HiQ

Tyler Cowen points us to Sam Knight of the Financial Times writing on high IQs. The featured player is Marilyn vos Savant, owner of the Guinness World Records highest IQ, now and forever, of 228.

Savant – the surname is real, it was her mother’s maiden name – has had a unique claim to fame since the mid-1980s. It was then, almost 30 years after she took a test as a schoolgirl in downtown St Louis, Missouri, that her IQ came to light. In 1985, Guinness World Records accepted that she had answered every question correctly on an adult Stanford-Binet IQ test at the age of just 10, a result that gave her a corresponding mental age of 22 years and 11 months, and an unearthly IQ of 228.

I say now and forever because Guinness has dropped that category.

If we were to try to interpret that IQ in the conventional fashion for adults, at the usual rate of 15 points per standard deviation, that number comes to just about eight and one half standard deviations and a probability of less than 10^(-17) or one in 100 quadrillion. That's not plausible, of course, but as a ten year old she supposedly did as well as the average 23 year old on an IQ test.

In any case, she was obviously a smart kid and has become a very clever and knowlegible adult. The FT article is a winner in my book, touching a number of points that fascinate me: the high IQ societies, the superstitious awe in which society holds IQ, and a few hints of the relationship to achievement (modest but real) - not to mention the good old Monty Hall problem, probably Marilyn's most famous controversy, but one that she did get right.

So what do IQ tests test? One of the beauties of the IQ theory is that once you have convinced yourself that a bunch of skills are correlated, testing almost any of them seems equally plausible. Because correlations are imperfect, most IQ tests present a grab bag, but three key components are pattern recognition, speed and complexity of mental processing.

The Wechsler Adult Inteligence Test is one of the most popular ones. They test four general areas, each of which has sub areas:

Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI)
Perceptual Reasoning Index (PRI)
Working Memory Index (WMI)
Processing Speed Index (PSI)

The well-substantiated claim for IQ tests is that they predicts academic performance. Looking at the individual skills certainly makes that claim seem plausible to me. It's also claimed that it predicts performance in all sorts of other areas. There is little obvious correlation of very high IQ to exceptional intellectual accomplishment, however. Geniuses are smart, but might have IQs only a couple of standard deviations above the norm. Many of the so-called super IQs are extremely modest in accomplishment. vos Savan, for example, was distinctly ordinary until she got the idea of claiming the world's highest IQ - two failed marriages (the first at age 16) and employment in the family business A very high IQ friend once explained to me the reason why he left academia - he found that the thing he was actually good at was taking tests.

A claim is made in the article for what I would call the Sheldon Cooper phenomenon - that very high IQ individuals tend to be socially incompetent and often suffer from Asberger's syndrome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more