Are mathematicians and theoretical physicists the most intelligent people in the world?
For me this is a highly topical question as I’ve just been training a handful of highly rated mathematicians from one of the world’s top ranking institutions (regularly ranked in the top 5) in a range of practical, high intelligence real-world tasks.I can assure you that they were consistently appalling.I’ve worked with Physics and Medicine Nobel Prizewinners, I’ve worked with top business people, with top science professors, surgeons and doctors. To be honest they’ve all have pretty good general mental facilities. They could probably do almost any job involving intelligence and do it well. They may have specific world class talents, but their general ability was in the top few percent.These brilliant mathematicians seem somewhat different. They were highly motivated, and devoting their own time and resources, but one of the main things that they seemed to suffer from was the Dunning–Kruger effect - the version where you underestimate the difficulty of other people's real-world tasks. This resulted in them simply not being able to pay attention for long enough or retain enough detail when participating in relatively complex business negotiations, or to pay enough attention and work systematically enough on complex software engineering issues. As a result they were probably working 50–70 IQ points lower than their actual IQ in these tasks. And they didn’t have the aptitude to struggle though and make up for it.The classic four stages of competence described their situation exactly. Here were a bunch of people, ignoring training, expert advice and reference materials and repeated displaying “unconscious incompetence” - where “the individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit and may deny the usefulness of the skill.” It’s a state that I’ve found is very rare among the super intelligent in other topics. Top doctors, engineers, business people are typically vary aware of when they don’t know something and can get up to speed with astonishing rapidity. Not my poor mathematical prodigies.I was actually astonished by all of this - (actually I was saddened as they seemed to have wanted to ‘succeed’ in these tasks) - until I remembered last time I’d seen something similar - many years ago with more top mathematicians.
Agree or disagree? Hillary brought this on herself:?
Who really thinks that even an inspiring young candidate like Obama would really have been able to give someone with Hillary's national name recognition and career credentials a serious race for the nomination if Hillary HADN'T CAST THAT STILL APALLING VOTE FOR THE IRAQ WAR? Even Michael Moore, who once wrote of his 'forbidden love' for the woman; Has called that vote 'morally indefensible'. Exit polls from Super Tuesday showed Democratic voters whose chief concern was Iraq voted by a large majority for Obama. And if Hillary thinks that even if she wins the nomination McCain won't use her change of heart on the issue as mercilessly against her as Bush used Kerry's on him in 2004 I have some riverside land in Arkansas I'd like to sell her. Now the party is so divided many aren't sure whether either Hillary or Obama will have enough delegates to win by convention time. It's hard to imagine how the party comes away from that in an ideal position for November.