If you're smart enough you can retain and master material very fast. People like Ed Witten and Terrance Tao probably mastered year's worth of material in months . IQ does not scale linearly, meaning going from 130 to 166 is not a 20% gains more more like multiple orders of magnitudes. It's hard to appreciate or comprehend what truly smart people are capable of doing. It's like magic, to put it bluntly.
>going from 130 to 166 is not a 20% gains more more like multiple orders of magnitudes.
I have always wondered what the truth is about this but I have never seen any real answers. On the "linear" side you have median incomes by IQ percentile. On the "not even quantitatively comparable" side you have the fact that your score on an IQ test will not increase that much if you are allowed much more than the standard time to finish it, indicating that there is a wall (defined by your ability) that you can hit. On the "sublinear" side, there's the fact that a lot of moderately smart people have made major scientific discoveries, which you wouldn't think could ever happen when there are 10,000 people with IQ > 160 in the US today - easily more than enough to take all of the places in the history books written about this decade.
a discovery is not the same as raw intellectual horsepower. If the goal is to learn as much as possible in the shortest period of time and understand it well, that requires horsepower. But being smarter increases the odds of finding a major discovery for more abstract concepts like math or physics, as Terrance Tao did many times. An IQ of 130 is probably not enough for pure maths, but may be enough for something like medicine.
Enough to make an important discovery in math, which gets citations and such. Having read math papers, there is a wide range of ability. Compare the stuff featured in Quanta magazine to your typical pdf in google. 130 is probably the min. to maybe get a master's degree.
You’re essentially correlating it just to processing speed which is of course important, but you can still have a significant +z score and need more time to absorb material. BTW, g (a statistical construct in psychometrics for general intelligence) according to research is best estimated through the measurement of reasoning ability on a standardized IQ test (WAIS, Standford - Binet) whereas the processing speed part of the test doesn’t significantly contribute to it.
consider the possibly that the other components of intelligence aid in learning ability too. Spatial reasoning probably helps when trying to understand geometry.
Can you tell a field that either Ed Witten or Terrance Tao knows a significant amount about outside their field of specialization? And don't say math for Ed Witten because his field is mathematical physics.
