Hi all, I was reading about this Boy, “Laurent Simons” Laurent Simons: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know | Heavy.com
and this other Boy was mentioned, “Luis Roberto Ramirez Alvarez”
Luis Roberto Ramirez Alvarez: Top 10 Facts You Need to Know | Heavy.com.
The reason for asking the question is, that I tried to get recent information about him but the last and only news that “I” can find is from back in 2013.
Thanks
I found this bit of news but it’s in Spanish. Somebody willing to translate?
"Su alto coeficiente le permitió concluir su educación media superior en menos de tres meses en el Colegio de Bachilleres de Michoacán plantel Zamora en el 2013, siendo el estudiante más joven en la historia de este colegio con un promedio general en sus 47 asignaturas de 9.9.
Tras ello, Luis Roberto, en enero de 2014, viajó a Los Ángeles, California, donde realizó una preparación con tutores certificados durante 15 días hábiles para la aplicación de los exámenes de admisión A.C.T. – Sat Subject Test en matemáticas y Sat Subject Test en física.
Puntualizaron que actualmente estudia en la universidad en Los Ángeles, California el cuarto semestre de la carrera de Física, que le permitirá, de acuerdo con sus planes, concluir su carrera en el 2017, iniciar su maestría y doctorarse en una de las mejores Universidades de ese país a la edad de 20 años
From this site:https://noticierosenlinea.com/matematicas-y-fi
Thanks
Google doesn’t do it too badly:
Most child prodigies don’t go any further than anyone else in their field. They just get there quicker.
If they don’t burn out and abandon their academic work. (William James Sidis, for example)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis
It’s hard to make any generalizations about child prodigies. Some do brilliantly well in their field when they grow up, some do very well but no better than many other people who were thought to be reasonably bright but nothing special as children, some do no better than anybody who was average as a child, and a few mess up good as adults. It gets a little tiresome when someone feels they have to mention Sidis every time prodigies are brought up, as if Sidis is typical of a large percentage of prodigies.
I’d like to skip it that IQs like his are not as rare as these sensationalist stories that you hear every now and then could make you believe (yes, I know, having a high IQ is not the same thing as being a prodigy, but in such debates the IQ issue invariably comes up, so people seem to think it is of relevance, and taht such an IQ is highly unusual). According to the article, the boy has an IQ of 145. If we assume that this was measured on the scale that is the most widely used in continental Europe (which uses a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15), then this would mean the boy scores three standard deviations above average, which puts him in the 99.7th percentile. That sounds like a lot, and it is; but it’s not all that much when calculated against absolute population numbers: It means there are three people out of a thousand with an IQ like that (or higher). Or, to put it differently: A city like Eindhoven, where he is attending university and which has a population of 230,000, can be expected to be home to hundreds of people (and dozens of boys about his age) with such an IQ.
On the other hand, you’ll sometimes see someone claiming an IQ of 190 or higher, which seems like it would mean “twice as smart” as 145. But that would be 6 standard deviations, which is enough that there probably isn’t anyone on the planet at all who’s that smart, and almost certainly nobody who’s ever had a chance to be tested.
To be exact, if we use a definition in which the standard deviation is 15 points, the highest I.Q. among all 108 billion people who have ever lived would be about 200 or 201. Look at the table in the link below. One person in 76,017,176,740 has an I.Q. of 200. One person in 119,937,672,336 has an I.Q. of 201.
But, in any case, ignore any claim of having an I.Q. above 160. The I.Q. tests usually given only measure I.Q.s that high. Someone claiming to have a higher I.Q. probably took that number from some test that’s not generally accepted.
And in particular, there are no online IQ tests, and anything that claims to be one is lying. The online “tests” tend to skew extremely high. Last time I saw folks comparing numbers on one of those, as a lark, I answered every question randomly, and got 130, then answered every question with the worst answer I could find, and got 102.
I wouldn’t quite go that far. For example, to join mensa I first was asked to do a timed online test, and then asked to come to my local Uni to do a formal test under exam conditions.
So there are online tests that are equivalent to, or at least a good guide for, “real” IQ tests.
But I would agree that the majority of online tests are nonsense.
And also, for the record, I am quite skeptical of the whole idea of IQ: I am skeptical about our ability to measure it, what the full implications are, and I think Western society puts too much emphasis on it versus hard work. The Hollywood idea of a high IQ being a superpower that enables a person to be immediately good at any cognitive task, with little effort, has seeped into the popular consciousness.
Yes, it hard enough to calibrate IQ tests accurately for people within the normal range. Numerical comparisons of people at such extremes are pretty much meaningless.
Well, I certainly agree that accurate measurement is challenging. But it’s empirically very well supported that there is a fairly high correlation for innate abilities across a wide variety of cognitive tasks. This factor that explains about 40-50% of the variance is what I.Q. tests seek to measure, general intelligence.
And we should be clear that the subjective question of whether Western society places too much emphasis on innate general intelligence is irrelevant to the empirical scientific question of whether it exists.
Well my whole post was largely off-topic; after 10 replies I thought we were free to riff somewhat.
On the g factor: yes I am aware of this. The point is, it’s showing a correlation between being good at cognitive task X and cognitive task Y. That’s a very different thing from saying that someone with a high IQ score is going to be the best at some particular task. More direct testing of specific required abilities is always going to be superior.
Furthermore, IQ tests test that you are good at those kinds of reasoning tasks, it’s debateable how applicable they are to real work situations.
For example, it’s a common belief, and gets repeated on the dope here, that there are likely minimum IQs for particular professions: Doctor: 120, Scientist 130 etc etc.
I absolutely dispute this. In my line of work I collaborate a lot with neurosurgeons. As revered as they are in society, they just seem like people to me. Some bright, some frankly that do not come across that way, but most very hard working and dedicated.
And it makes sense; because the job is a lot more about attributes like consistency and being calm under pressure, and a lot less about “thinking outside the box” than people outside of this work tend to think.
This is the definition of general intelligence, yes.
Yes, it’s different - that’s what correlation means. General intelligence explains 40-50% of the variance. You are attacking a straw man that general intelligence explains everything, nobody has ever claimed this.
IQ tests are usually supposed to measure innate general intelligence, as defined above. If they fail to do that, then they are poorly designed tests, and I don’t dispute that this is often the case. But that doesn’t imply that innate general intelligence is not real.
Even your paraphrase have acknowledges that the claim is that doctors and scientists are likely to have high IQs. That’s surely true. You then proceed once again to attack the straw man that they are certain to have IQs above a certain number.
It is surely true that (assuming we can measure it accurately), knowledge of someone’s IQ being above average does predict whether they are more likely to be a successful doctor or scientist, other things being equal. That’s what correlation means. You are not refuting the existence of a statistical correlation by insisting that other factors are also relevant to the performance of any particular individual. Of course they are.
Mensa accepts a wide variety of tests other than IQ tests. Those other tests generally correlate well with actual IQ tests (that’s why Mensa accepts them), and some of them are available online, but there are still not any actual IQ tests online. Actual IQ tests are always administered by trained psychologists, and don’t look much like what most people think they do. For instance, one common question on IQ tests is “Draw a picture of a person”, with the scoring being based on how many details the test-taker includes in the drawing.
There are janitors with an IQ of 130 and there are janitors with an IQ of 85 but there are no neurosurgeons with an IQ of 85. The idea that intelligence tests aren’t meaningful and useful is hogwash.
Huh? That would seem to simply measure a person’s artistic ability, not “intelligence”. Or is that something known to be correlated with intelligence?
If they asked me to draw a picture of a person, it would be a primitive stick figure with, probably, less detail than the typical xkcd figure. Does that make me a doofus?
Although I may well be one anyway.And what does that say about Randall Munroe?
I have not accused anyone in this thread of saying anything. My post in this thread was just clarifying that standardized IQ tests exist online; they are not all the clickbait con variety. That’s all.
The stuff in my last paragraph was an aside about my opinion about IQ tests. I was not sure about including that aside as it was just an IMHO and a tangent.
Again settle down. I have not accused anybody in this thread of saying that. I am making a general comment. It’s not a straw man because it’s trivial to list examples from pop culture where IQ is treated as a superpower and a barrier to entry: if you have an IQ of 130 so-and-so task would be easy, but below that, it’s virtually impossible. Do you dispute that?
No, you have misparsed my sentence. I said that the position is that there is likely to be a minimum IQ of X; this is very different to saying a given doctor is probably above X.
It’s the difference between ‘Probably every NBA player is taller than 6"3’ (false) and ‘A given NBA player is probably taller than 6"3’ (true).
Of course and I wouldn’t dispute this. My position is simply that the predictive value seems to overstated in pop culture in the West. There’s IQ testing here in China too, but people don’t put much stock in it; and they don’t have TV characters with intelligence superpowers like becoming fluent in a language by flipping through a book for a couple hours.
Well, it would certainly be foolish of me to dispute that you can invent hypothetical claims with sufficiently precise wording that you can then refute them.
But my principal point is that you seem to be conflating a discussion of social perceptions of the significance of intelligence with empirical questions about the significance of general intelligence. I don’t have any strong opinion about the former issue, about whether intelligence is overemphasized in Western society. But the extent to which general intelligence explains performance in diverse cognitive tasks is an empirical question answered with data and statistical analysis, not a matter of opinion or social emphasis.
The scoring is based on amount of detail, not how good that detail looks. And of course, that’s only one question: As with any sort of measurement, you get the best results by doing many different sorts of measurements and averaging them all together.