6 ms·

230 IQ: Terrence Tao Is the Smartest Person in the World

12 points by jkuria 9y ago

bradknowles 9y ago
No. Negative. Nope. Absolutely no. I say unto thee, “nuh-uh”. 230 is not the highest IQ that I have heard of. IQ is not a good measure of “smartest”. It is racially biased, gender biased, and geographically biased.
- programmarchy 9y ago
  An IQ test may not measure "smartest" since there are many definitions of that word, but I don't see how the test itself is biased. It simply measures a number we call general intelligence which happens to strongly correlate with academic/career achievement, income, and a variety of social outcomes. IQ may have different distributions across genders and races, but on an individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs will have similar life outcomes, so where does the bias come in?
  - elkond 9y ago
    IQ (wechsler's) is a quotient created for measuring whether person is mentally retarded or not, in context of learned informations, such as utilizing physical tools, language and mathematical inference. As any kind of psychometric measurement, it has an inherent bias (or, in other words, results are probabilistic), therefore you can't say someone has 230 "points" of IQ, because results are an interval, not a point.
    - programmarchy 9y ago
      Sure, but I don't see what that has to do with race or gender.
      - elkond 9y ago
        the fact that it operates on learned information, not biological capabilities of the brain. stuff you learn is the stuff you have the ability or you're allowed to learn. society has inherent bias against nonwhites and women (in western world/usa), against women and whites (asia, africa), etc, etc.
        programmarchy 9y ago
        The tests that measure the "g factor" (general intelligence) specifically avoid learned knowledge, and instead measure things like spatial reasoning and memory. You don't even have to be literate to take some IQ tests.
        h0l0cube 9y ago
        g-factor finds positive correlation against a diverse set of tests. Such correlations can then be used to make predictions of performance on some tests on other unrelated tests, a 'generalized intelligence'. Such correlations can be used to designed a minimal test that map closely to g. But note: "Tests of vocabulary and general information are also typically found to have high g loadings." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) As far as I'm aware, spatial reasoning, attention, memory, and logical inference etc. don't give the complete picture. I'm happy to be corrected on this.
        programmarchy 9y ago
        I think we pretty much agree... I don't think there's really any one test that can give the complete picture. What I'm trying to get at is that it's possible to design tests that can indirectly measure general intelligence which don't require vocabulary and general information, or other aspects that may rely on social or economic privileges. And that these type of tests would allow us to draw comparisons on a broader scale. I'd imagine if an illiterate person performed well on spatial and memory tasks, then if they had learned to read they would've also scored high on a vocabulary test, too.
  - h0l0cube 9y ago
    > on an individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs will have similar life outcomes Do you have any evidence to back up that claim?
    - programmarchy 9y ago
      Yes, there was a long term study on a group of children until they were young adults... maybe someone knows the paper. I'll look and edit this comment with a link if I can find it.
    - programmarchy 9y ago
      Alright, I could not find the exact study I had in mind, but did come across a summary of the history of research in this area, which touches on what I was talking about: THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186.102&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186... See around pages 240-243, Section 3: Mean Race–IQ Differences: A Global Perspective > Many critics claim that Western-developed IQ tests are not valid for groups as culturally different as sub-Saharan Africans (e.g., Nell, 2000). The main evidence to support a claim of external bias would be if the test failed to predict performance for Africans. Even if tests only underpredicted performance for Africans compared with non-Africans, it would suggest that their test scores underestimated their “true” IQ scores. However, a review by Kendall, Verster, and von Mollendorf (1988) showed that test scores for Africans have about equal predictive validity as those for non-Africans (e.g., 0.20 to 0.50 for students’ school grades and for employees’ job performance). The review also showed that many of the factors that influence scores in Africans are the same as those for Whites (e.g., coming from an urban vs. a rural environment; being a science rather than an arts student; having had practice on the tests; and the well-documented curvilinear relationship with age). Similarly, Sternberg et al.’s (2001) study of Kenyan 12- to 15-year-olds found that IQ scores predicted school grades, with a mean r .40 (p .001; after controlling for age and socioeconomic status [SES], r .28, p .01). In Rushton et al.’s (2003) study of African and non-African engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand, scores on the Advanced Progressive Matrices correlated with scores on the Standard Progressive Matrices measured 3 months earlier (.60 for Africans; .70 for non-Africans) and with end-of-year exam marks measured 3 months later (.34 for Africans; .28 for non-Africans). Figure 1 shows the regression of exam marks on test scores for these university students.
- zaarn 9y ago
  >IQ is not a good measure of “smartest”. It is racially biased, gender biased, and geographically biased. I'll disagree on that, IQ isn't biased, it's a uniform test. Just because the outcome has a bias and you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad. Geographical bias can be simply explained by different countries having different education and standard of living. Especially the amount of food you get during your childhood can affect brain development and thusly affect the IQ. Next point, the racial bias can be similar explained through a hidden variable; poverty. Especially in the US, people with low income have worse education and nutrient supply during childhood and have a certain demographic makeup which is a completely different problem in of itself. Lastly, the gender bias has been many times proven to be simple biology. You don't have to like it and it doesn't say anything about individuals but the chromosomes and genes you have are heavy first influencers on IQ and brain development. That doesn't mean women can't be as smart as men or men can't be as smart as women, quite opposite. This is simply a matter of distribution, which forms two bell curves with a slight offset. I've forgotten in which way they are offset but there is a clear difference in distribution. Again, just because the result is biased doesn't make the test wrong, it just means that the differences might be generated elsewhere, which in this case, they are. Some are fixable (support developing countries, better education, higher standard of living) some aren't.
- threatofrain 9y ago
  If you build a system that can solve problems like Ravens Matrices, there will be a deep suspicion that you are at least on track to building a general causal learning machine. Because Ravens Matrices is nothing more than developing a theory for why a bunch of shapes are changing.
daveFNbuck 9y ago
This is just a brief Quora answer that makes the unevidenced assertion of Tao having a 230 IQ and then quotes from Wikipedia a bunch. I don't think IQ tests can even measure above 200.
- scarmig 9y ago
  An IQ of 230 would be 8.66 standard deviations above the mean. Off the top of my head, that should be rarer than one in a trillion. I'm not a hard IQ skeptic, but there's nothing predictive or meaningful about any IQ over 150 or so, even in a strictly statistical sense. It's a tool built and validated against the bulk of the population, not extreme outliers.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Grue3 9y ago
    >that should be rarer than one in a trillion. You're assuming that the tail of the statistics behaves like in normal distribution. In practice this is incorrect (see "black swan theory"). Various sports that employ statistics (cricket, baseball, etc.) sometimes have a single player who strays from bell curve in a ridiculous way. For example Don Bradman's batting average in cricket [1]. [1] https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-cricketing-genius-make-him-a-statistical-outlier https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-c...
    - scarmig 9y ago
      IQ is a synthetic measure that follows a normal distribution by construction. To the extent that measurements of IQ in a population via test deviate from a normal distribution (with, say, fat tails), that's a reason to doubt the validity of that particular test in that domain.
sjhcanada 9y ago
Fire up Excel and enter these: A2 enter the IQ score you are interested in B2 =NORM.DIST(A2, 100,15,1) C2 =1/(1-B2) C2 will show the group size you are the top "1" of 195 IQ is the top IQ for a group of 8 billion people 197 (Walter O'Brien's supposed IQ on "Scorpion") = top IQ for 19 billion people 230 IQ is impossible.
sjhcanada 9y ago
Reference for this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/827371/description-of-the-normdist-function-in-excel https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/827371/description-...

12 points by jkuria 9y ago

No. Negative. Nope. Absolutely no. I say unto thee, “nuh-uh”. 230 is not the highest IQ that I have heard of. IQ is not a good measure of “smartest”. It is racially biased, gender biased, and geographically biased.

programmarchy 9y ago
An IQ test may not measure "smartest" since there are many definitions of that word, but I don't see how the test itself is biased. It simply measures a number we call general intelligence which happens to strongly correlate with academic/career achievement, income, and a variety of social outcomes. IQ may have different distributions across genders and races, but on an individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs will have similar life outcomes, so where does the bias come in?
- elkond 9y ago
  IQ (wechsler's) is a quotient created for measuring whether person is mentally retarded or not, in context of learned informations, such as utilizing physical tools, language and mathematical inference. As any kind of psychometric measurement, it has an inherent bias (or, in other words, results are probabilistic), therefore you can't say someone has 230 "points" of IQ, because results are an interval, not a point.
  - programmarchy 9y ago
    Sure, but I don't see what that has to do with race or gender.
    - elkond 9y ago
      the fact that it operates on learned information, not biological capabilities of the brain. stuff you learn is the stuff you have the ability or you're allowed to learn. society has inherent bias against nonwhites and women (in western world/usa), against women and whites (asia, africa), etc, etc.
      - programmarchy 9y ago
        The tests that measure the "g factor" (general intelligence) specifically avoid learned knowledge, and instead measure things like spatial reasoning and memory. You don't even have to be literate to take some IQ tests.
        h0l0cube 9y ago
        g-factor finds positive correlation against a diverse set of tests. Such correlations can then be used to make predictions of performance on some tests on other unrelated tests, a 'generalized intelligence'. Such correlations can be used to designed a minimal test that map closely to g. But note: "Tests of vocabulary and general information are also typically found to have high g loadings." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) As far as I'm aware, spatial reasoning, attention, memory, and logical inference etc. don't give the complete picture. I'm happy to be corrected on this.
        programmarchy 9y ago
        I think we pretty much agree... I don't think there's really any one test that can give the complete picture. What I'm trying to get at is that it's possible to design tests that can indirectly measure general intelligence which don't require vocabulary and general information, or other aspects that may rely on social or economic privileges. And that these type of tests would allow us to draw comparisons on a broader scale. I'd imagine if an illiterate person performed well on spatial and memory tasks, then if they had learned to read they would've also scored high on a vocabulary test, too.
- h0l0cube 9y ago
  > on an individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs will have similar life outcomes Do you have any evidence to back up that claim?
  - programmarchy 9y ago
    Yes, there was a long term study on a group of children until they were young adults... maybe someone knows the paper. I'll look and edit this comment with a link if I can find it.
  - programmarchy 9y ago
    Alright, I could not find the exact study I had in mind, but did come across a summary of the history of research in this area, which touches on what I was talking about: THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186.102&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186... See around pages 240-243, Section 3: Mean Race–IQ Differences: A Global Perspective > Many critics claim that Western-developed IQ tests are not valid for groups as culturally different as sub-Saharan Africans (e.g., Nell, 2000). The main evidence to support a claim of external bias would be if the test failed to predict performance for Africans. Even if tests only underpredicted performance for Africans compared with non-Africans, it would suggest that their test scores underestimated their “true” IQ scores. However, a review by Kendall, Verster, and von Mollendorf (1988) showed that test scores for Africans have about equal predictive validity as those for non-Africans (e.g., 0.20 to 0.50 for students’ school grades and for employees’ job performance). The review also showed that many of the factors that influence scores in Africans are the same as those for Whites (e.g., coming from an urban vs. a rural environment; being a science rather than an arts student; having had practice on the tests; and the well-documented curvilinear relationship with age). Similarly, Sternberg et al.’s (2001) study of Kenyan 12- to 15-year-olds found that IQ scores predicted school grades, with a mean r .40 (p .001; after controlling for age and socioeconomic status [SES], r .28, p .01). In Rushton et al.’s (2003) study of African and non-African engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand, scores on the Advanced Progressive Matrices correlated with scores on the Standard Progressive Matrices measured 3 months earlier (.60 for Africans; .70 for non-Africans) and with end-of-year exam marks measured 3 months later (.34 for Africans; .28 for non-Africans). Figure 1 shows the regression of exam marks on test scores for these university students.
zaarn 9y ago
>IQ is not a good measure of “smartest”. It is racially biased, gender biased, and geographically biased. I'll disagree on that, IQ isn't biased, it's a uniform test. Just because the outcome has a bias and you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad. Geographical bias can be simply explained by different countries having different education and standard of living. Especially the amount of food you get during your childhood can affect brain development and thusly affect the IQ. Next point, the racial bias can be similar explained through a hidden variable; poverty. Especially in the US, people with low income have worse education and nutrient supply during childhood and have a certain demographic makeup which is a completely different problem in of itself. Lastly, the gender bias has been many times proven to be simple biology. You don't have to like it and it doesn't say anything about individuals but the chromosomes and genes you have are heavy first influencers on IQ and brain development. That doesn't mean women can't be as smart as men or men can't be as smart as women, quite opposite. This is simply a matter of distribution, which forms two bell curves with a slight offset. I've forgotten in which way they are offset but there is a clear difference in distribution. Again, just because the result is biased doesn't make the test wrong, it just means that the differences might be generated elsewhere, which in this case, they are. Some are fixable (support developing countries, better education, higher standard of living) some aren't.
threatofrain 9y ago
If you build a system that can solve problems like Ravens Matrices, there will be a deep suspicion that you are at least on track to building a general causal learning machine. Because Ravens Matrices is nothing more than developing a theory for why a bunch of shapes are changing.

daveFNbuck 9y ago

This is just a brief Quora answer that makes the unevidenced assertion of Tao having a 230 IQ and then quotes from Wikipedia a bunch. I don't think IQ tests can even measure above 200.

scarmig 9y ago
An IQ of 230 would be 8.66 standard deviations above the mean. Off the top of my head, that should be rarer than one in a trillion. I'm not a hard IQ skeptic, but there's nothing predictive or meaningful about any IQ over 150 or so, even in a strictly statistical sense. It's a tool built and validated against the bulk of the population, not extreme outliers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Grue3 9y ago
  >that should be rarer than one in a trillion. You're assuming that the tail of the statistics behaves like in normal distribution. In practice this is incorrect (see "black swan theory"). Various sports that employ statistics (cricket, baseball, etc.) sometimes have a single player who strays from bell curve in a ridiculous way. For example Don Bradman's batting average in cricket [1]. [1] https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-cricketing-genius-make-him-a-statistical-outlier https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-c...
  - scarmig 9y ago
    IQ is a synthetic measure that follows a normal distribution by construction. To the extent that measurements of IQ in a population via test deviate from a normal distribution (with, say, fat tails), that's a reason to doubt the validity of that particular test in that domain.

sjhcanada 9y ago

Fire up Excel and enter these: A2 enter the IQ score you are interested in B2 =NORM.DIST(A2, 100,15,1) C2 =1/(1-B2) C2 will show the group size you are the top "1" of 195 IQ is the top IQ for a group of 8 billion people 197 (Walter O'Brien's supposed IQ on "Scorpion") = top IQ for 19 billion people 230 IQ is impossible.

sjhcanada 9y ago

Reference for this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/827371/description-of-the-normdist-function-in-excel https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/827371/description-...