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Weird to read over the Twitter threads like “I just can’t believe all these historical figures reputed as great geniuses had IQs as high as 140”, because like, I test around 175. People can be smart! Someone’s gonna be the long tail.
If you had an IQ of 175, that would mean that you were 5 standard deviations from the mean – which is not impossible, but would mean that you were one of the smartest 2300 or so people in the world.\u00a0
I am somewhat skeptical of this. Partially out of a sense that I find it more likely that I am talking to someone who would tell implausible lies about their IQ than that I am talking to someone with an IQ of 175. Partially out of a sense that I just think that you would probably be more notable in other ways if you were really that smart.\u00a0I was enough of an outlier they were concerned with the test’s validity so they retested me with a few others with different methodologies, they all came back between 174 and 178. They told me that put me somewhere between a 2 in a million people level and 1 in 2 (so that’d be between about 15,000 and 4,000 people on earth).
This was 2nd grade but I’d take one occasionally later and it was still on track.
You think you’d have heard of me, huh? How many of the other 2299 can you name? Like I said, someone’s gotta be the long tail.
Being the best at taking IQ tests doesn’t mean you have all the skills to be successful
Yeah, that’s a good point, until the personality change I was also significantly limited by an anxiety disorder, an influence on outcomes and place in the world totally independent of intelligence.
You have to take another test, for science!
As a little kid, I tested at “we can’t give you a number, the test doesn’t work that way”, which cashes out to “well, not less than 170”, as an autistic adult with severe ADHD and subclinical but noticeable dyslexia, I think I usually test in the 140-150 range? I’ve done a couple for curiousity or as part of trying to get all the challenges diagnosed.
And… it turns out that being ludicrously “smart” is actually a very small portion of what you need to get by in life. If you’re very smart but you can’t feed yourself on a regular basis without help, that actually doesn’t work out great.
That said, I think we’re all glad I’m not highly motivated and capable, because I don’t think I’d be one of the good ones if I were. Not saying I’m one of the good ones now, exactly, just… If I were highly motivated and capable, I don’t think the question would even remotely be on the table.
Being weak in other ways has made me a lot less contemptuous of other people.
“you would probably be more notable in other ways if you were really that smart”
i haven’t taken a proper iq test in a while so i don’t know where i score but i did grow up hanging out with mensans. y'know, the top 98th percentile and up club? my grandpa and a close friend’s mom were in mensa so they’d bring us to weekend gatherings to see each other. spent a lot of time running wild in hotels, but as we got older we hung out with the attendees and went to the talks and presentations more often.
sooo i can say with authority that having a super-high iq is neither as obvious nor as impressive as most people think. sure, a lot of these people had pretty impressive jobs, but in their off hours they ranged from Just People to….and i say this with love….pretty goddamn dysfunctional.
grandpa kept getting elected to be in charge of things because he was one of the only mensans with like. organizational skills.
but yeah, if you meet a genius just on the street, you’ll probably have no idea.
Yeah. There’s a lot of possible confounding factors.
Raw processing speed doesn’t keep you from falling for ridiculously stupid conspiracy theories, for instance – it actually makes you more vulnerable to them, because your brain will be better at offering excuses and justifications for continuing to hold an obviously wrong position.
It’s easy to have disabilities that don’t prevent you from doing well on tests, but absolutely make it harder to be successful.
Lots of people who can think brilliantly don’t.
I know a person that I have no doubt at all is at least three standard deviations out in the “smart” direction. Looks at problems that would take me an hour and says they’re obvious.
One time, they were bitching about how much they hate showering, because water gets in their eyes and its awful. And I thought about it a bit and concluded that I mostly face away from the water so it doesn’t go in my eyes, and they said they didn’t think that would work.
And what that means is, they had not tried that. Do you know what they had tried?
Absolutely. Fucking. Nothing.
They had, however, spent ten years hating showering intensely and thinking it was a source of stress, pain, and depression that they had to do it regularly, because it was miserably unpleasant.
And in all that time, it had simply never occurred to them that they could, in any way at all, take actions in response to this. One time I suggested they try baths to see if they liked that better. Guess what else they’d literally never even considered.
Being good at solving problems doesn’t mean you automatically realize that you can make the connection from “I’m suffering” to “this is a problem I could try to solve”.
Meanwhile, anyone whose family started out with $millions will probably automatically be “successful”. You can be a complete fucking idiot and be widely recognized as a Tech Genius because you’re rich enough to buy success, or because people keep throwing money at you anyway. It doesn’t matter if everyone who’s ever worked with you says that any successes that happened were despite your incompetence; if you’re rich you can probably buy a reputation as a genius, if that’s what you want.
The idea that being smart makes you hugely successful is, frankly, total nonsense. This isn’t to say it has no impact, just that the impact is not going to be nearly as large as the impact of other things, in general.
Luck is a bigger factor than either intelligence or hard work. Our cultural mythos of hard-working people making it big because of their hard work, or geniuses getting rich off their inventions, is actually very, very, rarely what happens. But it’s a great tool for getting people to think that if they’re suffering, it’s because of their flaws, not because the game was rigged.
It\u2019s also iirc a bit easier to be in the top percent of little kids, since presumably some child dunces just aren\u2019t through growing yet. If you pull yourself together early there\u2019s a clear field. Later they catch up.
the only thing a well above average iq got me is a lot of depression and people looking absolutely baffled at me when I could do some maths in my head.
But yeah once you get past a certain level the big problem is that you start to have certain assumptions that get locked in and you’ll VERY MUCH look to justify never questioning or changing them. I had to WORK at fixing that, repeatedly, because it’s just far too easy to do it.
And for me, the healthiest thing I ever did was to realize that I am far from the norm. Strangely, the idea that I AM strange is very comforting when I deal with people who are very different from myself.
IQ tests nothing but how well you match the design of that specific IQ test, they don’t measure intelligence, ability or knowledge, just if your education has been calibrated on the same framework as the test. IQ as a concept is a relic of american eugenics and has no merit and will never have merit.
I’m not sure how well the scale is calibrated \u2013 is someone with 150 IQ really twice as much smarter than someone 110 as someone 140 is from someone 120? \u2013 but of people I’ve in-personally known whose IQs I learned, the rank order of the scores has always turned out to match my previous individual assessment of the rank order of their intelligence.
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