How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Sort

Patio11 on The Sort

Patrick McKenzie has this excellent and often quoted thread about The Sort, and several other tweets or threads about what it looks like in practice. I highly recommend you read them, and all of his other writing as well (searching “patio11 dangerous professional” on Twitter/X is also a good time). The idea is that society is doing an increasingly good job at finding intelligent people and rewarding them — the graph quoted looks directly at pay — but there are also high prestige/low pay fields that are getting quite good at selecting the best candidates. I recently started law school, and have been learning about the legal field. The field of law is interesting in how lockstep and explicit it is about both rewards and selection criteria. When looking at the legal field and other comparable industries, you can see an interesting picture when comparing pay and IQ.

It is clear that in the United States, if you are selecting for pay, and if you have an IQ of 130 or higher, society has set your expected starting total compensation at roughly 250 thousand dollars a year.