Nate Meyvis

If you are creating a start-up, or otherwise building an institution from scratch, and hiring a whole team, various markers of talent—including intelligence and cooperativeness—will matter much more. Hiring a whole batch of very smart people has the potential to create strongly positive, dynamic, nonlinear benefits.

I could have also tapped the vast literature in psychology and economics, which tests the judgment and decision-making of undergraduates against benchmarks from statistics, probability, logic, and rationality. In many contexts, but not all, we humans make systemic logical errors, see illusory correlations, misattribute causal forces to random proce

Unless we work actively to become aware of the biases we introduce, the returns to additional information may be minimal—or diminishing.

Knowledge work is famous for very large differences in abilities among workers.15 For example, repeated studies found that differences between the programmers in the top 75th percentile and those in the bottom 25th percentile can be as much as 27 times along some dimensions of programming quality. And my own research has found that large gaps exist

When put together, the personality traits of conscientiousness and curiosity count for as much as intelligence.