Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by tokenadult on Sunday January 20, 2013 @10:04AM (#5087094)

This was a better and more original blog post than I expected from the title. The finding from the Terman study is rather important, and should be more widely known. The definitive book about the Terman study, written by a Stanford University Press Office science journalist who was the first independent researcher to have access to study files, is Joel Shurkin's Terman's Kids (1992).

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joel-n-shurkin/te...

Alas, that book is currently out of print, but well worth finding in a library. To say, as the blog post author does, "IQ is as important as height in basketball" gets the main point right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Boykins

AFTER EDIT:

I see there is a reply here that appears to be from the blog post author.

Will try something better next time. Sorry for my bad english.

I admire people who participate here even though they didn't grow up speaking English at home. That's not easy. What is your native language? What has been your process for learning English?

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by pmf on Sunday January 20, 2013 @10:40AM (#5087174)

Thank you! Im from Uruguay so my native language is Spanish. I've learned english mainly by playing videogames (I kid you not) as a kid, as Warren Buffett says "We prefer process over outcome" so It was a fun way to do it.

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by speeder on Sunday January 20, 2013 @11:54AM (#5087356)

Good to know that I am not alone in the learning method for that subject.

I am from Brazil.

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by gbaygon on Sunday January 20, 2013 @12:33PM (#5087469)

I'm from Argentina and learnt with se same method, also tv series helped with pronunciation.

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by stephth on Sunday January 20, 2013 @04:40PM (#5088369)

I started learning English with videogames too. I bought an English translation dictionary that was about half my weight to play Zak McKracken, on a 286 my dear avó owned. My tipping point came much later, with a pretty and sweet native English speaking girlfriend.

Great read by the way.

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by kenshiro_o on Sunday January 20, 2013 @02:54PM (#5087945)

Terman and IQ are also mentioned in "How Would You Move Mount Fuji" (http://www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move-Mount-Fuji/dp/031677849...). I recommend it to anyone interested in brainteasers and how Microsoft and a lot of other companies use them during the interviewing process...

Now back to the article: it was an enjoyable read, but I believe the title is somewhat misleading. High IQ does not make you less creative. However high IQ does not imply creativity. The converse is also not true. I am a bit tired of IQ being used as some kind of objective measure of capabilities, let alone success. Is there any other test that would be more representative of one's mental abilities?

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by archgoon on Sunday January 20, 2013 @02:26PM (#5087829)

>> I admire people who participate here even though they didn't grow up speaking English at home.

I concur. It is, however, why I wish that there was a side-channel specifically for notifying someone of grammar or spelling issues. It'd be useful to let people know if they're using non-standard constructions without the notification being public. Email would be overkill for this purpose.

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by vertis on Sunday January 20, 2013 @03:19PM (#5088054)

Something like TL;DR ... maybe ESL (English Second Language) at the top would work.

Though starting that practice means someone will eventually come on hacker news and complain that putting ESL at the top is redundant because they can tell from the writing that the person has English as a second language ;)

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by archgoon on Saturday January 26, 2013 @03:16PM (#5121599)

That's not a sidechannel. That's adding noise to the main channel.

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Re:Does having a high IQ make you less creative? by natural219 on Sunday January 20, 2013 @01:36PM (#5087674)

You don't happen to have any studies about work-sample tests used alongside IQ tests to predict an applicant's performance in a given job role, do you?

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