This is very surprising to me. How should I/you update?
Perhaps the IQ test was administered poorly.
I think that high g/IQ is still really important to success in various fields. (Stephen Hsu points out that more physicists have IQs of 150 than 140, etc. In other words, that marginal IQ matters even past 140.).
Feynman was younger than 15 when he took it, and very near this factoid in Gleick’s bio, he recounts Feynman asking about very basic algebra (2^x=4) and wondering why anything found it hard—the IQ is mentioned immediately before the section on ‘grammar school’, or middle school, implying that the ‘school IQ test’ was done well before he entered high school, putting him at much younger than 15. (15 is important because Feynman had mastered calculus by age 15, Gleick says, so he wouldn’t be asking his father why algebra is useful at age >15.) - Given that Feynman was born in 1918, this implies the IQ test was done around 1930 or earlier. Given that it was done by the New York City school district, this implies also that it was one of the ‘ratio’ based IQ tests—utterly outdated and incorrect by modern standards. - Finally, it’s well known that IQ tests are very unreliable in childhood; kids can easily bounce around compared to their stable adult scores.
So, it was a bad test, which even under ideal circumstances is unreliable & prone to error, and administered in a mass fashion and likely not by a genuine psychometrician.
A related question, concerning Hsu’s point: How much can historical data be trusted to reflect current trends? During the 50′s and 60′s, physics (especially nuclear physics and the closely-related field of particle physics) were “hot topics” and everyone “wanted in”; it’s not hard to imagine that the very best and brightest people entered the field during that time. But is that true anymore? It’s possible that as the desirability of a physics career has decreased, the average level of intelligence in the physics community has also decreased, and that the reputation that physics has for being “the smartest of the smart” may just be a leftover from a previous era.
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.
I recently found out that Feynmann only had an IQ of 125.
This is very surprising to me. How should I/you update?
Perhaps the IQ test was administered poorly.
I think that high g/IQ is still really important to success in various fields. (Stephen Hsu points out that more physicists have IQs of 150 than 140, etc. In other words, that marginal IQ matters even past 140.).
-- gwern
IQ is iffy enough as it is, it was even iffier back in the 1930s, and Feynmann doesn’t strike me as the sort who’d take IQ tests seriously.
A related question, concerning Hsu’s point: How much can historical data be trusted to reflect current trends? During the 50′s and 60′s, physics (especially nuclear physics and the closely-related field of particle physics) were “hot topics” and everyone “wanted in”; it’s not hard to imagine that the very best and brightest people entered the field during that time. But is that true anymore? It’s possible that as the desirability of a physics career has decreased, the average level of intelligence in the physics community has also decreased, and that the reputation that physics has for being “the smartest of the smart” may just be a leftover from a previous era.
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.