What's is Magnus Carlsen's IQ?

Of course IQ tests don't claim to measure general intelligence, but only inherent potential capacity for certain types of problem-solving. Hence their inappropriateness to accurately represent what most people consider "intelligence".

It is indeed true that 160 isn't in the top 100 of IQ because IQ is normalised with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. If you're going by the current world population of 8.1 billion (and there's a question about its applicability in past populations because IQ is always normalised to the current population); the top 100 individuals would be 184+ according to my calculations.

"Well rounded intellect" is not directly relevant to your IQ. IQ measures how well you do in a certain kind of test. Certain skills do have applications that are transferrable to such tests. Maybe someone like Maxwell might have more such transferrable skills, I don't know. No-one knows, because none of them have been tested.

I suspect no-one in the top 100 of IQ ever (if that is even a meaningful thing) was born before the IQ test was invented, as they would have much less experience in those kind of test questions than the top people today (and even some people uninterested in IQ tests learn to do these questions because they are sometimes used in job applications and have leaked into some strategy video games). In the case of someone like Da Vinci, he would have been unused to exams in general, never mind IQ tests, so probably would have done relatively poorly.

That's why IQ tests need to be standardized to the group being tested.

And indeed they are. But that means that the question "who had a higher IQ, Einstein, Carlsen, or Da Vinci" is meaningless; because even if they did the test, the test would be standardised to different groups so would be measuring something different.

I don't know if his IQ was ever measured (and he may not have taken such things seriously), but Alan Turing, mathematician, codebreaker and computing pioneer, programmed an early computer to play chess but was himself only an average player of the game.

Maybe he initially got the wrong end of the stick, and forgot about it because he had made an error?

It is true that Einstein's brain was dissected after he died, I suspect this is what he was actually referring to.

It's not difficult to work out how to perform an IQ test. You have to do something similar for some job applications, so I have tried and succeeded in increasing my score in them with fairly minimal effort. And this is coming from someone who already knows how to sit exams, which of course Da Vinci would not. There are video games with similar questions to IQ tests, and people get better at them the more they play. Indeed, chess puzzles have some similaries with IQ tests, and we all know you get better at those the more you do. Someone more dedicated (who, say, wanted to spend 3 years solely on improving IQ score, as much time as people spend on degrees) could probably get much further in it.

"Intelligence" as a general concept is subjective and depends on what skills you value more. Do you value physics the most? Einstein was the most intelligent. Do you value chess more? Carlsen. Do you value art very highly? Maybe Da Vinci. Perhaps you value IQ tests? Then the one with the highest IQ is the most intelligent.

What "most people consider to be general intelligence", which contains a large portion of learned information, and what cognitive scientists attempt to measure--the potential to process some kinds of information--are quite different.

So?

Anyone can get the wrong end of the stick about something. Einstein, Da Vinci, Carlsen, Hooke etc. all got the wrong end of the stick about something on multiple occasions.

Being smart doesn't mean you're infallible.

My point was that the fact he forgot it is perhaps and indication he initially got the wrong end of the stick. People tend to forget information when they know it is wrong.

What I do know is there was no-one saying publicly that they have measured Einstein's IQ, there's only some dodgy newspaper reports. There seems to be more evidence pointing against Einstein's IQ being tested than towards it.

Most people of note in the Renaissance were a polymath of some kind. They didn't really distinguish much between subjects at the time. Da Vinci is distinct from e.g. Einstein because he was an artist and Einstein wasn't; which was why I mentioned it.

Most famous people in history were disliked by somebody. Not everyone liked Alan Turing, for example. A minor chess-related item in his case is that he owned a chess set at Bletchley, where he was engaged in cracking German codes, and it was stolen. Maybe it was motivated by personal animosity, maybe not everyone there was on the up and up. Who knows? He ended up making a new one for himself from some wood for the board, and he fashioned chessmen from clay and heated them in a kiln to harden them.

While it was illegal, most of Britain's intelligentsia went to single-sex public schools and some kind of encounter with homosexuality was very common, whether or not that set the pattern of their sex lives. He was unlikely to be the only homosexual in his environment. The 1952 circumstances of his arrest suggest that like a lot of intellectually brilliant people, he was somewhat unworldly. An associate of a homosexual pick-up burgled his house, assuming he would not contact the police in case his private life was revealed as a result. Turing did contact the police and indeed they started investigating him. Mainly because of the oddness of his associations - the brilliant academic was unlikely to know people like Arnold Murray, the pick-up, unless it was about homosexuality.

And he didn't even work it out that such criminal gangs could operate like that? Even though he had so much more to lose than they did.

Well, as I have indicated, he was in some ways unworldly. He may have been angered by the break-in to the point that he forgot he could be the one who was most in trouble if he reported it. He appears to have believed the law on homosexuality was on the way to being reformed - which did happen in Britain, but only more than a decade after his death. A whole sub-set of the criminal world preyed on homosexuals, particularly middle-class ones who had some money. Blackmail was fairly common. The Dirk Bogarde film Victim, made in the early 1960s, examines this. Perhaps Turing was worried about blackmail attempts and thought going to the police would fend this off - which it may have done, but out of the frying pan into the fire.

Your lame joke.only exposes your own ignorance. According to Johns Hopkins University "cognitive scientists share the central goal of characterizing the structure of human intellectual functioning." Their Cognitive Sciences Department consists of, among other disciplines, linguists, computer scientists, anthropologists, neurobiologists, AI researchers, and psychologists. There are even philosophy PhDs involved.

Will you be explaining to us how one of the world's premier medical and research institutions is full of bull because they disagree with your limiting categorization?

As I suspected, you think you know better than a whole collection of eminent scientists from a variety of disciplines and one of the world's leading medical institutes.

At least this joke is funnier than the previous attempt.

Yes, he behaved as though he was very wet behind the ears. Probably thought that his superb contribution to the war effort would save him, while forgetting that it was secret and probably still classified. I believe I saw the Dirk Bogart film and of course he was gay. In general, a lot of the greatest British actors have been. I do think Dirk Bogart was a great actor but also less known, supporting role actors. And, I think, the glorious Fenella Fielding, too.

I don't think he thought that - at war's end a colleague at Bletchley said to him that now the war was over everything they had done in code-breaking could be made public, and Turing's response was along the lines of "don't be daft!" However, Turing may not have fully realised that he was expendable. The Jack Copeland biography of him discusses his death and does not rule out it being murder - after Burgess and Maclean defected, there was a certain amount of paranoia about homosexuality. Turing's conviction did not cost him his university job but did cost him his security clearance, and he had a lot of knowledge of the secret world, which might have supplied a motive to kill him. Copeland notes the odd detail that his shoes were left outside the door at the death scene, something Turing did not do in life.

Is that a pic of you from back in the day, @Optimissed?

I’m good - I still haven’t seen a pic of your grand baby. 👶

Sounds good! 👍

Turing did not usually kill himself either, as well as leaving his shoes outside. It's quite possible that he did it deliberately. We shall never know.

Copeland leaned more to an accident, thinking the evidence for suicide, despite that being the official verdict, was rather thin, and did not take account of evidence that Turing could be clumsy in the laboratory, he was partial to eating an apple before going to bed and was known to absent-mindedly put the apple down in cyanide. However, Copeland gave more attention to the possibility of murder than Turing's first biographer, Andrew Hodges. If you wanted to make a murder scene look normal without actually knowing anything about the victim's habits, leaving shoes outside a door might be what you would do. But yes, we will never know.