Given that human population growth is quickly trending towards zero, if we’re getting a new baby ~1/sec, we’re also getting a fresh death at roughly that same rate.
I want to know who is the rightest about everything. The person who has the most accurate view of reality. Not necessarily the most intelligent, just the most correct, on the whole.
I’d be curious whether they felt like they understood things at all.
It’s dependent on the Almighty being mighty easy to fool.
Slight possible hijack: supposedly Lorne Michaels, producer and creator of Saturday Night Live, was writing stand-up material in the late sixties, and submitted some of it to Woody Allen. By then, Woody was no longer doing that so he never used any of Lorne’s material. But he did make a point to call Lorne and praise him for one particular joke:
He had become obsessed that someone in the world, somewhere, was doing the exact same thing he was at the exact same time. He resolved to call this person…but the telephone line was busy.
Well, nobody has ever asked me yet.
They’re probably quite troubled.
Marilyn vos Savant had a column in Parade Magazine in which, when asked about knowing your exact time of death, said something about you could go skydiving without fear. I thought, if her time of death was twenty years in the future, she could break every bone in her body and lay in agony until then.
I sometimes wonder who the last person was to say “Whoop-dee-doo!” nonsarcastically.
The formulation is “Four out of five dentist recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum”. The fifth dentist probably thinks that aspartame is worse for you than sugar.
It is impossible to determine the smartest person in the world, practically speaking. First, you would need to create an I.Q. test that is generally accepted by psychologists who are experts in intelligence testing. It isn’t even generally accepted that there is such a thing as a single definition of intelligence. Second, you would have to give that test to everyone in the world. That’s 8 billion or so people.
What’s generally done is that you pick a group defined by age and location. So maybe you test 100,000 Americans who are 8 years old which you think is a good spread over everyone of that age and natiionality by intelligence. You give them your I.Q. test. You will probably find that several people have perfect scores on that test and several people don’t get any question right. Suppose you make sure that there are enough questions on the test that no one gets a perfect score and no one gets every question wrong. The way I.Q. is usually defined is using a normal curve. The average score must be 100. So a score of 160 on the test is given to the three people with the highest score and a score of 40 is given to the three people with the lowest score. That’s because a normal curve in I.Q. test has a standard deviation of 15 points. 160 is 4 standard deviations above 100 and 40 is 4 standard derivations below 100. If you look up the definition of a standard deviation, you’ll see that you expect one person in about 31,000 to have an I.Q. of 160 or above and one person in about 31,000 to have an I.Q. of 40 or below. Practically speaking, you can’t say that anyone has an I.Q. above 160 or that anyone has an I.Q. below 40. If everything is done right, you can use the scores of all those 100,000 people to say what the I.Q. of every American of age 8 if you then give all Americans of age 8.
You can’t use this test for everyone in the world. You expect everyone to become more intelligent up to some supposed age of maturity. Even if you gave the test to everyone over that age of maturity, you would have to make sure that the test is available for every language in the world, since everyone must be treated equally despite not all speaking the same language. There are over 5 billion people in the world over 21 years old. So even if you created a test which would fairly measure the I.Q. of every adult in the world, probably something like the following would happen. You announce that you gave everyone that test. You announce that you found the person who got the highest score. Unfortunately, they were living in a very poor country and they starved to death soon after finishing the test.
As per the Perfect Master, in 1980:
Not at all what the OP is talking about and maybe they could be found. I read a lot of biographies and get taken by brushes with fame like this from Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. He heads to California to make it out West and this happens. Who were those kids? Do they even know that they played with Springsteen when he was not famous?
I spent the next three weeks searching high and low for a paying job playing music. Finally, I thought I should just put a band together, audition somewhere, set a club on fire and let nature take its course. I was walking through the Hillsdale mall and I stopped in a one-hour photo shop to develop a few pictures I had taken on the trip. I got talking to a kid who looked in his early twenties behind the counter and he mentioned he played bass. He had a small group looking for a guitarist and asked if I’d like to come out and play with them over the weekend. They were down in San Jose, which was a bit of a drive, but hell, by now I was desperate and running low on cash.
That weekend I borrowed my folks’ car, drove the hour south and followed my directions into a middle-class suburb slightly outside of the city. It was straight-up Ozzie and Harriet land: modest ranch houses, side by side, the standard two-car garages and swatches of green front lawn. I came upon my friend’s house and there they were, my new band. The garage bay was open, and I could see my pal on bass and what looked to be a couple of fourteen-year-olds on drums and guitar. They were set up in classic formation, facing the street, a few small amps surrounding a kid who looked like Dennis the Menace with long hair on drums. They were kids, real kids, little kids, just learning to play. Kids with guitars they probably got for Christmas from Mom and Dad. And here I was.
I hauled my guitar out of the car, set up and put on a show for them all afternoon. I pulled out every trick I knew, and over the afternoon hours, I managed to draw a few folks away from their lawn mowers and barbecue grills. I played like I was at Madison Square Garden. I just needed to. At dusk, I packed up, thanked them for a lovely time and headed north toward home. I felt sad, foolish and happy. I wasn’t going to make it. California wasn’t going to be mine.
Emily Dickinson said
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside—
But she said it in 1862, and there wasn’t as much stuff to know then.
Claims a high IQ by, IIRC, extrapolation. Whatever test she took in school as a child was somehow jiggered to produce an adult IQ at a super-genius level.
It’s stupid. You get an IQ by dividing your mental age by your physical age, then multiplying by 100. I had an IQ calculated in the sixth grade based on my yearly achievement test scores at the time, which were pencil & paper, multiple choice, fill in the circle (I think there was one essay).
I wasn’t supposed to know my score, but I got left in the vice-principal’s office with my file folder one day, and of course, thumbed through it.
My IQ at the time was 142.
That’s high, but for a sixth grader with a January birthday, all it really meant was that I read a lot. This was true-- I read almost literally, all the time. I was never without a book. Never. You could fairly say I was obsessed with reading and language. So I read on an advanced level, about an average high school junior. Average, mind you.
Working backwards, 142/100 = 1.42 * 12 = 17.04, the age of a high school junior (there may be decimals and rounding I don’t know about).
That’s all the score really reflected. I wasn’t very good at math, but it was a multiple choice test, with 4 answers per question, and no penalty for wrong answers. My reading skills made me pretty good at guessing on multiple choice tests.
For a psychology class, I once took a test designed to measure a person’s skill at taking multiple choice tests, and missed only one question out of 50. I had that skill at 19, and I had it at 12. It did not make me a genius, just got me an artificially inflated score. To then extrapolate an adult IQ from it would just be more inflation.
Even to claim that as an adult, my IQ is 142 wouldn’t be quite honest. That’d be the same as saying because I weighed 109 lbs. at age 12, that is what I weigh now (it’s not).
I’m still holding out hope to get on the Sexiest Man Dead list.
That’s the old method for calculating an I.Q. That hasn’t been used since at least the 1960s (and perhaps since the 1940s). The method now used is based on using a normal curve. I explained in post #70 how that works. The quotient method only works for children, not for adults. At some point of maturity you cease becoming more intelligent. Vos Savant’s supposed I.Q. was based on the old method. She was born in 1946, so her measurement of I.Q. was done in the early 1950s.
Kind of personal, but something I’ve been puzzling about.
I’ve been rear-ended 6 times now. That’s the highest number among anyone I know. Obviously there’s a person who’s been hit 7 times. And 8, 9, etc.
Somewhere there’s a (non-commercial) driver who has the highest number of not-at-fault accidents in the world. I wonder who they are and what the number is.
Doug Forcett, 92%
Kid Cheesesteak was in the running for “person who listens to more AC/DC than anyone else.” but discovered other music exists and now is only in the top .001% of AC/DC listeners. The trick is to listen to music all the time and have almost your entire queue made up of one artist, then do that for an entire calendar year.
I don’t know your answer, but I bet they speak Russian.
I was thinking about that but I couldn’t remember where I heard of that guy!
I didn’t say “human”. I was thinking of a god-like being that made and controlled everything. And what I wrote is just a philosophical quandary, like trying not to think of some particular thing. In order to know you are not thinking of something you have to think about it.