is that the source itself is notorious for lack of empirical back-up or peer review for anything submitted to it. (The Medical Hypotheses blog is associated with the journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by the same person who posted the blog post I link above, and he runs the journal, and evidently the blog as well, to post ideas of his own that cannot obtain peer-reviewed publication elsewhere.) I have read several of the articles he cites in his blog post, and most have nothing to do with what he is writing about in the blog article, but are simply there to pad his reference list.
Common sense is the beliefs held by common people, by definition common people are much lower IQ than someone in the 170+ IQ range.
It would shock me if someone in the 170+ IQ range believed much of what "common" people believe. If they did, it would imply we have an extraordinarily well educated population and an extraordinarily boring genius class.
This reads like it's supposed to be comforting to people who feel like they have low IQs, "Well, I may not be smart, but at least I have common sense".
Is it really proper to equate social ineptness with lack of common sense.
If you look at the original article, it could also be interpreted as rationalizing the reasons the author has difficulty getting laid (per the conclusion). Weak though it is in scholarly terms, I found it quite thought-provoking nevertheless - reasoning from general principles without correctly weighting the desirability of likely social outcomes can create all sorts of problems.
IQ (or abstract reasoning ability or whatever you'd like to call it) ain't everything; there's a big difference between being clever and being cunning, and I've often wished there were a way to rebalance the stats :)
I can name without any effort a few geniuses that didn't lack neither common sense nor social skills (Feynman, Darwin, Newton, Da Vinci, Leibniz, Pitagora). I'm sure that there are scores of them.
I would say that the equation "Super-High IQ = Super-Low Common Sense" is simply wrong.
Second that. They're orthogonal, to a certain extent. I find it hard to imagine someone with an extremely low IQ to exhibit a lot of common sense, so to my feeling the relationship is the reverse, but in potential.
I would define it as 'super high IQ' = 'potential to exhibit high degree of common sense'.
Because people that have a super high IQ are not 'common' in their common sense does not automatically mean they are not right. Common after all is used here almost as a stand-in for average, but common sense means something else entirely.
This interpretation of common sense will get you in to Asperger syndrome territory when you look at individuals with a very high IQ, who can have a serious problem communicating their ideas to people that can't follow their train of thought.
How come you know their IQ scores? Or is it just an assumption that a "genius" has a super-high IQ? BTW most of those "geniuses" have a wealthy/bourgeois familiy background and they had to have some social skills to manage other people that worked for them, to become court mathematician etc.
[+] [-] tokenadult|16 years ago|reply
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/09/clever-sillies...
One problem with this source, another article from which I have studied with a group of psychologists a few weeks ago,
http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...
is that the source itself is notorious for lack of empirical back-up or peer review for anything submitted to it. (The Medical Hypotheses blog is associated with the journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by the same person who posted the blog post I link above, and he runs the journal, and evidently the blog as well, to post ideas of his own that cannot obtain peer-reviewed publication elsewhere.) I have read several of the articles he cites in his blog post, and most have nothing to do with what he is writing about in the blog article, but are simply there to pad his reference list.
[+] [-] smcq|16 years ago|reply
It would shock me if someone in the 170+ IQ range believed much of what "common" people believe. If they did, it would imply we have an extraordinarily well educated population and an extraordinarily boring genius class.
[+] [-] thwarted|16 years ago|reply
Is it really proper to equate social ineptness with lack of common sense.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|16 years ago|reply
IQ (or abstract reasoning ability or whatever you'd like to call it) ain't everything; there's a big difference between being clever and being cunning, and I've often wished there were a way to rebalance the stats :)
[+] [-] LucaDuval|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
I would define it as 'super high IQ' = 'potential to exhibit high degree of common sense'.
Because people that have a super high IQ are not 'common' in their common sense does not automatically mean they are not right. Common after all is used here almost as a stand-in for average, but common sense means something else entirely.
This interpretation of common sense will get you in to Asperger syndrome territory when you look at individuals with a very high IQ, who can have a serious problem communicating their ideas to people that can't follow their train of thought.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtho|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottWhigham|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|16 years ago|reply