
The Outsiders - 10ren
http://www.prometheussociety.org/articles/Outsiders.html
======
tokenadult
A quick comment: An IQ score on any test above IQ 160 is not a validated
score, and should be considered comparable to IQ scores in the usual range on
current, carefully validated tests of 40 to 160. Moreover, the standard form
of scoring IQ tests does not, and cannot, yield an IQ score with interval
characteristics, as Terman and Merrill (1937, p. 25) recognized.

"The expression of a test result in terms of age norms is simple and
unambiguous, resting upon no statistical assumptions. A test so scaled does
not pretend to measure intelligence as a linear distance is measured by the
equal units of a foot-rule, but tells us merely that the ability of a given
subject corresponds to the average ability of children of such and such an
age. This was all that Binet claimed to accomplish, and one can well doubt
whether the voluminous output of psychometric literature since his day has
enabled us to accomplish more. We have accordingly chosen to retain this least
pretentious of units for the estimation of mental level."

The numbers yielded by an IQ test are not measures, but rather more like
decathlon scores (Hunt 1997). Indeed, IQ scores analogize quite aptly to the
arbitrary rating numbers assigned by college rating guides to different
colleges and universities, even in how they differ from one brand of IQ test
to another.

The earliest mental tester, Galton, recognized that he had no "foot rule."
Early on, he was frustrated by the lack of an "external standard of
measurement" for what he was investigating, and resolved to report his results
as a rank-ordering of subjects, without a "foot-rule" (Galton 1880). The best
considered view is that IQ tests and other mental ability tests are not
measures at all. Certainly they should not be analogized to rulers. An IQ
score, despite the analogies appealed to by some authors, is not like a
marking on a ruler related to an absolute scale but is on an ordinal scale
(Mackintosh 1998, pp. 30-31). Alfred Binet warned against this error early on,
writing, "This scale properly speaking does not permit the measure of the
intelligence, [1] because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and
therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured, but are on the
contrary, a classification, a hierarchy among diverse intelligences;" (Binet
1905, English translation 1916).

See also

<http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html>

for background on high-IQ societies and their founders.

After edit: I can also provide a reference to specifically disagree with one
statement in the submitted article. "Wechsler is saying quite plainly that
those with IQs above 150 are different in kind from those below that level. He
is saying that they are a different kind of mind, a different kind of human
being." But David Feldman (1984), in a specialized study of study subjects who
scored above 180 on their IQ tests, noted:

"Put into the context of the psychometric movement as a whole, it is clear
that positive extreme of the IQ distribution is not as different from other IQ
levels as might have been expected. . . . While 180 IQ suggests the ability to
do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively
different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of
‘genius’ in its common-sense meaning, i.e. transcendent achievement in some
field. For these kinds of phenomena, IQ seems at best a crude predictor. For
anything more, we will have to look to traditions other than the psychometric
and to variables other than IQ."

REFERENCES

Binet, Alfred. (1916). New methods for the diagnosis of the intellectual level
of subnormals. In E. S. Kite (Trans.), The Development of Intelligence in
Children. Vineland, NJ: Publications of the Training School at Vineland.
(Originally published 1905 in L'Année Psychologique, 12, 191-244.) (Available
on the Web at Classics in the History of Psychology site
<http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Binet/binet1.htm> ).

Feldman, David (1984). A Follow-up of Subjects Scoring above 180 IQ in
Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius. Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 518-523.

Galton, Francis (1880). Statistics of Mental Imagery. Mind, 5, 301-318.
Received May 12, 2006 from <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm>

Hunt, Earl (1997). The Concept and Utility of Intelligence. In Bernie Devlin,
Stephen E. Fienberg, Daniel P. Resnick & Kathryn Roeder (Eds.). Intelligence,
Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve. New York: Springer-
Verlag.

Mackintosh, N. J. (1998). IQ and Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the
Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

------
shadowaccount
Heavily debated making this post, will not make it on my account due to
courting accusations of showboating, but in all earnestness this article
struck a chord with me in a major way.

I ask here only because I respect this community and consider the inhabitants
peers, and I genuinely want an answer. What can one _do_ about it? I quite
literally feel like an alien trapped on a planet full of people that
alternately infuriate and bore me.

Has anyone successfully addressed these issues before? I believe that my
growing misanthropy and detachment does not serve my interests in the long
run.

~~~
tokenadult
I'll give your question a serious answer. Growing up, I knew I had a high IQ
score (my parents actually lowballed in hinting what my IQ score was, but I
found out the actual score in adult life from my schoolteacher who referred me
for testing), and I read in a story by Philip K. Dick that high-IQ people feel
social distance from most classmates, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy
for me. But later in life I lived in east Asia as a student of the Chinese
language, and I discovered that Confucian philosophers expected smart people
to use their smarts to get along with everyone, summed up in the saying of
Confucius, "三人行，必有我师焉" "Wherever there are three persons walking, my teacher
is surely among them." I learned from my experience overseas that I could
appreciate other people for their abilities, and expect to learn from most
people of my acquaintance, whatever their IQ scores. Since then, I have been
more socially comfortable with a wider variety of people, and have felt less
isolated. I still devote a lot of my free time to activism on behalf of gifted
learners, which provides me with a social circle of people who understand my
personal background.

~~~
shadowaccount
I've already adopted a general philosophy of attempting to benefit from
interpersonal interaction as much as possible, I try to figure out how a
person works on their own level, including if I could assist them in any way,
and if in doing so I may be setting up a mutually beneficial arrangement. In
some cases, this works, but these cases are few and far between.

It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought
to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in
encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly
better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would
be incapable of making use of your assistance.

What then is the purpose of humanity at large, those who fall outside the
sphere of which can be of any advantage to you and are more valuable avoided
than utilised?

~~~
tokenadult
_It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought
to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in
encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly
better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would
be incapable of making use of your assistance._

If you seriously go through life with that much of a sense of superiority, it
would be no surprise at all to be socially isolated. I don't think that way.
Most people are important and useful to humanity at the individual level. My
default is to treat all people as if they are, and that default assumption is
generally born out in my interaction with people in many settings. I don't
merely seek PERSONAL advantage in dealing with people, but the broader
advantage of a better human society for all.

~~~
shadowaccount
Making the world a better place is promoting a personal advantage, so long as
you're not dragged down too much in the process. My point is that by and large
this is simply not the case.

I think if you believe it is then I'm wondering if your target population is
truly representative of humanity at large or simply those who you interact
with most commonly within some social sphere which you have found to be
agreeable with you.

It isn't even that I feel superior, I simply feel utterly different, as I
said, alien in the extreme. I believe this inhibits me when trying to
understand why other people behave as they do because all I have to work off
is a bunch of simulations of human behaviour in the past that I have observed
/ heard of.

~~~
shadowaccount
The pattern that I am seeing here and after having meditated on this myself is
this: My conclusions about humanity at large are mostly correct, but this
ought not discourage me from interaction in general due to one critical point.
There _are_ many great people despite the mass being largely useless. Further,
if one actually attempts to follow rational principles it would not be all
that difficult to find these people and maximise one's interactions within
this sphere.

Isn't that in fact exactly what I'm doing here? The first place I have ever
actually felt mostly socially comfortable in my life?

All the examples of positive social experiences that I can think of I could
logically have concluded would likely have ended up that way based on the
guessed at characteristics of the groups in question, the trick to human
interaction is not to optimise your communications for the mean, but to
optimise your communications for the groups whom with which you wish to
interact.

Thanks to those that responded.

~~~
robotrout
I think you need to get out of your head. It's a bit masturbatory, this
constant introspection and comparison. It feels good, but you shouldn't do it
all the time.

If you truly can't find joy in the smell of spring, or exploring a strange
city, or jumping out of an airplane, than you should seek some medical
assistance. If you indeed do get joy from these things, than go enjoy them,
and when you look to your left and your right, you'll find other people
enjoying them also. You just connected with another person socially, even if
he can't do differential equations in his head.

------
Estragon

      None of these [High-IQ] groups is willing to acknowledge 
      or come to terms with the fact that much of their 
      membership belong to the psychological walking wounded. 
      This alone is enough to explain the constant schisms that 
      develop, the frequent vendettas, and the mediocre level of 
      their publications.
    

Another perfectly plausible explanation: you have to be a raging egotist to
consider joining such a group.

------
ypavan
Aptly summarized by Huxley's quote from the text:

"Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race
there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we?
Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out
almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could
never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will
grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them"

------
DanielBMarkham
Perhaps it's just me, but this article seemed a bit of the self-masturbatory
side. Perhaps that is because of the venue it is presented in.

I did find some useful information, however. And I think there is an important
point here. But it also was a bit over-the-top. As an example of this
nonsense, _Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of
the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--
what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should
have found out almost nothing at all._

Ludicrous malarkey.

