by dahart | 2025-11-24 05:33:16+00:00
Weschler’s definition of intelligence fits almost all functional adults, and most animals on the planet for that matter, and it doesn’t really back up your claim above about extreme intelligence. You’ve conflated a lot of things together here. There’s no evidence of any concepts that average adults can’t understand given time and interest. Ability to solve Fermat’s last theorem is function of interest and grit and time and context and education and whole slew of things not directly related to intelligence. Your example actually demonstrates my point quite nicely: there are a lot of people who understand Wiles’ proof even though they didn’t come up with it. You and I could too, if we wanted; the barrier is willingness to devote the large amount of time and energy required, not intelligence.

> ‘massive outlier’ is a matter of perspective, but the amount of competition their best time is >1% faster than

It seems like you understood my point about standard deviations and ranking versus absolute values, but you’re insisting on looking at rankings still? Why? This is exactly the common mistake I was referring to. Yes, Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world, which puts him at a little over 6 standard deviations above the norm, if I used my lookup table correctly. He’s faster than around eight billion people. But does that mean he’s eight billion times faster than the average person, or a hundred times faster, or even ten times faster than the average? Well, standard deviations don’t tell you that. He’s actually less than 1.5 times faster than the average healthy male adult, and less than 10% faster than a typical competitive sprinter. He’s not that much faster at all, it’s just that he represents where humans physically top out, and he happens to rank the highest.

Same is true of human height and many other physical traits. The tallest person in the world, the biggest outlier that ever existed, is less than twice the average height of everyone on earth including women. Robert Wadlow was off the charts in terms of standard deviations, taller than billions and billions of people, but of course that doesn’t mean he was a thousand feet tall. He was less than nine feet tall, and that’s all it takes to be the tallest person in the world.

Why would intelligence be any different? All brains have the same basic design. Some people are above average and some are below. Yes there are distribution outliers, and there are non-functional people, but that does not imply the top is far from the average. What reason is there to believe that some brains are so much smarter than others that they can comprehend ideas that someone with an IQ of 120 can’t? I’m not aware of such an idea ever being published, are you? Seems like it would be famous, if true. How would that even work? There’s no language and no list of words that only people with 170 IQ can understand.

BTW I just rewatched “The Expert Myth” video by Veritasium, it’s very relevant to our conversation (https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA) and has a nice clip of Bolt in there too! It’s a good science backed explanation of why so-called ‘genius’ doesn’t actually depend on IQ much.