Rahul: Robert, Feynman didn’t win the Nobel Prize in Physics because he had a 190 Physics IQ or because he had a 125 IQ. He won it because he was ardently passionate about Physics and Math, and he contributed enough to the betterment of using Physics to serve humanity. That’s why he won the Prize.
I don’t mean to be rude when I say this Robert (hell, this is the case with pretty much any disagreement I have, which is a lot), but this comment was somewhat insulting to Richard Feynman. Really, you’re attributing it to his 190 Physics IQ (which I doubt)?
He was passionate about it and he contributed to using physics to better humanity because he had one of the most brilliant physics minds ever recorded. It’s not insulting to say Feynman had a 190 IQ in Physics. In fact, I bet if I knew him and I said that to him, he would probably laugh and say I was right. The 190 physics IQ is literally proven by having some of the highest physics scores ever recorded on various tests. If you go around the Net, everywhere they talk about Feynman’s IQ, they say just this. No one anywhere says he did it by trying really hard.
You do not get one of the highest Physics scores ever recorded on a widely given test by trying really hard. Fuck that. You get that by being one of the smartest and highest Physics IQ men in history in Physics.
Why are you such an IQ denier? Have you lived in America your whole life?
Because in this idiot, insane culture, the line is, “Anyone can do anything” and “Intelligence doesn’t matter.” And in America, there is a complete denial of intelligence itself. This is shown by contempt for the very concept. In America, “anyone can do anything they want if they give it enough effort” and often you cannot even acknowledge that human beings differ in intelligence at all or that this matters in any way.
I talk like this a lot because intelligence is interesting to me, and I get very politely shut down (they simply disagree with me very politely, mostly by dismissing my argument with a smile) all time.
This Idiocracy culture is so infuriating. We acknowledge frankly intellectual gifts in a whole range of things, even athletics, where “physical intelligence” forms a large part of “athletic genius.” Haven’t you heard athletes who say things like, “Baseball is 90% mental.”? However, your average American usually insists that great athletes simply tried real hard.
We often speak of artistic and musical genius and the implication is that it was inborn, though you often run into resistance to that with countless Americans implying that musical and artistic geniuses simply “tried really hard.”
Americans simply refuse to believe in the concept of inborn intelligence or intellectual strengths in any way, and that is when they acknowledge that intelligence itself even exists at all.
Many, perhaps most Americans simply insist that “there is no such thing as intelligence,” which is a stunning statement for a human being to utter. Most infuriating of all is that the smartest people are the worst intelligence deniers. Even more infuriating is that the more leftwing people get, they more openly hostile they are to the very concept of intelligence, especially if it is inborn. All I have to say is that an American Left culture that has extreme hatred for the very notion that intelligence exists at all is not one I want to be a part of. It doesn’t sound like one that’s going to be very successful either, or if it is successful, I fear for the country that ends up being run by these overeducated fools.
You start getting down below 100 or especially 90 IQ, they generally agree that some humans are definitely way smarter than other humans. At that level, people are often awestruck by very smart people.
That’s if they are not too stupid. Truly stupid people around 80 IQ often can’t even seem to grasp the concept of intelligence at all or refuse to see how it could be important in any way. This is because they are literally too stupid to even recognize intelligence for what it is.
Further, if you start talking about intelligence even related to jobs in the US, you get shut down almost immediately with, “Oh no, you don’t have to be smart to do that. Anyone can do that.” You even get shut down if you imply that some people are smarter than other people.
Sometimes I talk about how I can tell someone is smart by simply looking at their faces while I interact with them. I usually get completely dismissed when I say that. I can tell how smart someone is by looking into their eyes, listening to how they talk (for instance, speed, comprehension, response speed), and mostly looking for, more than anything else, simply speed of response. Smart people are simply faster than other human beings. And it correlates directly with IQ.
I had a girlfriend with a 140 IQ once, and she was one of the fastest women I have ever known. She got my jokes, bam, immediately, as soon as they hit her brain just like that. And she had a sharp response to the joke almost instantly. She was so fast it almost seemed like she started laughing before the joke was even over. I had another girlfriend with a ~115 IQ, and while she was definitely intelligent, there’s no way on Earth she was that lightning fast.
And I met a woman with an IQ of 156 once who was literally the fastest woman I have ever met in my life. She was faster than the 140 woman, knew more stuff, and picked up completely new topics she knew nothing about very quickly. She would ask me, “What is that?” about some concept that she had no idea what it was. I would start to explain it, and it never took more than 3-5 minutes before she had gobbled up the whole concept and had gotten the gist of it like an expert. I have never met a woman who understood brand new things with so little explanation.
She might even have been faster than I am. Her IQ was ~10 points higher. I didn’t feel outclassed at all though. We were basically on the same level. But I had definitely met my match. She was a real challenge to talk to, but I love challenges.
