The OP was judging a person by his job, and implying that the person in question couldn't be a genius because he worked at a menial job.
No, I was judging him by his accomplishments -- a measure by which your counterexamples shine, and the LSAT instructor falls down. All of the people you mention were successes in some way outside of their job, and they met my other criteria: they disproportionately advanced the state of the world.
What made you think your LSAT instructor's accomplishments were limited to his job titles?
What do you know about this man apart from those two facts?
Kafka and Van Gogh were completely unknown and unappreciated during their lifetimes. Kafka even burned 90% of his work before he died.
There are countless other examples of people who were only discovered and appreciated after they died -- often long after they died.
Conversely, many (if not most) of those who achieved great fame and fortune during their lifetimes are largely forgotten now, or considered of minor importance.
"You were talking about [jobs as marks of genius], but nobody else was."
On the contrary, that seems to be exactly what you were doing. Your lack of knowledge or appreciation of someone's accomplishments and apparent eagerness to judge this person by the job they held is what I was responding to.
If you want to debate the merits of inferring accomplishment from a person's job, that's fine. To call that my main argument, and countering it with your sample size of three, is trolling.
Here is the point: if all you know about someone is that they run a cash register, that doesn't tell you that they are unable to do anything else. This argument does not rely on sample sizes.
No, here's the point: if you run a cash register, don't scoff at someone who aims higher than what you've achieved, and don't throw your genius status in their face when you do it.
If you want to argue that a person's job is not indicative of ther level of achievement in life, then you absolutely do have to argue inductively. But I personally do not care about that argument. It is a stupid premise, and gnosis is picking an argument when one is not being forwarded. And he is doing it in a completely fallacious manner (overgeneralization, tu quoque), against what I clearly stated was an anecdote and life lesson.
Who does that? A person's own experiences, related as such, are anecdotes, not arguments.
But still, don't you think it's a little premature to judge your Target worker? Einstein was a patent worker while he thought about and conceptualized Special Relativity. Do you know what that fella' was doing in his free time?
I still agree with the main point though - IQ doesn't mean anything except another avenue of high potential. Just like being extremely physically fit and a better athlete leaves you with high potential to succeed in something physical. A high IQ gives you the potential to succeed in something mental, but you still have to put in the work and do something with it.
You learn a lot more about Einstein's potential by testing his IQ than by looking at his job history. If it turns out that the Target Einstein is too lazy to do any physics, that's OK, the IQ test will still tell you vastly more about what he COULD do under the right incentives.
No, I was judging him by his accomplishments -- a measure by which your counterexamples shine, and the LSAT instructor falls down. All of the people you mention were successes in some way outside of their job, and they met my other criteria: they disproportionately advanced the state of the world.
We were talking about jobs as marks of genius ...
You were talking about that, but nobody else was.