. . .why is her best-known accomplishment the writing of a weekly column in a cheesy newspaper insert, wherein, among other things, she answers basic probability, logic, and algebra problems? Why isn’t she out there developing the next Theory of Everything, or curing cancer, or running a company that will put Microsoft out of business?
Her intellect hasn’t really impressed me much. She may be a great logical thinker which helps get her through those ridiculous brain teaser-y things every week (“what do the following words have in common: yoyo, calendar, telephone, pencil, post-it note, laptop, mousepad. Hint: it may surprise you! The answer is at the end of the column.”), but the only evidence of her extreme intelligence is her byline.
Recently she asked people to write in with their submissions for the worst thing ever invented, and she started it off with two items: leaf blowers and electric guitars. OK, while they’re really convenient maybe leaf blowers haven’t contributed much to society, but where would the world (and history) be without the electric guitar? For such a supposed genius, that was a really stupid and shortsighted comment, simply because they have the ability to be noisy.
A: Things on McNew’s desk!
I think she tried to be an investor, but that didn’t work out. The other thing is she isn’t very educated. I think she dropped out of college. I think she also showed a real lack of understanding of higher math when Wiles solved Fermat’s theorem so maybe she doesn’t have the education for solving TOF.
The other thing about all the things you listed are that you have to be very driven to do any of them. Maybe she doesn’t care about those things.
I don’t think she is hurting for money (isn’t her husband very rich) and maybe she just likes writting those columns.
Because being intelligent isn’t the same as being effective.
Whatever made you think that Ms. von Savant is particularly smart? She’s neither claimed to be nor demonstrated that she is smart. What she claims is to have the world’s highest measured IQ, which is a completely different matter. A high IQ qualifies one to answer silly little brainteasers, and one as high as hers also qualifies her for an entry in that beer company’s book and a bit of notoriety (notoriety, in turn, qualifies one for a newspaper column), but IQ alone does not qualify a person to do research in fundamental physics or medicine, nor to run a successful business.
Amen - my son is being stalked as mentally gifted by his school, as I was as a kid. I say “it ain’t the size of the engine in the car - it’s whether you use it to drive someplace worthwhile and whether you get the most out of the engine you have.”
She seems a bit of a tool - and yeah, some of that is due to her crack about electric guitars!! :mad: 
The Wikipedia article pretty much nails it. Some of the IQ tests she took were as a child, and do not really extrapolate well to adults, or apply accurately in the upper ranges. In addition, there is the practice effect. Taking these tests over and over often has the effect of increasing the score every time.
She also has a few accomplishments other than writing a Sunday supplement column. From the same source:
As well as helping you do better at a multitude of other tasks.
I’m living proof of that!
She makes enormous amounts of money for doing practically nothing, and you’re denigrating her intelligence? Somebody has the world backward. 
But does she really get through those herself? I imagine the people that send those in also send in the answer. And is she comes up with any herself, then answering those should be a piece of cake for her.
For all we know, she can only answer 10% of the submissions that she gets and the others never see the light of day.
She’s not necessarily extraordinarily intelligent, with all the subtleties and nuance that entails; she’s just–or at least she once was–talented at taking a certain kind of tests.
I remember that one. I think that Wiles’ proof was still being verified at the time, but if I recall correctly, her argument was that it should be rejected because it used a non-Euclidean geometry (I think Lobachevskian?) in its arguments, and she cited some other geometric proof (in Euclidean geometry) that didn’t work if you switched systems of geometry.
But she failed to realize that Fermat’s Last Theorem is not a theorem making any claims about geometry, or any geometric system. It’s just a theorem about whole numbers. So as long as you don’t violate the properties of whole numers in the proof…
Great, now I’m gonna have that Tom Lehrer song stuck in my head all night.
Marilyn may have a high IQ, but she’s an idiot. Here is a list of things she was wrong about. My two favorites are 1.) how she forgot that Oxygen is necessary for combustion, and thus would add to the mass of smoke from a flame and 2.)when asked “how many ping pong balls would be required to build a four sided equilateral pyramid?”, she answered 4900! It only takes five. (four on bottom, one on top, creating four sides of 3 balls apiece)
There was also a thread here awhile back, that I can’t seem to find, about how she denied that alcoholism had a biological component. Something about how “alcohol doesn’t exist on nature”. That doesn’t tell me she’s the sharpest tool in the woodshed.
The only way I can understand ‘four-sided equilateral pyramid’ is as a synonym for ‘regular tetrahedron’… in which case you only need four balls.
::chuckle:: Yep, I guess you’re correct in that. I suppose I, like the column in question, was neglecting the base of the thing as a side. Thinking of the classical “four sided” (read: square base) Egyptian pyramids rather than a four sided tetrahedron.
Leave it to the dope, man. No matter how minor the mistake, It will be caught.
Oy. There’s a cultural myth that someone who is smart (in the I.Q. sense) can just sit down and do anything with a minimal browsing of the field. However, as Stephen Pinker pointed out in How The Mind Works, real geniuses–people who produced something that is both startlingly novel and useful–are wonks. They spend a lot of time thinking or working on a field–sometimes in a fashion that keeps them out of the limelight–before they render some discovery or invention that changes the world. They don’t just “get lucky” (although luck is definitely a component in success) but are instead a product of years of integrating and building upon prior knowledge.
Marilyn vos Savant clearly and demonstrably knows less about statistics, physics, chemistry, and any number of other topics than many of the presumably average or slightly-above-average members of this board. Nor is she smart enough to have her drafted answers reviewed by people who are experts in the respective fields or do the appropriate research to educate herself, which makes her not only not significantly smarter than the average person, but careless to boot, Mensa material or not.
Stranger
She’s just smart enough to impress the people who actually read Parade.