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.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 01:06:48AM * 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 15 August 2012 01:50:53AM 6 points [-]

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 ...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...

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.

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.)

Comment author: Epiphany comment score below threshold [+] (20 children)

Comment author: gwern 15 August 2012 05:11:30PM 9 points [-]

Living people with 220+ IQs do exist - you say the words "modern IQ tests" as if the ratio tests were invented in the dark ages. This only changed in recent decades.

Very well then, let us discuss the cases of people recorded to be hundreds of years old by less than modern documentation, like Methuselah as verified by the Book of Genesis. Wait, you don't think people actually live to thousands of years? But you just said we can use datapoints from any kind of test we please!

Whatever cutoff you choose to exclude things like Genesis or scientific results from hundreds of years ago while still including largely obsolete ratio tests, I will shift it slightly to include only better IQ tests. I think this is perfectly legitimate, as one should strive to use the best available data, and regard your 'but old obsolete scores!' as quibbling.

Which is perfectly consistent with them having IQs over 220, if you think about it...

And it's also consistent with IQs over 9000!!! <monocle shatters>

Occam's razor. Use it, love it. The base rate of IQs like 140 are by definition higher than >220.

There are differences that they have that I have not encountered in anyone else. Things stood out.

"But I was so impressed, don't you understand?" You'll pardon me if I ignore some rubbish anecdotes about them seeming like shining special snowflakes.

Why are you bringing up psychopathy? That's totally out of left field. Do you mean to imply that people claiming that IQ are probably psychopaths?

My argument was perfectly clear: brilliant conversation is far from a flawless indicator of intelligence. That you don't understand why I would bring up an example of how this indicator can fail catastrophically or interpret it as implying that...

More fun base-rate reasoning: psychopaths make up 1-2% of the population, and most are great manipulators; the top 1% of the population IQ-wise is sometimes taken as being the genius fragment; even if we assume the 1% IQ are all gifted conversationalists, if all we know about someone is their gifted conversation, we wind up inferring that they are equally or more likely to be a psychopath than a genius!

Comment author: shminux 15 August 2012 05:22:00PM 3 points [-]

they are equally or more likely to be a psychopath than a genius!

...And able to convince you that they have IQ > 220, regardless of whether it means anything,

Comment author: siodine 15 August 2012 05:29:12PM -1 points [-]

I wish I could do that, imagine how much "funding" I could get for my perpetual motion machine.

Comment author: shminux 15 August 2012 05:56:45PM 4 points [-]

Some, but apparently not that much.

Comment author: siodine 15 August 2012 05:59:13PM 1 point [-]

Damn, back to selling bridges.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 August 2012 08:26:34PM 0 points [-]

More fun base-rate reasoning: psychopaths make up 1-2% of the population, and most are great manipulators; the top 1% of the population IQ-wise is sometimes taken as being the genius fragment; even if we assume the 1% IQ are all gifted conversationalists, if all we know about someone is their gifted conversation, we wind up inferring that they are equally or more likely to be a psychopath than a genius!

I'm actually somewhat curious about the degree overlap between those two groups.

Comment author: gwern 15 August 2012 08:44:42PM * 4 points [-]

Well, assuming complete independence would just be 1% * 1%; but there does seem to be a slight negative correlation between psychopathy & IQ. Complicating matters is Hare and Babiak's research into business psychopaths, where they estimate they are over-represented by a factor of 2-3 or so, suggesting that the negative correlation may be skewed by the 'failures' in prison samples (which are the samples for most studies, for obvious reasons); smarter psychopaths are far less likely to resort to violence**, further hindering identification (since impulsive violence is one of the major diagnostic hallmarks). To the extent that the gifted 1% avoid business, that may restore a negative correlation / underepresentation. Finally, psychopath's impulsivity and few long-range goals or efforts (another part of the diagnosis along with glibness/manipulation) suggests that to the extent genuine objective achievements cause you to be considered a gifted 1%, we can expect still more underrepresentation*.

So guesstimating further, I'd say in a population of 300m people (eg. the US), we could expect substantially fewer than 30,000 gifted psychopaths (0.01 * 0.01 * 300,000,000). Phew!

On the other hand, they would be the ones who would do the most damage and be least likely to ever be diagnosed, so we may never know for sure...

* Which makes me wonder about high IQ societies, now that I think about it. My vague impression was that they tend to collect those with poor social skills, and also with fewer objective accomplishments & success. So if you meet someone in a high IQ societies who seems very charming and empathetic but lacks objective accomplishments, just how much does this increase the psychopath possibility over the 1% base rate..?
** Covered multiple times in the Handbook; first relevant paper seems to be "Psychopathy and Aggression", Porter & Woodworth.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 August 2012 10:38:03PM 0 points [-]

brilliant conversation is far from a flawless indicator of intelligence

Maybe, but if someone talks to me about quantum field theory and actually makes sense, my posterior probability that their IQ is < 80 suddenly goes down to epsilon.

Comment author: gwern 15 August 2012 11:05:48PM 2 points [-]

But how do you know that? Plenty of nutters sound convincing on quantum matters (as judging by the sales into millions of such folk as Deepak Chopra and abominations like The Dancing Wu-li Masters), so I assume you have some expertise in the matter - and now you're just judging based on that. (And what if they sound convincing on a topic you have no expertise in...)

Comment author: [deleted] 16 August 2012 09:05:27AM * 1 point [-]

I think one of the main reason they “sound“ convincing (though the readers' ignorance is also a necessary condition) is motivated cognition: the kind of people who read such books would like to believe what they say. Lose that, and your strength as a rationalist kicks in. (And anyway, I don't think Chopra et al. are idiots; they are either misguided or bullshitting the readers for fun and profit.)

And what if they sound convincing on a topic you have no expertise in

I'd have to test that. Anyone willing to give me a few paragraphs of either something “serious” or crackpottery (or a spoof à la Sokal), without telling me which it is, about a topic other than physics?

Comment author: [deleted] 16 August 2012 09:09:56AM 1 point [-]

And it's also consistent with IQs over 9000!!! <monocle shatters>

Upvoted (also) for this.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 01:06:03AM * 0 points [-]

Looking closer, I think there are several points of confusion. Neither of us carefully distinguished between meanings like "An IQ score / estimation that really was that high but not accurate." versus "An IQ score / estimation that high that is NOT accurate." and I guess that neither of us noticed the possibility for multiple meanings. We also did not address the possibility that this person's (inaccurate) IQ could be that high while incidentally, the person does have an intelligence level to truly match an IQ of 220. That sort of person would be more likely to get an IQ of 220 on a test/estimate, no? There may be people with that (true) IQ who also have a nearby (inaccurate) IQ result to match it. After all, that is what the developmental psychologists are aiming for - that they're right sometimes but not all the time is possible.

I thought this was great, BTW:

And it's also consistent with IQs over 9000!!! <monocle shatters>

Comment author: shminux 06 September 2012 01:22:01AM 0 points [-]

Note that it is physically impossible to measure IQ > 200:

There are not enough people in the world to 'beat'.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 02:37:46AM * 0 points [-]

It's not clear whether you're saying:

You can't create an accurate IQ test for that.
You can't generate an estimate IQ that high.
None of the IQ tests developed provide any method to generate an IQ that high.
You can't have an IQ that high.

Comment author: shminux 06 September 2012 03:46:22AM * 0 points [-]

Given that IQ is a measurement of intelligence, and there is no way to measure a number that is that high, all 4 apply. If you are still confused about the meaning of the verb "measure", here it is:

to ascertain the extent, dimensions, quantity, capacity, etc., of, especially by comparison with a standard

continue this thread »

Comment author: [deleted] 15 August 2012 10:31:24PM * 3 points [-]

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.)

I didn't count the nines, I just copied and pasted the output of pr norm(8) in gnuplot and moved the decimal point.

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