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Is "Scorpion" Really a Genius?
An anonymous reader writes CBS's upcoming hacker show Scorpion is pitched as based on the real life of Irish 'eccentric genius' Walter O'Brien a.k.a. "Scorpion". Some of the claims made for the real Scorpion are extraordinary. A child prodigy with an IQ of 197, hacking Nasa at age 13, [supplying] Ireland with more Personal Computers than DELL and Gateway together. Searching online I wasn't able to find anything which, for me, clearly backed up any of these (or other) claims. For example, rather than being the sixth fastest programmer in the world in 1993, his team ranked 90th out of 250 teams. Curiously, his degree grade was an ok, but hardly stellar B+ (II-I). Does anyone know anything to back up the genius claims being made about Scorpion?
Get in the way of a good story.
And he's not in jail, so sure, he's a genius. But are his exploits legendary? Well, much like fishing stories, I take hacking stories have more elaborations then truth.
Be seeing you...
Whiskey?
Who cares?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Who?
I used to say that all TV was fiction except the weather, but then I saw Fox lying about that too: severe winter weather does not contradict global warming/climate change.
Why is Snark Required?
I have have a 163 IQ. I was capable of making straight A's in high school, but was bored I just acted out and got in trouble. What they called Advanced classes was the top 25-30 students out of a class of 100 people (small school), which was a joke. I was the person who made an A on the test but didn't do a few daily grades here or there and things of that nature. In college I have a 4.0 but it was mind numbing to keep that grade. College for the most part was pure memorization and doing the daily work..
The point of this is that grades do not reflect IQ.
s/©//g
http://www.scorpioncomputerservices.com/the_founder.html
He probably is a smart guy, but these claims here would make me not want to hire him. He's so obviously full of himself that he'd probably never admit he might be wrong about something and that is just plain dangerous. So it's not just the hollywood drama, it's based on his on ludicrous claims.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
His website proves itself false. He claims it was founded in 1988; however Whois records for the domain only go back to 2000, and the web address doesnt appear in the Wayback Machine until 2003.
Looks like the guy has tried to mix his own marketing material into google results, but you can see where his highly touted ScenGen actually comes from here:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/wi...
This version of MAGICC/SCENGEN was developed primarily with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but it rests on developments carried out over the past 20 years that were funded by a number of organizations.
So the "ScenGen" you keep seeing in all the results is not the same as the one this O'brien dude keeps blathering about. In fact, hes apparently the only one who cares about it; he did do one talk at IEEE in 2010 (though strangely theres no mention of it anywhere except the bog-standard event page), but there doesnt appear to have been any chatter on the internet about it whatsoever.
So, to the AC who posted this: hopefully this is a useful lesson. Anyone can say anything on the internet, and even make it look passingly believable. But if it sounds "too perfect", its probably rubbish.
I haven't heard of this show until now. I wonder Anonymous Coward is just a sort of straw man trying to drum up interest.
Leaving aside the fact that an IQ score in the 190s is absurd (no one has curved a test over a large enough population for such an answer to reflect actual score distributions), as far as actual, normed IQ tests conducted by actual psychologists go, it's hard to find a test with a ceiling higher than 160 these days. The Weschler, easily the most popular among these, has a ceiling of 160, and getting a score above the low 140s requires doing very well across most of the individual batteries, some of which aren't especially g-weighted. No, the quiz in Omni is not, as far as most psychometricians are remotely concerned, an IQ test. To define it as such is to destroy most of the meaning of the term.
Occasionally, you see high scores due either to very old versions of the Stanford-Binet that did reach above 160 (it's likely that Ted Kaczynski got such a score) or the use of extensions of the old Stanford-Binet to investigate young people who hit or near ceilings, typically on verbal parts of these tests where raw scores tend to have a little more variance, but extrapolations to actual IQ scores aren't valid today due to the Flynn effect (ie: more young people are properly nourished and in intellectually stimulating environments than were in the early 20th century) and the fact that old versions of the Stanford-Binet weren't necessarily normally distributed along the 15-point sigma most tests are today. Though people have attempted to write on the upper echelons of performance on tests of cognitive ability, there's remarkably little that is peer-reviewed.
The tl;dr of all this is that whenever you hear reports of IQ scores above 160, you can more or less assume someone is talking out of their ass.
Not true. I work with EE faculty, and a number of them can't seem to grasp the concept that the being a brilliant engineer doesn't automatically confer one with expertise in diverse other areas such as patent law, accounting, videography, etc.
#DeleteChrome
If you read, he supplied more computers than Dell and Gateway combined....... Before 1993.
While both Dell and Gateway existed since the '80s, neither were international powerhouses until the mid-90s. I'm sure both HP and IBM were blowing this guy out of the water in Ireland.
I mean, I sold more cell phones worldwide in 2006 than Apple and Google combined, for crying out loud! (AKA: I sold one.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
The standard deviation of IQ seems to be 15
octave:16> erfc((197-100)/15)
ans = 5.9493e-20
That means only a fraction of 5*10^-20 of total humankind would exceed his intelligence.
Let me make a few remarks:
-That would mean humankind could exists in it current size for another 10^11 years without finding a second one like him
-Normal itelligence tests dont resolve in that region. It's pretty impossible to design a tests which ca resolve between 100 and 140 and at the same time distinct between 180 and 190. i am not sure if designing a test between 190 and 197
-The most likely other option is that the distribution of measured IQs is heavy tailed (instead of normal). In that case, the IQ measurement needs to be corrected for that.
I wish that journalists would turn their brain on and not off at every number they cite
The web site reads like they're a big consultancy, another McKinsey. Then the testimonals are all about Walter. Oracle manager: "Walter showed a great depth of knowledge in Word, WordBasic Macro programming". He still has recommendations up which mention Turbo Pascal. Not seeing rocket science here. The biggest success reported was translating some large English-only application into multiple languages, which made it valuable in Asia. That's nice, but a routine job. He claims to have written a general-purpose program to help with such jobs.
He also claims to have written ScenGen, a "scenario generator". It looks like that originated at Boeing in the mid-1980s. Running on a Compaq PC with 2MB back then. The pitch for the current model sounds like the one from back then, although the graphics are probably better now.
The web site is awful. There are lines of text with excess white space in the middle. I looked at the HTML, expecting to find some overly complex Javascript which was misbehaving. No. The HTML source just has explicit non-breaking spaces in the wrong places.
He seems to speak at a lot of strange conferences, such as the Family Office Association. A "family office", in this context,is a staff which manages the family fortune for a large, wealthy family. The Rockefellers have one.
This is getting weird.
"genious level" smart people mostly don't do well in school, they can't cope with the system.
Ahh - unsubstantiated willy-waving of IQ scores which are meaningless other than to show how well you took an IQ test. God, I love the internet. Never has there been a greater facilitator of self-important low self-esteem.
Man I wish could flaunt my IQ on the interwebs, but I can't because I'm too damn smart. Typically we of the IQ > 220 crowd keep quiet in public, allowing ourselves only gentle stroking of our nipples and an intolerably arrogant half-grin - well, that and some posting on /. obviously.
You're right:
From http://www.irishtimes.com/cult...
"I was coming home from school and encountered a house surrounded by black cars. Mom was on the couch, crying; Dad was not too happy. A lot of men in suits were wanting to yell at me for what I had done but were a little surprised when out of my schoolbag I pulled an extradition waiver â" which calmed the conversation down. If they signed this [the extradition waiver] then I would show them where the holes are in their network. We ended up doing a deal â" which happens in most hacking incidents you never hear about.â"
and:
"The showâ(TM)s creator, Nick Santora, introduced him as a man who âoehas saved the world several times over, things he canâ(TM)t even tell us aboutâ."
or:
"One of Scorpionâ(TM)s executive producers told Comic-Con, âoeWalter personally caught the Boston bombers by writing an algorithm that tracked motion on all the cameras within a two-mile radius of the blast. That kind of thing makes for a really compelling episode of television. He also stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening.â"
It's so full of weasel words it's unbelievable. An algorithm that tracks motion? what you mean checking if one frame is different to the next? that's tracking motion, hardly rocket science, any CS101 student could do it. Helped stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening? Well so have I, by not becoming an incompetent nuclear engineer that goes on to produce a flawed reactor design I assure you have also done exactly this. Things we can't be told about? Oh well, I'll assume they just don't exist then or I might as well just mention that I'm personally better than this guy because I saved not only the world numerous times, but the entire universe, I just can't tell you how.
Which is a shame because it sounds like the show may be a bit like Numb3rs, the sort of show that might interest me, but with this insurmountable pile of tosh and bullshit that's apparently surrounding it I'm going to steer VERY clear. This guy is obviously an egotistical self-publicist and a serial liar, and the guys writing about him are obviously absurdly naive and have failed to realise that they could've made up these exact same stories without getting him involved.
Everything he says is something many people could say and it would hold as much validity, there's literally nothing about this guy that's actually in any way verifiable - the incidents he claims to have been involved in, the things he claims to have done, absolutely none of it is verifiable. A genius that got a bog standard degree at a run of the mill UK university? - Christ, it's not like his "intelligence" even got him into Cambridge early, or even at all. It says he graduated in the late 90s, so if he was 13 in 1988 then that implies he only followed the same path of literally millions of other teens the same year he did. Why if he was such a genius wasn't he doing his A-Levels or degree early like real actual genius kids consistently manage to do? Even my fucking cousin got an A-Level at 14 because she was ahead of her years and yet she wasn't exactly exceptional - a few others in her school did too. I have two degrees, one of which I studied for whilst working full time, this means my academic achievements at very least are well ahead of this guy and I'm not exactly stand out either.
I can find not a single shred of evidence that this guy is anything other than mediocre at best.
My IQ is so huge it can only be expressed in hexadecimal. I am posting this directly from my mind while my body drives to the gym for a workout with my supermodel girlfriend.
Actually, the score (in answer points) plus the age (as inputs to a function, not as in arithmetics) make the IQ result. The tests are calibrated for different ages already.
Ezekiel 23:20
There are highly trained generalists who lack humility and don't make fools of themselves. They're the rarest of individuals but they do exist. ;)
A Real Genius uses a Space laser to pop the worlds largest popcorn container IN the home of his enemy.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
And just as unrealistic, I mean wouldn't a tattoo of the prison layout on your back be a bit of a givaway.
'Written by the team behind Prison Break, the show “follows an eccentric genius and his international network of super-geniuses as they form the last line of defence against the complex threats of the modern age”, according to its makers.' ref
Anyone will, sooner or later, make a fool of themselves
FTFY
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When you're not good at anything, you think everyone else is faking it. When you're gifted and you don't challenge yourself, you think you're good at everything. But, if you're gifted and challenge yourself regularly, you learn to acknowledge what you do and do not know. Once that happens, you claim the mastery that is your due, respect it when you see it in others, and lose patience with those who constantly want to dispute the validity of what you've become. You learn to despise the word "opinion", because you constantly have it thrown in your teeth by people whose ego is incapable of acknowledging that expertise exists at all, let alone acknowledge that you might have it.
At least, that's been my observation and experience. It's part of why I like volunteer work. When people are benefiting from your brilliance and watching you let others lead while you learn from them, they're less inclined to constantly challenge your capabilities, and more pleasant to be around. Purely social environments like bars and parties on the other hand, are a psychologically draining environment where bullshit flies, assertions are never compared against objective reality, and just listening to people talk threatens to make you stupider by normalizing a lack of rigor and discipline in acknowledging that you have areas of ignorance that no inherent brilliance can overcome.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth