One of the guests on tonight’s Jeopardy! said he’s the only person he knows to score perfect on all three high school college boards: The SAT, ACT, and the PSAT. He now works as an SAT coach.
Sadly, this did not translate into Jeopardy success as he finished double Jeopardy with negative 2400 and was removed the stage, while two women duked it out in Final Jeopardy.
This is a good example of regression to the mean. Just because you did super well on your college boards, does not mean you’ll do well on a different intelligence test. Of course just appearing on Jeopardy! at all suggests he’s way above average in general knowledge. He also may have been hurt by overconfidence, as he bet everything on a daily double and was penalized for giving several wrong answers when he could have stayed silent.
And not all SAT champs struggle on Jeopardy!. Amy Schneider, one of the best players of all time, claims to have scored a perfect 1600:
Schneider was born in 1979 so likely took the recentered SAT, where 1600 equates to IQ 154 (U.S. norms); 153 (British norms).
Pumpkin Person 
who the fuck takes all three? and why? other than to make pp write blog posts about it?
I guess just for tutor cred
where would you all estimate my IQ to be? at least verbal can be deducted from here if anything.
I don’t know you well enough to have enough observations to converge on a meaningful estimate, but your avoidance of capitalization and misuse of “deducted” in place of “deduced” are not points in your favor.
you take the PSAT to become a national merit scholar. You take the SAT to get into a good college.
In my understanding, you can submit a SAT scores in lieu of a PSAT, but as you are a bit younger, you will score a bit less, and it may damage your standing later when you submit a second SAT score instead of a first (higher) SAT score.
So it’s probably safer to proceed like he did …
NB : I m not familiar with the US education system except from reading blogs and watching TV series (and contemplating taking a GMAT for an MBA many years ago when i had 1 year work experience …). I took 2 Kaplan tests (for free) and was offered to be an instructor in another company (in Manhattan) by the trainer I met in paris during this free presentation class (an Indian guy with a MBA from MIT)
Weirdly this trainer talked me about another guy in a previous session who had (only) a 720 Gmat starting score but got a perfect GMAT – wich is extremely rare – ( a real one) and got an MBA from Stanford and became an investment banker (A. de Guillenschmidt, a Partner at Goldman Sachs) .
the perfect GMAT is rare because the test is “adaptive”. if you keep answering correctly the questions get harder. so it’s also rare because being good isn’t enough. you have to be lucky too. same with the old SAT.
i scored 790 on the practice test but 770 on test day.
i never applied to b-school. because only a few b-schools are worth it and i thought if i had a perfect score i might get in to one of them but otherwise wouldn’t. i didn’t get a perfect score so i didn’t apply.
770 would have been enough to get into most good schools. You didn’t need a perfect score to be a harvard mba. You seem to give up too easy. You did the same for the actuary exams. You may lack ‘grit’.
Of all the things he lacks, grit is what comes to mind? Your social IQ is so low.
PP, Who do you think is the greatest human being to ever exist? In terms of capability and influence/impact they had on the world.
Also of possible, can you estimate what their IQ was/is?
The most influential human is different from the most capable human
Mug of Pee need not apply lol.
i go to a business school myself. the content i am learning about can be challenging at times and i credit my peers for being intelligent and high-performing.
Ok who was/is the most capable human?
Capable of what?
I wouldn’t call this regression to the mean. If you score perfectly on all 3 tests the chances you’re actually a retard are extraordinarily low. He probably just doesn’t know random shit like that.
He scored perfectly on 3 tests that are virtually identical to one another. Basically 3 versions of the same test.
obviously peepee has never taken any of these or she’s lying. the ACT is very not like the SAT. or it was when i took them. it has two SAT like sections but it has two totally not like the SAT sections too. i did a lot better on the SAT like sections and my SATs were higher. but i got in the 99th percentile on both.
if he took the PSAT at age 15 or 16 and made a perfect score then he has a very high IQ.
i have a white half-brother from my father who is a little older than 40. he is white from his mothers side.
he works as a restaurant manager.
i have a sister where both of us share a father and mother and she is a computer analytics major from a very accoladed university.
my pedigree in terms of intellect is very high indeed.
*graduate
she already graduated from said prestigious university.
PP, would you make a rough estimation of Alia Sabur’s IQ? Probably above 180 sd15?
Being the youngest college professor ever we could generously call a +6.67 academic accomplishment. Correlation between IQ and academic success is .55 according to PP, so 6.67 times .55 = 3.6685 (IQ ~155). Don’t know if there’s any other relevant data, but I watched her on Greg Gutfeld and she’s reasonable and has a good sense of humor.
Precocity and adult IQ aren’t perfectly correlated. Do you know how rare a legit 180 IQ is? There might be one woman on Earth that smart considering that men predominate either end of the spectrum. The most successful *female game show contestant of all time is a dude for example. Wouldn’t surprise me if the top several smartest *women are trans tbh.
*Not to be a dick. I’ll call someone by their preferred pronouns to make them comfortable. Trans people are just a different category in my brain.
I’m clueless but I have to ask: Are you sure that’s what correlation means? My intuition tells me that correlation shows a spectrum. Like, 155 would be the lowest possible and 245 or something, would be the highest possible.
When you say female, you mean a trans woman or a trans man? Which game show are you talking about?
PS: Marilyn is *furious* with you right now! haha
My understanding is that correlation is the extent to which we should expect the unknown or dependent variable’s z-score to deviate from the mean compared to the independent variable’s z-score. Pedagogic Person has taught me a lot of neat stuff that I didn’t learn in school (although I was an extremely unconscientious student). We can square this correlation and get an estimate of the extent to which interpersonal difference in a dependent variable is caused by the independent variable (coefficient of determination).
Correlation may not hold true at extreme ends of the spectrum, though. Even though there is a clear linear relationship between height and basketball performance (your odds of making the NBA increase for every inch taller you are), we have never seen a player who is taller than 7′ 7″ presumably because requisite coordination and speed become impossible past that point. Basically the standard correlation coefficient can cease to be useful for extreme outliers. Maybe it is the case that 1 in a billion academic achievement requires a 1 in a million mind. I was arguing with G and PP that inquisitiveness is a key component of intelligence, and even though I learned that intellectual curiosity and “typical intellectual engagement” correlate only mildly with IQ, I suspect that past 3.5 or so, the relationship becomes stronger. Past that point, though, I acknowledge that the IQ-“academic achievement”relationship might me a lot spottier.
I was talking about Amy Schneider on Jeopardy. Marilyn v S is a supergenius, but her score on Mega ostensibly equates to about a 171 IQ (SD15). There’s a ceiling effect there, though. I don’t think any especially g-loaded test to date has been able to distinguish between those greater than 4.5 SDs above the norm. These people are by definition complicated and super rare, so it would take a lot of intelligence and work to devise and calibrate such a test. Hoeflin has probably come the closest.
Marilyn Vos Savant is kind of a charlatan. shes smart but no where near what she claims which is that she is the smartest human alive.
At least she’s good-looking
Hi Teffec,
Are you sure you want to squander all your great test items in the comment section? If you send me the answers I could publish it a more appropriate way.
I sent you an email btw.
Thanks for the response, Paul! I didn’t fully get it but that’s OK.
Random, but are you playing Wordle? I suspect you would like it.
I do enjoy crosswords and riddles, but I never got into Wordle. Doesn’t seem to be measuring skill.
Intelligence being positively skewed would probably increase the scope of a 180 IQ (or a Z score of over 5), no?
1. the scores for that game were all very low, so everyone “struggled”. the questions were too hard apparently. https://www.jeopardy.com/contestant-zone
2. the guy didn’t say when he’d taken the tests or how many times. he looks like a wrestler but a little like elliot spitzer who supposedly had perfect SAT and LSAT iirc.
Why are all my comments banned?
Because they’re all the same. You suffer from restricted repetitive behavior which is a major sign of autism.
Categorically a total lie. If you could read, they were all about different topics.
Different topics that you’ve discussed a hundred times before: blacks are affirmative action, Jews this, Jews that, Robert Rubin runs the World.
Happy International Women’s Day!
if women have a more “normal” IQ distribution than men and women are very rarely outliers in the absolute population…would that then mean that a kid with a certain IQ has a father and a mother whose scores cannot be simply explained by the two numbers?
for example kids who are very smart with normal (whatever that means whether it be low high whatever but not enough to catch up to the kids score) parents would just have good genetic recombination for an IQ score to come up that way. i think that would make sense.
PP, does psychometrics just come naturally to you? I’ve been reading you for over a year now and it took me a while just to understand regression to the mean, after reading Meng Hu’s blog. It just didn’t click with me until laid out algebraically.
I just find it so interesting which makes it easier to learn. Regression to the mean confuses a lot of people perhaps because it seems contradictory: Smart parents are smarter than their kids yet smart kids are smarter than their parents. Also people tend to assume it’s a law of biology when it’s actually much broader that that: Rich people have more money than smarts, but smart people have more smarts than money, etc.
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the following images are from sequencing.com’s “Cognitive Functions Wellness DNA Report.”
the first image is an overall assessment that i will have “significantly above-average cognitive ability.”
the rest of the images are captures of individuals SNPs detailing how they got to the above-mentioned assessment!
i have 7 “moderately enhanced cognitive ability” SNPs and only one “moderately reduced cognitive ability” SNPs.
this was a very informative and interesting site to use to study the genetic impacts of my cognition.
it is definitely very relieving to know that cognitively i am expected to be a top performer.
On the subject of the most (generally) capable human of all time, I would like to nominate Goethe.
He was not only accomplished (or at least competent) in virtually every intellectual field, he was athletic, a lady’s man, a self-made millionaire, and an able high-level civil servant.
He might not have been an admirable man in every respect (he treated women horribly and misunderstood the nature and general utility of mathematics), but Nietzsche was certainly justified in taking him as a model for his superman concept.