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Isildur
The big question, though, is the extent to which it is advantageous to be "smart" using the typical definition of "smart". Take competitive chess. It takes a very specific set of mental skills and is very much something you improve at with practice. You don't see any morons among the set of chess masters. Then again, few chess masters are also super-geniuses. Kasparov supposedly has a 135 IQ and excelled at visual memory, but an IQ of 135 is only two standard deviations above the mean meaning he is only in the top 2.2% of the population by IQ.

Good chess player != smart. Actually, in almost any area being on top means 99% experience/dedication/motivation and only 1% of talent. However, if you take somewhat new area for everyone a smarter person is going to ramp up faster.
Kasparov is somewhat dumb IRL and spreads a lot of nosense.

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Isildur
Combat fighter pilots are a good example of a group that should theoretically exhibit these traits to an extreme degree. While the mean IQ of the set of fighter pilots is probably higher-than-average, the link between IQ and combat ability is most likely pretty weak.

This is a good example because smart people don't go to army nor become combat fighter pilots. You have a limited selecetion there but a smarter pilot still has advantages. In any activity where brains matter, a smarter person has advantage. It's also very important in sports where a human opposes other human. Smarter poker players has better chances, smarter player in football is more useful for his team. Even in boxing a smarter boxer has advantage.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2010 12:28PM by Dwoggurd.