In real life if you want to solve a problem and you have unlimited time you also have access to resources such as books and other people.
Then there are some problems that some (almost all!) people couldn't solve with unlimited time and resources. Say prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
And then there are the problems that test special knowledge. I remember being in a waves and vibrations class where on Thanksgiving break the prof assigned us the homework to solve for the motion of two coupled harmonic oscillators. I didn't have anywhere to go but I did have a cold and had a fever but I powered through it anyway and managed to solve it with sin and cos. I was the only one.
Some of it was my general intelligence g and some was determination and hard work, not having distractions, etc.
When we had class next week the prof solved it in minutes on the board using the fact that
exp(iθ) = cos(θ) + i sin(θ)
which of course made an impression on all of us! An IQ test tries to ask questions which don't depend on your knowledge but it's tough to do that completely.
From time to time you see a press release that some celebrity took an IQ test got the maximum score on Raven's Progressive Matrices. [1] A lot of people are going to say "of course these people are really smart, this is proven by their success" and maybe that's right, I mean a good actor is a quick study who is good at learning the lines, easily adapts to whatever they have to do in terms of systems, technology and procedures on the set, etc. But it would not be hard at all to get coached on Raven enough to get a perfect score.
[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices which are about as independent of culture and language as is probably possible but... verbal intelligence is it's own thing, like I maxxed out every test of verbal intelligence I've taken since I was 17 and my IQ score is respectable despite having a bit of Meehl's "cognitive slippage" which impairs my complex task performance in a test environment although I have a lot of strategies to correct for it in real life
Then there are some problems that some (almost all!) people couldn't solve with unlimited time and resources. Say prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
And then there are the problems that test special knowledge. I remember being in a waves and vibrations class where on Thanksgiving break the prof assigned us the homework to solve for the motion of two coupled harmonic oscillators. I didn't have anywhere to go but I did have a cold and had a fever but I powered through it anyway and managed to solve it with sin and cos. I was the only one.
Some of it was my general intelligence g and some was determination and hard work, not having distractions, etc.
When we had class next week the prof solved it in minutes on the board using the fact that
exp(iθ) = cos(θ) + i sin(θ)
which of course made an impression on all of us! An IQ test tries to ask questions which don't depend on your knowledge but it's tough to do that completely.
From time to time you see a press release that some celebrity took an IQ test got the maximum score on Raven's Progressive Matrices. [1] A lot of people are going to say "of course these people are really smart, this is proven by their success" and maybe that's right, I mean a good actor is a quick study who is good at learning the lines, easily adapts to whatever they have to do in terms of systems, technology and procedures on the set, etc. But it would not be hard at all to get coached on Raven enough to get a perfect score.
[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices which are about as independent of culture and language as is probably possible but... verbal intelligence is it's own thing, like I maxxed out every test of verbal intelligence I've taken since I was 17 and my IQ score is respectable despite having a bit of Meehl's "cognitive slippage" which impairs my complex task performance in a test environment although I have a lot of strategies to correct for it in real life