
Is high IQ as much a burden as a blessing? - quoderat
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4add9230-23d5-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html
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ComputerGuru
When I was a child, I was leafing through _Parade_ when I came across "Ask
Marilyn" and read about her having the "world's highest IQ."

Several Sundays later when I'd gotten the gist of the whole thing, I asked my
mother: "but what does she _do_?" I was totally and utterly perplexed. Here
was a woman smarter than Einstein and Hawking squandering away her
intelligence on such downright silly matters. You don't need an IQ of 230 to
write a newspaper column... you just don't.

It pissed me off then, but I never gave it much attention... Since then I've
left the States and totally cast her out of mind. But when the topic comes up,
I just shrug and guess that this is God's way of showing us that you don't
need to be the world's most intelligent in order to accomplish something,
because sometimes the biggest "geniuses" amongst us are the biggest idiots in
reality.

An IQ like that applied to literally _anything_ under the sun other than a
newspaper column could yield huge benefits to humanity. It doesn't matter what
- anything she likes. History, psychology, chemistry, physics, math,
computers, English, philosophy, _anything_.

But she didn't. And that pisses me off like crazy. Because I don't have her IQ
but I work day and night hoping to make this world a better place.... and
there she is, showing off her IQ as if at the World Fair to make petty gains
as a household celebrity, a freak of nature rather than one of the luckiest
people on the planet.

~~~
pg
I don't think it's anything so serious as God's way of showing us anything. IQ
tests don't measure intelligence perfectly, especially at the higher ranges.
If millions of people take IQ tests, there will be a few who are super-good at
whatever they do measure. Occam's razor says she is one of them.

I remember taking an official IQ test in 5th or 6th grade. One of the
questions was how many feet there were in a mile. I kid you not. It happened
that I was a runner, so I knew a lap around the track was 440 yards. 440 x 4 =
1760, 1760 x 3 = 5280. But even at the time I remember thinking, how could
intelligence possibly depend on that kind of random domain knowledge?

~~~
rms
>I remember taking an official IQ test in 5th or 6th grade.

There is still inherent cultural bias in IQ tests, but it's definitely not
that bad anymore. There's also a big difference between group IQ tests, which
some states administer alongside achievement tests in elementary school and
are basically completely worthless for measuring anything at all, and actual
IQ tests, done one on one with a psychologist.

Normal IQ tests don't measure very high, to be certified with a 200+ IQ you
need to take a test that looks more like a Putnam Competition test than
anything else.

~~~
pg
The test I took was the type done one on one with a psychologist.

~~~
rms
Yes, because the group IQ tests are lumped in with achievement tests kids
often have no idea that it is different from the other achievement tests,
whereas the psychologist tests certainly stand out. Looks like NYC public
schools recently adopted a group IQ test after years of using the real
thing... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis-Lennon_School_Ability_Test>

Also see this comment from Ronald Hoeflin (an author of multiple super IQ
tests) about verbal intelligence. <http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ultra.html>

>A comment on verbal intelligence: Some people wonder about the value of
verbal items as a measure of "intelligence," since trying such items seems to
involve little or no intellectual effort. From the purely statistical
standpoint, many studies repeatedly showed that verbal intelligence, including
the sheer size of one's vocabulary, has one of the highest correlations of any
type of test item with overall intelligence as measured by tests containing a
wide variety of test items. See for example the book Intelligence in the
United States, published around 1958, for ample documentation. On the purely
intuitive level, one might say that learning a language, including vocabulary,
is for the child like decoding hieroglyphics. The brighter child will master
this decoding process far more readily than the average child. Later, of
course, one can artificially boost the size of one's vocabulary, but cleverly
designed tests of verbal intelligence can get around this problem by relying
on somewhat atypical verbal items that one would be unlikely to pick up
through a "vocabulary improvement" course but that a gifted child would be
likely to have picked up if he has been reasonably inquisitive -- and isn't
inquisitiveness an important part of intelligence? Finally, to use a computer
analogy, a powerful computer without adequate software (analogous to verbal
intelligence in humans) would be relatively unproductive no matter how
powerful the hardware. -- RKH

He has one more test that is publicly posted.
<http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/titan.html>

~~~
tokenadult
NONE of the "uncommonly difficult IQ tests" mentioned on that very interesting
site have ever been properly validated.

~~~
trapper
Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test?

~~~
tokenadult
_Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test?_

Thanks for asking the important follow-up question that is so rarely asked. To
validate an IQ test (a test that purports to estimate "general intelligence"),
one must first reach a consensus among test designers about some sign of
intelligence that is detectable outside the testing room. Over the years,
psychologists have proposed various behavioral characteristics of human beings
as signs that those human beings are "intelligent," with entering challenging,
high-income occupations that require a lot of higher schooling being one
criterion proposed for adult IQ tests, and being precocious in school and
having good grades and good teacher ratings being one criterion that is
proposed for child IQ tests.

One finds a sample of persons to take a new brand of test in its norming
administration, and rates those persons by external criteria of
"intelligence," weighting those criteria by consensus, and then checks the
rank-order correlation between the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the
IQ test and the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the validation criteria.
There will NEVER be a perfect ("1.0") correlation between the test and the
validation criterion, just as there is never a perfect correlation between IQ
scores on one occasion and IQ scores on another occasion on the same brand of
IQ test by the same group of test-takers.

There is enough play in the joints in both IQ test scoring (whatever the brand
of test) and ranking people by other validation criteria (whatever they are),
that strictly speaking one can't say that there is any all-time, universally
significant ranking of human beings by intelligence. But a close-enough-for-
government-work validation study would show an IQ test having correlations
above .80, and perhaps even above .90, in comparison with previous brands of
IQ tests, or in comparison with subsets of its own item content, or in
comparison with some well regarded external validation criterion.

For reasons mentioned in another comment in this thread (above?), there is
especially little reliability, and hence especially little validity, for IQ
scores far above the population mean, and thus it's very hard to devise a
validation criterion that would sort, say, members of Mensa

<http://www.mensa.org/>

or members of the Study of Exceptional Talent

<http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html>

or members of the Davidson Young Scholars program

<http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/>

into their "true" rank order by IQ, not to mention that IQ scores for the same
individual can and do change over the course of life.

~~~
trapper
Interesting. Makes complete sense, but I never knew it was done that way. Do
you know if there are any publically available raw datasets to play with?

------
robotrout
I believe that it can be a psychological burden, and possibly be a cause for
much unhappiness. Not as a direct result of the IQ, but because of the
expectations of yourself and others.

From an early age, I became aware of the positive reactions I got from people
when I spoke about science or math. I believe that this pushed me towards
these fields. After two decades of being a successful engineer, it occurs to
me that another path might have brought just as much satisfaction, and quite
possibly more.

My own son at one year, is impressing the hell out of me with what he
understands already. I want to cushion him from having his future brainwashed
into him by admiring do-gooders. I want to give him the freedom to become a
fisherman or a farmer or anything else, without feeling like he's letting down
mankind or himself.

We're the ones who make IQ a burden, but recognizing that fact, I think, can
be freeing.

~~~
berntb
When he can read, give him the book by Freeman Dyson's son on kayaking.

1/2 :-)

------
tokenadult
As Stephen Hawking says about IQ:

"Q: What is your I.Q.?

"A: I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html>

~~~
bd
_"Symptoms of the disorder first appeared while he was enrolled at Cambridge;
he lost his balance and fell down a flight of stairs, hitting his head.
Worried that he would lose his genius, he took the Mensa test to verify that
his intellectual abilities were intact."_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking#Illness>

~~~
tvon
While an interesting snippet, I don't see how it relates to the comment you
responded to.

~~~
queensnake
\-- he obviously cared about his IQ /at the time/ if he took the test. If he
really didn't care he could have just tackled some physics problem and seen if
it felt the same (or something).

~~~
zck
There's a difference between caring about -- or knowing -- one's IQ, and
boasting about it.

~~~
nailer
Also there are smart people who haven't achieved much in their life. Sometimes
I think I'm one of them.

Ultimately one's achievements mean more than their mental capacity.

------
rms
Errol Morris interview with the "smartest man in the world."

Part 1:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ak5Lr3qkW0&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ak5Lr3qkW0&feature=related)

Part 2:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mfbUhs2PVY&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mfbUhs2PVY&feature=related)

Part 3: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA0gjyXG5O0>

(Good interview, but the best one Errol Morris did with his tv series was the
one with the mob lawyer. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLEe496IS1o> And the
movie Fog of War, of course.)

------
pmjordan
Intriguing article.

I'm undecided about the usefulness of IQ tests, but I'm avoiding taking any at
all, which I suppose puts me in the "anti" camp. If I took one, I suspect the
result would either go to my head if it's high (for some unknown value of
"high") or be heartbreakingly disappointing, with nothing in between. Which is
somewhat silly I suppose, particularly as it contradicts the idea that it's
not a useful measure.

(as a background: I'm often assumed to be the smartest person out of pretty
much any group of people I happen to find myself in, which brings with it a
whole slew of expectations and social awkwardness. It's a vicious cycle in
that once people notice it, my reputation eventually precedes me. As a result
I regularly feel the need to "flee" from jobs, clubs, cities, etc. and "reset"
everyone's expectations. I'm finding freelancing/consulting easier than
holding a job. And yet there's the nagging pressure of expectation from
family, etc. that I "live up to my potential")

------
rjurney
As an insecure geek, I reject any intelligence test for which I am not the top
scorer. :)

~~~
frig
Probably the most perceptive comment in this thread.

~~~
rjurney
Considering the negative karma for such a silly statement...

------
dws
"You're not living up to your potential" is a Red Queen's game that having a
high IQ doesn't help.

------
known
burden, if you are an employee. blessing, if you are an entrepreneur.

------
banned_man
In childhood, it's bewildering but not so bad. In adolescence, it's awful. In
adulthood, it's good, so long as you're able to get past your shitty teenage
years.

The transition point (from disadvantage to benefit) is, on average, late
college. One would expect it to happen earlier, but what usually happens in
college (even, if not especially, in elite ones) is that the less talented
half emerge as social leaders, not because there's any persisting malice
toward smart people, but because they had better previous experiences.

~~~
tokenadult
Or perhaps because those other people who become social leaders had other
skill sets not tapped by IQ tests. This idea is just about as old as IQ
testing itself. Lewis Terman was the author of the IQ test that Marilyn of Ask
Marilyn took when she was a kid, and that I took when I was a kid. Here's what
he had to say about the limitations of IQ tests:

"There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the
reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that
the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a
particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not
coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability,
mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking,
a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on
the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales." (Terman & Merrill
1937, p. 25)

~~~
banned_man
I'm talking about high intelligence rather than high IQ. So, I guess I'm
technically answering the question, "Is high intelligence a blessing or a
curse", rather than that question about IQ specifically. In truth, I don't
care much about _IQ_ per se; the discussion of intelligence is a more
interesting debate.

~~~
tokenadult
What is your definition of "high intelligence"? This is an interesting issue
discussed in Keith Stanovich's new book,

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

which you probably would enjoy reading, as I did.

~~~
defen
"I know it when I see it" :-)

------
Eliezer
Blah blah blah whine whine whine. If you don't like it, get yourself a
lobotomy.

~~~
hc
did you read this? the focus of the article is not on people who "feel
burdened" by high IQs; it is about possible negative side effects of
intelligence. (isn't this what _you_ get paid to think about? this comment is
hilariously ironic...)

