intelligence...

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As I said when I don't give imporatnce to quickly I said that I didn't meant as slow as monkey producing Shakespear is OK. It's more like difference between speed chess and games in world chess championship. Speed chess is mostly recall from memory while championship games are innovations. Every champion is not Alekhine or Bobby Fisher but once they get at that level there is more than intelligence is involved. Courage and luck play there part.

If Shakespear had produce Lear, Hamlet, McBeth and Othello it would be sufficient to rate him high. Reiman even if he had produced quarter of what he did he would be in top 100 instead of top five. He died pretty young without a permanent faculty position nevertheless.

You need courage. Stuckleburg invented a model for nuclear interaction. He discussed that with Pauli who said it's nonsense and he didn't publish it but Yukawa published it got the Nobel. Pauli was terrible in that respect.
Luckily Yukawa didn't confere with Pauli. There was another case of proposal for electron spin without any rotating electron. Pauli said it's nonsense. The autors wanted to withdraw. They went to Ernfest, who had recommended the publication (this was necessary to get published), to request withdrawal. Erfest said that he already sent it and can't withdraw.
The authors got a Nobel. Lucky once.

When we are talking about Hawking we are talking about 0.01%tile. Romantic stories such as for Einstein, Hawking, Ramanujan do get little overblown. However Hawking had a courage to go against conventional wisdom and porpose that black holes are not permanent and can evaporate by radiation. Well that is part os every consomology model now. This fundamental contribution is not going to dissappear for 1000 year. Coming with such ideas is not everyday affair. Some times you have once in life time chance.

Feynman actually missed a boat once. Bunch of physicst, including Feynamn, were travelling in train from Pocono to New York. Feynman actually proposed that some conventional wisdom may be wrong. But he didn't follow it up. Lee and Yang did and got a Nobel.

Mensa kind of problems are speed chess. What Hawking did is like Championship game; he exhibits supreme self confidence and courage in addition to intelligence though luck was not on his side. But once again every Chess Champion is not Alekhine, and you also need self confidence, luck and courage in addition to intelligence.

Well, let's not play around with the whole MENSA questions thing. Neither of us were EVER talking about MENSA problems, so I think we can pretty much ignore any argument based on those for now.

But still, the question of speed clearly affects perception of intelligence in some way, which is really all I was trying to get at. Sure, you might have been able to call Shakespeare intelligent if he had ONLY produced one play, say, Romeo and Juliet, that he had worked his entire life on.

And there's a reason that I took my example to the extreme and used the "one page" example. Because that one page wouldn't have gone very far. To be able to quickly translate your ideas into concrete medium reasonably quickly (take note: Not instantly. We're not talking about MENSA) is an important part of intelligence.

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Well, let's not play around with the whole MENSA questions thing. Neither of us were EVER talking about MENSA problems, so I think we can pretty much ignore any argument based on those for now.

But still, the question of speed clearly affects perception of intelligence in some way, which is really all I was trying to get at. Sure, you might have been able to call Shakespeare intelligent if he had ONLY produced one play, say, Romeo and Juliet, that he had worked his entire life on.

And there's a reason that I took my example to the extreme and used the "one page" example. Because that one page wouldn't have gone very far. To be able to quickly translate your ideas into concrete medium reasonably quickly (take note: Not instantly. We're not talking about MENSA) is an important part of intelligence.

"Objective" multiple choice questions are like speed chess. Other ancillary attributes like how fast you can read and manage other logistics are also important, and problems are one step application. Remembering F=ma, m=F/a and a=F/m is useful but doesn't test intelleginec per se.

Championship games are akin to say problems in Putnam contest. They test out of box thinking, and test multiple step thinking process. But you have to do it reasonably quickly though if you are given more time you still may not make headway. During the epoch when championship games when there was no time limit some players refused to play when they were certain to loose, and hence the time keeping in chess.

But this anology is crude when you try to judge intelligence of people like Hawking from there out put of very high out of box thinking ability.

Einstein published three path breaking papers in 1905. But it took him almost 10 more years to go from special to general relativity. He was not mathematically equipped to do the job; lot of mathematical implementation of his ideas were done by his freind, I rhink his name was Besso. When he gave a lecture in Germany with Hilbert in the audience. Hilbert implemented Einstein's ideas, with a different apporaoch, literally during a week end. In fact Hilbert's paper got published one day before Einstein's. Physics IQ is different than Math IQ. Some problems do take inordinate amount of time.

Another example is Bertrand Russel. There was this problem of going from axoims of set theory to theorems consistantly, and some fallcies were know. Bertrand Russel spent inordinate amount of time to make that process consistent and logical. The book "Mathematica" was published describing the system and all mathematicians were trying to understand what was in "Mathematica". It was intellectually so taxing that Bertrand Russel said that he was so exhausted that he wanted to do no more mathematics. Then comes Kurt Godel and constructs his "Incompleteness Theorem": You can't prove all the truths of mathematics, that is theorems, with a logical process which will lead you from axioms to other theorems. Russel went thorugh Godel's work and exclaimed that whatever he did was futile. Russel never did anything in mathematics but still regarded as great mathematician, and highly intelligent one.

Single accomplishment is good enough. Laws of Nature are few and discovering even a single out of box idea is enormous effort. Dirac said that scientist should be judged by the highest quality work a person has done. I agree. Hawking has done it.

What could be inteligence is good topic for a PhD thesis.
 
"Objective" multiple choice questions are like speed chess. Other ancillary attributes like how fast you can read and manage other logistics are also important, and problems are one step application. Remembering F=ma, m=F/a and a=F/m is useful but doesn't test intelleginec per se.

Championship games are akin to say problems in Putnam contest. They test out of box thinking, and test multiple step thinking process. But you have to do it reasonably quickly though if you are given more time you still may not make headway. During the epoch when championship games when there was no time limit some players refused to play when they were certain to loose, and hence the time keeping in chess.

But this anology is crude when you try to judge intelligence of people like Hawking from there out put of very high out of box thinking ability.

Einstein published three path breaking papers in 1905. But it took him almost 10 more years to go from special to general relativity. He was not mathematically equipped to do the job; lot of mathematical implementation of his ideas were done by his freind, I rhink his name was Besso. When he gave a lecture in Germany with Hilbert in the audience. Hilbert implemented Einstein's ideas, with a different apporaoch, literally during a week end. In fact Hilbert's paper got published one day before Einstein's. Physics IQ is different than Math IQ. Some problems do take inordinate amount of time.

Another example is Bertrand Russel. There was this problem of going from axoims of set theory to theorems consistantly, and some fallcies were know. Bertrand Russel spent inordinate amount of time to make that process consistent and logical. The book "Mathematica" was published describing the system and all mathematicians were trying to understand what was in "Mathematica". It was intellectually so taxing that Bertrand Russel said that he was so exhausted that he wanted to do no more mathematics. Then comes Kurt Godel and constructs his "Incompleteness Theorem": You can't prove all the truths of mathematics, that is theorems, with a logical process which will lead you from axioms to other theorems. Russel went thorugh Godel's work and exclaimed that whatever he did was futile. Russel never did anything in mathematics but still regarded as great mathematician, and highly intelligent one.

Single accomplishment is good enough. Laws of Nature are few and discovering even a single out of box idea is enormous effort. Dirac said that scientist should be judged by the highest quality work a person has done. I agree. Hawking has done it.

What could be inteligence is good topic for a PhD thesis.

So in other words, we agree.
 
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This was an interesting approach to determining importance. Current scientists use impact factor to gauge importance of work and this is crude approximation.

http://lostinscience.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/top-10-most-beautiful-minds/

Glashow, Weinberg and Salam published their model around 1967. It was not much cited until 1972. Most of the citation were by themselves until then. In 1972 Gerald t'Hooft published a paper on how to renormalize their model. The citaions increased exponentially. t'Hooft's was seminal contribution, and in a sense generalizing Kenneth Wilson work. Glashow, Weinberg and Wilson are there in top 10. Salam is missing. Gerald t'Hooft who's work is seminal and is key to how to renormalize Weinberg-Salam-Glassow theory as well as Quantum Chromodynamics.

String theory may turnout to be just a fad; that is lot of theoretical physicist are working in that field and that contributes to citation, and may have no significance. If some thing published 50 years back as is cited it should get higher weight since it has passed the test of time.

String theory may be just mathematics rather than physics. Murray Gellman is still alive but not in the top 10. I think this method is flawed; too much weight to current fad.
 
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I didn't say it is perfect, just something that hasn't been brought up yet. The PhD crowd looks at impact factor of journals which is directly correlated to # of citations. While you're right, citations arent always positive, it gives an internal reference from within the physics world to, at the very least, who is noteworthy. You aren't likely to be cited by other physicists if your work has a major "duh" factor to it
 
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