Is "Scorpion" Really a Genius? 391
An anonymous reader writes CBS's upcoming hacker show Scorpion is pitched as based on the real life of Irish 'eccentric genius' Walter O'Brien a.k.a. "Scorpion". Some of the claims made for the real Scorpion are extraordinary. A child prodigy with an IQ of 197, hacking Nasa at age 13, [supplying] Ireland with more Personal Computers than DELL and Gateway together. Searching online I wasn't able to find anything which, for me, clearly backed up any of these (or other) claims. For example, rather than being the sixth fastest programmer in the world in 1993, his team ranked 90th out of 250 teams. Curiously, his degree grade was an ok, but hardly stellar B+ (II-I). Does anyone know anything to back up the genius claims being made about Scorpion?
Never let the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Get in the way of a good story.
He claims this himself (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.scorpioncomputerservices.com/the_founder.html
He probably is a smart guy, but these claims here would make me not want to hire him. He's so obviously full of himself that he'd probably never admit he might be wrong about something and that is just plain dangerous. So it's not just the hollywood drama, it's based on his on ludicrous claims.
Re:He claims this himself (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't even begin to count the number of things wrong with their web site which already makes me not trust them...
* Using Flash just to have a "fancy" text label on the home page
* More JavaScript than I can possibly imagine for a STATIC web page
* Video where the lighting exposure is off and the audio quality is questionable
* Speech during the video where the guy stumbles on his own words a couple of times
Really, for a company that supposedly "mitigated risk for 7 years on $1.9 trillion of investments" and ran by a supposed tech superstar genius, you'd think they'd at least get the basics of technology and media correct on their own e-penis self-promotion presentation...
Re:He claims this himself (Score:5, Interesting)
How about this then? From http://www.scorpioncomputerservices.com/whoweare.html [scorpionco...rvices.com]:
That's production quality.
Re: He claims this himself (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, you don't need to be a genius to know that the best way to judge a barber is to check out his sons hair!
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I love how he goes by his hacker name "The Scorpion". I'm surprised he didn't call it a handle. Or call him self "The Plague".
Anyway, I expect him to be be busted by Zero Cool and Acid Burn any day now.
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I remember in the late 70's, when truck drivers were actually fighting over the CB handle "The Bandit," completely oblivious to the fact that having that handle didn't make them look cool, it made them look absolutely pathetic.
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I hope having a Trans Am was the trump card. And when both had a TA... compare mustaches.
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The ex-polytechnic degrees are just as reputable as "red brick" university ones. Most polytechnics aren't like US community colleges, but more like the minor US universities.
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His 2:1 is also not from Sussex University as he claimed (which is a reasonably reputable establishment) but from the University of brighton according to his own source [scorpionco...rvices.com].
You're right, the article does say that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the (non-UK) newspaper that mixed up"University of Sussex at Brighton" and "University of Brighton"...
Re:He claims this himself (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right, he's probably nearly as smart as myself. It's a television show, what he doesn't come up with, the writers will. Have you, somewhere on this planet, come across a reality show that had unadulterated reality in it?
Let's examine the claims of this article; He claimed 6th fastest programmer, author claimed his team came in 90th. Still not exclusive of each other.I.Q. of 197, I merely want to know which test or groups of tests and who did the testing. Hacking NASA; which computer? What did he do, find a flimsy password for ftp? Computer philanthropy, let's see some numbers to compare to Gateway/Dell.
It really sounds more like Unknown Lamer just wanted to stir some drama to get his blog posted as a story on the main page as much as it sounds like bullshit on "scorpions" part.
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They me want to give him a wedgie.
Re:A truly smart person ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true. I work with EE faculty, and a number of them can't seem to grasp the concept that the being a brilliant engineer doesn't automatically confer one with expertise in diverse other areas such as patent law, accounting, videography, etc.
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There are highly trained generalists who lack humility and don't make fools of themselves. They're the rarest of individuals but they do exist. ;)
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Re:A truly smart person ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone will, sooner or later, make a fool of themselves
FTFY
Re: A truly smart person ... (Score:4, Insightful)
When you're not good at anything, you think everyone else is faking it. When you're gifted and you don't challenge yourself, you think you're good at everything. But, if you're gifted and challenge yourself regularly, you learn to acknowledge what you do and do not know. Once that happens, you claim the mastery that is your due, respect it when you see it in others, and lose patience with those who constantly want to dispute the validity of what you've become. You learn to despise the word "opinion", because you constantly have it thrown in your teeth by people whose ego is incapable of acknowledging that expertise exists at all, let alone acknowledge that you might have it.
At least, that's been my observation and experience. It's part of why I like volunteer work. When people are benefiting from your brilliance and watching you let others lead while you learn from them, they're less inclined to constantly challenge your capabilities, and more pleasant to be around. Purely social environments like bars and parties on the other hand, are a psychologically draining environment where bullshit flies, assertions are never compared against objective reality, and just listening to people talk threatens to make you stupider by normalizing a lack of rigor and discipline in acknowledging that you have areas of ignorance that no inherent brilliance can overcome.
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Ahh - unsubstantiated willy-waving of IQ scores which are meaningless other than to show how well you took an IQ test. God, I love the internet. Never has there been a greater facilitator of self-important low self-esteem.
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Re:A truly smart person ... (Score:5, Funny)
Man I wish could flaunt my IQ on the interwebs, but I can't because I'm too damn smart. Typically we of the IQ > 220 crowd keep quiet in public, allowing ourselves only gentle stroking of our nipples and an intolerably arrogant half-grin - well, that and some posting on /. obviously.
Re:A truly smart person ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Never let the truth (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep AFAIK the tests stop at 165 or around there. Anything above is made up as there is no statistical data that can confirm it.
197 would imply there is someone out there with an IQ of 3 as well.
Re:Never let the truth (Score:5, Funny)
There is. I worked for a number of them
Re:Never let the truth (Score:5, Funny)
I saw that. Get back to work or I'll put your internet in the recycle bin again. And this time I'll make sure it's emptied!!!
Re:Never let the truth (Score:5, Funny)
197 would imply there is someone out there with an IQ of 3 as well.
Just browse at -1 and you'll have your statistical data...
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197 would imply there is someone out there with an IQ of 3 as well.
Just browse at -1 and you'll have your statistical data...
Or, apparently, from recent postings, talk with a Comcast customer service representative.
Re:Never let the truth (Score:5, Informative)
Yep AFAIK the tests stop at 165 or around there. Anything above is made up as there is no statistical data that can confirm it.
197 would imply there is someone out there with an IQ of 3 as well.
Some of the tests on young children with age correction can yield this type of figure. I wouldn't be surprised if he was measured with an IQ of 197 at an age of 5 or 6, but it would result in a much lower measurement as an adult.
Re:Never let the truth (Score:5, Informative)
197 would imply there is someone out there with an IQ of 3 as well.
Some of the tests on young children with age correction can yield this type of figure. I wouldn't be surprised if he was measured with an IQ of 197 at an age of 5 or 6, but it would result in a much lower measurement as an adult.
Just to be clear, IQ originally stood for intelligence quotient, which was originally defined as mental age / physical age * 100. E.g., if you took a test at age 5 and scored as well as the average 10-year-old, you'd have an IQ of mental age 10 divided by physical age 5 (*100) = 200.
This sort of scoring is how Marilyn vos Savant [wikipedia.org], for example, managed to get an IQ score of 228 or something, which used to be listed as the highest IQ ever by the Guinness Book of World Records. However, that kind of test scoring has been completely deprecated since at least the early 1950s, and even Marilyn basically was taking an outdated form by the time she was scored almost 60 years ago. Guinness recognized this, and so retired the record category.
Nowadays, IQ scales usually are based on standard deviations, where a score of +/- 15 from 100 constitutes one standard deviation away from the average intelligence for that age. And I'm assuming this Scorpion guy is not 70 years old or something, so there's no reason he should have taken an IQ test using the old scoring method.
So, if someone has a claimed IQ of 197, that would be about 6.467 standard deviations above the norm. That comes out to somewhere around 1 in 10 BILLION people. And keep in mind that age scaling requires comparison only with kids at the age of the test taker, so this guy's claim would require that the test had been normed against a large enough population of whatever age he took the test was to differentiate at a 1 in 10 billion level.
Simply put, that's impossible, since there aren't that many people total on the planet.
So -- the only explanation is that someone gave him an older form of the IQ test, which computed scores using that outdated formula of mental age / physical age. And that IQ formula was deprecated because it was shown to give stupid meaningless results. Which leads one to ask -- for a guy who claims to be so smart, why would he insist on citing a statistic that is meaningless and shows the person who administered the test was probably incompetent (since he/she used an outdated formula that doesn't agree with modern norms)?
Re:Never let the truth (Score:4, Interesting)
If you estimate the distribution of all test takers for a given age category, then it is entirely possible to show that someone is 6.5 sigma from the mean, without actually sampling 1/10 billion people to be sure that all of them are less intelligent. That, after all, is the point of statistics.
First, note that most of the test norming has been done on samples of a few thousand people. The major IQ tests have been normed rather rigorously a number of times, but certainly not on samples of more than tens of thousands of people. Extrapolating an that outlier is somewhere around 6.5 sigma from the mean with any accuracy from such population samples is pretty difficult to begin with.
But beyond that, one has to ask whether it is even possible to measure "general intelligence" with a level of accuracy that we could pinpoint, literally, the smartest person in the world. I don't think we can. Maybe we could come up with a definition of "general intelligence" that accurately puts someone in the top 1% or top 0.1%, but beyond that, we're probably not able to differentiate with any precision.
So, the correct scientific and statistical conclusion to draw from an outlying score that appears to be 6.5 sigma from the mean in this case is -- "he's pretty far above average." Whether he's actually 4 sigma or 7 sigma is not really something any test can specify with any precision... and stating such a number is in fact meaningless. (The norms for modern IQ tests generally have a ceiling of 160 for that reason -- that's 4 sigma above norm. Beyond that, the tests make no claim, and that's probably appropriate given the ambiguity about what exactly we're measuring.)
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Then why does newspaper columnist Marian vos Savant have a recorded IQ of 228?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Never let the truth (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, from what I've come to understand, IQ tests just aren't ultimately that useful for ranking the intelligence of smart people. At least, according to a few different psychologists that I've talked to, the main purpose of IQ tests, the reason they're used and considered valid, is in detecting developmental problems rather than detecting genius.
So if someone scores a 160 as opposed to a 130, it gives some indication that the person is good at certain kinds of mental activity-- for example, spotting patterns in numbers and geometric shapes. That's about all you can really say, and it's ultimately not that meaningful. Of course, people who are really brilliant math/science types will likely do pretty well on these tests, but doing well on these tests does not make you a brilliant mathematician or scientist.
Where the test is helpful is in seeing problems/deficiencies. If you test a child who gets a score of 70, then it's a pretty good indicator that he should be put into a special program. That's what the test is good for, and that's largely why they administer it. If you're an adult, lording your 150 IQ over someone who scored a 145, then you're an idiot. If you're citing your 197 IQ as some sort of qualification for something, it's that much dumber.
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Every single bet possible on a roulette table has an expected value of less than zero. This is fairly easy to verify by going through each possible bet and noting that the payoff is a touch lower than the inverse of the probability.
It's easy to prove, in probability, that the expectation of the sum is the sum of the expectations, so the expected value of any session or strategy is the sum of the expected value of the individual bets, which means that playing roulette will, on the average, lose money.
T
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I suppose you think if you hit four blacks in a row on roulette you should always go red because it's red's turn to come up?
Although statistically it's totally irrelevant what the prior spins are, betting like this is how I pay for my expenses whenever I visit Vegas. Sure, I don't make a fortune doing it (usually just 20 here, 40 there), but I've never walked away from a roulette table a loser.
Then you haven't played enough roulette, or actually kept accurate records.
I would remember losing. Now, we're only talking about around $3,200 over like 4 different trips but still, it payed for my meals, taxis and, well, some of the alcohol. I never stay at the table, I swoop in, red or black, collect, and leave. I've stood around and watched people lose startling amounts of money on those tables.
Let me see if I understand you. Is this the gist of what your practices are? You walk down to the roulette wheel and wait for the ball to hit four blacks in a row, then place $800 on red and walk away a winner with an extra $800 in your pocket. I could certainly believe that has happened to you four times.
If you are making "20 here, 40 there" on a red/black bets, then taking in $3200 would require around 800 to 1600 winning bets on red/black. To simplify the math, I'll say each bet was $40, so we need at le
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I was tested back in 1981 and was technically "off the chart", which made it difficult for the test proctors to fill a box on the form. So, they were basically forced to estimate my IQ, probably through extrapolation from my other tests. For what it's worth, *my* estimated score was 189.
I also started my first company at 13 and have started and sold several since then. At a relatively young age, I wised up and distanced myself from my 'black hat' personas and handles. I became an consultant and I curren
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There's obviously been a bit of kissing the Blarney stone involved in how this story came together.
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Or, as we know from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
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We like like the idea of the IQ score as a measurement. It is a number to say I am better then someone else.
However people are complex and their IQ is only part of the overall person. Very successful people have average or even below average IQ's as well. They can compensate it with Physical abilities, strong influential personality, or just knowing who to ask for answers and good guidance for better decisions.
A person with a High IQ and they know about it use it as a crutch to make them feel superior to
He's on TV & the Internet, of course he's real (Score:3)
And he's not in jail, so sure, he's a genius. But are his exploits legendary? Well, much like fishing stories, I take hacking stories have more elaborations then truth.
Re:He's on TV & the Internet, of course he's r (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right:
From http://www.irishtimes.com/cult... [irishtimes.com]
"I was coming home from school and encountered a house surrounded by black cars. Mom was on the couch, crying; Dad was not too happy. A lot of men in suits were wanting to yell at me for what I had done but were a little surprised when out of my schoolbag I pulled an extradition waiver â" which calmed the conversation down. If they signed this [the extradition waiver] then I would show them where the holes are in their network. We ended up doing a deal â" which happens in most hacking incidents you never hear about.â"
and:
"The showâ(TM)s creator, Nick Santora, introduced him as a man who âoehas saved the world several times over, things he canâ(TM)t even tell us aboutâ."
or:
"One of Scorpionâ(TM)s executive producers told Comic-Con, âoeWalter personally caught the Boston bombers by writing an algorithm that tracked motion on all the cameras within a two-mile radius of the blast. That kind of thing makes for a really compelling episode of television. He also stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening.â"
It's so full of weasel words it's unbelievable. An algorithm that tracks motion? what you mean checking if one frame is different to the next? that's tracking motion, hardly rocket science, any CS101 student could do it. Helped stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening? Well so have I, by not becoming an incompetent nuclear engineer that goes on to produce a flawed reactor design I assure you have also done exactly this. Things we can't be told about? Oh well, I'll assume they just don't exist then or I might as well just mention that I'm personally better than this guy because I saved not only the world numerous times, but the entire universe, I just can't tell you how.
Which is a shame because it sounds like the show may be a bit like Numb3rs, the sort of show that might interest me, but with this insurmountable pile of tosh and bullshit that's apparently surrounding it I'm going to steer VERY clear. This guy is obviously an egotistical self-publicist and a serial liar, and the guys writing about him are obviously absurdly naive and have failed to realise that they could've made up these exact same stories without getting him involved.
Everything he says is something many people could say and it would hold as much validity, there's literally nothing about this guy that's actually in any way verifiable - the incidents he claims to have been involved in, the things he claims to have done, absolutely none of it is verifiable. A genius that got a bog standard degree at a run of the mill UK university? - Christ, it's not like his "intelligence" even got him into Cambridge early, or even at all. It says he graduated in the late 90s, so if he was 13 in 1988 then that implies he only followed the same path of literally millions of other teens the same year he did. Why if he was such a genius wasn't he doing his A-Levels or degree early like real actual genius kids consistently manage to do? Even my fucking cousin got an A-Level at 14 because she was ahead of her years and yet she wasn't exactly exceptional - a few others in her school did too. I have two degrees, one of which I studied for whilst working full time, this means my academic achievements at very least are well ahead of this guy and I'm not exactly stand out either.
I can find not a single shred of evidence that this guy is anything other than mediocre at best.
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I dunno about the degree thing. I mean, the kid is full of bullshit talk, but hey, I've had bad grades in school. My Statistics teacher was pissy because I had Ds and I got like 4 exam problems wrong all year--I never paid attention in class, I never did any homework, I was always goofing off, and I chewed through stat exams like a correctly working version of Mathematica. Obviously, I knew my shit hard; but I was failing the class.
It was boring. Well, homework was boring. I got better shit to do than
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hacking stories have more elaborations then truth.
That's why I always skip to the end.
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Better question (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares?
Never heard of him (Score:5, Insightful)
Who?
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Scorpion. He was the lead singer of the Police.
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Everything on TV is fiction (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to say that all TV was fiction except the weather, but then I saw Fox lying about that too: severe winter weather does not contradict global warming/climate change.
Grades vs IQ (Score:5, Insightful)
I have have a 163 IQ. I was capable of making straight A's in high school, but was bored I just acted out and got in trouble. What they called Advanced classes was the top 25-30 students out of a class of 100 people (small school), which was a joke. I was the person who made an A on the test but didn't do a few daily grades here or there and things of that nature. In college I have a 4.0 but it was mind numbing to keep that grade. College for the most part was pure memorization and doing the daily work..
The point of this is that grades do not reflect IQ.
Re:Grades vs IQ (Score:5, Funny)
If you are so smart perhaps you can explain why 98% of the internet has an IQ in the 150-170 range.
Re:Grades vs IQ (Score:5, Interesting)
From my experience with internet forums, especially gaming forums, youtube commentaries, twitter and facebook, 98% of the observable internet IQs would barely scratch the three digit threshold. A lot of people appear to be well-read, yet basic logic seems to escape most of them. Non-sequitur, strawmen, false dilemma, practically the whole list of logical fallacies can be found there. Yet a lot of people are easily fooled and mistake a few fancy words for competence, which is probably why politicians get elected despite being dumber than a bag of rocks.
I'd say, that most of the internet has about the same average IQ as the general population. Some of US may be a bit more tech savvy, but that's it.
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It has been that way ever since Eternal September. The internet lets everyone speak - but people in general are terrible at recognising the limitations of their knowledge. They aren't stupid, exactly - they are usually entirely competent in their specialised field. But they don't see how inept they are at everything else. They've read a few opinion columns on economics, so they consider themselves fit to weigh in upon tax policy. They took high-school science, so they act as if they can judge the entire fie
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I suppose I meant "self-reported IQ." I was making fun of how common it is for people on the internet to claim to have an extraordinarily high IQ, when an IQ of 163 would put you in the top .0013% [iqcomparisonsite.com].
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Re:Grades vs IQ (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a bragging story right? Well it isn't. What I've told you is that I had a comparative advantage as a child, no different to being given say a million pounds at birth. It tells you that it should have been easier for me to succeed than for others. However, I'm not a world renowned mathematician or running my own company. So far in my life my achievements are pretty mundane, even though I was handed a headstart. Claiming to have a high IQ and not having achieved more than average is saying you had a headstart on everyone else and you wasted it.
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According to The Onion, 80% of our nation's grandchildren are above average.
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I don't think the Onion originated that. Though they may have co opted and slightly modified this from back in the mid 80s. But then, there may be predecessors to that as well.
"Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." - Garrison Keillor
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If you are so smart perhaps you can explain why 98% of the internet has an IQ in the 150-170 range.
Because they take viral IQ quizzes meant to flatter, so you'll share them.
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There's selection bias in a couple ways...
I think you're talking about people who self-report IQs being the ones with high IQs, and having large absolute numbers.
There's another selection bias to compound there, where they take the IQ test that gave them the best score. These IQ tests, of course, tend to be free Internet tests of dubious provenance.
Then there's exaggerations, and then people who confuse a non-IQ test with an IQ test, and then outright fabrications.
It's basically impossible to evaluate the
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Re:Grades vs IQ (Score:5, Interesting)
The curse of the academically capable: I breezed through school getting very good grades with no effort at all. Never revised - I was just good at the code subjects (Except English Lit). Then went to university and had a breakdown, because it was the first time I'd been seriously challenged.
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Lots of brilliant people score horribly in school, usually due to boredom. I have a high IQ.
I didn't have straight A's in school, because I was completely bored with it by 8th grade. I scored well on tests, but I gave up on doing homework. 7 classes, each assigning 1 hour of homework didn't make any sense.
The only ones who excelled were the ones who teamed up to do homework together, and divided the workload. Sure, they each learned something, but they didn't learn everything they were suppose to.
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Lots of people with high IQ are far from brilliant. It's only a test result, it doesn't tap into your brain. The supposed verification of an IQ test is actual academic achievement; when high IQ people have low academic achievement, it might just as well mean the test is flawed.
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I was going to be really rich, but then I decided not to.
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What is worse is when you get a teacher that makes you down for not doing it their convoluted and retarded way. Sorry teacher but I can do all that in my head, and you are marking me down because I am not slowing down and driving myself insane with the archaic and backwards way of finding the answer.
Luckily I had parents that would scream at the teachers and principal. we finally went over the their heads to the superintendent where he read off questions, and I typically had the answer before he finishe
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What is worse is when you get a teacher that makes you down for not doing it their convoluted and retarded way. Sorry teacher but I can do all that in my head, and you are marking me down because I am not slowing down and driving myself insane with the archaic and backwards way of finding the answer.
Its not all about you or what you think is right, and you don't actually know everything regardless of what you think. Doing it in your head is fine when the teacher isn't trying to understand what you're doing, but when it comes to understanding what you're thinking process is, not showing your work makes it fairly hard.
Luckily I had parents that would scream at the teachers and principal. we finally went over the their heads to the superintendent where he read off questions, and I typically had the answer before he finished reading did they realize that teaching at pot head speeds did not work for me.
So you're an arrogant prick and your parents spoiled you and let you have your way. And better still, you think its your privilege to do whatever you think is the right way and ignore peo
Its nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
His website proves itself false. He claims it was founded in 1988; however Whois records [domaintools.com] for the domain only go back to 2000, and the web address doesnt appear in the Wayback Machine [archive.org] until 2003.
Looks like the guy has tried to mix his own marketing material into google results, but you can see where his highly touted ScenGen actually comes from here:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/wi... [ucar.edu]
This version of MAGICC/SCENGEN was developed primarily with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but it rests on developments carried out over the past 20 years that were funded by a number of organizations.
So the "ScenGen" you keep seeing in all the results is not the same as the one this O'brien dude keeps blathering about. In fact, hes apparently the only one who cares about it; he did do one talk at IEEE in 2010 (though strangely theres no mention of it anywhere except the bog-standard event page), but there doesnt appear to have been any chatter on the internet about it whatsoever.
So, to the AC who posted this: hopefully this is a useful lesson. Anyone can say anything on the internet, and even make it look passingly believable. But if it sounds "too perfect", its probably rubbish.
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Another Shiva Ayyadurai, except with even fewer verifiable accomplishments.
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I'm actually impressed by people who can, in this age, create even questionable fabrications this elaborate.
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He also invented "Artificial Intelligence engines" whatever the hell that means.
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Not a lot. Say you design a new heuristic for playing chess, you've now built a chess engine.
Say you build a tool which people can load new heuristics into - perhaps a variation of best first with your own pruning algorithm, you've now built an AI engine.
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His website proves itself false. He claims it was founded in 1988; however Whois records [domaintools.com] for the domain only go back to 2000, and the web address doesnt appear in the Wayback Machine [archive.org] until 2003.
Neither of these mean anything. You can buy a domain name years after founding a business, you can even change names or get a different domain name at a later time. Wayback machine doesn't archive every single website, nor does it archive them from the very start. I remember back then Wayback machine didn't archive anything unless somebody explicitly searched for the domain in Wayback machine.
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and at 13 years old started his company ScorpionComputerServices.com.
Thats from his "about" page, linked at the "IQ 197" summary link. He is directly claiming to have created a webpage at that address in 1988, unless he is claiming to have been 13 in 2003.
This Story Reeks of Advertisement (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't heard of this show until now. I wonder Anonymous Coward is just a sort of straw man trying to drum up interest.
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Genius or not, the story is bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
Leaving aside the fact that an IQ score in the 190s is absurd (no one has curved a test over a large enough population for such an answer to reflect actual score distributions), as far as actual, normed IQ tests conducted by actual psychologists go, it's hard to find a test with a ceiling higher than 160 these days. The Weschler, easily the most popular among these, has a ceiling of 160, and getting a score above the low 140s requires doing very well across most of the individual batteries, some of which aren't especially g-weighted. No, the quiz in Omni is not, as far as most psychometricians are remotely concerned, an IQ test. To define it as such is to destroy most of the meaning of the term.
Occasionally, you see high scores due either to very old versions of the Stanford-Binet that did reach above 160 (it's likely that Ted Kaczynski got such a score) or the use of extensions of the old Stanford-Binet to investigate young people who hit or near ceilings, typically on verbal parts of these tests where raw scores tend to have a little more variance, but extrapolations to actual IQ scores aren't valid today due to the Flynn effect (ie: more young people are properly nourished and in intellectually stimulating environments than were in the early 20th century) and the fact that old versions of the Stanford-Binet weren't necessarily normally distributed along the 15-point sigma most tests are today. Though people have attempted to write on the upper echelons of performance on tests of cognitive ability, there's remarkably little that is peer-reviewed.
The tl;dr of all this is that whenever you hear reports of IQ scores above 160, you can more or less assume someone is talking out of their ass.
IQ of 197? (Score:4, Interesting)
The standard deviation of IQ seems to be 15
octave:16> erfc((197-100)/15)
ans = 5.9493e-20
That means only a fraction of 5*10^-20 of total humankind would exceed his intelligence.
Let me make a few remarks:
-That would mean humankind could exists in it current size for another 10^11 years without finding a second one like him
-Normal itelligence tests dont resolve in that region. It's pretty impossible to design a tests which ca resolve between 100 and 140 and at the same time distinct between 180 and 190. i am not sure if designing a test between 190 and 197
-The most likely other option is that the distribution of measured IQs is heavy tailed (instead of normal). In that case, the IQ measurement needs to be corrected for that.
I wish that journalists would turn their brain on and not off at every number they cite
Re: (Score:2)
I wish that journalists would turn their brain on and not off at every number they cite
To be fair, what you just did there relies on knowing a fair bit of statistic methodology. Not something an average journalist does.
But, yeah, any journalist worth anything should be able to spot bullshit. And an IQ of 197 is obvious bullshit. You don't need to do the sums to see that.
Re:IQ of 197? (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot to divide by sqrt(2) in your erfc expression. The actual probability of IQ of a random human being over 197 is about 5e-11, which means about 0.35 humans should have it.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in... [wolframalpha.com]
Re: (Score:2)
hey, thanks for spotting the error!
wish I could moderate the answer up.
Re: (Score:2)
you are right.
the error function is the cumulative normal distribution, besides a factor and an offset. i got the factor wrong (see the other answer to my post).
Their web site doesn't say much (Score:5, Interesting)
The web site reads like they're a big consultancy, another McKinsey. Then the testimonals are all about Walter. Oracle manager: "Walter showed a great depth of knowledge in Word, WordBasic Macro programming". He still has recommendations up which mention Turbo Pascal. Not seeing rocket science here. The biggest success reported was translating some large English-only application into multiple languages, which made it valuable in Asia. That's nice, but a routine job. He claims to have written a general-purpose program to help with such jobs.
He also claims to have written ScenGen, a "scenario generator". It looks like that originated at Boeing in the mid-1980s [slashdot.org]. Running on a Compaq PC with 2MB back then. The pitch for the current model sounds like the one from back then, although the graphics are probably better now.
The web site is awful. There are lines of text with excess white space in the middle. I looked at the HTML, expecting to find some overly complex Javascript which was misbehaving. No. The HTML source just has explicit non-breaking spaces in the wrong places.
He seems to speak at a lot of strange conferences, such as the Family Office Association. A "family office", in this context,is a staff which manages the family fortune for a large, wealthy family. The Rockefellers have one.
This is getting weird.
Re: (Score:2)
My favourite bit of the home page is the table hard coded to look like a bullet list:
<!-- Begin Left Column Content -->
<table width="350" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<!-- Entry 1 -->
<tr >
<td class="rowbullet">•</td>
<td class="rowBulletContent">We saved $43 billion in opportunity risks over</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="rowbullet"
Re: (Score:3)
"The HTML source just has explicit non-breaking spaces in the wrong places."
This really points to the whole website being designed in front page, that was a fingerprint of that horrid horrid program.
As for the grades (Score:2)
"genious level" smart people mostly don't do well in school, they can't cope with the system.
Written by the team behind Prison Break? (Score:2)
'Written by the team behind Prison Break, the show “follows an eccentric genius and his international network of super-geniuses as they form the last line of defence against the complex threats of the modern age”, according to its makers.' ref [irishtimes.com]
Well that's no indication (Score:2)
> hacking Nasa at age 13
He's currently 39, which means this took place in the 1980s. A dog could "hack" NASA in the 1980s. Hell, they were already so far back down the other side of that bell curve of interest, they were talking about it as passé in "Out of the Inner Circle" which was published in 85.
Re:He's a real genius. (Score:5, Funny)
Whiskey?
Re:He's a real genius. (Score:5, Funny)
A Real Genius uses a Space laser to pop the worlds largest popcorn container IN the home of his enemy.
Re: (Score:2)
He gave one talk at an IEEE event at a doubletree hotel in 2010. You would be very hard-pressed to find it unless you narrowed your search quite a bit; literally noone was talking about him at that point.
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Hey, if you were on the undernet back in '96 - I think I know who you are!
Re:I worked for Dell back then (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read, he supplied more computers than Dell and Gateway combined....... Before 1993.
While both Dell and Gateway existed since the '80s, neither were international powerhouses until the mid-90s. I'm sure both HP and IBM were blowing this guy out of the water in Ireland.
I mean, I sold more cell phones worldwide in 2006 than Apple and Google combined, for crying out loud! (AKA: I sold one.)
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect my IQ is untestable. I was a subject in a few research projects as a child and teenager, so I've been through the common tests so many times I'd have an unfair advantage.
No idea what they were researching. Most of it seemed to involve contriving circumstances and recording response - there was one involving a 'target shooting' game rigged so the researcher could decide if the subject would appear to score or miss the target. I remember because I took a great interest in trying to determine how it
Re: (Score:2)
Intelligent people can be immature. In fact, all intelligent people were immature at some stage.
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That isn't the definition of intelligence that other people use, nor is it what dictionaries would call it. Intelligence is generally accepted to be the ability to take in information and to apply that information; it is not the amount of knowledge you have already acquired or even inherently the rationality with which you choose to apply it or not.
I was probably about as intelligent when I was 16
Re: (Score:2)
Clean url:
http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/a... [wikileaks.org]