Does Super-High IQ= Super-Low Common Sense?

http://www.scientificblogging.com/rogue_neuron/does_superhigh_iq_superlow_common_sense

by amichail • 17 years ago

11 18 17 years ago

LucaDuval2• 17 years ago

I can name without any effort a few geniuses that didn't lack neither common sense nor social skills (Feynman, Darwin, Newton, Da Vinci, Leibniz, Pitagora). I'm sure that there are scores of them. I would say that the equation "Super-High IQ = Super-Low Common Sense" is simply wrong.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Second that. They're orthogonal, to a certain extent. I find it hard to imagine someone with an extremely low IQ to exhibit a lot of common sense, so to my feeling the relationship is the reverse, but in potential.

I would define it as 'super high IQ' = 'potential to exhibit high degree of common sense'.

Because people that have a super high IQ are not 'common' in their common sense does not automatically mean they are not right. Common after all is used here almost as a stand-in for average, but common sense means something else entirely.

This interpretation of common sense will get you in to Asperger syndrome territory when you look at individuals with a very high IQ, who can have a serious problem communicating their ideas to people that can't follow their train of thought.

dasil003• 17 years ago

This closing line strikes me as complete unsupportable bullshit:

No, but the person with high IQ and high common sense, or Practical Intelligence, is definitely a rarer breed of genius.

Did it occur to the author that there might be bias from both sides?

Many super intelligent people who are socially well-adapted probably conceal their extraordinary intelligence because they are aware of how alienating it would be to cognitively soar past every conversation partner. And from the other side, someone of average intelligence who is more interested in arcane ideas than other people probably puts a lot of time into pursuing those ideas, leading other people to think they are geniuses just because they constantly talk about esoteric things in a very deep manner.

ScottWhigham• 17 years ago

Well that settles it then - you can name some therefore you must be right. Silly article.

LucaDuval2• 17 years ago

I'm inclined to believe that lack of common sense is an exception and not the rule among geniuses, despite popular beliefs, but I could be wrong. Care to offer a few counterexamples?

philwelch2• 17 years ago

Can't speak for the others, but from what I've gathered, Newton was arrogant, vindictive, and disagreeable.

btilly• 17 years ago

Newton is also believed to have been homosexual in a severely homophobic society, which puts a definite crimp in your lifestyle. Also his alchemical researches definitely gave him mercury exposure, which is doesn't help your personality either.

That said, going back to the root post I have never noticed a strong correlation between IQ and personality. The few studies with actual evidence that I've seen (ahem, which this is not) haven't seen one either. Therefore I am strongly inclined to ignore this blog.

xtho• 17 years ago

How come you know their IQ scores? Or is it just an assumption that a "genius" has a super-high IQ? BTW most of those "geniuses" have a wealthy/bourgeois familiy background and they had to have some social skills to manage other people that worked for them, to become court mathematician etc.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

How come you know their IQ scores?

A very good question. In fact we cannot possibly know the IQ test score of any person who lived before the era of the first IQ test, which was only a century ago. But it gets worse than this. Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of high-IQ elementary-age pupils showed that many of those young people did not qualify as "gifted" on a subsequent test that Terman gave them at high school age. But he kept them in the study group anyway.

Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.

An especially odd result of the Terman study is that Terman tested and rejected for inclusion in his study two children whose IQ scores were below his cut-off line who later went on to win Nobel prizes: William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, and physicist Luis Alvarez. None of the children included in the study ever won a Nobel prize. The book by Shurkin I have just cited here is a good corrective on many misconceptions about IQ, and has an excellent section on attempts by one of Terman's study associates to estimate--by extremely dubious methods that have never been validated--the IQ scores of historical persons.

waterlesscloud• 17 years ago

Feynman reportedly tested at 125 on an IQ test in high school. Which just indicates how completely useless that test was.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

I was kind of hoping this article would have some actual empirical evidence in it rather than just some loose application of psychological theories.

thwarted• 17 years ago

This reads like it's supposed to be comforting to people who feel like they have low IQs, "Well, I may not be smart, but at least I have common sense".

Is it really proper to equate social ineptness with lack of common sense.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

If you look at the original article, it could also be interpreted as rationalizing the reasons the author has difficulty getting laid (per the conclusion). Weak though it is in scholarly terms, I found it quite thought-provoking nevertheless - reasoning from general principles without correctly weighting the desirability of likely social outcomes can create all sorts of problems.

IQ (or abstract reasoning ability or whatever you'd like to call it) ain't everything; there's a big difference between being clever and being cunning, and I've often wished there were a way to rebalance the stats :)

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Original article:

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/09/clever-sillies...

One problem with this source, another article from which I have studied with a group of psychologists a few weeks ago,

http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...

is that the source itself is notorious for lack of empirical back-up or peer review for anything submitted to it. (The Medical Hypotheses blog is associated with the journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by the same person who posted the blog post I link above, and he runs the journal, and evidently the blog as well, to post ideas of his own that cannot obtain peer-reviewed publication elsewhere.) I have read several of the articles he cites in his blog post, and most have nothing to do with what he is writing about in the blog article, but are simply there to pad his reference list.

smcq• 17 years ago

Common sense is the beliefs held by common people, by definition common people are much lower IQ than someone in the 170+ IQ range.

It would shock me if someone in the 170+ IQ range believed much of what "common" people believe. If they did, it would imply we have an extraordinarily well educated population and an extraordinarily boring genius class.

Does Super-High IQ= Super-Low Common Sense?

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