Smartest Man In The World | Hacker News Reader

Smartest Man In The World

youtube.com

22 pointscianestro31 comments

"Academia is a heartless cold bureaucracy"

This man might be intelligent, but he is very known for making his mind up about something and then not changing it for anything.

"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell has a whole chapter on this guy and people like him, according to Gladwell, Langan has barely had any contact with academia, so the above statement doesn't seem to have much backing. He got thrown out because he couldn't understand the "social norm" of speaking up for himself, something he hints at in the video.

The person with the highest IQ in the world was a bouncer in a bar? A good reminder that pure intelligence does not equal ambition or life skill.

Mensa's demographic is smart underachievers

hmmm, maybe he was on to something here.. bouncers do have access to hot drunk girls.. maybe he is smart after all ;)

You mean the person who is most efficient at taking the iq test.

My psych 101 teacher actually put this on the study guide for our final.

Q: What is IQ?

A: A score on a test.

Grammar shortcomings aside, it was one of the most fun and interesting college courses I took.

He's kind of like what would have happened if Douglas Adams had taken himself way, way too seriously.

If measured by IQ that's believed to be Kim Ung-yong at 210. Still. if he would not have had poor academia experiences (what did he do at liberal arts college anyway?), he might have been very useful to the world. Terrible waste.

The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.

Even within science, IQ is only weakly related to achievement among people who are smart enough to become scientists. Research has shown, for example, that a scientist who has an IQ of 130 is just as likely to win a Nobel Prize as a scientist whose IQ is 180 (Hudson, 1966, p. 104, cited in Sulloway, p. 357).

His chance of doing anything is the same as everybody else.

I wonder why that is?

Because intelligence is a quality, not a quantity. That makes it like beauty and flavor, not height or weight. You can't put a point scale on it. Chocolate cannot be 7 better than vanilla. A beautiful person is not the one with the biggest lips and the largest cheekbones.

We we can do is to put general parameters around it, such as "beautiful people tend to be taller." In the same way, scoring generally well (over 120 or 130) on an IQ test is like saying you're tall. It's actually meaningless as to how smart you are, but they share some of the same parameters, so they will correlate a bit more.

Maybe it is like money and its relation to happiness. It can help up to a point to increase your happiness. But, once you can cover your monthly expenses, it doesn't help your happiness. After which, stuff like friendship come into play. So, after 130 maybe, stuff like your choice of academic supervisor or resources to do research come into play in determine whether you have a shot at the nobel prize.

I think IQ does measure something, but not what we generally consider as intelligence

IQ calculates processing speed, which is why it is timed. Many people can are good at problem solving, but what takes a normal person a week instead might take an IQ genius 5 minutes. That is all.

And a normal person can then train themselves to do that week in 5 minutes. It's like muscle mass: you're born with a genetic inclination to be weaker or stronger than average but the rest is up to you.

I was expecting to see someone jump out of a plane with a boy scout's backpack.

"we need an alternative to academia" is correct

"stupid people are in charge" is technically correct but misleading.

The idea that really smart people could lead better than the average man has been around at least since Plato. All it takes to cure somebody of this is a good look at places where really smart people were in charge.

There is more to solving political problems than intelligence.

The issue isn't that the average man is dumb, it's that people who are highly motivated and don't think through their positions are more effective in democracies than less motivated, more educated voters.

This was interesting, and I hate to say anything bad about Chris. But I got a whiff that being smart and having a bad academic experience left some emotional marks on him. So the answers for him involve, not surprisingly, smart people outside of academia.

It's a shame, because I think he's on to something with his description of academia getting in the way of true breakout thinking.

Where were really smart people in charge?

I believe the scope of than answer is greater than a HN thread, but I might just be wussing out. Hopefully others will engage you. If not, happy to take it offline.

I will say this: be careful of selection bias! Looking back, sure, if I show you a thousand examples that ended poorly your response will be something like "But they weren't really smart. Look how poorly it all turned out!" This is, at best, circular reasoning. The important thing is that, at the time, these folks were the best and brightest and put in charge for that very reason.

Good starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Sit...

I'd like to know also. Can you start new topic on HN perhaps?

Will do. Perhaps I can set this up as a blog entry and then cross-post.

The problem, I think, is to keep this non-political. Somebody brought up the Rumsfield example, which I think is a good one. I also think McNamarra is another good example. The problem is that decisions that are very visible and make a big impact can also politically-charged. I think using a couple of SecDefs is okay, but I'm not sure.

US Department of Defense, 2001 – 2006. Donald Rumsfeld's writings show he is clearly quite intelligent, yet he still managed to make numerous disastrous mistakes.

More importantly, where were really smart non-psychopathic people in charge? Psychopaths crave power, and intelligence allows them to get it. Smart people in general (and especially the smartest of the smart) tend to dislike any authority in their lives, even the kind wielded by them.

This poor dude is actually a case in point. He could not even allow himself the small bit of authority needed to stand up for himself and not get kicked out of college. I imagine that to him, working with shitkickers is a bit like working with plants.

I'm not sure there is much reason to think an alternative to academia wouldn't turn into the same thing. Do you have any reason to think that a new culture would somehow break through human nature?

Elephants and dolphins have bigger brains than humans.

Not in proportion to body mass.

Body mass is relevant, but it's a crude proxy for the amount of "brain" used to control the body and sense the environment. Excluding those things (and perhaps some more) leaves you with the cognitive brain mass, which seems to be a proxy for what we're interested in.

Part 3 is by far the best part of this whole video.

It certainly rises to unseen levels of nuttiness. Here's a quote about his theory of the 'true nature of reality':

http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Supr...

"Because physics is governed by the scientific method, it deals exclusively with phenomena. Thus, it effectively diverts attention away from the cognitive, categorical aspect of perceptual reality, without which neither phenomena nor scientific theories could exist. Because physics is irreducibly dualistic and takes the fundamental separation of mind and matter as axiomatic, it cannot provide us with a complete picture of reality. It can tell us only what lies outside the subjective observer, not within."

Thanks for posting this link. This is Chris on his own terms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com