Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
Yes, an oversight. In my opinion, the brief biographies and photos are worth visiting the site.
Get some sleep. Thanks for stimulating a little activity in this dying forum. -Bob
The story of Sidis was pretty grim, for instance, getting fired from a calculation job because they caught him using his head instead of a primitive adding machine. He is said to have anticipated black hole theory 25 years before anyone else but ended up broken and collecting subway tokens for a hobby. He was basically run out of academia on a rail because nobody could stand him for being arrogant in the extreme. It's too bad he was so vocal about calling people stupid, extremely intelligent people at that. I often wondered how he would have done in chess had he taken it up.
My own IQ I think clocked in pretty low, only around 140, not very high on the real intelligence totem pole.
But Richard Feynman was reported to have an IQ of about 126 so IQ by itself is not a good predictor of success in the real world of science.
Unless you get to 190-200 area. That was the area of Leibniz, the German math guru who invented calculus independently from Newton. His sign for integration is used today.
I thought it pretty amazing that people had been sniffing around the idea of calculus, ancient math papers from thousands of years ago talked about cutting angles into smaller and smaller pieces and such but when it was finally invented for real, 2 people do it at almost the same time!
You look at people like Marylyn Vos Savant, and she was up there with one of the highest IQ's ever recorded outside of Sidis but you didn't see anything like Nobel prize work coming from her.
Someone asked her once, what have you done? She replied, well, I wrote a book...(in jest of course but the fact remains she didn't live up to her potential)
They say you can chart the strength of chess players by IQ but only up to an IQ of about 125, after that all bets are off.
A person's humility is as much valued as any IQ number. Feynman is one example, showing up at undergrad parties banging on a bongo drum, being a real person as well as a scientific genius.
That is how you should judge intelligence.
In the end, affability and humility is a better judge of character.
You can have a Ferrari engine brain but if you are just stuck telling people how smart you are you are just wasting your big brain, it has to be coupled with the real world in a meaningful way not just sliding through life content with just telling everyone about your Ferrari engine brain.
What's your IQ?
25 Sep '13 21:49
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