Live data from Hacker News

210 IQ Is Not Enough

taylor.town

121–130 of 284 posts

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#121

> According to Yoo, by the time he was 1, her son learned both the Korean alphabet and 1,000 Chinese characters by studying the Thousand Character Classic, a sixth-century Chinese poem.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong Is that true? How is that even possible? Like, biologically.

Age reckoning in South Korea (and other east Asian countries) is quite different than what you might expect. Age 1 in this context could be up to 3; if year 1 is your birth date and you age up at the new year, you could be "2 years old" while being alive for only 3 days. It could also work the other way around if they follow one of the other methods. Pretty interesting and not yet fully standardized! https://en.wikip…

Thanks, I'm gonna start using East Asian age reckoning to indicate how many professional years of experience I have.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#122
I never get tired of telling this story about high IQs. One of my employees was in Mensa. Brilliant guy, incredibly humble, with Windows Internals knowledge so deep Microsoft acquired a company where we developed an entire product that big companies thought was impossible. I'm convinced he joined Mensa mostly as a hobby, like some people do crossword puzzles, he took IQ tests.

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.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#123
Intellectual horsepower is just one element. If you're trying to build the world's fastest car, you can't just grab the world's most powerful engine and call it a day. If you can harness it, sure – it could provide an edge. But there are a lot of other elements that come into play.

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.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#124
post #86

> According to Yoo, by the time he was 1, her son learned both the Korean alphabet and 1,000 Chinese characters by studying the Thousand Character Classic, a sixth-century Chinese poem.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong Is that true? How is that even possible? Like, biologically.

Not sure it is, so I assume a lot of stretching of the truth is involved. Most twelve month olds struggle to support their head, are just learning to shape their mouths to form syllables, and have only had eyes capable of resolving letters on a page for a few months. IQ won’t make blurry images sharp, or your neck muscles stronger.

If a 12 month old can’t support its head that’s a big problem. That’s a 4-6 month milestone. 12 months is starting to walk.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#125

A really good litmus test of individual perspective and maturity, here. Already seeing comments nitpick specific arguments or points, which is itself the trap to shine a light on those individuals more obsessed with arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success, rather than self-reflecting on said definition and asking whether or not this definition fits who they are or want to be as a person, o…

> arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success

You say 'external' meausures, but these do manifest as internal identities - all of which collectively form your social identity: https://srid.ca/identity/social

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#126

When I was at Google a long time ago, the hiring criteria were simple: Smart, and gets things done. 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.

To be clear, if the quality and quantity of output of the hard worker exceeds someone who works hard and is smart about it, smart and hard would be preferable?

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#127
From TFA:

> 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.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#128
post #66
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because it's impossible for someone who says that stuff to be smart, I'm saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because people who say that stuff tend to also lie about their IQ.

Well, it is mathematically impossible. Traditional IQ tests have a mean/median of 100, and follow a normal distribution with standard-deviation of 15 points. So 270 would be 11 standard deviations above normal so 1 in 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people.

So it is possible, and you just calculated the probability of that happening.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#129
post #57

See also: "Major IQ differences in identical twins linked to schooling, challenging decades of research" [1] [2] 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.scienc…

There isn't an idea that "IQ is some innate fixed quality". There are two separate actual ideas being conflated there: that intelligence is an innate fixed quality (which is more or less definitional ), and that IQ accurately measures intelligence (it doesn't, and we already knew that, but it's the best we have).

> There isn't an idea that "IQ is some innate fixed quality"

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).

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#130

What is the biggest problem: that smart people achieve too little, or that dumb people achieve too much?

If they're dumb and achieve a lot... are they really dumb? Should intelligence be correlated with success?
Post reply on HN