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billswift comments on The Singularity Institute's Arrogance Problem - Less Wrong Discussion

63 Post author: lukeprog 18 January 2012 10:30PM

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Comment author: billswift 19 January 2012 02:47:29PM 1 point [-]

I don't know a source for the number, but in one of his popular books he mentioned that Mensa contacted him and he responded that his IQ wasn't high enough, which means it was less than 130.

Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 19 January 2012 03:52:10PM 2 points [-]

Knowing Feynman, This might well have been a joke at their expense.

Comment author: arundelo 19 January 2012 04:42:18PM 10 points [-]

According to Feynman, he tested at 125 when he was a schoolboy. (Search for "IQ" in the Gleick biography.)

Gwern says:

There are a couple reasons to not care about this factoid:

  • Feynman was younger than 15 when he took it [....]
  • [I]t was one of the 'ratio' based IQ tests - utterly outdated and incorrect by modern standards.
  • Finally, it's well known that IQ tests are very unreliable in childhood; kids can easily bounce around compared to their stable adult scores.

Steve Hsu says:

I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. [...] It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided -- his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept as an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics -- including general relativity and the Dirac equation -- they also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things.

Comment author: wedrifid 19 January 2012 04:22:23PM 4 points [-]

Knowing Feynman, This might well have been a joke at their expense.

It is a joke at their expense. The question is whether he based it on a true premise.