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210 IQ Is Not Enough

taylor.town

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Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#231

Post by WJW »

DrScientist wrote: post #168
lordnacho wrote: post #96

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…

Indeed. Most of life is like a 100m race where it's allowed to turn up and start early. ie anybody can easily beat Usain Bolt by just starting a few seconds before him. There are some things which are perhaps a bit more like the highjump - where I'm never going to beat the worlds best no matter how many attempts I do - however these kind of things are very much the exception, not the rule.

Most fields which are like highjumps have considerable incentives to develop tools to aid in performance. Even the greatest high jumper can't beat a muggle with a ladder, after all. Nor is any weightlifter a match for a forklift.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#232

Post by bithead »

ghostpepper wrote: post #139
lordnacho wrote: post #96

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…

I like the car analogy for IQ. Having an engine with 50% or more horsepower above the people around you is only useful if you know how to handle it, how to steer, etc. The transmission is another great analogy, IMHO for communication skills. Applying full power to the tarmac from a dead stop is a great way to spin your tires.

The very notion of IQ reduces the mind to a receptacle for some ineffable thing called 'intelligence'. One may as well have a CQ - Comedy Quotient and start speculating who has a higher GQ - Robin Williams or Dave Chapelle.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#233

Post by noirscape »

jmull wrote: post #216
moi2388 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It correlates strongly with problem solving abilities on most tasks, predicts health outcomes, educational outcomes, career outcomes and finances all pretty significantly.

I don't see the particularly useful/meaningful part here. Who knows what you're referring to, but generally IQ tests measure general mental abilities on things society generally finds good. That's fine, but general education does the same in far more detail and comes with a robust achievement measurement (grades, and graduation/degrees). IQ competes with other measures that exist anyway and comes up short.

Grades aren't necessarily an indicator on if a person comprehends the educational material. Someone can visibly under-perform on general tests, but when questioned in-person/made to do an exam still recite the educational material from the top of their head, apply it correctly and even take it in a new direction. Those are underachievers; they know what they can do, but for one reason or another, they simply refuse to show it (a pretty common cause tends to be just finding the general coursework to be demeaning or the teachers using the wrong education methods, so they don't put a lot of effort into it[0].) Give them coursework above their level, and they'll suddenly get acceptable/correct results.

IQ can be used somewhat reliably to identify if someone is an underachiever, or if they're legitimately struggling. That's what the tests are made and optimized for; they're designed to test how quickly a person can make the connection between two unrelated concepts. If they do it quick enough, they're probably underachieving compared to what they actually can do and it may be worth trying to give them more complicated material to see if they can actually handle it. (And conversely, if it turns out they're actually struggling, it may be worth dedicating more time to help them.)

That's the main use of it. Anything else you attach to IQ is a case of correlation not being causation, and anyone who thinks it's worth more than that is being silly. High/Low IQ correlates to very little besides a sort of general trend on how quickly you can recognize patterns (because of statistical anomaly rules, any score outside the 95th percentile is basically the same anyways and IQ scores are normalized every couple years; this is about as far as you can go with IQ - there's very little difference between 150/180/210 or whatever other high number you imagine).

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#234

Post by Lerc »

HappySweeney wrote: post #23
stavros wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As World's Highest IQ Record Holder, I expect #BITCOIN is going to $220,000 in the next 45 days. > I will use 100% of my Bitcoin profits to build churches for Jesus Christ in every nation. > “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37) Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276.

Don't legitimate IQ tests top out at 160 for adults?

There are separate tests for the extremes, but obviously less researched because the further out you go the less they have to work on.

Many years ago, while unemployed, I was sent for a intelligence and dyslexia test (because of the very same perceived waste of potential that the article talks about). I was not dyslexic but scored above the range that the intelligence test could measure. The professor(I believe he was moonlighting for research funding) performing the test talked about the upper range tests, but said they were very long, required specialists to conduct and there's seldom any reason to investigate where you are in the upper range.

Then we went on to waste a huge amount of time talking about human perception and I remember describing an idea that finally seems to be feasible because the new Steam VR headset does it and calls it Foveated rendering.

I can't specifically recall the date of this but the tester was recording results on his palm pilot, which was a flash new thing at the time.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#235

Post by xtracto »

noirscape wrote: post #185

It keeps astounding me that people assign value to a score whose purpose was mainly intended to find outliers in the education system as being anything besides that. Or to quote the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking: "People who boast about their IQ are losers".

I've never understood IQ tests. Granted, i have only seen the beginning of some of them where they show you those 3/4 figures and tell you to choose the "next one" ... I have never had a clue of what am I supposed to look for.

Maybe I am just extremely stupid. But then I'm a walking example that you can be averagly successful even being dumb as a rock, if you are stubborn enough haha.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#236

Post by programjames »

soiltype wrote: post #225
programjames wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And in those other cases? You have a rigorous definition of comedy? There's surely more to comedy than subverting expectations. Someone else who cares more about comedy in particular can figure that out for themself, but surely I gave enough of the general idea to make it clear how you could go about measuring the intelligence necessary for comedy. > A story is believed because a listener "wants" to believe it. Som…

> Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability. This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true? Second, revolving conflicts is not the same thing as getting into them, so it's unclear why bring that up at all.

True. I expect most conflicts come from people preferring not to think, and I also expect most conflicts escalate from people preferring not to think. Those are separate statements, and I only said the former.

> This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?

Eh, I don't think it implies that, and I also don't think that is true.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#237

Post by pxc »

ux266478 wrote: post #112
pxc wrote: post #11

Kim Ung-yong (the one from the article with 210 IQ sounds like a good guy with a respectable career and a healthy self-conception. He even describes himself as happy! It seems like 210 IQ has proven to be plenty for him, although measurement of his IQ and intense childhood pressure may not have been beneficial to him.

It is entirely possible he would not have reached where he is in his life without all of that negativity. No life is complete without deep and woeful strife.

Maybe. From one¹ of the articles quoted in OP:

> According to reports, he was working at NASA at the age of eight, and in 1978, his name was recorded in the Guinness Book Of World Records for the highest IQ at 210.

> While his career as an academic genius was soaring to unprecedented heights, Kim Ung Yong decided to pull the plug on it abruptly. He returned to South Korea in 1978 and decided to pursue higher education at Chungbuk National University where he obtained his Ph.D. in civil engineering.

> The reason behind this decision was his growing dissatisfaction with the life of a genius. According to Mr. Kim, he missed out on many things in life while excelling academically. He spent his days couped up, deprived of the finer joys of life. His lifestyle also drew in some nasty rumors from the media.

> So, he left that life behind in pursuit of his own identity and a normal life with his family and friends. Though the media labeled him as a “failed genius”, a living proof of how things can go horribly wrong with gifted kids, Mr. Kim has no regrets about his decision. In a society that puts academic intelligence on a pedestal, he is adamant that a high IQ really doesn’t determine anything about a person’s character.

It seems like indeed he learned some valuable lessons. But it's also clear that he felt the extreme pressure was ruining his life at that time, and it took him off the (more prestigious— you can decide if you think it's "more valuable") path of science in favor of engineering.

If you asked him, he'd probably say that the most vital decision he ever made was rejecting the "deep and woeful strife" that came from his ultra-disciplined, intellectual, and otherwise profoundly empty childhood.

It also seems like he'd probably reject the notion of measuring him by "where he ended up in life", even if that judgment is favorable. If the more relevant question is "could he have wound up contented and emotionally healthy with some other kind of childhood", it seems hard to argue that the painful childhood he rejected is the only way that could have happened.

----

1: https://www.koreaboo.com/stories/south-korean-professor-once...

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#238

Post by sublinear »

stego-tech wrote: post #188
nonethewiser wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The observation in this article is part of a more general principle: Happiness isn't a single variable equation. It directly parallels the observation that "money doesn't buy happiness." 210 IQ will never be enough. $20M dollars will never be enough. This article is interesting to me because I see people falsely equivocating money with happiness all the time, and pretty much never see it with IQ. I didn't realize it…

Bearing in mind that my lived experience is entirely subjective, and that your mileage may vary accordingly: I find that when people associate money with happiness, what they fail to observe is that they actually want the presumed stability such money would afford them, at their current lifestyle . Failing to acknowledge and plan around that leads to “lifestyle creep” as income rises, which simply perpetuates the sam…

> billionaires engage in wealth and asset hoarding

That's not how money works. Nobody becomes a billionaire by hoarding. Money greater than a surprisingly low amount must be invested. Even the most obvious, boring, and low-risk investments still tend to have good returns. At scale lots of money just becomes a lot more money. There is no ego necessarily involved in this process.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#239

Post by programjames »

soiltype wrote: post #227
programjames wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Solomonoff beat me by about 70 years, and Wissner-Gross & Freer by about 10 years. Even if I had something novel to publish in this area, I think I would rather do something like solve ARC-AGI and make a lot of money.

If that's true, why is there broad consensus today that intelligence is ill-defined?

1. Religious mysticism. The murkier people are on concepts like thinking, consciousness, and intelligence, the easier it is to claim they include some metaphysical aspect. Since you cannot actually pin down the metaphysical aspect, they must claim it is because you cannot pin down the physical aspect.

2. People do not like feeling less intelligent than other people, so they try to make the comparator ill-defined.

Re: 210 IQ Is Not Enough

#240

Post by soiltype »

programjames wrote: post #236
soiltype wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability. This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true? Second, revolving conflicts is not the same thing as getting into them, so it's unclear why bring that up at all.

True. I expect most conflicts come from people preferring not to think, and I also expect most conflicts escalate from people preferring not to think. Those are separate statements, and I only said the former. > This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true? Eh, I don't think it implies that, and I also don't think that is true.

Ok, but then... what does any of that have to do with "conflict resolution is not usually a function of intelligence"?
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