I didn't know anyone was this smart!
HollyMinkowski
Posts: 1,398
I just started reading "iWoz" by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith
(hmmm. I wonder if it's the same Gina Smith that wrote the FPGA book I have not started reading yet)
I found this paragraph and was sort of stunned. I didn't realize anyone
had an IQ this high. Now I feel just a little slow
No wonder this guy was able to build a computer from scratch.
No wonder he is always smiling. I used to see him when he would
come on The Screensavers with Leo Laporte... I miss that show.
EDIT:
Found a picture of Gina and Woz using google images.
Gina on the right and the smiling Woz you can spot I think.
I'd have a huge smile too if I had a billion+ dollars and a
200+ IQ
Post Edited (HollyMinkowski) : 5/28/2010 4:29:56 AM GMT
(hmmm. I wonder if it's the same Gina Smith that wrote the FPGA book I have not started reading yet)
I found this paragraph and was sort of stunned. I didn't realize anyone
had an IQ this high. Now I feel just a little slow
No wonder this guy was able to build a computer from scratch.
No wonder he is always smiling. I used to see him when he would
come on The Screensavers with Leo Laporte... I miss that show.
EDIT:
Found a picture of Gina and Woz using google images.
Gina on the right and the smiling Woz you can spot I think.
I'd have a huge smile too if I had a billion+ dollars and a
200+ IQ
Post Edited (HollyMinkowski) : 5/28/2010 4:29:56 AM GMT
Comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ8IgX8RikM
"Steve Wozniak describes his youth, growing up as an Engineer's son. He talks about his early interest in electronics, radio, then, later, computers. Describes methods of circuit optimizaton as a way of life, and a natural trait for attaining the goals of both elegance & economics."
"Speech begins at 11:35 on the timeline, after the long introduction."
This is my source:
http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=2¬e=20065
These people belong to Mensa. And Mensa does not advertise so far as I know. They don't need to! These folks are so smart they can find it on their own...
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KPR
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I always have someone watching my back.
If you have a smart kid, don't do that. It caused problems. Smart kids easily get bored, and when we get bored we do very un-smart things.
I paid several high prices for those test scores. One area where I failed it was the whole "hooking up with girls" thing, and I can't honestly say I ever solved that; it solved itself when a girl fell in love with me, eventually figured out the problem, and threw herself at me hard enough to break through my lack of socialization. (I'm still married to her today.) I also failed "getting along with normal people" pretty hard for quite a few years. I didn't know how to pace myself or manage relationships and ended up having a huge row with my parents and dropping out of college with a 3.49 average, 96 hours of credit, and no degree. Fashion is an utter mystery to me. I do vaguely recall that my home team won the Super Bowl this year, but other than that sports are mostly a blank. Out in the real world, I found out I had no idea what life is like for the vast majority of people.
I was shocked to find one coworker, who was our comptroller and very smart and capable in her job, didn't like reading because she found it hard and unpleasant. When I told her I found it effortless and simply heard the words I was looking at as if they were being spoken to me, she didn't believe me.
Something Woz has clearly gotten, if you look at what he's been doing lately, is that if you're a smart person about the worst thing you can do is lock yourself in a room with a bunch of other smart people and congratulate each other on your smartness, which is why I won't go within a mile of a Mensa meeting. (My wife was a member for awhile before we met and she confirms this.) It is actually my blue-collar job, writing software that has to be used by random other people, which has taught me the most important things I've ever learned. I have learned more things of day to day usefulness from my technician coworkers and the real-life experience of keeping systems working in the field than I ever did in classrooms. I haven't had a need to calculate an integral in over 20 years, but knowing how to drive a forklift comes in useful regularly.
People who don't get those high test scores get really weird ideas about what it's like to be "that smart." It doesn't make you infallible or even wise. If you read Marilyn vos Savant's column (or at least when I read it LOL) it's clear that she's, in many ways, a very shallow person who is just good at solving the kind of puzzles they put in IQ tests. Contrary to what the authors of IQ tests think this is a skill you can learn, and Marilyn takes IQ tests as a hobby. Well duh.
Abilities aren't universal. I'm relentlessly monolingual despite several years of throwing myself at French, and for years I had a blind spot for history. I can't memorize spot facts worth a damn (which is a thing that limited those test scores a bit), and I can't remember dates at all. It took years of working with people and practice to stop coming across as a sanctimonious jerk when relating to "normal" people. And part of that was learning not to be a sanctimonious jerk once I realized how appallingly stupid most people seem. If you want to write software that can be used by illiterate truck drivers with as little error as possible, you need to learn to think like they do. And that exercise taught me that these "stupid" people have very rich lives in ways I can barely comprehend, because nobody gave them a computer and taught them calculus when they were 12 so they applied their energy to flirting with the opposite sex or figuring out fashion or memorizing an entire baseball encyclopedia.
A lot of this hidden intelligence that IQ tests can't measure is directed at hobbies and popular culture. Just because it's used for something a bunch of Mensa eggheads decided is "useless" doesn't mean it isn't there, and frankly after a lifetime of being the smart guy I've decided that in some ways it probably makes more sense to apply your gifts to something that gives you pleasure than to something abstract that does not. I consider myself fortunate to have found a niche that lets me exercise my rather unnatural gifts in a way that intersects the real world; there's nothing quite so cool as cranking up a quarter million dollar machine with several hundred moving parts that is only able to work because your code is guiding it. It's also a huge responsibility and one I take seriously and bear gladly. Technicians like to work with me because I speak their language and take their experiences seriously, unlike "the guys who spend all their time in an air-conditioned office and wouldn't know a scale if they tripped over it in the parking lot." Having the respect of those guys who work on the stuff I build out in the field means more to me than any test score.
As for Mensa, it's not hard to get in. I gained membership in my first year of high school, but let it lapse shortly after figuring out that they really didn't -DO- much. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
And just because someone is smart, doesn't mean that they are more aware, or have any different feelings than you or I. The calculator upstairs just works better with tech stuff than what clothes look nice.
Personally, I'd rather use my gray-matter to solve more important issues than how to please (or blend in with) other random people (especially with regard to seasonal fashion). There's a ton of room in the human mind, but it's not infinite, and I could care less about the trials and tribulations of prime-time television plots or whatever a celebrity endorses or some guy getting paid too much to go running around with a spherical object following an arbitrary rule-set designed to make the final outcome of the game extremely difficult to predict.
The fact that our brains probably grew so big in order to understand all the silly little social rules, ultimately meaningless facts, and inconsistent laws does bother me, but for some reason I'd rather just fill it with technologically necessary information and not all the silly little drama people create. Manipulate ideas and physical matter versus people. It's an orientation, whatever, I got over it a long time ago.
I felt compelled to give my own opinion because of the way this topic currently was headed. It was sounding like intelligence is a "disease" that needs to be cured. Give all the above-average smart people poison pills so they can be more average?
The average person, despite all the colorful anecdotes they can recite about their experiences, is actually really boring.
180!? OMG, I'm going to start asking you questions when I get stuck
You too JasonDorie.......
@KPR
Very cool! I'd love to get a chance to meet the guy.
I think the two would get along well, they would be able to talk tech all night and neither would have to fake it
Both of them created a hardware/software machine from scratch....an awesome thing.
I love that with Parallax you can come in here and actually talk to the guy that created the processor.
I like Atmel's stuff too....but you get the impression that you could never track down who designed a particular AVR chip.
(maybe nobody would be willing to take the blame...lol) It's like after an interminable wait they just fall from the
sky with little errata sheets attached to them...
So perhaps they would not talk all night, rather quickly figure out what the other was going to say, and conclude the conversation quickly?
Rich H
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The Simple Servo Tester, a kit from Gadget Gangster.
I grew up expecting to be the next Isaac Newton or Bucky Fuller. Instead I became something new and old at the same time, a cabinetmaker who works with code instead of wood. And I've found that it is a very satisfying way to live. The thing about living to invent is that a particular thing can only be invented once. I don't get credit for deriving all the equations for special relativity when I was in high school because Einstein did it first. And even if you do it right politics and fate can deny you your credit; we remember Newton more than Leibniz for inventing calculus, even though we use Leibniz' notation to this day; Lise Meitner was robbed of the credit for discovering fission simply because she was a woman. And don't even get me started on Alan Turing.
Living to make a better table is attainable and worthwhile. Expecting to fulfill yourself by inventing the table is unrealistic, and if that's your metric for self-worth you will live a very frustrating and unhappy life.
It took me a lot of years to make the conversion from trying to save the world to trying to make a better table, but it was in every possible sense the best thing for me to do. Sure changing the world is a big thrill but it's not one you get to have very often, if you want to do it by inventing calculus or faster than light travel or the Seed AI of the Singularity.
The funny thing is, I do change the world, regularly and in ways that can be measured and accounted; every time I leave a satisfied customer with a machine that works and doesn't frustrate him and break all the time, I've made the world better. I've made life better for that probably pretty average guy. And this is what whicker is totally failing to get. Because, at the end of the day, when you say you want to work on 'important problems' you have to define WHO finds those problems important. And most likely you'll find that the people who make it worth your while to tackle those 'important' problems are the very people you might find kind of boring because they don't get their standardized test results looking like the printer forgot how to print any digit other than 9. You might not think it's an 'important problem' to weigh and classify catfish fillets or fill shipping containers with grain, but I can guarantee you somebody does; that's why they pay me to do things like that.
And it is this sense as much as anything that drew me to the P8X32A. When I realized what the chip did and how it was designed, I knew immediately I was looking at the product of a mind like -- maybe even better than -- mine; it wasn't the best CPU ever, wasn't the fastest, didn't have the most memory, but what it did have was a new and beautifully elegant arrangement of function. It was, simply, beautiful, to me as much a work of art as a functional device. Anybody can throw brute force at a problem like increasing clock speed or transistor density and hope to be the first to find a solution, but Chip Gracey found a way to work within accepted limitations to do something graceful and harmonious and far more capable than it has any right to be.
My father was a teacher. He started out wanting to do something different though; he was wowed by one of the AEC vans sent around to recruit young people to physics in the years after WWII, and he dreamed of discovering new elements. Alas, by the time he got his Ph.D. the periodic table was pretty well fleshed out and physics was entering a dry time when the available technology wasn't really up to the task of pushing new discoveries. But he found that he liked the college environment, and the task of teaching, so he changed course and went to work at a small college teaching undergraduate physics. It was something he became very good at, as I his primary student can attest. Dad never did win the Nobel Prize but he did send thousands of students out with knowledge they didn't have until they came to him. If that's not changing the world, then the phrase doesn't have any meaning.
Are IQ tests relevant to the real world?
If you answered Yes to the above question, please continue taking this test.
If you answered No, you may now leave the room and find something more important to do with your time.
I was rested with a IQ of 94 back in 01' but then with a IQ of 165 in 06' . ( I don't test well with my aspergers sadly ).
Folks say " Oh your so smart " to fix that or what not to me at least once a week . I tell them "thanks! I am not overly smart but resourceful " See I for me I was and kinda still am a looser at times ( asbergers does that ) Untill I joined theatre !
I broke my shell in one year I went from a Nerd who Hides from people to being "normal" ..
Iam with LocalRoger """The funny thing is, I do change the world, regularly and in ways that can be measured and accounted; every time I leave a satisfied customer with a machine that works and doesn't frustrate him and break all the time, I've made the world better."""
I loved My job I had In So Cal . I was a empolyee at R-VAC a Unique small chain of Electroincs stores In the LA area .
I Love being the easy button ! folks came in with a Huge problem and left with a solution and a # to call after if they needed more help .
I was at the store volltering for some free parts LOL and one dude came in with a need for a Ipad headphone adapter
theI pad is a 4 Wire jack
so I drew him up a wireing diagram in a few minits to split the 4 Pole in to a Mic In 3.5mm and a 2Chan out 3.5mm.
I am not a expert at anythnng !!!! but a Very well rounded walking Wiki on all allmost things electronics . My Only huge hole is Software and digital stuff..
a few Years ago I did a side job for a company called roadworks there aftermarket wireing in there cabs and trucks asphalt paving was all Solid House wire !!!! so one day a unfused wire came loose and shorted out the main batttiry of the whole truck . it melted the Main wire bundle that fed the cab with everything from the Oil guage to the radio .
the harness to replace it was over $6000 and was 3 weeks away !
the bundle had over 80wires to it . some that were badly chared . so I workd foe 5 days respliceing and re building the whole thing .
the Only thing I was not able to salvage was the seatbelt to seat warning buzzer . ( if in seat and no belt buzzer) They loved my work ethic so much that a month later wnhn they were rewireing there Network closit they had me desgine it from the ground up ..
Lets just say I Undercharged @ $15 per hour but in the end I got a TON of work from them that whole summer .
so when ever I see a pot hole in Socal with new tar in it I Feel good ..
I find very few things I cant fix , Am I smart ? maby no? yes? not relly I just have this ability to reason fault issues in my head
EG My WiFi AP main CPU was last week acting up and overheating to the tune of over 100*F. the Ext PSU is cool and the rest of the circuit is cool . the main chip is on its own Bus at 3.3V but the WiFi RF section is on 5 .
I thought "Ohh its a PSU issue . it was . ! the SMPS that drops the 12V in to 5 V is Ok but the second SMPS that drops the 12 to 3.3 has some NASTY hash on it ! .. I found out from a speeker and a 1Uf cap in series I wired accross the output cap in series with a 1uF cap . ( passes AC but not DC ...)
I figured in a pinch that if there is enough AC noise on a rail to make a little headphone speeker put out noise then there is WAY to much to run a chip .
now I relise that this was NOT a good way to test this in a ideal world . (sadly my test gear is in a box in the garage ). but it proved my point .
so i broght it to my(old) work the next day to confirm my idea with a scope . I was right !! the output cap was doing bupkiss to smothe the SMPS output . sadly the thing got So hot from running like that for a month . that I decided to just dump it for relibility sake .
I Just got a new one today at Frys ..........
peter KG6LSE
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"Carpe Ducktum" "seize the tape!!"
peterthethinker.com/tesla/Venom/Venom.html
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
LOL
You are the second person I know who has aspergers, and both of you are
tech guys who like to program and fix things
95(ouch) to 165(wow) You must have been more motivated for the 2nd test!
I took one in middle school and it was 122, a later test was higher. I think I
just figured out what kind of sneaky puzzles they tend to create so I was
ready for them in the second round. Like with everything else, I devise an optimal
method of attack.
@localroger
I also get great satisfaction from creating software that works perfectly and makes
everything easy to use. It sates my craving for order that arises from my mild case
of OCD. What I am usually tasked to do is create software to handle I/O from new
controls and instrumentation to old equipment that needs a more useful and modern
interface to the world...this saves lots of money compared to just replacing the old stuff.
Saving money also sates my OCD... I love to bring things in way under the expected cost.
It's why I'm always shopping for tech bargains and doing everything I possible can with
software instead of hardware...my bosses always love me
seems to apply to shopping for clothes
You are so right about the shameful story of how poorly Alan Turing was treated! :-(
I read all about him in some books about cryptography... I just love cryptography.
I am always counting anything and everything and looking for patterns...more OCD stuff
and also a perfect trait for anyone interested in crypto.
Von Braun, Edison, Tesla, and many others.
I realize that some questions are unavoidable and I suppose in many cases the answers to the questions only have one right answer. If I miss a question I have the resources to look up the correct answer and take the test again resulting in a hopefully 'better score' ... Am I really smarter at this point, or have I just influenced the score in my favor simply by studying what's going to be on the test? ... and if so, what is the measure really even mean at this point anyway other than I now know how to use my resources to find an answer to a problem that I may or may not need to use at some future point in my life?
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
If the test makers are below average in intelligence, yet they are the ones who make the tests and sit around congratulating each other on what great test makers they are, where does that put the rest of the human race?
If the test makers are like many people I have worked with in industry, then they will classify me as retarded because I can not follow their references to things that they have seen on innumerable inane sitcoms, of which I have no clue because I rarely watch TV, therefore I don't get their IDOL is to DIVA as GUCCI ROMEREZ's Chihuahua's trainer is to.... logic associations.
I have seen many people who are great at taking tests but who can not solve problems, real world or otherwise.
I have seen people who are great at solving problems but who seemingly never get what I would consider a creative or original idea.
The human mind is a wild, wondrous place. But who's got the map or detection equipment that shows where all the buried treasure lies?
Of course you answer the test the way the test wants it... that's just understanding the underlying game. And getting a better score next time? That's part of intelligence too, the ability to anticipate and to learn. Say what you want about the uselessness of >100 IQ scores, but scoring in the brackets below 100 does have meaning and is more in line about what the test is really trying to measure.
localroger:
I have been misunderstood and unfairly targeted. Let me rephrase: I don't care so much about what a "normal" person actually watches on the big-screen LCD televisions, but the boxes they are shipped in are ran through machines that I wrote programs for, have specified the electrical controls for, made schematic and assembly drawings for, and in specific machines wired significant portions thereof.
So yeah, that and anything else that would otherwise come in a boring brown cardboard box, with color labeling glued onto it in order to be prettied up to distinguish itself and the contents therein. And on top of that, dealt with and retrofitted old decaying hardware.
So it's not appropriate to lump me into the "intellectual elite" bin. That being said I do aim towards pre-planning and triple-checking, instead of a "get'er done right now slap it together let's go drinkin and jaw about sports and girls" attitude that would benefit me socially. And unfortunately for the last 5 years it has been a choice between one or the other.
There certainly are counterexamples - very little about human beings is black and white. But in general, if you had an anonymous sample of human beings about whom you knew nothing but IQ score, and you were picking up sides for a baseball team, or picking people to work with on some emergency, or were looking for an attractive mate, you'd do well to pick the ones with the higher IQs. Contrary to popular myth, they are more likely than people in general to have the other positive qualities you're looking for.
Knowing that Steve Jobs had a tested IQ of 200+ doesn't change my impression of him much, given that I already knew about his real-world success.·There's no reason to use a simple test to predict something we already know about a person, right?
The nature of intelligence is an area of psychology filled with pop myths. Of course I wouldn't base an important hiring decision on a·difference of a few IQ points - real world factors like whether or not the person has reliable transportation would be more important. But there are real differences in intelligence among people, and there is no good reason to assume that an intelligent person is somehow lacking in other areas.
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 5/31/2010 1:05:54 PM GMT
I think people like Woz have a childlikeness in learning.· It is a learning fueled with a kind of "immaturity" or enjoyment to learning that keeps them at a happy emotional state to keep them learning.· When asked questions in the above interview I posted, he was happy.
I also think Woz was in the right place at the right time.· Give him off the shelf computer parts today apart from Apple and I'm not sure he would have all of the advantages in competition that he had back then simply because the market is ready to compete today.· Would he be then be known for his accomplishments today?· He would be known but as well known?· I think he would probably find his greatness in something else.
·
When I die, nobody will really care how smart I wasn't or how much money I didn't make. When my turn is over, the only thing I hope someone will say is that I genuinely cared about other people and actually did something to help other people have a good turn on the planet.
Sometimes I wonder: "Scope, is it better to be rather stupid and know it, or would you be better off being stupid and having no clue you're stupid?"
Then, I smell biscuits cooking and realize I'm hungry again. Short attention spans can help evaporate deep, painful thoughts.
I am a total intellectual misfit to these forums - sometimes, I honestly don't see how I'm tolerated (asking stupid questions, not figuring out "simple" stuff, et cetera). But, I like it here anyway - go figure.
Food is one of my main "shiny-things".
DJ
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Scope, when you're smart enough to write posts like that one, you're plenty smart enough to be here. Nicely said.
Happiness has become a topic of study for psychologists, and one finding is that events - even very serious ones like the death of a loved one - don't affect our happiness as much as we·predict they would. A large part of that is that we predict our future happiness paying attention only to that event, forgetting that there are plenty of other things in our day to day lives that affect it. Your comment makes me wonder if people with short attention spans are better than others at returning to a steady happiness level.
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 5/31/2010 5:41:24 PM GMT
Average people are only boring because you choose to perceive them as boring. It was shocking to learn just how average an average person can be, particularly when they try to apply themselves to my field of expertise. But I also found that it is worthwhile and useful to understand what drives these people. It should be and can be interesting, because there are a lot more people who score 100 on IQ tests than who score 180 or 200, and like it or not we have to live in a world mostly made by people like that. It can be maddening at times, but that is the challenge of this game called "life."
You don't have to memorize a baseball encyclopedia yourself to understand what drives someone who has, and even to feign enough interest to establish rapport so you can create a favorable impression for yourself and whatever you build for them. Average people can also smell the fact that you think you're better than they are at 1,000 meters. Average people are amazingly variable even if they do all watch the same lame TV shows; it can be fascinating to observe the differences in how they react to these common stimuli. The thing is, for a smart person, learning to appreciate average people is like learning to like the taste of wine; it requires a certain amount of effort, but is worth it in the end. And it's not something you will ever do if you associate only with people like yourself and regard others with contempt.
On a more amicable note, you also said... Check. But I'd say this is a trait that lies on an axis orthogonal to the smart-stupid axis; I know smart sloppy people and some people who can barely read who are meticulous about machine maintenance and extremely gifted at putting stuff together so it works. And part of it is the industry you're in; since I work on scales my industry is regulated (the government really doesn't like people who try to cheat with crooked scales, it messes up that whole interstate commerce thing) so people who aren't willing to take their time and do procedures right tend not to last long. I don't hang out with my coworkers or customers after hours, and I haven't found it necessary. What is important is that they respect the work I do, and they know I respect the work they do. I approach my customers with the attitude that I am there to do a job, to listen, to learn, and to make something that will make this person's life easier. I don't deny it when the subject of my reputation comes up but I do point out that I started out as a technician, have carried my share of 50 lb test weights, and I know how to do the same job as the guy standing next to me wearing Dickies, and that it's only because of that that I an be as good as I am at writing the software and designing systems.
I like to say that anybody can make a program or machine that will work when everything goes right; the real talent comes out when you make something that can fail gracefully. A sensible error message that you hope will never be displayed might save some poor bloke days of work when rats eat the wire. And I think of stuff like that because I'm thinking of the average people who will use and maintain my creations after I walk away.
Not if beer is involved. That's why the stuff was invented, you know. Without it, I seriously doubt civilization would've ever stood a chance.
I know that I have a much harder time socially because of exactly that kind of treatment. I still struggle with it often at 40 years old. I also know, or have known, a lot of people just like me in this regard.
However, I generally agree with your point if you exclude culture/social factors. Your IQ doesn't determine if you are tall, short, skinny, fat, cute, ugly, strong, weak, or have some defect or disease.
ElectricEye: I hate beer, it tastes nasty. Same goes for wine.
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