IQ Tests test how good you are at completing IQ tests… The fact this guy can max out the scores and then lead a fairly average if unusual life just shows the limitation of IQ Tests as a predictor of later achievements - I guess it’s OK to live your life how you choose to
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I posit that intelligence is so broadly defined and so relative with respect to time/place/culture/etc that it really doesn’t make sense to quantify it with standardized tests. What you describe would be one type of intelligence, but it is not the only one. The trouble with IQ isn’t with the tests themselves, but with how they are used. Labeling individuals according to some arbitrary metric and judging them based on that label is kind of a shitty thing to do, but that’s all these tests are used for.
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He reminds me of Lazlo Hollyfeld from Real Genius!
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Same. I think IQ tests are complete shit though. That doesn’t mean that this guy isn’t extremely brilliant or anything. I just hate those tests.
I would guess that higher intelligence slightly increases your ability to figure shit out, and thus gives you a slight survival advantage (though probably increases your risk taking).
Please don’t go on about how it’s wasted potential. I don’t know about this guy, but I can vouch for the fact that testing with exceptional scores on some test that asks you to execute a set of instructions for some carefully researched but painfully biased bunch of puzzles doesn’t do damned thing to keep horrible things from happening to you, nor does it do anything about your emotional well being, or how you feel when interacting socially.
No one asks for their body. This includes the brain. Every life has some wasted potential. Sometimes you just have to sit back and be happy you are alive (which is pretty hard at times).
Really, no one owes anyone anything though because of how they look or how their brains work. Or if they do, no one owes anything more than anyone else.
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He writes for a living. Probably a pretty good living. That’s a pretty big accomplishment. Wasted potential is something more along the lines of “had a lot of great ideas that he never followed through on, then he jumped off a bridge.” Seems like he did O K.
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Well, looking in the footnotes of his wikipedia page, I see that he has a habit of submitting “physics articles” as advertisements to Variety.
Rosner, Rick. Advertisements, Daily Variety: "Gravitation is relativistically attenuated", January 22, 1986, p. 10; "Mach's Principle applies to gravitation", January 26, 1986, p. 30; "In a universe containing only two objects, the objects wouldn't be gravitationally attracted to each other", February 2, 2007.Google is failing me at the moment so I don't know about the content, but the method sounds incredibly cranky.
I’d say any intelligence test worth a damn has to include multiple intelligences and not give a single score, but rather give you an idea of the shape of your intelligence set:
A number of these skills are not really considered to be markers intelligence in the same way, but they could be a lot more useful for getting what you want in life. It might also help not to put a score on it, as that gives people much more of an idea that they are better than others or generally have more potential, which is a) not necessarily true and b) not really useful.
I think productivity/success/happiness is probably going to be very culturally relative, and your score will take a big hit if you are a minority, or your skills are not valued in a culture, or you’re just not given the same opportunities as others.
I usually score pretty highly on these intelligence tests, but never performed as well in exams. (I actually heard from a classmate a few years later that when I first joined the school, the class was told that they were going to get a new classmate who was very intelligent - “but you’re not that smart, are you?” (I have no idea why they were told this, but I must have done well in the entrance exam)). I was later told by two different teachers that languages would be too difficult for me, but I’m doing pretty well as a translator now. I think a lot has to do with the environment you’re in, and high school really isn’t a good way of judging whether someone will be successful later in life.
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it’s unfortunately not true. IQ scores correlate positively with all kinds of desirable things, from the “important” to the mundane to the trivial.
yes, of course, any single continuous scale will be far from complete (in particular, it’s very useless in the self-improvement department), but to say it “means literally nothing else” is just poppycock.
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intelligence is the ability to figure shit out, and that’s what i have a problem with. i would happily sacrifice all of your other desiderata for 20 points of IQ. hell, i’d mutilate myself with a rusty razor if it would help.
Well, I didn’t mean that he has accomplished nothing. It’s just if IQ tests really did measure intelligence, then he could have done much better than game show litigation and writing for bad comedy TV.
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What does intelligence mean to you? You don’t think we live in a meritocracy, do you?
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Huh, last time I took an IQ test the result was on the low end of a signed int.
thanks folks, I’ll be here all week
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Really, no one owes anyone anything though because of how they look or how their brains work. Or if they do, no one owes anything more than anyone else.
Or for any other reason, presumably. So, I’m just wondering, you wouldn’t consider a suicide as “wasted potential”, right? I mean, no one owes anyone anything, so there’s nothing wrong with it, right?
Sweet Jeezus.
3 years of high school was way more than I was able to handle.
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Most of the “done much better stuff”, like research or whatever, he was probably too smart for. You’ve got to be a very specific kind of stupid to think that stuff is a good idea for basing a life around something like that, considering how the people who do tend to end up!
Alternately, he could have done what a great many other smart people have done, and dedicated himself to screwing others over for his own benefit - gone into finance or some other con-artist game, come up with some tricksy new banking mortgages and ways to beat the market. He have been wealthy (“done much better”?), but it doesn’t seem like he would have been happy.
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In my field, it would be some combination of the capacity for creative thought, logical problem solving, the ability to quickly and/or thoroughly process information, being able to deal with high levels of abstraction, being able to retain knowledge, and probably a bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten to include. In general, intelligence is so hard to even conceptualize that I can keep adding on to the above list almost indefinitely.
Not really sure what the meritocracy dig was for, since IQ tests are, at worst, a tool for promoting discrimination and entrenching existing power structures. To put it another way: our society is not a meritocracy and IQ tests aren’t making it more like one.
How do they end up? Based on the people I know, they mostly end up living long, fulfilling lives, while doing something they love.
I’m also not really sure why your only alternative involves making money. Seems like there are quite a few other things a very smart person could do.
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hmmm 10 years of high school actually sounds a bit creepy like that Matthew McConhohey character in dazed and confused. "That’s what i like about these high school chicks, I get older and they stay the same age’
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Ah, the well-adjusted, middle-class dream, which many people with potential can miss out on while still having a decent life, which apparently doesn’t include writing jokes for a living for a successful TV show. After all, Jimmy Kimmel Live doesn’t meet your criteria for good, so no good lives could be associated with it, and no smarts could go into the making of it.
If you disagree with the concept of “smart” or “genius”, fine, but if you posit a hypothetical potential and instead measure just desserts by (fairly unrealistic) outcomes, you’ve created a tautological idea of … potential<=>success<=>potential … with a similarly fundamental problem to the institution of single-number IQ-testing.
First off, +1 for intelligent use of nested parentheticals.
Next, that’s really fucked up.
Third and last, and longest, intelligence and smarts and cleverness and all of it changes fluidly over time and is not fixed at birth. Sure, there are some biological predispositions to intelligence. But I know that when you want to apply yourself to something, whatever it might be, you can fucking do it. I have friends who not only know tons of lyrics to songs, but have developed the ability to memorize them FAST. Plus, they can mix and munge the lyrics and tunes all sorts of ways, at will. That’s a level of intelligence that I do not possess. Although I can carry a tune, due to lots of time spent singing and playing the piano. But put those people in front of a dataset and they are lost. That’s where I come in. My ability to look at raw data and manipulate it into something useful is very high. But I wasn’t born with that! I had to develop it and work for it. So I just don’t think these IQ tests are worth all that. The guy in this article is probably very fucking smart. He’s also a dumbass for spending 10 years in high school. But I totally understand because I fucked off until I was well into my 30’s and I fully admit, like he did that I’m a dumbass about a lot of stuff. Don’t fuck with me about data, though: I’ll have your head.
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