This is not at all "well known". Well, at least I don't know that. I haven't read the study yet, but it's based on a survey on Mensa members, so probably only representative of Mensa members.
> "environmental factors are are believed to play the biggest role in IQ score differences."
That is false. [1] IQ has an interesting characteristic in that at young age environmental factors play a slightly larger role than genetics in IQ but as the child reaches their late teens their IQ becomes determined primarily by genetics. This is also to say that while a child may outperform against another child at a younger age, due to environmental factors -- if this comparison, even between the same people, was done at a later age then the result would generally be primarily determined by genetics. In other words the gains (or deficits) experienced in childhood do not carry on to adulthood - as counter intuitive as that may be.
> "IQ testing was invented by a certain demographic and as you would expect works best on people that take the test which fall under that demographic."
Comparing the IQ of nations is extremely difficult and plagued by a number of possible confounding variables. So that has to be taken into consideration, but nonetheless the majority of data that is available contradicts what you're saying. IQ testing was developed in Europe/England. It tends to be Asian nations that score the highest on IQ exams. I'm not linking to any particular source here since so far as I know this is completely fundamental - any source would verify as much including the one in the post I'm responding to.
Their entire high IQ sample comes from Mensa. So this should be restated something like "Inclination to join Mensa correlates with mental and physical disorder"
With my very limited experience with Mensa (1 month), I can anecdotally confirm that a lot of members do have a lot of problems. At least the group I spend time with there were mental disorders, workless (for decades) etc.
Going further, maybe the inclination to join any social organization correlates with mental and physical disorder. Such organizations, while limiting membership based on specific acceptance criteria, may be generally welcoming to people whose traits are orthogonal to those criteria.
I guess I'm the control here, because I was briefly a member of ISPE. Not because I have an IQ in the 99.9+% (as far as I know), but because they couldn't figure out how to password protect their Ning group.
Based on the posts though, the members didn't seem any smarter than the average person on HN and the discussions were generally less interesting.
There is another possible causation: people with mental disorders tend to have high IQ (whatever it is that IQ actually measures).
The blind typically have incredible touch for reading Braille. Some also have incredible hearing. These are not physiological benefits that they get at birth; their coping mechanisms train them.
Well, i don't know about specific disorders, but mental health declines rapidly with lower intelligence.
The most mentally unhealthy people are the ones that are on the lower end, but still within what we expect to function in society.
Source sadly not being verifiable since it is my psychologist wife that works with mental health in school with intelligence testing and extra resources to help those who need it.
That's an individual experience, not scientific proof. An experience limited to school kids of a certain age and location who share their problems with your wife.
No. She cited what was taught during her studies (she got her license 3 years ago, so the studies have all been within the last 10 years). According to what she was taught, Most mental illnesses correlate positively with lower IQ (apart from neurodevelopmental disorders, which this study measured, and bipolar disease).
> While the ideal would be to individually test all participants for IQ we found no scientific data that would give reason to discredit Mensa members in any country from being representative of those with high cognitive ability.
I think this entire paper is bogus, it reeks of lazyness. They did not have a control group either, they used general statistics:
> Although the national surveys would likely capture a broad range of intelligence, statistically only 2% of the national data would include those with a gifted cognitive ability such those who qualify for membership in American Mensa, Ltd.
Which is false, 2% of the population does not join mensa.
I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or exceptional. Perhaps using Mensa membership to draw inferences about smart people in general isn't statistically applicable. It could be that people who want to be recognized as smart have those mental issues, which other smart people don't.
Mensa is not exceptionally smart. It's 2% of all people. [removed a distracting point about social group size.] Most people are likely to know someone who could qualify for Mensa.
Mensa is quite smart, but I wouldn't use the word "exceptional." If you write a method that throws an exception on 2% of all inputs, I think maybe you're doing it wrong. 2% is still too common, in my opinion, to be considered an exception.
Dunbar's Number is about our cognitive ability to keep social relationships, not about how many social relationships people actually have. The later should be expected to vary widely by society, age, where you live etc. I don't understand what military unit sizes tell you about number of friends and acquaintances someone has.
Some argue that a platoon or troop is a natural number of men you can get to know well, and a company or squadron the number you can be well acquainted with.
That makes a lot of sense, just like Dunbar's Number does. However, at least from my personal, anecdotal experience my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by not actually meeting that many people and having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better. And on top of that things like moving result in weakened or lost relationships.
> my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by... having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better.
What's the difference between "cognitive capacity" and "time and energy"?
I have a near photographic memoy for faces and an exceptional ability to remember details about people's lives; I have to limit the number of friends o have for precisely that reason, my cognitive capacity to care would overshadow just about everything else in life.
Well the difference is this: If I'm sitting at home every evening because I'm too exhausted from work or come home late every evening and thus have very little social interaction is a very different limiting factor than what caps the number of people in a military unit that I can keep social bounds with. In fact I might be very effective at keeping good working relationships with a large number of coworkers. That doesn't translate at all though to having many friends. At one point in my career I knew everyone in an office of about 100 people by name and had frequently very pleasant conversations with then. Yet I had fewer casual (as opposed to close) friends in the city I lived in than can be counted on one hand.
I'm part of a lot of communities, and clearly HN is one of the rare where I am, more often than not, answered in comments by people more intelligent than me. So even if I'd consider myself an average Joe, it seems a good sign that HN has quite a lot of intelligent people. At least more than average.
While I cannot be certain that a randomly selected HN participant is above average intelligence, the average and is clearly is at least 1 SD above average, and the median is not 100. The quality of posts, in-depth knowledge expressed, nuanced, fluid, and flexible thinking, makes this a community in which I wish to participate, and this is coming from someone who frequently communicates with academic researchers and intellectuals in his daily life.
"but if you can’t reasonably quantify it based on anything empirical,"
Simply the writing quality, grammar and sentence structure of the comments on HN would easily be enough to prove that HN readers (well, commenters) are above average.
I spend enough time glazing over headlines, stories and comments from other sites out of casual interest and I'll bet any amount of money this is true.
Maybe it’s also the culture around here. I’ve seen a few casual lololol comments that get downvoted a lot, so it creates an impression that if you’re going to say something, at least do it stylishly. (Of course value is important too..)
I like HN, but can’t see it as a social space like most forums are. (And yes I like HN for that reason too!)
Some might wonder what relevance this soap-opera-ish tale has to the stated goals of the high-IQ societies. I would argue that in order to understand what these societies are about, one should understand their history, including the very human motivations that drove their foundings.
Although I agree that depending on your circles (college anyone?) 98th %ile isn't much of a stretch. Further, not having a 2% one-sided outlier in your 30-60 person uncorrelated sample set ranges from 45-70%... but you're not likely to know it, and they're not likely to be Mensa members. Wanting to be a member, may be a bigger indicator for the disorders question.
In this case, the word "exceptionally" may have some connotations associated with it that you've applied, but it really should be treated as your "quite".
There are actually specific terms to label intelligence based on the number of standard deviations from the norm (100 IQ). Two to 3 SD's is highly gifted; 4-5 is exceptionally gifted; and 6+ SD's is profoundly gifted. The numbers change depending on what IQ instrument is used, but the terms for those SD brackets remain the same. I forget what Mensa's IQ threshold is and what IQ instruments they accept as measures (I was a Mensa member for a year about 10 years ago, but they took my only available score, a GRE score, as proof), but it's possible that "exceptionally smart" is technically correct, based on SD thresholds.
IQ is defined to be a normal distribution. Intelligence, on the other hand, isn’t.
This is one of the problems with IQ as a measure of intelligence. IQ 150 doesn’t mean doing mental arithmetic faster than IQ 100 by the same margin that IQ 100 beats IQ 50, only that IQ>150 is as rare as IQ<50.
I tried out Mensa briefly some years ago. I was just looking for new social circles. I have some pretty sharp older buddies that I play Go with weekly, they're a blast to talk to, and I thought I'd find some more of that.
It was bad. Really, really bad. The local chapter had a tiny handful of post-retirement members. I knew a ton of folks in my community at the time, a bunch of them were smart, active people, and none of them were members. It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test.
The newsletter was hilarious. One of them had a feature article on which was the better superhero, Batman or Superman? The article and the responses to it mostly centered around which of the fictional comic book characters had a bigger IQ. The writing was juvenile (and not because it was written by kids), and there was a regular feature that would pick some kind of trouble in the world and ask readers how they'd solve it. None of the responses ever argued from any kind of expertise or domain knowledge or offered any new insight; the theme tended to be, "well, I'm pretty smart, so this seems like an easy problem to solve..."
The discussion on HN on any given topic -- and the topics themselves for that matter -- tends to be a heck of a lot more interesting. I keep coming back here because of the people that just randomly show up in discussions who are actual experts on the topic. That doesn't really happen in Mensa.
My takeaway from that whole thing pretty much agrees with what you're saying. People who are Mensa members are members because their IQ is really important to them to an unhealthy extent. That would seem to correlate well with other psychological and physiological problems.
Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ. Researchers wanting to do further work in this area could try polling those folks too.
> Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ.
I've never been able to get past 4k. But from having watched a bunch of Bats go lectures on YouTube, he says (and proves) that it's possible to get well past 1d on direction of play alone without having any problem solving ability.
And yet there are a ton of folks who have watched many of his videos and have played tons of games and not made it to 1d. Including me, I'm just a lowly 4k.
Maybe you're right, but my experience playing both in small local tournaments and a lot online has been that the folks 1d and above are pretty sharp generally.
How good you are at Go (or chess for that matter) has no correlation with your IQ. There are plenty of examples of people extremely good at chess that struggle, seriously, with academics (e.g. world champion Jose Raul Capablanca, and the youtuber and grandmaster Eric Hansen). Kasparov doesn't have 180+ IQ, which is a common myth. At some point he took the test and it turned out he had a respectable but definitely sub-Mensa IQ.
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected geniuses of our era, tested as only having an IQ of 125. IQ tests are far from perfect, to say the least. This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed.
Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke. ;)
It always struck me as crazy to represent all that is intelligence in one number. Also AFAIK many things such as "social intelligence" are not tested at all.
I always smile at people putting that much weight into IQ numbers..
The crazy thing you think people are doing is not actually being done.
IQ is not intended to represent 'all that intelligence is'. It is simply one way to measure a cross section of particular capacities that are valuable in a modern society and are easy to test.
E.g It doesn't attempt to measure the ability to track an animal, or remember the face of a person you met once last year.
This test is of interest because it is strongly predictive of other things we do care about, like educational attainment, criminal behavior, economic outcomes, etc.
> Also AFAIK many things such as "social intelligence" are not tested at all.
As far as I've read about it (not an expert; I've just seen this debate more than once before and tried to educate myself on the basics), that's because every time someone proposes an actual objective test for one of the "other intelligences", it turns out to either be primarily dependent on training (i.e. measuring conditioned behaviors) or to correlate so strongly with IQ that the test is effectively an IQ test.
The last time I had this argument in a big way with people telling me I had no clue what I was talking about, some forum I belonged to was having a heated argument because they had the habit of posting ridiculous tests, like "What kind of dog are you?", and someone had posted an online IQ test and things were getting pretty ugly (in part because a lot of people felt it was scoring them too low).
I stated up front that it likely only went up to 140, then took the test to shut people up and scored a 140. I had training in test taking in my high school gifted classes, so I tend to do well on such tests.
Mensa does not actually base membership exclusively on IQ tests, so your assertion doesn't accurately reflect the content of the study. There are other ways to get into Mensa, such as submitting your SAT scores. I was coached in gifted classes on how to take the SAT. Is it any wonder I did better than average? Should we not expect kids with training in test taking to perform better than those without, generally speaking?
If we are going to discuss some correlation between supposed high IQ and various disorders, is it meaningless to talk about how one ascertains IQ and what on earth that even means?
I think it is not terribly different from asking "What color is your aura?" but I am quite sure that if I went around asking that on HN (or, you know, posting articles about auras, chakras, etc), it would be flagged to death. Yet, IQ is equally invisible. You cannot look at someone and say "brown hair, 6 feet tall, IQ of 145." That just isn't a thing.
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 machines -- and IQ tests are not measurable by machines like MRIs -- the person has to read the output. How do we know they weren't high on LSD that day?
I mean, this is veering into territory of "Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly," * but I am being sincere here. I intend to step away from this particular thread because I don't think people think I am posting in good faith, or being sincere. So there is probably no good that can come from trying to further engage in discussion of a matter that I have thought a lot about and think is a serious issue.
>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.
Stephen Hsu argued there that Feynmans school iq test must have had a low ceiling. From what we know about the consistently high IQ scores of other incredibly bright theoretical scientists that sounds likely.
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, we just cannot reliably assert that someone's IQ is, say, above 200.)
If the test administered to Feynman only went to 130, as some do, then a test score anywhere close to that, such as 125, can be assumed to have "ceilinged the test." It can be viewed as a floor for the person's IQ, a minimum score suggesting it is at least that high.
Thus, Stephen Hsu's assertion that it must have just been a bad test with a low ceiling suggests to me that Mr. Hsu knows a great deal less about IQ tests than I know, so I see no reason to defer to his opinion.
Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge, good scores in kids strongly correlate to kids coming from upper middle class families with well educated parents, etc. So I think there is quite a lot of room for saying that if you take any child and feed them excellently well, dote on them, invest a lot of parental and societal time, effort and other resources in them, they will tend to perform better than average, both on IQ tests and in life generally.
I am not just screwing with people here. I have studied the space and I think there are serious problems with talking about IQ like it is concrete, unchangeable, primarily inherited with minimal influence from environmental inputs, etc.
If the test administered to Feynman only went to 130, as some do, then a test score anywhere close to that, such as 125, can be assumed to have "ceilinged the test." It can be viewed as a floor for the person's IQ, a minimum score suggesting it is at least that high.
Thus, Stephen Hsu's assertion that it must have just been a bad test with a low ceiling suggests to me that Mr. Hsu knows a great deal less about IQ tests than I know, so I see no reason to defer to his opinion.
Maybe there is some nuance I'm missing, but those two paragraphs seem to be arguing the same point - that a 125 score was probably not accurate, but hitting the ceiling of the test? I.e. you and Hsu agree. Here is Hsu's full quotation (never said "bad").
To understand this score we have to remember that typical IQ tests (e.g., administered to public school children) tend to have low ceilings. They are not of the kind that Roe used in her study. One can imagine that the ceiling on Feynman's exam was roughly 135 (say, 99th percentile). If Feynman received the highest score on the mathematical portion, and a modest score of 115 on the verbal, we can easily understand the resulting average of 124.
TLDR: Stephen Hsu and I are coming from very different mental models. His mental model asserts that it is very, very important that we keep promoting this elitist intellectual stuff. Note how he has fancy degrees and is important enough to get interviewed, while I remain some big fat nobody, having walked away from my National Merit Scholarship and done the full time homemaker thing for a lot of years, in part because I could not stomach the toxic environment involved in being One Of The Smart Kids (that all the teachers trained everyone else to hate).
I elaborated some on my mental model in this paragraph:
Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge, good scores in kids strongly correlate to kids coming from upper middle class families with well educated parents, etc. So I think there is quite a lot of room for saying that if you take any child and feed them excellently well, dote on them, invest a lot of parental and societal time, effort and other resources in them, they will tend to perform better than average, both on IQ tests and in life generally.
Part of what I am arguing is that we make up a measurement that validates that our "best" people -- like well educated, well heeled white males -- are best because they have this innate quality called high IQ and then we channel the "smart kids" from "good homes" into classes that cause them to test well.
The mental model that some kids are inherently more deserving of investment at school because they are smarter and do better than other kids winds up being self-fulfilling prophesy. Sort of like redlining of Black neighborhoods was self-fulfilling prophesy, causing Blacks to remain poor and their neighborhoods to remain not worth investing in by banks.
So, hopefully that clarifies it for you because I already said I am stepping away from this discussion.
That feels to me a little like someone telling me "We both agree that this person is currently a slave, so let's not allow your heartfelt belief that slavery is immoral interfere with our use of this slave. Moving on."
And I imagine I will regret saying that, but I can't see letting that stand and saying nothing.
No. It is actually one person saying, that's a slave, and you responding, no you are wrong, that's a slave, and you are wrong because we disagree about slavery.
Hsu said there was a ceiling on the test, you said he was wrong, there was a ceiling on the test, and IQ is flawed.
> we make up a measurement that validates that our "best" people -- like well educated, well heeled white males
The only trouble with your theory is that IQ actually does a very good job of predicting how well members of various minorities will do in life. Half a century you could argue the cultural bias hypothesis but it no longer flies. The tests have been updated and taking "culturally biased" questions out actually made minority scores go down (possibly due to lower G loading on those questions).
> The mental model that some kids are inherently more deserving of investment at school because they are smarter
Of course the test would be "what is the marginal benefit of education to this person" a very different question from what is their IQ level.
You just seem to be making stuff up to fit your ideological preconceptions.
> After that age, we just cannot reliably assert that someone's IQ is, say, above 200.
To add to all the other criticisms of IQ score, it’s defined to be mean-100-σ-15* — so nobody has an IQ of over 197, and only newborn anenephalactics ever score as low az IQ 3… and perhaps not even then if they score the same as the comatose.
* or σ-16, which changes the subsequent statements a little.
There's no guarantee that the normal distribution is a good model in the tails though. A former lecturer of mine would often assert that nothing is normal in the tails.
There are some other cases where it is generally thought that the distribution is normal, but it is not (in real samples). IQ has too many people in both far ends and has a different shaped tail on the right and left (the maximum is 200 or so, but the minimum is about 40). Weight of adults also has too many in the right tail and is not fully symmetric, but its right tail is also long (unlike that for IQ).
> When current IQ tests were developed, the median raw score of the norming sample is defined as IQ 100 and scores each standard deviation (SD) up or down are defined as 15 IQ points greater or less,
IQ itself — not intelligence or even score on an IQ test — is by definition not fat tailed. If a particular IQ test doesn’t produce a normal distribution, that test is wrong.
At least, wrong by the current standard definition of IQ; there have been others, and the very fact that it is flawed means there probably will be a new one in future.
>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
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.
The very existence of autism calls into question our historical conceptualization of intelligence and IQ testing.
I have two ASD sons. They are very bright. They also have some serious personal struggles.
So, which is it? Does IQ measure general competence or does it measure something else? Because this latest twist in the conversation seems just ridiculous.
I have no idea what you think this is supposed to prove. People with a weird brain condition have weird results on brain tests?
>Does IQ measure general competence or does it measure something else?
It's an Intelligence Quotient. It measures intelligence. No one said anything about "general competence", whatever that even means. I imagine intelligence is an important part of "general competence" though.
No, this is one of the biggest misundertandings about the IQ tests. It does not measure inteeligence, it measures something which we tagged with the name "IQ".
We cannot measure intelligence, since we cant even define it properly (in a way that we attach a measurement unit ot it).
It is called an intelligence test. Actual scientists talk about it and use it as such. It is a combination of measures of many different cognitive abilities. Which seems like a pretty good definition for intelligence to me.
>Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge, good scores in kids strongly correlate to kids coming from upper middle class families with well educated parents, etc.
> This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed
I'm not sure I'd say flawed so much as I'd say myopic. Which is absolutely still a flaw, but a very specific one that allows you to contextualize the results of an IQ test rather than discard them as worthless. IQ measures a subset of human intelligence pretty effectively, but misses the bigger picture. There's large parts of human intelligence that can't be measured using a test like that. A test can only provide stimuli for the mind and measure its reaction over the short period of time while taking the test. Among other things, it can't measure long-term recall or the ability to rehearse/learn information and skills over time, both qualities people would naturally associate with intelligence.
It's our need to have a single spectrum from mental retardation to genius-level that's led us to try to create a test which assigns a number to intelligence. But intelligence is multidimensional and an IQ test just fills in some of those dimensions.
It's like predicting an NFL player's performance based on stats--40 time，bench press, etc. They do these rather arbitrary tests, and over a lot of players there is some limited positive correlation with performance, but individually it does not mean very much. There are people with amazing stats that do not succeed.
Then for baseball players, everyhing changes.
Intelligence or smart are low-information, high-emotional-signalling terms. It means more about social status than anything else. Everyone has a mix of abilities. Some of the best engineers are terrible writers. Some are incompetent fathers (Steve Jobs). Some people are great at consuming and regurgitating a lot of info, but bad at original/critical thought. Some who would thrive in one life circumstance may struggle in another.
Academically, IQ is supposed to correlate with g, general intelligence. In other words，we're just creatures making up nonsense terms to, at face value, signal about ability, but it's often more of a social construct.
>Among other things, it can't measure long-term recall or the ability to rehearse/learn information and skills over time
The vocabulary battery would seem to measure long term memorization ability. It actually correlates with IQ better than any other test. Also SAT tests are often used as a proxy for IQ because they correlate so well with it.
>It's our need to have a single spectrum from mental retardation to genius-level that's led us to try to create a test which assigns a number to intelligence. But intelligence is multidimensional and an IQ test just fills in some of those dimensions.
No, it's not. Please learn what you are talking about. It was once believed that intelligence was multidimensional. But then scientists realized all those different dimensions correlated amazingly well. E.g. people with better memory were much more likely to be better at puzzle solving. And a single factor, g, could explain most of the variance. IQ tests try to measure g, which is very predictive of general cognitive ability.
> Also SAT tests are often used as a proxy for IQ because they correlate so well with it.
That understates it. The SAT is an IQ test, strenuously as the College Board May deny it. The test was originally the scholastic aptitude test and results from it correlate with other IQ tests just as well as results from IQ tests correlate with each other.
If anybody reading wants to know more about the broad field of which IQ is a small part the Wikipedia article on psychometrics is quite good.
125 is still in the top 5% of the population. Anyway Feynman gave the results of a childhood IQ test, and one that was taken before IQ tests were standardized. Feynman reported being exceptionally good at puzzle solving and math even at a very young age, so I am very skeptical of that.
IQ definitely matters. The average IQ of physics majors is like 2 standard deviations above average for instance. Suggesting some fields are very selective of IQ and low IQ people are much less likely to be able to do them.
When there's an HN thread on IQ, you can count on two things:
1. There will be a number of comments saying IQ is outright meaningless.
2. There will be a comment saying Feynman only had an IQ of whatever it was.
Never fails.
Anyway, as I've said here before, Feynman's books are primarily collections of stories. What's presented in them was selected to maximize the impact and entertainment value of the story. And Feynman was very, very good at storytelling.
To be perfectly clear, I am not saying IQ scores are completely meaningless. I am saying they probably do not measure some sort of objective, DNA-based trait of "smarts". You cannot separate these scores from a very long list of environmental factors and I am very leery of the mental model we have that people who test well are some sort of innately superior beings rather than people who have benefited more than average from an accumulation of societal and parental investment of various sorts.
I am very leery of the power of IQ tests to justify entrenching The Haves and Have Nots. Our mental models have scary amounts of power to shape outcomes and this mental model seems to justify classism as a kind of manifest destiny.
One of the videos linked here in reply to me has some smart authority figure type asserting that university students all have IQs above average. That seems pretty well tautological to me. One would hope that those getting more schooling would do better on tests. But that fails to genuinely prove that what these tests measure is some fundamental personal trait unrelated to the fabric of your life experience.
I was homeless for nearly six years. A lot of people wanted to see me as stupid and incompetent during that time. Those classist perceptions helped deny me opportunities which helped keep me poor which helped deny me opportunities. I can never seem to get that across to well off people that their tautologies simply entrench class based outcomes and really say nothing about personal competence.
When we design a world that closes doors to people arbitrarily, we design a world that actively wastes human potential. This makes all of us the poorer.
Stop putting moral judgements on scientific facts. Either IQ measures intelligence or it doesn't. And there is an enormous amount of research supporting the former. And very little to support your assertion that it's "just schooling" or whatever. In fact there's mounting evidence that schooling affects outcomes a lot less than most people believe, e.g. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/19/teachers-much-more-than...
Look, no one is saying your individual IQ test is the only thing that matters. There is random error on tests, and it's not like intelligence is the only thing that matters in a person. But if you go around denying that it exists at all, you are just spreading pseudoscience.
I think you described this well. Doesn't really get brought up enough, perhaps because there is a bit of survivor's bias here and people don't have that perspective. After having failed numerous times at being a professional software developer, I found myself having to abandon my apartment and live out of my car while trying to get by. I've been out of work for a while, in part because of the stigma attached to being out of work a while. Being homeless also has a stigma attached to it that you simply do not see when you're doing well. Having grown up in a culture that actively embraces those stigmas, and now having returned to it — they are family—, I find it quite eye-opening how the people I once considered mentors have really isolated themselves in a bubble of not having to be conscious of these things.
I am trying to do some things to bring down those barriers. I was able to start making some earned income online while homeless. My lack of nice clothes or a recent shower did not matter. I am trying to foster that model as a thing that can help protect against sliding into homelessness, help you scrape by while on the street and be something that can help build a future that won't be taken away because you got better. Plus, it is not a homeless service, is open to anyone interested.
I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class. I got a lot of brainwashing that I was destined for greatness etc. It didn't go down that way. So I think these mental models are mostly propaganda and we need to guard against that.
You're welcome. That looks like a nice resource and I've bookmarked it. I think it'll help going forward as I figure out how to build an income remotely from a variety of sources. Thanks :)
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.
Imagine a scatterplot of two correlated variables. Overall there’s a clear tendency for samples to be around the diagonal. Now zoom on the top 1% of the plot and surprise, you’ll see no apparent correlation.
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.
> Restriction of range, such as floor and ceiling effects or selection effects, reduce the power of the experiment, and increase the chance of a type II error.[5] This is because correlations are attenuated (weakened) by reduced variability
If you want to try this for yourself, try generating some fake SAT scores: (a,b) pairs where a and b are normally distributed with mean 500 and sd 100, and where a and b correlate at about 0.8.
Then, from your unbiased data set, select all the pairs for which 1600 >= a + b >= 1300, and check the correlation of a with b in the new, smaller data set.
Just examining this as a thought experiment, you can see that someone with an 800 math score might have a verbal score anywhere from 500 to 800. If we lower the math score, our expectation for the verbal score rises -- someone with a 600 math score will have a verbal score between 700 and 800. That is the basis of the negative correlation in the subgroup, but it's purely an artifact of the way we chose to label data points as being in or out of the subgroup.
Past the edit window: the 600 math score will of course imply a verbal score between 700 and 1000; the data I described has no caps on individual scores.
How good you are at academics actually correlates with IQ only up to a certain extent. When your IQ is more than 3-4 standard deviations from the norm, academic high performance is less likely, most likely because thinking and learning patterns in that segment of the population are so dramatically different from how material is taught (and from how it is learned by everybody else). Source: I've worked with a lot of the nation's (and world's) leading specialists on profound giftedness and twice exceptionality, especially in kids. There is literature and research on this, but sample sizes are (obviously, for statistical reasons) small.
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 additional college degrees. These other ways tend to result in real world achievement, like better jobs. CEOs and the like don't seem to spend a lot of time trying to get their smarts validated. They are too busy getting their business model validated.
So, I tend to see Mensa the same way you do: It primarily appeals to people who need validation they are incapable of getting via other avenues, such as pursuing their Master's or PhD.
And by extension, people who need validation via pursuing PhDs in an artificial environment (academia) are often people who have trouble succeeding in the real world.
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.
> 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.
What did you mean by "smarts", if not "intelligence", "competence" or "IQ"?
An organization declaring you to be one of the smart people may feel good, but it doesn't make it true. And it is generally more useful if the people stamping off on the idea that you are smart are issuing a degree in the process.
I have to note that getting degrees has nothing (edit: very little) to do with IQ.
That's just not true, even with the edit. Certainly high intelligence by itself isn't sufficient, but you're not going to find many physics PhDs with a 90 IQ.
I think it's worth considering though how much of that is pure problem solving ability, and how much is enthusiasm. I'd wager that the majority of academic programs could be successfully completed as long as long-lasting enthusiasm and time management are in place. Also worth considering is just how many factors can lead to a negative outcome.
I'd bet that physics PHDs get there with persistence, enthusiasm, and money. Intelligence barriers may not stand in there way but I don't think they're the determining factor.
Yes. You need human-level intelligence. The rest is personality characteristics (like slogging away for years), circumstances etc.
But this could be said for all intellectual achievement. I would go further, and say there are no geniuses, only acts of genius. Perhaps one person "could have done" it quicker than another... but the important achievement is that someone actually did do it.
Maybe, but you could easily get through medical school where rote memorisation, hard work, and diligence are more important. (In my country one pathway to medicine is a 6 year undergraduate degree you do straight out of highschool.)
I'm doing a double degree in elec engg and math, but I'm stupid as fuck and likely not going anywhere in life. (not being "falsely modest", I'm really struggling through my degree)
edit: I guess I should mentioned that I'm very close to finishing my degrees
Just out of curiosity, which super hero did they pick? I would imagine that Superman wouldn’t have to be too bright but I don’t know much about his character.
Depending on who happens to be writing him, Superman ranges from "smart guy but not THAT smart" to super-genius level. He's the last of a race of genetically optimized people and his parents were scientists so, I'd go with "he's much, much smarter than Batman, but Batman's power is to always have planned for everything whether or not the writers thought of it at the time."
Very similar to my experience. That organization is a train wreck. I realized afterwards that joining them is like joining something called the Leg Club. You aren't bound by an interest in anything other than yourself, as opposed to, say, an environmental or tennis club.
Your description of Mensa sounds exactly like the IQ obsession over on quora.com. Every week tons of posts about IQ. It’s the same questions over and over again, I really feel like the community over there has very low self esteem in regards to intelligence because they’re not on track to be the next mark zuckerberg.
>It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test.
Maybe not even that. I don't know if it's still true, but Mensa used to accept anybody with a PhD. I used to know a not-at-all-brilliant woman who was a Mensa member by virtue of her doctorate in Library Science.
A lot of people join Mensa not to brag about it. Mensa can be a really good group to join to meet interesting people and make new friends. Lots of members don't discuss their membership outside of Mensa meetups.
In my experience, the people interested in Mensa are people who need validation and aren't necessarily the sort to brag. Usually people whose identity is tied up in being intelligent. These are the sort of people who have trouble succeeding, because they're unable to take a risk (lest it somehow indicate they weren't smart).
You know the sort, love online debates about bikesheds, but can't seem to make anything happen in the real world.
Mensa most often attracts the deeply insecure and insufferably arrogant. I worked with several IITians and multiple PhD/MD’s... how many joined Mensa? Zero (0). Sure, IITians reminisced about rank every now and then, but they didn’t have social clubs about it.
But hey, to each their own. And if it reduces the density of people I’d rather avoid everywhere else, expand Mensa with gusto.
I tried Mensa a few years ago when I was at a crossroads in my life and looking for something new. It was a profoundly disappointing experience. My involvement was limited to the official Mensa Facebook group, which was deeply toxic and rude. I couldn’t believe how childish and confrontational the discussions were, and I quickly lost interest in getting worked up every time I poked my head in.
My take on it was that people who were active members had a chip on their shoulder about their intelligence, and believed themselves to be titans who were not obligated to suffer fools. There are many intelligent people in this world, the vast majority of whom are not in Mensa - and the better for it.
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...
It's not that simple. You can be super smart and (by that reason) choose to retire from society, or worst. The unabomber had a high IQ, for example.
High IQ PLUS hard work (Conscientiousness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk) is what can make a big difference in the world.
> 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).
The whole concept is repulsive to me, almost like having a club for white people.
The birds of a feather approach to connecting people is great when it’s based around an interest or activity, but not when it’s solely based on some crude 21st century approximation of what too many people equate with human value.
Why not just have events based around particle physics if that’s your interest? Oh that’s right, they do.
The point is why rule people out who’s IQ is one point below a cut off that may turn out to be your most interesting conversation or new best friend.
Nothing against those here who have applied. I know there are just different perspectives on it and many view it as benign.
For instance, the largest mood disorder was anxiety. Let me recast anxiety as "overly caring". An anxious person may work 3x as hard at a presentation or an exam.
I don't want to glamorize mental disorders, but I think this might not be a coincidental connection.
I'm bipolar, on medication for it. During my manic periods I have unbridled creativity. During my lows I can't bring myself to do much of anything. It's a double edged sword, and one I would never want to willingly give up. The key is learning to recognize and manage your swings to as much of your advantage as you can.
I don't think recognition that there are blessings with every curse is glamorizing it.
So, is this "scientifiamerican" a serious publication, or what? I mean, it says that high IQ leads to various good outcomes (a fact that is obvious, well-known and easily explained) and then basically says the opposite because of a...Mensa survey. Like, uh, that's not how you do science. At all. Not at all.
You're saying that survey results that are contrary to an obvious truth isn't science? I don't think I understand your concept of science.
Moving past that, the bad outcome found and your obvious good outcomes aren't incompatible. They could be more likely to be successful and suffer from disorders.
I'm saying the survey results measure facts related to Mensa members, not people with high IQ overall. The top comments in this same thread point out the exact same problem, but what-the-fuck-ever.
Both the article and the study note that this may be exclusive to Mensa. Spelling out how you chose the participants and acknowledging a potential bias is how you do science.
Seems like some of the OEs they mention the article are a contributing factor, but it also seems very likely that people who were aware of their higher IQ are more likely to go to doctors and psychologist, and therefore more likely that any other conditions are also caught. A population with a disproportionate level of observations will yield more results.
This isn't remotely news. Articles on this study have been posted to HN in recent months and overexcitabilities and the idea that certain disorders are "comorbidities" of high IQ was a common idea in gifted support groups, conferences et al twenty years ago. A stronger argument that there is a real link between the two is from a study showing the Ashkenazi Jews are about 2% of the population but about 10% of people awarded Nobel Prizes. This population has a high percentage of genetic disorders, a number of which are known to impact brain function. A rebuttal to the idea that this proves anything is that perhaps it is cultural.
"Genius" is defined by thinking differently. Should we be surprised if that has negative consequences, like not fitting in socially?
This is really old hat and adds nothing new whatsoever. If you are interested, there are plenty of existing resources to help you explore this topic.
Some "gifted" school programs require an IQ test for admission, and I believe that there have been studies that show that the students who were part of these programs do better than average in life. I haven't looked into it though, so I may be wrong.
I dunno, my dad took us to get tested at one point when we were in school, iirc I was ~130. Low enough to still be pretty common, high enough to feel the pressure to do something with it.
Then again, when I got to uni I was classed with people who scored way higher than I did and they were... I dunno, "intelligent" but not "smart". I didn't see any correlation between entry exam scores and subsequent performance.
I think kids get such scores when they are ahead of their age in areas of mental development. I think in my case, because of attentive parents who had me reading early, etc.
As I got older I realized I'm not actually smarter than other people, I was just a little ahead, and the false belief that I am somehow exceptionally clever was damaging in a number of ways.
As a high school dropout living in the blue collar world after some rough time as a teen on the street, having left home at 15, I'd long forgotten about the potential I once had in grade school. Years later when I decided to go back to school and get a degree, I entered the CS program. Despite great performance I carried the delusion that I was not nearly as smart as everyone else. I was also often the only woman in the class and deep down believed that I was inferior. I had accepted that hard work was my only real tool for success. But I truly loved the material and chose to get a double major in Math. I was pretty isolated from my peers and was completely unaware to what degree I was outperforming them. It wasn't for several years out in the workforce where I actually started to realize I was actually alright in the intelligence department and I wasn't just fooling everyone (although I still have my doubts some days...). Nowadays, I frequently find myself in disbelief of where I am now, what my career is, what I get paid and what my life is like compared to where I was headed many years ago.
My brother on the other hand was treated like a genius from an early age and was never really forced to work hard. Even when he failed, there was reasoning that he was just too gifted and he was bored and never really had to learn how to truly apply himself or grow. My dad gave him a job and eventually gave him his company when he retired that he ran into the ground. He lived with my parents until he was over 30 and now approaching 50 he still struggles with keeping a job.
I think about the two of us and how we were both led astray by our adults thinking they already knew what we were capable of. What you say about your experience being damaging really resonates to me even if I'm coming from the opposite side of things. I feel like I got extremely lucky that my particular set of experiences even if they were tough to live through allowed me to land on my feet.
We were given standardized tests every year growing up, then the PSAT and the SAT at the end of high school. So that amounts to a minimum of 12 tests just from the public school system.
I was given one at around age 12 in school to see if I qualified for an accelerated program, and then another one around age 28 as part of a university research study (on user interface related topics) I volunteered for.
I'm not surprised if people are tested in grade school, but I suspect running into them outside of research after your school years is rare.
My theory is that people with the mental and physical disorders measured in this study are more likely to regularly partake in activities that develop and accentuate traits that are used to measure IQ throughout their lives in order to cope with social exclusion and loneliness, starting from an early age. This social exclusion can come in the form of peer rejection, voluntary solitary withdrawal, or a combination of both.
If you're ugly, depressed, have an anxiety disorder, a personality disorder, or anything else that precludes you from engaging with other people and participating normally in "real life", you're going to spend more time resorting to escapism. If your form of escapism is something that contributes to a marketable skill later in life, and you engage in it from a very early age, then I think that this would correlate with a higher IQ, depending on the tests administered. Things like reading (books or the internet), videogames (certain ones), music, art, math, and programming of course.
I have a different theory, most cultures tell a kid that has mental issues or is unattractive that he's "smart" even if that isn't the case.because, after all,even with a good body and looks you can only go so far and if your social and emotional intelligence is low that only leaves academic intelligence.
So,my theory is that people prone to developing mental disorders tend to also get encouragement from their parents and community to seek academic intellectual success. I believe 80%(guesstimate) of "IQ" is a result of the individual working out their brain.
Sorry,should have said "most cultures that I have been exposed to." I was only speaking from the few cultures I have observed.
Although in some cultures I have seen,academic success and getting certain types of jobs is heavily encouraged by most parents and communities. I have also seen at least some US cultures that encourage extreme athleticism (sports scholarships and all)
Some of this reminds me of The Ph.D. Grind by Philip Guo [0] and my own experience when I was getting my PhD:
"For those few months, I morphed into an antisocial grump who shunned all distraction and became deeply immersed in my craft. All I thought about was computer code; I could barely speak in coherent English sentences except during my weekly progress meetings with Margo. Even though I appeared and acted subhuman (i.e., an unshaven disheveled mess), my emotional state was blissful. I was programming and debugging for over ten hours per day, but my mind was quite relaxed since my technical skills were well-calibrated for the challenges I faced."
> my emotional state was blissful
There was a huge disconnect between how happy I was and how I behaved and appeared. I gained 50+ pounds, lost normal hygiene, essentially only ate peanut butter, became nocturnal, and more or less didn't leave my apartment. My advisor was pretty explicit in their concern about my mental health, but, looking back, I was really happy.
I wonder how much of this mental illness : high IQ association is simply being obsessed with what you're working on?
Achieving excellence has a personal cost. Imagine that.
The other thing is that the first test that gave rise to the concept of IQ tests was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness for rural French children who often did not have birth certificates, so age could not be used as an indicator of school readiness. The problem was complicated by the fact that rural kids and city kids had different experiences that left the rural children less equipped to cope with the school environment. City kids were more likely to have already participated in preschool, among other things. So, there was a cultural divide.
The idea that some people are simply innately smarter is something that is very much debatable. IQ tests are highly influenced by deep cultural knowledge that is typically available to cultural "insiders." In the US, this is typically upper class and upper middle whites.
If an American takes a British or Canadian IQ test, they will tend to perform more poorly and show as having a lower IQ than on American tests, even though these are all English speaking countries. The effect gets worse if you are taking it in a second language. But it still exists even if it is merely a different culture, not a different language.
Your opinion is mindless drivel, and is a bad mentality for culture in the west. People are objectively better, spreading this clean slate illusion is only harming us in the long run. Sure some people do better do to familiarity with the problems, but iq tests are incredibly effective intrapopultion. IQ is the largest predictor is successful life outcomes, even more than parental socioeconomic status and wealth.
Is it possible that the average person has as much exposure to these disorders, however: They are not aware of it. And maybe they weren't as lucky to have it diagnosed.
If smartness is genetical and I'm born with it, then the disorder should have been present from the get go. But for me, these diagnosis only appeared when I got richer: First, I had fewer issues to worry about (like bills or rent to pay). Second, I'm more self-aware.
Imagine you are standing. You have a serious injury bleeding on your left hand. I put a hot metal to your right one. Do you feel the hot metal burn? Nah, you are too distracted by the serious injury.
Now if you have no injury, then you feel the burn. Smart people are usually successful financially. It means they don't worry about what other people worry about (rent, bills, food, etc...). So instead they focus on other stuff like does life really make any sense.
That, and this is the first time I hear about Mensa. Maybe I'm not that smart.
Everyone points out that the sample may have been biased.
Is there anyone willing to say something about the idea from a neurocognitive perspective, and not about the data or method?
Interesting discussion going on here. One thing I want to add that might serve as a confounding variable of intelligence and genetic disorders is parental age at birth. It has extensively been shown that especially the fathers age is linked to the chance of denovo genetic diseases in his children, due to mutations occuring in the ongoing cell replications. One the other hand older parents tend to have children that are better at school (on average), are more successful in their career etc. and therefore might be more likely to take an IQ test and join Mensa.
Math is a language for describing anthropic systems and perceptions. The brain is neither an anthropic system nor a perception, per se. So naturally, attempting to quantify it would select for eccentricities at either pole.
Researchers say that "superior IQ" also correlates with lower-income and higher achievement, but greater happiness. The question of what IQ actually signifies is a good one.
Maybe we should create some more competing metrics to study...Who knows what the data will find?
This is why you got to be careful when properly distributing your points. I mean look at Raistlin, he is super powerful and intelligent, but at the cost of his horrible ailments, while his brother is a beast and super strong, but at the cost of being far more simple...
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThat is false. [1] IQ has an interesting characteristic in that at young age environmental factors play a slightly larger role than genetics in IQ but as the child reaches their late teens their IQ becomes determined primarily by genetics. This is also to say that while a child may outperform against another child at a younger age, due to environmental factors -- if this comparison, even between the same people, was done at a later age then the result would generally be primarily determined by genetics. In other words the gains (or deficits) experienced in childhood do not carry on to adulthood - as counter intuitive as that may be.
> "IQ testing was invented by a certain demographic and as you would expect works best on people that take the test which fall under that demographic."
Comparing the IQ of nations is extremely difficult and plagued by a number of possible confounding variables. So that has to be taken into consideration, but nonetheless the majority of data that is available contradicts what you're saying. IQ testing was developed in Europe/England. It tends to be Asian nations that score the highest on IQ exams. I'm not linking to any particular source here since so far as I know this is completely fundamental - any source would verify as much including the one in the post I'm responding to.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Based on the posts though, the members didn't seem any smarter than the average person on HN and the discussions were generally less interesting.
https://www.thethousand.com/
The blind typically have incredible touch for reading Braille. Some also have incredible hearing. These are not physiological benefits that they get at birth; their coping mechanisms train them.
The most mentally unhealthy people are the ones that are on the lower end, but still within what we expect to function in society.
Source sadly not being verifiable since it is my psychologist wife that works with mental health in school with intelligence testing and extra resources to help those who need it.
> While the ideal would be to individually test all participants for IQ we found no scientific data that would give reason to discredit Mensa members in any country from being representative of those with high cognitive ability.
https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0160289616303324/1-s2.0-S01602896163...
I think this entire paper is bogus, it reeks of lazyness. They did not have a control group either, they used general statistics:
> Although the national surveys would likely capture a broad range of intelligence, statistically only 2% of the national data would include those with a gifted cognitive ability such those who qualify for membership in American Mensa, Ltd.
Which is false, 2% of the population does not join mensa.
Mensa is quite smart, but I wouldn't use the word "exceptional." If you write a method that throws an exception on 2% of all inputs, I think maybe you're doing it wrong. 2% is still too common, in my opinion, to be considered an exception.
Not saying that’s true, just explaining.
What's the difference between "cognitive capacity" and "time and energy"?
I have a near photographic memoy for faces and an exceptional ability to remember details about people's lives; I have to limit the number of friends o have for precisely that reason, my cognitive capacity to care would overshadow just about everything else in life.
It’s a cognitive blind spot to assume communities you’re a part of have a higher mean intelligence than the general population :)
Simply the writing quality, grammar and sentence structure of the comments on HN would easily be enough to prove that HN readers (well, commenters) are above average.
I spend enough time glazing over headlines, stories and comments from other sites out of casual interest and I'll bet any amount of money this is true.
I like HN, but can’t see it as a social space like most forums are. (And yes I like HN for that reason too!)
Some might wonder what relevance this soap-opera-ish tale has to the stated goals of the high-IQ societies. I would argue that in order to understand what these societies are about, one should understand their history, including the very human motivations that drove their foundings.
Although I agree that depending on your circles (college anyone?) 98th %ile isn't much of a stretch. Further, not having a 2% one-sided outlier in your 30-60 person uncorrelated sample set ranges from 45-70%... but you're not likely to know it, and they're not likely to be Mensa members. Wanting to be a member, may be a bigger indicator for the disorders question.
This is one of the problems with IQ as a measure of intelligence. IQ 150 doesn’t mean doing mental arithmetic faster than IQ 100 by the same margin that IQ 100 beats IQ 50, only that IQ>150 is as rare as IQ<50.
It was bad. Really, really bad. The local chapter had a tiny handful of post-retirement members. I knew a ton of folks in my community at the time, a bunch of them were smart, active people, and none of them were members. It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test.
The newsletter was hilarious. One of them had a feature article on which was the better superhero, Batman or Superman? The article and the responses to it mostly centered around which of the fictional comic book characters had a bigger IQ. The writing was juvenile (and not because it was written by kids), and there was a regular feature that would pick some kind of trouble in the world and ask readers how they'd solve it. None of the responses ever argued from any kind of expertise or domain knowledge or offered any new insight; the theme tended to be, "well, I'm pretty smart, so this seems like an easy problem to solve..."
The discussion on HN on any given topic -- and the topics themselves for that matter -- tends to be a heck of a lot more interesting. I keep coming back here because of the people that just randomly show up in discussions who are actual experts on the topic. That doesn't really happen in Mensa.
My takeaway from that whole thing pretty much agrees with what you're saying. People who are Mensa members are members because their IQ is really important to them to an unhealthy extent. That would seem to correlate well with other psychological and physiological problems.
Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ. Researchers wanting to do further work in this area could try polling those folks too.
I've never been able to get past 4k. But from having watched a bunch of Bats go lectures on YouTube, he says (and proves) that it's possible to get well past 1d on direction of play alone without having any problem solving ability.
https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin/playlists
Maybe you're right, but my experience playing both in small local tournaments and a lot online has been that the folks 1d and above are pretty sharp generally.
Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke. ;)
I always smile at people putting that much weight into IQ numbers..
IQ is not intended to represent 'all that intelligence is'. It is simply one way to measure a cross section of particular capacities that are valuable in a modern society and are easy to test.
E.g It doesn't attempt to measure the ability to track an animal, or remember the face of a person you met once last year.
This test is of interest because it is strongly predictive of other things we do care about, like educational attainment, criminal behavior, economic outcomes, etc.
As far as I've read about it (not an expert; I've just seen this debate more than once before and tried to educate myself on the basics), that's because every time someone proposes an actual objective test for one of the "other intelligences", it turns out to either be primarily dependent on training (i.e. measuring conditioned behaviors) or to correlate so strongly with IQ that the test is effectively an IQ test.
Equally flawed, taking one outlier as evidence of something inherent.
http://tagfam.org/
The last time I had this argument in a big way with people telling me I had no clue what I was talking about, some forum I belonged to was having a heated argument because they had the habit of posting ridiculous tests, like "What kind of dog are you?", and someone had posted an online IQ test and things were getting pretty ugly (in part because a lot of people felt it was scoring them too low).
I stated up front that it likely only went up to 140, then took the test to shut people up and scored a 140. I had training in test taking in my high school gifted classes, so I tend to do well on such tests.
But, whatever.
Plus, this study doesn't care if IQ tests are a good way to rate intelligence, people who score well on them also are more likely to suffer disorders.
If we are going to discuss some correlation between supposed high IQ and various disorders, is it meaningless to talk about how one ascertains IQ and what on earth that even means?
I think it is not terribly different from asking "What color is your aura?" but I am quite sure that if I went around asking that on HN (or, you know, posting articles about auras, chakras, etc), it would be flagged to death. Yet, IQ is equally invisible. You cannot look at someone and say "brown hair, 6 feet tall, IQ of 145." That just isn't a thing.
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.
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 machines -- and IQ tests are not measurable by machines like MRIs -- the person has to read the output. How do we know they weren't high on LSD that day?
I mean, this is veering into territory of "Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly," * but I am being sincere here. I intend to step away from this particular thread because I don't think people think I am posting in good faith, or being sincere. So there is probably no good that can come from trying to further engage in discussion of a matter that I have thought a lot about and think is a serious issue.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)
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.
You could have just conceded that you jumped too far from too few data, but whatever.
Stephen Hsu argued there that Feynmans school iq test must have had a low ceiling. From what we know about the consistently high IQ scores of other incredibly bright theoretical scientists that sounds likely.
If the test administered to Feynman only went to 130, as some do, then a test score anywhere close to that, such as 125, can be assumed to have "ceilinged the test." It can be viewed as a floor for the person's IQ, a minimum score suggesting it is at least that high.
Thus, Stephen Hsu's assertion that it must have just been a bad test with a low ceiling suggests to me that Mr. Hsu knows a great deal less about IQ tests than I know, so I see no reason to defer to his opinion.
Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge, good scores in kids strongly correlate to kids coming from upper middle class families with well educated parents, etc. So I think there is quite a lot of room for saying that if you take any child and feed them excellently well, dote on them, invest a lot of parental and societal time, effort and other resources in them, they will tend to perform better than average, both on IQ tests and in life generally.
I am not just screwing with people here. I have studied the space and I think there are serious problems with talking about IQ like it is concrete, unchangeable, primarily inherited with minimal influence from environmental inputs, etc.
Thus, Stephen Hsu's assertion that it must have just been a bad test with a low ceiling suggests to me that Mr. Hsu knows a great deal less about IQ tests than I know, so I see no reason to defer to his opinion.
Maybe there is some nuance I'm missing, but those two paragraphs seem to be arguing the same point - that a 125 score was probably not accurate, but hitting the ceiling of the test? I.e. you and Hsu agree. Here is Hsu's full quotation (never said "bad").
To understand this score we have to remember that typical IQ tests (e.g., administered to public school children) tend to have low ceilings. They are not of the kind that Roe used in her study. One can imagine that the ceiling on Feynman's exam was roughly 135 (say, 99th percentile). If Feynman received the highest score on the mathematical portion, and a modest score of 115 on the verbal, we can easily understand the resulting average of 124.
I elaborated some on my mental model in this paragraph:
Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge, good scores in kids strongly correlate to kids coming from upper middle class families with well educated parents, etc. So I think there is quite a lot of room for saying that if you take any child and feed them excellently well, dote on them, invest a lot of parental and societal time, effort and other resources in them, they will tend to perform better than average, both on IQ tests and in life generally.
Part of what I am arguing is that we make up a measurement that validates that our "best" people -- like well educated, well heeled white males -- are best because they have this innate quality called high IQ and then we channel the "smart kids" from "good homes" into classes that cause them to test well.
The mental model that some kids are inherently more deserving of investment at school because they are smarter and do better than other kids winds up being self-fulfilling prophesy. Sort of like redlining of Black neighborhoods was self-fulfilling prophesy, causing Blacks to remain poor and their neighborhoods to remain not worth investing in by banks.
So, hopefully that clarifies it for you because I already said I am stepping away from this discussion.
Adieu.
And I imagine I will regret saying that, but I can't see letting that stand and saying nothing.
Hsu said there was a ceiling on the test, you said he was wrong, there was a ceiling on the test, and IQ is flawed.
The only trouble with your theory is that IQ actually does a very good job of predicting how well members of various minorities will do in life. Half a century you could argue the cultural bias hypothesis but it no longer flies. The tests have been updated and taking "culturally biased" questions out actually made minority scores go down (possibly due to lower G loading on those questions).
> The mental model that some kids are inherently more deserving of investment at school because they are smarter
Of course the test would be "what is the marginal benefit of education to this person" a very different question from what is their IQ level.
You just seem to be making stuff up to fit your ideological preconceptions.
To add to all the other criticisms of IQ score, it’s defined to be mean-100-σ-15* — so nobody has an IQ of over 197, and only newborn anenephalactics ever score as low az IQ 3… and perhaps not even then if they score the same as the comatose.
* or σ-16, which changes the subsequent statements a little.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution
I regret I can’t find anything on Bing but the below but Google’s blocked where I am.
https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2014/10/13/fat-tailed-and-...
There are some other cases where it is generally thought that the distribution is normal, but it is not (in real samples). IQ has too many people in both far ends and has a different shaped tail on the right and left (the maximum is 200 or so, but the minimum is about 40). Weight of adults also has too many in the right tail and is not fully symmetric, but its right tail is also long (unlike that for IQ).
> When current IQ tests were developed, the median raw score of the norming sample is defined as IQ 100 and scores each standard deviation (SD) up or down are defined as 15 IQ points greater or less,
IQ itself — not intelligence or even score on an IQ test — is by definition not fat tailed. If a particular IQ test doesn’t produce a normal distribution, that test is wrong.
At least, wrong by the current standard definition of IQ; there have been others, and the very fact that it is flawed means there probably will be a new one in future.
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
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.
Popular culture stereotypes autists as being highly intelligent.
The very existence of autism calls into question our historical conceptualization of intelligence and IQ testing.
I have two ASD sons. They are very bright. They also have some serious personal struggles.
So, which is it? Does IQ measure general competence or does it measure something else? Because this latest twist in the conversation seems just ridiculous.
>Does IQ measure general competence or does it measure something else?
It's an Intelligence Quotient. It measures intelligence. No one said anything about "general competence", whatever that even means. I imagine intelligence is an important part of "general competence" though.
You are contradicting yourself.
We cannot measure intelligence, since we cant even define it properly (in a way that we attach a measurement unit ot it).
Why do you assume that's cause and not effect?
I'm not sure I'd say flawed so much as I'd say myopic. Which is absolutely still a flaw, but a very specific one that allows you to contextualize the results of an IQ test rather than discard them as worthless. IQ measures a subset of human intelligence pretty effectively, but misses the bigger picture. There's large parts of human intelligence that can't be measured using a test like that. A test can only provide stimuli for the mind and measure its reaction over the short period of time while taking the test. Among other things, it can't measure long-term recall or the ability to rehearse/learn information and skills over time, both qualities people would naturally associate with intelligence.
It's our need to have a single spectrum from mental retardation to genius-level that's led us to try to create a test which assigns a number to intelligence. But intelligence is multidimensional and an IQ test just fills in some of those dimensions.
Then for baseball players, everyhing changes.
Intelligence or smart are low-information, high-emotional-signalling terms. It means more about social status than anything else. Everyone has a mix of abilities. Some of the best engineers are terrible writers. Some are incompetent fathers (Steve Jobs). Some people are great at consuming and regurgitating a lot of info, but bad at original/critical thought. Some who would thrive in one life circumstance may struggle in another.
Academically, IQ is supposed to correlate with g, general intelligence. In other words，we're just creatures making up nonsense terms to, at face value, signal about ability, but it's often more of a social construct.
The vocabulary battery would seem to measure long term memorization ability. It actually correlates with IQ better than any other test. Also SAT tests are often used as a proxy for IQ because they correlate so well with it.
>It's our need to have a single spectrum from mental retardation to genius-level that's led us to try to create a test which assigns a number to intelligence. But intelligence is multidimensional and an IQ test just fills in some of those dimensions.
No, it's not. Please learn what you are talking about. It was once believed that intelligence was multidimensional. But then scientists realized all those different dimensions correlated amazingly well. E.g. people with better memory were much more likely to be better at puzzle solving. And a single factor, g, could explain most of the variance. IQ tests try to measure g, which is very predictive of general cognitive ability.
That understates it. The SAT is an IQ test, strenuously as the College Board May deny it. The test was originally the scholastic aptitude test and results from it correlate with other IQ tests just as well as results from IQ tests correlate with each other.
If anybody reading wants to know more about the broad field of which IQ is a small part the Wikipedia article on psychometrics is quite good.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics
IQ definitely matters. The average IQ of physics majors is like 2 standard deviations above average for instance. Suggesting some fields are very selective of IQ and low IQ people are much less likely to be able to do them.
1. There will be a number of comments saying IQ is outright meaningless.
2. There will be a comment saying Feynman only had an IQ of whatever it was.
Never fails.
Anyway, as I've said here before, Feynman's books are primarily collections of stories. What's presented in them was selected to maximize the impact and entertainment value of the story. And Feynman was very, very good at storytelling.
I am very leery of the power of IQ tests to justify entrenching The Haves and Have Nots. Our mental models have scary amounts of power to shape outcomes and this mental model seems to justify classism as a kind of manifest destiny.
One of the videos linked here in reply to me has some smart authority figure type asserting that university students all have IQs above average. That seems pretty well tautological to me. One would hope that those getting more schooling would do better on tests. But that fails to genuinely prove that what these tests measure is some fundamental personal trait unrelated to the fabric of your life experience.
I was homeless for nearly six years. A lot of people wanted to see me as stupid and incompetent during that time. Those classist perceptions helped deny me opportunities which helped keep me poor which helped deny me opportunities. I can never seem to get that across to well off people that their tautologies simply entrench class based outcomes and really say nothing about personal competence.
When we design a world that closes doors to people arbitrarily, we design a world that actively wastes human potential. This makes all of us the poorer.
Look, no one is saying your individual IQ test is the only thing that matters. There is random error on tests, and it's not like intelligence is the only thing that matters in a person. But if you go around denying that it exists at all, you are just spreading pseudoscience.
I am trying to do some things to bring down those barriers. I was able to start making some earned income online while homeless. My lack of nice clothes or a recent shower did not matter. I am trying to foster that model as a thing that can help protect against sliding into homelessness, help you scrape by while on the street and be something that can help build a future that won't be taken away because you got better. Plus, it is not a homeless service, is open to anyone interested.
http://independentdigitalworkers.blogspot.com/
I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class. I got a lot of brainwashing that I was destined for greatness etc. It didn't go down that way. So I think these mental models are mostly propaganda and we need to guard against that.
With regard to your last statement, here's a (very) vaguely related post from Penelope Trunk who also writes about aspberger's and life. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/12/01/living-up-to-your-p...
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.
> Restriction of range, such as floor and ceiling effects or selection effects, reduce the power of the experiment, and increase the chance of a type II error.[5] This is because correlations are attenuated (weakened) by reduced variability
If you want to try this for yourself, try generating some fake SAT scores: (a,b) pairs where a and b are normally distributed with mean 500 and sd 100, and where a and b correlate at about 0.8.
Then, from your unbiased data set, select all the pairs for which 1600 >= a + b >= 1300, and check the correlation of a with b in the new, smaller data set.
Just examining this as a thought experiment, you can see that someone with an 800 math score might have a verbal score anywhere from 500 to 800. If we lower the math score, our expectation for the verbal score rises -- someone with a 600 math score will have a verbal score between 700 and 800. That is the basis of the negative correlation in the subgroup, but it's purely an artifact of the way we chose to label data points as being in or out of the subgroup.
Saying that there's lots of great chess players with low IQ doesn't mean the two things are not correlated
For some actual numbers, see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307874653_The_relat...
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 additional college degrees. These other ways tend to result in real world achievement, like better jobs. CEOs and the like don't seem to spend a lot of time trying to get their smarts validated. They are too busy getting their business model validated.
So, I tend to see Mensa the same way you do: It primarily appeals to people who need validation they are incapable of getting via other avenues, such as pursuing their Master's or PhD.
IQ might help you understand a subject better, but being focused, studying, planning, and having the motivation is what gets you degrees.
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.
What did you mean by "smarts", if not "intelligence", "competence" or "IQ"?
An organization declaring you to be one of the smart people may feel good, but it doesn't make it true. And it is generally more useful if the people stamping off on the idea that you are smart are issuing a degree in the process.
That's just not true, even with the edit. Certainly high intelligence by itself isn't sufficient, but you're not going to find many physics PhDs with a 90 IQ.
I'd bet that physics PHDs get there with persistence, enthusiasm, and money. Intelligence barriers may not stand in there way but I don't think they're the determining factor.
But this could be said for all intellectual achievement. I would go further, and say there are no geniuses, only acts of genius. Perhaps one person "could have done" it quicker than another... but the important achievement is that someone actually did do it.
I'm doing a double degree in elec engg and math, but I'm stupid as fuck and likely not going anywhere in life. (not being "falsely modest", I'm really struggling through my degree)
edit: I guess I should mentioned that I'm very close to finishing my degrees
Maybe not even that. I don't know if it's still true, but Mensa used to accept anybody with a PhD. I used to know a not-at-all-brilliant woman who was a Mensa member by virtue of her doctorate in Library Science.
You know the sort, love online debates about bikesheds, but can't seem to make anything happen in the real world.
But hey, to each their own. And if it reduces the density of people I’d rather avoid everywhere else, expand Mensa with gusto.
My take on it was that people who were active members had a chip on their shoulder about their intelligence, and believed themselves to be titans who were not obligated to suffer fools. There are many intelligent people in this world, the vast majority of whom are not in Mensa - and the better for it.
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.
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).
The birds of a feather approach to connecting people is great when it’s based around an interest or activity, but not when it’s solely based on some crude 21st century approximation of what too many people equate with human value.
Why not just have events based around particle physics if that’s your interest? Oh that’s right, they do.
The point is why rule people out who’s IQ is one point below a cut off that may turn out to be your most interesting conversation or new best friend.
Nothing against those here who have applied. I know there are just different perspectives on it and many view it as benign.
For instance, the largest mood disorder was anxiety. Let me recast anxiety as "overly caring". An anxious person may work 3x as hard at a presentation or an exam.
I don't want to glamorize mental disorders, but I think this might not be a coincidental connection.
I don't think recognition that there are blessings with every curse is glamorizing it.
Moving past that, the bad outcome found and your obvious good outcomes aren't incompatible. They could be more likely to be successful and suffer from disorders.
Something like the old saying about "ignorance being bliss".
<edit>On actually reading the article it suggests something like this.</edit>
"Genius" is defined by thinking differently. Should we be surprised if that has negative consequences, like not fitting in socially?
This is really old hat and adds nothing new whatsoever. If you are interested, there are plenty of existing resources to help you explore this topic.
Where is everyone taking these IQ tests? In my entire life I've never come across one in the wild, just SAT, GRE, etc.
Then again, when I got to uni I was classed with people who scored way higher than I did and they were... I dunno, "intelligent" but not "smart". I didn't see any correlation between entry exam scores and subsequent performance.
As I got older I realized I'm not actually smarter than other people, I was just a little ahead, and the false belief that I am somehow exceptionally clever was damaging in a number of ways.
My brother on the other hand was treated like a genius from an early age and was never really forced to work hard. Even when he failed, there was reasoning that he was just too gifted and he was bored and never really had to learn how to truly apply himself or grow. My dad gave him a job and eventually gave him his company when he retired that he ran into the ground. He lived with my parents until he was over 30 and now approaching 50 he still struggles with keeping a job.
I think about the two of us and how we were both led astray by our adults thinking they already knew what we were capable of. What you say about your experience being damaging really resonates to me even if I'm coming from the opposite side of things. I feel like I got extremely lucky that my particular set of experiences even if they were tough to live through allowed me to land on my feet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
I'm not surprised if people are tested in grade school, but I suspect running into them outside of research after your school years is rare.
If you're ugly, depressed, have an anxiety disorder, a personality disorder, or anything else that precludes you from engaging with other people and participating normally in "real life", you're going to spend more time resorting to escapism. If your form of escapism is something that contributes to a marketable skill later in life, and you engage in it from a very early age, then I think that this would correlate with a higher IQ, depending on the tests administered. Things like reading (books or the internet), videogames (certain ones), music, art, math, and programming of course.
So,my theory is that people prone to developing mental disorders tend to also get encouragement from their parents and community to seek academic intellectual success. I believe 80%(guesstimate) of "IQ" is a result of the individual working out their brain.
It's that really true? It doesn't ring true to my experience (which, in general terms, is born in the late 70s in Australia)
Although in some cultures I have seen,academic success and getting certain types of jobs is heavily encouraged by most parents and communities. I have also seen at least some US cultures that encourage extreme athleticism (sports scholarships and all)
"For those few months, I morphed into an antisocial grump who shunned all distraction and became deeply immersed in my craft. All I thought about was computer code; I could barely speak in coherent English sentences except during my weekly progress meetings with Margo. Even though I appeared and acted subhuman (i.e., an unshaven disheveled mess), my emotional state was blissful. I was programming and debugging for over ten hours per day, but my mind was quite relaxed since my technical skills were well-calibrated for the challenges I faced."
> my emotional state was blissful
There was a huge disconnect between how happy I was and how I behaved and appeared. I gained 50+ pounds, lost normal hygiene, essentially only ate peanut butter, became nocturnal, and more or less didn't leave my apartment. My advisor was pretty explicit in their concern about my mental health, but, looking back, I was really happy.
I wonder how much of this mental illness : high IQ association is simply being obsessed with what you're working on?
[0] http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind_2012-07-16.pdf
The other thing is that the first test that gave rise to the concept of IQ tests was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness for rural French children who often did not have birth certificates, so age could not be used as an indicator of school readiness. The problem was complicated by the fact that rural kids and city kids had different experiences that left the rural children less equipped to cope with the school environment. City kids were more likely to have already participated in preschool, among other things. So, there was a cultural divide.
The idea that some people are simply innately smarter is something that is very much debatable. IQ tests are highly influenced by deep cultural knowledge that is typically available to cultural "insiders." In the US, this is typically upper class and upper middle whites.
If an American takes a British or Canadian IQ test, they will tend to perform more poorly and show as having a lower IQ than on American tests, even though these are all English speaking countries. The effect gets worse if you are taking it in a second language. But it still exists even if it is merely a different culture, not a different language.
Google Raven Progressive Matrices, there are accurate IQ tests are not associated with any culture
If smartness is genetical and I'm born with it, then the disorder should have been present from the get go. But for me, these diagnosis only appeared when I got richer: First, I had fewer issues to worry about (like bills or rent to pay). Second, I'm more self-aware.
Imagine you are standing. You have a serious injury bleeding on your left hand. I put a hot metal to your right one. Do you feel the hot metal burn? Nah, you are too distracted by the serious injury.
Now if you have no injury, then you feel the burn. Smart people are usually successful financially. It means they don't worry about what other people worry about (rent, bills, food, etc...). So instead they focus on other stuff like does life really make any sense.
That, and this is the first time I hear about Mensa. Maybe I'm not that smart.
Researchers say that "superior IQ" also correlates with lower-income and higher achievement, but greater happiness. The question of what IQ actually signifies is a good one.
Maybe we should create some more competing metrics to study...Who knows what the data will find?
An even distribution is what’s needed.