The claim that innate talent is a myth emerged as early as 1690, when philosopher John Locke stated that we all come into the world as intellectually “blank slates” and acquire knowledge and intelligence that are written on these slates by our experiences. The political view underpinning Locke’s assertion was that if, indeed, we all …
Augustin-Louis Cauchy was born in Paris, France on August 21, 1789, just a few weeks after the storming of the Bastille that launched the French Revolution. Cauchy’s father, who had been a high official in the Parisian Police of the Ancien Régime fled with his family for their lives. During the next 4 years, the …
Recently on this site, we’ve discussed whether those of high IQ often suffer from a low EQ (people skills). I’ve cited examples of high IQ people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos whose lives were encumbered by an abnormal amount of friction in social contexts: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=824&action=edit&calypsoify=1. (Some people have argued that the people …
As we humans looked around at the remarkable complexity of nature, we asked how such order and harmony could have come into being. With the human lifespan merely a single frame in a video of 10,000,000 frames, we were incapable of knowing how all this change came about. It was natural for us to anthropomorphize …
Companies in the high-tech fields compete aggressively for employees who are highly intelligent. To gain an insight into the skills sought by those who are recruiting employees, we look at a sample of interviews of the captains of the giant corporations. In 1993, Forbes journalist Richard Karlgaard, in a conversation with Bill Gates asked, “What …
Are Corporate executives seeking employees with high IQ? Read More »
As you might expect, different people attribute different values to intelligence and success. The American Dream, originally conceptualized as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” evolved after World War II into the pursuit of financial success. In Arthur Miller’s celebrated play Death of a Salesman (1949), the main character, Willy Loman is a salesman …
What do people respect more: Intelligence or success? Read More »
Between July 6 and July 16, 2022 the brightest and the best students from more than 100 countries attended the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in Oslo, Norway. On July 11, these intellectual gladiators were given 3 difficult problems to solve in a period of 4.5 hours, and then another 3 problems the following day. Each …
Do we all have the potential to become the next Albert Einstein, or are some people born with greater brain power than the rest of us? The debate rages on, fueled by strong emotions and fomented by cherished ideologies. Many who subscribe to an egalitarian ideology argue that, except for the mentally challenged, we all …
Sometimes, highly intelligent people fall into what psychologists call the intelligence trap–a tendency of experts to overreach the limits of their expertise. One of the most dramatic examples of this occurred in 1998 with the failure of the investment firm Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) generally attributed to the prevailing hubris among its senior partners …
Does intelligence increase your ability to fool yourself? Read More »
This post is a response to a question posed by a visitor to this site. A significant part of Einstein’s groundbreaking discoveries drew from his gedanken (thought) experiments. When most people believed that time is absolute, i.e., it unfolds at a uniform rate and is measured to be the same by all observers, Einstein realized that concepts …
