210 IQ Is Not Enough
taylor.town
taylor.town
But why should that be? If you're a scientist, you are dependent on getting funding to do experiments, and the experiment showing something interesting. Neither of these things is very connected to intelligence, beyond that low IQ people will not be likely to get to the start line.
If you're an entrepreneur, you also have to do a bunch of things that are more social than smarts. Basically your life is going around meeting people and getting them to either invest or build something or buy something. Is it useful to be smart? Sure. But it isn't as useful as, say, having the right connections from school, or a family with a sensible budget so you can concentrate on building rather than finding food.
Pretty much the only area where being super smart works is pure maths, and even there you really want to be born in the parts of the world where the economy can support a young person on that path.
Then there's the transmission to suit your engine. A super smart person still needs to be mature enough to consume the intellectual royal jelly that develops them towards where they will make the greatest contribution. You won't just know what to do just because you're smart, you need to be shown what the interesting problems are. You need to have motivation, and motivation is often what you actually see when you meet someone impressive.
The way I think of it, the smart and useful people are plenty. Courses are taught so that universities can get a sensible number of people through some amount of content. Being smarter than your average student at a prestigious college is nice, but it mostly buys you some free time. Being at the cutoff is terribly stressful, but that guy is still pretty accomplished and useful for most things that we consider elite.
High social aptitude is "smarts". It has arguably been more central to our evolution, survival, and even advancement than "book smarts".
The transmission is another great analogy, IMHO for communication skills. Applying full power to the tarmac from a dead stop is a great way to spin your tires.
And its not useful at all in a typical traffic situation, you are still limited to the speed of the one in front of you. Intelligence is only useful in environments that allows it to be, but most places are designed for typical people.
This sort of feels like a cope-comment trying to say that smart people aren't ACTUALLY smart, but I'm not sure the motivation for that.
Yes, because the article leads with that. But I think we're actually in agreement.
I make a distinction between intelligence and wisdom, something I thought about from D&D.
Intelligence is having accurate models. Quick thinking, and correct predictions.
Wisdom is about making good decisions. Risk control, understanding rewards.
Both are a mental qualities we appreciate in people, but often we are more dazzled by intelligence, and we often mistake wisdom for intelligence.
By just applying some common sense it is obvious how absurd this statement is (and I thus rather have difficulties understanding how people can come to such a hypothesis):
Just look at your daily life: how much highly intellectual or academic content (for the latter: e.g. lecture recordings of complicated scientific lectures) do you watch on YouTube? If not: which kind of content do you then watch on YouTube?
This should make it insanely obvious which kinds of people are influential and which ones are not.
Most of life is like a 100m race where it's allowed to turn up and start early. ie anybody can easily beat Usain Bolt by just starting a few seconds before him.
There are some things which are perhaps a bit more like the highjump - where I'm never going to beat the worlds best no matter how many attempts I do - however these kind of things are very much the exception, not the rule.
'All analogies are flawed'
A quick google search suggests this universal law hasn't been claimed - thus I'm claiming it for my own - DrScientists Law.
I don't think I'm that far away intelligently from my friends and other people, but these far outliers were amazing. Not alien, but almost.
It’s a sonnet of sorts about the curse of intelligence in an increasingly insane world, a reminder that brilliant people can be absolute monsters, and that the only person who can bring you contentment in life is yourself.
Now it's ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of us seeing the writing on the wall, and wondering whether we were anything special at all.
(The answer of course is no, but it's a tough pill to swallow)
It sucks. It sucks ass. It has lead to many a night shouting in rage, anger, depression, and malaise. It continues to incense me as I see reprehensible actions receive phenomenal rewards in the short term for inflicting harm, and ignorance of their consequences of the long-term. It sucks.
You’re not alone, at least, and acknowledging that reality helped me rally around more social causes as I accepted that individual success was more luck than talent or effort, at least at present. It doesn’t really get easier to accept that reality either, even as I work to create a better one that’s built more around objectivity than individuality. Still, I’ve been far calmer, more productive, and even happier as I acknowledge the reality around me instead of reject it out of some notion of “specialness” or exceptionalism.
Acknowledging the reality around you is, in its own way, quite liberating, even if it’s also frustrating and lonely at present.
The way you get into Eton is largely via money and social connections - not excellence ( though it's a good school ).
What's interesting is that 18 of those were before 1964. Then there was a gap of ~50 years, and then we got 2 in quick succession recently.
So social mobility ( and the idea of a meritocracy ) flourished for a bit, but we've gone in reverse recently.
I see the same happening in the US - Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, Trump is a billioniare, Hilary ( the almost president ) was the wife of previous president, George W Bush was the son of a previous President.
One of the problems is that many successful people now seem to believe it's all down to them, and therefore the world can be split into the deserving and undeserving.
That's simply not true - life is more complex than that - and sure talent and hardwork matter - and matter a lot - but Jeff Bezos isn't worth ( measured in output ) ~1 million times more than his average employee - there is nothing Amazon has created that wouldn't have happened anyway without Jeff - he didn't invent online shopping or cloud computing - though he did execute very very well.
And let me be clear Jeff is very good at his job and deserves to reap the benefit of that - but ~250 billion in one persons hands isn't proportionate - he's not worth that, and he has spent some of that putting Katy Perry into space - I'd argue not the best use of the worlds resources.
This article is interesting to me because I see people falsely equivocating money with happiness all the time, and pretty much never see it with IQ. I didn't realize it was a thing.
I find that when people associate money with happiness, what they fail to observe is that they actually want the presumed stability such money would afford them, at their current lifestyle. Failing to acknowledge and plan around that leads to “lifestyle creep” as income rises, which simply perpetuates the same grievances they currently have around instability or insecurity, just with higher price tags and consequences for failure. I strongly suspect that billionaires engage in wealth and asset hoarding for this very reason: a terror of status, security, and stability collapse.
Once I let go of lifestyle creep and found contentment and gratuity in what I had, I began realizing that stability is shockingly affordable even under modern policies and economics. Releasing yourself from this forced societal obligation to “Keep Up with the Jones’” is a key step towards objectively reflecting on your life as it’s lived, and identifying what’s of genuine import to you. Only by doing that do you find what is actually needed for personal fulfillment, and thus, happiness.
That's not how money works. Nobody becomes a billionaire by hoarding. Money greater than a surprisingly low amount must be invested. Even the most obvious, boring, and low-risk investments still tend to have good returns. At scale lots of money just becomes a lot more money. There is no ego necessarily involved in this process.
You cannot look me in the eyes and keep a straight face while saying their megayachts, private jets, palatial estates, private islands, and state capture are completely ego-less. To willfully retain or grow such wealth is to have a gluttonous, insatiable ego.
The function of all that is entertaining guests. Of course theirs must be the biggest and best to win people over. You may then ask why they need to win people over, and you will find it only keeps getting more complicated and torturous to maintain than what any individual's ego could possibly and stubbornly want to do.
I'm not saying the wealthiest are heroes or saints or anything like that. In fact, in some cases all of what I just said is totally wrong and it's just a front for massive money laundering. Having a means for large private gatherings is also ideal for other possibly nefarious activities.
I'm simply trying to explain what humanity and depth exists where you don't think it does. It's not really one single "evil" person, or even a group of "evil" people, but a situation caused by many well-intended constraints. That a system naturally becomes corrupt as a mere side effect of its scale and tiny imperfections adding up rather any intentions is probably the most evil thing imaginable.
At least, $20M dollars exists, while 210 IQ is mathematically nonsense -- it means "one out of several trillions", which exceeds the human population. You would have to colonize the entire galaxy, and then be the smartest human in that galaxy. If even that is not enough, I am giving up.
You say 'external' meausures, but these do manifest as internal identities - all of which collectively form your social identity: https://srid.ca/identity/social
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong
Is that true? How is that even possible? Like, biologically.
I heard that walking that early is actually not good because bones are not prepared but still kudos to your kid.
I don't know about the other claims, but this one is false. It would be somewhat concerning if a 6-month-old struggled to support their head.
Skill issue. Needs more belly time!
I guess it's not clear what they mean by learned the alphabet. Could point to the character and say the sound I guess? Know their meaning (you couldn't verify this easily if they cant talk)?
It's considered prodigious to be able to read at 3. I guess recognizing characters is short of that, but barely. And at 1? Im open to more information but I see no reason to think its true.
I’m not sure if reading before age one is biologically possible, but I have a surprising data point in my life, so who knows.
Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers.
What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-smartest-man-predicts-b...
Actions don't necessarily dictate intelligence. The goal of life has to be defined to make such arguments. For example, using a maze as an analog you could argue the more intelligent person can arrive to the end faster and more elegantly but with life, it has no such defined and agreed on ends. If we're arguing that selfishness is a sign of intelligence then that view is quite myopic.
> I will use 100% of my Bitcoin profits to build churches for Jesus Christ in every nation.
> “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)
Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276.
When you go from 30 seconds to 15 seconds to solve a problem, that's noticeable. But when you go from half a second to a quarter of a second, the difference doesn't really matter.
So a lot of IQ tests have some sort of ceiling where the only thing they can tell you is "Yeah, it's more than this".
“Top out” can be interpreted many ways. It depends on how they are used.
Modern tests are fairly accurate up to 2sd (70-130). The tests start wavering in accuracy between 2sd and 3sd (55-70 and 130-145).
Over 3sd, and the only thing one can confidently say is that the examinee is most likely lower or higher than 3sd (55 and 145). The tests just don’t have enough data points to discriminate finely beyond those thresholds.
Let me further say that, on the high end, there are very few jobs for which I would make any selection decision based on how high an IQ score (or proxy thereof) is over 130. There are other variables, many of which are easier to measure, that are better predictors of success.
All of this doesn’t even take into consideration that there is relatively more type II error/bias in IQ results — that is, there are plenty of people who score less than their theoretical maximum (e.g., due to poor sleep the previous night), while there are relatively fewer people who score much higher than their theoretical maximum.
Many years ago, while unemployed, I was sent for a intelligence and dyslexia test (because of the very same perceived waste of potential that the article talks about). I was not dyslexic but scored above the range that the intelligence test could measure. The professor(I believe he was moonlighting for research funding) performing the test talked about the upper range tests, but said they were very long, required specialists to conduct and there's seldom any reason to investigate where you are in the upper range.
Then we went on to waste a huge amount of time talking about human perception and I remember describing an idea that finally seems to be feasible because the new Steam VR headset does it and calls it Foveated rendering.
I can't specifically recall the date of this but the tester was recording results on his palm pilot, which was a flash new thing at the time.
IQ 160 means that you are 1 in 30,000 of your age group. That means that to calibrate a test that can measure that high, the authors had to test more than 30,000 people in each age group (depending on what statistical certainty you need, but it could be 10x the number for reasonable values). Not sure how large the age groups typically are, but the total number of people necessary for calibration is counted in millions. You have to pay them all for participating in the calibration, and that's not going to be cheap.
And with values greater than IQ 160, the numbers grow exponentially. So I am rolling to disbelieve than anyone actually calibrated tests for such large numbers. (Especially once the numbers start to exceed the total population of Earth, which is around IQ 190.)
So 270 would be 11 standard deviations above normal so 1 in 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people.
It‘s as if you would say 150% of all people are female. That is impossible, not just unlikely.
Even then, you need special tests to distinguish between anyone with IQ higher than about 160 - all those people get the same (perfect) score on regular IQ tests.
So: claiming to have an IQ of 276? Bullshit. The guy whose parents claimed he scored 210 on an IQ test? Also bullshit. To get 210, there would have to have been ~500 billion IQ test results recorded.
Might something a small as a grain of sand have phased through a solid barrier as thin as a piece of paper somewhere on earth, at some point over billions of years? Sure. Paper is still pretty thick, and a grain of sand is enormous on the atomic scale, but it's at least in the realm of practical probability. When you start talking about cum(P) events in the realm of 1/1e30 you simply can't produce a scenario with that many dice rolls. If our population was 8 quadrillion and spanned a 40,000 year empire we would likely still never see an individual 11σ from the mean.
In other words, the highest IQ of every living person has a defined upper bound that is dependent on the number of living people and it is definitionally impossible to exceed this value. Reports of higher values are mistakes or informal exaggerations, similar to a school saying a student is one that you would only encounter in a million years. By definition it is not possible to have evidence to support such a statement.
Con artist skill of 276, maybe.
IQ means a lot of things (higher IQ people are measurably better at making associations and generating original ideas, are more perceptive, learn faster, have better spatial awareness).
It doesn't give them the power to predict the future.
And I say this as one of the white amercian kids who did great on those tests. My scores are high, but they are not meaningful.
- making associations
- generating original ideas
- more perceptive
...
"spatial awareness" I can see though
Who is babbling? The number of concepts in human language that have no mathematical formalization far outnumber the ones that do, lol.
Yes, we can, obviously, come up with shared, mathematically precise definitions for certain concepts. Keep in mind that:
A. These formal or scientific definitions are not the full exhaustion of the concept. Linguistic usage is varied and wide. Anyone who has bothered to open an introductory linguistics textbook understands this.
B. The scientific and mathematical definitions still change over time and can also change across cultures and contexts.
I can assure you that someone who has scored very high on an IQ test would not be considered "intelligent" in a group of film snobs if they were not aware of the history of film, up to date on the latest greats, etc. etc. These people would probably use the word intelligent to describe what they mean (knowledge of film) and not the precise technical definition we've come up with, if any, whether you like it or not.
My point is not that it is impossible to come up with definitions, my point is that for socially fluid concepts like intelligence, which are highly dependent on the needs and circumstances of the people employing the word, we will likely never pin it down. There is an asterisk on every use of the word. This is the case with basically every word to more or lesser degree, that's why language and ideas evolve in the first place.
My whole point is that people that don't realize this and put faith in IQ as though it is some absolute, or final, indicator of intelligence are dumb and probably just egotists who are uncomfortable with uncertainty and want reassurance that they are smart so that they can tell other people they are "babbling" and feel good about themselves and their intellectual superiority complex (read: self justified pride in being an asshole).
My claim is that this high variability and contextual sensitivity is a core part of this word and the way we use it. That's what I mean when I say I don't think we'll ever have a good definition.
EDIT: Or, to make it a little easier to understand. We will never have a universal definition of "moral good" because it is dependent on value claims, people will argue morality forever. My position is that "intelligence" is equally dependent on value claims which I think anyone who has spent more than five minutes with people not like themselves or trained in different forms of knowledge intuitively understands this.
I agree with you in the linguistic sense on the word 'intelligence'. Everyone has their own colloquial meaning. That doesn't make their definitions correct. If someone says, "exponential growth," just to mean fast growth, they're wrong (according to me). It's impossible to have universally agreed upon definitions, but we can at least try to standardize some of them. If you only care about intelligence in regards to a specific niche, add adjectives not definitions.
IQ tests measure 'intelligence' in the general, correct sense of the word. Not perfectly, but they're pretty good. If you care about a specific task, you can finetune on that task. While a generally intelligent agent will do better than a less intelligent agent at pretty much all tasks, it can still be defeated by test-time compute.
In other words, this news is a completely irrelevant piece of information.
He's low-key just trolling at this point, aaying he wants asylum in the US and making videos about how jesus/God is real with some scientific methods etc.
Just go check out his YouTube you'll see what I'm talking about.
Speak for yourself, not all of humanity. There are plenty of rigorous, mostly equivalent definitions for intelligence: The ability to find short programs that explain phenomena (compression). The capability to figure out how to do things (RL). Maximizing discounted future entropy (freedom). I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?
Can you tell me which part of an IQ test or your "rigorous, moslty equivalent definitions for intelligence" capture any of them?
> I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
What makes something funny? Usually, it's by subverting someone's predictions. You have to be good at predicting other's predictions to do this well.
> How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies?
You have to explain a phenomenon better than the truth to convince someone of your lie.
> How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium?
As in, world-building? That is more of a memory problem than an intelligence problem, though you do need to be good at compressing the whole world into what is relevant to the story. People who are worse at that will have to take more notes and refer back to them more often.
> How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self?
They are better at explaining a phenomenon (their self).
> How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding complex, multi-faceted irony or picking up subtle social cues?
Refer to the above. Also, using the adjectives 'complex, multi-faceted' is lazy here. Be more introspective and write what you really want to say.
> Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently?
Compression = finding short programs that recover the data.
> How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively?
Quite often not an intelligence problem.
> How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?
"incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds," however will you do this? Oh, I know! Your brain will have to come up with a small circuit that compresses other people's brain pretty well, as it doesn't have enough capacity to just run the other brain.
> Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?
I am actually pretty good at pretty much all of these compared to the average person.
The fact that you claim to be 'above average' at empathy and social cues while writing this robotic dismissal that completely misses the point (I asked for measurement methods, you provided questionable definitions) is the ultimate proof of my argument. You haven't defined intelligence, you've just compressed the meaning of it until it's small enough to fit inside your ego.
I don't appreciate your expletives in your original unedited post, by the way, but the fact that you lost your temper is once again proof of something. You sound young, so I hope one day you "find a short program" to recover that data.
That last part was not sarcasm, in case you have any trouble picking it up.
It was the first edit where I added them, since I could not reply to your post, and I removed them once I could reply. Yes, I lost my temper. You did too (and first)... you're just less honest and put up a facade of politeness.
> And the world will have to make do without "training" on your secret "methods to measure intelligence", somehow.
Is the goal here to provoke me enough to get what you want? lol. Maximally adversarial.
And in those other cases? You have a rigorous definition of comedy?
> You have to explain a phenomenon better than the truth to convince someone of your lie.
This is so often not true I would argue it's generally false. A story is believed because a listener "wants" to believe it. Some listeners have more or less complex criteria for acceptance.
> As in, world-building? That is more of a memory problem than an intelligence problem, though you do need to be good at compressing the whole world into what is relevant to the story. People who are worse at that will have to take more notes and refer back to them more often.
People like Tolkien and Martin? Note taking as a sign of poor skill/intelligence is a wildly novel take from my point of view.
> Also, using the adjectives 'complex, multi-faceted' is lazy here. Be more introspective and write what you really want to say.
Couldn't I say the same about your use of Introspective? Surely a more detailed phrase exists to describe what you mean.
> interpersonal conflicts... Quite often not an intelligence problem.
Oh, I think this will get at the root of our misunderstandings. I believe I've seen this attitude before. Before I jump to conclusions: Why exactly do you say this skill is not intelligence-based?
There's surely more to comedy than subverting expectations. Someone else who cares more about comedy in particular can figure that out for themself, but surely I gave enough of the general idea to make it clear how you could go about measuring the intelligence necessary for comedy.
> A story is believed because a listener "wants" to believe it. Some listeners have more or less complex criteria for acceptance.
Yeah, that's the sense of "better" I was going for. I could have been more clear here, so I'm glad you figured out what I meant.
> Couldn't I say the same about your use of Introspective? Surely a more detailed phrase exists to describe what you mean.
It was a not-so-kind way of saying, "don't point at vague ideas to obscure what you really mean and make it difficult for others to understand what you mean to keep your opinion unassailable."
> Why exactly do you say this skill [resolving conflicts] is not intelligence-based?
Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability. That or a fundamental value difference (you want my food, I want my food).
This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?
Second, revolving conflicts is not the same thing as getting into them, so it's unclear why bring that up at all.
> This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?
Eh, I don't think it implies that, and I also don't think that is true.
In your post is demonstrated one of the deep mysteries of intelligence: How can a smart person make such a dumb assertion? (I'll give a hint: consider that "intelligence" is not a single axis)
2. People do not like feeling less intelligent than other people, so they try to make the comparator ill-defined.
So your belief is that the global scientific community broadly agrees that "intelligence" has not been rigorously defined because the global scientific community is trapped in religious mysticism?
I am going to be honest, and I'm not saying this as a jab - this is starting to sound completely disconnected from reality. The people who study intelligence are not, as a rule, mired in metsphysical hand-waving.
The information theorists generally agree it has a precise definition, though they may choose different ones. The machine learning researchers typically only know how to run empirical experiments, but a small group of them do theory, and they generally agree intelligence is low Kolmogorov complexity. The linguists generally agree it cannot be defined, in the nihilistic sense, but if you posit a bunch of brains, then words have meaning by being signals between brains and intelligence is moving the words closer to the information bottleneck. I don't know what the psychologists say on the matter, though I wonder if they have the mathematical tools to even say things precisely.
Or, "I have this game and this model. Does the model win the game more often than other models or humans?"
Or, "I have this model that takes in states in an environment and outputs actions. I have this environment. Does the actions it outputs have a higher discounted future entropy than other models or humans?"
First off, we don't have a good way to actually measure an individual's intelligence. IQ is actually meant to correlate with g which is a hidden factor we're trying to measure. IQ tests are good insofar as you look at the results of them from the perspective of a population. In these cases individual variation in how well it correlates smooths out. We design IQ tests and normalise IQ scores such that across time and over the course of many studies these tests appear to correlate with this hidden g factor. Moreover, anything below 70 and above 130 is difficult to measure accurately, IQ is benchmarked such that it has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Below 70 and above 130 is outside of two standard deviations.
So, in summary, IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. What you're doing here is pointing at some random guy who allegedly scored high on an IQ test and saying: "Look at how dumb that guy is. We must be really bad at testing."
But to say we don't know what intelligence is, is silly, since we are the ones defining that word. At least in this sense. And the definition we have come up with is grounded in pragmatism. The point of the whole field of research is to come up with and keep clarifying a useful definition.
Worth also noting that you can study for an IQ test which will produce an even less correlated score. The whole design and point of IQ tests is done with the idea of testing your ability to come up with solutions to puzzles on the spot.
The apologists enter the chat and state "well, its because they're frauds or they're gaming the system" without an ounce of recognition that this is exactly what we're designing AI systems to do: Cheat the test. If you expect being able to pass intelligence evals as being a way to grow intelligence, well, I suspect that will work out just about as well as IQ tests do for identifying individuals capable of things like highly creative invention.
It's worth noting that success in life (for whatever that is defined as) is not the same thing as intelligence. And being intelligent isn't even enough for you to be successful in intellectual pursuits either.
You can be highly intelligent and receive no education, have no access to books (or be unable to read) and then you might be able to intelligently solve the problem of eating a sandwich but that wont get you anywhere.
Likewise, you can be intelligent and have access to the right tools but you might be too anxious to try to excell. Maybe you're intelligent and have unmedicated ADHD causing you to constantly fail to actually get anything completes in a timely manner.
There are a lot of things between IQ and success in life. But we do know for a fact that when controlling for other factors, we see positive trends between IQ and life success. That doesn't mean that IQ is the only factor.
Certainly the fact you can pull out a handful of anecdotes about high IQ individuals and talk about how uninspiring their lives are doesn't mean that all high IQ people are living uninspiring lives, or that living an inspiring life is uncorrelated with IQ, or that there is even a meaningful definition of an inspiring life.
Lastly, please note that there are lots of successful people who had an IQ test where they scored really low, and lots of unsuccessful people who had an IQ test where they scored high. This will in part be due to the fact that IQ doesn't corelate at 100% with anything, but also due to the fact that IQ doesn't correlate with itself over time at 100%. You can do an IQ test on an exceptionally bad day, or an exceptionally good day, you might get an IQ test which is not good at measuring you in particular. That's why when we do research on this topic we apply multiple different tests, we control for variables, and we run these on large groups of people.
Whether intelligence is useful for a model or not, who knows. All I can tell you with relative confidence is that IQ tests are designed with humans in mind, and when you apply them to models, it is no longer clear what they measure.
One thing models don't have (yet) is lives which they can live and which we can study.
Paul Erdős is the only outsider intellectual on that list, IMO.
(Also note that ő and ö are different!)
it's hard for me to not reject the article already for it's click bait headline...
ps: 170 is 4.666 std dev, about 10^-6. that's very rare, hard to measure but at least real.
Someone can design a test and claim it determines IQ up to 210, but there's no way to statistically validate that so it's simply meaningless.
to me the 210 simply signals a certain distance of the author to the topic. that may be unjust, but I can't help it.
This is my favorite video mocking Langan, made by someone smarter than him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57IN9sBhYyg
Since the 90's he is feuding with Rick Rosner, when they both edited the Mega Society’s journal Noesis, over the title of smartest guy. They both took an untimed Richard Hoeflin test (that maybe only a few hundred people have actually taken and therefore impossible to norm) with completely arbitrary scoring criteria and self-assigned “record setting” IQs.
Neither has any outstanding intellectual contributions to their name. They are weirdos who have made "being smart" their identity.
It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth.
These absurd claims about IQ is almost evidence that the claimant are nowhere close. For starters, any IQ tests are not going to be normalized to that range because it is impossible to normalize to that range as there are 0 realistic samples.
Is human intelligence a normal distribution? Probably not. But IQ is extrapolated as such, and probably useless anyway. Which make absurd claims like this even more laughable.
Also, this is where theory meets reality.
Defining something as “the average” or “one std deviation “ is strange when the population is unmeasured and changing.
why can't you use historical population? like, the total amount of humans that ever existed? rough google shows around 100billion. seems legit that in the history of humanity, we could pop out someone so intelligent? But I do agree that IQ is probably a decent signal but entirely meaningless as sole measurement.
The average IQ of the people then would be 100, and the average IQ of people now would also be 100, even though there was a huge difference in intelligence. This is because 100 is defined as being the average rather than being an absolute measure.
So, to compare 100 IQ now with 100 IQ 50 years ago is hard, since you're not using the same test anymore.
There's an effect called the Flynn Effect which is essentially an inflation of IQ, so the tests are changed every few years so that it keeps the same distribution (so that the averagely intelligent human would score 100)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
In fact, you can't always compare the IQ tests of 2 humans alive, because the given score is comparing you to the other people of your age, not to the global population. So if you compare the IQ of a kid and middle aged man, it doesn't mean that one is more smart than the other in an absolute way (it's more a theoretical potential)
* Ug, the hunter gatherer
* Definitely could have invented fire-cooking if it didn’t predate homo-sapiens
* Can design novel knots and traps from scratch
* Second best stone knapper in the tribe without even trying (Og is better at knapping but that is all he does)
* Predicts movements of roaming antelopes faster than anyone else, and his extrapolations are accurate for days longer
* Can handle 200 social contacts (this skill is useless because the tribe is only 40 people big).
Also just because it's statistically unlikely doesn't mean it can't happen.
All else being equal, the very first human is just as likely to have had 210 IQ as the one born this morning.
It's like saying your regular thermometer returned a reading of 1000C, sure buddy.
It is not impossible to roll two sixes on a single roll of two dies because it is more likely you won't.
I agree 276 is unlikely (and how would you even test/norm such a thing?)
As a consequence, an IQ above ~3 standard deviations is basically unmeasurable with more tests, and by 6 standard deviations I'm not sure is even possible to theoretically construct since I don't think what it's trying to measure can be meaningfully defined to discriminate the order of just 8 people on the entire planet.
In this case we can be sure the dice aren't fair because there's significant motivation for them not to be, or at least it's easy to imagine a manufacturing defect in the dice.
If a 14' man shows up, an absurd outlier even among outliers, is all we're able to conclusively say that he is taller than 8'11"?
The short version is that intelligence is an ordinal value, not a cardinal value. You can say that person A is more intelligent than person B, but not that person A is exactly 3.14515x more intelligent than person B.
Intelligence is simply measured in percentiles, that's all. You can't be more intelligent than 100% of the population. The 100% of the population is the population of Earth. You cannot get a higher IQ score than that.
(Which is why it stays at the bottom of the HN comment thread.)
Or to quote the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking: "People who boast about their IQ are losers".
Maybe I am just extremely stupid. But then I'm a walking example that you can be averagly successful even being dumb as a rock, if you are stubborn enough haha.
It's not just that IQ allows you to succeed. It allows you to navigate the modern world. I see people having trouble with pointers, simple abstractions, basic diagrams, or statistics and wonder: what am I missing? And I'm no von Neumann to not miss anything.
A lot of people are smart, but don't get much brilliant work done. Even more people do a lot of work, but aren't very smart about it.
To be a genius with important contributions, you need to have both the brains and the work ethic.
I often think about exposure to music, and the fact that Einstein liked to play around on his violin. My suspicion is that this was more than just a hobby – and that these context switches, and exposure to different types of creative thought, all played into his discoveries.
It just’s an artifact of testing methodologies that can’t resolve very lumpy or spiky intelligence.
And therefore ends up being confused with genuine supergenius which is more correlated to the total area under the curve, so to speak.
I think wisdom and peace is more valuable than raw IQ and I think Zhiyu and Ung-yong and even Langan realized this, wanted nothing to do with "The Machine", and chose their life trajectories accordingly.
From Google, that bro is back, married, and runs a (probably quite profitable) psychiatry business now.
The other thing that’s occurred to me lately is how some “impressive” resumes and experience just won’t be possible about nation state level backing. So yeah, if you’re going to talk about games, be aware that there’s always more than one at play.
In my view, people who are able to question the legitimacy or applicability of IQ as a general measure of "intelligence", an idea that is highly contextual, are probably intelligent. They are at least smart enough to question social conceptions and to recognize the contingent nature of such conceptions. People who uncritically view IQ as some kind of unassailable proof of "intelligence" may be good at solving certain classes of known problems but, I really am not surprised that they may lack the imagination to contribute meaningful things to society, as a blind faith in a measure developed by fallible human beings is indicative of limited thinking /creativity.
Obviously someone can score well on an IQ test and question its validity as a signifier of intelligence, just as one can score poorly and place a strong degree of faith in it—but the way someone approaches it, in either case, is a very telling indicator of their own intellectual biases and limitations.
Then there's my wife's co-worker, member of Mensa and self-proclaimed intelligent person. She's barely functional in normal society, completely locked in a "I'm smart, so I'm right" mentality. Even if she may be technically correct, she completely fails to understand that rules might be wrong or needs to be bent to make society work. Yet somehow she also manages to overthink things, needlessly complicating things and designs procedures that requires a higher than average IQ to understand and gets upset when those procedures aren't followed. You'd think that smart people would design simpler and easier solutions, but apparently that's not a given.
Someone in the 1920s/30s would call the ability to solve equations or play chess well as signs of high intelligence. Not so long ago, translation of natural languages was considered a task requiring a good level of intelligence.
Each progress in AI changes the definition of intelligence as we realize that a machine finally able to do task X is not really as intelligent as we thought it had to be.
And today the AI/robotics industry struggles to build a machine that can perform the job of a room cleaner. Beating grand masters at chess was far easier.
"Success" is hard to nail down. Is it academic success? SES succes? Job performance? It's all over the map.
However we know that :
IQ is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.
Conscientiousness is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.
Low neuroticism is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.
And there are other "personality" metrics that have been studied. It is very easy for someone who has an exceptional IQ to be sert back by neuroticism for example and exceptional IQ is near useless if the person does not have the conscientiousness to follow through on tasks, these people will likely be exceptional a "shallow" tasks.
I think this is well trodden ground.
It seems like 210 IQ has proven to be plenty for him, although measurement of his IQ and intense childhood pressure may not have been beneficial to him.
> According to reports, he was working at NASA at the age of eight, and in 1978, his name was recorded in the Guinness Book Of World Records for the highest IQ at 210.
> While his career as an academic genius was soaring to unprecedented heights, Kim Ung Yong decided to pull the plug on it abruptly. He returned to South Korea in 1978 and decided to pursue higher education at Chungbuk National University where he obtained his Ph.D. in civil engineering.
> The reason behind this decision was his growing dissatisfaction with the life of a genius. According to Mr. Kim, he missed out on many things in life while excelling academically. He spent his days couped up, deprived of the finer joys of life. His lifestyle also drew in some nasty rumors from the media.
> So, he left that life behind in pursuit of his own identity and a normal life with his family and friends. Though the media labeled him as a “failed genius”, a living proof of how things can go horribly wrong with gifted kids, Mr. Kim has no regrets about his decision. In a society that puts academic intelligence on a pedestal, he is adamant that a high IQ really doesn’t determine anything about a person’s character.
It seems like indeed he learned some valuable lessons. But it's also clear that he felt the extreme pressure was ruining his life at that time, and it took him off the (more prestigious— you can decide if you think it's "more valuable") path of science in favor of engineering.
If you asked him, he'd probably say that the most vital decision he ever made was rejecting the "deep and woeful strife" that came from his ultra-disciplined, intellectual, and otherwise profoundly empty childhood.
It also seems like he'd probably reject the notion of measuring him by "where he ended up in life", even if that judgment is favorable. If the more relevant question is "could he have wound up contented and emotionally healthy with some other kind of childhood", it seems hard to argue that the painful childhood he rejected is the only way that could have happened.
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1: https://www.koreaboo.com/stories/south-korean-professor-once...
When I say "where he ended up in life", I don't mean his job, where he lives, etc. These are irrelevant material conditions. I mean who he is as a person. How he carries himself, his perspectives, the set of mental frameworks he's capable of utilizing, etc. Essentially "could he have wounded up contented and emotionally healthy" is what I assert is effectively impossible. How could he have? Without having the experience to internalize, process, interpret, and evade what is left to reject? How is he to know what he does not value? And my point even extends beyond that, it is not a utilitarian one.
> he'd probably say that the most vital decision he ever made was rejecting the "deep and woeful strife" that came from his ultra-disciplined, intellectual, and otherwise profoundly empty childhood.
This too isn't quite understanding what I mean, along a few axes. I think I'll cast the same point in different light and context:
No life which is spent from cradle to grave without ever knowing deep and personal loss can have claim to have been a proper or healthy life, or to be truly human at that. It is an existence left stunted and incomplete. The take away from this is not that we are to maximize our propriety or healthiness by killing those closest to us. What I broadcast is excruciatingly a non-dualistic, anti-utilitarian signal.
> it seems hard to argue that the painful childhood he rejected is the only way that could have happened.
I don't mean to imply that the environmental stress from being raised as a child prodigy is particularly unique in substance. Only that the stress (in a sense which extends beyond the shallow emotional sense of the word) with a valence aligned with the experiencer at that moment in time is an essential part to living.
I.e. the idea that IQ is some innate fixed quality has evidence against it. It seems obvious that this is the case, given that people get their children tutors so they can do better at IQ tests to get into schools...
[1] https://www.psypost.org/major-iq-differences-in-identical-tw...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...
Actually yes there is; I have come across many people who believe this, specifically saying that IQ is fixed.
> that intelligence is an innate fixed quality
I would also disagree with this — intelligence can be increased, (e.g. through education, training, and practice), and also decreased, (e.g. by lifestyle / environment).
> The authors note some limitations to their work. The group with “very dissimilar” education contained only 10 twin pairs. While this represents all such published individual data from the last century, it is a small sample size
Thanks, the study is interesting, but needs further research.
They don't check your memory association skills. You mostly solve patterns and logic puzzles, but future questions don't refer to the previous ones.
But I think it's much more likely that intelligence itself is just a bit overrated amongst "intellectual" / white collar types, as in, people that define their identity and self-worth by how smart they are, or think they are.
At the end of the day, being disciplined, sociable, focused, or even just having a narrow set of interests is probably more of a recipe for success than mere raw intelligence. And ironically I think there are a lot of people that would be more successful – in careers, personal relationships, etc. – if they were a little bit less intelligent.
And if you're far above, it may give you a slight boost, but is not going to magically propel you to success. You can do math in your head? Okay, your competitor will just use a calculator. You have impeccable spatial reasoning? Okay, the other guy will just draw himself a visual diagram.
There are only a few narrow domains where the raw processing power of your brain is going to automatically cause you to become richer or more successful than your peers. For everything else, luck, people skills, creativity and hard work are the dominant factors (in roughly that order).
He used to come back from the local Mensa chapter meetings with the best stories. According to him, watching a room full of geniuses try to solve basic organizational issues was exactly like attending the annual meeting of a very dysfunctional condo board. Same arguments, same confusion, just with a higher average IQ.
Does "IQ" measure something particularly useful or meaningful?
(I think, at best, it's a very incomplete measure of something quite vague and ill-defined.)
Who knows what you're referring to, but generally IQ tests measure general mental abilities on things society generally finds good. That's fine, but general education does the same in far more detail and comes with a robust achievement measurement (grades, and graduation/degrees).
IQ competes with other measures that exist anyway and comes up short.
IQ can be used somewhat reliably to identify if someone is an underachiever, or if they're legitimately struggling. That's what the tests are made and optimized for; they're designed to test how quickly a person can make the connection between two unrelated concepts. If they do it quick enough, they're probably underachieving compared to what they actually can do and it may be worth trying to give them more complicated material to see if they can actually handle it. (And conversely, if it turns out they're actually struggling, it may be worth dedicating more time to help them.)
That's the main use of it. Anything else you attach to IQ is a case of correlation not being causation, and anyone who thinks it's worth more than that is being silly. High/Low IQ correlates to very little besides a sort of general trend on how quickly you can recognize patterns (because of statistical anomaly rules, any score outside the 95th percentile is basically the same anyways and IQ scores are normalized every couple years; this is about as far as you can go with IQ - there's very little difference between 150/180/210 or whatever other high number you imagine).
I take it you haven’t encountered people with an in of 70 before? They are basically untrainable..
For example if you read the biography of Von Neumann, it's remarkable that he was able to focus and work in the most noisy and distracting environments.
But talking about intelligence always brings visceral reactions. While we readily admit that someone can be stronger, or taller, the need to somehow negate that people can be genuinely smarter is somehow evil.
Also I disagree with comments saying we don’t have a good definition of intelligence. We have several but to me the most important is to plan ahead, and then be able to successfully improvise when the plan goes wrong.
> Instead of competing in real games,
Define real games.
The modern world makes a lot of money off psychological vulnerabilities. Better to know yours than be unaware and played.
But at the end of the day, we do not have an inherent value. I wonder if people that get hung up on these metrics and what value they seemingly hold either that a person is a whole person, not just some measurement about them. The world's tallest man also has a favorite food, favorite color, and hobbies. He has friends and family. The metric you assigned to him is not the totality of the man.
I say this because recently I've been struggling with work and I feel like I have to say to myself sometimes, I am more than just a source of income and health insurance to my family. To someone who isn't in my situation, it might seem silly, but it has been scary and stressful and in some ways I did say to myself, you have value because you provide. But we have money saved, and are in a stable situation, and I could always find a new job, but my ego assigned value to the job regardless despite my best efforts at pretending that I don't play games with corporations. The stress that keeping a 9 to 5 causes in my mind is entirely self-inflicted by me.
I guess what I'm saying is that I should value other things about myself more highly, or maybe even not value anything about myself if that makes sense. What value is there in in measuring my success, as long as I am honest about my efforts and happiness?
I will never conquer the entire world by 25, or have a billion dollars, so maybe I need to learn to measure less and focus on true personal accountability and happiness instead. Hopefully that's a simple task...
Nassim Taleb's book starts out as self indulgent, self aggrandizing nonsense. It's basically summed up as "probability won't help you when something happens that hasn't happened before". You don't say, what an incredible insight for the first 40 pages.
I can’t think of one genius that became really famous and successful that also didn’t have to work their friggin’ as s off or who had everything handed to them, or who didn’t have to collaborate with or appeal to normies to get ahead in this world.
“It’s a long way to the top if you want to Rock ‘n Roll”
The first part of the article puts down a person whose IQ is in the 140-180 range. If you read about the person, that part makes sense as an opinion.
The second part of the article explains that the person referred to in the title, the alleged 210 IQ, has chosen a middle manager job because it makes them happy.
> I'm trying to tell people that I'm happy the way I am.
The author never explains the problem they have with this person.
Instead, I think the title should be more along the lines of "an IQ of 176 does not make you a good person". I guess people would not engage if the conclusion was obvious? The baiting title is totally misplaced.
Actually, the whole treatment of Kim Ung-yong is even worse than I make out in this comment. I am left with a really negative impression of the author.
As far as I can tell, the author doesn't have a problem.
The article is using common societal opinions on these people, which are demonstrated with quotes from those same people.
It's worse. In both cases the IQ scores are basically fake. The first one probably does not reach moderate 130 required for Mensa based on the report of repeatedly trying the same test and not passing some not-too-high bar the first time (the first _known_ time; the test is only valid when taken once).
The second one does not have any credible backing to their IQ score whatsoever and for all we know could be under 100.
Also, it's not just "maybe" that neither of these people have exceptional IQ. It is more like "most certainly not, unless they have some strong proof, because they lied multiple times".
Having a high IQ isn't enough - you must also choose to be happy.
But I agree with what the author is trying to say: Intelligence is not enough to be successful. No one is going to pay you to "be smart". You have to do something with that intelligence that is worthwhile.
Which is why you have people like Richard Feynman who famously had just "an above average" IQ while contributing greatly to several fields of math and science.
Now, it could be that Feynman just didn't care about the test when he took it. Because he intuitively knew that "being smart" wasn't enough. You had to apply yourself. You have to put in the work and there are no real shortcuts.
Being successful is a multifaceted thing and there are many pitfalls. And the real trick seems to be avoiding as many pitfalls as possible. Being smart helps, but it's not a guarantee.
lordnacho mentioned people think of intelligence as magic, and that's a good way to put it. Every other quality we have as people is not really disputed. If you're taller, we acknowledge it. If you're faster, we can test it. If you're stronger in your arms, we can test it. Etc. And we accept the results. And we accept that if we want to change things, we have to do the work.
But not intelligence. For some reason, no one can be smarter than anyone else. And everyone has to be smart in something. And if you're smart in one thing, you can't be smart in others. We invent things like EQ, street smarts, book smarts, etc to try and put everyone on equal footing. But a lot of times, people who have higher IQs also have higher EQs. And when people talk about "street smarts", what they're really describing is a sort of institutional knowledge that can only be gained by living in an area as often these "street smarts" are highly local to a certain subset of streets. And people often mistake trivia for intelligence. They think knowing a fact makes one smart. It makes one knowledgeable. And often having a lot of knowledge can be beneficial to those with higher intelligence. But high intelligence is often apparent even in those with little knowledge. For instance, my wife is a special education teacher and she has a non-verbal autistic child in her class. He clearly does not have a lot of knowledge, but he's apparently very intelligent. He can work things out. He can make references. He grasps concepts quickly. He gets frustrated by his own inability to articulate his thoughts.
Yes, of course, but how?! I don't right now, how do I go about doing that? Play more golf/chess/adult-tag/leetcode/etc? Talk to chaGPT/therapist? I ... I just don't even know where to start.
> You will never have enough IQ, nor money, nor time, nor energy. It's no excuse. You are enough -- no, no, you are plenty.
What the hell does this mean? Is this not a contradiction? What, probably obvious, thing am I missing here?
> But this is still about you. There exist no certificates nor trophies nor titles that can quench your thirst for permanence. If you worship human intelligence, 210 IQ is not enough. It is only plenty if you let it be.
I am so confused here! I'm not permanent! Only my works will survive me, and even then only the really good ones, and even then only the ones that the flukes of history deem passable.
What does plenty even mean here?
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Man alive! This is hitting hard to me and I don;t even know why it does. Is this some sort of Escher-AI-scissor-statement thingy?
You can start by deliberately being bored a bit, that allows some of the the inner noise and judgements to pass. And then there's also self-compassion.
He took a custom “iq” test of 48 questions, scored average, then retook the test knowing the questions, and got 47 right.
In my experience the gut feeling of being the smartest person in the room is often true. Many highly smart people don't have the social position that they are surrounded by like-minded or even smarter people.
If you, on the other hand, consider "red flag" to be against the respective person, I can only say that you are an evil bully.
Every smart person I've met in life so far has known that humility is key if you want other smart people to take you seriously. And to let your work speak for yourself.
It's somewhat similar to those YouTubers who help homeless people on camera. It's a paradox where if it's done on film it seems more self serving than generous but if it wasn't on film no one would know.
But there is a difference. Instead of going on film, smart people can produce actual works for others to read and validate.
What is wrong with no one knowing?
Its not really a problem, and its old - its mentioned in the Bible (obviously not videos, but doing good publicly for status).
Why assume he wants other smart people to take him seriously more than he wants to be authentic?
All that raw power and no way to direct it in a useful manner.
High IQ low EQ folks often struggle in careers and life because they’re “right” but can’t get anything done.
The most successful tend to be high-ish IQ but with enough EQ to get things done. Those folks are unstoppable.
There are probably a very large number of skills along other vectors that we haven’t identified/labeled that are equally, more or less important.
Smart comes in a lot of flavors.
Redirecting an unhealthy obsession with being the smartest person in the room, to just being as self-reflective as possible is far healthier for well being, but I think also it improves outcomes.
Of course you need a base level of IQ too, but if you're reasonably smart just being able to take a step back and ask if you're being reasonable, if you might be wrong, why someone feels the way they do about you, this makes you much better at any task that involves some level of collaboration – which the vast majority of tasks do.
People who just have high IQ might on average be good at reasoning on their own, but their ability to reason with others – playing into their strengths and knowledge and into that of others is what allows them to exceed beyond their IQ in terms of outcomes.
For what it's worth, I find Langan really interesting. He's clearly a smart guy, but also delusionally self-confident in himself.
And I kinda get that honestly. I've had a few official IQ tests in my life and I'm pretty confident I have a fairly high IQ. I know I've found in most cases I'm well served to not pay much attention to what the average person thinks about most things, but when I find people who think well, especially if they have more knowledge in some area than myself I become obsessively self-critical when I feel we're unaligned on something. Generally speaking in these cases I'm likely to be wrong.
My guess is that Langan doesn't do this. Perhaps he feels (mostly correctly) that trusting himself is generally the better strategy than trusting what anyone else thinks. Still, it's surprising he hasn't worked this out. Maybe there's more going on there.
Aced the SAT as a teen, and interned at JPL, etc. Got a free full ride, wherever he wanted. He got his undergraduate at CalTech. Ph.D at Some midwest college -a good one, but can't remember which one -may have been Urbana-Champagne.
His mother was adamant that he have as normal a childhood as possible. She deliberately kept his K12 at a normal pace.
He's now a regular professor at a fairly good college (but not an Ivy League one).
He's married, has a kid, and two cats. Has a great life.
Part of me wants to say "What a waste!", but that part needs to get smothered with a pillow.
He's quite happy, and is doing something that he really wants to do.
Most of us could be so fortunate.
I've found "I.Q. smart" to be overrated. It opens a lot of doors, but it can also get in the way.
Many of my heroes have 2-digit IQs.
1. being right most of the time?
2. knowing a lot (breadth)?
3. knowing a couple things in depth?
4. knowing in breadth and depth?
5. understanding new things fast (which is only measurable by someone who knows more?)?
6. solving puzzle and brainteasers easily?
7. being able to speak multiple languages?
8. being self-taught in what people may claim to be complex subjects?
9. being able to derive truths that other people fail to see?
10. being less prone to cognitive biases?
11. Mental clarity and easier data acquisition and processing?
Or something else?
Usually these people are knowledgeable because they are constantly learning. Eventually they become wise.
What do you think of that definition?
I have probably met a lot of people who might be highly rated in terms of IQ but I haven't found anyone particularly clever so far. So I am curious.
This guy is in a league of his own. Pretty stunning.
I would be quite surprised if "any college professor" is at the same level.
That said, I am also very much a "maker and doer." I spent my career amongst folks sort of like him, but focused on producing stuff. He would have knocked most of them, into a cocked hat.
Not worth arguing about.
I apologize for being unclear.
Whose consensus? Can you back up that claim with some links? The only actual metrics we have for intelligence are based on a speed race, and are not based on concepts that you and I can’t understand. Everyone can answer the questions on an IQ test correctly given unlimited time. I would claim that because IQ tests do not involve the ability to grasp concepts other can’t, there is no such consensus. Higher IQ is literally defined as someone being able to answer questions you can understand faster than you.
> Both and Kichoge [sic] are both huge outliers in running
A small nitpick, Bolt and Kipchoge are the fastest at what they do, but they are not huge outliers at all, they’re a very tiny bit faster than their competition, and there’s plenty of competition.
This actually brings up a pretty important statistical point - that measuring outliers in terms of standard deviations washes away ALL of the absolute differences between people. It’s a relative ranking score, not a direct measure of intelligence. Someone with an IQ of 210 might be 0.1% smarter than someone with an IQ of 130. Or even less. The popular idea that a high IQ score somehow means someone has extreme intelligence far higher than others is a complete and total myth, there’s no basis for believing it’s true aside from conflating or misunderstanding what a standard deviation is. Standard deviations tell you about the distribution. It is a metric that gets exponentially smaller the higher the number is, and is always measuring in relation to the group, and does not correlate directly with the metric it’s capturing.
There’s really no such thing as extreme intelligence with people who can grasp concepts others can’t. And there’s no such thing as a 210 IQ either, as others have pointed out. Everything over ~145 is almost completely meaningless and even if it had meaning simply does not demonstrate that very high IQ is appreciably smarter than your average scientist. Isn’t it actually already obvious there isn’t a cabal of super geniuses who have invented the things the rest of us don’t understand?
I mean even the people who conceived speed-based tests defined intelligence broadly as “the global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment” (Weschler), which aligns with other dictionary and colloquial definitions and scientists with broader interests than psychometrics, and of course daily arguments on here about whether neural networks have achieved general intelligence which focus on their performance on benchmarks humans struggle to pass, not their processing speed or token memory. Psychometricians' focus on speed for actual metrics is driven by expediency (and the belief that batteries of simple speed tests correlate well with the ability to learn to perform more complex tasks to exceptionally high levels) rather than because they think peak intellectual ability is characterised exclusively by rapid puzzle solving. Needless to say genius is defined even more in terms of accomplishment and insightfulness, which is why lists of geniuses are dominated by scientists and creatives who conceived things their peers couldn't (some of which give even grad students with an interest in the subject headaches trying to understand when being walked through it), not people who are particularly fast at solving simple puzzles.
Sure, 150 IQ people mostly just answer more questions within a time limit than 120 IQ people on some types of test, which is a function of processing speed and prioritization, but there are absolutely people who score low because they can't grasp what half the questions are looking for no matter how much time they're given. Not all of them are on the left side of the distribution, and some tests like Raven's APM give very similar rankings when taken untimed. And there are definitely plenty of smart people who couldn't say, solve Fermat's last theorem, despite being exceptional in their knowledge of mathematics and ability to solve related problems and being interested enough to try.
I think we both agree there's a tendency of people to fetishise extreme intelligence without realising that not only can you possess it and not do anything useful with it (and possess it and have massive flaws in some areas of judgement), but you can also solve pretty significant problems without be notably special in metrics related to it. Also agree that obviously IQ is a constructed scale that doesn't capture absolute differences and for this and many other reasons distinctions over 145 are pretty meaningless. But I think that aligns pretty well with "maybe psychometricians really don't know what makes exceptionally smart people exceptionally smart"...
(As for Bolt/Kipchoge, 'massive outlier' is a matter of perspective, but the amount of competition their best time is >1% faster than, selected from a pool of highly motivated full time professionals which in turn comes from a pool of millions who attempted sprint races at some point in their youth, is a point in their favour.)
> ‘massive outlier’ is a matter of perspective, but the amount of competition their best time is >1% faster than
It seems like you understood my point about standard deviations and ranking versus absolute values, but you’re insisting on looking at rankings still? Why? This is exactly the common mistake I was referring to. Yes, Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world, which puts him at a little over 6 standard deviations above the norm, if I used my lookup table correctly. He’s faster than around eight billion people. But does that mean he’s eight billion times faster than the average person, or a hundred times faster, or even ten times faster than the average? Well, standard deviations don’t tell you that. He’s actually less than 1.5 times faster than the average healthy male adult, and less than 10% faster than a typical competitive sprinter. He’s not that much faster at all, it’s just that he represents where humans physically top out, and he happens to rank the highest.
Same is true of human height and many other physical traits. The tallest person in the world, the biggest outlier that ever existed, is less than twice the average height of everyone on earth including women. Robert Wadlow was off the charts in terms of standard deviations, taller than billions and billions of people, but of course that doesn’t mean he was a thousand feet tall. He was less than nine feet tall, and that’s all it takes to be the tallest person in the world.
Why would intelligence be any different? All brains have the same basic design. Some people are above average and some are below. Yes there are distribution outliers, and there are non-functional people, but that does not imply the top is far from the average. What reason is there to believe that some brains are so much smarter than others that they can comprehend ideas that someone with an IQ of 120 can’t? I’m not aware of such an idea ever being published, are you? Seems like it would be famous, if true. How would that even work? There’s no language and no list of words that only people with 170 IQ can understand.
BTW I just rewatched “The Expert Myth” video by Veritasium, it’s very relevant to our conversation (https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA) and has a nice clip of Bolt in there too! It’s a good science backed explanation of why so-called ‘genius’ doesn’t actually depend on IQ much.
So while one may not be able to solve the entire suite of questions within 10 minutes, we can know that someone who can is smarter than someone who can't.
If you can try yourself to get better at the IQ questions, this is just about memory and pattern matching, not actual intelligence
> But Langan is clearly a smart guy. He probably cleared 140+ on an IQ test. He speaks like a book.[1]
where that last sentence is a link to a local-TV segment
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-788Upky2Y
Langan's only recorded lines in that TV segment are:
> Bonjo! 'Mon, boy! > I think it's about, uh, 20 horses, two llamas, two cows. > This particular paper's on something called a conspansive manifold. > It's a-a theory that studies the relationship between mind and reality. In other words, what's out there in the real world, how does the mind relate to it? > Yes. [/] You don't. [/] It's not that simple. I happen to know there's a heaven, because I know you can use your will to create things. In other words, do you continue to exist after you die? Absolutely. Nothing in this universe is wasted. Nothing ever ceases to exist, not really. The essence always remains preserved. > We, ah, didn't have a lot of money. And the old man was always in need of money, so we had to go with a worklist. > Well, as a matter of fact, I had to fight my way through high school. > There's the foal, and there's Star, his mother. > I mean, why am I not a famous politician, or a, a, a, financier? filthy rich? Ah, some of the business things don't mean that much to me. I'd rather have some meaning in my life, and this is how I get it. [/] In construction, ranch hand, farmhand, cowboy, firefighter — I worked for the forest service about four years. Um, just anything I could get my hands on. > Jeannie was very very taken with the beauty of the place. As a matter of fact she started crying, she was looking at it, and I realized then I couldn't say no. > No, it can't be done. > There's a sort of mind that I call a garbage-trap sort of mind. [/] Usually that kind of mind does not belong to a person who is capable of deep thought. > Sometimes it's hard to find the words when somebody expresses love. When I went to visit my mother, for instance — she's been a little bit ill lately — I had to tell her that I loved her, and she told me that she loved me, and, and then there was a long period of silence, because what can you follow that up with?
That doesn't qualify as "speaking like a book" in my book. I'd be interested to see videos of people who do habitually speak in well-formed sentences; I'm sure such people exist, although (from that one five-minute TV segment) Langan doesn't seem to be one of them.
I was recently asked, "Did people in the past really talk like that?" (i.e. in complex sentences like they do in the dialogue of your average 18th- or 19th-century novel) and I unfoundedly opined that while the answer was probably "no, the literary style is always an exaggeration of the natural speaking style; 21st-century people don't speak exactly like their novels, either," it seemed plausible to me that when all your educated people start their careers studying Latin grammar and rhetoric for several years, they do end up with more unconscious respect for grammatical structure and therefore more of an ability to generate complex yet well-formed sentences on the fly. I'd be interested to see what the experts think.
Saying someone is poisonous (watch this two hour YouTube video for why) is cheap.