Speaking of IQ, when I listen to interviews and podcasts of supposed high IQ people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I struggle to see signs of intelligence (not saying that they don’t have above average IQ). I find that these 2 have a hard time sifting through the noise (competing thoughts) in their head to get to want they want to say (the signal).
When I listen to Steve Jobs, I hear someone who has very strong ability to sift through noise. So Jobs couldn’t see engineering in a new way like Elon does but Elon couldn’t do what Jobs did either.
Regarding Zuckerberg, from what I’ve read he is the Bill Gates type where he has the traditional variant of high IQ, aka raw hardware/horsepower but lower on creativity/imagination side.
So intelligence seems to have different shapes and sizes.
Don't read this as a defense of Zuck or Musk, but some of the most brilliant people I've known sometimes had trouble getting thoughts out. It wasn't that they couldn't see their goal, but that how they thought of it was changing even as the words were leaving their mouths. Have you ever tried to explain while you were still working it out in your head? "See, it's kind of like A..., except that one part is closer to B, and that's interesting because, well, B and C have a relationship that's closer than A and C, so it might be more appropriate to say it's more C-like, except where A is..."
That didn't mean they were unintelligent. It meant that them trying to explain the flurry of ideas in their head was like me trying to type with mittens.
Of course, knuckleheads can also sound like that, but for different reasons. That kind of rambling doesn't imply that the speaker is a dumbass. It definitely doesn't guarantee that they're a genius.
Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.
We develop for iOS, so we need to register a bunch of Apple test accounts once in a while. Every time an account is registered, you get around 5 emails of ads. WITHOUT ANY UNSUBSCRIBE links.
Speaking of these standardised tests, I think it's ridiculous that even for someone like Elon Musk, who read for up to 10 hours a day for most of his of pre college days and learned how to build rockets with the use of books och instruction manuals, only scored 730 on the Math section and 670 on the Verbal section for a total composite score of 1400. The fact that he couldn't get higher score means something is wrong with these tests. They are mirroring a very narrow frequency of aptitude.
> The fact that he couldn't get higher score means something is wrong with these tests.
Does it? As others pointed out, those aren't bad scores. Not the highest scores, but not embarrassing for a better student.
It could be that his claimed reading time is just that, a claim, and not true. Or the material he was reading wasn't challenging in a way that would help with test prep to get him a higher score.
I was going to say, you can study 10 hours a day on topics that you like or find valuable and not cover all the material for the test. I took the SAT as a junior and didn't really study for it, so I hadn't covered some of the math types yet. I still did fine and got into all the colleges I applied to. It really only seems to matter if you want to go to a prestigious school.
> only scored 730 on the Math section and 670 on the Verbal section for a total composite score of 1400.
Those numbers are well above average. Good results. I don't know the context but if he didn't prepare much or at all then those results are quite good.
If you expected him to get a perfect score, your expectations might be too high or there might be some hero worship going on.
Been a very, very long time. But I expect that getting a top score involved being both "smart" (whatever that means exactly) and having done a ton of prep work.
Assuming those are SAT scores, at the time Musk would have taken it those scores would be around 90th percentile for math, 75th for verbal, and 92nd for the overall test. That's pretty good.
Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.
Your comment is very well-written, which is usually a sign of someone highly literate and well-read. I'm very curious about your story as an "intermediate reader" with "500 hours" of reading under your belt. TIA for any further details you're willing to share.
I don't know if you're alluding to it and I just missed the sarcasm but their comment is at least partially computer generated. Last sentence is classic bot talk coded.
Despite this comment's dubiety, this is a good point. Text communication is only about 8,000 years old IIRC, which is quite recent in human development.
You can knock off a few millennia there, and if you want to include most of the population, barely a century or two.
Literacy was needed to read the Bible and operate machinery, and now we have videos for that. Only (some of) the video makers need to read, so they can raid the libraries for material.
After reading the book "Apple in China", it’s hilarious to observe the contrast between Apple as a ruthless, amoral capitalist corporation behind the scenes and these WWDC presentations...
