Posted on 08/20/2009 8:00:22 AM PDT by decimon
IQ is only one measure of intelligence, or to put it another way, only measures one facet of the complex reality that we call ‘intelligence.’ It’s like trying to characterize people physically solely by their height.
Let’s not forget all of the pundits who said that Obama was the smartest president this country has ever seen!
*BARF*
ANY of the men from Teddy on back (and Reagan) would run circles around Obama. The man is about as intelligent as a sack of hammers, and that’s an insult to hammers!
As far as the article, great points. I know several people who have higher IQs than me, but they couldn’t write a sentence if they tried. Intelligence is not a measurable constant.
I think it is, we just can not create a quantifiable measure that is universal. Right now measuring intelligence is better from a judgmental stand point. That is to say that our personal experiences with a person is a better judger of intelligence than a test is.
IQ only measures three types of mental abilities. That’s like judging someone’s overall athletic ability based solely on how accurately they can pitch a baseball, how far they can kick a soccer ball, and their golf swing.
Any measure of intelligence, at this point, is going to leave much to be desired. There are mental abilities we don’t even fully understand yet. And how do we categorize savants (mentally retarded individuals with select prodigious skills)?
I doubt that Richard Feynman’s IQ was really under 130. It seems more likely that he didn’t take the test seriously.
What a person can do beats some score on an artificial test.
What psychologists call general intelligence, or g, is very measurable. What people not trained in psychometrics call intelligence can be something else and like you point out subject to problems in measurement.
I appreciate what the author of the article is trying to say. But I think the record would likely show that of all the people in the world ever described as geniuses, the vast majority have at least above average IQs. Probably a minimum of 120 or so, and many well above that.
I have a close relative with an IQ of 80 and is developmentally disabled (retarded). She fools everyone because she has learned how to respond to people in ways that they think she understands what is being said. She has memorized after many years,certain sayings like “you never know” or “just think positive”. Her mother is now in a nursing home and she is living in an apartment with visits from State provided assistants. Her neighbors are surprised when told that she is disabled. Many hard of hearing individuals also learn how to “bluff” and people think they are hearing them (very dangerous thing to do). My point is that I think Obama is of average intelligence but has learned how to bluff that he is highly intelligent. His facial mannerisms and body language are not authentic but rehearsed. I think he spends a good amount of time googling buzz words, bumper stickers etc, to find out what people are discussing. He then incorporates these buzz words/sayings into his comments and speeches and then everyone thinks he understands them.
Possibly or he had what David Treffert called savant syndrome. Where very rarely a normal person,or in this case high normal, can exhibit savant type abilities in more than one area in spite of his/her “limitations”.
The left judges intelligence on ones acceptance of Marxism.
Accepting Marxism makes an idiot a genius.
Rejection of Marxism makes a genius an idiot...
Not all creative people are geniuses (thus the Threshold Theory), but in order to reach genius status, creativity is a necessary attribute.
As insightful as this revelation seems, it implies that, as many have rigidly maintained over the years of battling with theories of genius, to be truly gifted, high I.Q. is still essential. A musical genius such as Mozart, who possessed an eidetic memory, creativity, application and ramped I.Q., is not a fair comparison to the rap "genius" of today who is illiterate, creative, and stumbles around with an I.Q. of 99.
We categorize them as idiot savants..
I agree. O has about average intelligence. You can tell,if you listen closely, that he doesn’t have a clue about “concepts”. He just has a whole bunch of disconnected facts or ideas memorized or placed in his head. But I don’t think he can really conceptualize and connected the dots. It is a forest/trees sort of thing.
Excellent comments in those first posts there!
I.Q. is a measurement of how well someone does on I.Q. tests. Only some mental abilities and skills can be measured by a test. There must be more to the picture. Maybe a series of real-life simulations would give a more accurate picture.
From wikipedia: "In high school he was bright, with a measured IQ of 125: high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer Gleick.[10] He would later scoff at psychometric testing."
He was born in 1918 so the test he took would have been different from that given today.
What Makes A Genius?
Easy question: My mom made a genuis. ME.
He obtained a perfect score on the entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics — an unprecedented feat — but did rather poorly on the history and English portions.
and:
Feynman (in common with the famous physicists Edward Teller and Albert Einstein) was a late talker; by his third birthday he had yet to utter a single word.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman]
There most certainly are many different kinds of intelligence. I doubt that many football QBs get high grades in college, yet their ability to memorize complex plays and react instantly to conditions on the field shows a kind of intelligence of a very high order.
Doesn’t an IQ of 125 put him at 94-5th percentile of the population (assuming IQ tests back then used the same standard deviation as those now)? That score isn’t average at all if it puts him at top 5-6% of the population.
It just seems like a classic case of a combination of talent and a large amount of hard work to me. Feynman isn’t like most people; he sticks to a problem for hours on end and kept logs of his train of thoughts. You’d be surprised what you can achieve doing that. I think people generally have a dichotomous view of how success is achieved, either you had the talent, or you had the work ethic, but rarely both.
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