Monday, January 2, 2017

Child prodigies


Old news but interesting. Indeed, awesome.

Twelve-year-old Nicole Barr, who lives in Essex in the UK, has scored 162 on an IQ test - beating renowned geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking by two points.

Fiona Macdonald

Also

Another one a month later. Lydia Sebastian, who is also from Essex. Something in the water?

12-year-old girl scores 162 in the Mensa IQ test

Another British girl, Alma Deutscher, from Surrey, rocks out with a full-length opera.

The Guardian
Hannah Ellis-Petersen

3 comments:

NeilW said...

The child test has a higher top score than the adult one due to adjustments.

An adult can only get a maximum IQ of 161 on the Cattell III B test. The Stanford-Binet goes up to 170.

But it makes good copy.

John said...

Not that it matters, but today's tests are surely dramatically different to the much earlier tests.

Whether Einstein was dyslexic or not is a moot point. He just couldn't be bothered to take any tests seriously. Smart man, Einstein. Admittedly not as smart as Louie Gohmert and today's GOPhers, but then no one is.

As Neil points out there are ludicrous discrepancies. I took one and got a perfect score, yet it seemed rather low In comparison with such geniuses as Sharon Stone. I took another a little later and got one question wrong, yet a near doubling of the result in the previous test. Every test I've taken have been, to my mind, pretty simple, and if the tests can be done in a fraction of the time that is allotted, then the tests aren't that difficult. The tests are also wildly consistent, whether it's the metrics, the supposed difficulty or many other things.

All this misses the biggest problem with IQ tests. They're nonsense. What do they in fact test? That you grew up in a middle class family and speak in a certain way: that's the verbal part taken care of. The verbal section is clearly skewed in that fashion, and linguists tend to agree. A certain degree of affluence accounts for whether you had books in the house and educated parents to help you with your education. And if you've had anything like a good mathematics or science education, you'll zing that part of the test.

Even after all this is taken into account, there's a huge complication that is hardly ever admitted. When you ask the person who got the question "wrong" what their thinking was, you usually find that their logic was in fact good. The question could have had that answer, but the middle class "educated" examiner thinks differently. No wonder Einstein got a low score.

Another reason they don't mean a thing is that you can be sure Mankiw and Krugman, possibly even Kudlow and Schiff, have staggeringly high IQs! Yet, as everybody here knows, they know nothing. Or as Magic Mike would say, NOTHING.

With that, Happy New Year everybody!

Peter Pan said...

Those on the "high" end of the Bell Curve tend to become misfits.
How well do IQ tests measure creativity?