10 ms·

Kim Ung-yong: The man with the highest IQ

106 points by fogus 17y ago

zackattack 17y ago
Even someone supremely intelligent seems to be bound by human needs of social approval. I wonder what his brain looks like. I wonder if he has superior rates of motor skill acquisition.
- barrkel 17y ago
  I would doubt it. Physical coordination seems to be inversely correlated with signs of intellectual achievement, such as advanced degrees etc. People who live in their head seem awkward in their bodies.
mmaunder 17y ago
This story is kind of sad. You'd think he would stick with Physics and help advance the species by building an engine to travel to the stars or solving the unified field theory. But instead he went into the most earth-bound profession imaginable. It makes one think that innovation is less about raw IQ and more about curiosity and passion.
- mapleoin 17y ago
  Have you seen Good Will Hunting?
  - mmaunder 17y ago
    Great movie, but it's about child abuse and recovery.
    - joss82 17y ago
      It's more about life and recovery.
  - ynniv 17y ago
    "While I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president." That scene couldn't have done a better job describing our last 10 years in the middle east if it had been written after it happened.
- wheels 17y ago
  Well, I think it just confirms that there's no strong coupling between intelligence and ambition, but I don't think that's really new information.
- ynniv 17y ago
  The greatest physicists have been disgusted by society's use of their work. Maybe a modern genius would decide that a small amount of social change would be better than a vast amount of scientific.
- fiaz 17y ago
  Actually, in a way it is inspiring: he is exercising his own choice to live a life that he loves.
  - AngryParsley 17y ago
    I think that's rather selfish. He's squandering his talents and the rest of humanity is worse-off because of it. There are a lot of problems in the world and they're not going to solve themselves. I think exceptional people have a duty to use their talents to aid humanity. I don't mean that everyone with an IQ >120 should drop what they're doing an join OXFAM. The greatest help is usually done through research. Also, people aren't robots with infinite motivation. They have to be interested in their work to perform well. That said, he can probably find something he's interested in that also benefits others.
    - mquander 17y ago
      I think that's an unbelievable remark! Nobody asks in advance to be born intelligent. Can you think of any other trait one could be born with which you would say bestows someone with a duty to lead their life in a certain way? I sure can't. What's next? Millions upon millions of people have obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in field X, and gone on to a career in field Y. Well, aren't they squandering all their hard-earned experience and knowledge in X? Were they duty-bound to pursue X instead? What's the difference? I also think it's absolutely absurd to say someone's squandering their talents and not "aiding humanity" when they have a Ph.D. in physics, they're a civil engineer, and they've published ninety academic papers.
      - AngryParsley 17y ago
        I guess duty was a poor word choice. Would you agree with this line of reasoning?: The world would be a better place if the most intelligent people worked to solve problems that cause the most harm to humanity. If an exceptionally intelligent person doesn't work on these problems, more people will die and/or suffer. This is bad, so exceptionally intelligent people should work on these problems even if they find more personal satisfaction in less important problems. That's basically what I meant by "duty." Now to address the specific points in your post: Nobody asks in advance to be born intelligent. Correct. Currently life is very very unfair. Nobody asks to be born into poverty and ignorance either. Can you think of any other trait one could be born with which you would say bestows someone with a duty to lead their life in a certain way? These aren't genetic traits but they can be inherited: Wealth. Power, such as in a monarchy. ...aren't they squandering all their hard-earned experience and knowledge in X? There are a couple of differences in your example. First, not all degrees are equally useful. A Ph.D. in Russian literature isn't going to be very useful in curing disease or engineering hardier crops. Second, education can't fully substitute for fluid intelligence. I also think it's absolutely absurd to say someone's squandering their talents and not "aiding humanity" when they have a Ph.D. in physics, they're a civil engineer, and they've published ninety academic papers. Compared to most people, yes, he has helped a lot. But if this guy really is the smartest person on the earth, he is wasting his potential. Bad things are happening -bad things will happen- that wouldn't have happened if he worked in biotech or physics or cognitive neuroscience. Here's a silly but analogous situation: If Superman was a social worker, wouldn't you be frustrated that he wasn't doing superhero stuff? Sure, social worker Superman has helped more than most individuals, but he could do so much more. The fact is that we all aren't born equal, but we all hurt; we get sick; we die. It's completely unfair. We need to fix it. The more great minds we have devoted to these problems, the sooner they'll be in the history books instead of the nightly news.
- ubercore 17y ago
  I don't think it's sad at all; I find it kind of comforting. This dude's living the life he wants to lead. Good on him for making a decision that was at odds with the expectations everyone seemed to be layering on him.
- starkfist 17y ago
  Maybe his gigantic IQ helped him to see the limits of his potential contribution to Physics. Related, innovative Civil Engineering is extremely important in densely urban societies like Korea.
- scotty79 17y ago
  Even highest IQ single man can have is small when compared with capacity of few people combined into a good problem solving process. Two people with IQ 120 can be smarter than one with 210. Not to mention if they all use computers.
  - Hexstream 17y ago
    Sorry but I doubt that, given that I'd much rather have a 2.1x programmer than 2 1.2x programmers. But of course that's not necessarily correlated with IQ.
    - scotty79 17y ago
      Your "programmer value quotient" is definitely not IQ. Knowledge and experience acts as IQ multiplier when tackling known class of problems. I think there is a number of 1.2x programmers that you would prefer to hire instead of single 2.1x programmer. For all activities there's a number like that and it's pretty low.
      - waterlesscloud 17y ago
        Depends on the task. There are some tasks any number of lesser programmers won't be able to complete. There are conceptual levels to programming that come into play on certain tasks. Huge numbers of programmers that don't understand those concepts won't be able to solve the problems.
      - scotty79 17y ago
        Science does not rely on geniuses and programming also shouldn't. There is simply too much to do to wait for genius to do it. If your problem is too hard you should rephrase it, break it into easier parts, limit domain to what is necessary and give up some constraints. That's what people do in science and that's what worked for humanity so far.
        orp 17y ago
        I'm not sure that works when it comes to major breakthroughs. I'm hardly an expert, but I'm not sure Einstien's work, for instance, could be replicated by a 100 physicists 'breaking it into easier parts. Not mention you're contradicting Heinlein, and we all know that's never good.
- blhack 17y ago
  Maybe he "doesn't want to spend the rest of his life explainin' shit to people".
- arethuza 17y ago
  Maybe he is smart enough to have decided that a star drive or unifield field theory are not possible and decided to do something else that interests him more.
- techiferous 17y ago
  "help advance the species by building an engine to travel to the stars or solving the unified field theory" But why? Technology is a means, not an end, so unless we've got our ends right, there's no point pouring all our effort into the means.
- vinutheraj 17y ago
  "You are not responsible for other people's expectations about you" - Richard Feynman
- DaniFong 17y ago
  Speaking as an ex-academic physicist, this is pure snobbery! What's wrong with civil engineering?
david927 17y ago
Malcolm Gladwell states in Outliers that there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes. I think that in the future we'll come to realize that IQ is actually a silly metric and that this "understanding" is where it's at. Point of view (understanding) doesn't give you more intelligence (Alan Kay's proverbial 80 IQ points), but instead intelligence can help you to gain understanding.
- mynameishere 17y ago
  I think it's cute that you believe something that Gladwell put forth to the world. http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-occupations http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-...
  - gjm11 17y ago
    Your link doesn't offer any sort of evidence against Gladwell's contention (which isn't original to Gladwell, and which on the basis of negligible evidence I suspect is an oversimplification but not far from the truth). In fact, arguably it offers a little evidence against what Gladwell says. If IQ above ~120 makes no difference to performance, and if "career" and "performance" are close enough to make it worth while citing this thing at all, then you ought to see no little difference between {occupations substantially found among people with IQ ~120} and {occuptations substantially found among people with IQ ~130}. Now, look down the 120 and 130 lines of that plot, and notice that you see quite different things in the two instances. (The foregoing is a bit of a simplification, but it'll do. Anyway, I see no way to read the graph as providing evidence that IQ 120 is better than IQ 110, but IQ 130 isn't better than IQ 120, in terms of likely success/performance.)
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      The estimate that the IQ threshold for adult eminence is about IQ 120 appears to come from Arthur Jensen. It has been repeated by Hans Eysenck and is most frequently written about by Dean Keith Simonton, who cites a specialized study on exactly that issue in one of his latest books. Locally, I'm in an ongoing discussion, partly in person and partly by email, with Thomas Bouchard on this point. I think the additional help of an IQ score above 120 is negligible compared to other factors that are known to be important for adult eminence.
mikecane 17y ago
And what about Christopher Langan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Neither has a validated IQ score. NO ONE with an IQ score reported to be above 160 has a validated IQ score. IQ test scores in that range have never been properly validated, on any IQ test of any era. It is well known that reliability of IQ tests is at its worst at the highest level of IQ scores. The author of the Stanford-Binet form L-M (the test that Marilyn vos Savant, among others, took to get a sky-high unvalidated score) was among the first to say so: "The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 http://learninfreedom.org/Terman%201937%20Figure%203.gif http://learninfreedom.org/Terman%201937%20Figure%203.gif is typical of the arrays at every age level. "From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds." (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44) To validate an IQ test (a test that purports to estimate "general intelligence"), one must first reach a consensus among test designers about some sign of intelligence that is detectable outside the testing room. Over the years, psychologists have proposed various behavioral characteristics of human beings as signs that those human beings are "intelligent," with entering challenging, high-income occupations that require a lot of higher schooling being one criterion proposed for adult IQ tests, and being precocious in school and having good grades and good teacher ratings being one criterion that is proposed for child IQ tests. One finds a sample of persons to take a new brand of test in its norming administration, and rates those persons by external criteria of "intelligence," weighting those criteria by consensus, and then checks the rank-order correlation between the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the IQ test and the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the validation criteria. There will NEVER be a perfect ("1.0") correlation between the test and the validation criterion, just as there is never a perfect correlation between IQ scores on one occasion and IQ scores on another occasion on the same brand of IQ test by the same group of test-takers. There is enough play in the joints in both IQ test scoring (whatever the brand of test) and ranking people by other validation criteria (whatever they are), that strictly speaking one can't say that there is any all-time, universally significant ranking of human beings by intelligence. But a close-enough-for-government-work validation study would show an IQ test having correlations above .80, and perhaps even above .90, in comparison with previous brands of IQ tests, or in comparison with subsets of its own item content, or in comparison with some well regarded external validation criterion. For reasons mentioned above, there is especially little reliability, and hence especially little validity, for IQ scores far above the population mean, and thus it's very hard to devise a validation criterion that would sort, say, members of Mensa http://www.mensa.org/ http://www.mensa.org/ or members of the Study of Exceptional Talent http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html or members of the Davidson Young Scholars program http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ into their "true" rank order by IQ, not to mention that IQ scores for the same individual can and do change over the course of life. Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ elementary-age pupils showed that many of those young people did not qualify as "gifted" on a subsequent test that Terman gave them at high school age. But he kept them in the study group anyway. Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown. An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children included in the study ever won a Nobel prize. The book by Shurkin I have just cited here is a good corrective on many misconceptions about IQ, and has an excellent section on attempts by one of Terman's study associates to estimate--by extremely dubious methods that have never been validated--the IQ scores of historical persons. P.S. As Stephen Hawking says about IQ: "Q: What is your I.Q.? "A: I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html
TheSOB88 17y ago
That English quote at the end seems pretty non-fluent to me (the "but" seems unnatural). I wonder how much of his other achievements are exaggeration.
- WingForward 17y ago
  The quote was originally in Korean. It could be a translation problem, or a cultural issue (conflict avoidance?).
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  You're applying your own regional knowledge of English to someone else's. I'm English and I've worked as a writer and I've done copy-editing, and that 'but' has every right to be there, even if it hurts the flow of the sentence. For anyone growing up in an English speaking country we all know that a pause readily means 'but', especially if it was a longer pause. As it's a translation of something he said, the issue here is the integrity of the translator not of the man himself. A good translator would have dropped the but, because he likely never used it when he spoke in Korean. I've spent a lot of time in France, and even though I'm nowhere near fluent I still manage to speak the slang. By spending time in the country and amongst the people I learnt all the social norms for speaking that I never learnt in a high school class. There's a vast difference in usage between Bonsoir and Bonne nuit, the latter is literally used exclusively in the meaning "goodnight, I won't see you again today". Similarly I've seen many a confused tourist when they were greeted with Salut "bye" as a greeting. Again from several vacations in Spain and the Spanish islands, I rarely ever heard Gracias "Thank you", they all use Graci "thanks", again despite everything I was taught of Spanish it wasn't right to how people actually speak. There's a big difference between being fluent in a language, and being fluent in a dialect. Dialects typically teach us how to use English improperly, mainly because 90% of our interactions are informal. However almost every English speaking person would remove their dialect in the instance if they were brought in front of a world leader. I know for people receiving Knighthoods from the queen they have to instruct people on how to pronounce "ma'am" (pronounced mam) as they try to pronounce it 'properly' and in doing so pronounce it wrong, which apparently bugs the Queen herself as she's been noted for correcting people on it too.
holdenc 17y ago
Personal theory: stardom comes during childhood or adulthood, but rarely both.
- Hexstream 17y ago
  First time ever I'm relieved to have been a loser in childhood. Incidentally, I'm starting to kick some serious butt. Get ready, World, here I come!
maxklein 17y ago
The most intelligent people are rarely thick skinned. And to be and stay famous, you have to be pretty thick skinned.
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  Hollywood disagrees.
sethg 17y ago
Assuming that the IQ test that Kim took was the kind that uses 16 points per standard deviation (some, IIRC, use 15), that puts him almost seven standard deviations above the mean. It seems to me that once you get above five standard deviations (i.e., the top 99.9999% of the population), tests of “general intelligence” aren’t really measuring anything more than the ability to max out whatever subtests that particular test author chose to include.
- aubergene 17y ago
  just thinking the same thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Post_War_to_1929 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Post_War_...
scotty79 17y ago
If you want to make yourself feel better go and pass Mensa entry test. As a programmer you are already highly advantaged by knowing such concepts as xor an other bitwise operations and knowing how to animate a moving point (erase it and draw it again some distance away in each frame). There are puzzles based on these concepts. I took that test once and had all answers correct, which means I have IQ at least 156 (Binet scale) but might be much higher since I still had almost 30 minutes left.
- cabalamat 17y ago
  I think the Mensa tests are made artificially easy, since they want people to pay trhem money. It's quite easy for people to improve their IQ scores by practisingf the questions. I once took an IQ test from a book (I think it was by Eysenck) and then did another test from the same book a few days later. On the second test I scored 27 points higher, so by definition my IQ was 27 points higher; I doubt if I was any cleverer in any meaningful way. I suspect that part of the Flynn effect (that IQ scores have been increasing over time) is due to people being more familiar with those sorts of puzzles. Having said all that, I suspect that being able to learn from experience (and therefore get higher scores on similar tests) is a pretty large factor in intelligence.
huherto 17y ago
"I was not a loser, but I just wanted to live ordinarily" Perhaps this is the best proof of his extraordinary intelligence.
- jraynor 17y ago
  I would be very interested in reading comments elaborating on this stance by people that agree with it, since my view is a bit different. In the interest of human progress, I would prefer that people with great ability are encouraged by society and their peers (which I assume the great minds at HN are likely to be among). I mean this in terms of what I see should be encouraged and done so through morals and not laws (e.g. in no way promote the violation of a person's freedom or liberty).
  - python123 17y ago
    Quit trying to suck up to the people on here. They are not talented people. This would be obvious to you if you had any talent at all. These people are mostly 30-some career software engineers who fantasize about becoming entrepreneurs and like thinking of themselves as hackers even though they lack the skills to justify that term. There's some good domain technical knowledge here, but very little actual intelligence. Just read any math links (everybody upvotes to look good, but nobody comments because they don't really understand - or they write really dumb comments). If you can read Outliers and not understand the horrible science and generalizations behind it then you are an idiot. 120 IQ?? Are you kidding me? Maybe it makes you feel better because you only have a 120 IQ, but that precludes you from achieving anything meaningful in math and science. High IQ does not mean you will be a high achiever, but only those with exception IQ's are able to achieve in certain fields. This is the problem with America. This is why America will lose to China in the next decades. We are trained to feel better about ourselves be devaluing those with superior intellect and ability.
    - bitwize 17y ago
      Would that you could tell that to Feynman (I.Q. 127). His amused smile at your remarks would probably be one for the ages.
wallflower 17y ago
Terman's Kids (the most famous longitudinal study of IQ and life achievement). http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/articles/terman.html http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/arti...
pw0ncakes 17y ago
I wonder if he's going to tell us to put toilet water on the crops, instead of Brawndo.
- gwern 17y ago
  Why would he do that? Brawndo has what plants crave.
Vicarious 17y ago
Is it possible that the higher the IQ is at birth the faster the brain degenerates? Not just from a built-in process but also from stress due to lack of social acceptance. This algernon process could imply that by 25, a physics PhD at 16 can only manage civil engineering.
- koenigdavidmj 17y ago
  I'm not sure that I would be so willing to call a guy who's published 90-ish papers in CE a dummy.
aswanson 17y ago
Similar to the story of William Sidis.
JeffJenkins 17y ago
Is there any evidence to verify the claims in that article aside from his IQ? This is all very suspicious looking, and I couldn't find anything about the timing of the Phd he got or that he worked for NASA.
- sausagefeet 17y ago
  I agree, I remain skeptical of all those [citation needed]'s. William James Sidis > * still.
mburney 17y ago
He was writing poems and showing an aptitude for languages at a very early age -- I wonder why as a child he was pushed into only doing physics rather than a wide variety of studies? We seem to believe that since physics is the most difficult subject to master, that means the most intelligent people have to do physics. That is pretty poor reasoning; I would think people with higher IQs may be better off as polymaths with a wide exposure to arts AND the sciences (and engineering). Goethe, for example, had a very high IQ and even though he wrote about science, his greatest contribution to humanity was his literature.
- mquander 17y ago
  What do you mean, he was "pushed into only doing physics?" Are you reading another source? In the Wikipedia article, it doesn't imply that he was pushed, and it doesn't imply that he gave up other pursuits.
elblanco 17y ago
IQ is a measure of capacity, not a measure of the current amount. IQ is a bucket. Even if you have a 5 gallon bucket, you can still only put 1 gallon of stuff in it.

106 points by fogus 17y ago

Even someone supremely intelligent seems to be bound by human needs of social approval. I wonder what his brain looks like. I wonder if he has superior rates of motor skill acquisition.

barrkel 17y ago
I would doubt it. Physical coordination seems to be inversely correlated with signs of intellectual achievement, such as advanced degrees etc. People who live in their head seem awkward in their bodies.

mmaunder 17y ago

This story is kind of sad. You'd think he would stick with Physics and help advance the species by building an engine to travel to the stars or solving the unified field theory. But instead he went into the most earth-bound profession imaginable. It makes one think that innovation is less about raw IQ and more about curiosity and passion.

mapleoin 17y ago
Have you seen Good Will Hunting?
- mmaunder 17y ago
  Great movie, but it's about child abuse and recovery.
  - joss82 17y ago
    It's more about life and recovery.
- ynniv 17y ago
  "While I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president." That scene couldn't have done a better job describing our last 10 years in the middle east if it had been written after it happened.
wheels 17y ago
Well, I think it just confirms that there's no strong coupling between intelligence and ambition, but I don't think that's really new information.
ynniv 17y ago
The greatest physicists have been disgusted by society's use of their work. Maybe a modern genius would decide that a small amount of social change would be better than a vast amount of scientific.
fiaz 17y ago
Actually, in a way it is inspiring: he is exercising his own choice to live a life that he loves.
- AngryParsley 17y ago
  I think that's rather selfish. He's squandering his talents and the rest of humanity is worse-off because of it. There are a lot of problems in the world and they're not going to solve themselves. I think exceptional people have a duty to use their talents to aid humanity. I don't mean that everyone with an IQ >120 should drop what they're doing an join OXFAM. The greatest help is usually done through research. Also, people aren't robots with infinite motivation. They have to be interested in their work to perform well. That said, he can probably find something he's interested in that also benefits others.
  - mquander 17y ago
    I think that's an unbelievable remark! Nobody asks in advance to be born intelligent. Can you think of any other trait one could be born with which you would say bestows someone with a duty to lead their life in a certain way? I sure can't. What's next? Millions upon millions of people have obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in field X, and gone on to a career in field Y. Well, aren't they squandering all their hard-earned experience and knowledge in X? Were they duty-bound to pursue X instead? What's the difference? I also think it's absolutely absurd to say someone's squandering their talents and not "aiding humanity" when they have a Ph.D. in physics, they're a civil engineer, and they've published ninety academic papers.
    - AngryParsley 17y ago
      I guess duty was a poor word choice. Would you agree with this line of reasoning?: The world would be a better place if the most intelligent people worked to solve problems that cause the most harm to humanity. If an exceptionally intelligent person doesn't work on these problems, more people will die and/or suffer. This is bad, so exceptionally intelligent people should work on these problems even if they find more personal satisfaction in less important problems. That's basically what I meant by "duty." Now to address the specific points in your post: Nobody asks in advance to be born intelligent. Correct. Currently life is very very unfair. Nobody asks to be born into poverty and ignorance either. Can you think of any other trait one could be born with which you would say bestows someone with a duty to lead their life in a certain way? These aren't genetic traits but they can be inherited: Wealth. Power, such as in a monarchy. ...aren't they squandering all their hard-earned experience and knowledge in X? There are a couple of differences in your example. First, not all degrees are equally useful. A Ph.D. in Russian literature isn't going to be very useful in curing disease or engineering hardier crops. Second, education can't fully substitute for fluid intelligence. I also think it's absolutely absurd to say someone's squandering their talents and not "aiding humanity" when they have a Ph.D. in physics, they're a civil engineer, and they've published ninety academic papers. Compared to most people, yes, he has helped a lot. But if this guy really is the smartest person on the earth, he is wasting his potential. Bad things are happening -bad things will happen- that wouldn't have happened if he worked in biotech or physics or cognitive neuroscience. Here's a silly but analogous situation: If Superman was a social worker, wouldn't you be frustrated that he wasn't doing superhero stuff? Sure, social worker Superman has helped more than most individuals, but he could do so much more. The fact is that we all aren't born equal, but we all hurt; we get sick; we die. It's completely unfair. We need to fix it. The more great minds we have devoted to these problems, the sooner they'll be in the history books instead of the nightly news.
ubercore 17y ago
I don't think it's sad at all; I find it kind of comforting. This dude's living the life he wants to lead. Good on him for making a decision that was at odds with the expectations everyone seemed to be layering on him.
starkfist 17y ago
Maybe his gigantic IQ helped him to see the limits of his potential contribution to Physics. Related, innovative Civil Engineering is extremely important in densely urban societies like Korea.
scotty79 17y ago
Even highest IQ single man can have is small when compared with capacity of few people combined into a good problem solving process. Two people with IQ 120 can be smarter than one with 210. Not to mention if they all use computers.
- Hexstream 17y ago
  Sorry but I doubt that, given that I'd much rather have a 2.1x programmer than 2 1.2x programmers. But of course that's not necessarily correlated with IQ.
  - scotty79 17y ago
    Your "programmer value quotient" is definitely not IQ. Knowledge and experience acts as IQ multiplier when tackling known class of problems. I think there is a number of 1.2x programmers that you would prefer to hire instead of single 2.1x programmer. For all activities there's a number like that and it's pretty low.
    - waterlesscloud 17y ago
      Depends on the task. There are some tasks any number of lesser programmers won't be able to complete. There are conceptual levels to programming that come into play on certain tasks. Huge numbers of programmers that don't understand those concepts won't be able to solve the problems.
    - scotty79 17y ago
      Science does not rely on geniuses and programming also shouldn't. There is simply too much to do to wait for genius to do it. If your problem is too hard you should rephrase it, break it into easier parts, limit domain to what is necessary and give up some constraints. That's what people do in science and that's what worked for humanity so far.
      - orp 17y ago
        I'm not sure that works when it comes to major breakthroughs. I'm hardly an expert, but I'm not sure Einstien's work, for instance, could be replicated by a 100 physicists 'breaking it into easier parts. Not mention you're contradicting Heinlein, and we all know that's never good.
blhack 17y ago
Maybe he "doesn't want to spend the rest of his life explainin' shit to people".
arethuza 17y ago
Maybe he is smart enough to have decided that a star drive or unifield field theory are not possible and decided to do something else that interests him more.
techiferous 17y ago
"help advance the species by building an engine to travel to the stars or solving the unified field theory" But why? Technology is a means, not an end, so unless we've got our ends right, there's no point pouring all our effort into the means.
vinutheraj 17y ago
"You are not responsible for other people's expectations about you" - Richard Feynman
DaniFong 17y ago
Speaking as an ex-academic physicist, this is pure snobbery! What's wrong with civil engineering?

david927 17y ago

Malcolm Gladwell states in Outliers that there's really no correlation between high IQ and performance. After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes. I think that in the future we'll come to realize that IQ is actually a silly metric and that this "understanding" is where it's at. Point of view (understanding) doesn't give you more intelligence (Alan Kay's proverbial 80 IQ points), but instead intelligence can help you to gain understanding.

mynameishere 17y ago
I think it's cute that you believe something that Gladwell put forth to the world. http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-occupations http://studentcareers.learnhub.com/lesson/6941-iq-ranges-of-...
- gjm11 17y ago
  Your link doesn't offer any sort of evidence against Gladwell's contention (which isn't original to Gladwell, and which on the basis of negligible evidence I suspect is an oversimplification but not far from the truth). In fact, arguably it offers a little evidence against what Gladwell says. If IQ above ~120 makes no difference to performance, and if "career" and "performance" are close enough to make it worth while citing this thing at all, then you ought to see no little difference between {occupations substantially found among people with IQ ~120} and {occuptations substantially found among people with IQ ~130}. Now, look down the 120 and 130 lines of that plot, and notice that you see quite different things in the two instances. (The foregoing is a bit of a simplification, but it'll do. Anyway, I see no way to read the graph as providing evidence that IQ 120 is better than IQ 110, but IQ 130 isn't better than IQ 120, in terms of likely success/performance.)
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    The estimate that the IQ threshold for adult eminence is about IQ 120 appears to come from Arthur Jensen. It has been repeated by Hans Eysenck and is most frequently written about by Dean Keith Simonton, who cites a specialized study on exactly that issue in one of his latest books. Locally, I'm in an ongoing discussion, partly in person and partly by email, with Thomas Bouchard on this point. I think the additional help of an IQ score above 120 is negligible compared to other factors that are known to be important for adult eminence.

mikecane 17y ago

And what about Christopher Langan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan

tokenadult 17y ago
Neither has a validated IQ score. NO ONE with an IQ score reported to be above 160 has a validated IQ score. IQ test scores in that range have never been properly validated, on any IQ test of any era. It is well known that reliability of IQ tests is at its worst at the highest level of IQ scores. The author of the Stanford-Binet form L-M (the test that Marilyn vos Savant, among others, took to get a sky-high unvalidated score) was among the first to say so: "The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 http://learninfreedom.org/Terman%201937%20Figure%203.gif http://learninfreedom.org/Terman%201937%20Figure%203.gif is typical of the arrays at every age level. "From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds." (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44) To validate an IQ test (a test that purports to estimate "general intelligence"), one must first reach a consensus among test designers about some sign of intelligence that is detectable outside the testing room. Over the years, psychologists have proposed various behavioral characteristics of human beings as signs that those human beings are "intelligent," with entering challenging, high-income occupations that require a lot of higher schooling being one criterion proposed for adult IQ tests, and being precocious in school and having good grades and good teacher ratings being one criterion that is proposed for child IQ tests. One finds a sample of persons to take a new brand of test in its norming administration, and rates those persons by external criteria of "intelligence," weighting those criteria by consensus, and then checks the rank-order correlation between the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the IQ test and the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the validation criteria. There will NEVER be a perfect ("1.0") correlation between the test and the validation criterion, just as there is never a perfect correlation between IQ scores on one occasion and IQ scores on another occasion on the same brand of IQ test by the same group of test-takers. There is enough play in the joints in both IQ test scoring (whatever the brand of test) and ranking people by other validation criteria (whatever they are), that strictly speaking one can't say that there is any all-time, universally significant ranking of human beings by intelligence. But a close-enough-for-government-work validation study would show an IQ test having correlations above .80, and perhaps even above .90, in comparison with previous brands of IQ tests, or in comparison with subsets of its own item content, or in comparison with some well regarded external validation criterion. For reasons mentioned above, there is especially little reliability, and hence especially little validity, for IQ scores far above the population mean, and thus it's very hard to devise a validation criterion that would sort, say, members of Mensa http://www.mensa.org/ http://www.mensa.org/ or members of the Study of Exceptional Talent http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html or members of the Davidson Young Scholars program http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ into their "true" rank order by IQ, not to mention that IQ scores for the same individual can and do change over the course of life. Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ elementary-age pupils showed that many of those young people did not qualify as "gifted" on a subsequent test that Terman gave them at high school age. But he kept them in the study group anyway. Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown. An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children included in the study ever won a Nobel prize. The book by Shurkin I have just cited here is a good corrective on many misconceptions about IQ, and has an excellent section on attempts by one of Terman's study associates to estimate--by extremely dubious methods that have never been validated--the IQ scores of historical persons. P.S. As Stephen Hawking says about IQ: "Q: What is your I.Q.? "A: I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html

TheSOB88 17y ago

That English quote at the end seems pretty non-fluent to me (the "but" seems unnatural). I wonder how much of his other achievements are exaggeration.

WingForward 17y ago
The quote was originally in Korean. It could be a translation problem, or a cultural issue (conflict avoidance?).
electromagnetic 17y ago
You're applying your own regional knowledge of English to someone else's. I'm English and I've worked as a writer and I've done copy-editing, and that 'but' has every right to be there, even if it hurts the flow of the sentence. For anyone growing up in an English speaking country we all know that a pause readily means 'but', especially if it was a longer pause. As it's a translation of something he said, the issue here is the integrity of the translator not of the man himself. A good translator would have dropped the but, because he likely never used it when he spoke in Korean. I've spent a lot of time in France, and even though I'm nowhere near fluent I still manage to speak the slang. By spending time in the country and amongst the people I learnt all the social norms for speaking that I never learnt in a high school class. There's a vast difference in usage between Bonsoir and Bonne nuit, the latter is literally used exclusively in the meaning "goodnight, I won't see you again today". Similarly I've seen many a confused tourist when they were greeted with Salut "bye" as a greeting. Again from several vacations in Spain and the Spanish islands, I rarely ever heard Gracias "Thank you", they all use Graci "thanks", again despite everything I was taught of Spanish it wasn't right to how people actually speak. There's a big difference between being fluent in a language, and being fluent in a dialect. Dialects typically teach us how to use English improperly, mainly because 90% of our interactions are informal. However almost every English speaking person would remove their dialect in the instance if they were brought in front of a world leader. I know for people receiving Knighthoods from the queen they have to instruct people on how to pronounce "ma'am" (pronounced mam) as they try to pronounce it 'properly' and in doing so pronounce it wrong, which apparently bugs the Queen herself as she's been noted for correcting people on it too.

holdenc 17y ago

Personal theory: stardom comes during childhood or adulthood, but rarely both.

Hexstream 17y ago
First time ever I'm relieved to have been a loser in childhood. Incidentally, I'm starting to kick some serious butt. Get ready, World, here I come!

maxklein 17y ago

The most intelligent people are rarely thick skinned. And to be and stay famous, you have to be pretty thick skinned.

waterlesscloud 17y ago
Hollywood disagrees.

sethg 17y ago

Assuming that the IQ test that Kim took was the kind that uses 16 points per standard deviation (some, IIRC, use 15), that puts him almost seven standard deviations above the mean. It seems to me that once you get above five standard deviations (i.e., the top 99.9999% of the population), tests of “general intelligence” aren’t really measuring anything more than the ability to max out whatever subtests that particular test author chose to include.

aubergene 17y ago
just thinking the same thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Post_War_to_1929 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Post_War_...

scotty79 17y ago

If you want to make yourself feel better go and pass Mensa entry test. As a programmer you are already highly advantaged by knowing such concepts as xor an other bitwise operations and knowing how to animate a moving point (erase it and draw it again some distance away in each frame). There are puzzles based on these concepts. I took that test once and had all answers correct, which means I have IQ at least 156 (Binet scale) but might be much higher since I still had almost 30 minutes left.

cabalamat 17y ago
I think the Mensa tests are made artificially easy, since they want people to pay trhem money. It's quite easy for people to improve their IQ scores by practisingf the questions. I once took an IQ test from a book (I think it was by Eysenck) and then did another test from the same book a few days later. On the second test I scored 27 points higher, so by definition my IQ was 27 points higher; I doubt if I was any cleverer in any meaningful way. I suspect that part of the Flynn effect (that IQ scores have been increasing over time) is due to people being more familiar with those sorts of puzzles. Having said all that, I suspect that being able to learn from experience (and therefore get higher scores on similar tests) is a pretty large factor in intelligence.

huherto 17y ago

"I was not a loser, but I just wanted to live ordinarily" Perhaps this is the best proof of his extraordinary intelligence.

jraynor 17y ago
I would be very interested in reading comments elaborating on this stance by people that agree with it, since my view is a bit different. In the interest of human progress, I would prefer that people with great ability are encouraged by society and their peers (which I assume the great minds at HN are likely to be among). I mean this in terms of what I see should be encouraged and done so through morals and not laws (e.g. in no way promote the violation of a person's freedom or liberty).
- python123 17y ago
  Quit trying to suck up to the people on here. They are not talented people. This would be obvious to you if you had any talent at all. These people are mostly 30-some career software engineers who fantasize about becoming entrepreneurs and like thinking of themselves as hackers even though they lack the skills to justify that term. There's some good domain technical knowledge here, but very little actual intelligence. Just read any math links (everybody upvotes to look good, but nobody comments because they don't really understand - or they write really dumb comments). If you can read Outliers and not understand the horrible science and generalizations behind it then you are an idiot. 120 IQ?? Are you kidding me? Maybe it makes you feel better because you only have a 120 IQ, but that precludes you from achieving anything meaningful in math and science. High IQ does not mean you will be a high achiever, but only those with exception IQ's are able to achieve in certain fields. This is the problem with America. This is why America will lose to China in the next decades. We are trained to feel better about ourselves be devaluing those with superior intellect and ability.
  - bitwize 17y ago
    Would that you could tell that to Feynman (I.Q. 127). His amused smile at your remarks would probably be one for the ages.

wallflower 17y ago

Terman's Kids (the most famous longitudinal study of IQ and life achievement). http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/articles/terman.html http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/julaug/arti...

pw0ncakes 17y ago

I wonder if he's going to tell us to put toilet water on the crops, instead of Brawndo.

gwern 17y ago
Why would he do that? Brawndo has what plants crave.

Vicarious 17y ago

Is it possible that the higher the IQ is at birth the faster the brain degenerates? Not just from a built-in process but also from stress due to lack of social acceptance. This algernon process could imply that by 25, a physics PhD at 16 can only manage civil engineering.

koenigdavidmj 17y ago
I'm not sure that I would be so willing to call a guy who's published 90-ish papers in CE a dummy.

aswanson 17y ago

Similar to the story of William Sidis.

JeffJenkins 17y ago

Is there any evidence to verify the claims in that article aside from his IQ? This is all very suspicious looking, and I couldn't find anything about the timing of the Phd he got or that he worked for NASA.

sausagefeet 17y ago
I agree, I remain skeptical of all those [citation needed]'s. William James Sidis > * still.

mburney 17y ago

He was writing poems and showing an aptitude for languages at a very early age -- I wonder why as a child he was pushed into only doing physics rather than a wide variety of studies? We seem to believe that since physics is the most difficult subject to master, that means the most intelligent people have to do physics. That is pretty poor reasoning; I would think people with higher IQs may be better off as polymaths with a wide exposure to arts AND the sciences (and engineering). Goethe, for example, had a very high IQ and even though he wrote about science, his greatest contribution to humanity was his literature.

mquander 17y ago
What do you mean, he was "pushed into only doing physics?" Are you reading another source? In the Wikipedia article, it doesn't imply that he was pushed, and it doesn't imply that he gave up other pursuits.

elblanco 17y ago

IQ is a measure of capacity, not a measure of the current amount. IQ is a bucket. Even if you have a 5 gallon bucket, you can still only put 1 gallon of stuff in it.