
Kim Ung-yong: The man with the highest IQ - fogus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong
======
david927
Malcolm Gladwell states in Outliers that there's really no correlation between
high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is
about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes.

I think that in the future we'll come to realize that IQ is actually a silly
metric and that this "understanding" is where it's at. Point of view
(understanding) doesn't give you more intelligence (Alan Kay's proverbial 80
IQ points), but instead intelligence can help you to gain understanding.

~~~
sethg
The original purpose of IQ tests was not to predict who would go on to the
most brilliant career, but to help teachers recognize who would need special
help in classes. _In that context_ I think the distinction between 120, 150,
and 180 IQ is meaningful.

~~~
WilliamLP
The distinction between 150 and 180 IQ is meaningful? Really? If such a
difference is reliably measured, and not easily trained by either person (e.g.
by devouring a few books on vocabulary and brain puzzlers in the week before
the test), then what is the meaningful difference? Both people are going to be
bored out of their mind at school and are going to have to be basically self-
reliant for their actual learning process for much of their lives. Feynman
supposed had an IQ in the low end of that range, and a given person at the
higher end probably isn't as smart in any real sense as Feynman was. Whatever
the difference is there, it isn't IQ.

~~~
pw0ncakes
I don't know if the distinction between a _tested_ 150 and 180 IQ is
meaningful, but that between those levels of intelligence is. I'm in the 150
range; I've met some who are probably in the 180 range (IMO gold medalists)
and they are noticeably smarter than I am.

That said, even a 200 IQ won't overcome a lackluster work ethic, mental
illness, or social adversity (internal or external).

~~~
nkassis
I'm glad I don't know my IQ, I can keep imagining I'm in the 500 range ;p

~~~
bitwize
IT'S OVER 9000

------
huherto
"I was not a loser, but I just wanted to live ordinarily" Perhaps this is the
best proof of his extraordinary intelligence.

~~~
jraynor
I would be very interested in reading comments elaborating on this stance by
people that agree with it, since my view is a bit different.

In the interest of human progress, I would prefer that people with great
ability are encouraged by society and their peers (which I assume the great
minds at HN are likely to be among). I mean this in terms of what I see should
be encouraged and done so through morals and not laws (e.g. in no way promote
the violation of a person's freedom or liberty).

~~~
python123
Quit trying to suck up to the people on here. They are not talented people.
This would be obvious to you if you had any talent at all. These people are
mostly 30-some career software engineers who fantasize about becoming
entrepreneurs and like thinking of themselves as hackers even though they lack
the skills to justify that term. There's some good domain technical knowledge
here, but very little actual intelligence. Just read any math links (everybody
upvotes to look good, but nobody comments because they don't really understand
- or they write really dumb comments).

If you can read Outliers and not understand the horrible science and
generalizations behind it then you are an idiot. 120 IQ?? Are you kidding me?
Maybe it makes you feel better because you only have a 120 IQ, but that
precludes you from achieving anything meaningful in math and science. High IQ
does not mean you will be a high achiever, but only those with exception IQ's
are able to achieve in certain fields.

This is the problem with America. This is why America will lose to China in
the next decades. We are trained to feel better about ourselves be devaluing
those with superior intellect and ability.

~~~
bitwize
Would that you could tell that to Feynman (I.Q. 127). His amused smile at your
remarks would probably be one for the ages.

~~~
python123
That only means IQ tests are utter bullcrap. I'm talking about real
intelligence. Feynman was an extremely gifted mathematician from a very early
age. He won lots of math awards and was even a Putnam Fellow. Those are far
more legitimate tests of his intelligence than whatever garbage exam produced
his 127. It's good you take a single example and try to generalize without
looking at any other facts. Sure, most people with 120 IQs can win Putnam or
go on to become great physicists.

~~~
pw0ncakes
I don't think there's an IQ test out there that can reliably distinguish 1M:1
("175") intelligence from 1000:1 ("147"), but it definitely exists and, in
some pursuits, it matters. I know because I'm in the 1-10k:1 range and I know
some 1M:1 people (IMO gold medalists, Putnam fellows) and, although they
aren't so different as to live in a separate world, they're clearly smarter.

~~~
python123
Ummm..... wouldn't such a test be something like Putnam or IMO? As you said,
those exact tests that let us distinguish at that level.

~~~
python123
@pw0ncakes

This just shows that IQ tests are garbage. Top level math contests are a much
better indicator of your intelligence. I don't know what tests you're talking
about because USAMO and Putnam don't have internationals.

And what mathematicians are you talking about? Take time to look them up
because I can think of no examples of great mathematicians being "bad at
proofs". That would mean they were bad at logic, which would mean they were
bad at math. Being more famous for a conjecture doesn't mean you were bad at
proofs. To even produce those conjecture requires deep understanding of the
math leading to it. I can almost guarantee that there are no great
mathematicians who would zero Putnam. I don't even zero Putnam, and there are
plenty of people way better than me who still have no chance of becoming a
great mathematician.

Do you realize how brilliant a mathematician has to be for you to even ever
know his name?

~~~
pw0ncakes
International students can take Putnam if they go to school in the US, no? I
could be wrong on this.

 _And what mathematicians are you talking about?_ I retract that: "sucked at
proofs" is too strong a statement. There was a time when the same degree of
rigor wasn't expected, so a lot of great mathematicians never or rarely wrote
proofs. An example would be Ramanujan, who contributed immensely to
mathematics and had amazing intuition, but who rarely wrote proofs and, when
he did, Hardy usually had to fill in the holes.

On the other hand, had Ramanujan desired or needed to learn how to write
rigorous proofs, there's no doubt that he would have been able to do so.

As for Putnam as a "better indicator" of intelligence than IQ tests, I'd
agree, but it still only measures one kind of intelligence. The problem with
IQ tests is that they aren't accurate in the upper ranges (140+) because
that's not what they're designed for.

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scotty79
If you want to make yourself feel better go and pass Mensa entry test. As a
programmer you are already highly advantaged by knowing such concepts as xor
an other bitwise operations and knowing how to animate a moving point (erase
it and draw it again some distance away in each frame). There are puzzles
based on these concepts.

I took that test once and had all answers correct, which means I have IQ at
least 156 (Binet scale) but might be much higher since I still had almost 30
minutes left.

~~~
cabalamat
I think the Mensa tests are made artificially easy, since they want people to
pay trhem money.

It's quite easy for people to improve their IQ scores by practisingf the
questions. I once took an IQ test from a book (I think it was by Eysenck) and
then did another test from the same book a few days later. On the second test
I scored 27 points higher, so by definition my IQ was 27 points higher; I
doubt if I was any cleverer in any meaningful way.

I suspect that part of the Flynn effect (that IQ scores have been increasing
over time) is due to people being more familiar with those sorts of puzzles.

Having said all that, I suspect that being able to learn from experience (and
therefore get higher scores on similar tests) is a pretty large factor in
intelligence.

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sethg
Assuming that the IQ test that Kim took was the kind that uses 16 points per
standard deviation (some, IIRC, use 15), that puts him almost seven standard
deviations above the mean. It seems to me that once you get above five
standard deviations (i.e., the top 99.9999% of the population), tests of
“general intelligence” aren’t really measuring anything more than the ability
to max out whatever subtests that particular test author chose to include.

~~~
aubergene
just thinking the same thing

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Post_War_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Post_War_to_1929)

------
JeffJenkins
Is there any evidence to verify the claims in that article aside from his IQ?
This is all very suspicious looking, and I couldn't find anything about the
timing of the Phd he got or that he worked for NASA.

~~~
sausagefeet
I agree, I remain skeptical of all those [citation needed]'s. William James
Sidis > * still.

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wallflower
Terman's Kids (the most famous longitudinal study of IQ and life achievement).

[http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/arti...](http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/articles/terman.html)

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holdenc
Personal theory: stardom comes during childhood or adulthood, but rarely both.

~~~
Hexstream
First time ever I'm relieved to have been a loser in childhood.

Incidentally, I'm starting to kick some serious butt. Get ready, World, here I
come!

------
mmaunder
This story is kind of sad. You'd think he would stick with Physics and help
advance the species by building an engine to travel to the stars or solving
the unified field theory. But instead he went into the most earth-bound
profession imaginable.

It makes one think that innovation is less about raw IQ and more about
curiosity and passion.

~~~
mapleoin
Have you seen _Good Will Hunting_?

~~~
mmaunder
Great movie, but it's about child abuse and recovery.

~~~
joss82
It's more about life and recovery.

------
mburney
He was writing poems and showing an aptitude for languages at a very early age
-- I wonder why as a child he was pushed into only doing physics rather than a
wide variety of studies? We seem to believe that since physics is the most
difficult subject to master, that means the most intelligent people have to do
physics. That is pretty poor reasoning; I would think people with higher IQs
may be better off as polymaths with a wide exposure to arts AND the sciences
(and engineering).

Goethe, for example, had a very high IQ and even though he wrote about
science, his greatest contribution to humanity was his literature.

~~~
mquander
What do you mean, he was "pushed into only doing physics?" Are you reading
another source? In the Wikipedia article, it doesn't imply that he was pushed,
and it doesn't imply that he gave up other pursuits.

------
mikecane
And what about Christopher Langan?

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

~~~
tokenadult
Neither has a validated IQ score. NO ONE with an IQ score reported to be above
160 has a validated IQ score. IQ test scores in that range have never been
properly validated, on any IQ test of any era.

It is well known that reliability of IQ tests is at its worst at the highest
level of IQ scores. The author of the Stanford-Binet form L-M (the test that
Marilyn vos Savant, among others, took to get a sky-high unvalidated score)
was among the first to say so:

"The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high
reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The
probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with
young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from
younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the
P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of
Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation
arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they
were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3

<http://learninfreedom.org/Terman%201937%20Figure%203.gif>

is typical of the arrays at every age level.

"From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is
not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It
has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater
I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see
that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been
predicted on logical grounds." (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)

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 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.

Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ elementary-age pupils showed that
many of those young people did not qualify as "gifted" on a subsequent test
that Terman gave them at high school age. But he kept them in the study group
anyway.

Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the
Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.

An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and
rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below
his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who
co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children
included in the study ever won a Nobel prize. The book by Shurkin I have just
cited here is a good corrective on many misconceptions about IQ, and has an
excellent section on attempts by one of Terman's study associates to estimate
--by extremely dubious methods that have never been validated--the IQ scores
of historical persons.

P.S. 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>

~~~
mikecane
Like others, I think it's sad that both of these people are not contributing
more and I find their trajectories to be a waste. Maybe that's my jealousy
speaking. But I know if I was suddenly gifted with the ease of learning and
grasping of concepts both of them have, I'd do a lot with that.

------
maxklein
The most intelligent people are rarely thick skinned. And to be and stay
famous, you have to be pretty thick skinned.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Hollywood disagrees.

------
elblanco
IQ is a measure of capacity, not a measure of the current amount.

IQ is a bucket. Even if you have a 5 gallon bucket, you can still only put 1
gallon of stuff in it.

------
Vicarious
Is it possible that the higher the IQ is at birth the faster the brain
degenerates? Not just from a built-in process but also from stress due to lack
of social acceptance. This algernon process could imply that by 25, a physics
PhD at 16 can only manage civil engineering.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
I'm not sure that I would be so willing to call a guy who's published 90-ish
papers in CE a dummy.

------
aswanson
Similar to the story of William Sidis.

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zackattack
Even someone supremely intelligent seems to be bound by human needs of social
approval. I wonder what his brain looks like. I wonder if he has superior
rates of motor skill acquisition.

~~~
barrkel
I would doubt it. Physical coordination seems to be inversely correlated with
signs of intellectual achievement, such as advanced degrees etc. People who
live in their head seem awkward in their bodies.

------
pw0ncakes
I wonder if he's going to tell us to put toilet water on the crops, instead of
Brawndo.

~~~
gwern
Why would he do that? Brawndo has what plants crave.

------
TheSOB88
That English quote at the end seems pretty non-fluent to me (the "but" seems
unnatural). I wonder how much of his other achievements are exaggeration.

~~~
electromagnetic
You're applying your own regional knowledge of English to someone else's. I'm
English and I've worked as a writer and I've done copy-editing, and that 'but'
has every right to be there, even if it hurts the flow of the sentence. For
anyone growing up in an English speaking country we all know that a pause
readily means 'but', especially if it was a longer pause.

As it's a translation of something he said, the issue here is the integrity of
the translator not of the man himself. A good translator would have dropped
the but, because he likely never used it when he spoke in Korean.

I've spent a lot of time in France, and even though I'm nowhere near fluent I
still manage to speak the slang. By spending time in the country and amongst
the people I learnt all the social norms for speaking that I never learnt in a
high school class. There's a vast difference in usage between _Bonsoir_ and
_Bonne nuit_ , the latter is literally used exclusively in the meaning
"goodnight, I won't see you again today". Similarly I've seen many a confused
tourist when they were greeted with _Salut_ "bye" as a greeting.

Again from several vacations in Spain and the Spanish islands, I rarely ever
heard _Gracias_ "Thank you", they all use _Graci_ "thanks", again despite
everything I was taught of Spanish it wasn't right to how people actually
speak.

There's a big difference between being fluent in a language, and being fluent
in a dialect. Dialects typically teach us how to use English improperly,
mainly because 90% of our interactions are informal. However almost every
English speaking person would remove their dialect in the instance if they
were brought in front of a world leader. I know for people receiving
Knighthoods from the queen they have to instruct people on how to pronounce
"ma'am" (pronounced mam) as they try to pronounce it 'properly' and in doing
so pronounce it wrong, which apparently bugs the Queen herself as she's been
noted for correcting people on it too.

