
Does having a high IQ make you less creative? - pmf
http://reglia.com/blog/does-having-a-high-iq-makes-you-less-creative.html
======
tokenadult
This was a better and more original blog post than I expected from the title.
The finding from the Terman study is rather important, and should be more
widely known. The definitive book about the Terman study, written by a
Stanford University Press Office science journalist who was the first
independent researcher to have access to study files, is Joel Shurkin's
Terman's Kids (1992).

[https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joel-n-
shurkin/te...](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joel-n-
shurkin/termans-kids/)

Alas, that book is currently out of print, but well worth finding in a
library. To say, as the blog post author does, "IQ is as important as height
in basketball" gets the main point right.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Boykins>

AFTER EDIT:

I see there is a reply here that appears to be from the blog post author.

 _Will try something better next time. Sorry for my bad english._

I admire people who participate here even though they didn't grow up speaking
English at home. That's not easy. What is your native language? What has been
your process for learning English?

~~~
pmf
Thank you! Im from Uruguay so my native language is Spanish. I've learned
english mainly by playing videogames (I kid you not) as a kid, as Warren
Buffett says "We prefer process over outcome" so It was a fun way to do it.

~~~
speeder
Good to know that I am not alone in the learning method for that subject.

I am from Brazil.

------
stared
It's tempting to look at IQ as a potential for everything, but as one having
access to a lot of ultra-smart people (I'm doing PhD in theoretical physics)
it's very easy to see that creativity lies on a different axis.

And during studies I've met many people who were able to solve very hard
mathematical problems, but at the same time - were seemingly unable to create
new ones on their own.

(And also, creativity many times is counterproductive, as encourages to try
something new rather than using a good, already tested solution.)

See also: <http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/72/28> (a good answer to a silly
question "Is IQ really unimportant for creativity beyond a certain basic IQ of
roughly 125?")

~~~
walshemj
the problem is that for higher IQ's you at the end of the distribution so the
effect of errors is much higher maybe the two Nobels just had a cold or a bad
day when they took the test.

And how do you factor conditions like dyslexia in I have seen suggestions that
dyslexics score 15 or 20 points off so by that mark I am a genius :-)

~~~
disgruntledphd2
That's a very good point, especially given that the standard deviation of IQ
scores is 15, which suggests that scores of between 125 and 140 are possible
(indeed, somewhat likely) for the same individual - a finding which I have
found in my own experience of taking them.

Additionally, IQ tests were developed to assess someone's ability to benefit
from formal education, and to the extent that these skills are uncorrelated
with successful outcomes, IQ will be a poor predictor of it.

------
api
I'd say that obsession and monomania about one form of cognition makes you
less creative, and high IQ people are often so impressed with their analytical
intellect that they fall into the trap of disregarding other mental
capabilities.

------
arikrak
"Write as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects:
a brick... average students had much more diverse answers than students with
high I.Q.’s. "

Asking a question like list things you can do with a brick is meaningless,
since there's no metric to measure the ideas by. Anyone can list an unlimited
number of completely ridiculous (and diverse) ideas if they want to, just many
would find that pointless. And ridiculous creativity isn't helpful either,
what's needed in life is good ideas.

A more useful test would be to see what useful ideas people could come up with
to solve a problem, though that would be harder to measure.

~~~
rm999
>And ridiculous creativity isn't helpful either, what's needed in life is good
ideas.

I think the point is to separate creativity and intelligence as two orthogonal
concepts. A creative person will filter out fewer thoughts, an intelligent
person will make better decisions from their thoughts. It's possible to have
both, and I think those are the most successful people.

When I think of the combination of creative and intelligent I think of Bobby
Fischer. Back when I used to play tournament chess I went through every game
from his book "60 Memorable Games", and I was amazed at how creative he was:
he would often pick game-winning moves that I would never consider. This is
part of what made him the greatest chess player of his time.

~~~
Someone
But the OP's complaint that there is no objective way to count 'ways to use a
brick' still stands. IMO, it also may be the reason for the negative
correlation with IQ. When thinking of this challenge, I soon started to
abstract away solutions (throw, hit, shield, sink, etc). That, for instance,
gives one 'kill an animal' way to use a brick, with subordinations 'in
defense', 'for food', etc. If you don't spend time abstracting this, you can
rattle of 'kill a mouse, kill a cat, kill a dog, kill a rat, kill a raccoon,
kill an elephant, etc.) for an insane amount of 'different' uses. I would rate
that lower than the single 'kill a plant' category that I thought of (as in
'use brick as a nutcracker' or 'use brick to mill flour')

------
gwern
> His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary students who went on to be
> Nobel laureates William Shockley and Luis Alvarez�and rejected them
> both.Their IQs weren't high enough. Terman concluded: "We have seen that
> intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated."

Both just barely failed the cutoff, and given the very low base-rate of
Nobelists, it's not surprising that there would be misses. This is the same
logic as with terrorism-detecting systems.

> The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once
> someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ
> points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. -

Wrong. The correlation doesn't go away in the Terman report, nor does it go
away in the later long-term SMPY studies. What happens past 130 or so is that
IQ loses predictive value compared to Extraversion (for income) or
Conscientiousness and Openness (for discoveries).

> For your surprise an English researcher named Liam Hudson found that average
> students had much more diverse answers than students with high I.Q.�s.

And yet - to go back to the submission title - when you measure Openness, it's
the only Big Five personality to show a correlation with IQ. The correlation
is positive and not negligible (r=0.3 or so, IIRC). So why does one sample
about divergent thinking matter?

------
joelmaat
To respond to the title, having a high IQ does not make you less creative.
Simple.

As for the Terman study, I think people with high IQ scores don't "go places"
mainly due to laziness, lack of ambition (failing to see the point in it all),
or due constant harassment by those envious of their intelligence or those
that feel inferior, or those that see an easy target. After years of taking a
beating many end up leading simple lives in which they hope to just survive.

~~~
gnosis
Ambition and perseverence is really the key. Over and over again, I've read of
famous people attributing their success to perseverence.

Some examples:

 _"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed
my way to success."_ \-- Thomas Edison

 _"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives
solely in my tenacity."_ \-- Louis Pasteur

 _"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When
I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly."_ \-- Alexander Hamilton

 _"What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it."_ \--
Doris Lessing

~~~
joelmaat
I agree. It's not everything, but perseverance is the difference maker, much
like (a positive) attitude.

------
mercuryrising
When he went through the "how do I become smart" section, I was expecting
these to be creative techniques, as these are the ones I frequently use in the
day.

Inversion: Flipping the problem on it's head. You want to fill up a water
bottle as quickly as you can? What about emptying it as fast as possible? The
second one may be easier to solve, and gives you additional insight into the
problem you want to solve.

Avoidance: This is more general, but don't look up what you want to find on
the internet. Look for something more specific, or don't look it up at all. I
forget exactly what it was, but one time I wanted to find something easily
online, but I didn't want to get the answer right away (waiting to get an
answer invests more of your neurons to the answer). I searched for the harder
things first. Also, looking things up will show you the way that other people
solved the problem, not the way that you solved the problem. It taints the
waters when you look online for something you're trying to be creative about.

Compound Interest: The pathways you make between ideas today will be useful
tomorrow. The training exercises you subject your brain to today will pay off
tomorrow. I like to imagine a river whenever I think about the 'flow' of ideas
in my brain. The river is always flowing, but some days it moves more of the
bottom of the river. Sometimes, you'll uncover something cool, sometimes not.
Rediscovering the bottom constrains you to similar thoughts, just going a
little bit deeper. You likely won't get new ideas from the bottom of the
river. You need your flow to branch out, to expand and see where it goes. Use
some of your brain flow to bifuricate your brain flow and find something new.
Maybe it will bring you back to your main river, or maybe you'll find
something new.

Tipping Points: When thinking of something new, blowing the problem up to
infinity, or extremely large (or maximum), or extremely small (or minumum) can
put an instant perspective on what needs to happen and whether or not a
solution is even possible.

Lollapaloozas: The creative slide. I call this mental momentum - when you
start having good ideas, you continue having them (until you run out of
steam). They may not truly be good, but the more ideas you have in a set
amount of time, the more power they having in breaking down the barriers that
are preventing your thoughts from going further.

------
dschiptsov
Creativity is usually defined as an ability to apply knowledge accumulated in
another fields. So, it is not about how much IQ points you have, but how you
use your mind. More different fields mastered - more chances for some creative
breakthrough.

Of course, higher IQ is an advantage (think about learning _efficiency_ ),
everything else being equal. It is like in sports - some people are just more
coordinated, less clumsy, so, they are progressing quickly in almost every
discipline.

------
Xcelerate
It's quite ironic that William Shockley's IQ wasn't high enough, considering
the controversy he was involved in (eugenics on the basis of intelligence):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Statements_abo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Statements_about_populations_and_genetics)

------
natural219
The blog post was good, but the title was completely misleading. I was
expecting a scientific / thorough look at the title question, and there was
absolutely nothing to that effect.

However, the real subject of this post -- "Methods To Increase Your
Intelligence" -- was rather well done.

~~~
pmf
Thought that could perform better with this tittle rather to the one you
sugested, anyways will have it in mind for my future posts. Thank you.

------
tmoertel
This makes a _great_ example of conflating correlation and causation. (I don’t
mean this as a criticism of the original post. Rather, I think it’s an
opportunity to discuss something that’s fascinating and counterintuitive and
that even researchers often get wrong.)

The original post says a researcher (Liam Hudson) was surprised to discover
that average students seemed to be more creative than high-IQ students. Thus
the question arises: _Does having a high IQ make you less creative?_ The
problem, however, is that the question is causal whereas the evidence that
prompts it is observational and tricky for humans to interpret causally.

To see why it’s tricky, let’s imagine a universe in which IQ and creativity
are _completely unrelated_. Nevertheless, if both factors contribute to
success (and it’s easy to believe that they do), they will have a negative
correlation, _conditional upon success_. And guess what? Almost all
creativity/IQ studies are implicitly conditioned upon success because
researchers don’t want to compare “A” students to “C” students, for fear of
biasing their results.

For example, let’s model our imaginary universe in R. First, let’s assign
normalized IQ and creativity scores to 100 students, completely randomly and
completely independently:

    
    
        n <- 100
        creativity <- rnorm(n)
        iq <- rnorm(n)
    

And now let’s say that success is some increasing (causal) function of
creativity and IQ, plus chance:

    
    
        success <- creativity + iq + rnorm(n)
    

And now let’s pretend that some researchers have captured this very data. _We_
know that IQ and creativity are completely unrelated (because we created the
universe), but _they_ don’t. Here’s what happens when they try to tease out
the relationship between IQ and creativity, conditioned upon success:

    
    
        Call:
        lm(formula = creativity ~ iq + success)
    
        Coefficients:
                    Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
        (Intercept) -0.08848    0.08042  -1.100    0.274    
        iq          -0.58801    0.09394  -6.259 1.05e-08 ***
        success      0.57538    0.05431  10.594  < 2e-16 ***
        ---
        Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 
    

Note that the IQ coefficient is negative. That is, given knowledge of a
student’s success, if we also learn that the student has a higher IQ score, we
should update our state of knowledge to _decrease_ our belief that the student
has a higher creativity score.

I know that that claim may sound counterintuitive, but if you do the
probability math, you’ll see that it makes sense. It only _seems_
counterintuitive. That’s because your brain can’t help but try to interpret
the relationship causally.

That is, it’s all too easy to take this relationship that exists between
_states of knowledge_ about the universe and think that it actually exists
within universe for real. (This mistake is what E. T. Jaynes called the “mind
projection fallacy” in his book _Probability Theory: The Logic of Science._ )
And lots of researchers make this mistake, too.

I don’t know for sure if that’s what’s happening here, in the IQ vs.
creativity research, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it has at least
contributed to some of the unexpected findings.

~~~
tmoertel
Please help me improve my comments: Why the downvote?

------
bennyg
This blog post doesn't do Creativity much justice, especially this nice little
summary quote at the end:

 _The best models come from biology, physics, mathematics, microeconomics and
psychology. Just think about what every freshman knows, and thats what you
need to know._

Creativity is a function on a lot of different things at once, and is
different for a lot of people. For one, it's a function on curiosity. Highly
curious people tend to have the inherent drive to learn new things, new
domains. This is in marked contrast to those that learn by being forced to
through school or extrinsic pressures. The intrinsic learners are looking for
understanding and knowledge, while the extrinsically motivated folks are
striving for grades, money, societal acceptance or something else entirely.
This is a very important distinction.

Next, creativity is a function on playfulness. John Cleese gets it absolutely
right in this 30 minute talk [1]. You've got to dance around the problem,
don't worry about wrong or impossible solutions, since the best solutions are
usually arrived after jumping through intermediate impossibles - things and
ideas that aren't realizable but make disparate connections in your brain and
thinking patterns that lead to ideas that are novel and that can be realized.
This is also very important. A childlike playfulness with concepts, ideas,
words and humor are necessary for driving creativity.

This playfulness directly correlates to a lateral thinking style. "Lateral
thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using
reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be
obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic [2]." You've got to
break the habits of being a rigid logician; it comes back to connecting
disparate thoughts, ideas and knowledge domains in your head. This is
imperative too.

The last point I want to make is that creativity is a process. Cleese talks
about it in the video mentioned above as well, but this is very important. You
can't worry about the details of implementation or the stress of time if you
want creativity to flourish. Your mind needs to be unbounded and free to roam,
free to explore the cosmos without being brought back down to Earth, if you
will. Cleese calls this "open mode." When you have your great idea, you should
switch to "closed mode" - a mode where you actually implement or create your
idea, because it's fully in your head. It may take a conscious effort for a
while to train yourself to get into open mode and stay there, but that's great
mental training.

It's also wonderful to remember that creativity applies to _everything_ , from
acting to aerospace engineers saving the crew of Apollo 13, so the domain
knowledge the author listed in the quote is good, but for sure not the extent
necessary for unbridled creativity. It's also not the only factor.

\-----

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking>

~~~
hackinthebochs
Your points about creativity aren't incompatible with the blog's points. In
fact, I'd say your points elaborate the framework defined by the author. The
blog defined creativity as applying mental models and combining one's past
experiences randomly to discover new connections. Your points about
playfulness and curiosity fall right into this framework. One who is more
inquisitive will have more experiences, and spent more time analyzing these
experiences. Playfulness comes with being more prone to making random
connections between disparate experiences and trying to find some underlying
patterns. I think this does a good job at getting to the the essence of
creativity.

------
steveeq1
The mental models approach discussed by this blogger can be further explored
in Charlie Munger's speech "Elemantary Worldly Wisdom":
<http://ycombinator.com/munger.html> .

I, myself, study the mental models using this app:
<http://www.thinkmentalmodels.com/> . So when I'm waiting in line I can review
a few models on my iphone

------
fauigerzigerk
There's something I keep wondering about whenever I see people draw any
conclusions whatsoever from IQ alone: How can it not matter whether a
particular score was achieved by being equally good at all tasks or by being
very good at some and very bad at other tasks?

I would expect a totally different outcome to many IQ related studies if that
were taken into account. Or maybe it is actually taken into account but never
reported, I'm not sure.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Empirically, the score on the whole IQ test is highly correlated with the
score on any subset of the questions. There is a difference between scores on
verbal/symbolic and visual/spatial questions that depends on the testee, but
it is usually modest except in cases of severe brain damage or malformation.

------
dougk16
I can't reference any studies or anything, but my personal experience is that
passion trumps all. The problem with passion is, you don't have much of a
choice. One might have a passion for gardening, whereas another might have a
passion for computers. The gardener has a lower chance of being "successful"
and "making a difference" (in the standard capitalist/western sense).

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Many studies have found that IQ predicts financial success regardless of
childhood socioeconomic background or profession. Running a chain of
greenhouses lack the flashiness of, say, particle physics, but it can be both
profitable and socially important.

------
looser
Creativity is a tricky area to dive in.

Sometimes the more you _fill_ your mind with (judgemental?) thinking, the more
the creativity escapes.

Sometimes the more you _empty_ your mind with secondary thinking, the more the
creativity appears.

Sometimes playing a musical instrument is a good thing.

Sometimes doing a query without joins is incoherent yet good results come.

------
gedrap
Is it only me, or the first half feels like a copy of one of chapters of
Outliers by Gladwell?

~~~
pmf
It is, im sorry if this offends anyone, but it was crucial to give a proper
introduction to the mental model thing. Will try something better next time.
Sorry for my bad english.

------
ajankovic
I wonder then how Google(web search) or Internet in general is affecting our
creativity. It's a great combination of stories and knowledge at our disposal.

And how visiting just one type of websites, like hacker news or reddit can
narrow our mental models.

------
scotty79
Anecdotal evidence: Worst school assignments for me was making stuff up. It
felt so stupid my brain actively rejected those. Memorizing - second worst.
Understanding, problem solving - pure bliss. Mensa member here.

------
PuercoPop
It's not about intelligence IMHO, its about the immediatesuccess oriented
culture that pervades modern life. A lot of intelligent people just want to
resolve the issue at hand as fast as possible.

------
bjhoops1
Almost the entirety of this post comes from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Good
read though and good summary!

------
knodi
It's just a number. Like everything in life its best to be objective about
these subjective numbers.

------
chimpout
pretty sure that it's only in the real tail that IQ loses its predictive
value, well above 1 sd

go read steve hsu

------
sagacityhappens
no, but it does get in the way of finishing what you have created.

------
Zenst
With a high IQ things that lesser IQ people deem creative are to you common
sence, so with that I'd say the answear too this is the classic yes and no
argument.

But in general IQ and creativity have no direct corilation and if anything EQ
(Emotional Quota) would be a more relative guage than IQ.

~~~
Zenst
sad nobody understood the point I was making, I shall dumb it down a little.

If a low IQ person saw a rocket and had no idea how it worked then they would
deem it magic, aka creative. So with that the more intellegent somebody is on
the IQ scale then the more that what would appear creative is to them common
logical sence. But thanks for the feedback of silence :p.

