Are there any true geniuses here? (IQ over 155)

Post Reply New Topic

IQ scores are so boring it's much more fun to work on ability by being conscienctious and thinking outside the box. Conscienctiousness is about being disciplined, applying oneself diligently, giving it your best, trying hard. Most genius is about hard work, according to our formula. So, if you work really hard, brainstorm new ways of doing things and go into a specific area (ability), should be ok. Be inventive.
If you do that, people will think you're a genius no matter what your eye cue scores are. (they keep changing so I made score plural). So, work on those things and you will be percieved as muy intelligente by all.

I have no idea what my IQ is. Where do people go to get such things tested 'officially'? I've done a few online IQ tests, but they are so very different, and I get widely differing scores. And often they are just tricks where you get the hang of them and can improve on subsequent similar tests (which is not supposed to happen).

I actually don't believe that genius is defined by IQ though. I see it as a person being outstanding in their area of interest - whether they are a musician or an artist or a physicist. I doubt whether Einstein or Mozart would have achieved all the tick boxes to achieve 'genius' level in an IQ test.

Millie I though your post on page 6 was hilarious. I totally agree with you.

Just to set the record straight I was not given any choice but to take the Stanford Binet when I was a kid.

The more recent test well that was not entirely of my chosing either. I've had some head injuries so I was sent to a neuropsych for an eval to determine if I had brain damage so the WAIS was part of the 6 hours of testing. Funny in that no time in the testing do I recall any part of the test that I would have suspected to be an IQ test and they don't tell you okay now we're going to do the WAIS or the MMPI-II, etc. Its just one freakin test after another.

Incidently, I'm going to have another neuropsych test because I found out the first dunderhead was not even board certified and she didn't give a full evaluation, left a lot of unanswered questions. The new doctor that will be testing me spent 1.5 hrs last week talking to me about it, yeah he could be on the spectrum , well he told me the WAIS should not be given to Native Americans and that my WAIS score therefore would have to be inaccurate measure of my abilities because ethnicity has to be taken into account when formulating the final score. In other words the WAIS is ethnocentristic ie: a Caucasian test, though it is the standard IQ test these days for professionals. He told me he was going to come up with an alternative plan based on my mixed ethnicity. No idea how he will do that but he has done papers on testing the Native population. I will ask him if he could let me know "when" I'm taking the IQ test that it is the IQ test.

Just an FYI- the online IQ tests are just games. Those are not real IQ tests as all of the "official" ones are copyrighted. Neuropsychologists are bound by professional contract to never give out copies of any of the psych tests nor publish on the internet for they could be sued for millions nor are they allowed to give out the formulation for how the tests are scored.

That said there are partial copies of the MMPI-II on the internet though hard to find. Actually I have a bunch of the questions from the MMPI still in my head I've taken it so many times. Though that's not an IQ test its to look for personality disorders, depression, OCD and so forth.

Carpiwim and Ana are probably correct in that genius is actually a thinking 'process' more than a fixed 'state' of mind of just raw intelligence. I read the article that was linked and found that the genius traits are very similar to an aspect of my condition which some people call savant syndrome which is also a process or a fluid situation and not a fixed state as some people believe.

She scored 185 or so on the Stanford Binet when she was a kid. Because she was already old enough to score at ceiling someone did some calculations to estimate her true IQ at about 230. 320 would be a little extreme even by Mega Society standards.

Ooh! An article by Paul Cooijmans. I've never met him online, but he's a big name in HIQ circles.

The threshold IQ for genius is generally considered to be 120, as it takes a certain amount of general intelligence to channel your genius properly. Of course there may be exceptions, as well as unusual savants, though a pure savant ability may not be considered genius, if there's no thought involved (sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't).

I took IQ tests as an adult to find out what was wrong with me, because, as some of you will know, people with freakishly high intelligence tend to be treated badly unless they either rigorously dumb themselves down or hide in some high IQ enclave somewhere I can't afford to get into. And there are lots of times where it feels like my intelligence is a worse handicap than being autistic, even though autism makes me unemployable. Or is it the intelligence that makes me unemployable? Imagine being 8 feet tall.

There are employers who won't hire anyone with an IQ over a certain score, because high IQ people don't fit in well enough in some jobs (e.g. police officer). And they're right. They should restrict themselves to people who are only of above average intelligence. It saves everyone a lot of hassle. So how are geniuses supposed to earn a living?

Oh, and Millie, IQ tests are usually used in the schools, to compare potential and performance. It's one way of catching learning disabilities. Your famous geniuses didn't need them once they were adults. As kids they might have helped with schooling.

Or hurt with schooling. I think testing children is a very dangerous thing as I was passed over and put in 'slow' classes due to my testing scores where in fact I was just a 100% spatial learner.

[/quote]


ah... i am well aware, Anemone.
My son's school is in communication with me and my ex about our son's need to skip classes and have an IQ test.

as for cezanne and Vincent et al, if they had been given the tests they may well have been tidied up and sanitised appropriately, as Inventor says. Dulled and prescribed prozac in this day and age. Why, they might even have fixated on IQ - thus rendering the practical application of their genius null and void. they'd be so busy using the magic number as an excuse for being SO different, they would have forgotten to paint.

that is my point.

And i think there is my reference in a prior post and thread somewhere, considering school use of IQ may be the only time they are of benefit -I am still undecided there, however - to help with a boredom-free childhood so a "gifted" kid doesn't end up in prison and on the streets.

You'd be surpised who you meet in the prison yard.
Contrary to prevaling stereotyped assumptions and stats, it is not all brawn.

I think your brain is amazing Anemone and continue to think so. I have enjoyed certain aspects of your website and your intellectual fervour and energy. I state that, quite objectively. As for your or anyone else's IQ - i could not give a toss. I don;t NEED to be reminded of IQ to sense or see someone's brilliance.....
a freequent referral to it just makes me think "blah...low self-esteem.

I continue to find the notion of IQ fixation in certain WP posters hilarious. i do not find the notion of brilliance and giftedness, or savantism, hilarious. I think THEY are magnificent and jewel like qualities we need to nurture and enjoy and rejoice in.

thatfor me, is the key distinction.

oh good Ticker. i am glad you enjoyed the stirring pot.

I was up painting at an indigenous community last year - very, very remote top end of Australia. croc and magrove country. You cannot get in by road half the time. only by small plane. freaky.
I should have taken a bundle of tests up there with me when i was teaching at the art centre. THe old girls (Australian aboriginal women in their 80's who still speak indigenous language) would have found them extremely relevant.
They could always test the young kids to see who will be most adept at milking the diesel out of the four wheel drives for petrol sniffing/brainfrying.


TESTS? - terribly caucasian. i agree with you.

Agreed. Purely linear academic skills tests can be bad as well as good, depending on the person. We do need to have more multiple intelligence kinds of tests. I still think I should have been tested musically. That might have been a technical skill to fall back on.

Or they could just put us in a Montessori type environment and watch what we gravitate to.

Though, as bad as tests often are, they still do help some people. Sometimes you need objective data to go along with preferences. I guess you always have to have a mixture of data to make good decisions.

You also need to have teachers who themselves are creative. My teachers still held me back due to my test scores even though they knew I was reading at a high school level in grade school.

I'd like to think that they'd be smarter than that. It does happen that people fixate on IQ, for whatever reasons, though I think most don't, even in Mensa etc. But I think the strength of character that these people had would have overridden any tendency to get stuck.

Back then, though, I think people fixated more on social class than intelligence, since it was more measureable. Poor little rich boys and girls? There have always been a few . . .

I think the ones that fixate are the ones that can't figure out how to just get on with their lives. Maybe they don't know what they want to do, or maybe people won't let them? Or maybe some of them are just snobs who like acting superior. I don't know what makes a snob a snob. Most people who get called snobs aren't, but I suppose some are.

I'm not saying geniuses are evil, actually; I am just saying they are not morally better than anyone else; and that the combination of human weakness and genius would make such people have a particular temptation towards undue pride. Not all of them would fall into it, just the same way not all NTs fall into gossip or not all Aspies become bitter against the majority neurotypes, but they'd be more vulnerable.

Because it's the moral qualities of a leader that are much more important than his intellectual qualities, genius should not make someone particularly suited for leadership; and because it makes him less able to relate to the average individual, probably less suited than most.

There several problems with that. If her IQ were 230, then she would be more than 8 standard deviations above the mean. That corresponds to a probability on the order of 6E-16, which, simply put, shouldn't happen if the test were normed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Since the distribution of IQs is a construct of the test makers, this points to either a deficiency in the design of the test when measuring extreme IQ scores, or a discrepancy between whatever the test used and the conventional IQ tests. It's mathematically nonsensical.

Speaking of mathematically nonsensical, I'm less than convinced Savant's puzzle solving talents imply anything about genius. Apparently she had a crack at criticizing the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which, if I recall, was a complete joke.

185, however, is entirely plausible, and there should be more such individuals on the planet.

Hi Callista; maybe you remember my name (it's been a while)?

No reason at all! but what has genius have to do with morality? Autism (as the term really refers to) is inherently moral!