The precocious children who have masters degrees by the time they’re twelve. Do they have high IQs and exceptional accomplishments as adults, or are they simply reaching their maximum potential faster?
Generally speaking, your IQ tends to increase with age, then may decrease in old age due to dementia and other issues. Children with high IQs don’t typically peak early. More typically, their IQ continues to rise at about the same percentage as everyone else. There is some variation though. As with almost everything, there’s always some outliers on the charts.
This may surprise some people, but precocious children often do not do well as adults. When they are young, they often focus too much on their talents and not enough on social skills. They often have difficulty making friends since while average people can find numerous other average people to hang out with, precocious people are a rarity and have a lot of difficulty finding others like them to be friends with. They also often push themselves too hard and end up burning out.
So that kid that got his masters at 12 may not necessarily end up a successful adult, even if he or she does still have a high IQ as an adult. IQ is not an accurate predictor of success in life.
From what i’ve read about very young children, milestones like walking, talking, numbers and abc’s aren’t a predictor or any future intelligence.
Mensa is full of people who tested high as kids and ended up underachieving as adults. Very few of them were Masters candidates at 12, but many where scholastic overachievers through HS & perhaps into college. Then their personality unbalance began to hold them back.
There seems to be a portion of parents who worry terribly if their child is later than average on reaching some of these, yet there are any number of cases where the “late bloomers” do just fine. One example is the child who hasn’t said his first word yet (or more than a small handful of words) at some almost alarming point, only to start speaking in complete sentences.
Think of it like sports. You have kids who are bigger, faster, stronger, more coordinated. As you move up each level, some succeed and move up, some peak and go no further, some can’t do well at that level, and some simply lose interest.
Looking back at my elementary and high school graduating class, there is absolutely no relationship between the raw intelligence some kids had and what they did with it.
I was friends with one kid who got straight A’s throughout elementary school, went to an honors high school, got straight A’s there and then failed calculus. He said he simply wasn’t able to adjust his thinking that way (the first time around, eventually he mastered it.)
Under what definition? Under the usual definitions, 100 is the average IQ for any given age group, and an individual’s IQ will tend to remain roughly constant throughout life.
Age group being the key. If the age group is 18-95 or 55-95 then there will be an increase in IQ with age, then a decline in IQ associated with senility.
18-95 is not a group of people all of whom are the same age.
I’ve been trying for a while to find some actual statistics on how well child prodigies do as adults. I can’t find any such numbers. If someone else can find a scientific study of the question (and, no, just an article about how some prodigies do well and some do poorly isn’t good enough), please let me know. It appears to me from a quick examination of articles on prodigies that posters in this thread are slightly exaggerating the extent to which child prodigies don’t always do well. It appears that on average child prodigies do better as adults than people who are considered as average achievers as children. Yes, some prodigies don’t do well as adults, some do about average, some do very well, and a few turn out to be the best in their chosen fields. This doesn’t mean that the majority of the people who turn out to be the best in their chosen fields were child prodigies. In fact, it appears that the majority of the best in each field are those who were considered somewhere between average and very good (but not prodigies) as children. If you’re a child prodigy, it appears that you will have a slightly better chance to be a top person in whatever field you end up in, but it isn’t remotely certain that you will.
There was a study that gave IQ tests to 11 year olds and then gave them again 60 years later. The correlation between scores was .66 which is very high. So smart children tend to be smart adults. This is less true for younger children as peoples brains can develop at different speeds. As for exceptional accomplishments IQ does correlate with accomplishments but the correlation is far from perfect.
I don’t think you can really use that analogy.
I think the bigger thing is that when everyone’s in school, there’s a more or less uniform set of things that everyone in that particular age cohort is interested in, with clearly defined success/failure criteria. So intelligence is a definite asset in that situation- smart kids will tend to make As more than others.
But as you get older, success is defined differently. Is a child prodigy who decided to find a satisfying job with low time committments and moderate pay, so he can concentrate on his family and personal interests less successful than being a frantically publishing professor at a world-class university, with all the stress that entails? Is that guy less successful than being an executive who works 80 hour weeks and has no time for home and family? That guy with the job may be the smartest of the bunch in more than one way, if you ask me.
There seems to be a perception that very intelligent children are somehow failures if they don’t go on to be internet billionaires at 30, or aren’t NASA rocket scientists, or working at Bell Labs or for Elon Musk at SpaceX or something. This isn’t the case at all.
Neither is 19-25. Neither is 18-19. neither is 18-18.5.
What;s your point?IQ is applied to age groups. 18-95 is an age group, just as 18-18.5 is.
Who would it surprise? It’s a cliche!
There’s also the strange and sad tale of William Sidis, whom the Master wrote about some years ago:
He also has a Wikipedia article, which notes that many of the claims about Sidis’s intelligence are suspect. So who knows?
This reminds me of a thread I started years ago: “Gifted Children” - Where are you now?
My theory was somewhat different, as I predicted ‘‘Gifted Children’’ would have more or less the same outcome as normal children who did better than average in school. With a few exceptions (one person was an astronaut) I turned out to be right, based on the narrow anecdotal experience of people on the Dope.
And yes, there was the inevitable IQ pissing match.
Typical age groupings classify people (in statistical terms, putting them in “bins”) as being in a comparable state of development and maturity with respect to the issue at hand. A grouping of 18-95 is essentially meaningless if the question is about development of a characteristic such as intelligence after adolescent development.
With respect to the claim that IQ increases with age, this probably says more about how we attempt to measure an inherent quality of intelligence with application-based testing. That is, it shows that there is a significant component of cultural awareness that contributes to performance on IQ tests, even though neurologically the plasticity, cognative flexibility, and memory retention/recall of the brain declines measureably with age. In other words, as a subject gains more knowledge they are better able to anticipate correct responses on an intelligence test even though their. brains are not as flexible and adaptable as they were in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood.
Getting back to the question posed by the o.p., the developmental disconnect aspect of high intellect and its resulting impact on socialization, especially on children who are highly focused on learning a technical or analytical skill area such as mathematics or chess, as been touched upon, but there is another factor as well, which is the skills and abilities that are amazing in a young child are much less so in a functioning adult. For instance, I learned to read at a very young age (I’m not going to “stealth brag” but it was significantly younger than my peers, although probably not achieving the ‘genius’ level) and I maintained 99+ percentile scores in reading comprehension based on standardized testing throughout primary and secondary school. While that was beneficial in being able to spend more time in early development absorbing advanced material, by the time I was in my late teens or early twenties my peers had caught up with me, and so it was no longer an especially impressive skill. My nearly editic memory (able to memorize large passages and arbitary strings of numbers) was useful in school, albeit mostly to allow me to spend a minimal amount of time memorizing mostly useless information while allowing me to spend time studying what I was most interested in, which was also mostly useless but still more entertaining, became largely a party trick, especially now that information is so readily available given nearly constant access to the Internet; being able to recall every film role of an actor or quote soliloquies from Shakespeare is now the purview of any schmuck with a smartphone. Dougie Houser, M.D. is amazing because he’s a 16 year old that went to medical school (as ridiculous as that premise is) but by the time he’s 35 he’s only going to be a little in advance of his medical peers in terms of intellectual and professional development.
On the other hand, most of my peers spent the years that I spent literally reading my way through a library developing social skills and connections which is an area of development that I struggle with at even a basic level today even with substantial effort. I’ve certainly been bypassed in work and personal arenas by people who are not as capable analytically, have less intellectual curiosity, and in general are less capable, but who are emotionally and socially savvy enough to not routinely make social gaffs like correcting a boss or droning on about some arcane aspect of discrete mathematics on a date. Society needs people with strong technical skills and knowledge to do the intellectual heavy lifting, but those people are rarely in charge and often poorly suited when they are promoted into leadership positions because they lack the essential knowledge of or respect for social niceities.
This isn’t universally true, of course; Lazlo Polgar and his wife insisted that their daughters (all world-class chess players in a field dominated by men) have other social activities and interests even as Polgar taught them to play chess from an early age (a deliberate experiment and demonstration of the trainability of intellectual capacity), and all three women are relatively socially normal unlike many other chess masters. It is possible to be both intellectually capable and socially adept, but that probably requires parents and other social mentors to help direct and balance out the intellectual proclivities of supranormally intelligent children. All of this is notwithstanding abnormal pathologies like autistic spectrum disorders which socially isolate people regardless of intellect.
Stranger
OTOH, there are examples of child prodigies that turn out rather well.
Terry Tao is the local boy made good.
Being local means an Adelaide boy, and for anyone who lives here, they know how connected the city is. My aunt was a midwife, and delivered Terry. A number of my colleagues had occasion to teach Terry when he attended university as a very young student. He is, by all accounts, a really nice, well adjusted, bona-fidé genius. And has been since childhood.
OTOH, the world is littered whose who didn’t continue with the promise. Musicians especially.
One study on the theme of achievements of girls labelled gifted at school was by Barbara Kerr, “Smart Girls, Gifted Women”.
The blurb of Kerr’s book:
“It was the 10-year reunion of all those gifted kids who attended the school for high achievers in St. Louis, an event that has changed the life of the author. Their early talents and intellect portended excellence, success, prestige, perhaps greatness, but most of the women in the group had settled into mediocre jobs, performing uninspiring chores or were unemployed, happy in traditional roles. And they were barely approaching the age of 30. As memories of that night’s party faded, Kerr set off on a new path–studying and researching the lives of gifted women, and counseling gifted girls and their adult counterparts. The Guidance Laboratory for Gifted and Talented at the University of Nebraska was thus born, directed by Dr. Kerr. In this title, she offers thoughtful suggestions for parents of gifted girls from preschool through graduate school.”
I did a course with her and was a specialist teacher of gifted education for mathematically advanced students. Most of my students seem to have gone on to very successful lives (not taking personal credit, I was just part of their much bigger world) - but they were not at the prodigy level, just found normal classwork very easy and so were extended and given enrichment work. I suspect that is a much more comfortable level of academic ability.