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OrphanWilde comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:
Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That's not telling Joe he's okay. That's telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let's explore what it means to be told you can't talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:
^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.
^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are "good" or "bad" is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.
^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they're an elitist when they're just talking about an intellectual difference that doesn't prove anything about your personality.
So, why doesn't Joe get to have the same freedom to express himself without society oppressing that? Why doesn't he get to talk about his difference without expecting prejudiced remarks that jump to conclusions about who he is?
We have a million excuses for this. "People feel threatened by intellect." Well, they used to feel threatened by black people, but that doesn't excuse society from working on removing their prejudices about black people and it doesn't excuse them from working on removing their prejudices about gifted people.
"That's just not polite." <- This is an interesting excuse. I'll explain why:
Imagine you go into a room and say "Hi, I'm white." (I realize that people of any race may read this comment, I am asking you to humor my hypothetical situation for a moment.)
Your race is evident. This is a neutral statement of fact.
If someone tells you "That's just not polite." why are they saying that? They're probably confusing it with an expression of the white pride attitude that is associated with the KKK. They're assuming that you're prejudiced.
What if you went up to a bunch of random white people and accused them of hating black people? Since this doesn't happen frequently, they'd probably be mostly bewildered. But imagine if random people did that to them every day.
Prejudice is a very serious offense to be accused of. It would stress them out. They'd wonder what kinds of social and career opportunities they might be missing out on. They might become more cautious to guard their physical safety - after all, prejudice is the kind of thing people get really heated about and some people get violent when they're upset. They'd start to hide hints that they're white on things like resumes. They would be oppressed by an assumption that they're prejudiced, just the same way that they'd be oppressed by an assumption that they're all criminals.
Accusing a person of prejudice simply for being part of a certain group is, in and of itself, prejudiced. That's prejudging them based on some trait that they can't control, not on their behavior. Yet, if you claim to have a high IQ, you are very likely to be accused of elitism. People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.
I'm glad you think it's okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, I think that's okay. But a looooooot of people don't!
Actually, let's try an experiment:
My IQ is estimated to be in the vicinity of 220.
What is your reaction?
I think you're lying.
Indeed. At the usual standard deviation norm of ~15, a 220 IQ would be 8 standard deviations out and make him ~1 in 8*10^14 (100 trillion).
Inasmuch as only 100 billion humans are estimated to have ever lived, the overwhelming majority of that having an average IQ far lower than 100 and so being essentially irrelevant, we can conclude that he is either lying or from the future.
220+ IQ scores DO happen - due to the fact that IQ tests cannot be made accurate for such an uncommon group of people, they're far more common than they're mathematically supposed to be. A collection of research on that can be found online right here:
http://hiqnews.megafoundation.org/Terman_Summary.htm
I've actually talked with people in that IQ vicinity, and based on the absolutely sublime intelligent conversation they're capable of providing, and considering the likelihood of specifically them being dishonest about that within the context of their other behaviors, I just don't think they're lying.
Superintelligent people do exist. And they have to actually BE somewhere, right? Where do they go?
Do you think that none of them would be attracted to a website like LessWrong? I think this site is likely to be a genius magnet.
If it turns out that this person's IQ really is over 220, I totally want to have intelligent conversation with them. If you give people the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, sometimes the result is more than worth the effort to withhold judgment for a while.
P.S. Yes, I realize the claim is that it was estimated at over 220, not that they received that score. The obvious argument here is "What professional would estimate it that high knowing how rare those scores are SUPPOSED to be?" but if you're not basing your estimation on observations about people who have received that score, all you are left with is attempting to deduce the characteristics of a person with such an IQ out of the numbers themselves, with no actual experience to base it on. Or, this person may be referring to the practice of adjusting a young child's IQ score upward in order to reflect the age at which they took the test. For instance, if you are 2 years old and get an IQ of 100 on an IQ test, that's really incredible. You definitely have to give that kid a higher score than 100. The only way I know of to get a score in the 200 ballpark is to have that sort of age adjustment done after taking the test with the highest limit before a certain age.
And that's a limitation of the tests being ratio tests or not being normed on the sufficiently large population they're supposed to be normed on. (Why are all the datapoints on that page so old?) That's why modern IQ tests come with listed ceilings! 'Past this point, who knows what it's measuring if anything'. With a short test, even random guessing will eventually throw up some remarkable scores...
Perfectly consistent with them having more earthly IQs >140. (If even that; I have been reading up on psychopathy lately, and one of the diagnosable traits is being gifted conversationalists and creators of emotional 'bonds', despite psychopathy being, if correlated with IQ at all, negatively correlated.)
IQ is defined to be a normal distribution with mu = 100 and sigma = 15, so “IQ 220” means ‘99.9999999999999th percentile¹’; if more than a person in 10^15 gets such a score, then the test is miscalibrated. (But most tests are, beyond a few standard deviations away from the mean.)
pr norm(8)in gnuplot and moved the decimal point.Awesome! Tell me super-intelligent thoughts? Have you met the others? (Nope, not gullibility. Explaining below in re to gwern.)
I'm not sure what a super intelligent thought would look like; there's a limit on how intelligent a thought could be, as a thought that gets too clever ceases to be clever at all. But if that's your internal reaction as well, I don't have any room to argue/criticize on this front, as you're being fully consistent.
(Strictly speaking, incidentally, any score above 180 is merely an estimate; IQ tests cease to perform reliably above that level.)
I loved your experiment. (: As for what a super-intelligent thought would look like, there are multiple ways of interpreting you:
You might be saying that a person with an IQ of 220 could be prone to over-thinking things. In that case, it would cease to qualify as cleverness due to a failure to maintain a good cost-benefit ratio between the amount of brainpower put in and the results coming out.
You may mean that if someone were to say something significantly more clever than what is commonly thought of as "clever" it may not be recognized as such, may not even be observable to most minds once pointed out, and therefore might never end up recognized as "clever" by anyone.
There's a much more interesting possibility - that a super-intelligent thought may transcend cleverness, take on emergent properties, or otherwise be so advanced that our current definitions of intelligence can't express it.
Estimated by whom?
You're taking my experiment literally.