From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Tue Nov 24 1998 - 02:23:13 MST
I just received the following request for assessments of IQs of famous
thinkers. Just thought I'd share it. Maybe you could give a better
answer than I did.
>From: selection@adformatix.com
>
>I am Aileen Pariņas, working as a researcher in an advertising agency in
>Manila, Philippines. I am doing a research right now on famous people who
>have very high IQs. I visited your site on Great Thinkers and it has helped
>me a lot. I was just wondering if you know the actual or estimate IQ level
>of these famous personalities (dead or still living) such as Einstein,
>Darwin, Gandhi, Galileo, Da Vinci, Picasso, Siddhartha, etc.
>
Unfortunately, I do not know of any methods that would help to estimate
the IQs of past famous thinkers. Or living - without asking them.
However, as I have spent some time studying intelligence,
I would like to make some suggestions. Intelligence is a
generic concept covering many abilities related to memorization
of various things and performance of different types of
perceptive and cognitive tasks. There are as many intellectual
skills as there are types of things to memorize and figure out.
To be exact, infinitely many radically different intelligent
faculties, out of which humans possess a limited number - but
still a considerable one, and in various combinations.
Intelligence of Picasso is not of the same kind as intelligence
of Einstein.
IQ tests assess only rudimentary intelligence skills, and are
not applicable to estimating the mental faculties of geniuses.
IQ does not even look at people's ability to draw complex
generalizations, does not assess creativity at all (!), or
qualities like perseverance, willpower, courage, ability to
empathize with people, emotional sensitivity, musical talents,
perception of color, knowledge of advanced scientific concepts,
and very complex problem-solving skills (ability to quickly
match simple patterns has little to do with these).
So I think IQ tests should be left for assessing a limited set
of mental skills of close-to-normal children. It would take us
a while to come up with reasonable numerical estimates for a
wide range of complex combinations of high mental skills that
define a genius; I personally doubt that a single numeric
indicator can make any sense here. Meanwhile, I'd suggest that
irrelevance of IQ for assessing skills of geniuses represents
an observation worthy of sharing with your readers.
As for the fame, after a certain level of intelligence, a
thinkers's fame seems to be a better indicator of the ability of
the social masses to recognize this person's talents, than of their
own ideas and skills...
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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
Great Thinkers page: <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/thinkers.html>
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