I was wondering at the fact that being really, really smart and really, really good looking typically don’t intersect in one individual all that often, which isn’t all that surprising in that both those states are not all that common to begin with, and to have them combine would be fairly improbable.
Now bear in mind I’m not talking about being “cute” or “quite intelligent”. If that was the case a lot of dopers (judging by the pics thread) might well qualify. I’m talking about being drop dead movie star handsome or gorgeous, and guaranteed MIT free ride scholarship level smart, or evidence of a very high intellect evidenced by some recognized accomplishment. Are there any examples of these types of individuals out there?
As an aside I’m not considering MacArthur “Genius” grants as direct evidence in and of themselves of very high intelligence as these grant awards seem somewhat academically and politically cliquish.
This puzzles me somewhat: sure the selection process might be a bit cliquish, but surely you’d need to be sufficiently smart to meet your criterion to even be in the running for such an award?
Would Hedy Lamarr qualify/ A true Hollywood beauty and among other things she also co-invented an early form of spread spectrum encoding, a key to modern wireless communication.
I once saw a reasonable theory that looks and brains should manifest in the same individuals. IIRC, the breakdown was something like this:
[ol]
[li]Attractiveness and intelligence are both heritable traits.[/li][li]Smart men are more likely to be successful.[/li][li]Women are attracted to successful men.[/li][li]Men, given their choices, will prefer beautiful women.[/li][/ol]
Therefore, smart men will have better access to beautiful women, and both parents will pass their desirable genes on to their children.
It’s likely that you can find empirical support for any single assumption on that list. Supporting the theory as a whole might take more work, but it’s at least falsifiable.
She is smart but not a genius is what I would say. I think Jodie Foster might better qualify, she graduated with Honors IRC.
Graduated in 1980 as the **class valedictorian ** from the private academy Lycée Français in Los Angeles.
Was reading by the time she was three years old.
Fluent in French by age 14, she spoke her own lines in the 1977 film Moi, fleur bleue (1977) and the 2004 film Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004).
She was fluent in Italian by the age of 18.
I just don’t know anyway to declare her a genius, she might be and in interviews she appears to be at least brilliant, where as Brooke Shields not so much.
That requires a cite of course for at least the beautiful part.
How do we qualify if you are a genius? You come across here as quite bright, but I don’t think we judge if you are a genius from your posts.
You’re going to have to specify more exactly the level of beauty and brains that you want if you’re going to answer this question. Brooke Shields was smart enough to get into Princeton, but that doesn’t mean she was a genius. Every year there must be tens of thousands of women who get into a top-level college in the U.S. (or were smart enough to do so if they had tried). I suspect that dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of those women each year were as pretty as Brooke Shields and at least as smart. Getting into Princeton (especially considering that going to good prep schools and being famous tends to help in admissions) probably doesn’t mean more than that Shields had an I.Q. of 140 or above (i.e., was in the top .4% of the population). That sounds exclusive, but it doesn’t mean any such thing. That means one person in 250 is that smart. So more than a million people in this country are that smart. Somehow I suspect that several thousand are prettier than Brooke Shields.
It’s not quite as impressive as it’s usually made out to be that Hedy Lamarr discovered frequency-hopping. It was independently discovered several times:
There are sometimes claims that Lamarr was a brilliant scientist or engineer. She was no such thing. She was a very smart person who never had the chance to show her intelligence except in this one thing. She may have been even smarter than this one discovery makes her sound, but there’s no way to be sure.
Danica McKellar is another case where it’s hard to be sure just how smart she is given the hype she has been given. Yeah, she graduated summa cum laude in math. She still hasn’t gone to grad school, so nobody knows just how well she would do. Publishing a paper as an undergrad isn’t that big a deal, especially when it’s in collaboration with a professor and another student. So how smart is she? It’s hard to tell. Clearly she’s very smart. She’ll probably have no problem getting into grad school and getting her Ph.D. A thousand people get math Ph.D.'s just in the U.S. every year. That doesn’t mean that she’ll be a first-rate mathematician. This is another case where it’s just too hard to tell if she’s really the utter genius her publicity makes her out to be.
As I understand it, statistically smart people do tend to be more physically attractive than average. Also, it’s been pointed out that there’s a more direct link between the two qualities; increased symmetry and other aspects of beauty are a reflection of good development in the womb, which makes it less likely that the person in question won’t have defects that lower intelligence.
O.K., now it’s clear how much hype there is in these matters. An I.Q. of 180 means that someone is 6 standard deviations greater than the mean in intelligence. Take a look at how rare that is:
Only about one person in a billion has an I.Q. of 180 or above. That means that there are only six or seven people in the entire world with an I.Q. that high. In general, it’s not even possible to measure an I.Q. above 160. There’s no way to norm the test for anything more than that. This is simply someone making an off-hand guess who knows nothing about I.Q. testing. Besides, while it’s rare to graduate from high school at 14, it’s not that rare. Alicia Witt is obviously very smart. It’s incredibly unlikely that she has an I.Q. of 180.
Cindy Crawford was valedictorian of her high school class and had a chemical engineering scholarship to Northwestern. IIRC, she was “discovered” during her first semester and promptly left Evanston for NYC.
You think so? You can always finish your education, but the window to make millions for shaking your shit is narrow. No different from leaving school early to play pro sports, really.
Its obviously the correct financial decision – correctly managed, a few years work means she never has to do a damn thing she doesn’t want to for the rest of her life.
