private_messaging comments on Einstein's Superpowers - Less Wrong
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We could quibble a bit about exact rarities -- Einstein was clearly exceptionally bright, but whether he represents 1 in 10^4 or 1 in 10^6 g depends on all sorts of trivia that I don't have good estimates for. (I think I'd start by trying to figure out the number of scientists active in math, physics, and chemistry in [say] 1935 and estimating the intelligence of the average 1935-era hard scientist relative to the population average, then assuming that Einstein was at the top of that community. That's just a ballpark estimate, though.)
That's all pretty orthogonal to what I read the grandparent as suggesting, though. By my reading of b_f2's post, someone claiming Einstein-level intelligence is probably saying that their estimate of their own intelligence exceeds all their convenient reference points below "famously smart scientist", suggesting a very smart person, but probably not 1 in 10^5 smart.
Which is actually a lot more charitable than my probable interpretation of such a claim: without impressive supporting evidence, I'd be more likely to assume that anyone claiming to have Einstein's brain is full of shit and probably a crackpot.
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.