Conversation with Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea) on Background, Family, South Korea, WAIS-IV, and Inflated Tests: Member, South Korean High-IQ Community
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/01/22
Abstract
This is an interview with a member of the high-IQ community in South Korea who wished to remain anonymous. They discuss: family stories; an extended self; the family background; experience with peers and schoolmates; some professional certifications; purpose of intelligence tests; high intelligence; the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses; the greatest geniuses in history; a genius from a profoundly intelligent person; genius; the gifted and geniuses; God; science; the tests taken and scores earned (with standard deviations); the range of the scores; an afterlife; life; and love.
Keywords: intelligence, IQ, South Korea, WAIS-IV.
Conversation with Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea) on Background, Family, South Korea, WAIS-IV, and Inflated Tests: Member, South Korean High-IQ Community
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*
*Edits based on interviewee request March 14, 2021.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were growing up, what were some of the prominent family stories being told over time?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I’ve not heard many mythical stories from my family tree, but there are some recent stories from my parental side. A realistic anecdote would be about my father. Raised in the countryside helping family agriculture, my father’s Weschler test score was around 138 with a perfect working memory score. For a mythical story, I’ve heard that parental grandmother verbally memorized Chinese Thousand Character Classic at age 2, just by growing up near the school studying this book.
Jacobsen: Have these stories helped provide a sense of an extended self or a sense of the family legacy?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): Probably. I believe working memory functions heavily rely on one’s condition and concentration skill which can be acquired and trained. If there’s something I’m heir to, it must be a tiny portion of focusing ability and rest of good environment, including socioeconomic status, education, and nutrition.
Jacobsen: What was the family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): Korean is my native tongue, and I’ve learned English by shortly going abroad between 7 to 8 years old. Anything else will be that of a typical Korean. From Confucianism based courtesies, Abrahamic religion education, ending up as an atheist.
Jacobsen: How was the experience with peers and schoolmates as a child and an adolescent?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): In elementary and middle school, I was just a model student with good grades. I was very talkative and enjoyed participating as a class leader throughout the grades.
Jacobsen: What is the purpose of intelligence tests to you?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): The Purpose would be mostly diagnosing or treating mental defects, acknowledging oneself better from this precise scientific tool, or maybe for finding gifted children. I’m only talking about Weschler or other standardized tests. The wide range of field the test measures, revised by research evidence and mechanisms, and its broad usages appear useful. And I think other high-range or online tests, or even extended Weschler tests and norms, are just puzzles.
Jacobsen: When was high intelligence discovered for you?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I don’t think there are any fundamental differences between people while high intelligence is classified. At least for me, I’m just a well-grown, well-educated ordinary person with a bit fair task commitment and efficiency. I often refer to the fact that heritability of IQ increases throughout the lifetime—snowball effect. Even though I can’t affirm any word with all of complex multi-variable entangled, one’s environment and his preference to choose and modify the environment via self-feedback seem very crucial.
Jacobsen: When you think of the ways in which the geniuses of the past have either been mocked, vilified, and condemned if not killed, or praised, flattered, platformed, and revered, what seems like the reason for the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses? Many alive today seem camera shy – many, not all.
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): Well, I lack knowledge of related topics or examples. But from the perspective that friendship often comes from sharing experiences, actions, cultures, and even consensus of thinking, some geniuses with bizarre interests, behaviours, and different ways of thinking would’ve triggered some rejection from others.
Jacobsen: Who seem like the greatest geniuses in history to you?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I don’t have the knowledge to understand their achievements.
Jacobsen: What differentiates a genius from a profoundly intelligent person?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): Just approaching on the surface, genius is named only when they’re remembered. So, I think both everlasting achievements or profound intelligence can be genius. But then there are too many intelligent people to be recognized, and this might be my misunderstanding, but extreme intelligence seems to end up function/subject-specific, while extreme skills are acquirable through extreme training!
The answer went out of track, but an extreme IQ score might be an exaggerated concept. Firstly, any extended norms of standardized tests are based on extrapolation. Even the proper norm is based on a few thousand people, but extrapolated norms reach the one-in-a-billion level. Regarding digit span, let’s assume that the normal distribution of a thousand men resulted in 7±2. But we cannot reason that scoring 17 will be 5-sigma above the average from this result. A long-or-short tail will affect the numbers significantly. Secondly, as mentioned, training. Studying mnemonics, anyone can memorize 40 or more digits which is far above average. Thus, the very closely packed human ability is sliced microscopically, and only close observation near average is useful. Elephant heights can’t be classified by human height indexes. Also, lining up every result as a single standard blurs the point.
Jacobsen: Is profound intelligence necessary for genius?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): Maybe there will be many counterexamples.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more important aspects of the idea of the gifted and geniuses? Those myths that pervade the cultures of the world. What are those myths? What truths dispel them?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): Maybe confusing some of the traits from Asperger syndrome. Media might have influenced them, but most people don’t have the chance to actually contact geniuses. This also applies to me. I have no answer to dispel these myths. There might be some researches that studied the correlation between behaviors.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the God concept or gods idea and philosophy, theology, and religion?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I don’t know. I don’t believe in a personal god, but I’ve also never thought about it seriously.
Jacobsen: How much does science play into the worldview for you?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I’ve learned the scientific method of analyzing which acts as my standard to avoid fallacies at my best.
Jacobsen: What have been some of the tests taken and scores earned (with standard deviations) for you?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): WAIS-IV 150. For online tests, the highest score was SLSE-I 39/50, and some scores were 160s. (all in sd 15).
Jacobsen: What is the range of the scores for you? The scores earned on alternative intelligence tests tend to produce a wide smattering of data points rather than clusters, typically.
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I might only have taken inflated tests, but a few tests were around 160 sd15. The most inflated score would be Fiqure, with a similar result when I was 13. Some scores were around 140s, including school group intelligence test. It was a timed multiple-choice exam, and Processing Speed is my weakness.
Jacobsen: Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, why, and what form? If not, why not?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): No. I’m waiting for the proof. It’ll be proved when GAI is developed, better proof with emotions.
Jacobsen: What do you make of the mystery and transience of life?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I don’t use English as my first language, so I can’t answer a metaphysical question in English!
Jacobsen: What is love to you?
Anonymous High-IQ Community Member (South Korea): I don’t know.
Appendix I: Footnotes
[1] Member, South Korean High-IQ Community.
[2] Individual Publication Date: January 22, 2021: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/south-korea; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2021: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.
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