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    Joined: Sep 2007
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    Val Offline OP
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    Originally Posted by Val
    Originally Posted by JamieH
    I don't think the people in charge have any idea of who the appropriate people are for the work they are choosen for. I also don't think intelligence has anything to do with IQ tests.

    Ahh! Great point. I'm going to start a new philosophical ramblings thread called "What is talent?" on this subject.

    Since joining this forum, I've been doing a fair amount of musing on the subject of talent and intelligence. The more I read here, the more I read elsewhere, and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that IQ is just a single (albeit important) facet of what could be called cognitive talent. What follows are some random musings I've had as I try to understand this attribute.

    As we all know, every now and then, a news article or segment about a PG+ kid appears, and the journalist describes the child by making liberal use of terms such as "next Einstein" or "genius." These claims never made sense to me. If the child had an IQ of 175 --- 5 full standard deviations above the norm on a S-B --- there would still be almost 2,000 people on the planet with that IQ.* Very, very high IQ? Yes. But the next Einstein? Surely that can't be true if there are almost 2,000 other people with the same IQ running around the world right now and 1,000 or so in 1960. If an insanely high IQ is all it takes, someone would have figured out quantum gravity 50 years ago.

    So this led me to considering creativity. Einstein was a very creative fellow. So was Richard Feynman. So was Charles Dickens. And Charles Darwin? Obviously. SO: we get high IQ plus high creativity. That's got to get you places.

    So then I learned that there are tests (however imperfect) to measure creativity ("Here's a toy truck. How many ways can you think of to make it better?). It seems that people have found that high levels of creativity are strong predictors of future success.

    Oh look, someone figured that out already --- in 1959.

    Originally Posted by Old Time magazine report on NSF conference
    With surprising unanimity, they concluded that 1) success in the scientific age is not simply a matter of intellect; 2) U.S. education is distressingly geared to uncovering the "bright boy" who can dutifully find the one right answer to a problem; 3) schools ignore the rebellious "inner-directed" child who scores low on IQ tests because they bore him; 4) teachers not only make no effort to nurture the creative rebel but usually dislike him. More than 70% of the "most creative," reported Educational Psychologist Jacob W. Getzels of the" University of Chicago in a startling guesstimate, are never recognized, and so never have their talents developed.

    Here's an interesting book that discusses creativity an IQ. It says that high IQ is no guarantee of high creativity:

    Originally Posted by Encyclopedia of Creativity
    Yet a high, and even genius-level intellectual capacity (i.e. IQ 140) by no means guarantees that an individual will exhibit any creative ability. ...

    The lack of precise correspondence between intelligence and eminence simply reflects the fact that creativity has a great many determinants, intelligence alone playing a small part.

    So this led me to think: hmm. An IQ of 140 is around 1:260 people. Let's goose the great-scientist-IQ-minimum up to 145 (seems reasonable to me). This IQ happens in 1:1000 people. If you then assume an equally high level of creativity, you'll still have a lot of people running around the planet who have both characteristics: even in a rarest-case scenario that assumes zero connection between IQ and creativity, you'd expect this to happen in 1:1,000,000 people (1,000 x 1,000). This is ~6,700 people right now based on the 2009 world population estimate and around 3,000 people in 1960 when the population was 3 billion people. If there's some small connection between the two, you'd expect those numbers to be higher. If the IQ minimum is lower (also possible), again, you'd have even more people. So. We should still have met the next Einstein decades ago. Didn't happen. What's missing?

    Obviously, various factors can affect a high IQ/creativity person negatively. They include being squelched by a school system (which can be a recoverable event), the need to support yourself and your family (which could mean taking a dull job in industry or even a coal mine), and so on. But still. Einstein said he was a poor student and had to take a job in a patent office. If there were really thousands of people with this ability, surely one of them could have got around suboptimal circumstances?

    Of course, there are personality attributes that also feed into being able to make a major breakthrough. They include self-confidence, an ability to challenge authority ("I think Newton may not have been completely correct") and an ability to soldier on when other people disparage you. That winnows the field, but not enough, I think (we've hit the my conjecture point of this discussion).

    So this led me to my most recent additional required talent, which I call thoughtfulness or a propensity to ponder ideas. Thoughtfulness means thinking and thinking about all facets an idea or condition. It means being open to new ideas. It means being able to accept that you have wrong ideas and being able to reject them without losing confidence. This is a relatively new concept in my mind, so I haven't gone through it in detail yet.

    This gives very high IQ + creativity + thoughtfulness plus the personality attributes. Are they enough? I don't know, but it sounds like a very cool combination in some ways (and an alienating one in others).

    Thoughts? Ideas? Thanks for reading this far.

    Val

    ----------

    * An IQ of 175 has a rarity of 1:3,483,046. See this link.

    Last edited by Val; 04/07/11 08:50 PM. Reason: Clarity
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    Hi Val,

    I am about to run out the door, but just wanted to say that I love what you've written here. I've had similar thoughts running about my head over time as I have thought about giftedness and what it actually means. I hadn't got to the point of forming them into something I could articulate though.

    Will come back to this when I have a chance smile


    "If children have interest, then education will follow" - Arthur C Clarke
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    Val Offline OP
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    Cool! Thanks.

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    And ... I'm back. Now you'll have to accept my apologies as this is fairly self indulgent, but only to illustrate my point.

    There is a fair whack of 'giftedness' in my family, some tested and some not. Those who have been tested were tested back with the SB L-M, with scores in the 165+ range. And yet they are as a whole largely unsuccessful (bar one or two exceptions). When I say unsuccessful I'm not talking about it in the context of not earning loads of cash (though they certainly haven't), I'm talking about not having terribly satisfying lives in general. And to a large extent feeling that they never lived up to their potential (which, if you look at it from the perspective of what they 'could' have achieved - being aware that 'could' and 'would' and even 'should' are all very different things - they have not).

    In fact, in many ways, I - who never realised my own potential until I had my HG+ dd, have been the most successful (if the definition is a happy and fulfilled life), even if that state has only been found recently. This is despite what can only be described generously as a 'difficult' childhood.

    I have long pondered how this could be. How could these educated, articulate and respected people feel this way. Sure, they can recite Shakespeare and do complicated equations in their heads (none of which I learnt to do), but how do they miss the connections between things that I see? They see - to use JamieH's line in another post - a lot of leaves, few trees and no forest. It's almost like they're stuck. And yet they're super smart.

    What my unsatisfied family lack, I suspect, is the thoughtfulness you describe (and to a lesser extent the creativity). Thoughtfulness (as per your definition), I have in abundance. I often think it was this aspect of my giftedness (now given a name - thanks!) that allowed me to move beyond my circumstances - or perhaps my circumstances allowed it to develop. It allows for adaptability and resourcefulness and the possibility to combine ideas, which for me creates a kind of tidal wave of implications that can be seemingly endless. I think that idea of being open to new ideas and open to being wrong are what my family don't possess. They wear their intelligence like a shield that can not be penetrated. Anything that doesn't fit is justified away. It's a trait I see with many professionally 'smart' people I know (and in many case love - so I don't mean to be harsh and obviously I'm generalising) - academics, doctors, lawyers etc. Many of whom don't seem to feel they've done enough with their potential either.

    Now, I have the thoughtfulness but possibly not the same extreme IQ as some of my family (though I'd hazard a guess I'm above normal), and I don't score terribly well on creativity tests. This causes a block for me I think, where I ride this ocean in my head but don't have a way of giving it a form or an outlet (yet! - I like to think of my thinking as a work in progress!) So when you talk about needing them all for that unprecedented ability to be realised, I completely get it.

    Now, I am conscious my very odd family is hardly a good sample, and I may have completely re-interpreted your comments for my own use (this is what thoughtfulness gets you, endless caveats!), in which case I apologise. But it was great food for thought for me smile


    Last edited by Giftodd; 04/08/11 04:51 AM. Reason: Clarification

    "If children have interest, then education will follow" - Arthur C Clarke
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    Val, I really enjoy your posts. smile

    I'd add in stubbornness in there and actually argue you need to have some sort of balance between stubbornness and thoughtfulness.


    I've worked with a number of gifted individuals, some who are the top of their field. DH and I both come from families filled with gifted individuals who vary in degree of success in their lives. I can actually think of two individuals in (one from DH's family and one from mine) who are very intelligent, creative, AND thoughtful but are unsuccessful. In both cases it's like their thoughtfulness consumed them and led them to depression. They seem to get overwhelmed with the tragedies in the world or how things are unfair and seem to get stuck. I can actually think of two fairly successful colleagues who could do much more with their lives but have the same problem. They get depressed because of politics or what they perceive as their own limitations.

    Stubbornness is an extremely important goal. Einstein clearly was stubborn and couldn't let physics problems go despite his work situation. Feynman constantly questioned authority and wouldn't believe what others said. Part of that is thoughtfulness but you need stubbornness to stick with your own ideals and not be weighted down by the opinions of others (as I have seen happen many times).

    I see stubbornness as a key ingredient that differentiates DH and myself. I just can't persevere through problems at work as well as he can. He as the ability to shut off the rest of the world and stick to his ideas. I just can't do that. He's also been much more successful at work and I think that's a key ingredient.

    The problem with stubbornness is that many people have it and don't have the other key ingredients too. That's why you always hear about crackpot scientists that try and go rogue and claim they have the answer to everything but nobody else will listen. Sure, this has happened on a few occasions but it's definitely the exception more than the rule. wink

    Last edited by newmom21C; 04/08/11 03:46 PM.
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    I think that creativity needs to be carefully defined to have a real discussion about how much it contributes to very high achievement. I have a feeling that a lot of very high achievers may have a heavy dose of intuition, which I don't think of as coextensive with creativity although they seem to overlap a bit. I guess, for me, creative thinking and intuition both fall under what I often see described as "divergent thinking", as they both give startling results, but they're not the same in the way they operate, and I don't think they're necessarily possessed in equal measure by a particular person. I think of creativity as more generative, and intuition as more reflective.

    I think of creativity, in the context of problem-solving, along the lines of broadening potential inputs or searches for solutions to a problem, and intuition essentially along the lines of pattern matching, but so subtle that it can seem like black magic. Intuition may be part of what's generally considered the creative process some of the time, such as suggesting initial areas of potentially valuable research, etc.

    There must be lots of highly gifted researchers out there, who brainstorm with the best of them, yet never become renowned because they never stumble upon the pathway to a great discovery; but intuition can remove the need for luck. If my concept is true, then some of the world's great scientists may have had tremendous gifts in other areas, though not world-beating intution, but still got lucky. Others would be guided by a vision of something like the theory of relativity, and due to their other gifts would be able to see the idea through to fruition. Still other brilliant minds might strongly intuit insights that they can't prove in the end, though they know them to be true; a conjecture like Fermat's Last Theorem would be a good example.

    I've read that mentorship can be important for a developing genius, although it is obviously not necessary in all cases. Perhaps intuition can be taught in part.


    Striving to increase my rate of flow, and fight forum gloopiness. sick
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    Speaking of Einstein, what about this 2011 guv'ment shut down? So what's that even mean? Congress is still in session, the post office is open today, and the schools are open today? Does this happen a lot, does anyone know?

    "I say tomato, she says bowling shoes." -Larry the Cable Guy

    Good topic Val. I think uh, well... Do we need another Einstein? What about Alexander the Great or Tomas Edison, or whoever's going to build the starship enterprise. Was Tomas Edison as smart as Einstein, but one was theoretical and one was applied science? Wait, fine. I'll google it. 145-180. Hey Lincoln and George Washington were OG.

    I'll bet the only pre-requisite is degree of desire for the truth. At one point in time I was less OG. That's what I had more of then that I have less of now. And belief there was the truth, something solid enough to continually refine a search for. And if you like truth too much that really screws with you socially, making you socially desirable to a great extent, but incompatible beyond that.


    Youth lives by personality, age lives by calculation. -- Aristotle on a calendar
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    The shutdown would take effect tomorrow if it happens. Congress will stay in session (but their staffers may have to go home, and I am not sure who will feed them in the cafeteria...). The post office has their own separate revenue stream, they will stay open. Your local schools do not get any money from the federal government, so they should stay open. Last time it happened was in 1995 (impact I noticed at the time was a snafu in a merger/acquisition project I was working on, as the Dept of Justice couldn't move forward on approval for the business deal-- the delay cost us a bunch of money).

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    I'm just itching to get into this great topic, but where to start. There are so many intuitive minds on this site, I am sure all of us knew the rest of us would love this topic...lol.

    Another aspect of talent I would like to add is free thinking. I think some people are often held back by the bounds of their social group, their workplace hierarchy or society. Some people seem able to think for themselves no matter what is happening around them. Others seem to vary depending on how much pressure is on them. I think Einstein was a free thinker.

    I have seen some high IQ scores applied to many of the recognized great minds, however, I believe these assignments were based on their achievement. I wonder what their IQs would have been had they actually taken the IQ test.

    A person has to wonder how many of todays high potential minds have found satisfaction in the many distractions available in our modern world. In Einstein's day, I imagine it would have been very difficult for an active mind to find an easy way to keep it occupied.

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    Val Offline OP
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    Wow, what wonderful replies. I love this forum so much because of the high caliber of posts that dominate this message board.

    Like Giftodd's first post, I'm in the middle of something now and will reply meaningfully later.

    Thanks all. This is great!

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