Re:Study suggests that the “brain training” industry may be ...
by MagnumOpus on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @03:17AM
(#11944016)
> Richard Feynman had an IQ of 125.
Likely mismeasured. He won the Putnam mathematics competition with a stunning margin without preparation. He reportedly had the highest scores ever on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. Both of these are reliable indicators of an IQ above 145, probably by a good bit. (And this is if you ignore the dozens/hundreds of theoretical physics professors who thought of him as the fastest thinker among them, and one of the deepest.)
Re:Study suggests that the “brain training” industry may be ...
by wallace_f on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @07:58AM
(#11945027)
Well, when we get obvious deviations between IQ and g (the thing IQ is stated in the academic literature as what it's trying to measure) some will say that the IQ test was administered incorrectly. Some will say that IQ tests aren't perfect.
IQ tests are probably both not perfect and administered incorrectly (often enough).
I think it's an almost meaningless number unless we're talking about very large groups of individuals, and there's a lot of evidence and theory to support that.
I view intelligence as like this: in training camps for professional American football, prospective players perform physical tests: 40 yard dash, bench press reps, etc., and scouts for pro teams take note, because the results of those tests are correlated with actual professional performance. However, sometimes the guy that had no impressive stats becomes a stand out player, and sometimes the guy with amazing stats never amounts to much. Richard Feynman had an IQ of 125. JD Salinger had an IQ of slightly above average, and the guy with the highest recorded IQ worked as a bouncer for 20 years and hasn't accomplished anything intellectually ground breaking or significant in life.
Maybe cognitive tests have some correlation with what psychometricians call 'g,' general intelligence, but you're either naive, conceited, misinformed, or just plain stupid to think IQ is a meaningful number within the scope of an individual. Judging someone's intelligence is probably more complex than someone's athletic ability, and it's already not hard to see how ridiculous we're becoming when we ask: who is the best athlete: Usain Bolt or Peyton Manning? It is nothing more than a trait of the human mind that as a product of us defining important concepts such as athleticism and intelligence, we then, of course, desire to place ordinal ranking to answer the next obvious question: what is the most athletic, the most intelligence -- it is in an attempt of the human mind's desire to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of ourselves and the people around us; it is not done to understand reality.