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

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Aug 24 2001 - 19:58:14 MDT


John Clark writes

> 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.

I'm sure that this was an improperly administered, or a very badly
designed test. I've studied excerpts from Feynman's high school
math notebooks. I was astonished at how much they resembled *my*
own high school informal math notebooks. Even the writing looked
the same. There was almost exactly the same level of (if I may say
so) clever mathematical thinking in one so young. You could really
see the intelligence shining through.

One difference, however, was that these extremely similar displays
were done by Feynman at fifteen and me at sixteen and a half. If
you do the division implied by "intelligence quotient" you come
up with an I.Q. difference between Feynman and me that was proably
real. You simply can't tell me that he wouldn't have knocked the
top off of any reasonable I.Q. test.

Lee



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