Comment on Einstein's Superpowers

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:41:20 GMT

You get extreme rarities for specific tasks very easily by combination.

E.g. 1 out of 1000 by g, 1 out of 1000 on factors having to do with intellectual endurance and actually using g to work rather than to find ways to avoid work, 1 out of 1000 on some combination of lucky external factors having to do with becoming a physicist rather than something else, and you have 1 in a billion going.

Given all the other rarities necessary, extreme rarity in g got to be unlikely. Furthermore it is not clear how rarities correspond to actual performance. The world's best athletes don't do anything quantifiable a significant % better than merely good athletes.

And of course, at Einstein's level, Spearman's law of diminishing returns makes g relatively meaningless. Plus the regression towards the mean severely lowers any measurement by proxy, such as via IQ. The same regression towards the mean severely lowers the expected performance of an individual you'd pick to have same IQ as Einstein by administering IQ tests.

Discuss