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210 IQ Is Not Enough

taylor.town

151–160 of 284 posts

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#151

People think of intelligence as some sort of magic. They ascribe all sorts of ability to intelligence, as if being smart should make you influential. But why should that be? If you're a scientist, you are dependent on getting funding to do experiments, and the experiment showing something interesting. Neither of these things is very connected to intelligence, beyond that low IQ people will not be likely to get to the…

This seems like a very flat view of intelligence. In my mind a sufficiently intelligent person isn't just "good at math" and is capable of understanding the landscapes you've laid out above and would also understand how to improve in them and to navigate them, assuming they're sufficiently motivated. Even then, intelligent people are better at parsing themselves, their own drives, knowing what they want and are motivated by and move towards it. I also think many of the most intelligent people I know are (gasp) extremely mature as well, as if those often go hand-in-hand.

This sort of feels like a cope-comment trying to say that smart people aren't ACTUALLY smart, but I'm not sure the motivation for that.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#152

The premise of the article is Langan has a high IQ, but is a bad person because he's conservative? Major political parties you disagree with are not "poisonous rhetoric", and political articles like this really don't belong on HN. People may know things you don't, and they base their world view on experiences you may not have had.

If you disagree with my opinions, it means you aren’t as smart as me.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#153

This reminds me of Liu Zhiyu who won a gold medal for China at the IMO in 2006 and was offered a full scholarship to MIT but turned it down to become a monk. I think wisdom and peace is more valuable than raw IQ and I think Zhiyu and Ung-yong and even Langan realized this, wanted nothing to do with "The Machine", and chose their life trajectories accordingly.

> Liu Zhiyu

From Google, that bro is back, married, and runs a (probably quite profitable) psychiatry business now.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#154
post #47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why couldn't you? i've always imagined IQ as the raw potential? or am I misunderstanding

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that people in the '60s were twice as smart as people now. The average IQ of the people then would be 100, and the average IQ of people now would also be 100, even though there was a huge difference in intelligence. This is because 100 is defined as being the average rather than being an absolute measure.

That's only true if you renorm. Look up the Flynn effect.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#155
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.

> Most twelve month olds struggle to support their head

Skill issue. Needs more belly time!

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#156
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first part of the article puts down a person whose IQ is in the 140-180 range. If you read about the person, that part makes sense as an opinion. It's worse. In both cases the IQ scores are basically fake. The first one probably does not reach moderate 130 required for Mensa based on the report of repeatedly trying the same test and not passing some not-too-high bar the first time (the first _known_ time; the t…

Maybe, but what the article is really about is how these two people responded to being marked for greatness at a young age. I don't see a reason to disbelieve that part.

Then the article should be titled "being famous as a child is not enough". But then it would not be a very interesting article.

Also, it's not just "maybe" that neither of these people have exceptional IQ. It is more like "most certainly not, unless they have some strong proof, because they lied multiple times".

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#157
post #3

There are no such thing as 210 IQ. It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth. These absurd claims about IQ is almost evidence that the claimant are nowhere close. For starters, any IQ tests are not going to be normalized to that range because it is impossible to normalize to that range as there are 0 realistic sample…

That's not really how statistics works. It is not impossible to roll two sixes on a single roll of two dies because it is more likely you won't.

Practically speaking, it's impossible to roll 6 one hundred times in a row on fair dice. Not technically impossible, but we each get to calibrate our skepticism based on how far out the probabilities are.

In this case we can be sure the dice aren't fair because there's significant motivation for them not to be, or at least it's easy to imagine a manufacturing defect in the dice.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#158
post #149

210 on a standard IQ scale (15 points per std dev) would mean more than 7 std deviations, order of 10^-12 it's hard for me to not reject the article already for it's click bait headline... ps: 170 is 4.666 std dev, about 10^-6. that's very rare, hard to measure but at least real.

Yeah, IQ tests don't really go above 160 precisely because there's no way to statistically validate the result. There aren't enough people.

Someone can design a test and claim it determines IQ up to 210, but there's no way to statistically validate that so it's simply meaningless.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#159
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The maximum IQ score anyone can get depends on the total number of people who have taken IQ tests so far. Even if every single person alive today took an IQ test (which is absurd in itself), the maximum IQ achievable would be between 190-197. In practice, I'd guess the maximum is somewhere between 170 and 185 (millions to tens of millions of IQ test results which were recorded).

Even then, you need special tests to distinguish between anyone with IQ higher than about 160 - all those people get the same (perfect) score on regular IQ tests.

So: claiming to have an IQ of 276? Bullshit. The guy whose parents claimed he scored 210 on an IQ test? Also bullshit. To get 210, there would have to have been ~500 billion IQ test results recorded.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#160
post #4

The "world's smartest man" very recently predicted on X that Bitcoin would hit $220k by the end of the year. [1] Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intell…

> his self-reported IQ of 276 In other words, this news is a completely irrelevant piece of information.

It's relevant, just not in terms of assessing good actual IQ.
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