ENCOURAGING: Your IQ Matters Less Than You Think

Thursday, April 30, 2026

https://nautil.us/your-iq-matters-less-than-you-think-237214

Psychology
Your IQ Matters Less Than You Think

  • In studies of children and historical figures, IQ falls short as a measure of success.

By Dean Keith Simonton 3:00 PM CDT on October 2, 2018

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Problem #1: The Intelligence-Eminence Correlation

The relation between IQ and achieved eminence is not huge or even large. Most statisticians would classify it as a “moderate” relationship. In practical terms, that means that there’s ample room for exceptions at either end. The highly eminent can have IQs lower than average and supremely high IQs can be associated with relative obscurity. I’ve already given three examples of the former, so who illustrates the latter? How about Paolo Sarpi, the Venetian historian? Although his estimated IQ was as high as 195, making him one of the very brightest among the 301, his eminence ranking put him in the lower 20 percent, that is, 242nd!

A more contemporary example is Marilyn vos Savant, who was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest recorded IQ. Reportedly, she had taken a revised version of the Stanford-Binet when she was just 10 years old, and got a perfect score! Although there’s some debate about how best to translate that performance into a precise IQ estimate, it is certainly arguable that she is more intelligent than the brightest Termite and any member of Cox’s 301. Yet what is her main accomplishment? Becoming famous for her super-high IQ! Exploiting that distinctive status, she writes the Sunday column “Ask Marilyn” for Parade magazine. That column doesn’t come close to the writing in Don Quixote or On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which her two intellectual inferiors, Cervantes and Copernicus, managed to pull off! An extra 60 IQ points or more didn’t buy her any creative edge at all.

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I wonder about the Placebo ① and Nocebo ② Effects?  

What would happen if we told children that they were, or were not, very smart?  We have some anecdotal evidence: Thomas Edison’s mom was told he was too stupid for school.  We know that Hallucinations, Delusions, and Cognitive distortions all exist.

Without doing further searches, I think we can take with a grain of salt anything we are told about IQ or how “smart we are”.

It has no bearing on reality and it may hurt you if expectations don’t match accomplishments.

“(There’s) no such thing as a stupid question” is a common phrase that states that the quest for knowledge includes failure and that just because one person may know less than others they should not be afraid to ask rather than pretend they already know. In many cases multiple people may not know, but are too afraid to ask the “stupid question”; the one who asks the question may in fact be doing a service to those around them.

# – # – # – # – #

① That’s the idea that people can be more likely to experience a benefit from a medication or other intervention if they expect it to help. Even if it’s not a valid treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo

② The nocebo effect is a phenomenon where people experience very real negative effects from a medical intervention if that’s what they expect going in. It’s all about the power of suggestion. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/nocebo-effect

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INSPIRATIONAL: Nikolai Vavilov was.a pioneer that was killed for his efforts

Tuesday, December 9, 2025

https://nautil.us/the-botanist-who-defied-stalin-238183/

The Botanist Who Defied Stalin

  • His dream of feeding the world died in prison. His dream of a seed bank lives on.

By Lee Alan Dugatkin April 21, 2021

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Vavilov, and those who starved at the VIR, could only have dreamed of the technology required to build and maintain a seed vault inside a mountain that sits in the permafrost of Spitsbergen, a remote Norwegian island 1,300 kilometers north of the Arctic circle. But the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the futuristic version of what Vavilov had begun in 1921. Dubbed the Doomsday Vault, with a proclaimed mission to serve as “a global seed vault to serve as a backup storage facility … to store duplicates (backups) of seed samples from the world’s crop collections,” it opened in 2008, as a repository that would ultimately contain all the world’s crop plant genetic diversity. That vault is capable of storing 4.5 million different varieties of plants within its temperature controlled, -18 degrees Celsius facilities: With an average of 500 seeds per sample, that’s 2.5 billion seeds. Precisely the sort of place that Vavilov had dreamed of.

As of today, 1,074,537 samples from around the globe sit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Among those samples are 60 boxes from depositor 1739365, the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Industry. In those boxes lay samples from 148 species and 41 genera of domesticated plants collected from 109 countries. Many are the descendants of the seeds Vavilov himself collected.

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Reading this article, one can only wonder what could have been if he was in a “capitalist” country like at the time England or the USA was.  Hard to imagine what he went thru to collect samples.  Humanity may not know his name, but his genetic “children” live on forever.

So sad to read all these dedicated people dying of basically starvation and political persecution.  

Next time someone extolls Communism or Socialism, they should be directed to read this.

“Capitalism” may be “bad” and have “flaws”, but Communism, and Socialism aka Communism “lite”, are horrendously worse.  

“The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone’s opinion is worth the same.” — Robert A. Heinlein

“Capitalism is a moral system because it offers individual freedom. You choose what you want. You choose your money and where you want it to go. You can be yourself. Socialism is groupthink. Step outside the group straightjacket and freedom ends.” —Stuart Varney

“The answer certainly isn’t socialism. Middle-class voters currently presume that elites already control the government—so why would they want to give the bureaucracy any more power?” — RAHM EMANUEL was the 44th mayor of Chicago

“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.” — Martin Luther King Jr

This man was an outstanding example of courage and determinatiom.  We should all be like him even in the smallest ways possible.

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HEALTH: A Missing Link Between Concussion and Alzheimer’s?

Thursday, December 4, 2025

https://nautil.us/a-missing-link-between-concussion-and-alzheimers-1184691/

Neuroscience
A Missing Link Between Concussion and Alzheimer’s
Viruses may play a surprising part
By Katharine Gammon January 27, 2025

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Itzhaki says in the future she wants to look into how to interrupt the damaging processes that unfold following traumatic brain injuries, such as those suffered in soccer, boxing, and football. She is aiming to test antivirals and other medications to reduce the inflammation caused by viruses that could be reactivated after a brain injury.

Though they are far from a perfect proxy, brain organoids will help her and others to continue this work.

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This is interesting to me in that Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease that robs people of memories and condemns them to an expensive end of life disaster.

Even football’s NFL, the NFPL, and individual players are recognizing the risk of the “sport”.  

Boxing should be restricted because we’ve seen the effect.  Muhammed Ali is the poster child for the damage.  There has to be a more civilized way to have this sport made safer.

Hopefully there will be a cure before too many more are lost.

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PHILOSOPHY: Are we in a simulation or a drug-​induced hallucination?

Thursday, March 6, 2025

https://nautil.us/can-we-prove-the-world-isnt-a-simulation-238416/?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nautilus-newsletter

Philosophy
Can We Prove the World Isn’t a Simulation?

  • You might think we have definitive evidence we’re not in a simulation. That’s impossible.

By Dylan DiScenza January 26, 2022

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What about the other way around? Could we prove we are in a simulation? In The Matrix, Neo realized he’d been living in a simulation when he took the red pill and woke up in a different reality. He shouldn’t have been so sure. For all he knows, his old world was nonsimulated and the red pill plunged him into a simulation.

Still, we certainly could get very strong evidence that we’re in a simulation. The simulators could lift the Sydney Harbor Bridge into the air and turn it upside down. They could show us the source code of the simulation. They could show us private episodes from our past, along with the simulation technology that produced them. They could show me a film of my brain hooked up to wires in the next reality up, with an associated readout of my thoughts and feelings. They could give me control of the simulation, so that I could move mountains in the world around me just by pressing some buttons.

Even this evidence would fall short of absolute proof that we’re in a simulation. Maybe the world we’re in is a nonsimulated magic world, like the Harry Potter world, in which all-​powerful wizards are using their powers to convince us we’re in a simulation. Maybe most of my life has been nonsimulated but simulators have put me into a temporary simulated duplicate to fool me. Or maybe I’m having a drug-​induced hallucination. Still, I think that if I got evidence like this, I would probably be convinced that I am in a simulation.

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If we are in either, what difference does it make?  We still have to “live” with the evidence presented us.  And, why would it be this way?  Is a wizard, a god, a space alien, or the flying spaghetti monster just playing with the equivalent of a kid’s train set?

Makes my head hurt so I’ll just pretend it’s “real life” until proven otherwise.

Ockham’s razor (i.e., fewest assumptions) says it’s “real life”.

Sigh! 

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