RE: Infantilized Yale students meltdown
debeguiled said:
Being high I.Q. does not automatically translate into high wisdom. If you have fifty minutes to spare, check out this doc on the highest I.Q. guy in the world.
Check out his life choices.
First, IQ tests can be noisy after 145-160 or so. However, that means they cover 99.73% to 99.99%+ (two-sided, to account for IQs of 55-40 or less) of the population quite well. If I have a 6'6" tape measure, I can measure almost all people in a population quite accurately and consistently, but the measurement noise increases as a function of a subject being increasingly taller than 6'6".
Secondly, people who take IQ tests as adults tend to be self-selected to be a bit peculiar for various reasons (many times it's at the encouragement of psychologists to help figure out what kind of crazy they are). Most people don't take IQ tests ever, much less as adults.
However, people take standardized tests like the SAT and GRE, which correlate well with IQ, so we can proxy from that.
For instance, Terrence Tao or Elon Musk have never taken an IQ test to my knowledge, but even from their achievements aside, we know their IQ must be quite high since Tao got 760 on the SAT math as a 9 year-old, and Elon Musk got into the Physics PhD program at Stanford (so almost certainly hit the Quant ceiling on the GRE).
That Rosner guy almost surely does not have the highest IQ in the world.
Thirdly, high-IQ people (or just other people in general of any IQ) may not care for our arbitrary evaluations of their life choices. Tao could definitely make more money (a lot more money) doing things other than academic mathematics, but he likes what he does.
Zelcorpion said:
I had a friend who was in the 150+ range (done with a test that maxed out at 155 - most others now are being done with open-end tests) and he had to repeat class due to his dyslexia and the fact that he was a lazy bum. Mathematics came easily to him - he could derive complex mathematical formulas in his head.
I was tested in the 140+ range, but could not do this. Of course I easily was the best in class since I studied a lot back then and was a muscular nerd (with no pussy though). Later I also found out that another female classmate was in the 140 range as well. We all did not know because her achievements were so utterly unimpressive. Also much later in life I found out that women usually require way higher IQ and effort to operate at levels that men with lower IQs can easily master. I also met actual geniuses and the difference between 140 and a genius is staggering, though in some cases the genius was a semi-autistic woman with zero social skills. Her ability to calculate high mathematical formulas simply had no bearing on everyday life. Others used their gifts better like this one guy who made 500.000$ doing odd-ball projects for corporations in his mid 20s. The most successful friend I have has an IQ in the high 120s and his mind was in constant heavy utilization with no 2 months left slacking off (he essentially has the same memory capacity as when he was 16). His social skills are off-the-charts and he will probably be one of the youngest VPs and potentially CEOs in the corporate pharma history.
In life there is always someone smarter, but IQs should not limit one too much in terms of what you can achieve. There are famous millionaire celebrities now with IQs at 85 or lower and there are a few homeless people in the 140+ range.
The number of people with IQs in the 120-130 cohort outnumber that of the 140-Infinity cohort about 18 to 1. Your most "successful" friend having an IQ "only" in the 120s means little.
Chris Paul has had a much better NBA career than Gerald Green, but the average 6'8" high school senior basketball player with a 36" vertical almost surely has a brighter basketball future ahead of him as a prospect than the 6'0" H.S. player who can barely dunk. And if we are sampling groups of such prospects... no contest. Also, the former prospect is much rarer than the latter, by hundreds or thousands to 1.
On under-85 IQ millionaires, IQ is not perfectly correlated with income--there are vocations where success/income may not be that tightly correlated with IQ. Sports, performance arts, climbing the corporate ladder in HR, etc. Furthermore, under-85 IQ people outnumber the 140-Infinity cohort about 41 to 1.
On women,
bitches on the right-tail of IQ are still pretty basic. Men are "nerdier," on average. However, on the flip-side, low-IQ women are less destructive than low-IQ men when it comes to crime and violence, and more able to hold down menial jobs.
IQ does not guarantee anything, but it's a very strong predictor between individuals. Between groups of individuals, its predictive ability approaches 100%.
IQ is so effective as a predictor in predicting life outcomes that other variables in economics, psychology, and sociology often disappear once IQ, and/or the heritability of IQ, is accounted for. It's over-powered like Mewtwo and Mew were in Pokemon Red/Blue, making other variables/Pokemon inconsequential. Mewtwo and Mew are generally banned from competitive tournaments, and similarly, IQ is generally discouraged from economics/psychology/sociology publications.
