Do you know any geniuses (or are you one)? What is it like to have exceptional intellectual ability?

My Grandfather was one of the people working on building the first computers, and helped with initial explorations into AI.

I think that the best word to describe genius is: lonely.

One of them is answering now.

My husband has a genius level IQ.I found out through a family member and when I asked him,he “fessed up”.
I would say in his case,it is a gift.He handles things well.

@Adirondackwannabe Well, give us your insight, sir lol.

@lucillelucillelucille What’s he like?

@Blackberry They keep kicking me out of the meetings for pulling down the mean IQ.

You worry. A lot. About everything. You assume everybody is playing dumb when you try and talk to people, so you get very quiet.

@Blackberry -He has been described as a man’s man.He is more than capable of abstract thought.He handles things well and can assess and take care of a problem very quickly…which is a good skill to have when you’re married to me.
He is also quick-witted, funny and handsome :)

@lucillelucillelucille – Did you write his facebook profile? ;-)

My 15 year old is one of them…he doesn’t read yet is a straight A double honors freshman in High School.

@iamthemob -LOL! Nope! I just took the photos.:)

@lucillelucillelucille DIRTY!!!!!!

My dad. I’m sure lots of daughters say that, but in this case it happens to be true. ;)

@lucillelucillelucille “He has been described as a man’s man.He is more than capable of abstract thought.He handles things well and can assess and take care of a problem very quickly…which is a good skill to have when you’re married to me.——He is also quick-witted, funny and handsome :)”
But can he cook?

@rebbel Yes.In the kitchen as well.XD

I knew this old farmer once, Dick Splatt was his name, right old character he was. Anyway, he fancied himself as an inventor, no bloody good, but that never stopped him. One notable device he championed was a belt placed around a chicken’s waist which enabled it to lay a boiled egg…hard or soft! Trouble was, the poor chickens didn’t know whether to fart, shit or whistle. The look on the poor buggers faces was a mixture of shock & mild arousal.
Still, he was a lovable old soul ;¬}

I don’t know from experience, but I imagine it’s a lot like being in your own head, only faster. You see the connections between things more quickly. You might think using three dimensional structures rather than using a linear series of symbols. Things come to you whole rather than having to work them out step by step. You just “know” more often than less intelligent people.

Also, your brain would always be going. Working on problems. Often you wouldn’t necessarily be consciously aware of it, but you could probably feel it perking away. Even when you worked on problems in a linear way, it would go faster, and if you were working with other people, it might be frustrating if they couldn’t keep up.

You’d have the same social needs as everyone else, but you might not have spent as much time figuring out how the social game is played, and you might not do so well at it. If you were really smart, you’d realize that genius is equally in the body as it is in the head, and you would take care of yourself physically. If you were really smart (or familiar with the field), you might even know that a lot of your thinking takes place in your body.

Anyway, I seriously doubt that if you were suddenly to find yourself inhabiting a genius’ brain, that it would be very unfamiliar. It would be a lot the same, except a bit faster and sometimes a bit more irritable.

@lucillelucillelucille Sounds like the guy to hang on to. Congratz!

In my profession (software engineer) I am generally surrounded by a bunch of scary smart folks. While I can “hold my own” intellectually with any of them, it is sometimes a bit intimidating.

@Yarnlady is a member of Mensa. I’ll send her a PM and ask her to weigh in.

My father was a genius (145 IQ), and my mother told me mine was about as high, but she refused to tell me what it was (fearing it would make me stuck up I guess). I never bothered to get mine checked. I have noticed that a lot of people seem to think I’m really smart, but it doesn’t occur to me that way. I’m just who I am. I love to think deeply about stuff, and as deep as you want to go, I’m willing to go deeper.

Edit: I just checked @yarnlady’s profile, and she says she’s taking a break from Fluther. Maybe she’ll eventually post and let us know.

Here is one thing that I think is key to being a Genius people may not appreciate.

The pauses are longer in interpersonal communications. What may seem like a second to someone of normal intelligence seems like an eternity inside a genius head. There is a large amount of space for second guessing.

Are you only interested in people who are really extraordinary, like the ones you mentioned? I know a lot of people who are in the 99th percentile by any intelligence test, but they are probably not going to revolutionize physics or similar, so I don’t know if they meet your criteria. If they do, though, I think they’re just like anyone else. A little neurotic, pretty insecure, normal humans.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought: what are you talking about?

I am not a genius but I have felt what it feels like to be less quick than I usually am. I had minor confusion as a symptom when sick a few years back, my brain just didn’t put things together like I’m used to, and it felt weird. I felt like I had to concentrate very hard to understand anything.

@nikipedia I mean those people, too, but there’s no way to categorize these things lol.

I’m not a genius, but I was what some might have called a ‘child prodigy’ (but not so far as Wunderkind). As far as I remember, I was made to read a book to the rest of the children (who couldn’t read, at least certainly not fluidly) on the first day of Reception, and to demonstrate writing. I don’t know what this was supposed to do for me, but it basically marked me out as a “freak” and I lived with that identity for next 8 years I suppose.

I found most of the games the other kids played to be boring, pointless and random, but I joined in sometimes just so I could “be involved”. Needless to say, no-one really ‘got it’, when we were 10 and playing the memory game “I went to market and bought…” or “In my Uncle’s trunk…” and my ‘item’ was two-hundred-and-fifty-six-megabytes-of-dual-in-line-memory-module-double-data-rate-synchronous-dynamic-random-access-memory… I suppose I didn’t ‘get it’, I thought the point of the game was to make it as difficult as you possibly can =]

My favourite ‘toys’ were pretty much Lego, building myself computers and, well, massive reference books. Needless to say, I loved the internet.

Then, when I was about 12 or 13, my teacher told me that I could already pass my GCSEs (school-leavers exam at 16) and I thought, wait a minute, all that hard work (which I’d enjoyed anyway) has suddenly just seriously paid off, and I spent the next three or four years completely pissing around at school and just ace-ing all the exams. From about 15 I started smoking ganja and drinking, at a LOT of mad parties in houses, abandoned buildings or just in the middle of nowhere… gave some fraud and ‘confidence-trickery’ a go, just for the kicks, ended up doing way too many experimental drugs, but in the end dropped some acid, saw my self-destructive behaviours for what they were, straightened my head out and got ‘accepted’ by some of the best universities in the country.

So that probably nerfed my IQ somewhat (I am still about 1/100, but certainly as a child it was more like 1/250, but of course it is based on age, so perhaps I was merely an early bloomer).

Anyway, I rejected the really academically prestigious universities, as I now do not like the academically-obsessive. That probably means it’ll be a while before I meet any true geniuses, but maybe I’ll do some post-grad at Cambridge, eh?

Now I just used my talents to laze around the whole year before learning everything in two days before each exam. I definitely have a different way of understanding the abstract concepts, compared with my friends. They like to memorize rules and techniques, whereas I like to simply think over the fundamentals and mechanics of things for HOURS, and then answer the questions by intuition or ‘thinking about it’. My friends are much quicker to answer, when they’ve LEARNED the answer, but they seem to get stuck when things don’t match the example they read. I think the words are ‘fluid’ and ‘crystal’.

So, I find life a lot easier now I actively try to be lazy. Maybe that’s sad, but I enjoy being able to be “First” degree standard, without working my arse off. And that’s enough. I honestly don’t want to be that ‘freak’ kid again. I think many geniuses feel so isolated, because, to everyone else, ‘genius’ is their identity, and so they devote everything to that. And maybe for them that’s rewarding, but for me… I just want to be a ‘person’.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to be a smart-arse, but that time of being on completely another level to everyone else was just not psychologically healthy. Maybe the education system is somewhat to blame (I definitely should’ve been doing what I’m doing now 5 years ago), but either way, that experience gives me some idea of what geniuses perhaps cannot escape from.

</lifestory>

@nikipedia: Hi, I’ll attempt to clarify. I was reviewing what @wundayatta said:

“it’s a lot like being in your own head, only faster”.
Furthermore:
“You’d have the same social needs as everyone else, but you might not have spent as much time figuring out how the social game is played, and you might not do so well at it.”

It is faster. So imagine a job interview, which makes everyone nervous. Now, imagine you are trapped in the seat interacting with a hiring manager, and your brain moves three times faster than it does now, and he is asking questions that seem simple, almost so simple she is trying to trick you.

I remember grade school, the nuns would send me to the office and ask me why I wasn’t doing well sense my I.Q. was so high. Apparently telling them that I was bored to shit wasn’t an acceptable answer.

I went to parochial school and they had “Church History” for most of the grades. It seems that the Crusaders were great guys and questions are not permitted.

By the time I got to high school, I have it down pat and could pull straight C’s with minimal work. Then I would ace the mid terms and finals. I was accused of cheating and even took one of the tests over again to prove that I could do it.

Education didn’t become interesting until I went to technical school for the Navy. Mostly aced that too but I had to study a little. It turns out that the threat of spending 4 years at sea as a cook or the guy that swabs the deck is a great incentive for academic achievement.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Yeah I remember suddenly deciding to master the ‘social game’ when I was 12 or 13 and went from being the freak nobody ever spoke to, to ‘in-with-in-crowd’, in about a year, then suddenly just hating everything about ‘trying’ to be popular, ripping apart all the really fake people I’d met (which was TOO harsh on some of the insecure girls, when I look back at it), and going back to being a freak, but now with a sense of pride, an unhealthy obsession with ‘honesty’, and some social skills.

And that’s me still, though I’ve certainly traded some of the honesty back for more social skills, hah…

Fair enough second-guessing everything you do yourself, you can’t expect others to do the same, or appreciate your doing it for them =P

I eventually realized most people are awesome, and not trying to trick me. I force myself to slow down and assume that they mean well, and now I love socializing.

It was definitely the case for me at least, that everyone else ‘growing up’ a bit was a good help.
I get along a lot better with my peers, now they’re not all petty children or whiny/vindictive teenagers haha.

People did try to trick you all the time at school, remember! They did laugh behind your back and ridicule your differences! People did look for your weaknesses and exploit them. And at the time, yeah, it seemed like the whole world was like that. But like you said, it’s not… =]

@The_Idler and @Imadethisupwithnoforethought Are you guys geniuses? What makes you geniuses? IQ score? Accomplishments? What do you want to do with your abilities?

No, read the first four words I posted in this thread.

And then if you don’t want to read the next thousand or so, I will summarize:
I describe my early life at school, where I was on a completely different plane, in terms of cognitive development, to the rest of my peers, and how that experience affected some of my decisions regarding “What do you want to do with your abilities?”.

I also consider the insight this experience may have given me, with regards to that of true ‘geniuses’, who would probably not be able to ‘escape’ in the way I did.

In short: I think it’s probably in some ways saddening because there’s this chasm that can suddenly appear, even at the worst times, when people get close, but also pretty awesome because, well, thinking about things is just amazing…

I have wasted a lot of time @Wundayatta.

Think of being a genius this way.
A human being is considered mentally handicapped at 75 IQ score.
The average person has an IQ score of 100.
The difference between me and the average person is greater than the difference between the average person and the mentally handicapped. Think of how everybody looks to you from that perspective. And I feel the same emotions as you.

It takes a very, very long time to figure out how to fit in.

Sorry but I have to comment again. I know plenty of people who have genius-level intellectual abilities and have no more social problems than the average person, and plenty of people with both extraordinary intellectual ability and extraordinarily good social skills.. I think it’s a little obtuse to assume that one’s social problems are because one is so superior to everyone around him.

@nikipedia I apologize if I had given you the impression I am in any way superior. I am disappointed I have not done more to help people. I am simply trying to describe a weird form of being isolated.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought

I wonder – in learning how to deal with social interactions, do you find that you actually end up lying a lot more than you’d like to…or at least bending your opinion in terms of how you communicate it…in order to not insult someone?

Hey, @nikipedia, where’d you meet so many geniuses, huh? =P

So, @Imadethisupwithnoforethought, you were kidding, when you said you were puzzled by relativity?
Just giving everyone else a chance to feel clever, huh? =P

@iamthemob I find in real life, people use emotions to inform most of their thinking. I avoid giving an opinion on anything I suspect they might feel strongly about. I just try to enjoy their company.

@Ron_C I had the same experience in school. They just couldn’t figure out why I was a lousy student when the IQ tests showed such high scores. However, it went a bit further than just being bored. Teachers and test questions are geared toward receiving pre-conceved “correct” answers. However, most of the time there are multiple ways of looking at things and the answer will be different depending upon perspective. So, often times I would give answers that would be perfectly correct but would not be the answer they were looking for. (Heck, I even began to wonder if they were intentionally trying to trick me by asking ambiguous questions.)

There is a (somewhat lewd) joke that a fellow jelly posted recently. The setup demonstrates the concept very well. It starts something like:

The school teacher asked Johnny: “If there are five birds sitting on a fence and you shoot one with your BB gun, how many will be left?”

Johnny answers: “None.”

The school teacher says: “The the correct answer is four. Why would you answer none?”

Johnny answers: “If I shoot one with my BB gun the rest would fly away.”

@The_Idler: grad school. Nearly everyone I regularly spend time with either has a PhD or will have one in the next few years.

@The_Idler don’t pretend if you think about something for a few minutes and it doesn’t come to you, you can let it go.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought – But isn’t not participating in such a conversation, in essence, a lie by omission?

@nikipedia The only PhDs that make you almost automatically a genius in my books must lie within the field of Maths, Physics or…. or maybe I’m being extremely prejudiced….

Oooh, neuroscience, now that is fascinating, I nearly opted for that myself =]

You’re making me think again about PhD….
I must admit, the majority of my coursemates seem like dullards, but maybe they’ll be gone by the Masters year =P

@iamthemob, didn’t @nikipedia seem to get pretty upset with me when I gave an honest answer? Did she accuse me of looking down on other people?

When I am on an honest answer site, I will answer and then apologize.

In real life, I change the subject.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought

And that’s what I’m talking about. As much as it’s about understanding the motivations of others, it’s also about self-editing because where to you, it is clear that you’re taking an objective position on something, and don’t mean any offense, the person to whom you’re speaking might be able to see it as an attack on who they are, a statement that they’re stupid, etc.

For me, the self-editing involved with avoiding those situations is a form of lying. I’m not saying that it’s not necessary at times, but I’m saying that it’s probably something you do a lot more now that you are socializing as opposed to when you weren’t really all that often (and I’m talking per-capita, of course ;-)).

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought I totally get you when it comes to the sort of strange introversion that comes with a high IQ. Bottom line is that most of the time you just aren’t on the same wavelength with the people you interact with. In my experience this can lead to feelings of isolation. And yes, it can be quite hard to express one’s honest opinions without being perceived as arrogant and conceited, and if you keep your mouth shut you are perceived as withdrawn or snobbish. Fortunately, the simi-anonymity of sites like Fluther afford us the luxury of being direct without the impact (and pitfalls) that true interpersonal communication carries with it.

I wonder, is there any place for an MChem in the field of Neuroscience?

Anyway, nice chat y’all, I got 20 hours to sleep, learn and sit CHM1002b, wish me luck =P

Oh and @YoBob, I see you, that’s what I meant up there, by ‘trading some honesty back for more social skills’ ...I don’t know why at one point I became so destructively obsessed with honesty, probably something to with blindly equating ‘truth’ with ‘good’...

@YoBob

I’d disagree with that last part on a certain level.

I find that on the internet the text has a tendency to flatten the tone, so things that were not meant to sound blunt or curt at all do so more…and things that are intended to slightly sounds so severely. Along with that is less of an ability for you to actively be in control of how you are perceived in what you’re saying, as when speaking you can modify to show whether or not you mean to be confrontational.

I know I have, and I’m sure you have, been perceived as being insulting when you just were stating your case. @Imadethisupwithnoforethought just stated that s/he was perceived improperly on this very thread.

What may be the case is that it’s a bit easier to shift off that onto a misinterpretation and correct the problem more easily than in direct conversation.

On an interesting note on that front…I find that I am oddly able to tell who on here has mild Asperger’s on here…perhaps because I’m fairly sure I’m an undiagnosed case. ;-) But where I consistently see people interact with someone who gets increasingly frustrated and blunt, and even accusatory, and the other party maintains their conversation tone online, plus some other things, I tend to be right that they have something similar to if not Asperger’s.

The benefit to it on a forum like this, as it affects ones ability to read emotions in social interactions, is that the text flattens out emotional expression, and therefore they end up being able to continue with a conversation because they don’t fall into the emotional trap – they don’t see it.

I wonder if @Blackberry still cares?

I’m reading…lol. Thanks for the input, everyone. :)

@iamthemob – IMHO, it is that very “flattening of tone” that sort of levels the playing field. After participating in on line discussion forums for any length of time, most develop the realization that it is difficult to determine the emotional import behind simple typed text and as a result those who stick around tend to grow a bit thicker skin.

@YoBob

But isn’t that as much the result of people gravitating towards sites where others have the same argumentative styles (if not the same position on issues)? I mean, there are plenty of places to go where rationality goes out the window, and people are set off by the smallest perceived slight (and then, of course, when someone reacts that way to them, claim that person should relax, it’s just the internet. ;-)).

@iamthemob – True. However even on the less rational sites if you insult someone (whether intentional or not) you risk very little in the way of real social damage. Whereas in real life, if something you say is perceived as insulting by someone that has influence among your peers (for example a co-worker or “connected” member of your community) you risk real world social retribution. Not so when it’s just words on a screen from a semi-anonymous contributor.

@iamthemob I have considered ‘is it lying to change the subject.’

I would ask myself, and do, by engaging in that discussion because I know the answer, whether I am doing so to help them or to be right. Then I proceed accordingly. Very often it is I would be engaging in the argument to be right. Thats just a weird form of masturbation almost.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought

But it’s very human. We all like to win. ;-)

The main asset I took from law school was knowledge of the Socratic Method. When I find myself talking to someone who I automatically have assumptions about what they think and what they are basing their knowledge on, I resort to the SM. I just ask questions, or mostly questions. It stops me from trying to assert something.

Oh I’m no genius myself but I think I know a few and they probably fall into the ASD spectrum. I don’t care for IQ charts or for mensa memberships or for PhDs – I think people who are genius are often isolated because our western society loves it some dumb.

My IQ is in the 160’s range, which technically means I’m a genius. I know a handful of fields of study really well, and in particular how they interact. Some people have used the term brilliant to describe me. Personally, I don’t get it. I think my skill with writing and intellectualism has more to do with my ability to read fast and comprehend, not to mention the spare time to do it, more than any inborn ability.

I’m coming late to the question, but I think many of the answers reflect what I have observed. I grew up during an era when the word egghead was used as a put-down. My social issues came from two sources, the students saw me as teacher’s pet, and I belonged to a socially unacceptable religion. I was teased unmercifully through out my entire school years.

My husband is much smarter than I am, to the point where he pretty much lives in a different world. He interfaces with great difficulty, and, much like a computer, spends a lot of time processing or trying to find a way to respond to comments. He can see dozens of answers and has to narrow it down to the most responsive one.

@incendiary_dan, the smartest man I ever knew had me read a PDF of a study called “Incompetent and Unaware of It”. It did an analysis showing that the more skill and comprehension a person had with a complicated topic, the less likely they were to believe that they were an expert.

It also showed, the less someone knew about a topic, the more likely they were to overestimate their own skill level in that field of endeavor. The dumber you are, the less likely you are to understand complexity. The more you understand complexity, the more you believe it to be complex. This results in inverted confidence vs. skill levels on a graph.

Last time I hit google for it, it came up easy.

My IQ is 152. I don’t really tell people I’m a genius because I can’t stand being asked so many questions about it. I tend to worry a lot, get pissed when other people can’t get what seems obvious to me, and it’s kind of hard for me to connect to people (this might just be me?).

Only a paltry 116, far from genius. I just make it up in wisdom and logic.

Same as @Hypocrisy_Central, I think I use wisdom and logic and am not a genius, although I have been told countless times by my classmates that I am.

My ex husband is one and when I met @mattbrowne, I was pretty sure he was one too.

@YoBob I think that was a terrifically good answer. When I was still going to church, I wanted my daughter baptized. It seems that the particular church I attended insisted that the parents took religious classes before the child could be baptized. My wife flat out refused; I thought it would be interesting to play the game.

Dutifully, I showed up at the 7:00 PM weekly classes prepared to go through the entire 6 week course. I found it interesting and tried to find out the rational behind the various dogma espoused.

Before the third meeting the priest took be aside. He said that there was no point for me to attend subsequent classes and suggested that I know enough already and he would baptize her on schedule. That sounded like a pretty good deal to me and left Tuesday nights free.

The moral of the story is that having an inquiring mind often brings benefits. Today my family is happily atheist without the need to bend logic to believe religious dogma.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought

It did an analysis showing that the more skill and comprehension a person had with a complicated topic, the less likely they were to believe that they were an expert.

For me, this speaks in many ways to what the definition of wisdom is as opposed to genius. Wisdom in many ways allows you to know how much there is you do not know, and therefore be open constantly to new knowledge.

I agree @iamthemob.

I just had a quick impression of @incendiary_dan running circles around everyone and not realizing he was doing it. :)

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Well, maybe one circle.

@incendiary_dan Psst Figure out an algorithm that will allow me to pick the winning lotto numbers, I will kick you down; remember….our secret, don’t tell anyone. <wink wink>

I don’t believe I’ve ever met any geniuses. IQ scores do not impress me. There are a lot of people who say they have genius level IQs and I’m thinking, ‘Oh really?’

@wundayatta An I Q score is a very poor tool to assess genius level.

To all those that have let everyone know what doesn’t prove genius, what proof would you accept?

That’s part of the problem, you can’t declare yourself a genius, or even “pretty smart” without sounding pompous, and there’s always someone to smack down those that try.

“You think you’re a genius? Prove it. Do sumin smart!”

Thanks to those who put themselves out there, it’s interesting stuff.

@funkdaddy No proof will do. I don’t think the concept makes sense, except as a way for schools to evaluate people and for people to gain an aura of authority. It’s about the same thing as saying “I work for Goldman-Sachs,” or “I went to Stanford.”

Thanks @YARNLADY Appreciate your comment.

Great point about the IQ scores. I was just thinking this while driving. IQ test are notoriously flawed, particularly in terms of pro-male and pro-Western (particularly WASP-y) bias. And it only tests one set of aptitudes.

@incendiary_dan Sorry, I agree that IQ tests are inherently flawed mechanisms for judging this contrived idea we have of ‘intelligence’, but how can you argue that they are “pro-Western”, when the East Asian race is the most ‘successful’, on average?

I am wondering now if we could go back to @Blackberry in response to @incendiary_dan.

When you asked the question @blackberry, did you want people who had taken an IQ test and who had hit the genius range on the results, or did you anticipate people who could play a musical instrument with amazing skill to respond?

I think I would like a confirmation of the operational definition under which the question was asked.

@The_Idler First, there is no such thing as “race”, it’s a cultural construct based around phenotype. So what you mean specifically “East Asian race” could include different groups selectively chosen to reflect a desired result. “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” is the old saying, and it’s pretty true. Second: Where did you get those figures, because that contradicts what I had learned in college. But it’s been a few years. Third: Most IQ tests have historically been written by upper-class white males, and naturally tended to reflect things they would know about in their life experience. A famous doctor working in the field of intelligence once remarked upon taking an IQ test and asking “What the hell is a schooner?” He was a white male, but not affluent, and therefore could easily have no experience with that sort of vessel. Anyhow, the curriculum in many East Asian countries, particularly highly industrialized ones, have reflected a lot of Western teaching for some time. Could have something to do with it. The IQ tests could also easily have been written and remade by people from that part of the world, and would naturally reflect the bias towards their culture.

Anyhow, nothing was so preposterous as the early assertion by some psychologists that basically everyone from Eastern Europe was clinically retarded. This was determined from the tests done on Ellis Island, which were given to new immigrants. What was the difference between the Czechs and Lithuanians and such that came through as opposed to the French, Italian, etc? Almost none of them spoke any English, whereas others might know a bit. The tests were in English only. Think of that when you hear statistics about testing.

P.S. I once took an alternative IQ test made for African Americans in the ‘60s or ‘70s, nicknamed the “Chittlins Test”. Apparently I’m a genius in that measure, too.

@incendiary_dan, it seems contradictory to say race doesn’t exist and then say exactly what it is. As a scientist, I find it odd to suggest that people from nearby geographical regions do not share more genetic traits than people from distant geographical regions.

As far as the Asian IQ advantage, Asians don’t just perform as well as Westerners, but they tend to outperform them on most IQ/general intelligence measures. In addition, Ashkenazi Jews have the highest mean IQ scores of any ethnic group, about 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the mean for Europeans.

@nikipedia Please read what I wrote. Though I should have worded the first sentence better by perhaps saying something like “Race has no clear categorization because it’s a cultural construct”, I never said people in a geographical region don’t share genetic traits. What I said was that thinking in terms of a fictional categorization such as “race”, which is constantly changing and cannot actually be categorized concretely according to any measure, is not useful, because of the lack of real life categorization. As a scientist, I would think you’d be familiar with the basic scientific concepts being used in studies of human populations today.

If you’re inclined, pick of Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban’s book Race and Racism.

1. semantics. Fine, I should never say the word ‘race’, but if you look at the region of the world known as ‘East Asia’ you will see an incredible correlation with the only region in which every nation exhibits an average IQ of over 100. There is a great variety in economic development, political freedom, levels of consumption, internet access, style of education & nutrition across that region, but they all demonstrate a higher average IQ than Europe.

2. I haven’t done any serious academic research into it, but I thought it was commonly accepted as @nikipedia says that people-of-ethnically-East-Asian-origin have a higher average IQ than people-of-ethnically-European-origin, and people-of-ethnically-Ashkenazi-origin considerably so.

3. I am certainly not referring to those absurd old-fashioned IQ or intelligence tests (like those used by US Immigration when it was an officially racist nation) which feature a load of non-abstract, knowledge-based questions. Obviously those are entirely useless, if you don’t speak English and haven’t had a formal education. Nobody uses them or seriously considers them in any way useful any more (except for the hilarious citizenship tests, as if memorizing a load of facts regarding political history and traditions suddenly makes you so much more likely to assimilate culturally)

IQ tests now are tests of abstract reasoning and pattern-recognition (go take one), and the fact is that some countries have higher averages than others, for a great variety of reasons, and whatever they are, they cannot now be described as ‘pro-Western’, when the entire East Asian region scores better than the US and Europe. That includes North Korea, in whose education system I suspect you will struggle to find many reflections of Western teaching.

The tests use the same original Western statistical methods of grading, which explains the fact that Europe and North America average at 100 (rather than the world doing so). The IQ scale is Eurocentric in that it considers the European average to be THE standard, to which all others are compared. But the fact remains that East Asia and Ashkenazi Jews are above that standard, destroying the myth that the test is any more pro-Western, than it is pro-Korean.

But hey, maybe it’s evolved from a white-European intelligentsia conspiracy into an East-Asian-Ashkenazi conspiracy to justify their domination of the peoples of the world. õ.O