Yuppp, this smelled like bullshit form miles away. Thanks for corroborating!
Comment on Anon is a child prodigy
mech@feddit.org 2 months ago
No reliable record exists of Sidis ever taking a standardized IQ test. The frequently cited claim that he scored between 250–300 on an IQ test stems from a single, uncorroborated account by psychologist Abraham Sperling in his 1946 (2 years after Sidis’ death) book Psychology for the Millions.
The concept of IQ as measured by modern tests did not exist during Sidis’s childhood
IratePirate@feddit.org 2 months ago
Summzashi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
IQ is pseudo science nonsense anyway.
lime@feddit.nu 2 months ago
i mean, iq is a normal distribution. it caps at 200. 160 represents the 99.996th percentile, and above that the error bars are so large that the result is uneless.
mech@feddit.org 2 months ago
It’s not capped, really. But the claimed 250 IQ would be 10 standard deviations from the mean, so he’d be the most intelligent person in a population of ~10^24 people.
~10^11 humans have ever lived on earth.
bampop@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The most likely explanation is that he was from outer space
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Smells like von neumann
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s capped in practical terms by the highest score a test can be given. Unless getting a perfect just means you have another harder round.
bort@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
so what you are saying is that it has a cap, which is based on the number of people he is compared against?
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No, but without people to compare against, there is a limit to how high the scale can stay accurate. This is different from it actually having a cap, though.
Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Strictly speaking, a normal distribution doesn’t cap, neither at 0 nor at 200. Maybe the scores achievable by standardized tests do, of course.
lime@feddit.nu 2 months ago
they usually cap at 150. but yeah it’s not a hard cap, it’s an asymptotic curve. statistically the chance of getting 201 or higher is the same as getting -1 or lower.
taiyang@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I was going to mention the same thing. Even the “smartest man alive” would be in those useless upper bounds.
To explain that upper bounds issue to others, imagine being the top score on a leaderboard. Some of that’s going to be random chance and other factors, even if most of the time you score in the top 1% of scores consistently.