[sultanofswing]

Usage of Feynman's official IQ score as some sort of 'proof' of anything is often overused.

I don't have the exact citation but it is fairly well documented that he scored well on other very challenging tests that correlate strongly with IQ (not to mention his actual career accomplishments).

Needless to say, people bandying around his score on this one test as evidence that he was 'bright but not in a high IQ' way is disingenuous or ill-informed, to say the least.

I could be wrong but I believe the common consensus is that his 120ish score on that test was not representative of his actual IQ, and was maybe the result of some other circumstance.

[tptacek]

I like how when Richard Feynman's IQ test score doesn't conform to some narrative, HN is in contortions with excuses why the test doesn't matter, but when we come around to the topic of white IQ supremacy, suddenly HN is armed to the teeth with factoids about how g-loaded and circumstantially neutral the mainstream IQ tests are.

[sultanofswing]

This seems like a reach, especially considering I don't personally believe the latter point you're making about IQ tests being neutral.

I'm not an expert on psychometrics, I think all I'm trying to point out is that Feynman performed highly on other tests that likely correlate highly with IQ, so I believe it more likely that there is some confounding factor at play other than this being representative of his actual IQ.

Or maybe that his IQ averaging here doesn't tell us much about which domains he scored highest in (some posit that he may have scored very poorly in a verbal section vs. mathematical etc.).

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

Or perhaps there is a difference between one-off individual measurements and group statistics, but please feel free to feel outraged...

Sorry for the snark but do you honestly not see that there is a difference between the two cases?

[linkregister]

Thomas, were the same folks making these comments?

[watwut]

In that case, the question is, why those two groups of people never interact and never discuss with each other? You would expect a discussion or fights between these groups once in while.

[linkregister]

Yes, and one might find them in the "comments" section of a technology news aggregator.

[tptacek]

No, I am just sort of throwing up my hands and howling into the void here.

[adwn]

Maybe that's because a single data point [1] of a single person doesn't refute decades of research and heaps of evidence?

[1] An unreliable/uncertain one, even.

[overgard]

I don't think it's disingenuous or ill-informed at all. Maybe people get sensitive when it comes to intelligence, but say I said something like "Drew Brees is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time despite being short for the position". It doesn't mean that height doesn't matter for the position (short stature is a disadvantage as a quarterback), it just means that he found other ways to succeed. I think you could make the same argument with intelligence: once you reach a baseline of "good enough", what you do with that intelligence is more important than just having a lot of it. Obviously Feynman applied his intelligence really well.

I think the argument of "so and so was a genius so don't bother you can't do what they did" is a really defeatist attitude.