Mensa IQ Test



  • http://www.mensa.org/workout/quiz/1

    Post score made by you! Don't feel shy.
    I only scored 12 in my first attempt!



  •  So your IQ is 12?

    I took the real MENSA test (actually two tests) about two years ago.  They don't tell you your score, only whether you qualified or not.  I've became a member about two months later once all the membership paperwork went back and forth.



  • @da Doctah said:

     So your IQ is 12?

    I took the real MENSA test (actually two tests) about two years ago.  They don't tell you your score, only whether you qualified or not.  I've became a member about two months later once all the membership paperwork went back and forth.

    I got 12 right


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @da Doctah said:

    I took the real MENSA test (actually two tests) about two years ago. 
    MENSA don't actually have their own tests. They use other people's (and will accept scores from tests administered elsewhere.)

    @da Doctah said:
    They don't tell you your score, only whether you qualified or not.
    For good reason. They're not interested in your intelligence, just on your ability to pass the tests:

    It is important to note that the tests are given for the purpose of admission into Mensa and not to quantify intelligence.


  • Depends on how you define good



  • @PJH said:

    @da Doctah said:
    I took the real MENSA test (actually two tests) about two years ago. 
    MENSA don't actually have their own tests.

    The ones they do provide are uncalibrated, meaning everybody testing reads about 20-30 points higher than they should.

    MENSA is a club for people who like to brag about being smart. Actually being smart isn't required. (On the contrary-- if I had a genuine IQ result of 120, I'd be fucking pissed at the MENSA asshole who walks around telling everybody he has a 130 IQ. Sure, on the uncalibrated test, my cat can score 130.)

    If they were so smart, they could tell me the point of selling socks in resealable Ziplock bags.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @PJH said:
    @da Doctah said:
    I took the real MENSA test (actually two tests) about two years ago. 
    MENSA don't actually have their own tests.
    The ones they do provide are uncalibrated, meaning everybody testing reads about 20-30 points higher than they should.

    MENSA is a club for people who like to brag about being smart. Actually being smart isn't required. (On the contrary-- if I had a genuine IQ result of 120, I'd be fucking pissed at the MENSA asshole who walks around telling everybody he has a 130 IQ. Sure, on the uncalibrated test, my cat can score 130.)

    If they were so smart, they could tell me the point of selling socks in resealable Ziplock bags.

    Hmmm, also IQ does not provide a good measurement of intelligence, hey my IQ even when tested in english and not actually paying much attention is above average and I'm not that smart.  Never been insterested in Mensa, also in my country really smart people are not liked at all, so we have to pretend (sad but true) /*sad childhood snip*/ Being intelligent will only make you miserable...

    But blakey no matter what, 120 seem low, who scores that?



  • @serguey123 said:

    But blakey no matter what, 120 seem low, who scores that?
     

    On a proper IQ test the average is 100, as that is how the scores are defined so 120 isn't low.



  • @serguey123 said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    @PJH said:
    @da Doctah said:
    I took the real MENSA test (actually two tests) about two years ago. 
    MENSA don't actually have their own tests.
    The ones they do provide are uncalibrated, meaning everybody testing reads about 20-30 points higher than they should.

    MENSA is a club for people who like to brag about being smart. Actually being smart isn't required. (On the contrary-- if I had a genuine IQ result of 120, I'd be fucking pissed at the MENSA asshole who walks around telling everybody he has a 130 IQ. Sure, on the uncalibrated test, my cat can score 130.)

    If they were so smart, they could tell me the point of selling socks in resealable Ziplock bags.

    Hmmm, also IQ does not provide a good measurement of intelligence, hey my IQ even when tested in english and not actually paying much attention is above average and I'm not that smart.  Never been insterested in Mensa, also in my country really smart people are not liked at all, so we have to pretend (sad but true) /*sad childhood snip*/ Being intelligent will only make you miserable...

    But blakey no matter what, 120 seem low, who scores that?

    Smart poeple not liked

    Are you in India?



  • @Nagesh said:

    Are you in India?

    No, I'm not but our countries share some common traits



  • @serguey123 said:

    @Nagesh said:

    Are you in India?

    No, I'm not but our countries share some common traits

    Where are you in that case?



  • @Nagesh said:

    Where are you in that case?

    Sorry but I won't talk about my country.



  • @serguey123 said:

    @Nagesh said:

    Where are you in that case?

    Sorry but I won't talk about my country.

    Send me privet mesage ;)



  • I only have two bits of knowledge about mensa.  A porn star is a mensa member, and people who are diagnosed with high IQ at a young age can develop pretty shitty traits, like perfectionism. Which sounds great, until you tell your boss you need 3x as much time as everyone else because it needs to be "perfect" instead of good enough and economically viable. Also they apparently tend to dislike not being able to grasp perfect at the first try because they are used to getting things on the first try in school. Which can result in people that may be smart, but don't actually have a lot of knowledge and know-how beyond their field of interest. e.g.  Want me to calculate the square root of 23423423 in my head. Fine. But don't make me do UML diagrams.

    These tidbits of info from a ex-colleague who is certifiably super smart as well as a member of mensa, but wasn't all that thrilled about it.

    Personally, i've taken tests where i scored 120 earlier in my life, but on the yearly national IQ test* I score about 105-110.  Mostly I lose a lot of points on the number sequences. Never had a head for numbers, and while I love patterns I just can't seem to find them quick enough in those rows of numbers.**

     

    * We have a national IQ test broadcasted each year by one of our public tv broadcast stations. Apprently called test the nation abroad 

    ** the number sequences like. 1, 5, 3, 7, 5, 9, ?   
    where you have to choose which number would be on the '?' 



  • @stratos said:

    I only have two bits of knowledge about mensa.  A porn star is a mensa member, and people who are diagnosed with high IQ at a young age can develop pretty shitty traits, like perfectionism. Which sounds great, until you tell your boss you need 3x as much time as everyone else because it needs to be "perfect" instead of good enough and economically viable. Also they apparently tend to dislike not being able to grasp perfect at the first try because they are used to getting things on the first try in school. Which can result in people that may be smart, but don't actually have a lot of knowledge and know-how beyond their field of interest. e.g.  Want me to calculate the square root of 23423423 in my head. Fine. But don't make me do UML diagrams.

     

    Diagnosed?  "I'm sorry... but you have.... high IQ!"

    And, anyway, smart people develop traits that look like these because everything really is easy for them, and, well, you try doing boring repetitive tasks and see how long it takes you to make them less boring by making some kind of game out of it, or being "perfectionist" about it.

    Legitimately very smart people don't really "develop shitty traits" either, they're just treated shitty by everyone, and then everyone's surprised when they don't turn out like everyone else. I've seen lots of ridiculously smart people ruined by people insisting they waste their time doing stupid shit to "prove" they know what they're doing, and burning them out because they can't deal with being treated like morons.  I mean, as a grad student I was forced to take classes that I had TAUGHT before (not quite the being forced to take a class you wrote the book on stereotype, but whatever) because, well, how else will they know that I know the subject?  I've also seen lots of very smart people have their social skills screwed up by people being dicks to them because they're intimidated by hanging around with smart people, or they don't know how to deal with smart people. I knew a high school kid who was taking graduate level physics classes and having an easy time, and was treated like crap by everyone in the department, and is now living in some third world country awkwardly chasing girls around with his terrible social skills, which were developed from years of everyone ignoring him. It was really sad, too, he was a nice kid.

    That being said, many of the MENSA people are douchebags and are not actually particularly intelligent. And most people who say they're really smart aren't, anyway. Those guys have to go and ruin it for everyone else.

     



  • @cfgauss said:

    Diagnosed?  "I'm sorry... but you have.... high IQ!"

    You can be diagnosed with good things.

    @cfgauss said:

    And, anyway, smart people develop traits that look like these because everything really is easy for them,

    Bunk.

    @cfgauss said:

    and, well, you try doing boring repetitive tasks and see how long it takes you to make them less boring by making some kind of game out of it, or being "perfectionist" about it.

    Bunk. In fact that doesn't even make sense... if you think the task is boring, why would you spend more time doing it "perfect" instead of doing it just "good enough"? Doesn't sound very smart to me.

    @cfgauss said:

    Legitimately very smart people don't really "develop shitty traits" either, they're just treated shitty by everyone,

    Indiana Jones and the Temple of Bunk. Even if you do subscribe to there being such a thing as a single "intelligence" that can be measured with a number, Dungeons and Dragons-style, you have to realize that intelligence and social skills are entirely different. If you got made fun of, it's because you had poor social skills-- almost by definition.

    And, once again, not figuring out how to fit in with your peer group doesn't sound very smart to me.

    @cfgauss said:

    I've seen lots of ridiculously smart people ruined by people insisting they waste their time doing stupid shit to "prove" they know what they're doing, and burning them out because they can't deal with being treated like morons.

    Have any specific examples?

    @cfgauss said:

    I mean, as a grad student I was forced to take classes that I had TAUGHT before (not quite the being forced to take a class you wrote the book on stereotype, but whatever) because, well, how else will they know that I know the subject?

    Aw, poor baby! I'll get out my tiny violin.

    @cfgauss said:

    I've also seen lots of very smart people have their social skills
    screwed up by people being dicks to them because they're intimidated by
    hanging around with smart people, or they don't know how to deal with smart people.

    If people are being dicks to you, maybe you should use some of that smartness and figure out why, then how to stop it. Again, if that simple thought never occurred to you then... well, that doesn't sound very smart to me.

    @cfgauss said:

    I knew a high school kid who was taking graduate level physics classes and having an easy time, and was treated like crap by everyone in the department, and is now living in some third world country awkwardly chasing girls around with his terrible social skills, which were developed from years of everyone ignoring him.

    Geewhiz, professor, maybe there's more to high school than cramming your head full of facts and figures!

    And of course, obviously, his current state is everybody's fault except his own, right? No need to answer... of course it is.

    @cfgauss said:

    That being said, many of the MENSA people are douchebags and are not actually particularly intelligent.

    I'd yet to meet a MENSA member who's not a douchebag. They may exist... like that mythical Java program with the fast, native GUI... but until I see one, I'm going to file it under "mythology."

    @cfgauss said:

    And most people who say they're really smart aren't, anyway. Those guys have to go and ruin it for everyone else.

    Read up on the Dunning-Kruger effect, if you haven't already.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    Diagnosed?  "I'm sorry... but you have.... high IQ!"

    You can be diagnosed with good things.

    That doesn't make it sound less funny.

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    And, anyway, smart people develop traits that look like these because everything really is easy for them,

    Bunk.

    Finding everything easy is the definition of "smart." 

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    and, well, you try doing boring repetitive tasks and see how long it takes you to make them less boring by making some kind of game out of it, or being "perfectionist" about it.

    Bunk. In fact that doesn't even make sense... if you think the task is boring, why would you spend more time doing it "perfect" instead of doing it just "good enough"? Doesn't sound very smart to me.

    Because when you're done with it, you move on to the next boring task. Making the task longer and less boring is more economical. In other words, the same reason every teenager takes the logical route when told to clean his room and spends 10 hours playing video games mixed with a few hours of cleaning instead of 15 minutes of cleaning.

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    Legitimately very smart people don't really "develop shitty traits" either, they're just treated shitty by everyone,

    Indiana Jones and the Temple of Bunk. Even if you do subscribe to there being such a thing as a single "intelligence" that can be measured with a number, Dungeons and Dragons-style, you have to realize that intelligence and social skills are entirely different. If you got made fun of, it's because you had poor social skills-- almost by definition.

    This has no bearing on if intelligence can "be measured with a number," just that there is a thing called intelligence and that some people tend to have more of it than others.  And "intelligence" (through metrics such as IQ and others) is correlated with lots of other good measures of intelligence, including social intelligence, so it's not a matter of "believing" anything, it's a matter of understanding what intelligence means, which is defined through correlations with other things.

    Also, acting anti-socially or without regards to what people think about you doesn't mean you can't or don't know how, it means you don't care to, or don't care to learn. Most of the smart people with "bad" social skills I know are, when you get to know them, the most nice, outgoingly caring and friendly people I know. They just don't care to be social with other people because they don't get much out of it because they aren't treated well because they get lectures from crazy people about using too-fancy language, or knowing too many facts, or whatever. (The same reason why, when some random person on the bus asks me what I do, I lie. Because when I tell them "I do string theory" I get a bizarre lecture on how my field is full of terrible people like 50% of the time, and their crazy opinions on science or blank stares the other 50%. So now they get an angry anti-social glare because that's more convenient than being lectured to about my field by a moron.)

    In fact, as an anecdotal example, a while ago I was visiting a university with a bunch of other scientists, one of them was hanging out in the back ignoring everyone else and being very anti-social. A few people "tried" to talk to him by loudly asking typical annoying small talk questions, and his response was mostly to glare at people and tell them he didn't feel like talking. After a while a few people were talking about that "weird" guy and how he doesn't have social skills and how he won't talk to anyone. But by not acting like a loud moron, I was able to easily and immediately start a conversation with him, learn where he was from and what he was doing there, and why he didn't want to talk to people--he was basically dragged there, didn't want to be at that university, and all the other scientists were in different fields he wasn't interested in talking about, and were kind of loud and annoying. I ended up spending the rest of the day ditching the rest of the group and walking around the area with him, since he ended up being more interesting than those other people.  So, the group of 20 or so very social adults universally thought he had bad social skills when really, no, he just thought they were annoying.

    @blakeyrat said:

    And, once again, not figuring out how to fit in with your peer group doesn't sound very smart to me.

    Once again, not figuring out != not caring, or not bothering, or not being given the chance to figure it out because people go out of their way to be dicks.

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    I've seen lots of ridiculously smart people ruined by people insisting they waste their time doing stupid shit to "prove" they know what they're doing, and burning them out because they can't deal with being treated like morons.

    Have any specific examples?

    Too many. Of the top 5% or so of the people I knew as an undergrad, in terms of actual ability (e.g., I could talk to them about a new paper I read and they could make insightful comments, as opposed to blankly staring, or making fundamentally wrong statements), none of them went to grad school, because they were all exhausted by idiotic homework sets and teachers who were overtly condescending when they said that classes were too easy ("how can it be easy!? most of the class is failing!" "I'm not failing" "buy you can't possibly find it easy!").  There's that high school kid who took grad physics classes I mentioned in my post.  Similarly for a few grad students I've known.  Fuck, it's happened to well-known practicing scientists. One well-known string theorist who was one of the important young people behind some topics in M-theory angrily quit his job at Harvard a few years ago because of things like this (not just due to people inside his field, but due to this happening with the administrative people, too).

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    I mean, as a grad student I was forced to take classes that I had TAUGHT before (not quite the being forced to take a class you wrote the book on stereotype, but whatever) because, well, how else will they know that I know the subject?

    Aw, poor baby! I'll get out my tiny violin.

    How would you feel if your job made you take a year-long intro class in C to prove that you "know computers"? And you could not work with any of the other good people you wanted to until you "proved" you knew C?

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    I've also seen lots of very smart people have their social skills
    screwed up by people being dicks to them because they're intimidated by
    hanging around with smart people, or they don't know how to deal with smart people.

    If people are being dicks to you, maybe you should use some of that smartness and figure out why, then how to stop it. Again, if that simple thought never occurred to you then... well, that doesn't sound very smart to me.

    I don't care if people are dicks to me, I care if people are dicks to young people who could become valuable members of society, but instead don't because people never gave them a chance because they didn't bother to actually pay attention to them.  And there's really nothing anyone can do to stop it, it's just how people are.

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    I knew a high school kid who was taking graduate level physics classes and having an easy time, and was treated like crap by everyone in the department, and is now living in some third world country awkwardly chasing girls around with his terrible social skills, which were developed from years of everyone ignoring him.

    Geewhiz, professor, maybe there's more to high school than cramming your head full of facts and figures!

    That doesn't even make sense. He didn't want to do that. He wanted to do science. He literally fled the country because he was sick of how people constantly act towards him. And science has nothing to do with "facts and figures" anyway, wtf? Science has to do with playing with cool shit and understand how things work. 

    @blakeyrat said:

    And of course, obviously, his current state is everybody's fault except his own, right? No need to answer... of course it is.

    Yes, the fact that the professor in a class full of 20 people did not even know there was a brilliant high school kid in the graduate quantum field theory class is entirely his fault. Obviously he should have done something impressive to get their attention.  

    @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    And most people who say they're really smart aren't, anyway. Those guys have to go and ruin it for everyone else.

    Read up on the Dunning-Kruger effect, if you haven't already.

    Read about it years ago. This, by the way, is the same effect that causes people to be assholes to smart people. Turns out a bunch of research has actually been done on this.

    Most people can't tell the difference between a brilliant person and someone of their own intelligence, so when an excited young brilliant person comes along who wants to learn something cool, they're treated with derision by people because they think "when I was his age I couldn't understand that so obviously he can't really understand it, he must only be pretending to understand it, or he must not actually understand the details." This is bad when those people are e.g., professors or employers, because then you get into that situation where they repeatedly force them to "prove" they know by, e.g., making them retake classes they took years ago (oh he took that as a kid he must have forgotten it by now!) or that they've taught (he couldn't really have understood the topic back then) or just force them to do menial work because they refuse to believe that person is capable.

    Socially, it's worse, because it causes people to literally not be able to identify with smart people. Which causes lots of problems. When this happens to young people, particularly when it happens through both teachers and peers, it causes them to withdraw, not develop coping mechanisms, and refuse to exercise the social skills they do have (although it does not, apparently, necessarily inhibit the development of social skills), among other things.  

    It's not really like people used to think (until very recently) where they made claims like "smart people are more likely to have mild autism spectrum disorders," there are actually very distinct causes for why they exhibit similar outcomes; it's like the difference between sleeping all day because you're depressed and sleeping because you have narcolepsy. Of course this all only can only apply to at most 10 or 20% or whatever of the population is "very smart" thanks to the bell curve and everything, times whatever factor of people don't get affected by this for whatever reasons.  So, yeah, not bunk, there's actual research backing these kinds of claims up.

    So, yeah, the point is that smart people don't have bad social skills becaue they have bad social skills, it's because they don't want to talk to people because the other people have trouble relating to them, so they'd rather be doing something else. 

     

     



  • @cfgauss said:

    Finding everything easy is the definition of "smart."

    So a smart person, randomly pulled off the street, would find, say, playing tight end for the Seattle Seahawks easy? Bullshit.

    @cfgauss said:

    In other words, the same reason every teenager takes the logical route when told to clean his room and spends 10 hours playing video games mixed with a few hours of cleaning instead of 15 minutes of cleaning.

    So intelligence is just procrastination? Once again: bullshit.

    @cfgauss said:

    This has no bearing on if intelligence can "be measured with a number," just that there is a thing called intelligence and that some people tend to have more of it than others.

    That's your belief. Can you prove it?

    @cfgauss said:

    And "intelligence" (through metrics such as IQ and others) is correlated with lots of other good measures of intelligence, including social intelligence, so it's not a matter of "believing" anything, it's a matter of understanding what intelligence means, which is defined through correlations with other things.

    Ah, but a little bit ago, you were talking about people who were (supposedly) intelligent, and yet didn't fit in with their peer group. So... which is it? Are both politicians and rocket scientists intelligent? What if the politician scores a 85 on an IQ test? Is he still intelligent then? What if the rocket scientist is being hit on at a party and doesn't pick up the cues, is he still intelligent?

    @cfgauss said:

    Also, acting anti-socially or without regards to what people think about you doesn't mean you can't or don't know how, it means you don't care to, or don't care to learn.

    Well, then they don't get to complain, do they? But man, talk about penny wise and pound foolish!

    @cfgauss said:

    They just don't care to be social with other people because they don't get much out of it because they aren't treated well because they get lectures from crazy people about using too-fancy language, or knowing too many facts, or whatever.

    You seem to have utterly missed my point. They could simply not use too-fancy language, or not demonstrate knowledge of facts (which is fucking irritating, BTW), or not do "whatever". If they were intelligent, they'd probably figure that out pretty fucking quick, huh?

    You're really making no sense here. Intelligent people don't want to associate with others because they get "treated badly." Despite the fact that, according to your theory of what intelligence is, they should be easily able to fix that small problem.

    Then you're saying it's a tragic thing that they don't have a lot of social connections, even though you admit that they're doing this voluntarily. So... which is it? If they choose to not have social connections, then why is it tragic that they don't? If I say I don't want to live in New York City, and I spend my whole life in Seattle, is it tragic that I never lived in New York City?

    @cfgauss said:

    (The same reason why, when some random person on the bus asks me what I do, I lie. Because when I tell them "I do string theory" I get a bizarre lecture on how my field is full of terrible people like 50% of the time, and their crazy opinions on science or blank stares the other 50%. So now they get an angry anti-social glare because that's more convenient than being lectured to about my field by a moron.)

    Wow, you're an asshole.

    @cfgauss said:

    In fact, as an anecdotal example, a while ago I was visiting a university with a bunch of other scientists, one of them was hanging out in the back ignoring everyone else and being very anti-social. A few people "tried" to talk to him by loudly asking typical annoying small talk questions, and his response was mostly to glare at people and tell them he didn't feel like talking. After a while a few people were talking about that "weird" guy and how he doesn't have social skills and how he won't talk to anyone. But by not acting like a loud moron, I was able to easily and immediately start a conversation with him, learn where he was from and what he was doing there, and why he didn't want to talk to people--he was basically dragged there, didn't want to be at that university, and all the other scientists were in different fields he wasn't interested in talking about, and were kind of loud and annoying. I ended up spending the rest of the day ditching the rest of the group and walking around the area with him, since he ended up being more interesting than those other people.  So, the group of 20 or so very social adults universally thought he had bad social skills when really, no, he just thought they were annoying.

    Aw you made a love connection!

    But seriously, and assuming this story isn't utter bullshit which I'm virtually certain it is, how did you start the conversation without small talk? Did you just walk up to him and start reciting the phone book? Inquiring minds want to know!

    @cfgauss said:

    Once again, not figuring out != not caring, or not bothering, or not being given the chance to figure it out because people go out of their way to be dicks.

    Nobody over the age of 16 goes out of their way to be dicks. Nobody. If people are being a dick to you, it's in response to something you're doing. (For example, glaring at them like a crazy person when they casually ask what you do.) If you don't want people to be dicks, you need to figure out what that thing is, and stop doing it.

    And in any case, if you don't care, why the holy shit would you even bring it up here? Obviously you care, otherwise it wouldn't matter if that one high school kid was in a third-world country awkwardly trying to pick up chicks. Right? Or am I taking crazy pills?

    @cfgauss said:

    Too many. Of the top 5% or so of the people I knew as an undergrad, in terms of actual ability (e.g., I could talk to them about a new paper I read and they could make insightful comments, as opposed to blankly staring, or making fundamentally wrong statements), none of them went to grad school, because they were all exhausted by idiotic homework sets and teachers who were overtly condescending when they said that classes were too easy ("how can it be easy!? most of the class is failing!" "I'm not failing" "buy you can't possibly find it easy!").

    Maybe they actually wanted to do something productive with their lives instead of spending their lives mentally masturbating about string theory in a dusty university library. That behavior strikes me as pretty fucking intelligent, frankly.

    @cfgauss said:

    Fuck, it's happened to well-known practicing scientists. One well-known string theorist

    String theory is fringe. I give it 50/50 odds it's complete crap.

    And in any case, he's not a "practicing" scientist if he sits on his ass and thinks about 11-dimensional shapes all fucking day. That's not practice, that's theory... and it's theory that doesn't make any useful predictions we could use to, say, build a new type of nuclear reactor or explain to me why socks come in resealable Ziplock bags. Jesus Christ, do something useful. Even the tweed jackets that create the W3C standards are doing something slightly productive, they're just fucking awful at it.

    @cfgauss said:

    That doesn't even make sense. He didn't want to do that. He wanted to do science. He literally fled the country because he was sick of how people constantly act towards him. And science has nothing to do with "facts and figures" anyway, wtf? Science has to do with playing with cool shit and understand how things work. 

    People act that way towards him because of something he is doing. As I've said now about a half-dozen times.

    @cfgauss said:

    Yes, the fact that the professor in a class full of 20 people did not even know there was a brilliant high school kid in the graduate quantum field theory class is entirely his fault. Obviously he should have done something impressive to get their attention.

    What kind of attention did he require? I'm sure the prof just treated him like any other student; if he was having problems he should have proactively talked to the prof about them, that's why God invented office hours. If he didn't take advantage of the facilities provided, well... I would question the assertion that this kid is smart at all.

    @cfgauss said:

    Most people can't tell the difference between a brilliant person and someone of their own intelligence, so when an excited young brilliant person comes along who wants to learn something cool, they're treated with derision by people because they think "when I was his age I couldn't understand that so obviously he can't really understand it, he must only be pretending to understand it, or he must not actually understand the details." This is bad when those people are e.g., professors or employers, because then you get into that situation where they repeatedly force them to "prove" they know by, e.g., making them retake classes they took years ago (oh he took that as a kid he must have forgotten it by now!) or that they've taught (he couldn't really have understood the topic back then) or just force them to do menial work because they refuse to believe that person is capable.

    Bunk.

    Look, I agree our educational system sucks, but you're completely off-base here. Half, actually probably more, the point of schooling is learning how to interact with other human beings... if you have a kid who wants to learn new material, but hates interacting with other kids, he is missing the point of going to school. He could just as easily learn on his own without bothering with school in the first place. We're social animals. Almost by definition, any human who is anti-social is not very good at being human.

    The complaints you're making about his later career are due to your profession requiring people to jump through hoops to get degrees. Having a Computer Science degree doesn't mean you know shit about programming, or even using a computer-- I should know, I interview CS degree holders almost every week and more than half of them are completely useless. All it means is that you jumped through enough hoops, and the right hoops, to get a few letters added to the end of your name-- that's the whole fucking point of the university system. (And why I have very little respect for it.) The best are always the ones who were excited about the material that they learned it on their own, long before ever stepping foot in a dormitory.

    @cfgauss said:

    Socially, it's worse, because it causes people to literally not be able to identify with smart people. Which causes lots of problems. When this happens to young people, particularly when it happens through both teachers and peers, it causes them to withdraw, not develop coping mechanisms, and refuse to exercise the social skills they do have (although it does not, apparently, necessarily inhibit the development of social skills), among other things.  

    It's not really like people used to think (until very recently) where they made claims like "smart people are more likely to have mild autism spectrum disorders," there are actually very distinct causes for why they exhibit similar outcomes; it's like the difference between sleeping all day because you're depressed and sleeping because you have narcolepsy. Of course this all only can only apply to at most 10 or 20% or whatever of the population is "very smart" thanks to the bell curve and everything, times whatever factor of people don't get affected by this for whatever reasons.  So, yeah, not bunk, there's actual research backing these kinds of claims up.

    Why don't you cite some, Mr. Wizard.

    @cfgauss said:

    So, yeah, the point is that smart people don't have bad social skills becaue they have bad social skills, it's because they don't want to talk to people because the other people have trouble relating to them, so they'd rather be doing something else.

    Jesus fucking shit. This is a programming forum, for programmers. Don't you know an infinite loop when you see it?

    Smart people don't talk to other people because they have trouble relating to them. Smart people have trouble relating to other people because they don't talk to them.

    That's not smart, that's fucking retarded! How can you not see that?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So a smart person, randomly pulled off the street, would find, say, playing tight end for the Seattle Seahawks easy? Bullshit.

    Should I stop assuming you're not an idiot and can understand the intent of statements? Do I need to state this explicitly in terms of Gaussians and expectation values?

    So intelligence is just procrastination? Once again: bullshit.

    This is the exact opposite of what I said.

    That's your belief. Can you prove it?

    It's not a belief, there's absolutely no belief of any kind in real, properly done science. It's a statistical fact. One cited even in introductory textbooks on psychology. Also in literally thousands of studies done ever since psychology became a real science (only like 20 years ago, but w/e).

    Ah, but a little bit ago, you were talking about people who were (supposedly) intelligent, and yet didn't fit in with their peer group. So... which is it?

    They fit in with their peer group just fine, just not others, because they don't identify with each other.

    Are both politicians and rocket scientists intelligent?

    According to studies, politicians, no, rocket scientists, yes.

    What if the rocket scientist is being hit on at a party and doesn't pick up the cues, is he still intelligent?

    This comment is based on one of the generalization fallacies.  Intelligence (though a number of metrics) correlates with social ability (both positively and negatively, depending on metrics and groups they're interacting with).  So for an individual, maybe, maybe not.  This isn't a meaningful question.

    Well, then they don't get to complain, do they?

    Kind of like how you don't get to complain about people doing stupid things with technology, because you "choose to" work with them?

    . They could simply not use too-fancy language, or not demonstrate knowledge of facts (which is fucking irritating, BTW), or not do "whatever". If they were intelligent, they'd probably figure that out pretty fucking quick, huh?

    First, they do figure it out quick, which is why they tend to not be social outside their (small) groups. Also, why should someone change the way they behave to suit random other people they don't even care about?

    And "demonstrating knowledge" of facts is not the same as randomly ramming facts down people's throats to show off, demonstrating knowledge is when you say "hey you know you can just e-mail this document to me directly rather than printing it, scanning it, putting it in a word file, and sending that to me?" And, as we all know, people do not always respond well to such suggestions.

    You're really making no sense here. Intelligent people don't want to associate with others because they get "treated badly." Despite the fact that, according to your theory of what intelligence is, they should be easily able to fix that small problem.

    You can't change how other people behave. What you're suggesting is that they should fix that problem by becoming different people which is a pretty stupid fix.

    Then you're saying it's a tragic thing that they don't have a lot of social connections

    I'm not saying that at all--I'm saying generally people don't identify well with people who are smart, and this causes trouble, just like when any group of people does identify well with any other group they are in contact with. 

    even though you admit that they're doing this voluntarily. So... which is it? If they choose to not have social connections, then why is it tragic that they don't?

    This is like saying black people voluntarily act black, and if they would just choose to act more white, they'd have more white friends.  Problem solved!

    No, the issue is different groups that have trouble identifying with each other don't interact well, it doesn't mean that one of them has poor social skills!  In particular, it doesn't mean the group you aren't a part of has the good social skills!

    Wow, you're an asshole.

    Yeah, I'm an asshole because I don't want to listen to 45 minutes of the person next to me on the bus ranting to me about this one time they read a book by that guy and they thought that vibrations were the cause of all disease, and if we could just learn to vibrate at the right frequency...

    But seriously, and assuming this story isn't utter bullshit which I'm virtually certain it is, how did you start the conversation without small talk?

    It is completely true, and I introduced myself by being observant enough to notice what annoyed him, and saying something like "I'm tired of having the same conversation with all of these people too!"

    If you don't want people to be dicks, you need to figure out what that thing is, and stop doing it.

    You're absolutely right, and all we need to do to stop terrorism is to figure out what we do that annoys them and stop! Perfect plan! I'll inform the Israelis, I'm sure at no point in the past several thousand years have they tried this plan!

    I'll also call up my stereotypical black man and tell him the solution to stopping racism is to act more white!  Brilliant!

    And in any case, if you don't care, why the holy shit would you even bring it up here?

    I didn't bring it up, stratos said:

    @stratos said:

    people who are diagnosed with high IQ at a young age can develop pretty shitty traits

    to which I responded that that's not true, different groups, etc, etc.  Because it seems as rediculous to me to suggest that smart people don't have social skills as it does to suggest that black people or asian people or whoever don't have social skills because they don't do things the way you do.

    Maybe they actually wanted to do something productive with their lives

    Except for the part where I said several times that that's not the case, but whatever, you can pretend I said whatever you like, don't let me stop you.

    String theory is fringe. I give it 50/50 odds it's complete crap.

    Based on your expert understanding of UV completions of quantum field theories, and decades of research in the field?  No?  Well, pretty ironic then...

    and it's theory that doesn't make any useful predictions

    Again, based on your years of intensive study into the predictions it can make? Or, say, based on, say, a crackpot's hilarious rants about it?

    What kind of attention did he require?

    The kind of attention an insanely brilliant person needs in a class that bores them to death. Say, for example, talking about things that might actually be challenging to him and would not waste his time.Or letting him work on an interesting research problem, or any number of a billion things that are different than totally ignoring him.

    if he was having problems he should have proactively talked to the prof about them, that's why God invented office hours.

    Did you miss my example above about how the typical professor's reaction to "this class is too easy" is "THAT'S UNPOSSIBLE!" (at least in my field and associated ones).

    the point of schooling is learning how to interact with other human beings... if you have a kid who wants to learn new material, but hates interacting with other kids, he is missing the point of going to school.

    Academic interaction isn't valuable when the people you're interacting with don't understand any of the things you're doing because then they can't associate well with you.  And none of these kids hate interacting with other kids, they hate interacting with the kids who are boring and never have anything interesting to say. Academically interacting with people is no fun when, for example, you try to do homework with them, and the assignment you finish in five minutes they take weeks on. (And, yeah, at a grad school level the difference between the top and the bottom of the classes is taking minutes vs a week or weeks to do homework).  That's no fun, it's just brutal.  

    He could just as easily learn on his own without bothering with school in the first place.

    Yes because you can totally get a job in science by not getting a PhD and just saying "trust me, I know stuff!" 

    We're social animals. Almost by definition, any human who is anti-social is not very good at being human.

    What about a person who's not good at reading? What are they?

    The complaints you're making about his later career are due to your profession requiring people to jump through hoops to get degrees.

    Yes--and these hoops shouldn't be there. They're the result of exactly the complaints I'm making!  But in principle, in hard sciences, it's supposed (as in, it used to) to mean something because you had things to show for it. You had things to show for it because people paid attention to students and recognized the smart ones, and put them to work; e.g., Heisenberg started working on quantum mechanics as a teenager, right after he started college, because he was quickly recognized as smart. That doesn't happen anymore. But why is another discussion. The point I'm trying to make here is that there is nothing correct about the original social skills complaint: it is that smart people (statistically) think and behave differently enough that people (statistically) have trouble identifying with them, which causes one group to think the other has poor social skills, when really they don't. They're just different, and have no interest in being like the other group.

    Why don't you cite some, Mr. Wizard.

    Because it's the internet, and I don't have to. Also, because the 5 minutes it took me to type this response is much smaller than the 20 or 30 minutes it will take me to find and dig out my textbooks and track down specific literature sources, and I don't care to put an extra 500% effort to this post. Also, because it's textbook knowledge. Get a textbook.

     

     



  • @cfgauss said:

    It's not a belief, there's absolutely no belief of any kind in real, properly done science. It's a statistical fact. One cited even in introductory textbooks on psychology. Also in literally thousands of studies done ever since psychology became a real science (only like 20 years ago, but w/e).

    Defined how? Measured how?

    (And what the holy shit does "w/e" mean? In any case, experimental psychology dates to the 19th century. Just because Freud was a hack doesn't mean the entire field was full of hacks.)

    @cfgauss said:

    Are both politicians and rocket scientists intelligent?

    According to studies, politicians, no, rocket scientists, yes.

    See, this is how I know when you're spouting complete bullshit. It stands to reason that the guy capable of convincing literally millions of people to vote for him in an election is intelligent. If your definition of "intelligence" doesn't take that into account, than it's fucking wrong, and that's all there is to it.

    @cfgauss said:

    This comment is based on one of the generalization fallacies.  Intelligence (though a number of metrics) correlates with social ability (both positively and negatively, depending on metrics and groups they're interacting with).  So for an individual, maybe, maybe not.  This isn't a meaningful question.

    Ok; how does it correlate? You could head off some of this snarkiness if you would anticipate these fucking obvious clarifying questions. Are you arguing that intelligent people are more likely to be socially successful, or the opposite? Or is that not a meaningful question, either?

    Of course that sentence is so filled with weasel words and vagueness it doesn't really mean anything at all. Make sure whatever you do in a debate, never say anything concrete! If you say something concrete your opponent might figure out you're full of shit! Weasel words, more weasel words!

    @cfgauss said:

    I'm not saying that at all--I'm saying generally people don't identify well with people who are smart, and this causes trouble, just like when any group of people does identify well with any other group they are in contact with. 

    No. People don't identify with people who are assholes. Like you. There's no relationship between being an asshole and being smart. I know a lot of smart people who are not assholes. I know a lot of dumb people who are. And yes, being an asshole is a conscious choice. Asshole.

    @cfgauss said:

    And "demonstrating knowledge" of facts is not the same as randomly ramming facts down people's throats to show off, demonstrating knowledge is when you say "hey you know you can just e-mail this document to me directly rather than printing it, scanning it, putting it in a word file, and sending that to me?" And, as we all know, people do not always respond well to such suggestions.

    Depends on how you make the suggestion, doesn't it? Are you being an asshole? Probably.

    @cfgauss said:

    This is like saying black people voluntarily act black, and if they would just choose to act more white, they'd have more white friends.  Problem solved!

    @cfgauss said:

    It is completely true, and I introduced myself by being observant enough to notice what annoyed him, and saying something like "I'm tired of having the same conversation with all of these people too!"

    Yeah; that's small talk. (Just a variation on the old standby "aren't all these people so phony?")

    @cfgauss said:

    String theory is fringe. I give it 50/50 odds it's complete crap.

    Based on your expert understanding of UV completions of quantum field theories, and decades of research in the field?  No?  Well, pretty ironic then...

    Ok; then what fucking good is it? Convince me. It's your life's work, right? Give me the elevator pitch.

    @cfgauss said:

    The kind of attention an insanely brilliant person needs in a class that bores them to death. Say, for example, talking about things that might actually be challenging to him and would not waste his time.Or letting him work on an interesting research problem, or any number of a billion things that are different than totally ignoring him.

    Did he ask for any of these things? People aren't telepathic, as it turns out.

    @cfgauss said:

    He could just as easily learn on his own without bothering with school in the first place.

    Yes because you can totally get a job in science by not getting a PhD and just saying "trust me, I know stuff!" 

    Maybe you can, maybe you can't. My point isn't that you need the letters to get a job, my point is that getting the letters consists of jumping through hoops. The high school kid working at Taco Bell needs a food handler's permit, right? You get that by jumping through hoops, the same way you get a PhD. If your field is too obsessed with pointless hoop-jumping to get the high school grad a fair chance, that's your field's fault, not mine. I happen to work in one that gives pretty much everybody a fair shake.

    @cfgauss said:

    Did you miss my example above about how the typical professor's reaction to "this class is too easy" is "THAT'S UNPOSSIBLE!" (at least in my field and associated ones).

    That's because professors are all fucking useless hacks who couldn't cut it in the real world and would be fired in 5 minutes if they didn't have unions and tenure to keep their incompetent asses around. Fuck, half my professors couldn't come to 10:00 AM classes SOBER.

    @cfgauss said:

    Academic interaction isn't valuable when the people you're interacting with don't understand any of the things you're doing because then they can't associate well with you.

    I didn't say "academic interaction", I said "interaction." Fuck, how hard do you have to try to miss points that obvious? Do you like cross your eyes and turn your back to the monitor then read through a mirror? I'll just assume you're doing that, because it's a pretty funny image.

    @cfgauss said:

    We're social animals. Almost by definition, any human who is anti-social is not very good at being human.

    What about a person who's not good at reading? What are they?

    I dunno; dyslexic? Is this a quiz game? Were you going somewhere with this question?

    Hey everybody, here's Blakeyrat's advice, and I'm super intelligent so you better listen to it: nobody likes an asshole.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @cfgauss said:
    It's not a belief, there's absolutely no belief of any kind in real, properly done science. It's a statistical fact. One cited even in introductory textbooks on psychology. Also in literally thousands of studies done ever since psychology became a real science (only like 20 years ago, but w/e).

    Defined how? Measured how?

    Statistics and experiments, the same way everything else is?  Generally things are defined through correlations to other things. If you're lucky there is a nice functional relationship that can be derived, but in the non-hard sciences that's usually not the case and you are essentially calculating conditional probabilities associated with certain statements.

    (And what the holy shit does "w/e" mean? In any case, experimental psychology dates to the 19th century. Just because Freud was a hack doesn't mean the entire field was full of hacks.)

    w/e = whatever. And for various reasons psychology wasn't in a particularly good condition until fairly recently, mostly due to poor methodology and misuse of statistics (understandable, these things are hard to use correctly in practice and it's not really unusual for a science to take a very long time to be able to use them correctly). 

    See, this is how I know when you're spouting complete bullshit. It stands to reason that the guy capable of convincing literally millions of people to vote for him in an election is intelligent. If your definition of "intelligence" doesn't take that into account, than it's fucking wrong, and that's all there is to it.

    It's not my definition, it's psychologists' definition, and it correlates with various problem solving abilities (including social ones) and, e.g., on IQ tests politicians score slightly above average (slightly as in, less than a standard deviation). And intelligence is neither necessary nor sufficient to convince a typical person that an argument is correct. There are other metrics of intelligence, too, and afaik politicians do not score significantly above average on them. And above average != "smart," smartness is defined as being some (1 or 2 or whatever) number of standard deviations above average.

    Ok; how does it correlate? You could head off some of this snarkiness if you would anticipate these fucking obvious clarifying questions.

    It depends. I can't be specific because the correct version of this question is a scientific question and depends on a non-trivial understanding of methodologies and definitions, otherwise this conversation ends up like those idiotic "studies" the media talk about when they proclaim "chocolate cures cancer, everyone should eat chocolate!"

    Are you arguing that intelligent people are more likely to be socially successful, or the opposite? Or is that not a meaningful question, either?

    I am saying that people group themselves by intelligence, because intelligence is strongly correlated with behavioral differences, and behavioral differences are (maybe or maybe not strongly, depending on what groups) correlated with forming social groups (groups that that don't generally identify well with other groups).  People are likely to identify well with people, and be perceived as having "good social skills" by people within their groups, and having bad ones by people outside of it regardless of actual social ability.  

    Smart people--by definition of being smart--make up a small minority of the population so the groups involved tend to be smaller, meaning most people don't have frequent interactions with them, meaning they don't understand how they are and get stupid ideas like that they don't have social skills, that they like to assault people with facts, etc, just like people who aren't around black people think black people are stupid, or criminals, or people who aren't around asians think all asians can do complicated arithmetic in their heads intrinsically. 

    To summarize for the 10th time since you don't seem to get it: people don't get along with people they can't identify with. That doesn't mean either group has bad social skills. This is true regardless of the specific groups: races, middle school cliques, nationalities, intelligences, professions, etc.

    This is a basic fact that's been known in psychology forever, and has been quantified to death. See literally any psychology textbook for a discussion of this.

    Yeah; that's small talk. (Just a variation on the old standby "aren't all these people so phony?")

    Yes, and using my amazing social skills I was able to identify that this was the correct phrase, while other socially skilled people were not!  Everyone involved had social skills!  The point is that it was all based on a lack of understanding; no one else figured out why he wasn't interested in talking about their stupid things (and, really, literally, every person was having the same god damned introductory converstation with everyone else, and it was exhausing) because they couldn't concieve of why someone wouldn't want to have that discussion because in their group that kind of discussion seemed like a good idea.

    String theory is fringe. I give it 50/50 odds it's complete crap.
    Based on your expert understanding of UV completions of quantum field theories, and decades of research in the field?  No?  Well, pretty ironic then...
    Ok; then what fucking good is it? Convince me. It's your life's work, right? Give me the elevator pitch.

    Did you even read the unskilled and unaware of it paper? This is a model example of its conclusion. People don't study this subject for decades to become competent in it so I can fucking explain why it's right as an "elevator pitch," that's inconceivably retarded.  You want to learn why it's right, go to fucking school and spend the next ten years learning quantum field theory, general relativity, and high energy particle theory so you can understand what the words I would use to describe it even mean and then I will consider it.  Asking this question is like asking an areospace engineer "so how does the space shuttle work?" and expecting an answer to prove to your satisfaction that it will function.  If you do that, you'll end up as stupid as the New York Times.

    Did he ask for any of these things? People aren't telepathic, as it turns out.

    Do you read anything I say? How do you think he got the "this is hard you can't possibly find it easy" reply without asking???

    That's because professors are all fucking useless hacks who couldn't cut it in the real world and would be fired in 5 minutes if they didn't have unions and tenure to keep their incompetent asses around. Fuck, half my professors couldn't come to 10:00 AM classes SOBER.

    Just because your profession is filled with hacks doesn't mean everyone else's is. Unless you think that nearly every scientific advance comes from hacks--because the vast majority of science researchers who make important breakthrouhs are or have been professors.

    @cfgauss said:

    I didn't say "academic interaction", I said "interaction."

    THAT DOESN'T MATTER!  GROUPS! GROUPS!! How many times do I need to explain that GROUPS ARE WHAT'S IMPORTANT!  The specific groups don't matter, they're just examples!

     



  • @cfgauss said:

    Did you even read the unskilled and unaware of it paper?

    Yes.

    @cfgauss said:

    This is a model example of its conclusion.

    No.

    @cfgauss said:

    People don't study this subject for decades to become competent in it so I can fucking explain why it's right as an "elevator pitch," that's inconceivably retarded.

    Well der. Of course people don't study the subject for the sole purpose of giving elevator pitches about it. That's about the most retarded thing I've ever heard, as you point out. I don't see what it has to do with my request.

    @cfgauss said:

    You want to learn why it's right, go to fucking school and spend the next ten years learning quantum field theory, general relativity, and high energy particle theory so you can understand the words I would use to describe it mean and then I will consider it.

    If you can't explain it, in plain English, in 500 words or less, you have no fucking clue what it is. Basically, you're not helping your case much here. Wikipedia can do it, what's your problem? (Well ok, it can't do it very well, but then again it's Wikipedia.) (Also, look at the talk page, it's fucking hilarious.)

    @cfgauss said:

    Asking this question is like asking an areospace engineer "so how does the space shuttle work?" and expecting an answer to prove to your satisfaction that it will function.

    Yes, I would expect an aerospace engineer to be able to give me an elevator pitch on how the space shuttle works. Why shouldn't I? (As to the second part of your statement, well, they could just say it's gone up over a hundred times already... that's pretty strong evidence that it works, eh?) I'd expect a steam engineer to be able to give me a simple explanation of what causes a water hammer, and why it's dangerous. I'd expect a CPU designer to explain to me in simple terms why I should buy his product instead of the competition.

    Communication. Is. Everything.

    @cfgauss said:

    Just because your profession is filled with hacks doesn't mean everyone else's is. Unless you think that nearly every scientific advance comes from hacks--because the vast majority of science researchers who make important breakthrouhs are or have been professors.

    I wager there are about the same percentage of useless professors as there are useless programmers. The only difference is, useless programmers can be fired by savvy companies, where useless professors stick around for decades, contributing nothing except discouragement to generations of students.

    @cfgauss said:

    @cfgauss said:

    I didn't say "academic interaction", I said "interaction."

    THAT DOESN'T MATTER!  GROUPS! GROUPS!! How many times do I need to explain that GROUPS ARE WHAT'S IMPORTANT!  The specific groups don't matter, they're just examples!

    No; you missed the point entirely. I said schools are useful for learning how to interact with other people. You went on some bullshit about how that doesn't work because when they're assigned homework groups, the smart kid finishes first, which doesn't even come close to addressing my point. In short, you changed my statement "interaction" to "academic interaction" which completely and utterly changed the point I was making. For a smart person, you're either a very poor debater or a very dishonest one.

    Honestly, I have no fucking clue why you're shouting "groups" repeatedly. What groups? What are you talking about? Don't make me break out the WTF cat again.



  • My my, what a mess.

    Are you purposefully being dense, Blakey?

    Smart people don't like dumb people. Do you know why?

     

    @blakeyrat said:

    Give me the elevator pitch.
     

    Greene's The Elegant Universe. You already know the elevator pitch, which is what the pop sci magazines publish. What you need, it seems, is something a little more involved. Good book. Have at it.



  • If you can't explain it, in plain English, in 500 words or less, you have no fucking clue what it is. Basically, you're not helping your case much here. Wikipedia can do it, what's your problem? (Well ok, it can't do it very well, but then again it's Wikipedia.)

    In other words Wikipedia can't do it. Particularly, since not much in that article makes any sense...

    But I can't explain it because the whole point of string theory is that it's about the details of other theories that are themselves details of theories like quantum mechanics and Newtonian mechanics.  That's why the popular science books, even those written by people like Hawking, don't actually explain much about the subject. It's like asking to explain the details of how a compiler compiles code to someone who doesn't know what a computer is. Or trying to explain what trancendental numbers are to someone who doesn't know what numbers are. It is just not possible to give an even remotely correct explanation of what string theory even is to someone who doesn't understand what string theory is fixing. Let alone why string theory should be right, which is a much harder question.

    I wager there are about the same percentage of useless professors as there are useless programmers. The only difference is, useless programmers can be fired by savvy companies, where useless professors stick around for decades, contributing nothing except discouragement to generations of students.

    In the hard sciences this is definitely not so. More so than it should be, but not as bad as other fields. And the purpose of professors not being able to be fired is that places like that have had histories of firing people doing totally awesome things because they did not understand what was being done, for political purposes, or because someone didn't like someone. In particular, if you look into the history of math, there was a BIG problem with this in the past! Tons of mathematicians who did important foundational work in various areas have died in destitute and jobless because of this. It's happened plenty in other science fields, too, so it's something people are loath to get rid of. Although it's clearly going too far to make there be absolutely no way someone can get fired. But it's better than the alternative, since well-known schools have almost eliminated entire departments where science nobel-prize-winning work was being, or would be, done because they didn't understand it.

    No; you missed the point entirely. I said schools are useful for learning how to interact with other people. You went on some bullshit about how that doesn't work because when they're assigned homework groups, the smart kid finishes first, which doesn't even come close to addressing my point. In short, you changed my statement "interaction" to "academic interaction" which completely and utterly changed the point I was making. For a smart person, you're either a very poor debater or a very dishonest one.

    You're mixing up examples and general cases. The initial point was, to reiterate,

    @stratos said:


    people who are diagnosed with high IQ at a young age can develop pretty shitty traits

    Which I said is false; they don't, people only think they do because they belong to different groups than them, which with they have difficulty interacting. The specific examples were to illustrate this point by giving specific examples of people not getting along because of various differences. Such as, people who finish homework quicker not getting long well with people who don't because the people who finish it quicker tend to be smarter, and so belong to different social groups; professors can't identify with smart students because the professor can't imagine how the student could be doing so well, so they assume they do not actually know what's going on; black people are all like [black people stereotype] and white people are all like [white people stereotype] so they don't get along; etc; etc; etc. 

    Noticing a pattern here?  The communication difficulties are not due to social skills, but due to group differences. This is true independently of specific groups: academic, non-academic, social, non-social.  Which is the only point I am trying to make about this.

    It's not my fault if you can't distinguish general and specific things, or one side of a logical implication from another! Don't blame me for not understanding. 

    If you want specific references see, e.g.,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Tuning and related catch phrases (don't read the wiki article, it's as terrible as the rest of them, look at the references). There are also papers on social interactions among cliques that go by a name I can't remember offhand that are mostly applicable, and there are whole journals on intelligence and on social skills that are where I've gotten this all from.

     



  • @dhromed said:

    Are you purposefully being dense, Blakey?

    Smart people don't like dumb people. Do you know why?

     

    @blakeyrat said:

    Give me the elevator pitch.

     

    Thank you.

     



  • When i say shitty traits, I do not mean high IQ people are shitty, or I somehow think it is their fault or whatever. What I mean when I say shitty traits, is that high IQ people apparently are prone to develop traits that in a business environment can be seen as shitty.  Perhaps in acedemic wonderland you don't have deadlines or clients or whatever. But i'm reasonably sure that when you have an average job, like say software engineer. The traits apparently commonly developed by high IQ people are quite shitty demonstrably.

    We have deadlines, we need to be pragmatic, things don't need to be perfect and don't have to be perfect. And no you can't take a whole day to read the 500 page specification to this API just because you need to make one or two calls to it, just skim it.



  • @stratos said:

    When i say shitty traits, I do not mean high IQ people are shitty, or I somehow think it is their fault or whatever.


    I know!

    What I mean when I say shitty traits, is that high IQ people apparently are prone to develop traits that in a business environment can be seen as shitty.  Perhaps in acedemic wonderland you don't have deadlines or clients or whatever. But i'm reasonably sure that when you have an average job, like say software engineer. The traits apparently commonly developed by high IQ people are quite shitty demonstrably.

    We have deadlines, we need to be pragmatic, things don't need to be perfect and don't have to be perfect. And no you can't take a whole day to read the 500 page specification to this API just because you need to make one or two calls to it, just skim it.

     

    What I'm saying is just that the traits correlated with IQ have nothing to do with the traits you're complaining about, and any perceived existence of those traits is due to miscommunication/misunderstanding from one party or the other, or due to traits they only incidentally possess (or due to the fact that they aren't actually smart! Being perfectionist and slow and stupid is certainly a problem ;)).

    And there are plenty of deadlines in academia, and aside from responding to e-mails in a timely manner (or sometimes at all) most good scientists don't have much of a problem with them. (Though the administrative people certainly do!)

     



  • @cfgauss said:

    Thank you.
     

    You're not getting off here either, Mr. Vague. Your explanations make sense, as do your examples and anecdotes, but there's little hard data coming from you.

    That's a thing Blakey really hates, and rightly so, so it's contributing to the two of you talking right past eachother.


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat said:

    MENSA is a club for people who like to brag about being smart. Actually being smart isn't required. (On the contrary-- if I had a genuine IQ result of 120, I'd be fucking pissed at the MENSA asshole who walks around telling everybody he has a 130 IQ. Sure, on the uncalibrated test, my cat can score 130.)
    I took a calibrated test once in college - one of those "be our research guinea pig and we'll give you almost enough money to buy a burrito!" deals correlating IQ with sexual prowess or some shit. It sounded like a hilarious project, so I just had to do it. Fucking cleaned house on it and walked away with a score a bit more than 2 standard deviations above the average for that test. I came to the conclusion that everyone else must either be incredibly dumb, or the entire concept of an IQ test is flawed like crazy. I suspect it's the latter, because I'm a god damned idiot most of the time.


  • :belt_onion:

    @PJH said:

    @da Doctah said:
    I took the real MENSA test (actually two tests) about two years ago. 
    MENSA don't actually have their own tests. They use other people's (and will accept scores from tests administered elsewhere.)

    @da Doctah said:
    They don't tell you your score, only whether you qualified or not.
    For good reason. They're not interested in your intelligence, just on your ability to pass the tests:

    It is important to note that the tests are given for the purpose of admission into Mensa and not to quantify intelligence.

    Passing an Mensa test is very easy. Last time I gave it a try, I answered the questions and clicked the "evaluate" button. The results were immediate without a postback happening, so I had a quick look and it turned out that the answers were hardcoded in Javascript. So when redoing the test, I scored maximum points as well.

    My ability to pass tests is enormous but obviously I don't want to be associated with a bunch of Mensa morons



  • @Weng said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    MENSA is a club for people who like to brag about being smart. Actually being smart isn't required. (On the contrary-- if I had a genuine IQ result of 120, I'd be fucking pissed at the MENSA asshole who walks around telling everybody he has a 130 IQ. Sure, on the uncalibrated test, my cat can score 130.)
    I took a calibrated test once in college - one of those "be our research guinea pig and we'll give you almost enough money to buy a burrito!" deals correlating IQ with sexual prowess or some shit. It sounded like a hilarious project, so I just had to do it. Fucking cleaned house on it and walked away with a score a bit more than 2 standard deviations above the average for that test. I came to the conclusion that everyone else must either be incredibly dumb, or the entire concept of an IQ test is flawed like crazy. I suspect it's the latter, because I'm a god damned idiot most of the time.

    I agree, IQ test are a bunk, heck even when I use a test in english I manage to score too high, also it is weird that most charts stop at 150, what the hell is wrong with that?

    Hmmm, this thread is bringing back sad memories.



  • @Blakeyrat said:

    ...Politicians are smart...

    Not really, by that definition all past US presidents are smart and that is not so..

    @cfgauss said:

    ...There is no belief in science...

    Not really, if you can quote Heisenberg and say that...

    Scientist belief in a lot of stuff that has not yet being proven



  • @dhromed said:

    That's a thing Blakey really hates, and rightly so, so it's contributing to the two of you talking right past eachother.

    Yah, I'm also not as coherent at 1:00 AM. The real problem is that I don't believe in such a thing as a single "intelligence" that can be measured with a number, and it seems everybody else in this thread (or at least the self-proclaimed intelligent ones) do. cfgauss says in one sentence intelligence is defined by correlations to other factors, then in the next sentence he's talking about it like it's an RPG stat again. And the idea that anybody believes you can be both stupid and persuasive boggles the mind.

    I really would like to hear the string theory elevator pitch, though... the more people refuse to give me one, the more I think it's just psuedo-science nonsense that makes no predictions and provides no insights.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    And the idea that anybody believes you can be both stupid and persuasive boggles the mind.
     

    Well, there's you.



  • @dhromed said:

    That's a thing Blakey really hates, and rightly so,
    I think it's more that Blakey has a well-honed self-pitying-bullshit-rationalisation detector, and his, like mine, is flashing every colour under the sun at CFGauss's nauseating nonsense. Honestly, kids, if you have the world's tiniest dick, there's nothing to be gained by trying to persuade everyone that tiny dicks are just fine, particularly when as part of your argument you make a big point out of how incredibly tiny your dick actually is.

    Oh, and an elevator pitch for string theory: 'it's a bunch of stuff that other, important, theories seem to imply'.



  • @cfgauss said:

    People don't study this subject for decades to become competent in it so I can fucking explain why it's right as an "elevator pitch," that's inconceivably retarded.  You want to learn why it's right, go to fucking school and spend the next ten years learning quantum field theory, general relativity, and high energy particle theory so you can understand what the words I would use to describe it even mean and then I will consider it. 

    @cfgauss said:

    Most people can't tell the difference between a brilliant person and someone of their own intelligence, so when an excited young brilliant person comes along who wants to learn something cool, they're treated with derision by people because they think "when I was his age I couldn't understand that so obviously he can't really understand it, he must only be pretending to understand it, or he must not actually understand the details." This is bad when those people are e.g., professors or employers, because then you get into that situation where they repeatedly force them to "prove" they know by, e.g., making them retake classes they took years ago (oh he took that as a kid he must have forgotten it by now!) or that they've taught (he couldn't really have understood the topic back then) or just force them to do menial work because they refuse to believe that person is capable.

    Ha-hm.



  • @cfgauss said:

    @stratos said:

    When i say shitty traits, I do not mean high IQ people are shitty, or I somehow think it is their fault or whatever.


    I know!

    What I mean when I say shitty traits, is that high IQ people apparently are prone to develop traits that in a business environment can be seen as shitty.  Perhaps in acedemic wonderland you don't have deadlines or clients or whatever. But i'm reasonably sure that when you have an average job, like say software engineer. The traits apparently commonly developed by high IQ people are quite shitty demonstrably.

    We have deadlines, we need to be pragmatic, things don't need to be perfect and don't have to be perfect. And no you can't take a whole day to read the 500 page specification to this API just because you need to make one or two calls to it, just skim it.

     

    What I'm saying is just that the traits correlated with IQ have nothing to do with the traits you're complaining about, and any perceived existence of those traits is due to miscommunication/misunderstanding from one party or the other, or due to traits they only incidentally possess (or due to the fact that they aren't actually smart! Being perfectionist and slow and stupid is certainly a problem ;)).

    And there are plenty of deadlines in academia, and aside from responding to e-mails in a timely manner (or sometimes at all) most good scientists don't have much of a problem with them. (Though the administrative people certainly do!)

     

    Well I am only saying what i've been told by some high IQ person, annecdotal evidence at best. But they align with other tid bits of information that i have read or otherwise heard.  Anyway scaresly matters.
    Why I actually reiterated my point after you and blakey took off, was becauseI got the impression you where saying

    No, those traits are not shitty   (loosly translated from "And, anyway, smart people develop traits that look like these because ... bla bla" ).

    instead of

    No, those traits are not common among high IQ people

    However brievity is certainly not one of your strong points and patience not one of mine, so mis-communication isn't that unexpected.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     Jesus Budda-Fucking Moses, guys, I think this one's hit an all new wall-o-text quotion.

    .

    .

    .

    .

    I did like the Temple of Bunk line, though.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    I did like the Temple of Bunk line, though.

    Woo.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The real problem is that I don't believe in such a thing as a single "intelligence" that can be measured with a number, and it seems everybody else in this thread (or at least the self-proclaimed intelligent ones) do.
     

    I take it you subscribe to something closer to the 8 intelligences model (don't remember it's name but the one with spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, kinesthetic (sp?), language, math, and some other thing that I'm forgetting right now).  Only some of those can be tested in some standardized test form which can lead people that do well on standardized tests to dismiss (or maybe just overlook) the others.



  • @locallunatic said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    The real problem is that I don't believe in such a thing as a single "intelligence" that can be measured with a number, and it seems everybody else in this thread (or at least the self-proclaimed intelligent ones) do.
     

    I take it you subscribe to something closer to the 8 intelligences model (don't remember it's name but the one with spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, kinesthetic (sp?), language, math, and some other thing that I'm forgetting right now).  Only some of those can be tested in some standardized test form which can lead people that do well on standardized tests to dismiss (or maybe just overlook) the others.

    To be honest, I'm not familiar with it. But if it takes into account that convincing millions of people to do something is intelligent, then I'm all for it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @locallunatic said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    The real problem is that I don't believe in such a thing as a single "intelligence" that can be measured with a number, and it seems everybody else in this thread (or at least the self-proclaimed intelligent ones) do.
     

    I take it you subscribe to something closer to the 8 intelligences model (don't remember it's name but the one with spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, kinesthetic (sp?), language, math, and some other thing that I'm forgetting right now).  Only some of those can be tested in some standardized test form which can lead people that do well on standardized tests to dismiss (or maybe just overlook) the others.

    To be honest, I'm not familiar with it. But if it takes into account convincing millions of dumb people to do something intelligent, then I'm all for it.

    FTFY

    btw  by that metric the Pied Piper from Hamelin is the smartest human ever



  • @serguey123 said:

    btw  by that metric the Pied Piper from Hamelin is the smartest human ever

    When you build a hypnotic flute that works on animals and humans using only medieval materials, you will be as smart as he was.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @serguey123 said:
    btw  by that metric the Pied Piper from Hamelin is the smartest human ever
    When you build a hypnotic flute that works on animals and humans using only medieval materials, you will be as smart as he was.

    Nah, it was probably "Made in Taiwan" like everything else this days



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @locallunatic said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    The real problem is that I don't believe in such a thing as a single "intelligence" that can be measured with a number, and it seems everybody else in this thread (or at least the self-proclaimed intelligent ones) do.
     

    I take it you subscribe to something closer to the 8 intelligences model (don't remember it's name but the one with spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, kinesthetic (sp?), language, math, and some other thing that I'm forgetting right now).  Only some of those can be tested in some standardized test form which can lead people that do well on standardized tests to dismiss (or maybe just overlook) the others.

    To be honest, I'm not familiar with it. But if it takes into account that convincing millions of people to do something is intelligent, then I'm all for it.

     

    Quick google-fu found me a wikipedia entry on it.



  • Can't we all just ignore smart, and focus on the really dumb.



  • @stratos said:

    Can't we all just ignore smart, and focus on the really dumb.

    Depends on how do you propose we focus on them



  • @serguey123 said:

    @stratos said:

    Can't we all just ignore smart, and focus on the really dumb.

    Depends on how do you propose we focus on them

     

    Police blotters that make you scratch your head and ask "why would someone do that?" are a good place to start, though it would rob me of much entertainment.



  • @locallunatic said:

    @serguey123 said:

    @stratos said:

    Can't we all just ignore smart, and focus on the really dumb.

    Depends on how do you propose we focus on them

     

    Police blotters that make you scratch your head and ask "why would someone do that?" are a good place to start, though it would rob me of much entertainment.

    Finding them is not hard, what you do when you find them is



  • @serguey123 said:

    @stratos said:

    Can't we all just ignore smart, and focus on the really dumb.

    Depends on how do you propose we focus on them

     

    Well, we could all start watching C-SPAN.


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