For reference Albert Einsteins iq was 160 and he played chess, but was never a GM...
No it wasn't. The closest thing Einstein did to an IQ test is the Edison test, and he failed that so he couldn't have scored that highly. People’s estimate of Einstein's IQ is wholly made-up.
You are correct, but many experts agree he had a IQ very close to 160. Let's agree he was a
very smart man, perhaps in the top 100 ever to exist.
For reference Albert Einsteins iq was 160 and he played chess, but was never a GM...
No it wasn't. The closest thing Einstein did to an IQ test is the Edison test, and he failed that so he couldn't have scored that highly. People’s estimate of Einstein's IQ is wholly made-up.
You are correct, but many experts agree he had a IQ very close to 160. Let's agree he was a
very smart man, perhaps in the top 100 ever to exist.
Einstein was very intelligent, but we have no idea if this intelligence would have been measurable on IQ tests or not.
In the same way the Magnus Carlsen is very intelligent, but we have no idea if this intelligence is measurable on IQ tests or not.
I'm not sure if the 160 IQ estimate is even from experts, as far as I'm concerned it came from random newspapers. The number is wholly made up.
If anything, I would expect Carlsen's IQ would higher than Einsteins if they took a test, because:
a) Chess and chess puzzles are closer to IQ test questions than the process of writing a physics paper
and b) Einstein has a record of failing an aptitude test, to my knowledge Carlsen does not.
However, this is speculation. Neither of them took an IQ test, so both of their IQ is unknown.
If anything, I would expect Carlsen's IQ would higher than Einsteins if they took a test, because:
a) Chess and chess puzzles are closer to IQ test questions than the process of writing a physics paper
and b) Einstein has a record of failing an aptitude test, to my knowledge Carlsen does not.
However, this is speculation. Neither of them took an IQ test, so both of their IQ is unknown.
Chess is a game, but writing the theory of everything or string theory in math is entirely a different monster in every regard. I don't think Magnus has the maths. I also am a fan of the goat Magnus, but we are comparing two very different things. I think Magnus is around 130 IQ and is the best chess player to play, so far.
If anything, I would expect Carlsen's IQ would higher than Einsteins if they took a test, because:
a) Chess and chess puzzles are closer to IQ test questions than the process of writing a physics paper
and b) Einstein has a record of failing an aptitude test, to my knowledge Carlsen does not.
However, this is speculation. Neither of them took an IQ test, so both of their IQ is unknown.
Chess is a game, but writing the theory of everything or string theory in math is entirely a different monster in every regard. I don't think Magnus has the maths. I also am a fan of the goat Magnus, but we are comparing two very different things. I think Magnus is around 130 IQ and is the best chess player to play, so far.
Three things:
-Einstein had nothing to do with string theory, and had no successful theory of everything.
-There are no string theory questions on IQ tests. There are, however, spatial reasoning questions; which are similar to chess puzzles. Chess is indeed a game, and IQ tests hsve more in common with games than they do with science.
-Any numerical IQ estimate of Carlsen is just as made up as any Einstein IQ estimate and has no real value.
If anything, I would expect Carlsen's IQ would higher than Einsteins if they took a test, because:
a) Chess and chess puzzles are closer to IQ test questions than the process of writing a physics paper
and b) Einstein has a record of failing an aptitude test, to my knowledge Carlsen does not.
However, this is speculation. Neither of them took an IQ test, so both of their IQ is unknown.
Chess is a game, but writing the theory of everything or string theory in math is entirely a different monster in every regard. I don't think Magnus has the maths. I also am a fan of the goat Magnus, but we are comparing two very different things. I think Magnus is around 130 IQ and is the best chess player to play, so far.
Three things:
-Einstein had nothing to do with string theory, and had no successful theory of everything.
-There are no string theory questions on IQ tests. There are, however, spatial reasoning questions; which are similar to chess puzzles. Chess is indeed a game, and IQ tests hsve more in common with games than they do with science.
-Any numerical IQ estimate of Carlsen is just as made up as any Einstein IQ estimate and has no real value.
Its been fun, thanks for the banter.
Don't get me started on lefty liberal constructs like "social", "interpersonal" or the newly fangled "emotional intelligence".
I don't buy it either. So-called emotional intelligence is mainly about low levels of tension, vanity and so forth and higher levels of sociableness. It doesn't relate to the sort of intelligence that IQ is concerned with. That is, of course, obvious, but all this stuff about emotional intelligence is like buying a very short person a pair of high heeled shoes.
For me intelligence is raw cognitive power. Things like interpersonal intelligence involve not being an a-hole and have nothing to do with intelligence IMHO.
I think I agree with this.
That is unfortunately a very common and very arbitrary take on a protean notion of intelligence. The supposed generality of human intelligence is not a law of the universe, but a convenient postulate of the talentless plethora. Most experts in fields like science in math are not trapped within the limited rules of that field
Do I agree? No, I think most are trapped by virtue of their excellence in limited fields.
(and not by chance that almost all practical contributions in science/math, come from experts within a field - not plumbers with a sense of rationalistic, intellectual grandiosity.
You'd expect that, because it's their field of work. Excellence in fly-tying probably is less often found among mathematicians.
High expertise in one (open) system, doesn't mean that one isn't free to create elementary associations with information outside of their field. If a field of study includes facts (elements) A, B, and C, there is nothing that prevents an expert from associating element B with element D (on the grounds of some subtle pattern or anomaly), from some other field. The brain does not compartmentalize information sets, it has very broad neuronal networks that constantly associate patterns. Of course, there are always those 'intellectual dicks' who are purely interested in aimless 'fact finding' within their respective fields - these are people confuse their ability to learn with intelligence, and are extremely narrow thinkers. It's very likely not just IQ, but limitations of the neural inter-complexity and computational speed (intuition) of individuals is what allows some to actually apply information they've learned in ways to solve problems and exhibit higher learning through forming higher n order abstractions.
Possibly, yes. I wonder is that's a learned skill? I think it is, suggesting that too much specialisation is intellectually limiting, which brings us back to the point about them being trapped by their excellence.
Individual performance can and should only be evaluated at any specific given moment and time and are the product of developmental factors. One can only abstract from a given system like 41, 25, 49, n , if they are given that system to analyze - effectively nullifying any supposed quality of 'intelligence'. You can't give someone half of an idea, and then give them credit for the whole. In the real world, we don't know what elements are in are set, or what, when or exactly where we have to think hard. And ideally, 'smart' people should be defined as those who come up with new ideas from their own experimental models (sets)....yeah we don't live an ideal world.
Is this last paragraph an example of the sort of "intellectual dickery" we're told to avoid?
Just a subtle note that there are no plumbers who have contributed to mathematics, but there have certainly been mathematicians (or, at least, those heavily trained in math) who have contributed to plumbing.
An expert can always stop, and be burdened by the same mundane issues as the laymen, but many of them have the good taste not to care so much about such things. A person of intellect (not simply an 'expert') has developed more bridges (unbeknownst to them) from theory to practice, and from practice to theory - so it's not so much they think 'harder' (cognitive load), as that they will inevitably ponder about the world in ways that common men are oblivious to. Put simply, a person of intellect has 'perspective'.
Finally, promoting the archaic concept of IQ, with little understanding of Western philosophy of mind, makes for a foolish enterprise. And unlike the fudged statistics suggest, and collusive g-men have urged, it is in fact, that IQ has failed to adequately predict job performance, educational quality, and income for over 100 years. Unfortunately, just because they found it impossible to make IQ correlate with the system, doesn't mean it's impossible to engineer the system to correlate with IQ.
I might sleep while reading this post.
I think that may be why I didn't answer it, although I disagreed with the writer.
Regarding Einstein's supposed genius, I believe the suggestion that he was in the top 100 cleverest people to exist is ridiculous. Even regarding an IQ of 160, that isn't amazingly high. For instance, my own IQ, measured by specialists in the field and then also by myself, is higher than that.
Einstein was a good mathematician indeed. But he was so inept at so many other things that he certainly didn't have an all-round intellect. Compared with someone like Leonardo da Vinci, probably the British physicists Robert Hooke and Maxwell, to name but three; also very many more, Einstein wouldn't come close.
Of course IQ tests don't claim to measure general intelligence, but only inherent potential capacity for certain types of problem-solving. Hence their inappropriateness to accurately represent what most people consider "intelligence".
Don't get me started on lefty liberal constructs like "social", "interpersonal" or the newly fangled "emotional intelligence".
I don't buy it either. So-called emotional intelligence is mainly about low levels of tension, vanity and so forth and higher levels of sociableness. It doesn't relate to the sort of intelligence that IQ is concerned with. That is, of course, obvious, but all this stuff about emotional intelligence is like buying a very short person a pair of high heeled shoes.
For me intelligence is raw cognitive power. Things like interpersonal intelligence involve not being an a-hole and have nothing to do with intelligence IMHO.
I think I agree with this.
That is unfortunately a very common and very arbitrary take on a protean notion of intelligence. The supposed generality of human intelligence is not a law of the universe, but a convenient postulate of the talentless plethora. Most experts in fields like science in math are not trapped within the limited rules of that field
Do I agree? No, I think most are trapped by virtue of their excellence in limited fields.
(and not by chance that almost all practical contributions in science/math, come from experts within a field - not plumbers with a sense of rationalistic, intellectual grandiosity.
You'd expect that, because it's their field of work. Excellence in fly-tying probably is less often found among mathematicians.
High expertise in one (open) system, doesn't mean that one isn't free to create elementary associations with information outside of their field. If a field of study includes facts (elements) A, B, and C, there is nothing that prevents an expert from associating element B with element D (on the grounds of some subtle pattern or anomaly), from some other field. The brain does not compartmentalize information sets, it has very broad neuronal networks that constantly associate patterns. Of course, there are always those 'intellectual dicks' who are purely interested in aimless 'fact finding' within their respective fields - these are people confuse their ability to learn with intelligence, and are extremely narrow thinkers. It's very likely not just IQ, but limitations of the neural inter-complexity and computational speed (intuition) of individuals is what allows some to actually apply information they've learned in ways to solve problems and exhibit higher learning through forming higher n order abstractions.
Possibly, yes. I wonder is that's a learned skill? I think it is, suggesting that too much specialisation is intellectually limiting, which brings us back to the point about them being trapped by their excellence.
Individual performance can and should only be evaluated at any specific given moment and time and are the product of developmental factors. One can only abstract from a given system like 41, 25, 49, n , if they are given that system to analyze - effectively nullifying any supposed quality of 'intelligence'. You can't give someone half of an idea, and then give them credit for the whole. In the real world, we don't know what elements are in are set, or what, when or exactly where we have to think hard. And ideally, 'smart' people should be defined as those who come up with new ideas from their own experimental models (sets)....yeah we don't live an ideal world.
Is this last paragraph an example of the sort of "intellectual dickery" we're told to avoid?
Just a subtle note that there are no plumbers who have contributed to mathematics, but there have certainly been mathematicians (or, at least, those heavily trained in math) who have contributed to plumbing.
An expert can always stop, and be burdened by the same mundane issues as the laymen, but many of them have the good taste not to care so much about such things. A person of intellect (not simply an 'expert') has developed more bridges (unbeknownst to them) from theory to practice, and from practice to theory - so it's not so much they think 'harder' (cognitive load), as that they will inevitably ponder about the world in ways that common men are oblivious to. Put simply, a person of intellect has 'perspective'.
Finally, promoting the archaic concept of IQ, with little understanding of Western philosophy of mind, makes for a foolish enterprise. And unlike the fudged statistics suggest, and collusive g-men have urged, it is in fact, that IQ has failed to adequately predict job performance, educational quality, and income for over 100 years. Unfortunately, just because they found it impossible to make IQ correlate with the system, doesn't mean it's impossible to engineer the system to correlate with IQ.
I might sleep while reading this post.
I think that may be why I didn't answer it, although I disagreed with the writer.
Regarding Einstein's supposed genius, I believe the suggestion that he was in the top 100 cleverest people to exist is ridiculous. Even regarding an IQ of 160, that isn't amazingly high. For instance, my own IQ, measured by specialists in the field and then also by myself, is higher than that.
Einstein was a good mathematician indeed. But he was so inept at so many other things that he certainly didn't have an all-round intellect. Compared with someone like Leonardo da Vinci, probably the British physicists Robert Hooke and Maxwell, to name but three; also very many more, Einstein wouldn't come close.
It is indeed true that 160 isn't in the top 100 of IQ because IQ is normalised with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. If you're going by the current world population of 8.1 billion (and there's a question about its applicability in past populations because IQ is always normalised to the current population); the top 100 individuals would be 184+ according to my calculations.
"Well rounded intellect" is not directly relevant to your IQ. IQ measures how well you do in a certain kind of test. Certain skills do have applications that are transferrable to such tests. Maybe someone like Maxwell might have more such transferrable skills, I don't know. No-one knows, because none of them have been tested.
I suspect no-one in the top 100 of IQ ever (if that is even a meaningful thing) was born before the IQ test was invented, as they would have much less experience in those kind of test questions than the top people today (and even some people uninterested in IQ tests learn to do these questions because they are sometimes used in job applications and have leaked into some strategy video games). In the case of someone like Da Vinci, he would have been unused to exams in general, never mind IQ tests, so probably would have done relatively poorly.
That's why IQ tests need to be standardized to the group being tested.
And indeed they are. But that means that the question "who had a higher IQ, Einstein, Carlsen, or Da Vinci" is meaningless; because even if they did the test, the test would be standardised to different groups so would be measuring something different.
I don't know if his IQ was ever measured (and he may not have taken such things seriously), but Alan Turing, mathematician, codebreaker and computing pioneer, programmed an early computer to play chess but was himself only an average player of the game.
Of course IQ tests don't claim to measure general intelligence, but only inherent potential capacity for certain types of problem-solving. Hence their inappropriateness to accurately represent what most people consider "intelligence".
No they DO measure what most people consider to be intelligence, which tends to be that which is measured by intelligence tests.
Don't get me started on lefty liberal constructs like "social", "interpersonal" or the newly fangled "emotional intelligence".
I don't buy it either. So-called emotional intelligence is mainly about low levels of tension, vanity and so forth and higher levels of sociableness. It doesn't relate to the sort of intelligence that IQ is concerned with. That is, of course, obvious, but all this stuff about emotional intelligence is like buying a very short person a pair of high heeled shoes.
For me intelligence is raw cognitive power. Things like interpersonal intelligence involve not being an a-hole and have nothing to do with intelligence IMHO.
I think I agree with this.
That is unfortunately a very common and very arbitrary take on a protean notion of intelligence. The supposed generality of human intelligence is not a law of the universe, but a convenient postulate of the talentless plethora. Most experts in fields like science in math are not trapped within the limited rules of that field
Do I agree? No, I think most are trapped by virtue of their excellence in limited fields.
(and not by chance that almost all practical contributions in science/math, come from experts within a field - not plumbers with a sense of rationalistic, intellectual grandiosity.
You'd expect that, because it's their field of work. Excellence in fly-tying probably is less often found among mathematicians.
High expertise in one (open) system, doesn't mean that one isn't free to create elementary associations with information outside of their field. If a field of study includes facts (elements) A, B, and C, there is nothing that prevents an expert from associating element B with element D (on the grounds of some subtle pattern or anomaly), from some other field. The brain does not compartmentalize information sets, it has very broad neuronal networks that constantly associate patterns. Of course, there are always those 'intellectual dicks' who are purely interested in aimless 'fact finding' within their respective fields - these are people confuse their ability to learn with intelligence, and are extremely narrow thinkers. It's very likely not just IQ, but limitations of the neural inter-complexity and computational speed (intuition) of individuals is what allows some to actually apply information they've learned in ways to solve problems and exhibit higher learning through forming higher n order abstractions.
Possibly, yes. I wonder is that's a learned skill? I think it is, suggesting that too much specialisation is intellectually limiting, which brings us back to the point about them being trapped by their excellence.
Individual performance can and should only be evaluated at any specific given moment and time and are the product of developmental factors. One can only abstract from a given system like 41, 25, 49, n , if they are given that system to analyze - effectively nullifying any supposed quality of 'intelligence'. You can't give someone half of an idea, and then give them credit for the whole. In the real world, we don't know what elements are in are set, or what, when or exactly where we have to think hard. And ideally, 'smart' people should be defined as those who come up with new ideas from their own experimental models (sets)....yeah we don't live an ideal world.
Is this last paragraph an example of the sort of "intellectual dickery" we're told to avoid?
Just a subtle note that there are no plumbers who have contributed to mathematics, but there have certainly been mathematicians (or, at least, those heavily trained in math) who have contributed to plumbing.
An expert can always stop, and be burdened by the same mundane issues as the laymen, but many of them have the good taste not to care so much about such things. A person of intellect (not simply an 'expert') has developed more bridges (unbeknownst to them) from theory to practice, and from practice to theory - so it's not so much they think 'harder' (cognitive load), as that they will inevitably ponder about the world in ways that common men are oblivious to. Put simply, a person of intellect has 'perspective'.
Finally, promoting the archaic concept of IQ, with little understanding of Western philosophy of mind, makes for a foolish enterprise. And unlike the fudged statistics suggest, and collusive g-men have urged, it is in fact, that IQ has failed to adequately predict job performance, educational quality, and income for over 100 years. Unfortunately, just because they found it impossible to make IQ correlate with the system, doesn't mean it's impossible to engineer the system to correlate with IQ.
I might sleep while reading this post.
I think that may be why I didn't answer it, although I disagreed with the writer.
Regarding Einstein's supposed genius, I believe the suggestion that he was in the top 100 cleverest people to exist is ridiculous. Even regarding an IQ of 160, that isn't amazingly high. For instance, my own IQ, measured by specialists in the field and then also by myself, is higher than that.
Einstein was a good mathematician indeed. But he was so inept at so many other things that he certainly didn't have an all-round intellect. Compared with someone like Leonardo da Vinci, probably the British physicists Robert Hooke and Maxwell, to name but three; also very many more, Einstein wouldn't come close.
It is indeed true that 160 isn't in the top 100 of IQ because IQ is normalised with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. If you're going by the current world population of 8.1 billion (and there's a question about its applicability in past populations because IQ is always normalised to the current population); the top 100 individuals would be 184+ according to my calculations.
"Well rounded intellect" is not directly relevant to your IQ. IQ measures how well you do in a certain kind of test. Certain skills do have applications that are transferrable to such tests. Maybe someone like Maxwell might have more such transferrable skills, I don't know. No-one knows, because none of them have been tested.
I suspect no-one in the top 100 of IQ ever (if that is even a meaningful thing) was born before the IQ test was invented, as they would have much less experience in those kind of test questions than the top people today (and even some people uninterested in IQ tests learn to do these questions because they are sometimes used in job applications and have leaked into some strategy video games). In the case of someone like Da Vinci, he would have been unused to exams in general, never mind IQ tests, so probably would have done relatively poorly.
This seems to be quite a good post, which I appreciate. However I partially agree and partially disagree, if you would permit me to say so, with
<<"Well rounded intellect" is not directly relevant to your IQ. IQ measures how well you do in a certain kind of test.>>
It's reasonable to assume that IQ tests are aimed at being culture neutral, gender neutral, even education neutral if possible but that's getting difficult. To achieve that, quite a large cross section of test types have been used although verbally based ones are not culture neutral. In general, they tend to be logically based. It's difficult to work out how else to perform an iq test. They can't be general knowledge tests, for instance.
The well rounded intellect that we're speaking of is composed of different skills including literature, knowledge based education, debating ability, music; all sorts of different things really. There is some belief, though, that all such abilities tend to correlate positively with one another.
IQ itself is obviously a correlation or an attempted correlation, between test results in quite a limited area and predicted intellectual ability on a wider scale. It's been shown to work, to a large extent.
With this, <<I suspect no-one in the top 100 of IQ ever (if that is even a meaningful thing) was born before the IQ test was invented, as they would have much less experience in those kind of test questions than the top people today>>
you're making a bit of an error. Are we discussing "most intelligent people ever" or "highest IQ scores ever"? Obviously those who lived before IQ tests didn't have their IQs measured. I think the point was to discuss the "100 most intelligent people ever" and I'm sticking to my guns and asserting that Einstein wouldn't have come close.
I think da Vinci was clever enough to have passed modern exams if he somehow took them then. I think probably Einstein wasn't.
I'm not sure if the 160 IQ estimate is even from experts, as far as I'm concerned it came from random newspapers. The number is wholly made up.
It was definitely an assessment made by experts in the field of intelligence testing. He died in 1955 and I recall quite a bit of hoohah. I was very nearly four years old. My father was talking about him and I asked him at the time. It turned out that two or three years before, he had known some physicists who knew Einstein. I asled him some questions at the time, which he refused to answer. Many years later, (60 years later) a couple of years before my father died, I tried to get him talking about that conversation we had when I was four, but unfortunately he couldn't remember it taking place.
I'm not sure if the 160 IQ estimate is even from experts, as far as I'm concerned it came from random newspapers. The number is wholly made up.
It was definitely an assessment made by experts in the field of intelligence testing. He died in 1955 and I recall quite a bit of hoohah. I was very nearly four years old. My father was talking about him and I asked him at the time. It turned out that two or three years before, he had known some physicists who knew Einstein. I asled him some questions at the time, which he refused to answer. Many years later, (60 years later) a couple of years before my father died, I tried to get him talking about that conversation we had when I was four, but unfortunately he couldn't remember it taking place.
Maybe he initially got the wrong end of the stick, and forgot about it because he had made an error?
It is true that Einstein's brain was dissected after he died, I suspect this is what he was actually referring to.
Don't get me started on lefty liberal constructs like "social", "interpersonal" or the newly fangled "emotional intelligence".
I don't buy it either. So-called emotional intelligence is mainly about low levels of tension, vanity and so forth and higher levels of sociableness. It doesn't relate to the sort of intelligence that IQ is concerned with. That is, of course, obvious, but all this stuff about emotional intelligence is like buying a very short person a pair of high heeled shoes.
For me intelligence is raw cognitive power. Things like interpersonal intelligence involve not being an a-hole and have nothing to do with intelligence IMHO.
I think I agree with this.
That is unfortunately a very common and very arbitrary take on a protean notion of intelligence. The supposed generality of human intelligence is not a law of the universe, but a convenient postulate of the talentless plethora. Most experts in fields like science in math are not trapped within the limited rules of that field
Do I agree? No, I think most are trapped by virtue of their excellence in limited fields.
(and not by chance that almost all practical contributions in science/math, come from experts within a field - not plumbers with a sense of rationalistic, intellectual grandiosity.
You'd expect that, because it's their field of work. Excellence in fly-tying probably is less often found among mathematicians.
High expertise in one (open) system, doesn't mean that one isn't free to create elementary associations with information outside of their field. If a field of study includes facts (elements) A, B, and C, there is nothing that prevents an expert from associating element B with element D (on the grounds of some subtle pattern or anomaly), from some other field. The brain does not compartmentalize information sets, it has very broad neuronal networks that constantly associate patterns. Of course, there are always those 'intellectual dicks' who are purely interested in aimless 'fact finding' within their respective fields - these are people confuse their ability to learn with intelligence, and are extremely narrow thinkers. It's very likely not just IQ, but limitations of the neural inter-complexity and computational speed (intuition) of individuals is what allows some to actually apply information they've learned in ways to solve problems and exhibit higher learning through forming higher n order abstractions.
Possibly, yes. I wonder is that's a learned skill? I think it is, suggesting that too much specialisation is intellectually limiting, which brings us back to the point about them being trapped by their excellence.
Individual performance can and should only be evaluated at any specific given moment and time and are the product of developmental factors. One can only abstract from a given system like 41, 25, 49, n , if they are given that system to analyze - effectively nullifying any supposed quality of 'intelligence'. You can't give someone half of an idea, and then give them credit for the whole. In the real world, we don't know what elements are in are set, or what, when or exactly where we have to think hard. And ideally, 'smart' people should be defined as those who come up with new ideas from their own experimental models (sets)....yeah we don't live an ideal world.
Is this last paragraph an example of the sort of "intellectual dickery" we're told to avoid?
Just a subtle note that there are no plumbers who have contributed to mathematics, but there have certainly been mathematicians (or, at least, those heavily trained in math) who have contributed to plumbing.
An expert can always stop, and be burdened by the same mundane issues as the laymen, but many of them have the good taste not to care so much about such things. A person of intellect (not simply an 'expert') has developed more bridges (unbeknownst to them) from theory to practice, and from practice to theory - so it's not so much they think 'harder' (cognitive load), as that they will inevitably ponder about the world in ways that common men are oblivious to. Put simply, a person of intellect has 'perspective'.
Finally, promoting the archaic concept of IQ, with little understanding of Western philosophy of mind, makes for a foolish enterprise. And unlike the fudged statistics suggest, and collusive g-men have urged, it is in fact, that IQ has failed to adequately predict job performance, educational quality, and income for over 100 years. Unfortunately, just because they found it impossible to make IQ correlate with the system, doesn't mean it's impossible to engineer the system to correlate with IQ.
I might sleep while reading this post.
I think that may be why I didn't answer it, although I disagreed with the writer.
Regarding Einstein's supposed genius, I believe the suggestion that he was in the top 100 cleverest people to exist is ridiculous. Even regarding an IQ of 160, that isn't amazingly high. For instance, my own IQ, measured by specialists in the field and then also by myself, is higher than that.
Einstein was a good mathematician indeed. But he was so inept at so many other things that he certainly didn't have an all-round intellect. Compared with someone like Leonardo da Vinci, probably the British physicists Robert Hooke and Maxwell, to name but three; also very many more, Einstein wouldn't come close.
It is indeed true that 160 isn't in the top 100 of IQ because IQ is normalised with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. If you're going by the current world population of 8.1 billion (and there's a question about its applicability in past populations because IQ is always normalised to the current population); the top 100 individuals would be 184+ according to my calculations.
"Well rounded intellect" is not directly relevant to your IQ. IQ measures how well you do in a certain kind of test. Certain skills do have applications that are transferrable to such tests. Maybe someone like Maxwell might have more such transferrable skills, I don't know. No-one knows, because none of them have been tested.
I suspect no-one in the top 100 of IQ ever (if that is even a meaningful thing) was born before the IQ test was invented, as they would have much less experience in those kind of test questions than the top people today (and even some people uninterested in IQ tests learn to do these questions because they are sometimes used in job applications and have leaked into some strategy video games). In the case of someone like Da Vinci, he would have been unused to exams in general, never mind IQ tests, so probably would have done relatively poorly.
This seems to be quite a good post, which I appreciate. However I partially agree and partially disagree, if you would permit me to say so, with
<<"Well rounded intellect" is not directly relevant to your IQ. IQ measures how well you do in a certain kind of test.>>
It's reasonable to assume that IQ tests are aimed at being culture neutral, gender neutral, even education neutral if possible but that's getting difficult. To achieve that, quite a large cross section of test types have been used although verbally based ones are not culture neutral. In general, they tend to be logically based. It's difficult to work out how else to perform an iq test. They can't be general knowledge tests, for instance.
The well rounded intellect that we're speaking of is composed of different skills including literature, knowledge based education, debating ability, music; all sorts of different things really. There is some belief, though, that all such abilities tend to correlate positively with one another.
IQ itself is obviously a correlation or an attempted correlation, between test results in quite a limited area and predicted intellectual ability on a wider scale. It's been shown to work, to a large extent.
With this, <<I suspect no-one in the top 100 of IQ ever (if that is even a meaningful thing) was born before the IQ test was invented, as they would have much less experience in those kind of test questions than the top people today>>
you're making a bit of an error. Are we discussing "most intelligent people ever" or "highest IQ scores ever"? Obviously those who lived before IQ tests didn't have their IQs measured. I think the point was to discuss the "100 most intelligent people ever" and I'm sticking to my guns and asserting that Einstein wouldn't have come close.
I think da Vinci was clever enough to have passed modern exams if he somehow took them then. I think probably Einstein wasn't.
It's not difficult to work out how to perform an IQ test. You have to do something similar for some job applications, so I have tried and succeeded in increasing my score in them with fairly minimal effort. And this is coming from someone who already knows how to sit exams, which of course Da Vinci would not. There are video games with similar questions to IQ tests, and people get better at them the more they play. Indeed, chess puzzles have some similaries with IQ tests, and we all know you get better at those the more you do. Someone more dedicated (who, say, wanted to spend 3 years solely on improving IQ score, as much time as people spend on degrees) could probably get much further in it.
"Intelligence" as a general concept is subjective and depends on what skills you value more. Do you value physics the most? Einstein was the most intelligent. Do you value chess more? Carlsen. Do you value art very highly? Maybe Da Vinci. Perhaps you value IQ tests? Then the one with the highest IQ is the most intelligent.
Of course IQ tests don't claim to measure general intelligence, but only inherent potential capacity for certain types of problem-solving. Hence their inappropriateness to accurately represent what most people consider "intelligence".
No they DO measure what most people consider to be intelligence, which tends to be that which is measured by intelligence tests.
What "most people consider to be general intelligence", which contains a large portion of learned information, and what cognitive scientists attempt to measure--the potential to process some kinds of information--are quite different.
I'm not sure if the 160 IQ estimate is even from experts, as far as I'm concerned it came from random newspapers. The number is wholly made up.
It was definitely an assessment made by experts in the field of intelligence testing. He died in 1955 and I recall quite a bit of hoohah. I was very nearly four years old. My father was talking about him and I asked him at the time. It turned out that two or three years before, he had known some physicists who knew Einstein. I asled him some questions at the time, which he refused to answer. Many years later, (60 years later) a couple of years before my father died, I tried to get him talking about that conversation we had when I was four, but unfortunately he couldn't remember it taking place.
Maybe he initially got the wrong end of the stick, and forgot about it because he had made an error?
It is true that Einstein's brain was dissected after he died, I suspect this is what he was actually referring to.
Wrong end of what stick? My father's IQ was measured by the British Army in 1943 at 171 so he wasn't exactly thick. That's where I get my own high IQ from.
For reference Albert Einsteins iq was 160 and he played chess, but was never a GM...
No it wasn't. The closest thing Einstein did to an IQ test is the Edison test, and he failed that so he couldn't have scored that highly. People’s estimate of Einstein's IQ is wholly made-up.