Does having a high IQ make you less creative? | Hacker News Reader

Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

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104 pointspmf53 comments

This was a better and more original blog post than I expected from the title. The finding from the Terman study is rather important, and should be more widely known. The definitive book about the Terman study, written by a Stanford University Press Office science journalist who was the first independent researcher to have access to study files, is Joel Shurkin's Terman's Kids (1992).

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joel-n-shurkin/te...

Alas, that book is currently out of print, but well worth finding in a library. To say, as the blog post author does, "IQ is as important as height in basketball" gets the main point right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Boykins

AFTER EDIT:

I see there is a reply here that appears to be from the blog post author.

Will try something better next time. Sorry for my bad english.

I admire people who participate here even though they didn't grow up speaking English at home. That's not easy. What is your native language? What has been your process for learning English?

Thank you! Im from Uruguay so my native language is Spanish. I've learned english mainly by playing videogames (I kid you not) as a kid, as Warren Buffett says "We prefer process over outcome" so It was a fun way to do it.

Good to know that I am not alone in the learning method for that subject.

I am from Brazil.

I'm from Argentina and learnt with se same method, also tv series helped with pronunciation.

I started learning English with videogames too. I bought an English translation dictionary that was about half my weight to play Zak McKracken, on a 286 my dear avó owned. My tipping point came much later, with a pretty and sweet native English speaking girlfriend.

Great read by the way.

You don't happen to have any studies about work-sample tests used alongside IQ tests to predict an applicant's performance in a given job role, do you?

>> I admire people who participate here even though they didn't grow up speaking English at home.

I concur. It is, however, why I wish that there was a side-channel specifically for notifying someone of grammar or spelling issues. It'd be useful to let people know if they're using non-standard constructions without the notification being public. Email would be overkill for this purpose.

Something like TL;DR ... maybe ESL (English Second Language) at the top would work.

Though starting that practice means someone will eventually come on hacker news and complain that putting ESL at the top is redundant because they can tell from the writing that the person has English as a second language ;)

That's not a sidechannel. That's adding noise to the main channel.

Terman and IQ are also mentioned in "How Would You Move Mount Fuji" (http://www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move-Mount-Fuji/dp/031677849...). I recommend it to anyone interested in brainteasers and how Microsoft and a lot of other companies use them during the interviewing process...

Now back to the article: it was an enjoyable read, but I believe the title is somewhat misleading. High IQ does not make you less creative. However high IQ does not imply creativity. The converse is also not true. I am a bit tired of IQ being used as some kind of objective measure of capabilities, let alone success. Is there any other test that would be more representative of one's mental abilities?

It's tempting to look at IQ as a potential for everything, but as one having access to a lot of ultra-smart people (I'm doing PhD in theoretical physics) it's very easy to see that creativity lies on a different axis.

And during studies I've met many people who were able to solve very hard mathematical problems, but at the same time - were seemingly unable to create new ones on their own.

(And also, creativity many times is counterproductive, as encourages to try something new rather than using a good, already tested solution.)

See also: http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/72/28 (a good answer to a silly question "Is IQ really unimportant for creativity beyond a certain basic IQ of roughly 125?")

Good point on the drawback of creativity. I suffer horribly from that. I'll spend weeks or months trying to solve problems in unique/clever ways when there's already a clear solution if I just took a day to read and understand it.

That feeling you get when you do figure out a new way to do something though...I like to think it's worth it.

the problem is that for higher IQ's you at the end of the distribution so the effect of errors is much higher maybe the two Nobels just had a cold or a bad day when they took the test.

And how do you factor conditions like dyslexia in I have seen suggestions that dyslexics score 15 or 20 points off so by that mark I am a genius :-)

That's a very good point, especially given that the standard deviation of IQ scores is 15, which suggests that scores of between 125 and 140 are possible (indeed, somewhat likely) for the same individual - a finding which I have found in my own experience of taking them.

Additionally, IQ tests were developed to assess someone's ability to benefit from formal education, and to the extent that these skills are uncorrelated with successful outcomes, IQ will be a poor predictor of it.

When it comes to IQ - think as is you wanted to assign one number to describe individual's sport ability. It will serve[x] some purpose for average (from bed-ridden ill to a healthy athletic person), but most likely - it will be almost useless for sports(wo)men, where more specialistic predispositions are required (sometimes contradictory; e.g. a great heavy weight boxer won't be even an amateur marathon runner).

[x] Actually, it's used in military, to rate conscripts - if they should be enrolled.

I'd say that obsession and monomania about one form of cognition makes you less creative, and high IQ people are often so impressed with their analytical intellect that they fall into the trap of disregarding other mental capabilities.

"Write as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick... average students had much more diverse answers than students with high I.Q.’s. "

Asking a question like list things you can do with a brick is meaningless, since there's no metric to measure the ideas by. Anyone can list an unlimited number of completely ridiculous (and diverse) ideas if they want to, just many would find that pointless. And ridiculous creativity isn't helpful either, what's needed in life is good ideas.

A more useful test would be to see what useful ideas people could come up with to solve a problem, though that would be harder to measure.

>And ridiculous creativity isn't helpful either, what's needed in life is good ideas.

I think the point is to separate creativity and intelligence as two orthogonal concepts. A creative person will filter out fewer thoughts, an intelligent person will make better decisions from their thoughts. It's possible to have both, and I think those are the most successful people.

When I think of the combination of creative and intelligent I think of Bobby Fischer. Back when I used to play tournament chess I went through every game from his book "60 Memorable Games", and I was amazed at how creative he was: he would often pick game-winning moves that I would never consider. This is part of what made him the greatest chess player of his time.

If you can't be as good as Bobby Fischer, try to spend your issue with people have different skills to you. The best academic collaborations I know of all contain a "generator" and a "filter" of ideas.

But the OP's complaint that there is no objective way to count 'ways to use a brick' still stands. IMO, it also may be the reason for the negative correlation with IQ. When thinking of this challenge, I soon started to abstract away solutions (throw, hit, shield, sink, etc). That, for instance, gives one 'kill an animal' way to use a brick, with subordinations 'in defense', 'for food', etc. If you don't spend time abstracting this, you can rattle of 'kill a mouse, kill a cat, kill a dog, kill a rat, kill a raccoon, kill an elephant, etc.) for an insane amount of 'different' uses. I would rate that lower than the single 'kill a plant' category that I thought of (as in 'use brick as a nutcracker' or 'use brick to mill flour')

> His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary students who went on to be Nobel laureates William Shockley and Luis Alvarez�and rejected them both.Their IQs weren't high enough. Terman concluded: "We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated."

Both just barely failed the cutoff, and given the very low base-rate of Nobelists, it's not surprising that there would be misses. This is the same logic as with terrorism-detecting systems.

> The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. -

Wrong. The correlation doesn't go away in the Terman report, nor does it go away in the later long-term SMPY studies. What happens past 130 or so is that IQ loses predictive value compared to Extraversion (for income) or Conscientiousness and Openness (for discoveries).

> For your surprise an English researcher named Liam Hudson found that average students had much more diverse answers than students with high I.Q.�s.

And yet - to go back to the submission title - when you measure Openness, it's the only Big Five personality to show a correlation with IQ. The correlation is positive and not negligible (r=0.3 or so, IIRC). So why does one sample about divergent thinking matter?

To respond to the title, having a high IQ does not make you less creative. Simple.

As for the Terman study, I think people with high IQ scores don't "go places" mainly due to laziness, lack of ambition (failing to see the point in it all), or due constant harassment by those envious of their intelligence or those that feel inferior, or those that see an easy target. After years of taking a beating many end up leading simple lives in which they hope to just survive.

Ambition and perseverence is really the key. Over and over again, I've read of famous people attributing their success to perseverence.

Some examples:

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton

"What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it." -- Doris Lessing

I agree. It's not everything, but perseverance is the difference maker, much like (a positive) attitude.

When he went through the "how do I become smart" section, I was expecting these to be creative techniques, as these are the ones I frequently use in the day.

Inversion: Flipping the problem on it's head. You want to fill up a water bottle as quickly as you can? What about emptying it as fast as possible? The second one may be easier to solve, and gives you additional insight into the problem you want to solve.

Avoidance: This is more general, but don't look up what you want to find on the internet. Look for something more specific, or don't look it up at all. I forget exactly what it was, but one time I wanted to find something easily online, but I didn't want to get the answer right away (waiting to get an answer invests more of your neurons to the answer). I searched for the harder things first. Also, looking things up will show you the way that other people solved the problem, not the way that you solved the problem. It taints the waters when you look online for something you're trying to be creative about.

Compound Interest: The pathways you make between ideas today will be useful tomorrow. The training exercises you subject your brain to today will pay off tomorrow. I like to imagine a river whenever I think about the 'flow' of ideas in my brain. The river is always flowing, but some days it moves more of the bottom of the river. Sometimes, you'll uncover something cool, sometimes not. Rediscovering the bottom constrains you to similar thoughts, just going a little bit deeper. You likely won't get new ideas from the bottom of the river. You need your flow to branch out, to expand and see where it goes. Use some of your brain flow to bifuricate your brain flow and find something new. Maybe it will bring you back to your main river, or maybe you'll find something new.

Tipping Points: When thinking of something new, blowing the problem up to infinity, or extremely large (or maximum), or extremely small (or minumum) can put an instant perspective on what needs to happen and whether or not a solution is even possible.

Lollapaloozas: The creative slide. I call this mental momentum - when you start having good ideas, you continue having them (until you run out of steam). They may not truly be good, but the more ideas you have in a set amount of time, the more power they having in breaking down the barriers that are preventing your thoughts from going further.

Creativity is usually defined as an ability to apply knowledge accumulated in another fields. So, it is not about how much IQ points you have, but how you use your mind. More different fields mastered - more chances for some creative breakthrough.

Of course, higher IQ is an advantage (think about learning efficiency), everything else being equal. It is like in sports - some people are just more coordinated, less clumsy, so, they are progressing quickly in almost every discipline.

It's quite ironic that William Shockley's IQ wasn't high enough, considering the controversy he was involved in (eugenics on the basis of intelligence):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Statements_abo...

The blog post was good, but the title was completely misleading. I was expecting a scientific / thorough look at the title question, and there was absolutely nothing to that effect.

However, the real subject of this post -- "Methods To Increase Your Intelligence" -- was rather well done.

Thought that could perform better with this tittle rather to the one you sugested, anyways will have it in mind for my future posts. Thank you.

This makes a great example of conflating correlation and causation. (I don’t mean this as a criticism of the original post. Rather, I think it’s an opportunity to discuss something that’s fascinating and counterintuitive and that even researchers often get wrong.)

The original post says a researcher (Liam Hudson) was surprised to discover that average students seemed to be more creative than high-IQ students. Thus the question arises: Does having a high IQ make you less creative? The problem, however, is that the question is causal whereas the evidence that prompts it is observational and tricky for humans to interpret causally.

To see why it’s tricky, let’s imagine a universe in which IQ and creativity are completely unrelated. Nevertheless, if both factors contribute to success (and it’s easy to believe that they do), they will have a negative correlation, conditional upon success. And guess what? Almost all creativity/IQ studies are implicitly conditioned upon success because researchers don’t want to compare “A” students to “C” students, for fear of biasing their results.

For example, let’s model our imaginary universe in R. First, let’s assign normalized IQ and creativity scores to 100 students, completely randomly and completely independently:

    n <- 100
    creativity <- rnorm(n)
    iq <- rnorm(n)

And now let’s say that success is some increasing (causal) function of creativity and IQ, plus chance:

    success <- creativity + iq + rnorm(n)

And now let’s pretend that some researchers have captured this very data. We know that IQ and creativity are completely unrelated (because we created the universe), but they don’t. Here’s what happens when they try to tease out the relationship between IQ and creativity, conditioned upon success:

    Call:
    lm(formula = creativity ~ iq + success)

    Coefficients:
                Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
    (Intercept) -0.08848    0.08042  -1.100    0.274    
    iq          -0.58801    0.09394  -6.259 1.05e-08 ***
    success      0.57538    0.05431  10.594  < 2e-16 ***
    ---
    Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Note that the IQ coefficient is negative. That is, given knowledge of a student’s success, if we also learn that the student has a higher IQ score, we should update our state of knowledge to decrease our belief that the student has a higher creativity score.

I know that that claim may sound counterintuitive, but if you do the probability math, you’ll see that it makes sense. It only seems counterintuitive. That’s because your brain can’t help but try to interpret the relationship causally.

That is, it’s all too easy to take this relationship that exists between states of knowledge about the universe and think that it actually exists within universe for real. (This mistake is what E. T. Jaynes called the “mind projection fallacy” in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.) And lots of researchers make this mistake, too.

I don’t know for sure if that’s what’s happening here, in the IQ vs. creativity research, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it has at least contributed to some of the unexpected findings.

Please help me improve my comments: Why the downvote?

This blog post doesn't do Creativity much justice, especially this nice little summary quote at the end:

The best models come from biology, physics, mathematics, microeconomics and psychology. Just think about what every freshman knows, and thats what you need to know.

Creativity is a function on a lot of different things at once, and is different for a lot of people. For one, it's a function on curiosity. Highly curious people tend to have the inherent drive to learn new things, new domains. This is in marked contrast to those that learn by being forced to through school or extrinsic pressures. The intrinsic learners are looking for understanding and knowledge, while the extrinsically motivated folks are striving for grades, money, societal acceptance or something else entirely. This is a very important distinction.

Next, creativity is a function on playfulness. John Cleese gets it absolutely right in this 30 minute talk [1]. You've got to dance around the problem, don't worry about wrong or impossible solutions, since the best solutions are usually arrived after jumping through intermediate impossibles - things and ideas that aren't realizable but make disparate connections in your brain and thinking patterns that lead to ideas that are novel and that can be realized. This is also very important. A childlike playfulness with concepts, ideas, words and humor are necessary for driving creativity.

This playfulness directly correlates to a lateral thinking style. "Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic [2]." You've got to break the habits of being a rigid logician; it comes back to connecting disparate thoughts, ideas and knowledge domains in your head. This is imperative too.

The last point I want to make is that creativity is a process. Cleese talks about it in the video mentioned above as well, but this is very important. You can't worry about the details of implementation or the stress of time if you want creativity to flourish. Your mind needs to be unbounded and free to roam, free to explore the cosmos without being brought back down to Earth, if you will. Cleese calls this "open mode." When you have your great idea, you should switch to "closed mode" - a mode where you actually implement or create your idea, because it's fully in your head. It may take a conscious effort for a while to train yourself to get into open mode and stay there, but that's great mental training.

It's also wonderful to remember that creativity applies to everything, from acting to aerospace engineers saving the crew of Apollo 13, so the domain knowledge the author listed in the quote is good, but for sure not the extent necessary for unbridled creativity. It's also not the only factor.

-----

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking

Your points about creativity aren't incompatible with the blog's points. In fact, I'd say your points elaborate the framework defined by the author. The blog defined creativity as applying mental models and combining one's past experiences randomly to discover new connections. Your points about playfulness and curiosity fall right into this framework. One who is more inquisitive will have more experiences, and spent more time analyzing these experiences. Playfulness comes with being more prone to making random connections between disparate experiences and trying to find some underlying patterns. I think this does a good job at getting to the the essence of creativity.

The point about intrinsic vs extrinsic is important. I certainly know people who have always been motivated throughout schooling and academia to achieve high test scores.

What you can sometimes observe with these people is that once they get outside of that framework they find motivation difficult.

They will learn quickly if they see the possibility of a high test score , a promotion or a leader board rank of some kind but find it difficult to understand the point of doing something just to see if they can or where the reward for success is uncertain.

One interesting question that i haven't seen mentioned too much regarding creativity, is:How can we use computers to increase our creativity ?

Because definetly they can help with creativity. Just looking at a discussion threads around a subjects can expose one to various mental models. And searching google for interesting stuff(not directly related) is also very helpfull.

I wonder though, are there other useful techniques ?

The mental models approach discussed by this blogger can be further explored in Charlie Munger's speech "Elemantary Worldly Wisdom": http://ycombinator.com/munger.html .

I, myself, study the mental models using this app: http://www.thinkmentalmodels.com/ . So when I'm waiting in line I can review a few models on my iphone

There's something I keep wondering about whenever I see people draw any conclusions whatsoever from IQ alone: How can it not matter whether a particular score was achieved by being equally good at all tasks or by being very good at some and very bad at other tasks?

I would expect a totally different outcome to many IQ related studies if that were taken into account. Or maybe it is actually taken into account but never reported, I'm not sure.

Empirically, the score on the whole IQ test is highly correlated with the score on any subset of the questions. There is a difference between scores on verbal/symbolic and visual/spatial questions that depends on the testee, but it is usually modest except in cases of severe brain damage or malformation.

I can't reference any studies or anything, but my personal experience is that passion trumps all. The problem with passion is, you don't have much of a choice. One might have a passion for gardening, whereas another might have a passion for computers. The gardener has a lower chance of being "successful" and "making a difference" (in the standard capitalist/western sense).

Many studies have found that IQ predicts financial success regardless of childhood socioeconomic background or profession. Running a chain of greenhouses lack the flashiness of, say, particle physics, but it can be both profitable and socially important.

Creativity is a tricky area to dive in.

Sometimes the more you fill your mind with (judgemental?) thinking, the more the creativity escapes.

Sometimes the more you empty your mind with secondary thinking, the more the creativity appears.

Sometimes playing a musical instrument is a good thing.

Sometimes doing a query without joins is incoherent yet good results come.

Is it only me, or the first half feels like a copy of one of chapters of Outliers by Gladwell?

It is, im sorry if this offends anyone, but it was crucial to give a proper introduction to the mental model thing. Will try something better next time. Sorry for my bad english.

More likely this: http://prometheussociety.org/cms/articles/the-outsiders

I wonder then how Google(web search) or Internet in general is affecting our creativity. It's a great combination of stories and knowledge at our disposal.

And how visiting just one type of websites, like hacker news or reddit can narrow our mental models.

Anecdotal evidence: Worst school assignments for me was making stuff up. It felt so stupid my brain actively rejected those. Memorizing - second worst. Understanding, problem solving - pure bliss. Mensa member here.

It's not about intelligence IMHO, its about the immediatesuccess oriented culture that pervades modern life. A lot of intelligent people just want to resolve the issue at hand as fast as possible.

Almost the entirety of this post comes from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Good read though and good summary!

It's just a number. Like everything in life its best to be objective about these subjective numbers.

pretty sure that it's only in the real tail that IQ loses its predictive value, well above 1 sd

go read steve hsu

no, but it does get in the way of finishing what you have created.

With a high IQ things that lesser IQ people deem creative are to you common sence, so with that I'd say the answear too this is the classic yes and no argument.

But in general IQ and creativity have no direct corilation and if anything EQ (Emotional Quota) would be a more relative guage than IQ.

sad nobody understood the point I was making, I shall dumb it down a little.

If a low IQ person saw a rocket and had no idea how it worked then they would deem it magic, aka creative. So with that the more intellegent somebody is on the IQ scale then the more that what would appear creative is to them common logical sence. But thanks for the feedback of silence :p.

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