There's really only two things you need to do in order to be really good at basically anything:
1. Care a lot.
2. Work on continuously improving your skills.
That's pretty much it. Yes, there is such a thing as natural ability, but outside of the true outliers, natural ability is a pretty small factor compared to caring a lot and continuous improvement.
And, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, caring a lot and continuously improving your skills is what makes you an outlier among outliers. Conversely, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, someone who's just above average can be better than you by caring a lot and improving their skills.
There are obviously a few counterexamples. I'm sure there are hundreds of sprinters who care more and maybe even work harder than Usain Bolt. But if you're doing anything more complicated than running in a straight line, these factors start to outweigh natural ability really quickly.
Much as I dislike Scott Adams' views on many things, he has some smart advice in a lot of areas too. His take on success is to find a few areas where you can be in the top 25% and combine them. It's too hard to be in the top 1% of a specialty without natural talent, but if your specialty is the combination of four areas and you're in the top 25% of each of those areas, you're very likely to be amongst the top of the combined field - or be there by default because there's so few others doing it.
I feel this way too - having to distance myself from the messenger, but there is so much to learn in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big[0]
What if you have an IQ of say 90 and want to be really good at theoretical physics? I don't see caring a lot and working continously as enough to overcome IQ here.
IQ can be raised by a full standard deviation with a few months of training [1]. IQ is only stable over time because most people don't work continuously to improve it. IQ can be learned, just like everything else.
Color me skeptical. Pretty much every intervention ever tried has failed to measurably increase IQ long-term. The only exceptions are fixing nutritional deficiencies. If you could reliably raise IQ by a standard deviation in reasonably nourished children, it would be one of the most profound socio-political developments of all time (on the scale of major economic transitions like agriculture -> manufacturing -> knowledge work).
Well average IQ of the human population around the world has been increasing in the past decades if not centuries. And it's not because we're evolving within a few generations.
Minor nitpick. I understand what you're saying but average IQ is by definition 100 (with a deviation of 15). The scale itself moves, e.g. new 100 would usually be more than 100 in previous iteration of the test [1]
Your parent is right: IQ has been increasing. Even in countries where you wouldn't expect the cause to be improved nutrition. But nobody really knows why, nor has anybody discovered an intervention that can, on its own, reliably increase IQ.
Not only nutrition, but overall childhood experience is getting better worldwide. Even in countries that had no malnutrition, there was a lot of space to improve in children<->parents relationships etc.
Meanwhile some countries that were really good in all areas a while ago are now reporting minor IQ decrease..
I certainly studied for a major IQ test, over the course of a week. Basically, I went online and did every free IQ test I could find. You start to learn the various tricks and patterns they search for, and my overall range of scores increased over time (though there was wild variance from test to test).
Ostensibly, given all the nebulous argumentation of what "intelligence" is, the only thing an individual IQ test concretely measures is how good you are at taking IQ tests. ;-)
when I got my first home PC in 1993 there was IQ test software on it. I took the test tired, drunk, happy, caffeinated, all sorts of ways. I had huge swings in the score . +- 40 points for me personally.
I came to the same conclusion as you - that it only ranks how well I can take an IQ test.
That article studied IQ gains in students aged 17 or younger. I’m a bit skeptical the same findings generalize to adults and older, but I’d shown otherwise with other studies/sources
I already acknowledged that there are some counterexamples. In most of those counterexamples, natural talent is necessary but not sufficient. There are probably hundreds or thousands of people with the same level of natural talent as Michael Jordan who are not in the Basketball Hall of Fame, and there are definitely hundreds or thousands of people with the same natural talent as Michio Kaku who never applied themselves.
I don't think it's generally helpful to treat these outlier situations as if they were especially common. Most people err on the side of thinking they're limited by their natural talent and giving up.
Even if you're in a position to become a theoretical physicist--e.g. if you're a 16-year-old high school student and you're struggling with your math homework--it's not really worth having a ten year life plan built around becoming a theoretical physicist and making your day to day decisions based on whether you think you can accomplish that based on the outcome of some IQ test you took. You should still care a lot and work hard on your math homework.
If you don't have the natural talent to become a theoretical physicist, you'll find that out after you get accepted to a good college and start taking theoretical physics classes and you hit that wall. And that might be upsetting for you. It's probably upsetting to the 16 year old kid with dreams of athletic stardom to hit the wall at age 18 and not get an athletic scholarship. But what other option do you have at that point? The only one I can think of is to try and find something else you care a lot about and can work on improving your skills at. There's no getting out of that part.
One of Altman's points was doing work you enjoy because then you're productive in it. So there's no point in becoming a Theoretical Physicist if you aren't enjoying the maths homework.
I'd guess that 90 is enough for basic computer usage and some kind of very basic programming. So, theoretically, if all the world's information would be in computer processable form, you could augment your brain with software that you could also tweak and improve better and better, and the augmented/"mind-cyborg" you could work at a much higher manifest IQ, enough to do meaningfull advances in theoretical physics.
Unfortunately, we're not there yet: most of the world's knowledge is in "natural language" or "tied to" / "disambiguable only by" natural language, and AIs aren't yet smart enough to process human natural language well ("chat bots" are fun, but far from understanding philosophy or the subtleties of causality arguments in scientific papers...).
I'd imagine that, paradoxically, after the performance of AIs crosses a certain threshold (still well below human level), it will become very feasible to augment low-ish-IQ human minds to work as "mind-cyborgs", with the human part providing self-conscience, social abilities and some general common sense, and the AI one providing higher quantitative reasoning. (Now, once AI gets self conscious, it would probable really really dislike being (im)paired with anything but the brightest human minds, at least until it gets past their level too...)
But again, I'd bet that after the first-wave of AI advancement, we'll started to see low-ish-IQ-but-augmented humans taking jobs that are now "high IQ only". It's gonna be some really weird times ahead...
"Caring a lot", in this context, means you have the intention to get better at planing your day, improve your workflow, are not afraid to reconsider your methods and find what works based on experimentation. This is what Altman did. His intention was to improve his productivity.
This is a deep misunderstanding of IQ. As the product of two MENSA-ns, I can say with good faith: While high-IQ people do seem to have more varied interests than average people, IQ doesn't so much as govern interest as govern processing speed. One of the original purposes of IQ was selecting for fighter pilots -- fighter pilots with higher IQs means that you have fewer deaths, because they are able to process and react to stimulus faster than others, and they are better able to process the spacial information given to them.
The best analogy I know of for people in tech, is that you should think of it like having a slightly faster processor with slightly bigger caches. You're more able to manipulate things in your head (thanks to having a bigger stack), react to stimulus faster, change focus easier, and so on.
Someone with a lower IQ is capable of the same tasks, but they are likely to need to expend more effort and time at achieving the same result. From observation I can say the difference is mostly marginal.
As a personal, anecdotal example: One of my parents is in the top 1% of the population, the other is in the top 2% of the population. I have observed many times that my parent in the top 1% will come to a revelation, and voice it -- and as they begin voicing the first syllable or so, the same revelation occurs to the other parent. It's quite amusing. [I feel I should add -- there are cases where the roles are swapped, but that usually only happens when their attentions are focused on separate things].
EDIT: Also note that having a high-IQ doesn't magically make you less-susceptible to bad teaching or incorrect explanations. There exists a sub-society of MENSAns who were told by their tutors that they were slow and stupid, and that they would never amount to anything, and who have low self-esteem and other problems from being told such things.
EDIT 2: An example of someone in science with a low-IQ (of 98), is Julia Robertson, known for her work on Hilbert's tenth question, and her work in decision theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Robinson
Also could you please tell if it is possible to maintain friendship with high IQ people by a normal IQ people (say 120). Do the high IQ people find boring to maintain the thought process and conversation with low IQ people and hence can not enjoy company? What's your observation from your high IQ parents friendship circle ? Please provide honest feedback.
Not OP, but I think I have enough of appropriate experience / friends that match your question.
> if it is possible to maintain friendship with high IQ people by a normal IQ people
Yes.
> Do the high IQ people find boring to maintain the thought process and conversation with low IQ people ...
Yes, but not always. High IQ !== does know everything. And usually high IQ people love to learn new things, from anyone who can teach them.
> ... and hence can not enjoy company?
No, it can be enjoyed regardless. Even when you ignore activities not based on conversation (e.g. Sports, games), sometimes you want boring conversation.
Pedant that I am, I would like to point out that 120 is not a "normal" IQ. The test is scored such that 100 represents the median IQ, with 85-115 being within one standard deviation of that median. This means that less than about 1/3 of people will have a score outside of that range.
That having been said, I apologize for not being able to answer your actual question since I don't know the IQs of the folks I maintain friendships with. Most of them seem like they probably are higher than that range, but that might just be confirmation bias.
Did you get halfway through the first paragraph and reply based on that?
EDIT: Also, the symbol puzzle is timed as well. Most of the IQ questions are perfectly solvable by the average person when given a day to think about it, or 6 hours or so at the least. Raven's Matricies are far easier if you are given 6 hours to dwell on it a little.
Also, with the MENSA test, you aren't just timed on the total test, everyone does the same question at the same time. There's someone reading them out.
Edit: I think people have wildly differing interests, and that IQ and something like theoretical physics go hand in hand.
Issac Asimov wrote an essay years ago about intelligence, where he pointed out that when the doorbell rang, he jumped up and answered the closet. (his IQ was pretty high, and was member of MENSA). Yet, he still marvelled at how smart his mechanic was at fixing his car.
To Asimov, his mechanic was a genius, but his IQ wasn't likely very high, and would therefore correlate neatly with the notion that the mechanic likely could care less about physics. While the reverse was true for Asimov.
This is true especially in your teenage years. It could change by more than 20 points. Can someone with high motivation and with an IQ of 110 make useful contributions to theoretical physics? I fail to see why not.
IQ is determined by a test that's ultimately measuring skills. And skills can be learned. Even if the intent of the test is to measure some sort of innate, unchanging capacity.
> 9% of the students showed a significant change of 15 points or more in IQ scores
I had the opposite experience. I've had various IQ tests at age 5, then 9, then 16, then again in my mid-late 30s. 7 tests in all. They have various scores and scales, but in every case, I was within spitting distance of the same spot on the various scales of each test. In some cases, I didn't know I was going to be tested - no prep. In other cases, I'd planned the tests, so ... I can't say I "studied" as such, but I got good sleep, was relatively(!) calm, not anxious, etc.
I don't doubt that over time intelligence capacity changes some, based on a variety of factors. My own experience is that it doesn't change much - both with myself and people I know. It may be that I already tend to know people of above average intelligence, and there's less room for them to grow in the first place?
If your environment was deficient perhaps you would have scored lower, and then with improved circumstances you would get a better score. Perhaps your score is not moving because you already have a good environment.
There is often a disingenuous and dishonest attempt to diminish the impact of environment. As if a seed will thrive whatever the environment. This seems to be a transparently ideological position.
The idea that a rich or middle class upbringing with access to excellent education and resources will somehow produce the same outcomes as a poor family that cannot provide access to a stable home, nurturing environment, basic upbringing educational resources and good schools is not logical and cannot be made in good faith. Yet people with seemingly high IQs continuously make this claim. Suggesting perhaps that IQ is not everything.
At the time, we were in a rather ... low-end school district. It wasn't the worst, but declining. My parents (and others) were lobbying (for years) for some sort of program for gifted students - nothing existed in our school system at the time. There were programs in other schools - even in the same county - but not our end of the county (not poverty area, but nowhere near the 'rich' side of things, and not really quite 'middle class', looking back at things as an adult).
You're not wrong though - certainly environment has to play a factor. Diet and health probably have to have an impact in some capacity as well.
I did have a 2 parent family (up until 17, anyway!), and a supportive extended family who valued education. The school system itself was pretty deficient, and we moved later (5th grade for me), so my younger brothers had access to 'better schools' pretty much from day 1.
I also did have an interesting of reading which was nurtured early on; trips to the library were probably more fun than trips anywhere else, and I remember getting really excited when learning that the "you can only take 2 books" was just something the parents imposed - you could really take out many more at any one time(!)
Part of the claim of the post above was that IQ can 'change' - seemingly dramatically - just based on study/prep/exercises/practice (that's how I read the piece anyway). My own experience tells me that whatever change happens is likely not as impactful or longlasting as one might first assume.
IQ certainly isn't everything. I've learned that many times over the years. Much like income, over a certain particular number, for most people, there's diminishing returns re: value. Having an IQ score were 120 is on the high end, vs, say, 85 on the low end - yes, that can be advantageous. Moving that same score to, say, 128... probably not all that noticeable or useful for most people in most walks of life. Hesitating to use specific numbers because I know different tests use different scoring scales.
1. Care a lot.
2. Work on continuously improving your skills.
That's pretty much it. Yes, there is such a thing as natural ability, but outside of the true outliers, natural ability is a pretty small factor compared to caring a lot and continuous improvement.
And, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, caring a lot and continuously improving your skills is what makes you an outlier among outliers. Conversely, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, someone who's just above average can be better than you by caring a lot and improving their skills.
There are obviously a few counterexamples. I'm sure there are hundreds of sprinters who care more and maybe even work harder than Usain Bolt. But if you're doing anything more complicated than running in a straight line, these factors start to outweigh natural ability really quickly.