The remark about football teams hit home. At my elementary school graduation, student achievement was recognized with stickers attached to their diplomas. Each individual sport had its own sticker. There was precisely one sticker for academic achievement. Result: athletic kids had a paper full of stickers, nerds got one. At the time this struck me as grossly unfair (why not have a sticker for each subject?)
On the other hand, sports can be watched and enjoyed by anyone. It doesn't require intellect. The achievements of the highly intelligent, however, are typically difficult to grasp for those lacking the same faculties. Hence the dynamic where communities are willing to support the varsity football team without even thinking about it, but balk at the notion of putting similar resources into a scholarship team. Both are elitist, but one has a natural broad appeal and the other does not and cannot.
On another note, one thing your analysis leaves out is population genetics. In the current environment the highly intelligent tend to have a low birth rate, and the population therefore gets a bit stupider with every generation. Gifted programs and lifetime genius grants may help to address that, by setting up a natural dating pool in which highly intelligent young people can find equally intelligent mates that they can communicate with at the same level, and then freeing them from the extended professional training that tends to delay childbirth. Society is better off if the gifted make the most of their abilities, but society is also better off if gifted women start having children in their early 20s and go on to raise 4 or 5 of them, rather than waiting until they finish a doctorate and finally having 1 in their mid-30s.
140 is not a conservative estimate for the requirement to produce genius. Read 300 geniuses by Cox (1926) and you will find geniuses with an estimated IQ of below 130.
The remark about football teams hit home. At my elementary school graduation, student achievement was recognized with stickers attached to their diplomas. Each individual sport had its own sticker. There was precisely one sticker for academic achievement. Result: athletic kids had a paper full of stickers, nerds got one. At the time this struck me as grossly unfair (why not have a sticker for each subject?)
On the other hand, sports can be watched and enjoyed by anyone. It doesn't require intellect. The achievements of the highly intelligent, however, are typically difficult to grasp for those lacking the same faculties. Hence the dynamic where communities are willing to support the varsity football team without even thinking about it, but balk at the notion of putting similar resources into a scholarship team. Both are elitist, but one has a natural broad appeal and the other does not and cannot.
On another note, one thing your analysis leaves out is population genetics. In the current environment the highly intelligent tend to have a low birth rate, and the population therefore gets a bit stupider with every generation. Gifted programs and lifetime genius grants may help to address that, by setting up a natural dating pool in which highly intelligent young people can find equally intelligent mates that they can communicate with at the same level, and then freeing them from the extended professional training that tends to delay childbirth. Society is better off if the gifted make the most of their abilities, but society is also better off if gifted women start having children in their early 20s and go on to raise 4 or 5 of them, rather than waiting until they finish a doctorate and finally having 1 in their mid-30s.
I didn’t know about Lorenzo de' Medici. That’s incredible.
Please delete me
To see how a genius can score 102 on an IQ test, go to youtube and watch the short video called Top 10 Chess grandmaster Hikaru takes an IQ test
Jensen said that the probability of seeing genius output (for genius is about production, not some abstract definition) is limited by:
Ability x Conscientiousness x Creativity
IQ is not even in the equation, allthough it clearly affects the ability part when it comes to abstract problem solving.
140 is not a conservative estimate for the requirement to produce genius. Read 300 geniuses by Cox (1926) and you will find geniuses with an estimated IQ of below 130.