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Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#151

Post by nnq »

tigershark wrote: post #123
MR4D wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a choice between having a reputation as being very smart or having a reputation as very hard working, I’d choose the latter. 25 years in the working world have utterly convinced me that being hard working is a much higher contribution to civilization than being super smart.

I don't think so. A single super smart person has a far far bigger impact on society than billions of hard working people. Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Seriously, I never thought that I would read something like this on HN...

> Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people.

Yeah, except that the guy who "was smart enough to think about agriculture but not hard working enough to practically invent it" didn't help much towards moving away from hunting to something better. Probably people like him only got others killed in various direct or indirect ways. Also, "recruiting others to implement your ideas" is also really hard work: you're not going to convince others to do what you thought with just a few smart sounding remarks, and if they'd be smart enough to understand you arguments and explanations, they would have invented the new thing themselves.

So being witty out of the question, argumenting and explaining out of the question, the smart guy who invented agriculture probably had to work his ass off until he proved others he can do at least as well as by spending the same amount of time hunting!

Ergo our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the hard working people! (And yeah, if enough people work hard, some of them would also happen to be smart since IQ is mostly randomly distributed.) Seriously, get your shit together and work your ass off if you want your smarts to have a non-negative impact on anything (including on yourself).

EDIT+: Also, you picked a very ironically unfortunate example: in general, hunting can actually require much higher intelligence than doing basic agriculture in many cases (although inventing agriculture from scratch is a different thing).

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#152

Post by DoreenMichele »

croon wrote: post #145
DoreenMichele wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never applied to Mensa. A cousin of mine (that I barely knew) was in it. He encouraged me to apply on the theory that they had a small scholarship that would help me return to college. He felt my SAT scores would qualify me. I have seen some discussions on the internet that fit with your hypothesis that many people join Mensa to have their smarts validated. There are other ways to validate that, like getting additi…

While I agree on your overall point that you should be using your mind for something productive rather than showing off, I have to note that getting degrees has nothing (edit: very little) to do with IQ. IQ might help you understand a subject better, but being focused, studying, planning, and having the motivation is what gets you degrees.

I am medically handicapped and was also suicidal throughout high school. I had better test scores in high school than grades. I missed a lot of school and often failed to do homework.

In most cases, past grades are a better predictor of future grades than test scores. But college was physically easier for me because I had more control over my schedule and was thus better able to accommodate my handicap. So my grades went up substantially, more in line with my high test scores.

My health issues have long been a barrier to achievement. So this always gives me pause when trying to judge ability of other people. Maybe their poor performance says more about racism, sexism, an abusive childhood etc etc than it does about supposed innate ability. Maybe their good performance says more about getting social support, being born into the right family, etc than it says about innate ability.

But I will note that the comment you replied to said nothing about IQ. I only spoke of a need for validation and that's it. I was quite careful to not suggest it had anything to do with intelligence or competence.

I have spent quite a lot of my life failing to have a real career, failing to get taken seriously and failing to make much in the way of money. So there are ways in which I hunger for validation, yet Mensa does not appeal to me. I see it as mostly massaging one's ego and I would rather find actual solutions to my problems instead. Getting a serious career and adequate income etc will take my pain away. Validation from Mensa would be sort of like a painkiller, not a means to heal what ails my psyche.

I am not interested in remaining a loser but getting adorned with some sort of phony crown implying that I am totes not a loser, really. Instead, I want to stop losing at life, even if no one else notices.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#153

Post by thaumasiotes »

gleb wrote: post #127
thaumasiotes wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really no need; that's exactly what you would expect to see in a thresholded population ("elite players").

Please elaborate

On the assumption that IQ and "chess skills" both contribute to "chess performance", then everyone achieving a threshold of "chess performance", such as being an "elite player", has been selected to have at least a certain sum of "IQ + chess skills".

This means that, given high IQ, it's not necessary to have good chess skills to be in the elite group, whereas given low IQ, it is necessary to have good chess skills to be in the elite group. This will establish a negative correlation between "chess skills" and IQ within the elite group even though they are positively correlated overall.

Similarly, SAT math and verbal scores tend to be negatively correlated within the student population of any particular university, because universities will reject applicants whose total scores are low, despite the fact that the math and verbal scores are very strongly positively correlated in the larger population.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#154

Post by thaumasiotes »

lgas wrote: post #131
thaumasiotes wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really no need; that's exactly what you would expect to see in a thresholded population ("elite players").

Maybe I'm just not that bright but I would expect to see a positive correlation between IQ and exceptional chess ability.

There is a positive correlation between IQ and chess ability. That does not imply that there should be a positive correlation between IQ and chess ability in a group that has been selected for strong performance in chess.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#155

Post by walshemj »

dqpb wrote: post #36

People who do well on standardized tests of intelligence—IQ tests—tend to be more successful in the classroom and the workplace. Where is everyone taking these IQ tests? In my entire life I've never come across one in the wild, just SAT, GRE, etc.

As a dyslexic I have taken a couple all totally cold

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#157

Post by DoreenMichele »

lucio wrote: post #140
DoreenMichele wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that most IQ tests do not go all that high. It is quite challenging to get an accurate IQ score above a certain range. It requires not only the right assessment tools -- ie tests -- but a trained professional administering it. Gifted kids mess with test administrators all the time, sometimes intentionally so. (Plus, to get a super high score, you need to test the child by about age 7. After that age, w…

>Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge Raven Progressive Matrices, I believe the most used IQ test today is not influenced by cultural knowledge. IQ has an amazingly high correlation with academic success and work success, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM it is worthwhile

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matric...

Wikipedia says that people with autism and asperger's outperform other people on Raven's tests. Most people view ASD individuals as seriously cognitively impaired and they are often seen as low IQ, so I have trouble with your assertion. It suggests that people the world sees as highly impaired whose lives typically are harder than average are smarter than the rest of us. This completely flies in the face of every definition I have ever seen for IQ as a general predictor of competence.

Wikipedia also says the answers for Raven's matrices have been leaked, making them useless as an assessment tool.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#158

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

delhanty wrote: post #141

The mental bit is possibly related to Joel Spolsky's {smart, not-smart} X {gets things done, doesn't} analysis [1] >People who are Smart but don’t Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. ... Also, the ADHD thing of course. Definitely I'd like to get more done, and for my mind and body to hurt less, even if it costs me some IQ poin…

I spend most of my time indoors and recently started forcing myself to go out during the day and staying directly under the sun while drinking coffee. It's amazing how much better I've been feeling. Just remember to wear sunscreen!

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#159

Post by boomboomsubban »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #122
boomboomsubban wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article begins by labeling standardized tests of intelligence as IQ tests, I was following that definition. The correlation is between people who do well on the tests and disorders. It could be that more preparation for the tests, the SAT classes for example, leads to both of these results. Auras have no repeatable way of being measured. IQ tests show something, even if labeling that intelligence is wrong.

Auras have no repeatable way of being measured. IQ tests show something, even if labeling that intelligence is wrong. There are people who claim to see auras. How is this different from people trained in administering IQ tests? The average person is just taking the word of some test taker that it means thus and such. At some point, you simply have to trust the person telling you something. Even when people use machin…

>How is this different from people trained in administering IQ tests?

Repeatability, you can do the test multiple times and expect similar results. Not identical, and outliers exist, but similar.

I am not a fan of current IQ tests as a measure of intelligence. I am not trying to change your mind, nor do I doubt you believe these things. This article is careful to distinguish intelligence from IQ test results, and the link is interesting without trusting IQ tests.

What bothered me the most was using the Feynman example without anything scientific in your argument.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#160

Post by delhanty »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #158
delhanty wrote: post #141

The mental bit is possibly related to Joel Spolsky's {smart, not-smart} X {gets things done, doesn't} analysis [1] >People who are Smart but don’t Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. ... Also, the ADHD thing of course. Definitely I'd like to get more done, and for my mind and body to hurt less, even if it costs me some IQ poin…

I spend most of my time indoors and recently started forcing myself to go out during the day and staying directly under the sun while drinking coffee. It's amazing how much better I've been feeling. Just remember to wear sunscreen!

Yeah! It's great for mood isn't it!

>Just remember to wear sunscreen!

I just use extra virgin coconut oil - found a brand that doesn't make my skin go red.

Also, I cover up my face and arms (that get too much sun) and strip off to spread the sun over a larger surface area - need less minutes in the middle of the day to obtain vitamin D quota.

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