Does Super-High IQ= Super-Low Common Sense?
scientificblogging.com
scientificblogging.com
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/09/clever-sillies...
One problem with this source, another article from which I have studied with a group of psychologists a few weeks ago,
http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...
is that the source itself is notorious for lack of empirical back-up or peer review for anything submitted to it. (The Medical Hypotheses blog is associated with the journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by the same person who posted the blog post I link above, and he runs the journal, and evidently the blog as well, to post ideas of his own that cannot obtain peer-reviewed publication elsewhere.) I have read several of the articles he cites in his blog post, and most have nothing to do with what he is writing about in the blog article, but are simply there to pad his reference list.
It would shock me if someone in the 170+ IQ range believed much of what "common" people believe. If they did, it would imply we have an extraordinarily well educated population and an extraordinarily boring genius class.
Is it really proper to equate social ineptness with lack of common sense.
IQ (or abstract reasoning ability or whatever you'd like to call it) ain't everything; there's a big difference between being clever and being cunning, and I've often wished there were a way to rebalance the stats :)
I would define it as 'super high IQ' = 'potential to exhibit high degree of common sense'.
Because people that have a super high IQ are not 'common' in their common sense does not automatically mean they are not right. Common after all is used here almost as a stand-in for average, but common sense means something else entirely.
This interpretation of common sense will get you in to Asperger syndrome territory when you look at individuals with a very high IQ, who can have a serious problem communicating their ideas to people that can't follow their train of thought.
No, but the person with high IQ and high common sense, or Practical Intelligence, is definitely a rarer breed of genius.
Did it occur to the author that there might be bias from both sides?
Many super intelligent people who are socially well-adapted probably conceal their extraordinary intelligence because they are aware of how alienating it would be to cognitively soar past every conversation partner. And from the other side, someone of average intelligence who is more interested in arcane ideas than other people probably puts a lot of time into pursuing those ideas, leading other people to think they are geniuses just because they constantly talk about esoteric things in a very deep manner.
But it doesn't mean they don't think 90% of those kinds of activities are as dull as any homework assignment.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1
The recent book-length work on this subject
http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...
provides abundant references to peer-reviewed experimental literature on this distinction.
That said, going back to the root post I have never noticed a strong correlation between IQ and personality. The few studies with actual evidence that I've seen (ahem, which this is not) haven't seen one either. Therefore I am strongly inclined to ignore this blog.
A very good question. In fact we cannot possibly know the IQ test score of any person who lived before the era of the first IQ test, which was only a century ago. But it gets worse than this. Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ elementary-age pupils showed that many of those young people did not qualify as "gifted" on a subsequent test that Terman gave them at high school age. But he kept them in the study group anyway.
Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.
An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children included in the study ever won a Nobel prize. The book by Shurkin I have just cited here is a good corrective on many misconceptions about IQ, and has an excellent section on attempts by one of Terman's study associates to estimate--by extremely dubious methods that have never been validated--the IQ scores of historical persons.
IQ tests only show how good someone is at doing IQ tests, there may be some correlation to other tasks, however they're of little use except to examine how well someone performs in academia.
A genius is someone who can see things that no one else can, and by virtue of this nature them landing high on an IQ test is rather unlikely. Feynman was a true genius, but he admittedly spent the majority of his life messing around with things, which is why he is a genius.