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General Question
The other day I was in my philosophy class, and my teacher started telling us a story about how her neighbor was a really brilliant 12 year old boy who’s passion was finance, and she’d often get calls from Goldman Sachs and other large firms asking about the 12 year old boy. That got me thinking about how no adults with an iq on a level similar to that of what the child is currently at would get the same inquiry’s. In fact they’d often have to compete with other people of similar accomplishment levels for positions at Goldman Sachs. So it got me thinking how a child could appear more brilliant than an adult with a similar intelligence level.
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The vast majority of 150 IQ people don't get calls from investment banks lmao, especially not a 12 year old. If a 12 year old says their "passion is finance" and are getting calls from investment banks, all that means is the dad works at Goldman.
Yeah, but it wasn't the boy getting calls from Goldman Sachs, it was the ... somehow ... the neighbor. Which makes perfect sense if you stick a pencil far enough up your nose.
I mean it’s definitely possible, I go to uni in a relatively affluent area so I really wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, but at the same time too, Goldman Sachs isn’t going to be the boy the time of day unless he’s able to do something seriously impressive, one detail I didn’t include in the original post was that he was extremely successful in the stock market according to my professor and tripled his money in the first few months of investing. Goldman likely gave him the class because of this l, and like I said before I also don’t think Goldman knew he was 12, but also to be fair I’m getting like 2nd to 3rd hand information from both my professor who gets the calls and the 12 year old telling my professor stories, so there’s also a good chance for some bits of info to be twisted or exaggerated.
I lived in a relatively affluent area growing up and went to a relatively affluent university and I've never heard of something like this unless it's the parents talking about their special little boy being a genius and bragging to their colleagues at Goldman about it. Especially if they said they have "a passion for finance." Noone has a passion for finance, not even people working in finance, they just want to make money. That's just something people say in job interviews.
Plenty of people make a lot of money in the stock market, but that wouldn't have recruiters reaching out to you.
I'd not be surprised if someone doing that well in the market was getting phone calls
It's not that the child is seen or appraised as more intelligent; it's that younger people simply have more to give and can give longer.
For example, a football recruiter doesn't care about a 6'3" 280lbs 40 year old man. But, they might care about a 6'2 250lb 16 year old.
Well that analogy doesn't make sense because you are comparing two people who'd be in different percentiles of their age population whereas the question asks about the potential difference between two people with 150 iq, which'd mean they'd both be in the same percentile of their own age group
Yes it does.
well actually a 12 year old with an iq of 150 would be about 1 sigma less intelligent than an adult with an iq of 150 until they matured further. My question was about two people that were, at the moment at least, within the same percentile. It’d be like a 12 year old who was 6’4 vs a 25 year old who was 6’4
For a reddit with high IQ scores, some of you seem to not understand English, obviously a kid with IQ of 150 would have worse raw scores than an older person with the same age adjusted IQ, that's not what I was saying what I was saying was that if a kid has the same age adjusted IQ than an older dude but still get more inquiries then his analogy doesn't make sense because the two individuals aren't in the same age adjusted percentile. But if by your og question you mean a kid that scores the same 'raw' as an adult then obviously that kid is more sought after because he's much smarter according to people his own age, that's just obvious
Oh well sure, but his logic still applies regardless of whether or not the age brackets fit like a glove, I was just willing to overlook his miscalculation.and I guess to answer the second part of your response, I think Goldman would be way more interested in hiring by aptitude rather than potential. It’s the same reason a child prodigy that graduates from highschool with a 3.0 isn’t going to Harvard just because of their age, they’re likely headed to Chico state or otherwise. Nor do schools care at what age you took the SAT, only your score. If a 12 year old was getting calls from Goldman Sachs it likely means his resume is at least somewhat on par with other successful applicants to the company
This is completely false. Investment banks do not need 150 iq twelve year olds.
That story is nonsense. No banks are calling 12 year olds.
Didn’t you read? Finance was his passsion!
May you get testicular torsion
I’m sorry, what?
I’d imagine they did not know he was 12
How would they know about a 12 year old at all? Sorry, but this Story doesn’t make sense.
Because of his accomplishments I’m guessing
Critical thinking isn’t given to everyone huh
Your teacher made this story up.
Tbf it’s possible, my teacher said this in response to a student she wasn’t very fond of, mainly cause he never speaks in class, and the student shared that his passion was finance. So the teacher could have made this story up to shame him and say “even a 12 year old can do what you do better”
The reason you find this puzzling is because you made a fundamental error by believing the story to be true. No one is ringing the 12 yo.
I mean again I’m not denying that the story could be fabricated, the motivation for fabrication makes a bit less sense to me
you said it yourself in another comment, to make another student feel bad
Your teachers neighbors 12 year old is not getting calls from gs.
it is, it's just the call are from individual gs execs
No.
Yis.
Did you notice someone wrote the word “gullible” on your ceiling
If a big company publicly expresses interest in hiring a 12-year-old like this it's purely a PR stunt. Even really smart children who have incredible promise don't have the breadth of knowledge to compete with similarly smart grown-ass adults who have practical experience. It's not even close.
Every once in a while you'll hear about some 12-year-old that got into Harvard. Ever hear about one of those kids going on to be the CEO of Citigroup or designing a better microchip? Usually they just keep stacking degrees. They're good at going to school.
The way it was described by my teacher made it sound more like the kid had done most of the networking online and gs was unaware of the kids age
I’m a director at an investment bank. No one is calling 12 year olds. People barely pick up the phone for the college sophomores and juniors who attended the same university as them, and are in the recruiting process.
I’d imagine they wouldn’t know he was 12
What?
That’s not how any of this works.
Whoever told you these things was lying.
Well if the intitial steps of the application were online, he could fill that out without anyone knowing he was 12
you don’t get recruited via resume drops like that. They recruit through on campus recruiting
they want to see your college, grades, etc. wtf is a 12 year old going to put on his resume?
You got played.
I am scoring 150 as an adult and I know for a fact that I didn‘t seem smart as a kid, except for academics. My grades in college and on national standardized tests are around the same rarity as my IQ. However, throughout my life I ran into many issues, including academic ones, just like everyone else.
School wasn‘t easy (it was hell, even) and yes, I did have to study - a lot. No, I don’t have photographic memory and answers to questions don’t magically pop up in my mind by virtue of my IQ. I still have to read, learn, seek and invest in order to get what I want. There’s no red carpet of opportunities showing themselves before me. While I am indeed getting pretty good opportunities, I am clawing my way into them and always trying to make the most of my current situation. No men in black suits are showing up at my door.
I, like many here, had been thinking that people with an IQ 150 would have to be “something else” entirely and that they’d have the world at their feet. That’s why I never considered I might be one of them until I got this result on tests. It took some time to sink in but now I realize that people with high IQs differ quantitatively and not qualitatively from their peers. They differ in that they can perform some intellectual tasks more effectively and with greater accuracy, but they are not elevated above ordinary life constraints.
I'm a bit confused, my IQ is definitely nowhere near 150, but I got really good grades with minimal studying/sometimes with only lectures. I was really "good at school", I always assumed that's correlated with IQ. Like I don't think I've had to study more than 10 times in my life (and it sucked because I didn't know how to study)... It could be that my memory was just better or something (not photographic though), but this is seriously surprising.
The commenter’s flair says that their IQ is less than 85, so I wouldn’t assume anything they’re saying to be true
Yeah I agree, my VCI and WMI are my strongest areas (138 and 145 respectively) and I can say for sure in uni English, law, and philosophy classes I produce significantly more novel answers to questions posed by my professors than my peers without reading the material the questions are based off. Any essays I have due are assigned weeks prior and are 6+ pages long. I start them sometimes 3-4 hours before they lock and still get A’s, having a higher IQ definitely does mean that school comes easier to you, so I’m guessing his issue is more long term memory than conceptual.
It’s weird but somehow my scores are pretty good as well. I am a medical student and on top of my class so I have no memory issues whatsoever. I was talking about middle school and high school more, which were both very challenging to me. My grades in high school were lower than my grades in medical school and I found it much harder, for various reasons.
However, I stand by the fact that I do have to study for this. I get the sense that I study an average amount among my classmates.
My point was that it doesn’t have to subjectively feel easy just because you have a high IQ. How easy school feels also depends on neuroticism, perfectionism and how validating your environment is, not just IQ and grades.
I mean of course I agree that IQ does not mean everything, when calculating academic success, but at the same time it should help A LOT. Can you be more specific about why you didn’t perform as well in highschool? And I mean to be fair, most classes taken in med school are going to be a lot more crystallized based than fluid, so having a memory that’s not entirely special could definitely level the playing field a bit. What would you say the reason is that you decided to become a doctor rather than say an engineer, lawyer, economist, computer scientist, etc?
Nope, memory is one of my strongest areas. I was good at school on paper and had pretty good grades. However, due to inability to focus for more than 3 minutes straight back then, I needed to “study” for hours and hours in order to get enough of those 3 minute increments to actually learn much of anything. This completely went away by the time I was 19 and in college. So college was much easier than high school for me.
You're scoring 150 as an adult with "(IQ <=85)" under your name. Get your story straight.
My flair is a joke bro.
Well I've scored in the high 150's ( even higher than that on HRIQ tests) and I didn't have trouble in school until I got to college. I was in gifted and went to private schools. The only issue I had in college was that I had to learn how to study, bc I never really studied in HS. I was a mathematics major bc it required the minimum amount of studying and memorization. I also find that I out perform most of the people in my industry in almost every respect. Most of the smarter people I know have had a similar experience to me, and most others seem to have to try really hard for something that takes me very little effort to do.
Yeah, I’m the top scoring student in my class of 100 in medical school as well. Where did I imply I was unsuccessful? I only ever said my road was neither linear nor easy and I intended to dispel some of the myth of the almighty high IQ individual.
Also, high schools in my country have entrance exams and I was in a class where you had to score in the top 5-10% of all students to even be considered for. It was a built-in gifted class. And I was in the top 15% of that class anyway despite major struggles. Overall though, my high school experience was very stressful and genuinely worse than medical school.
You should also note that IQ and achievement are imperfectly correlated. If you get an extremely high score on an IQ test, that will matter for the g-loaded part of academic achievement. The rest of it will be subject to regression to the mean (ie, another luck of the draw that’s more likely to drag you down than pull you up).
This is a really good take, thank you
What makes you think companies don’t actively recruit adults?
No I just mean the market is extremely competitive
Assuming this story isn't made up bs, the reason the kid is being inquired about is due to his potential, not current ability. Terence Tao was given private lessons by Paul Erdos as a child, not because he was more capable than adult mathematicians, but because he showed great promise in becoming more capable than them in the future. Any mathematician would have wiped the floor with 9yo Terence in terms of current mathematical ability but, lo and behold, 30 years later he is one of the best mathematicians of the century so far. That potential is what was detected by Erdos.
The same reason it can be shocking to hear a young child speak with a complex vocabulary. Most children we meet are child-like.
This sounds like a completely fabricated story. This kid is not some finance celebrity. There are multiple aspects that go into how intelligent we perceive someone. The same level of intelligence can be shared between an 8 year old and a 50 year old, but depending on who you’re talking to one seems much more impressive. That’s the problem with gifted kids, they are markedly above their peers at first, but through drug use, burn out, mental illness, and lack of practical experience over years they tend to level out at a similar level to their now adult peers. The gifted child will likely still be above average as an adult but an adult who has much more life experience will tend to compete equally with a gifted person due to wisdom and acquired knowledge. A highly intelligent enthusiast will seem less intelligent and than a less intelligent expert, despite the discrepancy in intelligence
they study the world more than people who live through life. that changes the denominator of things you know vs others on a knowledge v wisdom scale.
relative circumstances. a smart kid seems smarter than a smart adult because on average kids aren't as smart as adults and therefore it stands out more.
This is a third party story, and ppl are full of it.
I work in finance. I've worked in the hedge fund world for over 16 years now. I've scored in the high 150's on the WISC as a kid, and a lot of people who work in this industry have IQs of 150+. There is no way in hell that Goldman would call or call about a 12 year old for anything whatsoever. The kid would not have the necessary experience, education, or pedigree to warrant a discussion. Moreover, legal and compliance would have a sh*t storm for multiple reasons, but mostly for negligence.
We judge children based on potential. We judge adults based on accomplishments.
A 12 year old has literally nothing to think about beyond his passion.
The 40 year old has a job, a family, bills, health concerns, trauma, obligations, fears, and other issues that his brain needs to process. He simply has less time. He might also just care less; his other concerns may be more interesting to him than whatever little smart thing he shares.
most people find extreme natural talent in children more impressive than extreme natural talent in adults, for some reason.
Because he is . Intelligence doesn’t equal knowledge or maturity at all
kind of the same reason why it's better to start martial arts young... by the time you're 25 you already have 20 years experience, where people who started as 24 have got 1 year of experience. Now add geniusness
Kids are ridiculously adaptable and they don’t have pesky things like work and life admin getting in the way of their study. Also your teacher is probably exaggerating. I doubt they are calling a kid to direct their investments. That’s a pretty quick way to loose your clients.
A child couldn’t without the life experience of the adult.
That kid's name? Albert Einstein
150 > 135
This might be somewhat unrelated, but children often appear more intelligent because they have no buffer and can express themselves freely. Once an intelligent child grows older, they realize others will envy or despise them, and their ideas often create conflict. Therefore, a lot of intelligent adults are reserved and can appear "slower" than children.
They have a more novel intellect.
There's an expectation for at least a certain number of adults to be very intelligent and outstanding in their field. Aside from academic performance, that expectation doesn't really exist for children so when we see them being super smart and excelling in anything normally outside of their scope it's more impressive.
I'm going to say this particular story is BS, but usually when you do see things about these child geniuses and their accomplishments it's most reflective of them having family or others in their social network with the right connections to get them special consideration and opportunities and to publicize it, rather than a case of them being somehow even more outstanding than adults or other child geniuses.
I will say that banks aren't out here calling children though. Although if they are, I've got one that just turned 14, IQ in the 140s with a special interest in stocks and investing. I'm sure he'd love a remote position. 😂
Because a child is a better listener.
Translation: “My daddy has connections”