JetPilot said:
I just took the test on the website, half of it consisted of factual knowledge so I just cheated and looked up anything I didn't know while taking the test. Ended up getting a 142 IQ... interesting how easy and stupid they must be I thought, I just cheated my way in.
Are you talking about Mensa? That used to be just a preliminary test to see if you should bother applying. The real test was proctored, or you had to provide results of a proctored exam that they recognized as legitimate.
gendanken said:
My IQ measured in at a hefty 64. Or was it 86?
People with 86 IQ are barely able to read and write. Their level of literacy is enough to get them mail-room jobs because they can read names and addresses. Your ability to toss out hyperbole is the mark of intelligence.
Roman said:
Science is hands on research. Otherwise, it's just philosophy. The Hawkings and Einsteins rely on other people's discoveries (or mistakes that reveal curious anomolaies) to put everything together. As Newton said, they stand on the shoulders of giants (or the collective knowledge of generations of academics).
You need to review the definition of "creativity":
"Unless you're God, creating something means discovering a new and useful way to combine two or more things that already exist."
I think I heard that from James Burke on "Connections" but I doubt that he was the first to say it. That would have been out of character for him.
The ability to
abstract is rare, as we can see by the number of people on SciForums who post entire articles instead of bothering to summarize them for us. To assimilate the "collective knowledge of generations of academics" and extract something new out of it is not "standing on their shoulders."
This is something I do routinely--not generations of academics because I'm not in academia, but I correlate bits out of things I've read over the past fifty years and come up with my own connections and hypotheses. People think I'm brilliant but all I do is read the newspaper and the magazines in my dentist's office, and follow intriguing URLs here and on other sites. To me it's just a leisure activity.
There's a surprisingly strong nerd movement in America. While they may be maligned by ther contemporaries, they stick together. They've even got their own musical genre– nerdcore.
I guess it's the same phenomenon I experienced during the Space Race. Everyone realizes that they need nerds to survive in the Information Age, so they have to treat them with a modicum of respect or there won't be anybody to find their lost files.
And of course the nerds perpetuate this by continuing to standardize the so-called Information Infrastructure around the PC architecture and Windows. A Windows box is a little Science Fair project that plagues you for the rest of your life. The average person would be incapable of getting a computer to work for more than three or four days at a time without the help of his friendly nerds.
Those of us in I.T. who have genuine empathy for the average people of the world envision an infrastructure built around the Macintosh: an appliance, you turn it on, push a button, and perfectly toasted data starts popping out. You need the services of a professional perhaps more often than you do on a toaster, but no more often than on your car, which is successfully marketed as a consumer appliance. Car mechanics are generally regarded as blue-collar trash despite their intelligence and manual dexterity that rivals a musician.
Nerds hate Macs because they portend the end of the non-stop Science Fair In Every Home And Office. And their status as the salvation of a human race perpetually exasperated by Windows.