Are there any true geniuses here? (IQ over 155)

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2ukenkerl
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07 Mar 2011, 10:18 pm

jamesp420 wrote:

My parents got me tested when I was 8 years old. Astonishingly I scored 163. They paid $400 for a test with a bull result. There is no way in hell I'm that friggin intelligent.

WELL, IQ=(MA/CA)*100 So your CA was 8 which means your MA was not quite 13. NOW the forum says you are 18, so one would hope your MA is AT LEAST 18, about 38% smarter than you were then. So who knows?

justarandomperson
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07 Mar 2011, 10:45 pm

anbuend wrote:

justarandomperson wrote:

I believe people do have an "IQ," but whether a test can accurately measure it or not is another story. I think that for a lot of people, some tests do come close, but that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. Suffice to say that a kid who is thriving in college at 13 obviously has a high IQ. If you think about it, the average college student is supposed to have an IQ between 110 and 120, and thus I'd imagine this person's IQ to be around 160. Obviously the test was flawed in one way or another if he scored 30.

I'm uneasy with such explanations. Because they basically take all the people with unexpectedly (to most people) high or low IQ scores, and they explain it away as "but they really have a (higher/lower) IQ than that if they were tested properly". Rather than acknowledging that maybe IQ isn't such a useful concept. It's also a little insulting to people with low IQs, if you think about it. If they have something that most people would call "intelligence", then suddenly "the test was wrong", suggesting that people with "real" low IQs are unintelligent. (I have spent half my life among primarily people with low IQs and I can say that is absolutely not the case. To get a low IQ score, you need to have any of a huge array of sensory, motor, cultural, or cognitive issues. But it doesn't say what most people think it says about all of a person's thinking skills, or at least it doesn't have to say that. But it does have to say that if every time a person with a low IQ shows certain skills, everyone says "Oh, their IQ must be much higher than that.") It's kind of... circular, in a way, although I can't explain it in words very well.

Of course, I genuinely don't know about every possible other person's mind. I know that mine absolutely does not have a fixed cognitive capacity. It is constantly changing and shifting in just about every cognitive area possible. I range from being able to carry on conversations such as these, to having no conceptual thinking, to being in a state where all I can say is that there is awareness of some kind because there is not a whole lot else of anything. I don't think any single one of those is my "true ability", because my true abilities change all the time, you can't just pick out the best or the worst and say "this one is the real one". And that's oversimplifying things to only certain kinds of cognitive skills.

I agree mostly about IQ. I think of it as something which deepens what already seems likely or apparent. If someone scores in the genius range then there is reason to believe the person is a genius, especially if there already were reason to believe it. If a person scores in the lower range then the same is true, but if there is plenty of evidence contrary to the implication of a low IQ (such as high achievement), then there's no reason to weigh the IQ score heavily, and to in fact question it. Basically, I think in some cases, measured IQ correlates with broader intelligence and cognitive capacities, in other cases it does not. Also to help reconcile some issues is that many believe that "optimal" range is really somewhere between 70 and 130. Too far from that in either direction is a bad thing socially speaking.

carltcwc
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07 Mar 2011, 10:47 pm

Mine rounded out to 122 on an IQ test in 2006, however on individual scores i ranged from 3rd to 99th percentile so I ranged from ret*d to genius on any given portion of the test.

katzefrau
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07 Mar 2011, 11:03 pm

pezar wrote:

I was just wondering if there are any honest to god bona fide true geniuses here, the type of people who blow the doors off IQ tests of any type

my 11 year old nephew is this person. he went to a giftedness specialist for IQ testing and she had to keep bringing him back for more questions because they didn't initially have any he could not answer. however he has AS and dysgraphia. so he scored >18 grade level (grad school level) for math applied problems and 4th grade level for fluency. general ability index (approximated due to incomplete testing) > 160

my sister in law says it is intimidating being his parent. i think he's hilarious and amazing.

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08 Mar 2011, 6:58 am

No, however I have had the pleasure of being acquainted with a small handful of individuals who, though I don't know their IQ scores, I can say were, beyond doubt, true geniuses.

They excelled above most in their field in both the speed at which they learned, the quantity of information they were able to absorb, their retention of that information, and their ability to use it effectively, and they generally had to put far less effort into learning than others did and I was quite impressed with them, and couldn't help but to wonder what the world looked like from their perspective, as I imagine they had a better view of the universe than I did.

I was most impressed, however, by their humbleness. All but perhaps one were exceedingly kind an patient, perhaps even a little embarrassed by their abilities. It's a curious thing that being profoundly more intellectually endowed than most does not absolve one of the desire to fit in amongst their peers.

Meow101
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08 Mar 2011, 8:04 am

garyww wrote:

I didn't mean to give you the impression that I agree with the government of school system. I do think both institutions are very sick and routinely mistreat the general public I just meant to show you that we were trained to accept these horrors as being a normal part of daily living.

Yup. I'm a little bit younger (in my 40s) but I remember being told about air raid drills and the like by kids who were older. I also saw pics of the Japanese kids in school. It wasn't thought to be anything we shouldn't be exposed to.

And on topic, my IQ has been tested 4 times, the lowest score was 148, the highest 170. Dunno what to make of it except that it's high and my academic performance has borne that out. Wish my social functioning were that high...but alas, AS has made sure it's not.

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08 Mar 2011, 9:16 am

Looks like there are many definitions of a "genius."

According to this source^ 2% of the world is "genius."

There was a thread I followed some years ago on a topic of IQ and Richard Feynman, and it featured a *perplexled theme* about how on earth could Richard Feynman score in the superior range( 120's)? And the fact that he replied to someone's comment about joining Mensa and he said, "I could never pass the entrance exam." Hahaha. :lol:

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08 Mar 2011, 10:15 am

I still think Groucho Marx got it right: "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member".
Doubly true for Mensa. :roll:

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Meow101
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08 Mar 2011, 10:25 am

Cornflake wrote:

I still think Groucho Marx got it right: "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member".
Doubly true for Mensa. :roll:

I wouldn't join mensa. (1) Don't wanna pay the outrageous fee. (2) High IQ in and of itself? Dunno what it means exactly...

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08 Mar 2011, 10:30 am

^^ and (3) it's nothing more than a mutual jack-off club anyway.

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Plywood
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08 Mar 2011, 1:37 pm

I get too bored to even finish the IQ test.

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22 Mar 2012, 9:05 pm

Janissy wrote:

Mdyar wrote:

The human mind is more modular than the psychometricians would like to admit. Testing fails at 'creativity' for one.

."

A giant limitation of IQ tests (in addition to limitations already discussed) is that they only contain the questions and puzzles that the psychometricians themselves can think up. A truly outside the box creative thinker could have a middlng score because their thoughts are so diofferent from the thoughts (and therefore questions) of a psychometrician. Are psychometricians really the pinnacle of possible human intelligence? Doubtful. But somehow their view of the world (and the questions one should answer about it) got enshrined as the standard.

Props! very well said!

Jory
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22 Mar 2012, 9:14 pm

I've tried to take IQ tests before, and I couldn't even complete them. I have too many problems with them. First, I can't focus on anything if I'm not interested in it, and I'm rarely interested in any of the questions. I get so bored and distracted that I quit. (This is one of the reasons I did so horribly in school.) Second, my math skills are a train wreck, and way too many of the questions are math related. (Another reason I did poorly in school.) Third, many of the questions simply don't make any sense to me at all. ("If this word means 'den,' and this other word means 'quaue,' then..." What the hell is this one all about, anyway?) The best I can say for my intelligence is that I can answer some of the questions in a heartbeat just by glancing over the text, and I can feel my brain making the connections quickly. I imagine this is how math wizards feel when they're working out a problem quickly, but I just do it with other areas.

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22 Mar 2012, 9:23 pm

anbuend wrote:

JSMC wrote:

I'm a student in electrical engineering specialised in electronic design. I'll be working in a clean room lab (Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic circuit) for my master degree. I've done math contest when I was young. I've never studied in my life, even at university. But still got over average results. By comparing myself to other student in my department, I'm the fastest at laboratory work and even if I don't get the highest result, I'm sure my understanding are much more profound than everone else. When others takes the 4 hours allowed time, I can do much more work in 1h30. Many of my friends I've worked with on different project often say "For a pot head, you have strike of genius"... Most often in my exam, I don't need to study since most of the time we have access to one formula sheet or whatever we want (laptop not allowed). I can do a problem in a way the teacher never taught! I see the formula I need and apply them how I feel I need too.

I'm good at image/signal processing algorithm, printed circuit design, building stuff together (like my car which I modified a lot on my own, without any mechanic formation), art (drawing, painting, music,...), computer programming ...

Never be too sure... among the people I know are:

A woman who was a PhD student in philosophy, capable of sustained language and abstraction the like of which I can't even close to comprehend, and got tested as part of getting services. Her tested IQ was 80.

A woman who has written something like seven or eight books, at least one of them a bestseller, has a college degree or two or three (can't remember exactly what degree she got), excellent singer-songwriter, gifted sculptor and painter, very moving poet. Her tested IQ is 67.

A kid who's been in college since the age of 13 or 14, and is thriving there, has done award-winning work in his area of interest, etc. His tested IQ is somewhere in the 30s.

So simply being really really good at what you do and being quick on your feet mentally doesn't mean you'll have a high IQ. Some of the most intellectually nimble autistic people I know, including people (unlike me) who have no particular deficits in conceptual thinking, have IQs ranging from 20ish-85ish. And some (like me) have had our IQs get noticeably lower as we get older. (Which is why I suspect my IQ is even lower now than it was when I was last tested.)

I have a friend who believes that most people really have some sort of consistent cognitive capacity that really is a sort of internal "IQ" of some kind. I don't believe that. She claims that I just think that because I have no such consistent capacity, but... with the people I've known, I' just doubt that IQ means anything but the test score. So even if you're tremendously talented in intellectual areas, it doesn't necessarily mean your IQ will turn out to be really high (or even high at all).

I respectfully disbelieve your statements regarding these people and they are demonstrably inconsistent with many decades of research in psycho-metrics. Show me even one case in the literature of an individual with severe 'retardation' who succeeds in any real university. Please.

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22 Mar 2012, 10:09 pm

I'm a "genius", but I don't take any pride in it. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I am a living counterexample to the idea that being a "genius" makes you a genius. I'm good at IQ tests, but I do the stupidest things you could possibly imagine, on a regular basis.

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22 Mar 2012, 10:27 pm

Declension wrote:

Reminds me of D&D, weirdly enough.

If you've played D&D, you know that a character has three mental stats--intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Charisma is people skills and people-related intuition as well as force of personality and confidence. Intelligence is "book smarts"--your ability to figure out puzzles, remember information, learn abstract information. Wisdom is your common sense--your awareness of the world around you, your street smarts, your intuition, your self-control. If you're good at IQ tests but have often been accused of not having any common sense, then your D&D-verse double would have a high Intelligence and a low Wisdom, and make a wonderful absend-minded professor of a wizard character. The opposite is also a possibility; I once played a high-Wisdom, low-Intelligence character who at first seemed like a typical near-illiterate peasant, but who had a lot of life experience to draw from and eventually became a mentor to the rest of the party. I picked the Druid class, which gave him a rapport with animals (you see, you don't have to worry about intellectual discussions when you're interacting with your horse or with the squirrel in the nearby tree), and had him communicate in a simple, taciturn style. It worked out well.

I like that concept--the idea that there are different sorts of intelligence and none is really more important than the others. I've never really liked the concept of general intelligence; I don't think it exists.

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