Re: Is IQ usefully predictive? (not in one case)

From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Fri Aug 24 2001 - 15:37:33 MDT


John Clark wrote:
>
> The physicist Richard Feynman was one of the greatest geniuses of the 20'th
> century and when he was in high school he had an IQ test. He got a mediocre 125.
> The best definition of intelligence that I can think of is " the sort of thing
> that Richard Feynman did" therefore the disgrace can not be Feynman's,
> it's the advocates of the test who should feel embarrassed.
>
> Years later after he became famous and won the Nobel prize the people at
> Mensa wrote to him and begged him to join, he took great delight in telling
> them that he could not, he just wasn't smart enough.

Well, I have a little bit to add on that: I have an IQ of 160, as many
IQ tests will attest, yet the school counselors told my parents that my
IQ was only 125. I've heard similar stories from many other people who
are geniuses, and it's my opinion that the old "IQ of 125" is one of
those little scams that the teaching establishment does to eliminate
special treatment of genius kids.

Those same counselors claimed I had the same IQ as my older brother, but
he was a dope to the point that we were taking the same math classes in
high school even though I was two years younger, and I was tutoring him
on the homework. I got A's on tests, he got C minuses on tests.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:13 MDT