lecture about how we will be able to create babies with 300 IQ’s within the next fifty years. Could you really tell the difference between someone with a 200 and a three hundred IQ? Since, we base these parameters upon how POPULATIONS do on tests, what population would you compare to arrive at a number?
I think this is probably better suited to IMHO as I don’t think there is any way we can conclusively say that an IQ of 300 is going to be massively different to an IQ of 200. Granted IMO, it probably would be but we don’t have an accurate IQ test which goes as even as high as 200 so how would we know?
well if we’re basing it on todays population… and the normal bell curve…
then someone with a 300 iq would be exponentially smarter then someone with a 200 iq.
Given that IQ’s are scaled by a bell curve, its meaningless to say what a 300 IQ person is like. Given a SD of 15, I dont think I even have a calculator that can give me what 13 SD’s is. Suffice to say, its less than one person/6 billion so it really has no meaning.
Roughly, an IQ becomes meaningless when the person has an IQ 50 above yours.
Someone with a 100 is unlikely to see much difference between 200 and 300, but someone with a 200 may be able to.
Was this comment made either a) on TV, b) in an introductory course, or c) around grant-proposal time? =) I don’t personally think that it would be possible to create children with 300 IQs (relative to the current standards) within 50 years. I don’t think we understand either genetics or cognition well enough to achieve this within such a short time-scale. Perhaps within a few hundred years, but probably not by 2050. So maybe the statement was meant to spark interest in the power of genetics (A or B) or to secure funding ©. =)
I think that the difference between IQ seems to blur above 3 or 4 SD (145 - 160). In the middle range, a difference of 10 or 20 can be significant. A person with an IQ of 90 is unlikely to understand abstract or complicated ideas, and would probably end up doing menial work, while a person with an IQ of 100 might be able to comprehend certain ‘difficult’ ideas, and might do well at work that requires some thinking. A person with an IQ of 110 would see a person with an IQ of 100 as basically like themselves, but they would see someone with IQ 90 as being rather dumb.
However, a person with an IQ of 150 would not see someone with IQ 160 or even 170 as being significantly more intelligent than themselves. Both would be quite capable of understanding doctorate-level concepts in whatever field appealed to them, and both would be capable of doing very well in any sort of occupation. Perhaps the 150 individual would see the 170 person as being particularly knowledgeable or well-known in their field. But this gap would represent the difference between, say, a physicist at a respected college and a world-renowned one such as Steven Hawking. Both would still be able to understand any ideas put forth by the other, and would be able to create new ideas of interest to the other. The same could not be said about a pair with IQs of 90 and 110, or 80 and 100.
What probably needs to be considered is the difference in area under the curve (I think this is called R(x), but I don’t remember very well), or the difference in percentile scores. Both individuals in the 150/170 pair would be in the 99th percentile, so the difference in the probability of each individual meeting an individual less intelligent than themselves would be quite small. In the 90/110 pair the percentile scores would be very different. (Calculation of the difference is left as an exercise to the reader. =) I can’t find my calculator.)
An I.Q. of 300 makes no sense in the real world. Do some research (either in books or on the Internet) about the notion of a standard deviation. To have an I.Q. of 100 + (15n) means that you are n standard deviations above the average. An I.Q. of 200 is already above any useful significance for I.Q. in the real world. It would mean that you are 6 and 2/3 standard deviations above the the average, which means that you are the smartest person among 50 billion people, and there are only 6 billion or so people now living.
An I.Q. of 300 means that you are 13 and 1/3 standard deviations above the average, which would mean that you’re the smartest person in a group of (approximately) 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e., 10 to the 40th power). Suppose that we assume that this means that you are the smartest intelligent entity in the universe. Even if every planet in the universe has had 1 trillion intelligent beings over its history, and there are 10 planets per star, and there are 100 billion stars per galaxy, and there are 100 billions galaxies in the universe, there are still only 10 to the 35 intelligent beings in the universe.
last week (which I often listen to while staying up all night studying). They were saying that both artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation might enable the development of intelligence that was orders of magnitude greater than the smartest human, and that it would almost certainly be possible within the next century (if someone really cares to know who it was I can go look it up at www.coasttocoastam.com This begs the question if IQ is only useful to around 150 (or to be generous 200) how could we QUANTIFY such intelligence? The speakers thesis was that such intelligence might lead to a “speciation event” that is to say that the “genius” entity (either human or artificial) would be so much smarter than us that they would segregate (or be segregated) into a seperate breeding population.
Ah, segregation leading to a super-intelligent master race.
I see this thread ending well.
(although it is a valid area of exploration in any discussion of likely or possible future scientific trends). However, the actual question involves the mundane question of measuring “super intelligence”. If God snapped her/his cosmic fingers and created ten individuals with “SUPER” intelligence each twice has smart as the previous one (and the dumbest one having what we would describe as a 150 IQ) could we tell the difference between them? I once heard of a Physicist who was commenting on UFO’s and said (paraphrased) “any technology capable of sending beings across space to our planet would be essentially indistinguishable from magic to us” Perhaps that would apply in this case as well.
I think it is important to note that IQ is meaningless, period.
That’s not a slam. It’s inherent in the definition of IQ [Mental age/Chronological age]. Mental age is fatally a flawed construct. There are substantial and irreconcilable differences between the mental capacities and predilections of a ten-year old with an IQ of 180 and an 18 year old with an IQ of 100. The two are only comparable in the crudest of fashions, and even then, only if you don’t look too closely.
That’s a solid fact, openly acknowledged by every reputable researcher in the field, including the pioneers of all the well-qualified tests. If it bothers you for social or political reasons, consider the other end of the scale: do you honestly feel that a 50 year old researcher with an IQ of 180 --probably in the prime of his creative powers in many fields-- is the mental equivalent of a 90 year old with an IQ of 100?
This fundamental flaw is rarely discussed on this board, and I don’t know why. There are altogether too many threads whose correct answer would rely on this fact, but many people on the board seem to have a consensus that (IMHO) wanders around a lot of valid, but relatively peripheral effects instead.
I don’t have a degree in any branch of psychology, but I do have a degree in medicine with distinctions in psychiatry. I’ve worked in the education of gifted children at various times since I was 15 (including writing several texts and curricula for gifted children programs). And you don’t want to know my IQ.
People with extremely IQ (say, 165 or higher) aren’t “better”. They’re different. No one can tell you exactly why or how, despite the subtantial body or researh on the subject, because they are as different from each other as they are from normal. There is some relation between “IQ” and “smart”, but it’s a mistake to treat IQ as “brains” and draw the usual casual value judgements from that equivalence.
Sorry. I really wish there were an easy answer - or any answer at all. You ahve no idea how much I wish that.
It raises the question that IF IQ is not a good measure of intelligence, then perhaps we need to develop a different, more useful parameter. How can we seek to develop AI, or genetic intellectual enhancement, when we can’t adequately describe the end result we are trying to achieve? Still, one can confidently say that certain people are SMARTER at certain things than OTHER people. Of course we can probably break down intelligence into many areas mechanical, analytical, verbal, and even physical. Here’s an idea IF we COULD develop computer based AI much SMARTER than US could we then instruct it to “work on” developing intelligence MUCH smarter than “it”. Using this “leap-frog” approach it might be able to develop something exoponentially more advanced than ourselves (even if we couldn’t understand how it worked) in a much shorter period of time than would otherwise be the case (perhaps a few hundred rather than thousand years). Maybe such intelligence could help us solve fusion, nanotechnology, and faster than light travel (not to mention global warming) problems.
Isn’t there a point where you’ve done all you can with the information provided? It seems to me that logically there should be a “cutoff point” somewhere where a being/computer/whatever will always get the right answer if there’s enough information, and after that it should become how long it took to get the answer.
the OMNIPOTENCE level. However, short of that I would think there is a contiinuem. You do make an awesome point about time being a valid parameter. Extremely, advanced intelligence for instance might be able to outline MULTIPLE avenues to achieve fusion energy.
It’s provable that given any notion of “truth” it’s impossible to tell what all true statements are, and there are questions which are simply unanswerable. That is, it’s inconsistent to think in terms of “gives the right answer to every question”.
The easiest example of an unanswerable question is the “halting problem”, which when presented with a computer program determines whether the program will halt or get stuck in an infinite loop and run on forever.
Okay, my apologies for drifting so far from GQ, but maybe the OP did as well. I hope you don’t take this as a hijack, Roland.
Mathochist, what you seem to be saying, is that there is some fundemental difference between logic and intuition. And I’m sure I went overboard by saying “always get the right answer”.
But given the same input/premise/data/information, why shouldn’t there be a logical answer, if even static probabilities, to every question?
I guess in that case the computer would spit out “chance of god: 50%”, or some such. I guess I should have taken more philosophy way back when, and conjured a greater understanding of the meaning of the word, “intelligence”.
Cuz I’m a Fart Smeller!
Er, I mean, smart feller 
I’m saying quite a bit more, actually. There is a logical answer to the halting problem for a given program: either it halts or it doesn’t. The problem is that it’s impossible to devise a general method that will work for all programs. The proof is rather technical, but Wikipedia coveres it pretty well.
The existence of “noncomputable functions” is part of a whole series of “undecidability” or “incompleteness” theorems that came out of the 1920s and 1930s. The upshot (imho) was the downfall of the positivist program; it’s impossible to get the right answer and some questions have no right answers.
Okay. Damn that Turing with all his tests and algorythms!
But what does that really have to do with intelligence? If it’s impossible to determine the outcome, it’s impossible to determine the outcome, right? That is to say, even an infinitely intelligent “being” couldn’t determine the outcome, and would spit out it’s best guess at 50/50 (or whatever) and another one, 10 times as smart would reach the same conclusion.
Roland Deschain writes:
> This begs the question if IQ is only useful to around 150 (or to be generous
> 200) how could we QUANTIFY such intelligence?
We can’t quantify intelligence beyond the idea of the I.Q. score. There is no such thing as an objective measure of intelligence that we can compare any single person or other sort of entity to. Intelligence is not like, say, height. There is an objective definition of height that applies not just to people but to any physical object. That’s not true of intelligence. There is no objective yardstick for intelligence.
To use the term “I.Q.” in any meaningful way, you have to assume that, first, the test that you’re using measures intelligence (i.e., that someone who scores better on the test is more intelligent) and that you have given the test to enough people to make the assigning of I.Q. scores useful. An I.Q. of 300 has no useful meaning because there aren’t enough people in the world (or even, very generously, enough intelligent beings in the entire history of the universe) to make it useful. We can’t say anything about the meaning of some supposed intelligence “greater” than any intelligence we have seen up to now because we have no idea what it would mean or how we would measure it.
KP: You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how IQ is calculated. Your algorithm is used only for very young children and even then is not widely used. There are many different IQ tests but the most common ones rank people on a bell curve with 15 IQ points per standard deviation. This means that if you have an IQ of 100, all that means is that you score better than 50% of the people who have taken the test. If you have an IQ of 115, you’ve scored better than roughly 87%. Thus, IQ is merely a measure of relative intelligence so there is no meaning to a 300 IQ. In fact, the best way to give everyone a 300 IQ would be to simply declare all bacteria as intelligent beings. We would then instantly all have ~300 IQ’s 