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BGonline.org Forums
Joe Sylvester
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: Joe Sylvester (Stick)
Date: Wednesday, 15 September 2010, at 5:55 a.m.
Hi Stick:
She is a very smart lady, no question about it. But her score as a child was something like 230+. The computation, as I understand it, was based upon her maxing a test with a top score for adults of 160, which was then adjusted, ad hoc, to account for her age.
That is even more outrageous when the nature of the IQ score is considered. Most people imagine that the score is either a raw score, or arrived at through some simple multiplier (e.g. the max score is set at 200, so if you correctly answer 36 out of 50 questions you score 144).
Actually the IQ score is based upon the distance from the mean; on a Stanford-Binet each 16 points represents one standard deviation, on a Wechsler it is 15 points. Mensa admits those who score 130+ on the latter, and 132+ on the former. This is popularly described as "top two percent" or as "one in fifty," but more accurately it is 2+ std.
Hoeflin, who created the Mega and a number of other tests, and offers admission to various high-IQ societies he founded, asked those submitting results to include IQ or SAT scores, and then he "normalized" the Mega scores based upon their correlation to the others. What he is thus claiming about MVS is that she is 5.7+ std. That may be so, but you can see all of the problems with his statement, and why several grains of salt are still needed. As for "230+" as listed in the Guinness Book, that would be over eight standard deviations; it is meaningless. (And if meaningful, I would hate to meet her counterpart on the left side of the curve, the one with an IQ of minus thirty.) (Come to think of it, I think he used to play in Chicago chouettes.)
The highest scorer on the Mega test with 47 out of 48, by the way, was Chris Langan, who was featured in Malcolm Gladwell's entertaining, if sometimes dubious bestseller Outliers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
Langan founded his own high-IQ society when the Mega Society refused to promote his "Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe."
For the math geeks in the crowd, the toughest question on the Mega Test was something like this. Imagine for a moment you have two squares and place them on a table so their corners cross. You have six shapes (edges are transparent when needed): the original squares, the amalgamated unit, the two squares with bites out of their corners, and the small square formed by the overlap. Now imagine manipulating three squares to create the maximum number of possible shapes. And now that you are warmed up, try it with three cubes in three-dimensional space.
Best,
Jake
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