Good question - maybe a hasty take. I'll try to defend it ;)
Dropped a line in above. I'm assuming a normal distribution of intelligence from a nature perspective that has not changed much in the last 2k years, and then on top of that an enormous nurture influence.
Right now there are a lot more people, with a lot more access to reading and writing education, and food - than there have been in the past. 90k legal graduates/y is a huge output. If you assume the filters that put folks into clerkship are a mix of meritocracy and then some elbow-rubbing noise - the end outcome should still be extremely talented compared to other groups of thinkers in the past. This does also imply that the same should be true for other current intellectual institutions that filter from large pools.
The assumption breaks down to the extent the filters aren't meritocratic. I'm not super qualified to speak to that - and there's at least one qualified opinion above expressing that the mix maybe leans more towards work and networking than ability - so maybe I'm wrong here.
Well, literacy and education, as nice as they are, don’t actually increase intelligence, do they?
I think I get what you are saying if you mean that there are a lot of law grads who have knowledge and capabilities that distinguish them greatly from people who haven’t learnt the law. All the more so for the people who come top of their class.
If I was in the presence of a top legal mind in a court of law, with much to lose or gain, I’m sure I’d be in awe. I’d certainly be prepared to suppress my own volition and be lead by their learned advice.
Outside of a court of law, I don’t think I’d have the same reverence for such a person’s vocational skills. They have knowledge of a system, and their intelligence should enable them to obtain desirable outcomes from that system. Outside of the system, I’d expect them to be more mortal.
For sure - how to resolve the statement is almost entirely about definitions here.
I said something that would reasonably be interpreted way more broadly than what I meant, and was rightfully called out for it by a few folks.
My intent was to in a pithy way support how it's maybe not a great comparison to pull the top of one field and compare to the median of another when discussing compensation.
Dropped a line in above. I'm assuming a normal distribution of intelligence from a nature perspective that has not changed much in the last 2k years, and then on top of that an enormous nurture influence.
Right now there are a lot more people, with a lot more access to reading and writing education, and food - than there have been in the past. 90k legal graduates/y is a huge output. If you assume the filters that put folks into clerkship are a mix of meritocracy and then some elbow-rubbing noise - the end outcome should still be extremely talented compared to other groups of thinkers in the past. This does also imply that the same should be true for other current intellectual institutions that filter from large pools.
The assumption breaks down to the extent the filters aren't meritocratic. I'm not super qualified to speak to that - and there's at least one qualified opinion above expressing that the mix maybe leans more towards work and networking than ability - so maybe I'm wrong here.