The Smartest Guy in the world.. maybe

As anyone who has read Vos Idiot Savant’s attempts to answer questions that require actual reasoning knows, she’s far from the smartest person who ever lived. I suspect that she would have a difficult time passing most freshman philosophy or composition classes.

On at least one level, Cecil is far far smarter than Marilyn VS–he has a sense of humor and she has never shown one. I suppose that one could argue that “humor quotient” should be considered in determining overall intelligence. After all, few otters crack jokes, dogs generally don’t get sarcasm, cats are incapable of irony (no flames, please). One of the things that sets humans apart from other animals, as far as we know, is a sense of creating humor.

High IQ is a pretty meaningless concept in most ways. On some of these tests I am a math genius, which I certainly am not in the “real world.” Ability to detect danger or to track an animal may be essential skills in one society, while ability to surf the Net may prove to be key to another. Even theories that propose “multiple intelligences” often miss the point, ignoring acuity that is often paramount.

INCREDIBLY SNIDE COMMENT COMING UP, NASTY OF ME, IT REALLY IS, BUT I CAN’T RESIST:

Rousseau likes to sign off with some statement about a group’s intelligence being that of the IQ of the lowest member divided by the number of people in it. If intelligence is based on being able to reasonably argue, prove, defend, and refute, his presence makes us all idiots.

SORRY ABOUT THAT. I TRY TO STAY AWAY FROM NASTINESS HERE, I JUST COULDN’T HELP IT!

Bucky

A minor caveat, Dr. F:
Irene Adler was not the only person to outwit Holmes. In one of the other stories in “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” – I think it is “The Five Orange Pips” – someone asks Holmes if he has ever been beaten.
And the Master replied that four persons, one a woman, have beaten him.
Also, in “The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes” Dr. Watson makes reference to a few cases that Holmes did not solve – one involving a duellist who received a worm unknown to science.


The Coyote gnaws …
but he does not swallow.

Mea culpa, Coyote.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been a Baker Street Irregular.

Actually Sidis, who argued his own case, lost the lawsuit against the New Yorker. A New York appeals court wrote: “Regrettably or not, the misfortunes and frailties of neighbors and ‘public figures’ are subjects of considerable interest and discussion to the rest of the population.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve been a Baker Street Irregular.]]]]]]]]]]]]

Do irregular Irregulars ever go to the Black Widow gatherings?


<— 3½¢

How do we know that intelligence, whatever that is, has a gaussian distribution?

Are we just applying the Central Limit Theorem here?

Could intelligence, whatever it is, have that “new” distribution, the one that shows why we get 100 year floods every 20 years? If that is the case, there may be no limit on max intelligence. Anyway, using the Standard Deviation argument to set a limit on intelligence seems to me like using a similar argument to say that life-as-we-know-it could not have arisen by evolution.

Keith:

The argument was not against high intelligence per se, but against an absurdly high IQ. IQ tests are designed to produce a nice clean bell curve. There is no justification to extend the scale beyond three standard deviations. The numbers become meaningless at either extreme of the graph.

We can say that Sidis had an IQ that was beyond the useful application of standard tests, but assigning a number to that is impossible. Be that as it may, an IQ score only shows how well you perform on IQ tests and does not necessarily correlate with “intelligence”, a much more complex entity.

Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”

And mäni interesting furry animals

Gus? Is that you? Where have you been? Good to see you again my friend.

KeithB writes:

> How do we know that intelligence, whatever
> that is, has a gaussian distribution?

We don’t. We don’t even know that intelligence exists. The concept “intelligence” is a classic example of reification. We have taken a vague popular notion (X is smarter than Y) and decided to treat it as if it was a physical quantity like height or weight. Intelligence may or may not turn out to have some correlation to a physical characteristic of the brain, but there’s no way to tell this just from our definition of the term.

We have decided that answering “correctly” certain questions is an indication of intelligence. There’s no objective way to decide which questions belong in an I.Q. test or which answers are the correct ones. We have only our intuitive sense that a particular question requires the use of intelligence and that a particular answer to it is the correct answer.

We have no objective reason to put I.Q.'s into a Gaussian distribution either. The only reason we do is that many physical quantities do fall into Gaussian distributions, so we might as well use them for I.Q.'s. However, once we have decided that we are using a definition in which I.Q.'s are normally distributed, we have to do this consistently, so I.Q.'s above 200 or below 0 have no meaning, even theoretically, given that there have only been 100 billion people in all of history. Since any given I.Q. test is only taken by about 100,000 people, there’s no reliable way to assign an I.Q. above 160 or below 40.

Look up “the Flynn effect” sometime in the library or on the web. Until the early '80’s, it was always assumed that the average I.Q. was unchanging. Then a New Zealand academic named James R. Flynn found that every ten years the average I.Q. is rising by about 3 points (and this is true in every country where I.Q. tests are commonly given and in every decade since I.Q. tests have been given). In other words, if you gave an I.Q. test that had been set up so that ten years ago the average score of those taking it (all children of a given age or whatever) got a 100 I.Q. on it, this year the average test taker for a comparable group will get a 103 I.Q. No one has a good explanation of this phenomena.

Gratuitous Nit-Picking Dept.:
Wendell, there’s only one of 'em, so the word should be phenomenon, not phenomena.


the Artist Formerly Known as Kara

I have many random thoughts to share. I’ll start with the expectation many in society have regarding people with high intellect using it to serve society. I feel this is similar to society putting the expectation on people who are born beautiful to be Playboy or Play Girl centerfolds, nude models for artists, super models, or some other job which makes use of their looks to serve society’s “needs”. It’s also similar to feeling that someone born 6’11 who has a fantastic basketball talent would be lacking morals if a career in the NBA wasn’t entered into if offered, even if the person hates basketball or at least has other job opportunities which would make the person happier. I grant you that coming up with a cancer cure or various other things which are more gray matter dependent than physique dependent could better life for society in a more important way, but isn’t interesting that America pays it’s professional athletes and porn stars better than it does its scientists and even the person who runs the county politically? I feel people have a moral obligation to be self-supporting and not intentionally wronging others, but beyond that, I think people can go too far in their expectation of what people “should” do with their lives.

Next, I’d like to respond to the issue of parents who have kids reading at 18 months being pushy (and whatever worse words people might use). Our son wasn’t reading newspaper articles at 18 months, but he was reading words like “Happy” from a TV Guide FTD ad for Valentine’s Day flowers, “game” and “closed” at the mall, “clean” off a dishwasher, “Doh” off a Play Doh container, “edit” while sitting on his mother’s lap while she typed something on the computer, and other words, including “reading”. At 19 months, he was reading things like a banner that said, “Welcome to the neighborhood.” It was quite faschinating to see his gears turning; he said, “Hood, neighborhood!” It was like reading was this great little puzzle for him, and he was quite good at it. At age 2, he was reading books and magazines on his own, and was also correcting my spelling, reading my business letters and suggesting words which would be more descriptive, and correcting typos and grammatical errors in things like a concert program no sooner than did we take our seats. We never had ANY intention of teaching a tiny tot to read (I didn’t even know it was possible for anyone to teach a toddler to read), and never used any flashcards or phonics programs. Our son simply had a way of learning that was most unusual. Hours after he was born, he was already rolling from his stomach to his back. Again, we never tried to teach him to do this, as I had enough child psychology courses to “know” babies didn’t start doing this typically until 19 weeks of age (and I wasn’t completely delighted when he was rolling from stomach to back and back to stomach, either, as it meant he had to be kept an eye on all the closer). Our son also is pretty decent at math, and again, this is not because we have drilled math into him. As he learned to read by pointing to words and asking what they were, he learned math in large part by having an inquiring mind and parents who didn’t respond with, “Don’t worry about that. You are too young for it.” He was doing three digit negative number math in his head at age 2, and at age 5, he was doing algebra problems in his head while walking along the beach (solving for X and Y for given problems using factorials, square roots, exponents, etc.). Also at age 5, he asked what the “log” key on his father’s scientific calculator was for, and after a 5-10 minute discussion on logs, was that night in his head solving problems such as log base three of 1/9 (which is negative two). We were very fortunate in that our son’s pediatrician strongly urged us to homeschool our son when our son was 18 months old and had shown an interest in magnets, resulting in my taking out a puzzle I had of magnetic states, and then in two hours of studying the state shapes, he knew 30-some by memory (in any orientation, even flipped so that only the black side was showing). By the way, this doctor was married to someone with two Ph.D.s and had two sons attending the same public school system our son would have attended had we not homeschooled our son.

My point is that the notion that precocious kids (or exceptionally precocious kids) are the result of pushy, wacko parents is not always true (while I might be wacko, I am really rather laid back about most things, including our son’s education, for the most part), though I suspect it is true some portion of the time, and have no idea if William Sidis had pushy parents or not as I have not read but this article about him and would not base any such opinion on one article alone. Our son wasn’t turning around hours after birth because he taught him to, and the mere notion that this could be so is enough to make me laugh. When he was probably a few months from being born, I happened to pat my “belly” a few times, and noticed our son either kicked or punched back the same number of times. I felt it was probably coincidental, but tapped a different number of times, and again, he mimiced the number of taps. I wasn’t trying to teach our son to count or anything; this was purely a freak thing.

From what I could tell skimming the responses here, no parents of precocious kids had posted yet, and I want to share with you what an enjoyable ride it is having a kid who is so quick to learn, but more importantly, at least in our case, such a happy and good child. Our son used his quick reading ability (at 7, he could read about 700 words per minute with 100% comprehension using Speed Reading software to test himself, and we had not tried to improve his reading speed at all other than to spend a few minutes reading part of an Evelyn Wood book) at age 5 to raise over $1,350 in a Multiple Sclerosis read-a-thon, and at age 6 and 7, he raised even more (over $1,500 one year), making him the top fundraiser in the state all three years. Right after his 7th birthday, he entered a national essay contest for 4th and 5th graders on making the world a better place and won the grand prize of two new computers. He’s handed out wrapped books to kids in the hospital on Christmas Eve the last few years, and wanted to wear a Santa suit one year. When he saw an elderly man with a cane approaching a restaurant while we were in the middle of a lunch sometime ago, our son shot up out of his seat and ran to open the door for this man. He has always given his toys in Kid Packs to other kids, and when he’s gone trick-or-treating, he has tried to get candy that his parents like rather than himself. At age 7, he wrote to the library to ask if he could read to younger kids there, and got approval. He also signed up to volunteer at a local retirement home to read to residents there (some are in their 90s, and one is 100), which he does every week (he also invited them to our holiday party this year, and picked out Christmas gifts for each). It isn’t his IQ that makes him most special to us, it is his heart.

As our son tells me that people should show the good with the bad, I will also share with you that having a child who is this precocious is not always a piece of cake. No matter where he has gone since he started to talk (which was also, as you might guess, earlier than the norm; well before age 2, he had a vocabulary of over 1,500 words and over the average 4 year old’s vocabulary), people have nearly instantly turned their eyes and ears his way and made comments about how smart he is and how they will see him in the newspapers some day and right in front of him, said to me things such as, “You don’t need to save for retirement; he’s your retirement plan” or earlier today a 12 year old said to me, “He’s going to be supporting you soon.” I know people don’t mean harm with these comments, but I don’t like them for many reasons. First, we are NOT using our son for our retirement or to have a mansion someday (though our son did tell us years ago that if we don’t buy

A little tidbit I didn’t put in my last post, but thought I should share with you as many probably don’t realize this (I know I didn’t till awhile after our son was tested, and am glad I didn’t know beforehand as his results were hard enough to swallow as it was) is that the highest I have heard of any IQ test testing for mental age is in the 20s. I also have heard from several sources (though I don’t know how reliable these sources are) is that the average ADULT scores a mental age of 14-16 on the IQ test our son took, so it’s not as though the mental age correlates well to the true age of adults taking this test. The test was designed with questions at the upper levels that were to be hard for many adults to answer.

Yet another thing I forgot to respond to was the post about intelligence and a sense of humor, and I agree that someone with a good sense of humor often has a high intellect (though people often find me funny, even though you wouldn’t know it from my posts today, and I am not someone of exceptional intellect). However, I do think there are a good many people who have a high intellect and lack of sense of humor. My mother was one such person. She skipped grades, graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude (not summa only due to getting a D in swimming) from a good at the time college, went on to American University to get her graduate degree in mathematics, was the first female to graduate from the National War College, and many years after she stopped working at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, had a lobby exhibit on her contributions to the world of science. She was not only brilliant, she met society’s expectations (including becoming rich; in her early 30s, she had an income in the top 1% of all Americans). She was an excellent thinker in general, but I don’t recall her ever cracking a joke, and those that my father, my brother, and I made, she often didn’t get.

BTW, our son has always had a great sense of wit and wisdom. A couple of his jokes from early in the year: “What do you call someone who gives the temperature and makes funny sounds? Bobby McFarenheit. Who did the babies use to help them get their rights? The National Association for the Advancement of Coloring People.” When my husband was using tenderizer, our son said, “I know a meat tenderizer doesn’t make meat into money, so what does it do?” When I read a story to him in which a cat says, “My family has resided in some of the most aristocatic homes in the state,” our son quickly joked, “That should be 'aristoCATic”. Over a year ago, our son heard me complaining that a friend had thought my husband to be 3 years younger than me rather than 3 years older, as I was very hurt and it made me feel like I was aging poorly (I mean, my husband was nearly completely gray, and I don’t even have gray hair yet). Anyway, our son said, “Mom, the way I see this, there are two ways you can look at this. You can see it as a compliment to Dad or an insult to you. Whenever you can see something as either an insult or a compliment, it would be wise to look at it as a compliment.” It is moments like that which make me wonder who the parent and who the child is.

I don’t have much to say except congratulations on that son of yours. What a fine character to go with an exceptional mind! And as far as I can tell from your writing, you seem to be doing just fine as a parent. My kids are smart, though nowhere near that, and we also get badgered by other people as to how we treat them. Just keep doing it your own way!

It appears to me, Respectable, that your son is a reincarnation of:

a) Jackie Mason
b) The Buddha
c) Both

A book that came out last year, Origins of Genius, by, I think, Dean Simonton (I read half of it and got bored), postulated that a smart person could only be considered a genius if s/he did something with his/her intelligence. He specifically referred to Marilyn Vos Savant and noted that while she has a high IQ, she doesn’t really do anything with it.

Whoops! I meant to say the book came out within the past year (indicating 1999), not last year (indicating 1998).

David’s post brings us back to the original post, and the misunderstanding that the author of that OP shows for the sense of failure with which we view someone like Sidis.

Mr. Kennedy may know this (my quote books are buried in boxes and I don’t feel like getting them out to check the precise wording), but I believe that President Kennedy once pointed out that success isn’t measured by ability, but rather by the application of ability and the result achieved. That is to say, it isn’t what you have, it’s what you do with what you have. Sidis, by all accounts and based on the available evidence, had quite a bit of innate ability. But he doesn’t seem to have managed to turn that into much success. I am not measuring his success by his money, or his ‘status’ in life (never thought you would hear an attorney say THAT, did ya!), but rather by the potential he had for doing SOMETHING to forward the human race in its flight through time to a better life. Even if he was personally successful (which I define as happiness with one’s life), he still doesn’t seem to have utilized his potential for helping out mankind. Thus, we view him as a ‘failure.’

Debate the validity of such a measure if you wish.

Dear Respectable,

To give your son some balance, why not start him out on some qi gong tapes? The younger you start, the easier it is. (Just like everything.) He will thank you for it. my advice is to search the net with him and then choose a tape or two together. A teacher is also an alternative, although I think it might actually be easier to start with tapes and then progress from there. Energy is led by the mind, and it sounds like his mind is as good as any. Email me if you have questions.

yours,

mike grogan

[ramble on]

Another thing to consider is classically expressed as “the difference between ‘intelligence’ and ‘wisdom’”.

I suspect that there is more than one kind of intelligence: there’s mind-intelligence (which may be what IQ tests try to measure), but there’s also emotional intelligence and body-intelligence.

When I was a kid, I was considered ‘smart’; in other words I apparently had a high mind-intelligence. But I also had a low body-intelligence and emotional-intelligence. (Yes, I was one of those geeky kids with glasses… )

Much of my training these days is related to learning how to exist and interact emotionally. The art of sensing how other people feel and knowing the right thinhg to do is a lot of what people call wisdom, and I suspect that wisdom may be more emotional intelligence than mind-intelligence.

As for body-intelligence… school wasn’t good for teaching that. I could have used true ‘physical education’: how to be in your body… not the organized thuggery called ‘team sports’ that masqueraded under that name.

It’s amazing–several people I have met have had such positive experiences with team sports in school, and are utterly astonished when I describe how disastrous team sports were for me. Perhaps some critical knowledge about teaching physical education to people of different types and personalities and abilities was not known when I was in school?

I can really sympathize with the poster who described eir child learning to do things on eir own at an unusually-early age, and who homeschooled the child… I wonder what would have happened if my parents had had the oppurtunity to do the same.

I have heard talk about the schools being places for necessary ‘socialization’, without which children are incomplete. In my case at least, this school socialization, and its accompanying bullying and cruelty, did years of damage. Even now, twenty years on, I am only beginning to deal with the results…

It would seem to be a tough bind: how do you give your ‘smart’ child the toughness to deal with the world (and not become roadkill or one of the walking wounded), and at the same time ensure that the child retains enough of that golden spark to have beauty and happines in eir life? How do you nurture social connection, grace, strength, joy, and beauty, as well as intelligence?

My parents did the best they could. Maybe we can do better…

[ramble off]


“Kiu frenezas? Cxu la mondo aux mi?” -Persone