The author is referring to genius without defining it.
You might say that being 1/1,000,000 in intelligence qualifies as a genius. However, that would still leave around 8000 people smarter in the world. This author seems to limit the word 'genius' to the people that those 8000 people look up to.
When this author talks about genius, she means a genius among geniuses. The population she's calling not-geniuses are in the top 1/10th to 1/100th of 1%.
She, and exactly. A 1-in-1,000,000 person (like Terry Tao) saying Math and Science need all the 1-in-10,000 people it can get and the focus on the 1-in-1,000,000 people is not helpful is not useful advice for K-12 policymakers. If 1-in-10,000 people say that the 1-in-100 don't receive enough attention, that would be important information to elite college admissions people. But these people have no relevant experience with average people and probably have nothing useful to say about how to educate average kids in average schools.
Personally I think I am at best 1-in-100 smart. I don't know if in the future there will be useful work for people only as smart as I am.
I think you're missing her overall point by focusing on the "genius" label though. Our reward system is set up for those at the very top. But those top performers rely on a whole host of other good-but-not-stellar actors who never see a comparable reward for their efforts.
It astonishes me that people can claim with a straight face that it is not. I suspect it is sour grapes or something?
If intelligence isn't measurable, then you would agree that the average frog cannot be reliably distinguished from the average human in terms of intelligence?
Ok, so lets move on from that, and don't give me some painful story about how there are different kinds of intelligence and frogs are 'smarter about eating bugs' or something, please?
Maybe with the benefit of the doubt, you are trying to say that human's are genetically not very diverse, and so you can't find significant differences in intelligence. To that I would say you are certainly not claiming this in good faith, and you have some quasi-political reason to deny something that is obviously true to anyone who has interacted with more than 3 people. (and we can skip the lecture along the lines of 'you can't trust what is obvious and have to pretend that all your beliefs are properly cited or they are invalid')
Intelligence is somewhat measurable, with some nice big error bounds and a big asterisk for the particularly stark replication problem in psychology.
You can define genius as a mark on the IQ scale, but that certainly isn't the definition being used when people use the word in conversation. That conversational form of genius is the social construct.
So you really think intelligence can be accurately measured using a single number?
Do you not agree that different people have different talents? Some are good at constructing clever arguments, some can compose beautiful music, and some can solve partial differential equations in their heads.
thats just being butthurt because we chose to call it intelligence, and somehow not being classically intelligent is understood as a personal insult.
the IQ simply doesnt measure creative genius. if it was called "the test that measures how good a persons brain is at pattern recogniton", you wouldnt care. you'd simply state that you're not particularly interested in logical reasoning.
intelligence, in terms of IQ, is a more or less well defined metric. in popular language, its conflated with "not being a mouthbreather". thats why people get pissy when they dont score above average on an iq test. its kinda pointless, really. people only care about iq tests because of the name.
It's possible to be a very able, erudite person and not do well on an IQ test. Conversely, it's possible to score highly and be incompetent.
Intelligence is an ill-defined, nebulous quantity. IQ is a precisely defined quantity. Since intelligence is hard to measure and IQ is easy to measure, it's tempting to use one as a proxy for the other. But I, and the other posters above me, just don't find that very convincing.
You might say that being 1/1,000,000 in intelligence qualifies as a genius. However, that would still leave around 8000 people smarter in the world. This author seems to limit the word 'genius' to the people that those 8000 people look up to.
When this author talks about genius, she means a genius among geniuses. The population she's calling not-geniuses are in the top 1/10th to 1/100th of 1%.