They absolutely are in the US.
Please tell me where to apply, because neither Google nor Facebook were willing to pay me that for a senior position.
https://www.levels.fyi/
There absolutely are engineers making that much, I even know more than one making 7 digits in liquid comp, but they are not "typical" in any way.
If by mid level you mean well tenured L6, then sure.
If by mid level you mean actual mid level, like L4, then no.
If by typical you mean someone not working at Google or Facebook, then no.
I don’t think l6 is a good definition of typical. Only 10% of SWEs are at 6 and above. 50% are at least L5, making that the median grade, and therefore a pretty good definition of “typical”.
That's sort of my point, L5 SWEs aren't making 500K anywhere.
> 50% are at least L5
I don't think half of software engineers are senior or above.
At Google they are. Half are below L5, half are L5+, 10% are L6+.
I think they are since you are senior when you have 5-10 years of experience.
Is E5 mid-level? I made <400k at Facebook and that was after very substantial stock appreciation and a “discretionary equity” extra grant bonus.
I hire engineers at a large Bay Area tech company, and this is way off. According to https://levels.fyi, even a Senior SWE at Google pays ~$343k annually including stock. And that’s a FAANG salary. The majority of firms are not paying that.
They also get a nice pension and can retire early. At least in California being a cop is a pretty nice gig.
And total immunity from prosecution for virtually any class of crime. Surely that can be valued.
New York City is an outlier in combining low pay and high cost of living. Baltimore (Freddie Grey) officers start at $55k, in a city where a nice townhouse costs $250,000. In Minneapolis starting salary for new officers is $55-70k depending on qualifications. Chicago PD officers start at $72,000 after the probationary period. Generous benefits add $20k+ to that figure.
Note the median starting college graduate salary is about $50,000. Median mid-career college graduate salary is $80,000.
> In Minneapolis starting salary for new officers is $55-70k depending on qualifications.
Wonder how their recruiting will be doing now? They will need to raise that a lot to get reasonable candidates now.
This is a very rosy presentation of police work, it's hard to believe you've known many police who felt comfortable enough to open up about the pitfalls of their work.
>Pays well Not for the amount of danger and emotional baggage involved.
> Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges. > Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation
Which is why you will frequently be following established procedures relevant to the situation at hand and deviating from procedure will often be frowned upon without a defensible reason. Further, you'll often have to suppress your insight because of political reasons. Police frequently know in advance what places are gang hangouts and who's selling drugs or sex, but having the information and having it collected in a format you're allowed to act on are different matters (and that's before getting into whether you're even allowed to try and collect that information).
>Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes.
This is just a progressive way of saying "High tolerance for eating other peoples shit while staying focused on doing your job." There is almost never a real 'resolution' to a domestic dispute for example, there's you getting screamed at and threatened not only by an abuser but also by their victim who will probably lie on their behalf because it was a neighbor who made the call. Then, if nothing immediately actionable is happening, you get to leave for the third time in a week after making a few notes and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not doing anything again.
>Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive.
Being a cop earns you hero points with some groups but in the mainstream will get you villified or at least distrusted. Worse, you will often see people advocating procedural changes in that either increase your personal risk (as if they have a bottomless resevoir of disposable LEOs available) or which reduce your ability to police effectively (but they'll still criticize you for failing to clean up problem neighborhoods). This is a major factor behind why police and their unions almost always stand by each other even when it looks bad, because the public will often demand you fall on a sword or turn on you the instant your optics leave even a little room for doubt.
>On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force.
Rare exceptions aside, smart people realize the risk isn't worth the reward and emotionally intelligent people realize the job frequently destroys LEOs emotionally. Both groups likely believe that the job is important for a functional society if they're not blinded by cynicism but they'll also understand that the majority of their energy is going to be spent primarily on dealing with beuracracy, paperwork, and simply enduring the situations they'll be placed into. This is far from catnip for these people.
>It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population dominating the forces.
This is attitude is another reason people who can do the math decide not to be police or cease being police. Because people assume most cops ("the system") in the present are just meat heads. But if you try to introduce tech-centric solutions, like cameras, to cut down on the number of necessary meat heads in an area you get accused of trying to create a dystopian surveillance apparatus. If you try to explain why a proposed change is a bad idea you get accused of everything from being racist to being a sadist who just likes how easily you can abuse the current system. And if you implement new sensitivity policies the public forgets within five minutes anyway because a cop in a totally different part of the country did something bad. This isn't to say that no cop enjoys their work or finds it worth it, but the idea that there's a massive untapped market of uber cops being kept away because of the old guard is just wishful thinking that holds appeal because it makes the problem seem much simpler than it is.
You responded to this better than I did.
I participated in my local explorers program because my mom was a dispatcher. Go on enough ride alongs to see that 90% of the job is dealing with domestic disputes or drunk and disorderly people and you’ll never want to be an officer
It is not often that I read a post that illuminates and informs the way your comment has. Everything you said should be obvious but I only came to that after reading your comments. Yet again another validation of the value and wisdom of listening to different perspectives. My thanks.
90% of the job is dealing with drunk and disorderly people or descalating domestic disputes. That knocks a lot of High IQ/EQ people off the list.
My mother was a dispatcher for 15 years. I was in our local areas explorers program. It’s exactly what you see on Live PD. Traffic stops, drunk and disorderly people, drug busts, or domestic disputes. Cops do almost no detective work. Investigators do that.
> Cops do almost no detective work. Investigators do that.
Why not? Not enough crime to solve?
I answered that question. It’s a separate job to investigate.
Regular cops are first responders not investigators.
The test involved is called the Wonderlic Personnel Test, and is a different matter from IQ although the creator of the test claims comparability. A Wonderlic score of 20 is intended to be equivalent to an IQ score of 100 (e.g. the median), although it's questionable how well it aligns with IQ which is tested using a pretty significantly different methodology - most significantly, completion time is a major factor in the Wonderlic (it is designed to be too long to complete within the short allotted time and the number of questions the candidate completes is a major factor in scoring), which is much less the case for IQ tests.
The use of the Wonderlic is actually surprisingly widespread if you haven't been exposed to the world of industrial psychology. It's supposed to be a good way to screen people for suitability for all kinds of jobs, and there is research to show that people with higher Wonderlic scores are generally more successful in their careers. I do not know of any research suggesting that individuals with a "too high" Wonderlic score are more likely to turn over, although there's certainly a strong cultural belief that this is the case.
The Wonderlic has been subject to quite a bit of criticism. First, it is available in a set of multiple test forms and it is well-known that some of the test forms are more difficult than others, so you cannot really compare scores between test forms like you would expect. There are probably still employers doing this even though the vendor now recommends against. Second, several of the questions are specifically related to uncommon vocabulary, and the questions further date back to the 1940s so a couple of them are somewhat archaic. This creates a strong preference against non-native English speakers. More generally, the Wonderlic is thought to emphasize literacy over numeracy or other areas of intelligence.
Intelligence measurement is a complex topic as many ways have been tried to measure intelligence and it's not always understood how they relate to each other, as they do not necessarily correlate across people. The Wonderlic correlates well with certain intelligence measures and poorly with others, as is often the state of affairs.
It's also used by the NFL during the draft
"OKs" is such a terrible word to use for a court case. The court isn't ruling on "what's okay" it's ruling on what is and is constitutional. Cheating on your girlfriend is not OK. It's also not unconstitutional. Here, because high intelligence people are not a protected class, courts apply something called "rational basis scrutiny." Under this extremely lax standard, so long as the government can articulate a plausible rational principle in support of a policy, it passes Constitutional muster under the equal protection clause.
A better headline would be something like: "Court rules that the Constitution does not require unelected judges to overturn the policy of a politically accountable police department to not hire people with high IQs."
A shorter headline may be "Jury decides that IQ discrimination conforms to US constitution"
Ok, I've attempted to encode that in the title above.
Great one!
I enjoy the dry de-baiting of a good double negative.
Do the honorable justices want to let a caste system form in America on their watch for lack of "political accountability"? For want of a nail....
I have a friend who is quite obviously way smarter than anyone else around. As in: I don't usually explicitly notice how smart people are, but when I first met him it was so plainly obvious to me like few things are.
Anyway: at some point this friend decided all he needed for happiness were books and water, so he quit his law job and spent a year reading. Once that got boring, he decided to hire on as a tram driver, which they were desperately looking for at that time.
He was rejected for this very reason. They have apparently seen quite a few people on this sort of career trajectory, and since the training is quite extensive, it hurt them financially.
A year later, their need had grown even worse, or maybe my friend's dedication made them change their mind. In any case, he was accepted and, after six months of training, became a driver on his own local tram line.
Six months later, he got bored and quit.
That made me laugh so much. I've known people like that.
Out of curiosity, what made him seem way smarter than everyone else around?
Here's an online version of the Wonderlic test. There's a "start quiz" button at the very bottom.
https://beatthewonderlic.com/take-a-free-wonderlic-test-onli...
I was fairly surprised by it. I've tested well on standardized tests and IQ tests my entire life, so I assumed I would also test well here. Especially since I saw the test was also biased towards verbal understanding, which is my strong suit.
Not so! My score was fairly low. The questions, individually, are trivial, but I ran out of time fairly early on in the test. I think you'd have to be a quick reader and good at mental calculations to score highly on this test.
Ditto. I score 98+ percentile on SAT, GRE, etc., but only 50th percentile on this. Ran out of time on question 34 of 50.
I didn't take advantage of scratch paper and pencil, which would have helped. Or pay much attention to the timer. I'm sure I could get my score up, with some work, but not that much.
Remember, those were recentered in 1995.
Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I've always tested well and score around 120-130 on most online IQ tests. Going in knowing that the test was designed not to be finished, I prioritized speed over accuracy. I answered 49/50 questions and got a score of 39, which is quite a bit higher than I expected going in.
It is surprisingly hard. The mental arithmetic killed me, I'm just not fast enough at it. Still apparently too smart to be a cop...
While I did well enough, there were a couple questions that brought me back to my horrors in engineering school. Specifically, 'if you fold this, what touches what.'. I'm completely incapable of doing this, and don't know why. I quit classes in my mech Eng course because they'd ask to take an abstract shape, transform it somehow, and draw it. I couldn't and it's probably the first time I'd felt helpless. Luckily I haven't needed that skill again, until now!
I wonder how much of success on this test is knowing when to take educated guesses or skip questions? Since I saw you say you ran out of time, I made sure to make a quick guess at the ones that seemed a bit more complicated so that I could finish the test. I did pretty well (38/50, or 90% "LIKELIHOOD OF JOB OFFER").
More importantly, though... I don't understand why anyone is hiring based on this test. It's incredibly hard, and I don't know what it really shows about a person.
Yeah I had the same experience. It is really strange because speed is one thing people can practice for. Thus, many intelligence type tests try to give you more time per question so that speed isn't that much of a deciding factor.
But, yeah if anyone needs to take this test for an important job keep in mind that if you practice a lot, your speed will improve significantly.
Yet it makes one wonder why they will give out an intelligence test that depends so much on practice. Say you are an NFL team trying to select a QB ... do you want to give credit to the QB that spent most time practicing for the wonderlic?
I think perhaps, the company that offers the test has decided to make the most money from training people to take the test and thus have crafted a test that depends so much on practice.
There is a more insidious reason why employers shun people with high IQs for blue collar jobs. High IQ people may become natural leaders and can start unions or organize workers against management in other ways. High IQ people may find ways management is screwing up or quietly breaking some law or regulation or lying to customers and may make a stink. So it is not only a wholesome desire to keep geniuses from getting bored.
Although I shouldn't badmouth those high IQ exclusionary policies. They saved me a lot of grief back when I was young and dumb. You see, once I actually ended up in a Navy recruitment office. Luckily I was not too dumb and "failed" the IQ test upwards.
> High IQ people may become natural leaders and can start unions or organize workers against management in other ways.
Maybe you should take the dogma goggles off ? Public sector unions are pretty common without the "genius leaders" and from what I see police unions are often reported covering for the police officers caught in despicable wrongdoing and obstructing disciplinary measures - they are pretty much the worst example of a union you want to support, along with prison unions lobbying for more incarceration and so on.
During my ARMY service, my Sargent told me there are two types of people: hardworking and dumb, or smart and lazy. He said the ARMY wants its officers to be smart and lazy so they'll get the job done in the least amount of effort, but they want the grunts to be dumb and hard working so they won't question.
Sounds like a paraphrase of this classic adage:
> The German World War II general Erich von Manstein is said to have categorized his officers into four types. The first type, he said, is lazy and stupid. His advice was to leave them alone because they don’t do any harm. The second type is hard-working and clever. He said that they make great officers because they ensure everything runs smoothly. The third group is composed of hardworking idiots. Von Manstein claims that you must immediately get rid of these, as they force everyone around them to perform pointless tasks. The fourth category are officers who are lazy and clever. These, he says, should be your generals.
First and foremost, I have a very high regard for the british coppa.
Right. Onwards. I don't know how coppers think. I appreciate they are engines of the law and officially can't pick and choose (though in fact they can and do, when they can, quite wisely IME). But I could not do a job where I believe arresting someone for something harmless like various drug-takings is causing more harm than not arresting them.
A bad law causes damage by being bad. I could not enforce that. Ergo I could not do that job.
I use drug taking as an example and of course it's not a simple situation, but another one which is perhaps even simpler is - going back quite a few years - institutionalised legal discrimination against gays.
This isn't about drugs or gays, but about enforcing bad laws against your own conscience. I don't accept the view that it's the law so it must be enforced. Until we get better laws this friction must exist. So how do brit cops deal with it? Any here to illuminate?
This is an article about the US. The British police forces do not to my knowledge discriminate based on a higher than average IQ.
He should have been smart enough to get some questions wrong
Is IQ even the right test to decide if someone would be good for a career in law enforcement?
Probably high EQ, superb communication skills, and indicators for independent thinking would be better.
I suspect one of the things that people with high IQ are bad at is listening to orders and issues with authority.
Their theory that people with high IQ will get bored is plausable until you think of them progressing to detective. This is a very strange thing. Never imagined there would be a job where you get rejected for having high IQ.
Your theory that people with high IQ are likely to disobey orders doesn't seem to be based on anything other than personal hope.
Independent thinking doesn't gel well with hierarchical, procedure based organizations.
If anything being a Cop these days seems more like herding cattle through a slaughterhouse. They just get people who will to turn the crank of the mincer.
Agreed, I was listing what I think being a good cop should entail, but being successful in the current system probably rewards group think much more than independent thought.
EQ is bullshit.
> Some historical and scientific issues related to research on emotional intelligence
> In the past decade, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has emerged as a potential new construct for explaining behavioral variance not accounted for by traditional measures of general academic intelligence or personality. EI researchers credit E. L. Thorndike as the first to propose such a construct when he suggested that social intelligence is independent of abstract or academic intelligence. The current paper traces the historical roots of social intelligence and the current scientific status of emotional intelligence. It appears that emotional intelligence, as a concept related to occupational success, exists outside the typical scientific domain. Much of the data necessary for demonstrating the unique association between EI and work‐related behavior appears to reside in proprietary databases, preventing rigorous tests of the measurement devices or of their unique predictive value. For those reasons, any claims for the value of EI in the work setting cannot be made under the scientific mantle.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.317
>> Much of the data necessary for demonstrating the unique association between EI and work‐related behavior appears to reside in proprietary databases
Most of your claim rests on that. That's not saying it's BS, it's saying it's understudied.
Yes. The Bell Curve actually has a passage on this question, when the NYC police department used a cognitive test in 1939 as the major part of its application process. Those officers attained higher ranks and had fewer disciplinary problems. It doesn't mention the attrition rate, though.
https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1267111560566235138
The problem is not generally IQ. It's that police officers in the US are such a poorly-trained bunch while simultaneously being equipped with deadly force as a nearly default option. They do not get practice at what they would have to do if they didn't have the weapon, or if their weapon were ineffective at dealing with the problem.
Any new / uncertain situation is to be approached with the technique "pull trigger until thing in front of you falls on ground". Which produces the exactly the stupid result that you think it would. Combine it with the lack of experience (and fear) of most officers in any really serious situation = the first time ends up being their last.
If you look at police officers who are selected from soldiers who returned from Iraq/Afghanistan, where they've seen some real shit, they don't default to opening fire nearly so often as with suburban never-seen-anything officers. Funny how people who've been to war are less twitchy than someone who's only sat in a car all day for the last year. [1,2,3]. Of course, there are opposing observations / opinions also [4].
Even in other countries, when officers are trained to finally shoot someone (and maybe never have to do it in the end), they do it in a targeted way, stop, see what happened, and decide whether another shot is needed to control the situation.
The problem is not IQ. It's practice.
[1] https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/Publicatio...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/12/08/504718239/military-trained-po...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/08/17/how-can-pol...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/asking-...
I always suspected police hiring in America targeted idiots, likely idiots with a penchant for violence. Now we have undeniable proof. I wonder where else such anti intellectualism is codified into law.
"New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27", and "The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average."
Shouldnt the UN condemn what is going on in the US? Police ramming protesters, shooting people filming from their own property, and so on reminds a lot about HK protests. Rohynga, Uyghurs, Black Americans, Native Americans are tortured in these 3rd world countries and the UN does NOTHING.