kfisherx wrote:
Page 121 talks about the methods that are commonly used in court. My shrink says 10 IQ points is easily worth 1 million dollars. It is apparently defensible.
Most of those methods still rely on testing the person, something that cannot be done with Einstein, as he is dead and did not take any IQ tests. The only one that doesn't rely on that, is using age, sex, race, occupation, and a few other variables and calculating what the average score for such a person would have been. That's the only possible one that would apply to Einstein, and yet, since Einstein lived in a very different time period than this, and since average IQ scores for those demographics have changed with time (and it's not clear whether all that demographic information existed back when he was alive), it still probably doesn't apply to him, or not very well, anyway.
And it's
highly unclear as to whether people who
think they know what his IQ score was, have used any of these court-approved methods or not. All we hear is what his estimated IQ supposedly was, and frankly I've heard a
very large range of scores used, and it's not clear which, if any, is "right". Aside from that, if he was neurologically atypical (which he well might have been, and I think there were parts of his brain that were grossly different from normal, so even if there's no diagnosis possible, it's still pretty clear that he was not neurologically typical in the broadest sense of the word), these methods of estimating his score are more likely to be inaccurate. So, as I said, his score might have been much lower if he'd actually taken the tests in question, than many people would predict it as.
As far as other people on this thread -- "hearing" somewhere what Einstein's IQ was, doesn't make it real. He never took an IQ test in his lifetime. Which makes nearly all of even these court-approved methods, impossible to use (because they rely either on IQ subtest scores, or on other standardized tests that he has not taken). The only court-approved method that
is possible to use on him, may have been inaccurate because of the fact that he lived in a different time period than the current norms apply to (the norms change with time), and also because of the fact that he had obvious neurological atypicalities (by which I mean, from looking at his brain, not from guessing based on his history), and people who are neurologically atypical do
not have such predictable scores on IQ tests (can have scores much higher or lower than an estimate based on the usual norms would predict). Plus, it's not clear that the methods people used to arrive at the wide variety of scores people attribute to him (some of which are actually higher than this boy), are actually any of the methods I just discussed at all, which would make them even
more inaccurate.
And that's all presuming that there's such a thing as an "accurate IQ" in the first place, which is not something I believe (because I do not believe an IQ is actually a part of a person, it's simply a score on a test, no test, no IQ). BTW, if you search around the Internet for "Einstein's IQ", you'll see a lot of people asking what his IQ is, and getting the answer basically, "Einstein never took an IQ test, so we will never know what his IQ was." Which is far more correct than people just guessing at a "genius level" IQ score essentially because of the fact that his name has become synonymous with genius (even though the kind of genius he had, doesn't necessarily correlate to the kind of "genius" tested on IQ tests... very few people with IQ scores in the "genius level" range would qualify as a "genius" the way Einstein is said to be).
I think some people take IQs
waaaaay too seriously.
_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
26 Mar 2011, 5:10 am
