Well said. Emotional intelligence seems to have been invented as a way to lower the value and relevence of IQ from what i can tell. Its most likely a nonsense measure that literally measures your brainwashability as a good thing.
I hear these kinds of claims regularly, and as someone with a pretty good IQ (it's not immense, this isn't flexing), I think the idea that there is zero value to the concept of emotional intelligence is absurd. It seems that the term 'emotional' is the loaded one here that causes a lot of people to experience click-whirr reactions to hearing the phrase. First of all, I think it is wrong to position it intellectually as existing in competition with IQ, as though we're having a debate about whether someone's height or cock size is more important for being attractive. It's nonsense.
The data on distributions of IQ in the upper echelons of society bears out the fact that there is some set of factors that are intervening on success, over and above IQ. I want to say that it was beyond a mean of 127 that IQ starts to become proportionately less represented in corporate leadership. Now, why would that be the case? Common sense tells us that it's because past a certain level of intelligence, people's social competency tends to be negatively impacted. Not only do people with high IQs usually exhibit greater neuroticism, they also have higher rates of depression, personality disorders, and the size of a person's social circle also declines with increasing IQ.
I want to be careful to specify that this isn't indicative (always, anyway) of social ignorance or complete lack of ability. Rather, it reflects that people with very high IQs just tend to prefer greater isolation. The things they care to focus on, and the level of abstraction at which they prefer to think, makes regular social interaction difficult, or less stimulating, or both.
And of course, the relationships aren't inverse. It's not as though 'emotional intelligence' increases as IQ decreases for the entire range of human intelligence. But I think we'd be remiss not to acknowledge that there is some set of factors (which probably includes raw intelligence itself) that describes how a person is able to interact with others effectively, to empathize, to influence, etc. In my own personal experience, the people I've known with the absolute strongest charisma and the best ability to influence others were not very high IQ people, but neither were they low IQ. There is some kind of sweet spot that occurs at above population mean, but below superior, where people just seem to be the most effective in people-oriented environments.
I don't know what that set of factors includes. I don't know specifically how it interacts with IQ. I don't care whether a person calls it emotional intelligence (if you'd rather call it social effectiveness, or something, that's fine) - I just think it is obvious that it is something that exists, and it isn't synonymous with IQ.
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