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