Yuppp, this smelled like bullshit form miles away. Thanks for corroborating!
Comment on Anon is a child prodigy
mech@feddit.org 5 hours 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 5 hours ago
lime@feddit.nu 5 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours ago
The most likely explanation is that he was from outer space
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Smells like von neumann
Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 5 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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.