It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth.
These absurd claims about IQ is almost evidence that the claimant are nowhere close. For starters, any IQ tests are not going to be normalized to that range because it is impossible to normalize to that range as there are 0 realistic samples.
Practically speaking, it's impossible to roll 6 one hundred times in a row on fair dice. Not technically impossible, but we each get to calibrate our skepticism based on how far out the probabilities are.
In this case we can be sure the dice aren't fair because there's significant motivation for them not to be, or at least it's easy to imagine a manufacturing defect in the dice.
Even if we could positively confirm that the person is smarter than literally every human who has ever lived... that would be about IQ 200, still far from IQ 210. (The required number of humans grows exponentially.)
Yeah, this is a mistake everyone makes, and it is difficult to explain to people who didn't study statistics.
The short version is that intelligence is an ordinal value, not a cardinal value. You can say that person A is more intelligent than person B, but not that person A is exactly 3.14515x more intelligent than person B.
Intelligence is simply measured in percentiles, that's all. You can't be more intelligent than 100% of the population. The 100% of the population is the population of Earth. You cannot get a higher IQ score than that.
That's right. If the event has a 1 in 390B chance, and there are 8B tries, you would expect to observe the event 2% of the time you conduct the 8B tries. So if you did 8B tries 50 times you would expect it to happen once. And its something higher than 8B - current population isn't the correct sample size.
There's a lot of things that are theoretically possible, but to realistically consider them based on the known likelihood is something I'm not entertaining here.
IQ isn't some intrinsic property that we can measure that has a probability distribution. It's something we construct to have a specific probability distribution. Essentially, you have >145 IQ not because 0.1% people happen to have that high of an IQ but because we define 145 IQ to be the cutoff between the smartest 0.1% of the population and the dumbest 99.9%.
As a consequence, an IQ above ~3 standard deviations is basically unmeasurable with more tests, and by 6 standard deviations I'm not sure is even possible to theoretically construct since I don't think what it's trying to measure can be meaningfully defined to discriminate the order of just 8 people on the entire planet.
It's more likely that someone screwed up on the test, or that he cheated somehow. Maybe he's articulate and good at solving logic puzzles, but his Wikipedia article clearly shows that the guy has a screw loose.
You can solve every one of the logic puzzles and it should not give you any score that high, unless it's a specifically designed bogus test to make certain person look and feel good.
It's like saying your regular thermometer returned a reading of 1000C, sure buddy.
> It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth.
why can't you use historical population? like, the total amount of humans that ever existed? rough google shows around 100billion. seems legit that in the history of humanity, we could pop out someone so intelligent? But I do agree that IQ is probably a decent signal but entirely meaningless as sole measurement.
The other problem with IQ is that it's not a fixed scale, so you can't really compare IQ scores across time. An IQ of 100 is average by definition. Even if the average "intelligence" (or whatever IQ measures, because it doesn't seem to be intelligence as people think of intelligence) rises or falls over time, that average will always be a 100 IQ.
It's not raw, in the sense that it's not an objective measurement. It's a comparison with other humans of the same age that took the same tests. 100 IQ means that you score in a perfectly average way, you're better than 50% of people that took that test and worse than 50% other people that took that test, it's a comparison, not really an absolute score.
So, to compare 100 IQ now with 100 IQ 50 years ago is hard, since you're not using the same test anymore.
There's an effect called the Flynn Effect which is essentially an inflation of IQ, so the tests are changed every few years so that it keeps the same distribution (so that the averagely intelligent human would score 100)
In fact, you can't always compare the IQ tests of 2 humans alive, because the given score is comparing you to the other people of your age, not to the global population. So if you compare the IQ of a kid and middle aged man, it doesn't mean that one is more smart than the other in an absolute way (it's more a theoretical potential)
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that people in the '60s were twice as smart as people now.
The average IQ of the people then would be 100, and the average IQ of people now would also be 100, even though there was a huge difference in intelligence. This is because 100 is defined as being the average rather than being an absolute measure.
Ah. okay yeah that makes sense. I didn't realize it's a relative measurement. I'm surprised it's not more robust. Something like using historical results to compare against, and updating tests in a very standardized way where the math/logic is always fairly similar, but the fact checking/knowledge that requires understanding of current world might be different data wise, but tests similar attributes or qualities.
That one person in our entire history somehow got tested accurately (is that even possible? there isn't any sense or point for any IQ test to even go into that range, because what would you be baselining and verifying the test against?) and is advertising about it? Count me skeptical.
Someone crazy smart is far more likely to take an IQ test at some point in their life. Ask the opposite - how hard would it be to overlook the fact that a 3 year old is doing fucking calculus? That's just insane. There is virtually no chance that gets looked over.
There is no assumption, that is the definition of IQ.
Is human intelligence a normal distribution? Probably not. But IQ is extrapolated as such, and probably useless anyway. Which make absurd claims like this even more laughable.
IQ is offset and scaled with the goal of producing that normal distribution, but that process is informed by the available data. Outliers don't get forced onto the curve, because there definitionally isn't enough data to figure out how outlying they are as a percentile.
It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth.
These absurd claims about IQ is almost evidence that the claimant are nowhere close. For starters, any IQ tests are not going to be normalized to that range because it is impossible to normalize to that range as there are 0 realistic samples.