[muerteverde]

I have seen this guy in videos and interviews before and he does not impress me as being intelligent and what intelligence he does have lacks education, knowledge, and maturity. There was a thread here on sherdog about him maybe a year or so ago.

Some of the stuff he was saying before struck me as sounding like what a freshmen starts talking about when he discovers Marixsm for the first time. Suddenly, he thinks he can solve the problems of the world all by himself, his ideas are so revolutionary and unique. No, you are making the same amatuer mistakes and believing the same dumb things that everyone does when their first get excited about a new subject but don't know enough about it to say anything smart yet. That goes for a great many disciplines.

The fact that this guy's "theories" are laughed at by people who really are truly geniuses, that he has not succeeded in life, that he can offer no evidence that any of his elitest paternalist eugenics is anything but an immature, schoolboy fantasy, or that any of his other juvenile ideas have any merit -- it disproves his claim to genius.

Intelligcne is not a simple matter anymore. You may know of Dr. Howard Gardner who in 1983 proposed the theory of multiple intelligences. According to him, intelligence can take many forms and should be classified as such. Beethoven would be a genius because his musical intelligence was off the charts.
Here is the Wikipedia page:
Theory of multiple intelligences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and from another source, here is how Garnder classified intelligences:

• Linguistic intelligence ("word smart"):
• Logical-mathematical intelligence ("number/reasoning smart")
• Spatial intelligence ("picture smart")
• Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence ("body smart")
• Musical intelligence ("music smart")
• Interpersonal intelligence ("people smart")
• Intrapersonal intelligence ("self smart")
• Naturalist intelligence ("nature smart")

Multiple Intelligences

I don't fully agree with Garnder either (I read his work and his critiques in my education theory classes) because there still seems to be something missing. Some essential component of being able to put it all together -- not just smart about words, or about numbers, but about making difficult judgments of an adbstract sort that I can't quite place on the chart.

Back on the subject of IQ tests, they have been almost completely discredited by now as a measure of raw intelligence. There was an excellent article in the New Yorker last year about IQ tests and how we have had to change the grading curve multiple times in the past centry because within every population people have been doing better on the tests. Also, that affluence is a primary determinant on performance.

Read this article:
http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/iq.pdf

[balance]

Originally Posted by Cayne-Abel

You are assuming that the most intelligent people are interested in the highest-paying jobs. I can tell you from what I see in law school that this is a bad assumption. The great majority of of the smartest and most intellectually gifted students I know are interested in becoming professors or otherwise working in not-very-high-paying fields.

Hell, look at 99% of scientists...they go into a field where you have virtually no chance of ever becoming "wealthy."

Your logical reasoning has no place in this thread!

[6StingHero]

Originally Posted by balance

Your logical reasoning has no place in this thread!

So are the rich people the smartest then?

[son_goku]

Originally Posted by psyc3xx

IQ tests mean absolute jack shit.

I wouldn't consider IQ tests to be completely worthless, but I think its more realistic to look at it in very general terms:

80-100 -- Probably not the next Einstein
100-120 -- Average
> 120 -- Smarter than the average population.

I really don't think its possible to reliably infer anything beyond that.

In Richard Feynman's book he mentioned that he took an IQ and scored 125.

[balance]

Originally Posted by muerteverde

I have seen this guy in videos and interviews before and he does not impress me as being intelligent and what intelligence he does have lacks education, knowledge, and maturity. There was a thread here on sherdog about him maybe a year or so ago.

Some of the stuff he was saying before struck me as sounding like what a freshmen starts talking about when he discovers Marixsm for the first time. Suddenly, he thinks he can solve the problems of the world all by himself, his ideas are so revolutionary and unique. No, you are making the same amatuer mistakes and believing the same dumb things that everyone does when their first get excited about a new subject but don't know enough about it to say anything smart yet. That goes for a great many disciplines.

The fact that this guy's "theories" are laughed at by people who really are truly geniuses, that he has not succeeded in life, that he can offer no evidence that any of his elitest paternalist eugenics is anything but an immature, schoolboy fantasy, or that any of his other juvenile ideas have any merit -- it disproves his claim to genius.

Intelligcne is not a simple matter anymore. You may know of Dr. Howard Gardner who in 1983 proposed the theory of multiple intelligences. According to him, intelligence can take many forms and should be classified as such. Beethoven would be a genius because his musical intelligence was off the charts.
Here is the Wikipedia page:
Theory of multiple intelligences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and from another source, here is how Garnder classified intelligences:

• Linguistic intelligence ("word smart"):
• Logical-mathematical intelligence ("number/reasoning smart")
• Spatial intelligence ("picture smart")
• Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence ("body smart")
• Musical intelligence ("music smart")
• Interpersonal intelligence ("people smart")
• Intrapersonal intelligence ("self smart")
• Naturalist intelligence ("nature smart")

Multiple Intelligences

I don't fully agree with Garnder either (I read his work and his critiques in my education theory classes) because there still seems to be something missing. Some essential component of being able to put it all together -- not just smart about words, or about numbers, but about making difficult judgments of an adbstract sort that I can't quite place on the chart.

Back on the subject of IQ tests, they have been almost completely discredited by now as a measure of raw intelligence. There was an excellent article in the New Yorker last year about IQ tests and how we have had to change the grading curve multiple times in the past centry because within every population people have been doing better on the tests. Also, that affluence is a primary determinant on performance.

Read this article:
http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/iq.pdf

Pointing out the fact that he really hasn't accomplished anything groundbreaking only adds evidence to the theory that he is brilliant. He has, after all, managed to become world-renown without ever having put forth an effort to achieve anything of quantifiable substance. That sounds pretty genius to me. Not to mention he won 250K on some game show for what amounted to a fraction of a day's work.

[omgitsrick]

Originally Posted by 6StingHero

So are the rich people the smartest then?

No, but they have more freedom to be.

[bobbylight]

Originally Posted by psyc3xx

IQ tests mean absolute jack shit. He's good at one type of intelligence. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. This guy couldn't outperform most of the posters on this board in other facets of intelligence.

you just assume because his iq is high, that it is all he is good at??

[balance]

Originally Posted by 6StingHero

So are the rich people the smartest then?

The two are not mutually inclusive of eachother. If a person desires financial wealth, of course it would be advantageous for him to have high intelligence. But a man's mental capacity is not measured by his bank account.

[bobbylight]

lol, the man with the highest IQ in the world believes in God.

[Cayne-Abel]

Originally Posted by 6StingHero

So are the rich people the smartest then?

I hesitate to generalize, but again, speaking from my own experience (I was an accounting major in NYC for undergrad, and was at the top of my class, so I had a handful of internships at some big-name accounting and finance firms and met a lot of very wealthy people), I would say that rich people do not have any more "cognitive horsepower" than the average person. They do, however, tend to be highly motivated people, and that is certainly a virtue. They also tend to have excellent social skills, which is extremely important in fields like law and business, for those who are interested in making tons of cash.