Journal Entry # 49

April 30^th, 2010

This is a very exciting day for my wife and me as we are attending our eldest’s son graduation from college.  You might know him as Zack the other half of this music project. You see in as a musician you pretty much have to keep your day job. We are very proud of him. He wants to continue on to University where in conjunction with his college certificate he can graduate with a degree in 2 years. He will end his academic career in debt of course but a reasonable amount.  If we lived in France his education would be subsidized even more. If we were Native Canadians he might walk out with no debt.

As a species are we getting dumber or is the level of stupidity increasing?

Answers to questions on IQ can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient .  What is your IQ score and is it really that important. My score when I tested 12 years ago was 142 which put me well above average. Einstein’s IQ was 160. What does this mean? It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t apply it. I believe that there are all kinds of intelligence and that an IQ score does not come close to measuring them all. For example no matter how hard I try I cannot grasp the basic concepts of mechanics. Put me around a car and I turn into an idiot. Now my youngest son is a natural at anything mechanical and he can fix just about anything. I remember when he was 2 years old his mom and I came out to the living room one morning and he was sitting there with a beaming smile of pride. He had ripped off the entire baseboard and trim from the window, cut it all up and made a beautiful box for his mom. This is at 2. Now we praised him up and down and did not let on that he had destroyed the window. I still cannot figure out where he found all my tools. Now here is the stupid part. I went out got new materials and fixed everything he had taken apart. The next morning he had done it again only he built something else. Who was the genius here?

IQ Scores & Ratings

What is a good IQ score?  What is a high IQ score?  What is a low IQ score?  These are common questions, particularly after someone finds out their score from an IQ test.

Lewis Terman (1916) developed the original notion of IQ and proposed this scale for classifying IQ scores:

• Over 140 – Genius or near genius
• 120 – 140 – Very superior intelligence
• 110 – 119 – Superior intelligence
• 90 – 109 – Normal or average intelligence
• 80 – 89 – Dullness
• 70 – 79 – Borderline deficiency
• Under 70 – Definite feeble-mindedness

Normal Distribution & IQ Scores

The properties of the normal distribution apply to IQ scores:

• 50% of IQ scores fall between 90 and 110
• 70% of IQ scores fall between 85 and 115
• 95% of IQ scores fall between 70 and 130

99.5% of IQ scores fall between 60 and 140 The Highest IQs On Record

People Still Alive

• Physicist / Engineer Kim Ung-yong has a verified IQ of 210
• Bouncer Christopher Michael Langan has a verified IQ of 195
• Engineer Philip Emeagwali is alleged to have an IQ of 190
• World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov is alleged to have an IQ of 190
• Author Marilyn Vos Savant has a verified IQ of 186
• Actor James Woods is alleged to have an IQ of 180
• Politician John H. Sununu is alleged to have an IQ of 180
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is alleged to have an IQ of 180
• Mathematician Andrew Wiles is alleged to have an IQ of 170
• World Chess Champion Judith Polgar is alleged to have an IQ of 170
• Chess Grandmaster Robert Byrne is alleged to have an IQ of 170
• World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer is alleged to have an IQ of 167
• Mathematician / Physicist Stephen W. Hawking is alleged to have an IQ of over 160
• Microsoft Founder Paul Allen is alleged to have an IQ of over 160
• Actress Sharon Stone is alleged to have an IQ of 154

As a race are we getting smarter or are we getting dumber? Whichever it is that is the way we will breed.

The Age of Stupid

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xldjjk5f1jE

Stupidity from 2003

I think that we are over time going to breed ourselves out of existence if we don’t smarten up. What’s the point of doing something clever or creating a great piece of art if there is no one to recognize the accomplishment. It’s hard to do when everyone is at the UFC championships. I will leave you with one more preview of a fictional movie called Idiocracy. If you have not seen it you should. I realize it is an exaggeration of a situation but it gets s the point across. If we don’t start placing a higher value on intelligence and education were fucked.

 Seek the truth always

Gary David Currie