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Smartest Man In The World
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- chegra 16y agoYou mean the person who is most efficient at taking the iq test.
- DXL 16y ago* effective
- bradleyland 16y agoMy psych 101 teacher actually put this on the study guide for our final. Q: What is IQ? A: A score on a test. Grammar shortcomings aside, it was one of the most fun and interesting college courses I took.
- andr 16y agoThe person with the highest IQ in the world was a bouncer in a bar? A good reminder that pure intelligence does not equal ambition or life skill.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoMensa's demographic is smart underachievers
- WestCoastJustin 16y agohmmm, maybe he was on to something here.. bouncers do have access to hot drunk girls.. maybe he is smart after all ;)
- tybris 16y agoIf measured by IQ that's believed to be Kim Ung-yong at 210. Still. if he would not have had poor academia experiences (what did he do at liberal arts college anyway?), he might have been very useful to the world. Terrible waste.
- tfh 16y agoThe saddest thing in life is wasted talent.
- chegra 16y agoEven within science, IQ is only weakly related to achievement among people who are smart enough to become scientists. Research has shown, for example, that a scientist who has an IQ of 130 is just as likely to win a Nobel Prize as a scientist whose IQ is 180 (Hudson, 1966, p. 104, cited in Sulloway, p. 357). His chance of doing anything is the same as everybody else.
- tocomment 16y agoI wonder why that is?
- david927 16y agoBecause intelligence is a quality, not a quantity. That makes it like beauty and flavor, not height or weight. You can't put a point scale on it. Chocolate cannot be 7 better than vanilla. A beautiful person is not the one with the biggest lips and the largest cheekbones. We we can do is to put general parameters around it, such as "beautiful people tend to be taller." In the same way, scoring generally well (over 120 or 130) on an IQ test is like saying you're tall. It's actually meaningless as to how smart you are, but they share some of the same parameters, so they will correlate a bit more.
- chegra 16y agoMaybe it is like money and its relation to happiness. It can help up to a point to increase your happiness. But, once you can cover your monthly expenses, it doesn't help your happiness. After which, stuff like friendship come into play. So, after 130 maybe, stuff like your choice of academic supervisor or resources to do research come into play in determine whether you have a shot at the nobel prize.
- pmiller2 16y agoPart 3 is by far the best part of this whole video.
- Luc 16y agoIt certainly rises to unseen levels of nuttiness. Here's a quote about his theory of the 'true nature of reality': http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Supraphysical http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Supr... "Because physics is governed by the scientific method, it deals exclusively with phenomena. Thus, it effectively diverts attention away from the cognitive, categorical aspect of perceptual reality, without which neither phenomena nor scientific theories could exist. Because physics is irreducibly dualistic and takes the fundamental separation of mind and matter as axiomatic, it cannot provide us with a complete picture of reality. It can tell us only what lies outside the subjective observer, not within."
- cianestro 16y agoThanks for posting this link. This is Chris on his own terms.
- thinkdifferent 16y agoI think IQ does measure something, but not what we generally consider as intelligence
- darien 16y agoIQ calculates processing speed, which is why it is timed. Many people can are good at problem solving, but what takes a normal person a week instead might take an IQ genius 5 minutes. That is all.
- david927 16y agoAnd a normal person can then train themselves to do that week in 5 minutes. It's like muscle mass: you're born with a genetic inclination to be weaker or stronger than average but the rest is up to you.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago"we need an alternative to academia" is correct "stupid people are in charge" is technically correct but misleading. The idea that really smart people could lead better than the average man has been around at least since Plato. All it takes to cure somebody of this is a good look at places where really smart people were in charge. There is more to solving political problems than intelligence. The issue isn't that the average man is dumb, it's that people who are highly motivated and don't think through their positions are more effective in democracies than less motivated, more educated voters. This was interesting, and I hate to say anything bad about Chris. But I got a whiff that being smart and having a bad academic experience left some emotional marks on him. So the answers for him involve, not surprisingly, smart people outside of academia. It's a shame, because I think he's on to something with his description of academia getting in the way of true breakout thinking.
- tome 16y agoWhere were really smart people in charge?
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI believe the scope of than answer is greater than a HN thread, but I might just be wussing out. Hopefully others will engage you. If not, happy to take it offline. I will say this: be careful of selection bias! Looking back, sure, if I show you a thousand examples that ended poorly your response will be something like "But they weren't really smart. Look how poorly it all turned out!" This is, at best, circular reasoning. The important thing is that, at the time, these folks were the best and brightest and put in charge for that very reason. Good starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Situations/dp/0201479486 http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Sit...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tocomment 16y agoI'd like to know also. Can you start new topic on HN perhaps?
- davidw 16y agoI was expecting to see someone jump out of a plane with a boy scout's backpack.
- noonespecial 16y agoHe's kind of like what would have happened if Douglas Adams had taken himself way, way too seriously.
- ique 16y ago"Academia is a heartless cold bureaucracy" This man might be intelligent, but he is very known for making his mind up about something and then not changing it for anything. "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell has a whole chapter on this guy and people like him, according to Gladwell, Langan has barely had any contact with academia, so the above statement doesn't seem to have much backing. He got thrown out because he couldn't understand the "social norm" of speaking up for himself, something he hints at in the video.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoElephants and dolphins have bigger brains than humans.
- asdflkj 16y agoNot in proportion to body mass.
- anamax 16y agoBody mass is relevant, but it's a crude proxy for the amount of "brain" used to control the body and sense the environment. Excluding those things (and perhaps some more) leaves you with the cognitive brain mass, which seems to be a proxy for what we're interested in.