Anyone here with an extremely high IQ?

Cygnus1027

I know, but I haven't actually taken an IQ test. It is true that some people are great test-takers but may or may not have a high IQ.

lisab

No no no, you're skipping the "Who's the best-looking" physicist thread.

Dembadon

RabbitWho

I have a really low IQ but I find it really easy to learn and understand things so I don't mind.


IQ tests remind me of Richard Feynman talking about this strange habit people have of making clubs to congratulate themselves on how smart they are instead of working on using their brains.

Evo

Were you professionally tested or did you take an online test?

RabbitWho

Both, as a kid and teenager I always did really badly on them. I think because I'd only have maybe the first 10 questions answered when the time would be up.

Pythagorean

“Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.”
― Bruce Lee

Evo

That could just be a sign that you don't test well.

RabbitWho

I was reading about IQ tests today (not because I'm worried about it, because it's part of the syllabus)

In the early IQ tests women scored 10 points higher on average than men, so they took out the questions that all the women were excelling at to make the average IQ equal for both genders.

Modern IQ tests are still based on this model and that's why women and men have the same average IQ.


I think this is a sort of acknowledgement of the nature of these tests, that they have in built bias, they corrected for the gender bias problem, but they haven't done it for all the other differences that individuals have or that social groups have.

zoobyshoe

This is interesting, and I've never heard of it. Can you dig up a link?

RabbitWho

I found something about it on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_psychology#IQ

You can't tell anything about male and female intelligence from this, my point is that the tests are intentionally adapted to make absolutely sure they give the result that our culture expects. It's pretty awesome that even at the turn of the century they decided to keep it so that women would show up as being equal and not try to make it look like we were dumb! Ahead of their time!

zoobyshoe

What I'd like to know, among other things, is the nature of the questions women did so much better on.

Illuminerdi

I don't have the answer for you, however, it's well known that, while men have more of the mysterious "gray matter" in the brain (tissue consisting primarily of cell bodies-the "powerhouse" of the neuron), women have more "white matter" (tissue consisting primarily of axons and myelin sheaths, the "connecting" bits of neuron). This said, women tend to greater excel at tasks pertaining to long term memory or other things dependent on intricately relating knowledge, where men tend to excel at brute force mental activities.

RabbitWho

Ha ha good question. I assume they nature of them couldn't have been that different from the type of questions you see on IQ tests now, they would have been another type of question but in the same topics.

It is a really good question, you often see certain people feeling quite smug because men excel in one subject, but maybe often that subject has been crafted over hundreds of years by men to facilitate the way men think (as though they were removing or remodeling the questions that men do bad at), the more we know the strengths of both genders the more we can get both genders working to their full potential and not have subjects dominated by one gender or another and not have "glass ceilings" because both genders will be able to preform to their best abilities.

RabbitWho

What's a brute force metal activity? Wining a chess game by breaking the opponents arm?

Illuminerdi

Something like solving a math problem at a really fast speed using only known algorithms.

Dembadon

In mathematics, I'd define a brute force method of solving a problem as the "long/hard way". Brute force methods usually lack elegance or creativity, but are sometimes more effective than other methods; it really depends on the problem. This is not to say that there exist elegant or creative solutions to all problems, though.

Example: How many 3-digit combinations can one make using 1's and 0's?

Brute Force: (write out all of the combinations and then count them)

Analytically: 2³ = 8. One chooses between two^* distinguishable "balls" to put into three^** different "bins" for each combination.

^* the base -- representing the number of choices one has for each digit
^** the exponent -- representing the number of digits one must use to form a valid combination