Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Are professional pianists highly intelligent?

I understand the frustration.

Hahaha. Go to bed you freaks.

At the end of the day, none of this proves anything about anything at all. The entire thing is laughable and become rather amusing.

@stores
Yes, the original claim is laughable. Glad we can agree!

I don't know what made you think I didn't read it and take it into account.
(I did, and I did.)

I mean, look.
You said a 300-point spread is what you would have expected?

SO?

I had already indicated that I didn't expect anything like that (obviously having thought about it).

So, how was your thing supposed to affect that?

Is that how 'intelligence' is defined in USA - based on exam scores in maths and verbal skills?

Not that I want to get involved in the "I'm right, therefore you're wrong" stuff that's been going on here , but in the UK, we don't correlate exam results with intelligence. Otherwise, someone who's been taught well in a private school (a.k.a. 'public school') will always be more 'intelligent' than someone who went to a school where expectations are low - especially in stuff like maths and vocabulary -, and we know that's not true.

I did an intelligence test when I was 16 (I was selected for it, but could have refused if I didn't want to, as it was just for someone's research, not school-related), and the questions bore absolutely no relation to anything I was studying at school - the maths involved was very basic, but it required logic and abstract and lateral thinking; the verbal skills section used very simple English, but again was logic-based (e.g. a cat is to a skunk as an astronaut is to a ..... ); there was a large section on spatial skills/orientation/shapes.

In other words, the tests made absolutely no demands on your maths or vocabulary, or your command of English - which means that anyone who can count to 100 and have rudimentary English can be tested on equal terms to a part-time brain surgeon and concert pianist who's also a CERN physicist .
Which seems to me to be a real test of intelligence.

BTW, I also did a MENSA test as an adult a few years later, just out of interest - and that test was very similar. And my score was almost identical, despite the fact that I was a much better pianist (and had started work in an science-related profession). As I consider myself a 'scientist' who happens to play the piano, I have absolutely no axes to grind, nor knives to sharpen, unlike some people here.....

Well, they do have a column marked "IQ" which hopefully derives from some reasonable test like the ones you referred to. However, if there is a high correlation between the IQ scores and the other test scores then this brings the validity of the test into question. I do not care to study the table in that much depth so I do not know if this is the case.

It is hard enough to get a consensus on what intelligence is, let alone a way to measure it. The SAT and GRE exams are not intended as a measurement of IQ but as a measure of education and preparedness to enter either college or graduate school. The tests are heavily biased toward skills needed to enter American universities. As such they are probably not a good indicator of "intelligence". This could also help explain the unusual spread between verbal and math scores. If the sample population had a significant number of foreign students it would tend to skew the results in this way. Since there is no information on the population there is no way to know how biased the numbers might be.

The difference is you're thinking about the SAT, and I'm talking based on the GRE. For people who haven't taken much math, these results can be surprising.

Imagine, if you can, that you'd taken at least five math classes beyond calculus. Suddenly the simplistic math on the GRE isn't going to seem very hard. One of my professors told me, "don't worry about studying for the math GRE, it will be simple for you."

Then take into consideration that engineering majors don't do anything different in English. You would expect them, on average, to get the same score as every other major. Which is basically what happened (the average score is around 430-450).

Also, this is explains why the GRE is a lousy way to measure IQ, because not everyone goes into it with the same experience.

I was talking about both.

I think it's clear from this particular thread that professional pianists are the most intelligent humans on the planet, but not nearly as clever as some of the amateur ones...... ;-)

@Pianoloverus, I don't know of any studies that have been done to measure a musician's intelligence compared with that of the general public, but there have been studies via brain scans showing that in general the - oh now is it called the hypothalamus? - has been found to have been larger in the brains of musicians. Probably not in all musicians and I don't know what that has to do with intelligence.

Pianolover, you're a psychologist or a psychiatrist, right? What are the indexes by which you measure intelligence?

No, but anyone reading this thread would probably need one.I gave some of the criteria in the first post.

Fortunately, Mark is a psychiatrist.

I don't know why I thought you were a doctor I'm sorry! I see you're a retired math and tennis teacher. I'm terrible at both math and tennis. Well, I have quite good mental arithmetic and I can count! Actually Stephen Hough was named as one of twenty living polymaths by the Economist this year or last year. Just because the Economist names only 20 doesn't mean there are only 20 but it's high praise, right? Yeah I'd say Hough is pretty smart. I'd say Hamelin is pretty smart too. I mean it takes a certain kind of smarts to navigate the industry, because honestly it's a shark pit.

Sorry to come late to this thread, but I've been poking around the internet and found the source for the IQ numbers by college major. Although the link to statisticbrain.com claims that the source is the Educational Testing Service (with a research date of 1.1.2014), I could find nothing of the sort at ETS. The source actually appears to be a blog posted here, which is dated August 29, 2007.

In it, the blogger discusses the source of the data:

"A reader sends along this table from the Graduate Record Exam from ETS giving average scores by intended field of study in grad school. He includes an estimate of IQ from one of the popular conversion tables, although he didn't tell me which one." (Emphasis added.)

The statisticbrain.com table has several questionable items, such as the discrepancy mentioned before around GRE/SAT. The column containing the sum of the verbal and quant scores is called "Average." In addition, at the top of the table is the notation "Standard Deviation +/- 0.80." Standard deviation of what? The standard deviations of the verbal, quantitative, total, and IQ scores are 41.0, 77.1, 95.6, and 7.7, respectively. A quick glance at the range of numbers in each column would immediately inform any engineer schooled in even elementary statistics that something was amiss.

In other words, a poster has repeatedly referred to a web site posting with several immediate discrepancies, without apparently bothering to check the source. What is supposed to be iron-clad evidence in support of the poster's point of view, and used as a hammer to pound anyone with an opposing view, is instead based on a 6 1/2 year old blog posting of undisclosed source or methodology!

Another blogger posted a similar chart (dated September 17, 2012) based on SAT scores, and based the IQ distribution on the average IQ of 103 for all takers of the SAT. Here is the link for that one. In both cases, these blog postings continue to be sourced as news and factual reality by other blogs and websites, long after their original posts.

Haven't we all learned to at least question the authority of anything casually posted to the internet?

By the way, the comments at the first link above delve into the question Mark C raised about the wide gap in the GRE data between verbal and quantitative scores.

Thank you for making this post. I agree that statistical findings are usually taken at face value with some kind of concluding statement. I usually like to find the source so that I can see the actual methodology and gain some kind of context. In this case I did what you did and looked at the ETS website but failed to match anything. Google didn't turn anything up within the given date range so I gave up at this point.

Doug -- nice post.

I also would have commented on this:


....except that because it's written so small and sort of hidden (together with the indication about it being the Grad Recs), I didn't see it. When I eventually did see it (with Horowitzian's help), I had no idea what it meant either, and I knew it wasn't my fault.
I tried at some length to make sense of it, and was at a total loss.

The whole thing has the look of something done by a student and which didn't get a real good grade, unless the teacher wasn't really paying attention.

Great post, Doug. I don't think I'll be trusting anything found on statisticsbrain.com

Why hasn't anyone simply looked at the available data? First of all, the GRE is no longer scored in a way that yields numbers in those ranges. Secondly, if you look at the numbers the ETS puts out, gaps that large between verbal and math scores don't exist for ANY major.

People have been arguing about bogus numbers for ten pages!

Well, obviously, arguing is what it's all about. Facts and opinions are irrelevant.

Perhaps people are trying to see how many posts they can get in before this thread is locked (frankly, I'm surprised it's stayed open this long).

Blame pianoloverus. He was the one who started it, three and a half long years ago.

Intelligence is good. Most people are good-but they are not good all the time! Therefore, not all people are intelligent all the time.

On the other hand-maybe I need to think about this a little more. That might do me some good! Then I might be intelligent for at least a moment.

I don't know it all seems so confusing. Maybe I should quit this forum and study up for my IQ test.