Wednesday 28 May 2014

Maybe very high intelligence IS (nearly-) always creative - although high IQ test scores are not

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I have been thinking lately that it seems possible that very high intelligence is always (or almost always) creative - despite that people with very high IQ scores are not always creative.

It is a matter of definitions.

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Very high intelligence is clearly not the same thing as scoring very high on IQ tests - thus it is possible that all those people who really are creative are actually intelligent (if general intelligence - or 'g' - could be validly measured).

(For example, very few - some but very few - women are genuinely creative - and this is a much smaller proportion than the women who score very highly on IQ testing - at least modern IQ testing.)

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And we need also to look-at the definition of creative.

People of recognized high creativity are only a - probably small - proportion of genuinely creative people; because some very creative people are working in areas where the general public has little or no interest, and the subjects may not be useful or profitable in a particular society. Therefore their genuine creativity is not recognized.

This applies to people like the high-IQ prodigy William Sidis - http://www.sidis.net/ - who is popularly supposed to have 'burned-out' and wasted his life - but who was actually very creative in fields that were not given recognition.

Another example would be Grady M Towers, who had an ultra-high IQ but worked as a night watchman. http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/essential-reading-for-iq-scholars-grady.html his creativity was in the form of some superb essays written for high-IQ societies.

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Given that it is possible for high levels of creativity (such as that of Sidis) to be unknown or invisible for many years - it is reasonable to suppose that some very highly intelligent people are highly creative in domains that are never known to other people - for example in private, unpublished, destroyed journals.

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Furthermore, creativity requires luck, as well as ability - so that some very creative people are simply unlucky, and never make the achievements of which they are capable.

Putting all this together - the deficiencies of IQ tests in measuring general intelligence plus the limited ability for us to recognize genuine creativity -  it is certainly possible that highly intelligent people are always creative - indeed are driven to be creative.

And conversely, that many (or almost all) of the supposed examples of unintelligent people being creative, or creative people being unintelligent, are due to misclassification. As when a creative achievement is actually (knowingly or unconsciously) stolen from the work of a truly creative person; or when a low score on an IQ test has simply failed to measure real intelligence.

In other words maybe very high intelligence just is the creative personality - could we but measure intelligence and creativity validly.

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