It's more that actual is a better measure of potential than a test for potential would be. There's little about IQ tests or similar tests that necessarily measure intelligence - they just happen to be the best we can do when we try to measure and compare potential cognitive ability of millions of kids in a couple of hours. Any attempt to extrapolate much further to narrowly pin down a person's ability based on these tests is unwise. I actually wrote quite a bit on this topic, so some quotes:

Smarter than Obama no way, but thanks for asking. Even if you have a high IQ, that guarantees little about your intelligence when compared to another clever guy; IQ may be used for probabilistic assumptions when comparing a group of people; but even then, I believe in the theory that after some threshold (around 130), IQ is of little help.

This is pretty close to a state secret. Got a source?

There's probably a lot of truth to this. However, at those levels, so much of talent is specialized. I am willing to bet there are a ton of things that require intelligence that Obama would have no chance to do no matter what training or tutoring that you are capable of, and most likely, the reverse is true. How do you tell who is smarter in such a situation? It becomes very murky at that point. However, with a large enough gap in IQ, you should be able to mop anyone under the table in just about anything (assuming you were trained properly, etc...). Obviously this would exclude pure creative tasks.

Just googled and saw it in a few places. Could be complete garbage, or the truth, I have no idea. It was the best data point I could find. Take it with a grain of salt.

You sound smart.

+1

I actually respect you more now that I know you didn't go to law school.

I think too many law schools teach "group think".
In law school they teach that wheat that is:
*Planted in Ohio
*Grown in Ohio
*Harvested in Ohio
*Consumed in Ohio
is...<drum roll>...interstate commerce. Not intrastate commerce. Say what!!!???
This decision was critical in growing federal govt power at the expense of the states.
The poor farmer wanted to grow the wheat to feed his chickens on HIS land...he was ordered to destroy this wheat or pay a fine. Yeah...detroying food. Yep, that sounds like a great law. I wonder which nitwit president made a law to stop food from being grown. He must have been a Repub president.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

The Supreme Court made the same decision on California Marijuana Laws.
Take the Wickard decision, change the state from Ohio to California, change wheat to marijuana, and we see another violation of a state's right to regulate intrastate commerce...

And how did Justice Clarence Thomas rule in the California Marijuana case?
He ruled for the potheads...which was the correct decision...but Thomas was in the minority....Hah!...a pun Get it?... MINORITY. LOL! I crack myself up.

While we are grasping at straws over Obama's brain. Let's use a similar technique.
Ron Paul -
BS Biology, Gettysburg College
MD Duke University
Businessman
Over 20 years as a ball breaking Congressman
Has written over 10 quality books etc.

You just went down a notch.

At least you made an excuse.



Gave almost everyone a seven. -1 for you.

-1 for you. (at least he mentioned the MD)

Has too much confidence in posters.

Skewed all his ratings toward his ignorant liberal bias. Nicely done. -1 for you.

I let all the 9's slide due to margin of error.

But could you know that someone has more potential than basically the best QB ever based on some basic tests of raw athleticism given in high school?


The only reason why IQ tests are considered meaningful is that they are - loosely speaking - correlated with success. Barack Obama is one of the most successful people in the world. If you don't believe that variance in success beyond that which is predicted by IQ or similar tests isn't correlated with intelligence, you went from using IQ tests because they help explain real-world phenomena to blind faith in IQ tests.


I'm more talking about deep understanding of human emotions and behavior, as opposed to merely ability to find and apply patterns in a structured setting. By far the hardest task most people face is governance of one's own and others' emotions. And despite what EQ people say, the task is fundamentally cognitive. It's strongly correlated with what we consider intelligence in many fields. I'd argue that IQ at the low and medium range is correlated with success because it measures capacity for understanding emotions by proxy. At the low range, IQ tests reveal cognitive defects that may prevent such understanding and at the medium range, they test for past success at learning social conventions and other cognitive skills which in turn require understanding of and successful manipulation of one's own emotions. But as the scores get higher, you don't start getting people who are truly great in terms of understanding one's own and others' emotions, but rather people who just happen to have their preferences optimized for the particular test. Hence, lack of correlation between success and IQ scores at the higher end.


By your description, you guys are not that different in terms of what you excel at.


I was basically this type of person at one point in my life and I think those skills are seriously overrated in assessing overall intelligence. While it's possible that I'm biased against these accomplishments because they are easy for me, I think it's more that there's a good cultural explanation for why we conflate a certain personality attribute with overall cognitive ability, when we use the term "smart" and bother not to correct misconceptions. As for your contentions, I don't know if I'm smarter than Obama, but if I am, it's very unlikely that it's by a significant amount. If he is smarter, it's somewhat more likely that it's by a significant amount. This likely holds for anyone else you put up as possibly smarter than Obama.

In the end, we're all just part of a larger cognitive system on many levels and specific differences are fairly meaningless. We're ultimately not measured by individual cognitive excellence, but ability to contribute to collective cognitive excellence. This is true at every level of human organization. Discussion of intelligence is always discussion of potential and while it can be interesting, it can be divorced from reality rather quickly, when we don't carefully consider what we're assuming. No one gets to live multiple lives.

I'm curious if people think Obama or Phil Ivey is smarter.

i personally do not but i also think a lot of people mistake public speaking for intelligence

Best QB ever, no. A lot of those things cannot be measured. However, we can very accurately predict the potential of basketball players as young as 7th grade, for example. Basketball requires more raw talent than an NFL QB would. A high school player has to develop his body tremendously, and that is of course harder to predict.

Not sure why you need to predict someone as the GOAT, though. Predicting that of course is tough. Predicting "probable NFL starter someday" is a lot easier.

Really? Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, Sean Hannity, etc... are all considered very successful people. Sarah Palin too. But not because they are smart, of course. Of course there is a correlation, which is useful, but success is such a subjective term. Many people with extremely high IQs are not very successful at all precisely because they are too smart to understand or interact with the masses. Look at that guy who has a 200 IQ and is a bouncer.

100% agree. Again, I'm not judging successfulness of people, but intelligence. People who go into sales and excel at it often times are not incredibly technically smart. They are great at reading people, reading emotions, and manipulating situations. Obviously this is a skill that some people have, but I'd say it is a different skill than raw intelligence. It certainly is extremely valuable and worthy and all that, just not what I was looking at in this case. Politicians, in general, are the ultimate salespeople. They sell themselves instead of a product. You can be a very successful politician and not be that intelligent (but still intelligent enough to not do anything stupid). But you damn well better be a master salesperson.

Well, yes and no. He's not a world class opera singer or something that different from me. There are many intellectual tasks that one of us is vastly superior to the other, and it's not even close.

Absolutely. What crushes a ton of very intelligent people is their lack of ability to relate to others and lack of ability to cooperate. That's why so many of them end up being recluses or working on their own rather than cooperating. And of course, this makes them far less valuable to a society than a somewhat intelligent person who can understand the masses and find some need to be filled. These two types of people often times need each other. Look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was highly technical and could do tons of things Jobs could never do. But Woz could never actually sell the vision that Jobs had to the masses. He didn't quite see the big picture as much as Jobs did. In terms of raw intelligence I'd rate Jobs as lower, but much more "rare" and "valuable" of a person to benefiting society. Technical wizards, while rare, can be found all over. Being able to utilize and direct that talent is a completely different type of beast and much more rare.

How is a very humble person with a 180 IQ supposed to answer?

SRY TD, naturally due to my brilliance I figured I already knew what your OP said before I read it.

I'm not saying potential can't be measured at all - I'm against the use of simple tests largely divorced from reality and that actual success in this reality often tells you a lot more about potential than any measure of potential could ever do.


Sure - is there any high school QB that's projectable as an NFL starter? How much better do they have to be at the high school level than actual NFL starters were, for them to project to be better?


We're measuring success in a very different way and the intelligence of those people is somewhat underrated.


Sarah Palin got an 8 from me by the way. Instead of success, you can use excellence at a range of important cognitive tasks.


I think we went over this - "too smart to understand" is an oxymoron. In most cases, when someone is "too smart" to understand to interact with the masses, it's just a euphemism for describing serious deficiencies in social skills. Deficiencies in any cognitive task are not a positive, when we're trying to assess overall intelligence.


I think you may have glossed over: "the task is fundamentally cognitive." I'm saying that this task requires raw intelligence exactly the same way math requires raw intelligence. More importantly, this is basically what our intelligence evolved for and what distinguishes us from lower animals. Understanding complex behavior, at the individual and organizational level is absolutely at the core of what makes humans intelligent. Btw, this isn't about being a "salesperson" - it's more about being a leader.