210 IQ Is Not Enough

> Whose consensus? Can you back up that claim with some links?

I mean even the people who conceived speed-based tests defined intelligence broadly as “the global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment” (Weschler), which aligns with other dictionary and colloquial definitions and scientists with broader interests than psychometrics, and of course daily arguments on here about whether neural networks have achieved general intelligence which focus on their performance on benchmarks humans struggle to pass, not their processing speed or token memory. Psychometricians' focus on speed for actual metrics is driven by expediency (and the belief that batteries of simple speed tests correlate well with the ability to learn to perform more complex tasks to exceptionally high levels) rather than because they think peak intellectual ability is characterised exclusively by rapid puzzle solving. Needless to say genius is defined even more in terms of accomplishment and insightfulness, which is why lists of geniuses are dominated by scientists and creatives who conceived things their peers couldn't (some of which give even grad students with an interest in the subject headaches trying to understand when being walked through it), not people who are particularly fast at solving simple puzzles.

Sure, 150 IQ people mostly just answer more questions within a time limit than 120 IQ people on some types of test, which is a function of processing speed and prioritization, but there are absolutely people who score low because they can't grasp what half the questions are looking for no matter how much time they're given. Not all of them are on the left side of the distribution, and some tests like Raven's APM give very similar rankings when taken untimed. And there are definitely plenty of smart people who couldn't say, solve Fermat's last theorem, despite being exceptional in their knowledge of mathematics and ability to solve related problems and being interested enough to try.

I think we both agree there's a tendency of people to fetishise extreme intelligence without realising that not only can you possess it and not do anything useful with it (and possess it and have massive flaws in some areas of judgement), but you can also solve pretty significant problems without be notably special in metrics related to it. Also agree that obviously IQ is a constructed scale that doesn't capture absolute differences and for this and many other reasons distinctions over 145 are pretty meaningless. But I think that aligns pretty well with "maybe psychometricians really don't know what makes exceptionally smart people exceptionally smart"...

(As for Bolt/Kipchoge, 'massive outlier' is a matter of perspective, but the amount of competition their best time is >1% faster than, selected from a pool of highly motivated full time professionals which in turn comes from a pool of millions who attempted sprint races at some point in their youth, is a point in their favour.)

Weschler’s definition of intelligence fits almost all functional adults, and most animals on the planet for that matter, and it doesn’t really back up your claim above about extreme intelligence. You’ve conflated a lot of things together here. There’s no evidence of any concepts that average adults can’t understand given time and interest. Ability to solve Fermat’s last theorem is function of interest and grit and time and context and education and whole slew of things not directly related to intelligence. Your example actually demonstrates my point quite nicely: there are a lot of people who understand Wiles’ proof even though they didn’t come up with it. You and I could too, if we wanted; the barrier is willingness to devote the large amount of time and energy required, not intelligence.

> ‘massive outlier’ is a matter of perspective, but the amount of competition their best time is >1% faster than

It seems like you understood my point about standard deviations and ranking versus absolute values, but you’re insisting on looking at rankings still? Why? This is exactly the common mistake I was referring to. Yes, Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world, which puts him at a little over 6 standard deviations above the norm, if I used my lookup table correctly. He’s faster than around eight billion people. But does that mean he’s eight billion times faster than the average person, or a hundred times faster, or even ten times faster than the average? Well, standard deviations don’t tell you that. He’s actually less than 1.5 times faster than the average healthy male adult, and less than 10% faster than a typical competitive sprinter. He’s not that much faster at all, it’s just that he represents where humans physically top out, and he happens to rank the highest.

Same is true of human height and many other physical traits. The tallest person in the world, the biggest outlier that ever existed, is less than twice the average height of everyone on earth including women. Robert Wadlow was off the charts in terms of standard deviations, taller than billions and billions of people, but of course that doesn’t mean he was a thousand feet tall. He was less than nine feet tall, and that’s all it takes to be the tallest person in the world.

Why would intelligence be any different? All brains have the same basic design. Some people are above average and some are below. Yes there are distribution outliers, and there are non-functional people, but that does not imply the top is far from the average. What reason is there to believe that some brains are so much smarter than others that they can comprehend ideas that someone with an IQ of 120 can’t? I’m not aware of such an idea ever being published, are you? Seems like it would be famous, if true. How would that even work? There’s no language and no list of words that only people with 170 IQ can understand.

BTW I just rewatched “The Expert Myth” video by Veritasium, it’s very relevant to our conversation (https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA) and has a nice clip of Bolt in there too! It’s a good science backed explanation of why so-called ‘genius’ doesn’t actually depend on IQ much.