Malcolm Gladwell states in Outliers that there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes.
I think that in the future we'll come to realize that IQ is actually a silly metric and that this "understanding" is where it's at. Point of view (understanding) doesn't give you more intelligence (Alan Kay's proverbial 80 IQ points), but instead intelligence can help you to gain understanding.
For some reason I want to read heavily between the lines of the wikipedia summary, and I find it incredibly sad. I mean in the first place my knee jerk reaction is to equivocate "I'm still good enough, even if I didn't solve diffeq problems at 6. My son's okay even if he still doesn't read at the age of 4."
But I don't want to imagine the kind of expectation people put on this kid (when he was a kid). Cynically, I suppose as I read I thought "oh yeah what's he done now? We still have cancer and no unified field theory. Does P=NP?! huh?" and yet under that was the expectation "well this guy should be curing cancer and resolving open problems!"
No wonder he escaped to something ordinary (poor Civil Engineers, though, what a bad rap that is ... my profession is the most ordinary!) People haven't changed much since the dark ages (or before). They still expect miracles and magic to cure their woes, they just expect it now from Science.
It agrees with me that accomplishment comes after the 120 IQ...heck I'm barely above the marker.. shwoo. But it comes in increments. It comes in mostly in pieces we have to put together. Einstein didn't make the world a better place single-handedly, it was the engineers who came after and created GPS (for instance) that did it. There's no reason this guy should have created miracles with his IQ, we probably don't have enough of the base research to solve that (whichever) problem, yet.
Instead, he's improved the world a bit (quite a bit in the sector of civil engineering apparently). Honestly, the universe is miracle enough. The fact that we can make it slightly better by our actions and increase joy in the miracle of existence at all is a good thing. Some people do a better job of that with much smaller IQs.
"On November 2, 1967, at age 4, he solved an advanced stochastic differential equation."
... and then gets a PhD in physics at age 16. Although the IQ score might be outdated/irrelevant - there is something special about this man and if we don't strive to quantify it we won't be able to reliably reproduce it.
I'm somewhat confused. What does being able to label something have to do with reproducing it?
I may be able to label the heart in a person, or perhaps distinguish an exceptional sonata from something that isn't, but that doesn't mean that I can create a hart, or play that song.
Although you could see it as reproducing this human (breeding, eugenics) you could also look at it as discovery and training. Sort of like being able to spot a really great runner at age 5 and getting them to the Olympics by age 18, etc.
I think if we can understand (since it probably isn't IQ) the "real" reason this person has such above-average abilities then we can find ways to test for it and help other people with these abilities develop fuller potential, and hopefully humanity gets something back - in both the arts and sciences.
The original purpose of IQ tests was not to predict who would go on to the most brilliant career, but to help teachers recognize who would need special help in classes. In that context I think the distinction between 120, 150, and 180 IQ is meaningful.
The distinction between 150 and 180 IQ is meaningful? Really? If such a difference is reliably measured, and not easily trained by either person (e.g. by devouring a few books on vocabulary and brain puzzlers in the week before the test), then what is the meaningful difference? Both people are going to be bored out of their mind at school and are going to have to be basically self-reliant for their actual learning process for much of their lives. Feynman supposed had an IQ in the low end of that range, and a given person at the higher end probably isn't as smart in any real sense as Feynman was. Whatever the difference is there, it isn't IQ.
Feynman had the advantage of built-in syntax highlighting, a gift I would absolutely love to have:
"When I see equations, I see the letters in colors - I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students."
I don't know if the distinction between a tested 150 and 180 IQ is meaningful, but that between those levels of intelligence is. I'm in the 150 range; I've met some who are probably in the 180 range (IMO gold medalists) and they are noticeably smarter than I am.
That said, even a 200 IQ won't overcome a lackluster work ethic, mental illness, or social adversity (internal or external).
The distinction between 150 (barely recognizable as a validated score on current tests) and 180 (NOT a validated score on any test, ever) is less meaningful than many suppose:
"Put into the context of the psychometric movement as a whole, it is clear that positive extreme of the IQ distribution is not as different from other IQ levels as might have been expected. . . . While 180 IQ suggests the ability to do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of ‘genius’ in its common-sense meaning, i.e. transcendent achievement in some field. For these kinds of phenomena, IQ seems at best a crude predictor. For anything more, we will have to look to traditions other than the psychometric and to variables other than IQ."
Feldman, David (1984). A Follow-up of Subjects Scoring above 180 IQ in Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius. Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 518-523.
IQ scores, especially in childhood, vary over the course of a test-taker’s life, sometimes varying radically. Deviation IQ scoring was originally developed to make for more stability of scores over the course of childhood. Nonetheless, deviation IQs for children can also change considerably over the course of childhood (Pinneau 1961; Truch 1993, page 78; Howe 1998; Deary 2000, table 1.3). "Correlation studies of test scores provide actuarial data, applicable to group predictions. . . . Studies of individuals, on the other hand, may reveal large upward or downward shifts in test scores." (Anastasi & Urbina 1997 p. 326).
For example, young people in the famous Lewis Terman longitudinal Genetic Studies of Genius (initial n=1,444 with n=643 in main study group) when tested at high school age (n=503) were found to have dropped 9 IQ points on average in Stanford-Binet IQ. More than two dozen children dropped by 15 IQ points and six by 25 points or more. Parents of those children reported no changes in their children or even that their children were getting brighter (Shurkin 1992, pp. 89-90). Terman observed a similar drop in IQ scores in his study group upon adult IQ testing (Shurkin 1992, pp. 147-150). Samuel R. Pinneau conducted a thorough review of the Berkeley Growth Study (1928-1946; initial n=61, n after eighteen years =40). Alice Moriarty was a Ph.D. researcher at the Menninger Foundation and describes in her book (1966) a number of case studies of longitudinal observations of children's IQ. She observed several subjects whose childhood IQ varied markedly over the course of childhood, and develops hypotheses about why those IQ changes occurred. Anastasi and Urbina (1997, p. 328) point out that childhood IQ scores are poorest at predicting subsequent IQ scores when taken at preschool age. Change in scores over the course of childhood shows that there are powerful environmental effects on IQ (Anastasi & Urbina 1997, p. 327) or perhaps that IQ scores in childhood are not reliable estimates of a child’s scholastic ability.
REFERENCES
Anastasi, Anne & Urbina, Susana (1997). Psychological Testing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Deary, Ian J. (2000) Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howe, Michael J. A. (1998). Can IQ Change?. The Psychologist, February 1998 pages 69-72.
Moriarty, Alice E. (1966). Constancy and IQ Change: A Clinical View of Relationships between Tested IQ and Personality. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Pinneau, Samuel R. (1961). Changes in Intelligence Quotient Infancy to Maturity: New Insights from the Berkeley Growth Study with Implications for the Stanford-Binet Scales and Applications to Professional Practice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.
Truch, Steve (1993). The WISC-III(R) Companion: A Guide to Interpretation and Educational Intervention. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
It seems like you know a whole lot about this. I once heard a Math professor say that children were able to use more methods for doing basic arithmetic when they first started school than when they'd gone to school for a year, or something of that nature.
I've also been through public school, and I know that the way they teach stuff is not modern in any way. It is almost the same school system that Prussia had, that later was adopted by countires like the USA. A school of compulsion, instituted to teach students the "virtue of obedience" and to make them parts of a bigger machine (like the war machine). So the teaching method of choice naturally became to have the students do simple tasks obediently at their desks. This can be seen in modern American classrooms aswell (yes, I went to one for a year). Think back to American History, what did you do really? Did you copy down, word for word what the teacher said? Was those chores teaching you anything on how to think when it comes to reviewing history? No, it couldn't have, you were just fed words that you didn't even have time to analyze. How could that have taught you anything?
I think the same goes for Math. In Sweden you didn't learn the principles of Math in the first ten years (this is important, since Montessori Schools (atleast those who are run by sane people) are able to teach kids the actual concepts behind Math at a very young age). You had 100 similar problems to solve, and you had the solution on a paper, you just had to do that a 100 times or more and remember long enough to pass the upcoming test, then you could forget about it. This is BAD for problem solving, and I can only thank programming for not stripping of the pleasures of REAL problem solving. So naturally, when a child goes to do an IQ test, which is basically a test in problem solving, he/she wouldn't know how to do it, because he/she would have been used to not having to solve problems.
I think this would explain a lot, I think that IQ can be used to explain a lot of things if the world actually prepared you for them. Am I wrong or do I have a point? Anyway, that's my theory.
I once heard a Math professor say that children were able to use more methods for doing basic arithmetic when they first started school than when they'd gone to school for a year, or something of that nature.
My anecdotal experience correlates with this. First grade, with its required use of "bubble math," was very detrimental to my arithmetic abilities I'd acquired at home and during Montessori-style preschool.
So naturally, when a child goes to do an IQ test, which is basically a test in problem solving, he/she wouldn't know how to do it, because he/she would have been used to not having to solve problems.
Some IQ tests seem to test certain kinds of problem solving, like identifying patterns in a grid. Some few individuals may be able to identify the patterns without any prior experience, but I suspect most who answer such questions correctly do so from knowledge of a general class of problems, not intuition.
Purely subjectively, I feel the busy work in school made me stupider, whereas once I've been out and learning on my own, my mind feels better and sharper, and I'm more interested in learning.
My opinion is that two really big factors are desire and free will. People need desire in order to really excel, and they need to think for themselves to quickly see good solutions. Both of those are hard to capture on an iq test.
to help teachers recognize who would need special help in classes
As opposed to SATs, which were designed to determine who was most likely to succeed in post-secondary education (which again has relatively modest correlation with career success).
One of my psychology professors pointed out that income and IQ have a positive, but far from perfect correlation. He said we all could probably think of people who aren't the sharpest who've made great money. He also pointed out that those with high IQs often seek careers they think will be intellectually challenging, but not the most financially rewarding ... like becoming professors.
This also goes to show how much determination matters for a startup. Yes, being bright matters, but being determined matters more.
An uglier aspect of it is this: although people with 150+ IQs, contrary to the nerd stereotype, usually get along fine socially, they'll virtually never be selected as leaders, and always be outsiders. People usually aren't comfortable with a leader who is that smart.
We evolved in small tribal groups of 20 individuals per generation, so we look to the 90th-95th percentile (6'1, 120 IQ) for leadership, but extremes and "giants" frighten us. 99.5+ percentile is a threat-- possibly some other hominid that is going to eat us.
Bill Clinton is supposedly scary-smart, at least in terms of being quick-witted and able to multitask very effectively. It wouldn't surprise me at all if his IQ were over 150.
"It's an almost scary mind, that of a multitasking wizard who plays hearts while he talks on the phone with a head of state, who sits through a dense briefing on chemical weapons intently doing a crossword puzzle, only to take reporters' questions hours later and repeat whole sections of the briefing word for word."
Sure. The same goes for Barack Obama. And this is why they're facing one hell of a revolt from the morons, who will not accept such people as them for leaders.
There are legitimate reasons to disagree with both Clinton and Obama, but the real problem they face is that they make the dumbs feel bad about themselves. Said dumbs elect manipulative bastards who play to their complex, and said bastards launch ad hominem attacks and make it almost impossible for them to get any work done. This is what the Clinton sex witch-hunt and the modern-day Republican make-Obama-fail-at-all-costs efforts are really about: stickin' it too those smarty-pants lib'ruls.
It must be comfortable to think that those who disagree with you does so because they are intimidated by awesomely intelligent liberals such as your heroes (and perhaps yourself?). Has it ever occurred to you that they might feel the same way about you?
It must be comfortable to think that those who disagree with you does so because they are intimidated by awesomely intelligent liberals such as your heroes (and perhaps yourself?).
I don't think that, but I think anti-intellectualism is a major reason why Clinton and Obama both got mired in ad hominem attacks that made it difficult to get anything done.
That's different than claiming that people with IQs of 150+ "[will] virtually never be selected as leaders, and always be outsiders. People usually aren't comfortable with a leader who is that smart." Regardless of his accomplishments or the obstructions thrown up by Republicans, a _lot_ of people were comfortable having him as a leader.
Intelligence dedicated to solving abstract or impersonal problems is worthless for a leader. Therefore, the kind of intellectual talents that show up on an IQ test are not very useful. Someone who takes a problem-solving approach to the world will not make a good leader. Someone who takes a problem-solving approach to his parents, friends, classmates, and so forth will do well.
That's because leadership consists in large part of stating and forging a group consensus, perhaps not in that order. A leader rarely suggests a course of action that doesn't immediately make sense to other people. If education and elucidation is required, he does that beforehand. A leader doesn't bother with courses of action that his followers aren't already one little nudge away from accepting, and then he provides that nudge. For this reason, it's best for a leader not to devote too much intelligence to actually solving problems -- he will just come up with useless and distracting ideas. A leader with a lot of credibility can get people to accept a new course of action solely on his own credibility, but if it doesn't work out, he loses a lot of credibility. He mostly needs to stick to courses of action that are credited to other people or which just feel right to his followers.
Leading by surpassing excellence is an invention of propaganda. Only after you already have a lot of power and loyalty can you start manufacturing such a myth.
That's a leader in the popular sense. But if being such a leader means he can't think deeply, then he'll have to rely on the intellectuals to provide him with the deep ideas he needs to lead.
Fair point. The creative visionaries are the people who should be leaders in an ideal or even morally acceptable society, but almost never the people who have the capability to grab power.
By and large, I am a strong believer in rule by the smart, although culture is a lot more important than IQ. Probably 20-30% of those in the ruling class have a high enough IQ (125+) to be there but less than 1% have sufficient culture. Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney come to mind as examples. They're so uncultured they probably eat steak with their fingers; that such louts could rise to such high levels of influence is a serious problem. And our society is such an ugly mess because people like them (uncultured people, with ugly minds) rise to power and remake the world in their image.
I think it's also obvious that most business executives are selected for people-pleasing and crude optimizations (next-quarter profits) rather than vision, creativity, and humanity.
The traditional two-tier managerial structure (although excruciatingly flawed and less-than-useless in practice) had the right idea. At one degree above the average (110-125) you have the managers, whom the line workers look to for leadership, but who do not alienate them with their intelligence. At two degrees up (125-145) you have the executives, who can lead and mentor the managers, and whose closer connection to "the metal" gives them a strong voice in the decision-making. At 3 and more degrees, you have strategists and academics who present the information and advise the decisions. However, modern corporate society doesn't work this way; the executives are often mediocrities, the "advisor" class isn't really listened-to, and most of what goes on in academia is self-referential bullshit.
"Rule by the smart" is not flawless, of course. Bigger problems than a lack of intelligence in our ruling class are the lack of integrity, vision, and compassion... which are also much harder to measure-- although all of these correlate are correlated much more strongly with IQ than with "leadership" as measured by our current selection process. Therefore, an "IQ meritocracy" would be an improvement. Between a set of 140+ IQers (among whom there would be some who are unfit to lead) and the people running the show now, I'd bet on the first class without hesitation.
After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of people like this. He may not be the largest "producer" or whatever your personal metric for being successful is, but even solving a small problem that you or I won't ever be able to will have a unique, lasting, permanent effect on the world.
I tend to agree. The fact that your IQ metric can be swayed by lack of sleep, bad experience in the day of test, etc. make it an inaccurate way to measure intelligence precisely.
"... there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes."
Carl Friedrich Gauss. General life "performance" at popularity and piling up money may (may) top out at 120, but there are some jobs where performance means being able to see through a brick wall of symbols like it is a window pane.
Any person with an IQ of 120 can learn and reproduce Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes, especially because most educated people have familiarity with the most elementary number theory concepts (divisibility, primality).
Less than 1/10,000 of people with IQ > 120 could have come up with it at that time, keeping in mind that the only language one had to express numbers was geometry-- no algebra or number theory existed as we think of them today. Of course, whether this rare ingenuity shows up on an IQ test is an open question.
The same holds for something like Godel's theorem. I'm starting to understand it-- he's encoding a Lisp in number theory-- but there's no way I could have come up with it in 1931.
After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes.
I know you don't mean it this way, but this comes off as very smug. There are lots of reasons why most very-high-IQ people (170+) seem to underperform their potential-- some good, some bad-- but they're a lot more complex than a lack of emotional maturity and innate social acumen.
First of all, I think that people with high IQs tend to have a stronger tendency toward mental illnesses and related patterns such as rumination, hypersensitivity to rejection, and low self-confidence. I think many of the underperformers have what might be considered subclinical mental illness (but is more accurately described as the normal exaggerated sensitivity of creative people and adolescents).
So, they're more "fragile" off the bat, and this is probably neurological in basis. We can provide more support as a society, but there are obvious limits regarding what can be done here.
Second, society is generally bad at recognizing talent and connecting it with the resources that could be used to actualize it. Those resources tend to go to people-pleasers and horse-traders rather than to those who can make the most use of them (who are almost always viewed with suspicion). This is true as much in academia as anywhere else.
Combine the general stupidity of society and the hypersensitivity of the sharpest intellects, and you have a lot of very smart people who get discouraged and bitter, then lose all desire to play.
First of all, I think that people with high IQs tend to have a stronger tendency toward mental illnesses and related patterns such as rumination, hypersensitivity to rejection, and low self-confidence.
Is that a belief support by anecdote, or have you seen some study supporting it?
Whether they bear on IQ itself is an open question, but the fundamental concept is that certain mental habits that produce depression also produce focused thinking (which is a necessity for people who want to achieve at high levels).
Maybe one explanation is that people who can focus very well on a problem can see it best and solve it best, thus have high IQs. Since their minds focus so well, it is hard for them to lose focus and loosen up, essential for socializing. Thus, people treat them as weird, they feel rejected, and grow bitter.
Very likely. The intense, problem-solving focus doesn't hold well in social interaction.
A common social quirk of smart people, when they're young-- say 5-10, is to come out with a really good retort 5 seconds after it was appropriate and when it's no longer funny (because it requires a conversational "rewind"). This is because they've put a lot of energy and focus into saying the "right" (funny, most socially beneficial) thing instead of going with the flow.
Your link doesn't offer any sort of evidence against Gladwell's contention (which isn't original to Gladwell, and which on the basis of negligible evidence I suspect is an oversimplification but not far from the truth).
In fact, arguably it offers a little evidence against what Gladwell says. If IQ above ~120 makes no difference to performance, and if "career" and "performance" are close enough to make it worth while citing this thing at all, then you ought to see no little difference between {occupations substantially found among people with IQ ~120} and {occuptations substantially found among people with IQ ~130}. Now, look down the 120 and 130 lines of that plot, and notice that you see quite different things in the two instances. (The foregoing is a bit of a simplification, but it'll do. Anyway, I see no way to read the graph as providing evidence that IQ 120 is better than IQ 110, but IQ 130 isn't better than IQ 120, in terms of likely success/performance.)
The estimate that the IQ threshold for adult eminence is about IQ 120 appears to come from Arthur Jensen. It has been repeated by Hans Eysenck and is most frequently written about by Dean Keith Simonton, who cites a specialized study on exactly that issue in one of his latest books.
Locally, I'm in an ongoing discussion, partly in person and partly by email, with Thomas Bouchard on this point. I think the additional help of an IQ score above 120 is negligible compared to other factors that are known to be important for adult eminence.
Your graph only shows that IQ matters up to about 120. I agree that Gladwell wildly exaggerates his case, but your statistics don't contradict it at all.
Malcolm is certainly not the first person to put that idea out there, and I think there's some credence to it. I read something else recently (based on a Stanford study) that said that the greatest predictor of success wasn't IQ, but rather self discipline: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...
Certainly someone with a high IQ AND self discipline could go farther than someone with just one or the other, but IQ by itself is not a meaningful gauge of someone's potential.
I would be very interested in reading comments elaborating on this stance by people that agree with it, since my view is a bit different.
In the interest of human progress, I would prefer that people with great ability are encouraged by society and their peers (which I assume the great minds at HN are likely to be among). I mean this in terms of what I see should be encouraged and done so through morals and not laws (e.g. in no way promote the violation of a person's freedom or liberty).
Having a high IQ can be as much of a curse as it is a blessing. Sometimes the pressure is too much and you want to try and stop thinking and just observe.
I have quite a high IQ. When I was starting school, they though I had a learning disability. My parents sent me to be tested . Apparently I was one of the smartest kids that the tester had seen, but I was a bit disorganized and tended to overfocus (which would be diagnosed as mild ADHD these days ... when everyone has to have a frigging disorder). I don't know how high the score was, or how many kids he had tested, or whether all the other kids were genuinely low IQ ... who care about this stuff anyway?
My parents were smart enough to not tell me (until I was halfway through uni), because they knew I wasn't mature enough to know that the smartest thing you can do (especially when you are learning) is giving other people's intelligence the benefit of the doubt and try to learn from them.
--I would prefer that people with great ability are encouraged by society and their peers
While in concept it is a great idea, the realities are usually much harder for the exceptional gifted. I have a really good friend with aspergers syndrome who has as slightly higher IQ (190's) than mine. He is very well liked but his perception of reality is quite distorted due to his hindrance, unfortunately high IQ is many times coupled with some other form of mental or physical impairment, there are a lot of theories as to why this is, but sufficient to say not all of them are a joy. My point being these impairments are usually the target of ridicule at formative points in an intelligent persons life and some times bitters them from the pursuit of their potential and in extreme cases like my friend bitters them from helping better mankind at all.
Being the smartest man in world(or at least) can be a big burden. Can you imagine that? Every body expecting you too be perfect; every little sentence you make analyzed; everybody trying to see how smart you really are; everybody trying to prove that they are smarter than you; everybody criticizing that you haven't contributed more. Being the smarter man in the world was given to you; you didn't ask for it. Besides, there are plenty of things that are important, and intelligence should be also about living a full filling life.
Quit trying to suck up to the people on here. They are not talented people. This would be obvious to you if you had any talent at all. These people are mostly 30-some career software engineers who fantasize about becoming entrepreneurs and like thinking of themselves as hackers even though they lack the skills to justify that term. There's some good domain technical knowledge here, but very little actual intelligence. Just read any math links (everybody upvotes to look good, but nobody comments because they don't really understand - or they write really dumb comments).
If you can read Outliers and not understand the horrible science and generalizations behind it then you are an idiot. 120 IQ?? Are you kidding me? Maybe it makes you feel better because you only have a 120 IQ, but that precludes you from achieving anything meaningful in math and science. High IQ does not mean you will be a high achiever, but only those with exception IQ's are able to achieve in certain fields.
This is the problem with America. This is why America will lose to China in the next decades. We are trained to feel better about ourselves be devaluing those with superior intellect and ability.
Gleick's bio actually puts it at 125. There are a couple reasons to not care about this factoid:
- Feynman was younger than 15 when he took it, and very near this factoid in Gleick's bio, he recounts Feynman asking about very basic algebra (2^x=4) and wondering why anything found it hard
- the IQ is mentioned immediately before the section on 'grammar school', or middle school, implying that the 'school IQ test' was done well before he entered high school, putting him at much younger than 15. (15 is important because Feynman had mastered calculus by age 15, Gleick says, so he wouldn't be asking his father why algebra is useful at age >15.)
- Given that Feynman was born in 1918, this implies the IQ test was done around 1930 or earlier. Given that it was done by the New York City school district, this implies also that it was one of the 'ratio' based IQ tests - utterly outdated and incorrect by modern standards.
- Finally, it's well known that IQ tests are very unreliable in childhood; kids can easily bounce around compared to their stable adult scores.
So, it was a bad test, which even under ideal circumstances is unreliable & prone to error, and administered in a mass fashion and likely not by a genuine psychometrician.
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data, and this isn't even a very good anecdote. (I charitably assume that Feynman isn't joking here about the score; Gleick gives no source.)
That only means IQ tests are utter bullcrap. I'm talking about real intelligence. Feynman was an extremely gifted mathematician from a very early age. He won lots of math awards and was even a Putnam Fellow. Those are far more legitimate tests of his intelligence than whatever garbage exam produced his 127. It's good you take a single example and try to generalize without looking at any other facts. Sure, most people with 120 IQs can win Putnam or go on to become great physicists.
If you are going to argue something while insulting the intelligence of the community you are trying to convince, at least make sure you have a clear and consistent argument to make. You're currently contradicting yourself, by first claiming
[..] only those with exception IQ's are able to achieve in certain fields
while you now claim
IQ tests are utter bullcrap
If you confuse the terms intelligence and IQ, any arguments concerning the difference become very unconvincing.
I don't think there's an IQ test out there that can reliably distinguish 1M:1 ("175") intelligence from 1000:1 ("147"), but it definitely exists and, in some pursuits, it matters. I know because I'm in the 1-10k:1 range and I know some 1M:1 people (IMO gold medalists, Putnam fellows) and, although they aren't so different as to live in a separate world, they're clearly smarter.
This just shows that IQ tests are garbage. Top level math contests are a much better indicator of your intelligence. I don't know what tests you're talking about because USAMO and Putnam don't have internationals.
And what mathematicians are you talking about? Take time to look them up because I can think of no examples of great mathematicians being "bad at proofs". That would mean they were bad at logic, which would mean they were bad at math. Being more famous for a conjecture doesn't mean you were bad at proofs. To even produce those conjecture requires deep understanding of the math leading to it. I can almost guarantee that there are no great mathematicians who would zero Putnam. I don't even zero Putnam, and there are plenty of people way better than me who still have no chance of becoming a great mathematician.
Do you realize how brilliant a mathematician has to be for you to even ever know his name?
International students can take Putnam if they go to school in the US, no? I could be wrong on this.
And what mathematicians are you talking about? I retract that: "sucked at proofs" is too strong a statement. There was a time when the same degree of rigor wasn't expected, so a lot of great mathematicians never or rarely wrote proofs. An example would be Ramanujan, who contributed immensely to mathematics and had amazing intuition, but who rarely wrote proofs and, when he did, Hardy usually had to fill in the holes.
On the other hand, had Ramanujan desired or needed to learn how to write rigorous proofs, there's no doubt that he would have been able to do so.
As for Putnam as a "better indicator" of intelligence than IQ tests, I'd agree, but it still only measures one kind of intelligence. The problem with IQ tests is that they aren't accurate in the upper ranges (140+) because that's not what they're designed for.
First of all, you can study for those (although virtually all of us hit a ceiling because those problems are very hard). I used to study for those tests (although technically not IMO since I never qualified for it) and did reasonably well, although my IQ is "only" about 150. If these tests were perfect IQ tests, I shouldn't have even placed in the top thousand... since there are 400-4000 Americans smarter than me per year, plus the international students. (However, my "math IQ" if such a thing could be measured would probably be around 165-170, and "verbal IQ" around 135-140.)
Also, there are a couple of famous mathematicians (names don't come to mind) who are notorious for sucking at proofs. Their conjectures were very good and almost always right, but they relied on future mathematicians to prove their work (details, details). They would likely zero the Putnam.
LOL. I love this example. An absolute genius looks at his own work and thought process to conclude that one does not need to be a 'genius' in order to succeed in math. It's difficult for someone that brilliant to understand that while the things he does may seem ordinary, they are far beyond the reach of the vast majority of human beings.
And he's trying to convince the people who were only Putnam honorable mentions or whatever not to give up on math. This has nothing to do with people with a 120 IQ (I know IQ is a BS measure, but when people say 120 IQ, they mean someone who is above-average, but modestly so).
I wonder what Terry Tao's definition of genius is. Would he consider himself a genius? Everybody else would. But he might not.
It's difficult for someone that brilliant to understand that while the things he does may seem ordinary, they are far beyond the reach of the vast majority of human beings.
Right, so on the hand, he's brilliant and understand both things that are ordinary and things that are extraordinary, but when it comes to somewhat softer knowledge, suddenly his genius is a reason for him to not understand something. Luckily we have you to explain that to him and us...</below the waist, but you are really, really asking for it>
Tao is a genius that teaches other people how to do math and we may well assume that he understands what it requires. He has probably taught dozen of students and according to him, they could be people that score 120 on an IQ test and yet succeed at math.
Finally, if only geniuses could succeed at math, most Ph.D. students would not count as successful, despite advancing the science. You're redefining 'success' to suit your needs and you're doing the same thing with other facts: bending their ambiguity to support your thesis, instead of basing your thesis on a single interpretation of the facts.
If you want to make yourself feel better go and pass Mensa entry test. As a programmer you are already highly advantaged by knowing such concepts as xor an other bitwise operations and knowing how to animate a moving point (erase it and draw it again some distance away in each frame). There are puzzles based on these concepts.
I took that test once and had all answers correct, which means I have IQ at least 156 (Binet scale) but might be much higher since I still had almost 30 minutes left.
I think the Mensa tests are made artificially easy, since they want people to pay trhem money.
It's quite easy for people to improve their IQ scores by practisingf the questions. I once took an IQ test from a book (I think it was by Eysenck) and then did another test from the same book a few days later. On the second test I scored 27 points higher, so by definition my IQ was 27 points higher; I doubt if I was any cleverer in any meaningful way.
I suspect that part of the Flynn effect (that IQ scores have been increasing over time) is due to people being more familiar with those sorts of puzzles.
Having said all that, I suspect that being able to learn from experience (and therefore get higher scores on similar tests) is a pretty large factor in intelligence.
Assuming that the IQ test that Kim took was the kind that uses 16 points per standard deviation (some, IIRC, use 15), that puts him almost seven standard deviations above the mean. It seems to me that once you get above five standard deviations (i.e., the top 99.9999% of the population), tests of “general intelligence” aren’t really measuring anything more than the ability to max out whatever subtests that particular test author chose to include.
Is there any evidence to verify the claims in that article aside from his IQ? This is all very suspicious looking, and I couldn't find anything about the timing of the Phd he got or that he worked for NASA.
This story is kind of sad. You'd think he would stick with Physics and help advance the species by building an engine to travel to the stars or solving the unified field theory. But instead he went into the most earth-bound profession imaginable.
It makes one think that innovation is less about raw IQ and more about curiosity and passion.
I think that's rather selfish. He's squandering his talents and the rest of humanity is worse-off because of it. There are a lot of problems in the world and they're not going to solve themselves. I think exceptional people have a duty to use their talents to aid humanity.
I don't mean that everyone with an IQ >120 should drop what they're doing an join OXFAM. The greatest help is usually done through research. Also, people aren't robots with infinite motivation. They have to be interested in their work to perform well. That said, he can probably find something he's interested in that also benefits others.
I think that's an unbelievable remark! Nobody asks in advance to be born intelligent. Can you think of any other trait one could be born with which you would say bestows someone with a duty to lead their life in a certain way? I sure can't.
What's next? Millions upon millions of people have obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in field X, and gone on to a career in field Y. Well, aren't they squandering all their hard-earned experience and knowledge in X? Were they duty-bound to pursue X instead? What's the difference?
I also think it's absolutely absurd to say someone's squandering their talents and not "aiding humanity" when they have a Ph.D. in physics, they're a civil engineer, and they've published ninety academic papers.
I guess duty was a poor word choice. Would you agree with this line of reasoning?: The world would be a better place if the most intelligent people worked to solve problems that cause the most harm to humanity. If an exceptionally intelligent person doesn't work on these problems, more people will die and/or suffer. This is bad, so exceptionally intelligent people should work on these problems even if they find more personal satisfaction in less important problems.
That's basically what I meant by "duty." Now to address the specific points in your post:
Nobody asks in advance to be born intelligent.
Correct. Currently life is very very unfair. Nobody asks to be born into poverty and ignorance either.
Can you think of any other trait one could be born with which you would say bestows someone with a duty to lead their life in a certain way?
These aren't genetic traits but they can be inherited: Wealth. Power, such as in a monarchy.
...aren't they squandering all their hard-earned experience and knowledge in X?
There are a couple of differences in your example. First, not all degrees are equally useful. A Ph.D. in Russian literature isn't going to be very useful in curing disease or engineering hardier crops. Second, education can't fully substitute for fluid intelligence.
I also think it's absolutely absurd to say someone's squandering their talents and not "aiding humanity" when they have a Ph.D. in physics, they're a civil engineer, and they've published ninety academic papers.
Compared to most people, yes, he has helped a lot. But if this guy really is the smartest person on the earth, he is wasting his potential. Bad things are happening -bad things will happen- that wouldn't have happened if he worked in biotech or physics or cognitive neuroscience.
Here's a silly but analogous situation: If Superman was a social worker, wouldn't you be frustrated that he wasn't doing superhero stuff? Sure, social worker Superman has helped more than most individuals, but he could do so much more.
The fact is that we all aren't born equal, but we all hurt; we get sick; we die. It's completely unfair. We need to fix it. The more great minds we have devoted to these problems, the sooner they'll be in the history books instead of the nightly news.
I would agree with your first paragraph if we were all strictly rational machines. But I think that the key to long-term progress and success is to give people the greatest degree of freedom possible, combined with incentives (i.e. salaries, grants, awards) toward things that help society. When you start stigmatizing or punishing people for choices that aren't even bad -- they just aren't "good enough" -- then there's no way that won't backfire and just instigate (rightful) resentment and anger.
I really would not be frustrated that Superman was not doing superhero stuff. It's very hard to herd someone smart or capable into doing something they don't genuinely want to do, and I doubt it's usually productive in the end.
I have to admit, I take this personally, because I may not be Superman, but I sit around writing little stories that nobody but me will ever read, reading books that do little practical good but to fill me with a sense of beauty and contentment; I shoot some pool, play some chess, and I work on software that exists primarily to satisfy my curiousity or to make me money. Most of it doesn't help anyone else very much, and I like it that way. I think I have the right to do whatever I please, as long as I take care of myself and my friends without doing harm to other folks on the planet. When a man comes up to me, as has happened, and talks about how I have a duty to make an impact on the world, I want to kick that man.
Maybe his gigantic IQ helped him to see the limits of his potential contribution to Physics. Related, innovative Civil Engineering is extremely important in densely urban societies like Korea.
I don't think it's sad at all; I find it kind of comforting. This dude's living the life he wants to lead. Good on him for making a decision that was at odds with the expectations everyone seemed to be layering on him.
The greatest physicists have been disgusted by society's use of their work. Maybe a modern genius would decide that a small amount of social change would be better than a vast amount of scientific.
"While I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president."
That scene couldn't have done a better job describing our last 10 years in the middle east if it had been written after it happened.
Your "programmer value quotient" is definitely not IQ. Knowledge and experience acts as IQ multiplier when tackling known class of problems.
I think there is a number of 1.2x programmers that you would prefer to hire instead of single 2.1x programmer. For all activities there's a number like that and it's pretty low.
Depends on the task. There are some tasks any number of lesser programmers won't be able to complete. There are conceptual levels to programming that come into play on certain tasks. Huge numbers of programmers that don't understand those concepts won't be able to solve the problems.
Science does not rely on geniuses and programming also shouldn't. There is simply too much to do to wait for genius to do it. If your problem is too hard you should rephrase it, break it into easier parts, limit domain to what is necessary and give up some constraints. That's what people do in science and that's what worked for humanity so far.
I'm not sure that works when it comes to major breakthroughs. I'm hardly an expert, but I'm not sure Einstien's work, for instance, could be replicated by a 100 physicists 'breaking it into easier parts.
Not mention you're contradicting Heinlein, and we all know that's never good.
Ever heard of Lorentz transformation? As for SR Lorentz gathered all the pieces together. Einstein "just" looked at them from different angle and what he saw was shocking.
Apart from that Eintein was not the most intelligent man that ever lived. He was smart enough man at the right point in history. Genius, but not thanks to his capacity but to his achievements.
I'm not sure what you mean by "contradicting Heinlein". The Starship Troopers Heinlein? ;-)
Maybe he is smart enough to have decided that a star drive or unifield field theory are not possible and decided to do something else that interests him more.
He was writing poems and showing an aptitude for languages at a very early age -- I wonder why as a child he was pushed into only doing physics rather than a wide variety of studies? We seem to believe that since physics is the most difficult subject to master, that means the most intelligent people have to do physics. That is pretty poor reasoning; I would think people with higher IQs may be better off as polymaths with a wide exposure to arts AND the sciences (and engineering).
Goethe, for example, had a very high IQ and even though he wrote about science, his greatest contribution to humanity was his literature.
What do you mean, he was "pushed into only doing physics?" Are you reading another source? In the Wikipedia article, it doesn't imply that he was pushed, and it doesn't imply that he gave up other pursuits.
Neither has a validated IQ score. NO ONE with an IQ score reported to be above 160 has a validated IQ score. IQ test scores in that range have never been properly validated, on any IQ test of any era.
It is well known that reliability of IQ tests is at its worst at the highest level of IQ scores. The author of the Stanford-Binet form L-M (the test that Marilyn vos Savant, among others, took to get a sky-high unvalidated score) was among the first to say so:
"The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3
"From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds." (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)
To validate an IQ test (a test that purports to estimate "general intelligence"), one must first reach a consensus among test designers about some sign of intelligence that is detectable outside the testing room. Over the years, psychologists have proposed various behavioral characteristics of human beings as signs that those human beings are "intelligent," with entering challenging, high-income occupations that require a lot of higher schooling being one criterion proposed for adult IQ tests, and being precocious in school and having good grades and good teacher ratings being one criterion that is proposed for child IQ tests.
One finds a sample of persons to take a new brand of test in its norming administration, and rates those persons by external criteria of "intelligence," weighting those criteria by consensus, and then checks the rank-order correlation between the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the IQ test and the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the validation criteria. There will NEVER be a perfect ("1.0") correlation between the test and the validation criterion, just as there is never a perfect correlation between IQ scores on one occasion and IQ scores on another occasion on the same brand of IQ test by the same group of test-takers.
There is enough play in the joints in both IQ test scoring (whatever the brand of test) and ranking people by other validation criteria (whatever they are), that strictly speaking one can't say that there is any all-time, universally significant ranking of human beings by intelligence. But a close-enough-for-government-work validation study would show an IQ test having correlations above .80, and perhaps even above .90, in comparison with previous brands of IQ tests, or in comparison with subsets of its own item content, or in comparison with some well regarded external validation criterion.
For reasons mentioned above, there is especially little reliability, and hence especially little validity, for IQ scores far above the population mean, and thus it's very hard to devise a validation criterion that would sort, say, members of Mensa
into their "true" rank order by IQ, not to mention that IQ scores for the same individual can and do change over the course of life.
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.
P.S. As Stephen Hawking says about IQ:
"Q: What is your I.Q.?
"A: I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."
Like others, I think it's sad that both of these people are not contributing more and I find their trajectories to be a waste. Maybe that's my jealousy speaking. But I know if I was suddenly gifted with the ease of learning and grasping of concepts both of them have, I'd do a lot with that.
Is it possible that the higher the IQ is at birth the faster the brain degenerates? Not just from a built-in process but also from stress due to lack of social acceptance. This algernon process could imply that by 25, a physics PhD at 16 can only manage civil engineering.
Even someone supremely intelligent seems to be bound by human needs of social approval. I wonder what his brain looks like. I wonder if he has superior rates of motor skill acquisition.
I would doubt it. Physical coordination seems to be inversely correlated with signs of intellectual achievement, such as advanced degrees etc. People who live in their head seem awkward in their bodies.
You're applying your own regional knowledge of English to someone else's. I'm English and I've worked as a writer and I've done copy-editing, and that 'but' has every right to be there, even if it hurts the flow of the sentence. For anyone growing up in an English speaking country we all know that a pause readily means 'but', especially if it was a longer pause.
As it's a translation of something he said, the issue here is the integrity of the translator not of the man himself. A good translator would have dropped the but, because he likely never used it when he spoke in Korean.
I've spent a lot of time in France, and even though I'm nowhere near fluent I still manage to speak the slang. By spending time in the country and amongst the people I learnt all the social norms for speaking that I never learnt in a high school class. There's a vast difference in usage between Bonsoir and Bonne nuit, the latter is literally used exclusively in the meaning "goodnight, I won't see you again today". Similarly I've seen many a confused tourist when they were greeted with Salut "bye" as a greeting.
Again from several vacations in Spain and the Spanish islands, I rarely ever heard Gracias "Thank you", they all use Graci "thanks", again despite everything I was taught of Spanish it wasn't right to how people actually speak.
There's a big difference between being fluent in a language, and being fluent in a dialect. Dialects typically teach us how to use English improperly, mainly because 90% of our interactions are informal. However almost every English speaking person would remove their dialect in the instance if they were brought in front of a world leader. I know for people receiving Knighthoods from the queen they have to instruct people on how to pronounce "ma'am" (pronounced mam) as they try to pronounce it 'properly' and in doing so pronounce it wrong, which apparently bugs the Queen herself as she's been noted for correcting people on it too.
I think that in the future we'll come to realize that IQ is actually a silly metric and that this "understanding" is where it's at. Point of view (understanding) doesn't give you more intelligence (Alan Kay's proverbial 80 IQ points), but instead intelligence can help you to gain understanding.