

Smartest Man In The World - cianestro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mfbUhs2PVY&feature=player_embedded

======
ique
"Academia is a heartless cold bureaucracy"

This man might be intelligent, but he is very known for making his mind up
about something and then not changing it for anything.

"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell has a whole chapter on this guy and people like
him, according to Gladwell, Langan has barely had any contact with academia,
so the above statement doesn't seem to have much backing. He got thrown out
because he couldn't understand the "social norm" of speaking up for himself,
something he hints at in the video.

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andr
The person with the highest IQ in the world was a bouncer in a bar? A good
reminder that pure intelligence does not equal ambition or life skill.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Mensa's demographic is smart underachievers

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chegra
You mean the person who is most efficient at taking the iq test.

~~~
bradleyland
My psych 101 teacher actually put this on the study guide for our final.

Q: What is IQ?

A: A score on a test.

Grammar shortcomings aside, it was one of the most fun and interesting college
courses I took.

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noonespecial
He's kind of like what would have happened if Douglas Adams had taken himself
way, way too seriously.

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tybris
If measured by IQ that's believed to be Kim Ung-yong at 210. Still. if he
would not have had poor academia experiences (what did he do at liberal arts
college anyway?), he might have been very useful to the world. Terrible waste.

~~~
chegra
Even within science, IQ is only weakly related to achievement among people who
are smart enough to become scientists. Research has shown, for example, that a
scientist who has an IQ of 130 is just as likely to win a Nobel Prize as a
scientist whose IQ is 180 (Hudson, 1966, p. 104, cited in Sulloway, p. 357).

His chance of doing anything is the same as everybody else.

~~~
tocomment
I wonder why that is?

~~~
david927
Because intelligence is a quality, not a quantity. That makes it like beauty
and flavor, not height or weight. You can't put a point scale on it. Chocolate
cannot be 7 better than vanilla. A beautiful person is not the one with the
biggest lips and the largest cheekbones.

We we can do is to put general parameters around it, such as "beautiful people
tend to be taller." In the same way, scoring generally well (over 120 or 130)
on an IQ test is like saying you're tall. It's actually meaningless as to how
smart you are, but they share some of the same parameters, so they will
correlate a bit more.

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thinkdifferent
I think IQ does measure something, but not what we generally consider as
intelligence

~~~
darien
IQ calculates processing speed, which is why it is timed. Many people can are
good at problem solving, but what takes a normal person a week instead might
take an IQ genius 5 minutes. That is all.

~~~
david927
And a normal person can then train themselves to do that week in 5 minutes.
It's like muscle mass: you're born with a genetic inclination to be weaker or
stronger than average but the rest is up to you.

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davidw
I was expecting to see someone jump out of a plane with a boy scout's
backpack.

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DanielBMarkham
"we need an alternative to academia" is correct

"stupid people are in charge" is technically correct but misleading.

The idea that really smart people could lead better than the average man has
been around at least since Plato. All it takes to cure somebody of this is a
good look at places where really smart people were in charge.

There is more to solving political problems than intelligence.

The issue isn't that the average man is dumb, it's that people who are highly
motivated and don't think through their positions are more effective in
democracies than less motivated, more educated voters.

This was interesting, and I hate to say anything bad about Chris. But I got a
whiff that being smart and having a bad academic experience left some
emotional marks on him. So the answers for him involve, not surprisingly,
smart people outside of academia.

It's a shame, because I think he's on to something with his description of
academia getting in the way of true breakout thinking.

~~~
tome
Where were really smart people in charge?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I believe the scope of than answer is greater than a HN thread, but I might
just be wussing out. Hopefully others will engage you. If not, happy to take
it offline.

I will say this: be careful of selection bias! Looking back, sure, if I show
you a thousand examples that ended poorly your response will be something like
"But they weren't really smart. Look how poorly it all turned out!" This is,
at best, circular reasoning. The important thing is that, _at the time_ ,
these folks were the best and brightest and put in charge for that very
reason.

Good starting point: [http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-
Avoiding-Sit...](http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-
Situations/dp/0201479486)

~~~
tocomment
I'd like to know also. Can you start new topic on HN perhaps?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Will do. Perhaps I can set this up as a blog entry and then cross-post.

The problem, I think, is to keep this non-political. Somebody brought up the
Rumsfield example, which I think is a good one. I also think McNamarra is
another good example. The problem is that decisions that are very visible and
make a big impact can also politically-charged. I think using a couple of
SecDefs is okay, but I'm not sure.

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JoeAltmaier
Elephants and dolphins have bigger brains than humans.

~~~
asdflkj
Not in proportion to body mass.

~~~
anamax
Body mass is relevant, but it's a crude proxy for the amount of "brain" used
to control the body and sense the environment. Excluding those things (and
perhaps some more) leaves you with the cognitive brain mass, which seems to be
a proxy for what we're interested in.

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pmiller2
Part 3 is by far the best part of this whole video.

~~~
Luc
It certainly rises to unseen levels of nuttiness. Here's a quote about his
theory of the 'true nature of reality':

[http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Supr...](http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Supraphysical)

"Because physics is governed by the scientific method, it deals exclusively
with phenomena. Thus, it effectively diverts attention away from the
cognitive, categorical aspect of perceptual reality, without which neither
phenomena nor scientific theories could exist. Because physics is irreducibly
dualistic and takes the fundamental separation of mind and matter as
axiomatic, it cannot provide us with a complete picture of reality. It can
tell us only what lies outside the subjective observer, not within."

~~~
cianestro
Thanks for posting this link. This is Chris on his own terms.

