3 ms·

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
- mikecane 17y ago
  Like others, I think it's sad that both of these people are not contributing more and I find their trajectories to be a waste. Maybe that's my jealousy speaking. But I know if I was suddenly gifted with the ease of learning and grasping of concepts both of them have, I'd do a lot with that.

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

mikecane 17y ago
Like others, I think it's sad that both of these people are not contributing more and I find their trajectories to be a waste. Maybe that's my jealousy speaking. But I know if I was suddenly gifted with the ease of learning and grasping of concepts both of them have, I'd do a lot with that.