This is the most ridiculous thing I have read for a while.
Intelligence: All That Matters by Stuart Ritchie is a good summary of modern intelligence research. https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc... To quote:
"The scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world's top scientific journals."
This paper shows two things, although only one is surprising enough for publication. The surprising part is that "schooling in adolescence raises IQ scores", which is the title of the paper. Another is that IQ is so reliable that increase of 0.6 IQ points is statistically significant.
Astonished, she thought about what it was trying to test and took another test: now genius.
None of us think that either was right...
Turns out that the test can be tuned to a range. If you take the wrong one it loses some accuracy at the low and high end of the range, so they had to retest me. They had assumed I might be dim and gave me the wrong one. The real problem was that I was so insufferably bored all the time that I wouldn't engage. But I liked puzzles and the test had a bunch I'd never seen before, so by the last one I was taking it in the spirit it was given.
My guess is in two parts. Either your mother took the wrong one(s), or took a bogus one, or you're thinking of elements of a successful adult that the test can't measure, like common sense and social graces.
In any group of peers at that level there are bound to be people who can certainly do the work, possibly better than you, but who are painfully, even cringingly, bad at certain other life skills. It gets a little uncomfortable to acknowledge these people as geniuses. And there are people who seem not to be all that, but on occasion surprise the hell out of you by coming through in a clutch.
he was a Genius, but his IQ was probably average, according to what we know about him
But in many fields, such as mathematics, high IQ seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for genius. This makes sense -- doing well in mathematics courses requires the same logical and analytical skills required to score high on an IQ test. In that sense, it obviously has some predictive value.
But, we can use the IQ test to predict who isn't a genius, or to make large scale predictions. For example, if a state has 100,000 students entering middle school per year, there's approximately one genius in that group. If you can afford an intensive math program for 7,500 students, the IQ test would let you predict that any potential geniuses get enrolled with high probability. That raises issues of fairness, discrimination, etc., but that's another topic.
Not sure why the downvotes. While discounting the relationship of genius with IQ is specious in light of their point, this person offers a possible nugget of truth on an alternative understanding of genius.