Re:Does Super-High IQ= Super-Low Common Sense?
by electromagnetic on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @04:01PM
(#961806)
IQ =/ Genius.
IQ tests only show how good someone is at doing IQ tests, there may be some correlation to other tasks, however they're of little use except to examine how well someone performs in academia.
A genius is someone who can see things that no one else can, and by virtue of this nature them landing high on an IQ test is rather unlikely. Feynman was a true genius, but he admittedly spent the majority of his life messing around with things, which is why he is a genius.
A very good question. In fact we cannot possibly know the IQ test score of any person who lived before the era of the first IQ test, which was only a century ago. But it gets worse than this. Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ elementary-age pupils showed that many of those young people did not qualify as "gifted" on a subsequent test that Terman gave them at high school age. But he kept them in the study group anyway.
Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.
An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children included in the study ever won a Nobel prize. The book by Shurkin I have just cited here is a good corrective on many misconceptions about IQ, and has an excellent section on attempts by one of Terman's study associates to estimate--by extremely dubious methods that have never been validated--the IQ scores of historical persons.