I think it's a huge mistake to compare the life of Richard Feynman and the results of an IQ test and think "huh, maybe he wasn't that smart."

Richard Feynman was obviously brilliant, based on any measure of real life impact you can imagine. Meanwhile, an IQ test is just something we made up.

The only reasonable approach to this set of data is to conclude that IQ is not as good as we wish at actually measuring intelligence.

I see IQ measurements as a rough estimate of certain cognitive skills that have some predictive ability of how well you will fare in solving classical school problems.

The pattern recognition skills that most IQ tests ask are fairly similar to solving a lot of exam questions. But they're only a part of the skillset that you need to become a great physicist.

If Feynman had prepared for an IQ test I bet he could have made it to 160. The kinds of patterns you see on IQ tests can be trained. But it's not a particularly interesting pursuit. I've personally done a professional IQ test and reached 130 while in university. Because in school you're training similar kind of problems regularly. I'm sure if I did an IQ test now I wouldn't even get close to 130, because I don't do exam questions regularly anymore. I also can't quote any successes similar to Mr. Feynman, so I doubt this is meaningful.

What IQ doesn't measure is curiosity. It doesn't measure how well you connect disparate disciplines. It doesn't measure how ready you are to upset the status quo. And if I read Feynman's book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" correctly (great read btw), it was these things that actually made him think about physics problems from a different perspective.

Well first off, 120 is very smart. I don't see how saying that suggests he wasn't highly intelligent. My only point is that there's a reasonable case to be made that his contributions had more to do with how he acted, his personality, his drive, etc., than just with being born smarter than everyone. I really dislike the notion of "genius"; because I think it gives people an excuse to never develop themselves or to be happy with whatever intellectual plateau they've reached. Whenever I hear someone say "well so and so was a genius" I always feel like there's an unstated but implicit message of "so why bother?"

Usage of Feynman's official IQ score as some sort of 'proof' of anything is often overused.

I don't have the exact citation but it is fairly well documented that he scored well on other very challenging tests that correlate strongly with IQ (not to mention his actual career accomplishments).

Needless to say, people bandying around his score on this one test as evidence that he was 'bright but not in a high IQ' way is disingenuous or ill-informed, to say the least.

I could be wrong but I believe the common consensus is that his 120ish score on that test was not representative of his actual IQ, and was maybe the result of some other circumstance.

I like how when Richard Feynman's IQ test score doesn't conform to some narrative, HN is in contortions with excuses why the test doesn't matter, but when we come around to the topic of white IQ supremacy, suddenly HN is armed to the teeth with factoids about how g-loaded and circumstantially neutral the mainstream IQ tests are.

This seems like a reach, especially considering I don't personally believe the latter point you're making about IQ tests being neutral.

I'm not an expert on psychometrics, I think all I'm trying to point out is that Feynman performed highly on other tests that likely correlate highly with IQ, so I believe it more likely that there is some confounding factor at play other than this being representative of his actual IQ.

Or maybe that his IQ averaging here doesn't tell us much about which domains he scored highest in (some posit that he may have scored very poorly in a verbal section vs. mathematical etc.).

Or perhaps there is a difference between one-off individual measurements and group statistics, but please feel free to feel outraged...

Sorry for the snark but do you honestly not see that there is a difference between the two cases?

Thomas, were the same folks making these comments?

In that case, the question is, why those two groups of people never interact and never discuss with each other? You would expect a discussion or fights between these groups once in while.

Yes, and one might find them in the "comments" section of a technology news aggregator.

No, I am just sort of throwing up my hands and howling into the void here.

Maybe that's because a single data point [1] of a single person doesn't refute decades of research and heaps of evidence?

[1] An unreliable/uncertain one, even.

I don't think it's disingenuous or ill-informed at all. Maybe people get sensitive when it comes to intelligence, but say I said something like "Drew Brees is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time despite being short for the position". It doesn't mean that height doesn't matter for the position (short stature is a disadvantage as a quarterback), it just means that he found other ways to succeed. I think you could make the same argument with intelligence: once you reach a baseline of "good enough", what you do with that intelligence is more important than just having a lot of it. Obviously Feynman applied his intelligence really well.

I think the argument of "so and so was a genius so don't bother you can't do what they did" is a really defeatist attitude.

I would have to go back and read my old copy of "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" but I recall the story about his participation in the Manhattan Project. The way the story gets told, he quickly gained a reputation as someone who was unafraid to tell the older physicists when their ideas might have flawed thinking in them, and in return they would seek him out as someone fresh out of Cal Tech, trained in all the latest thinking, who could help them stay on track. So he quickly gained a reputation as a brilliant young hotshot, not to be taken lightly, even among the most esteemed Physics minds of the time.