Feymann got his Nobel prize for making funny drawings of quantum physics. IQ isn’t the limiting factor for that feat. It’s willingness to pursue ideas that other people weren’t willing to pursue.
My post was a bit tongue in check. I don’t want to minimize the fact that Feynman was sophisticated. The main issue is that he didn’t compete were other competed.
In an intellectual field where everybody tries roughly to do the same thing IQ picks winners. Again I simplify.
Feymann had a quality of approaching problems differently then the rest. Feymann had a way to motivate himself to engage deeply in a playful way with physics at a level where there no obvious use in going down a certain path of thoughts beyond having fun.
This is a little misleading. Feynman diagrams are simple, sure, but they represent difficult calculations that weren’t understood at the time he invented them. There was certainly genius involved, not just perseverance.
Much more likely his IQ result was unreliable, as gwern thinks.
Feymann got his Nobel prize for making funny drawings of quantum physics. IQ isn’t the limiting factor for that feat. It’s willingness to pursue ideas that other people weren’t willing to pursue.
I think you may be considerably understating the sophistication and the mathematical content of what Feynman did to get the Nobel Prize.
My post was a bit tongue in check. I don’t want to minimize the fact that Feynman was sophisticated. The main issue is that he didn’t compete were other competed.
In an intellectual field where everybody tries roughly to do the same thing IQ picks winners. Again I simplify. Feymann had a quality of approaching problems differently then the rest. Feymann had a way to motivate himself to engage deeply in a playful way with physics at a level where there no obvious use in going down a certain path of thoughts beyond having fun.
This is a little misleading. Feynman diagrams are simple, sure, but they represent difficult calculations that weren’t understood at the time he invented them. There was certainly genius involved, not just perseverance.
Much more likely his IQ result was unreliable, as gwern thinks.