Where do you place Jensen IQ-wise?
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Psychologist Arthur Jensen would not report his own IQ. "Fortune" columnist Dan Seligman offered some textual evidence from Jensen's books suggesting he tested at around 156.
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Wouldn't surprise me too much. So, about Robin Hanson territory (based on Robin's GRE). Now I'd love to know Pinker's IQ. He seems hyper-conscientious and says he found MIT math off-putting, so maybe a bit lower, like around 148.
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Pinker would seem to me to be among the very, very smartest verbal public intellectuals (while still being highly functional with numbers). A tough combination to beat.
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He does speak in polished copy, though in his chat with Tyler Cowen I was struck by how much smarter and more mentally confident Tyler seemed despite his much plainer style. Gould was also a flawless speaker.
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Carl Sagan is another good example. Richard Feynman was very much the exception.
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I knew a Caltech professor of astronomy who studied under Carl Sagan; he worshipped Sagan.
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The weakness of IQ tests is that they cannot be corrected for indifference.
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There are High Stakes cognitive tests (military's AFQT/ASVAB, SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) and Low Stakes tests (NAEP, PISA, etc.). Results are usually pretty similar, although there can be problems. NLSY79 used a 105-page ASVAB, which a lot of black males gave up on.
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What are the stakes for graduate students in taking an IQ test?
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Smart but not too smart. The best for an age of mass media when, as Tocqueville predicted, people would be obsessed with "education" and "general ideas" and AS A RESULT struggle to appreciate fine-grained thought (indeed, "evolution" is such a general idea).
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In passing, there is SOMETHING to Gould's "non-deductive reasoning" idea. I don't think Darwin, for instance, would have had an IQ comparable to say Newton's, or to many of his contemporaries. Growing up he was considered
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a bit thick (it's all relative of course). And to read the Origin or the Descent is to be struck by its "literary" character in a bad way. But then, it's Darwin's theory, not Whewell's or Huxley's (who Darwin acknowledged was smarter)...
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Darwin was an impressive writer by modern standards but nothing special by Victorian English standards. To me, Darwin was like Neil Armstrong: not a unique genius, but the result of the system working to put the right man in the right place at the right time. Galton, too.
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Spot on.
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Finally, I think one reason it takes so long for someone to develop a full-blown theory of evolution (the idea had been around forever, of course) is that someone like Hobbes, who as well as being one of the greatest writers in English, a philosopher, who kept up with the natural
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science of his day and whose thought would seem to depend on some notion of "development," wasn't that interested in the "boring" details; like his predecessors, he was more interested in metaphysics and politics ("the big stuff"). So again, it can pay not to be TOO smart...
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When I worked at UW about 15 years ago, I found this in a recycle bin.pic.twitter.com/bMZQS2o6sc
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Note that it's got Lewontin's signature on it.
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Gould could never really understand factor analysis, which is the foundation of g factor theory. A man's got to know his limitations.
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Gould was consciously lying. He was a culture warrior, not a scientist.
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