the deal with IQ

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So I was just wondering...

A series of questions...


what's the deal with IQ "off the charts"

What does it mean to have a IQ over 200? 300? does it get progressively less and less accurate?

One person was said to have an IQ of 400. But is that measurable, and if it is, what does it mean?

Any alternative tests for intelligent that are more meaningful that are now becoming used or have been used in the past?

Hmmm...
If you're ten years old, but are only as smart as a seven year old then you have an IQ of 70.

If you're ten and can do what a ten year old can do you have an IQ a 100 (average), a 20 year old two hundred (genius).

So if you're ten but are already having the midlife crises of a forty year old then you have an IQ of 400! And are an off-the-charts uber genius who makes Einstein look like an amoeba!

You don't need to concern yourself with that range.

I couldn't help but read OP in Jerry Seinfeld's voice and cadence.

google AI says:
what are smartest people who ever lived?
"1. William James Sidis
(1898-1944) An American child prodigy with an estimated IQ of 200–300, Sidis was a mathematician, linguist, historian, and author. He could read the New York Times before age 2 and spoke at least 10 languages by age 6. Sidis entered Harvard at age 11 and published The Animate and the Inanimate in 1925, a book in which he speculated about the origins of life."

"What are the 4 types of intelligence tests?
The most prominent types of intelligence tests are the Binet-Simon Test, Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), and Raven's Progressive Matrices. All of these tests use a series of subtests to produce a ratio that relays the level of intelligence of an individual."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellige ... t%2Dtakers.

If the potentiality of a 200 , 400 IQ was available to be developed. Could that same IQ be detected if the person
was raised in repeated very traumatic circumstances .. or adverse circumstances ,How might that IQ be able to manifest itself.?

IQ tests can't account for potential ability, only demonstrated ability.

If you take the test while intoxicated, sleep deprived, hungover, etc you'll also get a lower result than you'd otherwise receive.

If your IQ is in the top 2% of the general population then I encourage you to join Mensa.

However, remember that intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think.

It's great for pondering the futility of your existence and being miserable.

many celebrities and captains of industry belong to mensa, a self-selected exclusive cognitive elite. i can't judge as i am not one of the cognitive elites, but i have the acquaintanceship of a certifiable genius, who maintains that "(IMHO) my experience with mensans, by and large, revealed them to be self-impressed, ultimately uninteresting folk." he related to me that a selection of mensans he queried about "a simple logical problem" looked at him like "deer in the headlights" [IOW they didn't know what he was talking about, much less had any suitable answers to the "simple logical problem"]. he explained the "simple logical problem" to me but it sailed right over my head. i couldn't even repeat a sensible description of it. this person has many patents after his name. among his inventions is a medical device which saved my health.
the upshot of this little ramble, is that IMHO more of the mensan set might well consider, for the betterment of the society in which we all share, that 1) they are still not the ultimate in intelligence, IOW there is still much more they don't know, than do know, and 2) trying harder to translate the exceptional insights they do have into a more digestible form and sharing such wisdom with us "great unwashed" rather than hold their wisdom tightly in haughty reserve for their own kind. this part is just my own jejune opining

Being qualified for Mensa means that, unlike all of your friends, you are able to...read your comic books without moving your lips!

And thats about it.

I know cause I was able to get into Mensa myself.

Hmmm...if a person is into getting recognition from mensa, should we be expecting better posts ? here .

Both my sons qualify for Mensa membership based on real IQ tests (not made up ones that Hollywood types give them selves). Mine is just below the cutoff, but from a percentile point of view most of my subtest scores are above the percentile Mensa uses as the cut off. Those that are not drag the full scale average down. As a parent of high IQ kids I have to consider carefully how to understand IQ and how to look out for my kids best interests.

Opinions tend to run to extremes.

Realistically IQ is like height. It is a real metric and it really means something but it isn’t the only metric and it doesn’t always mean what you might think.

“Intelligence” is hard to define and harder to quantify. Joining Mensa might help some people who feel alone or isolated to find people they can connect with, or find a mentor. As others have shared joining Mensa might also be a disappointment. There are other high IQ societies with even higher cut-offs. We never have filled out the paperwork.

Having a high IQ without good social skills in school (age 5 to 18) can be like having a target on your back. IQ may also not go with quality of life or “success”. If you get other good cards dealt to you with IQ you may have a very good hand to play.

To answer OP’s question: an IQ of 400 is higher than any real IQ that I have heard of. IQ as a number should correlate to percentile. The point of percentile is that there are fewer people with high IQ (in terms of everyone who ever took the test and by extension, hopefully the population as a whole). Similarly there are fewer people with low IQ. Most people tend to cluster around the middle.
IQ tests are designed this way on purpose. IQ on the x axis and number of people on the y axis should form a nice bell curve. As OP suggested normal IQ tests are less sensitive and more prone to error on the low and high end. There are specially designed IQ tests that are supposed to be more sensitive on high end or on the low end. No IQ test is perfect. The same person who takes the same IQ test more than once may get different scores. Taking different IQ tests are usually not comparable except as pure percentile numbers, but the “number” is usually designed to be similar to other well known and well respected IQ tests.

There are many arguments as to if IQ really measures “intelligence” or not, and even if “intelligence” can really be measured. Some say “IQ tests measure what IQ tests measure”.

The original purpose of IQ was to help government schools do what the government wanted schools to do: give everyone the education that he or she has a “right” to, even if everyone was not the same.

Having a very high IQ is rather meaningless if, like me, you have significant executive functioning difficulties. In my case organising and planning are my Achilles heel. It's easier doing most high range IQ tests, than prioritising the steps needed to keep my flat clean. Multistep tasks are my nemesis!

As for extremely high IQs; I personally know, as in have had some interaction with, two people with supposed 200+ IQs. Don't quote me on it, but the rarity would be about 1 in 7/8 billion !