Lots of gifted people here. :bugeye: Having a high IQ is a mixed blessing. It isn't the end all, be all many concerned parents and insecure intellectuals seem to think it is. Mental age divided by chronological age. Thats it. An IQ test taken as a child will change as you advance in years. Chess masters play there best games between 30 and 40 then there skills begin to slip. When I was in 5th grade the class had to do this IQ test. Suddenly my teacher was especially interested, my mother overly proud. I didn't understand the fuss. More tests. When I was going into 7th grade(many states later) I had to take another IQ test. I got many of the instructions bass ackwards. When they scored me, this was looked at and taken into account. A councilor from the state school board came to our house to ask me questions and I got into the first gifted program my state's public schools ever offered.(back in the days of funding) In the gifted class, we were given different studies (replacing grammer, social studies, and humanities iirc) The class size was 12:2. For an angry, ghetto living youth, all this attention was something else. One of the students was building a computer from scratch, one student was drawing what the 7th dimension would look like from a 2 dimensional drawing, I enjoyed blindfolded 3-d chess. The lead instructor would lead us in a focusing meditation before class. Weekly field trips to cool places. Occasional weekend trips. Guest instructors. We were pretty much given free reign and treated this special way. Outside the gifted class, other kids rapidly knew who we were. Singled out and expecting something from us. I don't know what. Sometimes it was taunting, sometimes earnest questions. Other teachers treated us like royalty. (I'm assuming the other gifted kids had it the same way) I'd never been in a school for longer than 6 months before and I spent 2 years there. Sometimes the gifted classroom talk was oh so superior to those simple minded regular students. If we only knew the real world at that time. Well I moved out of state and highschool was a sad, sad reality. Simple, easy, the only challenge was the social one. Got into college on sat and IQ. Left college without a degree. I moved back to my gifted state after various adventures. I found 2 of my old class mates. One was working as an asst. mgr. in a fast food dive. One was living on welfare, raising her single parent family. I was a struggling drug dealer at the time. What a trio huh? 3 of the smartest people in the state. Goin' nowhere fast. I was told later that another had killed themselves. Being able to see a bigger picture, or figuring out a problem faster is handy in this world. In the end it isn't all that important. Stable loving family, Friends in high places, serendipity, are all more important for success. Both of my old classmates cursed their intellect. Fitting in this society is ironicly much harder for the mensa. Sure, many have figured it out. But this nation is geared toward the lowest common denominator. Bowling, Bars, Movies and TV. I know that at least some of you know exactly what I'm talking about.
My IQ is about 140, but my EQ is 94. However, IQ tests really fail to capture any idea of your potential intelligence, such as your will to learn, or your ability to understand a subject. For example, I find I pick up mathematical stuff fairly easily, it makes sense to me and I usually have little difficulty remebering it. When it comes to art or English Literature though, I find myself less motivated, and generally have greater difficulties. I'm really trying to say that IQ says almost nothing about you as a person. The 'best' test of intelligence I've done was the STEP maths papers to get into Cambrideg University, as they were challenging questions designed to see how you thought about the problems as well as whether you could solve them. They weren't much fun at the time though. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
justagirl- I'm the TNS membership officer and was doing a google search to find out what other foreign-language versions of the WAIS there are besides the HAWIE-R when I found your post about our membership standards, etc. You wrote: "the triple nine accepts these test and scores as admission and pretty much all other test are considered meaningless as an accurate reflection of your IQ. These days though there even seems to be a debate on what a genius level is..Mensa has used 132 on their test and I hear 140 thrown around alot. Chris Langan which they say has the higest IQ in the world is around 200 as he went off all of the charts and they were left to guess. But to show you how meaningless most of this is, he is a bouncer that's just getting by but he has written some impressive articles." Well, let's see . . . . Yes. The accepted TNS tests (currently listed at www.triplenine.org ) are those that we feel confident are as accurate and as resistant to cheating as possible. You can take forever on a Tickle test or retake it under a different name, or collaborate on another web-provided or take-home test, but the ones we accept are proctored and represent, to best of our ongoing ability to discern it, a genuine 1/1000 (3-sigma, plus, actually 3.09 sigma, if memory serves) result, though no test is perfectly resistant to determined malefactors. The point is to provide a reasonable guarantee that admittees will be real peers joining real intellectual peers. Smarts ain't everything, but it's occasionally useful (and a relief) for smart people to be able to hang out with other smart people, where you don't always have to explain your jokes, literary references, scientific bases, etc. At the time of the Esquire article, five or six years ago, Chris Langan was working on Long Island as a bar bouncer, but presently he and his very-very-bright comrade in arms have moved to their own farm in the midwest where they're setting up a center for HiQ activities, and they seem to be doing quite well, actually, thank you. Einstein worked, as did Faulkner, in a government office for many years, which they found afforded them abundant leisure time, and as Grady's article cited below suggests, such a course isn't entirely unusual for smart people. Your point that intelligence doesn't necessarily guarantee wealth is, of course, true individual by individual, but statistically it certainly does correlate with financial prosperity. Above 140, who knows, the increase isn't so direct for various obvious reasons (see Grady Towers' article, The Outsiders, publicly available at www.prometheussociety.org and, most importantly, The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein and Murray, which conservatively presents what's still considered by professional psychometricians to be a "duhh" while still being reviled by agenda-bearing nonprofessionals of the lefty persuasion). Genius? I think it's something more than just having good, fast wiring that enables superior problem solving (high intelligence), but without high intelligence, the possibility of genius is zero. So it's a sine qua non, not the whole story. M Stewart TNS Membership Officer membership@triplenine.org
Firstly, I saw that you just joined today, and this was your first post, so welcome to the boards. =) Is the highest society out there the Giga Society? That consists of two people? Secondly, here's my post, since this topic was brought up again. I'm not trying to offend anyone, but I absolutely hate the idea of an IQ society. I used to think that it was pretty neat there exists a place in which those "above average" can find other "above average" people to socialize with. Then I realized that such a society is just a subculture that will soon die down. Otay, maybe that was a bit over-exaggerative - much tantamount to saying that Intel will soon become obsolete. But what I'm saying is that now, I simply don't really like how esoteric it sounds. Maybe people connect better in an environment exclusively for those with an high IQ, but it contains a certain amount of...conceit. People begin to define each other as a number. As much as I love mathematics, that should not be the case, as a person is infinitely more than just his/her intelligence. An IQ does not necessarily measure intelligence, as most of you have already said. It may partially measure a certain aspect...but then again, what _is_ intelligence? What does it incorporate? Amazing cognition? The ability to hack? Thirdly, I don't want to stray way too off topic. My IQ is 146 - but I took the test when I was 7 [maybe 8? =\ I forgot], so it may have dropped. Also, online tests are not very reliable. I've tried them before; they are very poorly designed. They gave ridiculous results - close to 180 or 190. As with any test, there's usually an "algorithm" to be sniffed out. Like the SATs, if you practice them enough, you'll score well. Lol @ Porfiry, you sound like Beakie.
Mine was 162 on the CTMM and I forget what it was on the MMPT, but that was back in '66. I'm a life Mensa member, and what is acceptable depends on which test is submitted for evaluation. ...and a high IQ can be both a blessing and a curse. In elementary school, I got tired of being called "Einstein"!!!! I learned to shut up until I was about thirty or so. Sometimes it's handy, but mostly it's a drag. And never forget that... Too often we confuse wisdom with knowledge, forgetting that the antonym of wisdom is not ignorance, but folly. An old friend, who's since passed away, with a measured IQ close to 200 never could hold a job. He just couldn't keep his mouth shut.
I took a real, live IQ test stoned once, as part of ADHD testing. I didn't know they'd be testing IQ before I went. I got 119. Taking the online test like the one at the provided link get 138 or 139. Same score as the guy in the office next to me. Same score as the other engineer in the room as well. 140 is max that test will give. We each missed one. Maybe it was a different test, but I'd guess it similar. Kind of funny. For verbal reasoning, I scored above 99th percentile. I scored under the 20th percentile for processing speed. That was probably about 7 years ago. EDIT: the one at iqtest.com just said 141, and my daughter was messing with me while I was taking it. All that said, I have little faith in IQ test numbers, especially those granted online.
Indeed, that is also the reason why I will never tell anyone my IQ. The scores are ridiculously high.
onliners are never accurate, however i even doubt the real profilers, they profiled me a few years back and gave me a ridiculously high score i woudnt believe
I like my bank account numbers, that's where the numbers really count! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
> lil miss demosthenes wrote: >Firstly, I saw that you just joined today, and this was your first post, so >welcome to the boards. =) Is the highest society out there the Giga >Society? That consists of two people? Thanks, and I don't know. Darryl Miyaguchi's most excellent site, http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/hoeflin.html has a link down the page a bit entitled Short (and Bloody) History of the High IQ Societies with the URL http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html which reveals something that should come as no surprise, namely that verifiably really smart people can be as asinine, backstabbing, and childish as anybody. A part of the ongoing nonsense in HiQdom is the allegation and occasional substantiation of the groundlessness of certain HiQ-organization claims; certainly Mega and Giga are on, umm, interestingly nonthick ice in claiming that their entrance vehicles can be broadly demonstrated to be unquestionably valid. Lawyerly enough for you, that verbiage? It seems reasonable to believe that meaningful claims can be made for certain 4-sigma (1/30,000) criteria; Sattler's 1992 regression equations for the WAIS-R show that its useful ceiling is significantly above the 150 that Wechsler arbitrarily placed on it, largely for his own philosophical reasons, and the new Stanford Binet 5 test has its normal scale run to 160 (also with a 15-pt SD) while purporting to enable testing significantly above that, too. The 2003 renorming of the MAT shows either a shocking degradation in the intelligence of those taking the test or a significantly increased ceiling (well above 4 sigma), so there are a number of timed, proctored, "normal" tests in addition to the Hoeflin-type power tests that are valid up to and above 160 SD 15. But much above that, we're really in a no-person's-zone, where the difficulties of norming a test when there are so few genuine super-high performers make any tests in that region a bit iffy. Think of it as a financial issue, also: balancing the difficulty of creating a test that can truly, honestly measure IQs above 165 SD 15 means that you're working your ass off for a population of 1/100,000 or fewer--so you won't get a whole lot of people who will either be taking your test or contributing to its norming. So, who knows. Both Prometheus and Ultranet have the same entrance vehicles presently, so those [three tests] are probably valid, and those organizations, to the extent to which they've maintained the integrity of their admissions process, probably reasonably reflect what they purport to represent in the makeup of their members (4-sigma). >Secondly, here's my post, since this topic was brought up again. >I'm not trying to offend anyone, but I absolutely hate the idea of an IQ society. I used to think that it was pretty neat there exists a place in which those "above average" can find other "above average" people to socialize with. Then I realized that such a society is just a subculture that will soon die down. Otay, maybe that was a bit over-exaggerative - much tantamount to saying that Intel will soon become obsolete. But what I'm saying is that now, I simply don't really like how esoteric it sounds. Maybe people connect better in an environment exclusively for those with an high IQ, but it contains a certain amount of...conceit. People begin to define each other as a number. As much as I love mathematics, that should not be the case, as a person is infinitely more than just his/her intelligence. Of course. And the egalitarian impulse that leads to this repulsion is in itself commendable, I think, and shared by many (including lots of HiQers, at least when they were younger). I always dismissed Mensa when I was younger for the Groucho Reason (who wants to be a member of a club that'd have me as a member?), but as I got older and found that, truly, good conversation was hard to find and that the world was filled with dull people, I started looking into this stuff. I found (to my surprise) that although I knew I was smart (duhh, the usual "doesn't live up to potential" stuff on the report cards, etc.), I hadn't recognized that many of the not-fitting-in issues that I'd experienced for three-plus decades weren't a function so much of "them" being right and my being somehow unable to grok that but rather it was that I was seeing the world differently--and arguably more clearly and accurately. This kind of epiphany is what many people experience when they stumble into HiQdom, and for a while, it can be pretty important for people. In the end, of course, intelligence is nothing compared to industriousness, perseverance, integrity, compassion, and simple thoughtfulness. But it _is_ something that has a quality and that enables certain kinds of "being understood" that aren't possible in the general environment. Dats jus' de fac's, ma'am. >An IQ does not necessarily measure intelligence, as most of you have already said. It may partially measure a certain aspect...but then again, what _is_ intelligence? What does it incorporate? Amazing cognition? The ability to hack? The ability to solve problems, the ability to do mental processing with a minimum of cerebral glucose uptake in an environment of less neural electrical loss by virtue of increased myelination of the affected circuitry, is the best definition presently. There's no great mystery about what intelligence is among genuine psychometricians (professional psychologists who do measurements). All of the multiple intelligences that Gardner et al. have been milking for two decades for their enrichment and to politically muddle the waters of what intelligence is (and that it's highly heritable) have really nothing to do with what is clearly recognized now as a second- or third-order factor-analysis-derived quantity, namely Spearman's _g_. The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray and Jensen's The _g_ Factor are the current clear statements of virtually unchallenged understanding on these matters (again, among professionals, not among those with some political ax to grind). >Thirdly, I don't want to stray way too off topic. My IQ is 146 - but I took the test when I was 7 [maybe 8? =\ I forgot], so it may have dropped. Childhood IQs are notoriously unstable, and if your score was an age-ratio score, as from the SB L-M, yeah, a normal test now would show it to be more around 130. If it was a relatively recent SB 4 or WISC, it might be about right, still, though. Scores after 16 usually stay pretty stable. >Also, online tests are not very reliable. I've tried them before; they are very poorly designed. They gave ridiculous results - close to 180 or 190. And so subject to compromise, retaking, etc.; yes. >As with any test, there's usually an "algorithm" to be sniffed out. Like the SATs, if you practice them enough, you'll score well. But not that much better, unless you were really slacking to begin with. Any test has an _s_ and a _g_ component (specific and general factors, which add up to 1.0). For any _g_ you bring to a test, if you can make the _s_ as transparent a vehicle for displaying that intelligence as possible, you'll score the best you can; it's more like defeating yourself less rather than increasing your "intelligence." Obviously, a genius who doesn't read much isn't going to score as well on the analogy and similarity portions of a verbal test as she would if she were more broadly read; in that way she would've been blocking her ability to demonstrate her intelligence. It's not that subsequent reading and vocab improvement made her smarter, it just kept her from making such an inadequate showing of what she had within. Maco
This: http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/intell/mainstream.html is a good thing to read for those interested in/skeptical about IQ testing. Wikipedia also has a great synopsis. The thing about IQ versus things like dedication, perseverence, compassion, love of learning, etc, is that IQ can be quickly and accurately measured, even at an early age. IQ is also much more objective. Recently it has be correlated with simple reaction time tests. Early IQ testing lets your teachers and parents know how hard to push you, because they have some idea what level you should really be performing at. Also, IQ is generally more predictive of job performance than any other measure (that can be measured). Amazingly enough, studies have shown it to be a better predicter than tests of the actual skills used on the job, and a better predicter, on average, than subjective interviews (Hunter and Hunter, 1984). The main reason its use is confined to the school systems and limited in the workplace and larger society is because it has the effect of seperating people into a disturbing racial continuum (black, hispanic, white, east asian, jewish). It's an unfortunate reality that you with find IQ testing more common in racist/right leaning parts of the country. A lot of the issues brought up on this thread as marks against high-IQ refer to the well known insecurity, low self esteem, and sometimes just plain confusion that plagues the highly intelligent. There are many reasons for this effect and I'm thinking about making this problem my area of research. I'd appreciate any ideas/observations you guys have on some of the causes/feedback effects of low self esteem and low self confidence among intelligent people. thanks! James Gambrell
I've taken two "official" IQ tests, my first was 126 (at age 17) my second was 142 (2 months ago at age 18). I don't agree with IQ tests at all however. I can be quite stupid (and am nearly all the time). And I am positive about the fact that I am in a low percentile when it comes to actual intelligence on these boards. And I've never taken an EQ test. - also, I've taken numerous internet IQ tests, which of course are the most trusted sources I've ever known (Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!). My IQ's range with those, but it might just be my MPS acting up again.
