Thank you for your well thought out responses. I look forward to reading your posts; they are a delight.
Well that's a bit of a "duh" really, 95-96% of the population caps out at 120 IQ. The minimum requirement for Mensa acceptance is (generically, as tests vary in scoring methodology) set at 132 which is the 98th Percentile (meaning they score higher than 98% of the population) so I think you are actually a bit high in your estimates honestly.
120-130 would equate to the level of intelligence of say Presidents Ford, Eisenhower, and Truman vs Hitler at 141 or Dahmer at 145. Einstein and Hawking level is 160ish. Terence Tao, a (literal and figural) mathematical anomaly, hits 230.
Estimating IQ across decades and thousands of miles and cultural boundries is kind of a futile thing. I simply interpret it as a way of saying so-and-so was smart, but this other so-and-so was a bit smarter. Its kind of like the hardness scale that has these arbitrary values at whole digits defined as how hard some particular mineral is, like topaz, diamond or ruby.
Mohs scale of mineral hardness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Things that fall in between are given fractional equivalents but it has no real measure, its all just relative to other standard hardnesses.
And also a persons IQ varies from one day to the next. A persons IQ is like their time in the 40 meter dash; it is their measure of achievement on a particular day and that is about all really. I have known some people who test in the 140ish range and they are very ordinary people otherwise.
There is an "infliction" of sorts upon the higher intelligences that causes many social issues, which if left to their own devices, are oft turned to "evil" means. For the highly intelligent, emotions are oft regarded as useless impediments, thus buried, denied, and ignored - which in itself leads to a state of lacking empathy for others oft noticed in those who commit crimes.
Intelligence is not a component of being a moral person. In fact, I often think there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and moral rectitude.
On the other hand, IQ isn't everything; there is a lot to be said for the argument of "book smart" vs "street smart." To example, my last official (Mensa application of 1993) IQ was noted at 140, this does not preclude me, however, from being a total moron in certain other aspects of life that most "less intelligent" folks are easily able to handle. For example I cannot maintain a "routine" /at all/, things like remembering to take out the trash every week on trash day completely eludes me (I have to have an alarm to remind me,) I also cannot remember names of people despite having a near photographic memory, and my memory is very selective so, for example, I can watch a movie 100 times and /not/ really recall the outcome heh In the larger scope, when confronted with an "emotional" situation, my instinct is oft "wrong" in that it is usually completely devoid of emotion; it is not until I've had time to consider something that I can determine, or even perhaps decide, how I "feel" about it. As a result, my thinking is "slow" in emotional situations; in an emergency I won't panic, but I'm also not as likely to even /consider/ helping someone else or saving someone else's life before it's too late for them. Emotionally weak and intellectually strong is a less "desirable," perhaps even arguably a less "stable" state, than to be more equally apportioned between the two.
We all think abit differently from each other and from our own selves depending on the time and situation. And of course I am sure you are aware that there are many different kinds of 'intelligence' from spatial reasoning to linear logic, to memory to linguistic glibness, etc.
Back when our society was primarily facing objective challenges like building bridges across rivers, low cost shelters, more efficient farming methods, etc, our measure of intelligence was more toward objective criteria and reflected good memory, spatial reasoning and so forth. Now that our success is far more dependent on how well one can spin their accomplishments or just make them up from scratch like Brian Williams, so linguistic intelligence, social intelligence and such are far more valued as so much of our societies challenges today are completely subjective. Our values systems are more and more relativistic as a result. This gets more and more subjective and spin oriented till a crisis comes along that forces society to again value objective skills, if the society gets through the crisis at all. Check out the history of the Byzantine Empire and their various cycles of degeneracy and reform.
Yea I saw that comment. However, thinking "outside the box" is not something that can really be taught, it is more learned through experience. It is the difference between procedural knowledge learned from experience in doing things vs declarative knowledge that is learned from a book. It is not at all unexpected for students without any real world experience to lag in "out of the box" thinking because what one deals with in school is inherently declarative. Schools teach declaratively as a foundation for later procedural knowledge to build upon.
But in this case the box is defined by what the widespread consensus is for what is true and what is not and that range is pretty narrow, basically everything from neoMarxist radicals to anarchists and Post Modern Nihilism.
A rough example of the difference between procedural and declarative knowledge; one is learning to write a computer program and the teacher tells them their assignment is to code the most efficient way to output "Hello World." The textbook gives 12 different examples that one can use to accomplish the task of outputting "hello world". However, if the student does not test the textbook codes on their own, they will not be able to find the most "efficient" way of doing so.
And I would hope that there was some kind of criteria for evaluating what the instructor means by 'more efficient'. In a class I once had in C++ we had to write a program that would load a file and sort the beginning of each new line alphabetically. The most efficient code was a guy who simply ran a DOS system command to sort the file; took about a dozen lines of code, lol, but wasn't what the instructor was wanting.
While I agree 100% that book learning has flaws, it is the best way we logistically have to disseminate knowledge to students.
Well, I disagree. It is the easiest, but we really need to challenge ourselves to get at least a dribble of experience in a subject or else we are not really speaking with primary knowledge but secondary knowledge.
Who understands woodworking better; the man who has read five books or the man who has built five different pieces of furniture himself by hand using all the techniques he had read about and then improvised on them?
But the advantage the person of a lesser skill level has over those of the next level of skill up, is that if they can study that persons game and see the strategies and prep for that specific person, they can win and pull the upset.
In this case it wasn't even required to study the Harvard teams style and techniques. The prisoners only had to think for themselves.
But when you think about the fact that our Oligarchy takes its next generation of leaders from these elites schools one thing is easy enough to predict; we are fucked.
