Actually, to expand on challenging yourself—when I see someone smart—I don’t think much of them. Majority of smart people never achieve anything noteworthy; they’re nothing like geniuses we see when we look into the past and grade by accomplishment. You only call them geniuses because they do well on a test on which geniuses do well. If I see a smart person who challenges himself—there is always a lot of things this person tried, some successfully, some stalled (if you always succeed you aren’t choosing tasks hard enough!) - those people can go very far.
The notion that school must challenge people like him, that’s rather new. If you look at all the accomplished scientists—none of them were challenged by the school system; they had their own labs in the basements, doing stuff; they were studying mathematics at university level when they were 12 (and actually doing exercises, not ‘i’ve read a book, okay’); that sort of stuff. Nobody was baby-fed baby challenges. To do all enrichment things is to study all the advanced math (linear algebra, calculus, statistics, etc) at age 12; you can do that even in a fairly backwards place. In advanced place—there will be adults baby feeding you baby challenges of no importance, wasting your time doing what they think is accomplishments appropriate for your age, but what doesn’t train you anything. Science fairs for example. There’s no use doing baby science; the genius needs to study important stuff (math mostly), and perhaps mess with idk electronics in the basement, and then he’ll be more than well equipped to do actual science better than adults with degrees (because more intelligent).
Does he have some sort of lab in basement doing interesting stuff out of curiosity? Or alternatively, making computer programs because he wants to see if he could? Or something similar?
Majority of smart people never achieve anything noteworthy; they’re nothing like geniuses we see when we look into the past and grade by accomplishment.
Yep, IQ is only one of the components of genius, as that word is commonly used.
Yea. The IQ test is pretty much designed with attempt to ignore ability to learn; it does not test person’s ability to e.g. build searchable databases of huge volumes of information, through the life.
Ultimately: the geniuses are within top 1% or better on many categories, not just IQ test, and while someone with high IQ is much more likely to be a genius than average, the odds of high IQ person being a genius in the pre-IQ-test sense of the word are still very low, in the one in thousands level.
Furthermore, all tests like that suffer from a sort of over-fitting at the extreme high range. When it is pretty close to 100, you have people who are more intelligent solve the test better; when it is past 150 or so, the extra ability is gained via factors not so related to intelligence. E.g. with the progressive matrices and other means of testing where the correct answer is highly subjective, at the normal range, the gains are realisable by seeing fairly obvious patterns but at high range gains may be only realisable by mental similarity to the test maker. Intelligence can not predict which one of the alternatives the test maker favoured, but similar intelligence with similar cultural exposure can. It may well be that past the intelligence level of test makers (considering the time factor), the IQ test stops working. After all, for all the questions on IQ test, someone with not very extraordinary abilities must know an answer. And the answers are not computer-generated so far.
Imagine people with IQ of 80 having to make IQ test, as an intuition pump. It is kind of obvious that the test wouldn’t work terribly well past 100 or so. You can’t test for genius level intelligence; all you can do is let genius convince you with some real accomplishments, but even this can fail.
Actually, to expand on challenging yourself—when I see someone smart—I don’t think much of them. Majority of smart people never achieve anything noteworthy; they’re nothing like geniuses we see when we look into the past and grade by accomplishment. You only call them geniuses because they do well on a test on which geniuses do well. If I see a smart person who challenges himself—there is always a lot of things this person tried, some successfully, some stalled (if you always succeed you aren’t choosing tasks hard enough!) - those people can go very far.
The notion that school must challenge people like him, that’s rather new. If you look at all the accomplished scientists—none of them were challenged by the school system; they had their own labs in the basements, doing stuff; they were studying mathematics at university level when they were 12 (and actually doing exercises, not ‘i’ve read a book, okay’); that sort of stuff. Nobody was baby-fed baby challenges. To do all enrichment things is to study all the advanced math (linear algebra, calculus, statistics, etc) at age 12; you can do that even in a fairly backwards place. In advanced place—there will be adults baby feeding you baby challenges of no importance, wasting your time doing what they think is accomplishments appropriate for your age, but what doesn’t train you anything. Science fairs for example. There’s no use doing baby science; the genius needs to study important stuff (math mostly), and perhaps mess with idk electronics in the basement, and then he’ll be more than well equipped to do actual science better than adults with degrees (because more intelligent).
Does he have some sort of lab in basement doing interesting stuff out of curiosity? Or alternatively, making computer programs because he wants to see if he could? Or something similar?
Yep, IQ is only one of the components of genius, as that word is commonly used.
There’s a good explanation on the genius knol
Yea. The IQ test is pretty much designed with attempt to ignore ability to learn; it does not test person’s ability to e.g. build searchable databases of huge volumes of information, through the life.
Ultimately: the geniuses are within top 1% or better on many categories, not just IQ test, and while someone with high IQ is much more likely to be a genius than average, the odds of high IQ person being a genius in the pre-IQ-test sense of the word are still very low, in the one in thousands level.
Furthermore, all tests like that suffer from a sort of over-fitting at the extreme high range. When it is pretty close to 100, you have people who are more intelligent solve the test better; when it is past 150 or so, the extra ability is gained via factors not so related to intelligence. E.g. with the progressive matrices and other means of testing where the correct answer is highly subjective, at the normal range, the gains are realisable by seeing fairly obvious patterns but at high range gains may be only realisable by mental similarity to the test maker. Intelligence can not predict which one of the alternatives the test maker favoured, but similar intelligence with similar cultural exposure can. It may well be that past the intelligence level of test makers (considering the time factor), the IQ test stops working. After all, for all the questions on IQ test, someone with not very extraordinary abilities must know an answer. And the answers are not computer-generated so far.
Imagine people with IQ of 80 having to make IQ test, as an intuition pump. It is kind of obvious that the test wouldn’t work terribly well past 100 or so. You can’t test for genius level intelligence; all you can do is let genius convince you with some real accomplishments, but even this can fail.