Avi Ben-Abraham, man of a thousand and one faces:
July 22, 2001 9:37 PM   Subscribe

Avi Ben-Abraham, man of a thousand and one faces: 43-year-old Ben-Abraham . . . has spent the past two decades surfacing, disappearing and resurfacing in the company of presidents, prime ministers, Hong Kong billionaires, European royalty, Hollywood moguls and members of the Kennedy family.
posted by aladfar (16 comments total)
 
Wow, aladfar, this was one of the more interesting posts to MF in a while. It's totally scary how persistence and a complete lack of care about the truth can actually get people somewhere; it's also scary how many people have just accepted what they've been told by this loon (because they assume that people are fundamentally good), thus helping perpetuate his myth.

Great find.
posted by delfuego at 11:25 PM on July 22, 2001


A real-life Zelig.
posted by jonathanbell at 12:59 AM on July 23, 2001


I loved the bit about the "estimated IQ around 250". Excuse me while I get off on a rant here, but it's long been one of my pet peeves how people misunderstand IQ. Even more amazing is how people who claim to have unusually high IQs are seemingly oblivious to the reality that an IQ score becomes effectively unmeasurable at around a z score of 3 to 4, putting lie to their claims of extraordinary IQ (not to mention how meaningless an IQ is to begin with...).

An IQ of 250 is ludicrous in every way. Assuming a standard deviation of 15, as is common in IQ tests (although some use 16), 250 would result in a z-score of 10 (or 9.375 using SD=16). Converting this into probability/ rarity of occurence requires figuring out the percentile rank for the given z-score. Excel bombs out at z scores of 8, but even a z score of 8 is equal to 15 nines, or 1 in a quadrillion. With estimates that in the whole of human existance about 60 billion people have been born, this means a 1 in quadrillion ranking would mean they were so smart, the human race would be required to produce more than 16,000 times the number of people it already has in all of our collective existence to create someone like that- and this at an alleged IQ of 220. You can, uh, imagine my skepticism about an IQ of "250", probably a few million times rarer still- or that fraud Marilyn vos Savant and her supposed 228 IQ. :)
posted by hincandenza at 3:42 AM on July 23, 2001



Sounds similar to this chap.
posted by johnny novak at 4:29 AM on July 23, 2001


And of course, The rest of the story.
posted by Apoch at 4:41 AM on July 23, 2001


Is he a spy?
posted by ph00dz at 6:27 AM on July 23, 2001


he is zelig.
posted by clavdivs at 7:34 AM on July 23, 2001


Funny, clavdivs -- that's the first thing I thought of, too, but one would hope that the various security agencies of the world would know better than to create a spy who stands out in the crowd THIS much.

Then again, maybe some reverse psychology -- "they'll NEVER think this guy's a spy, he's so obvious!"
posted by delfuego at 8:03 AM on July 23, 2001


(Oops -- I meant to reply to ph00dz, not clavdivs. Apologies on the house.)
posted by delfuego at 8:04 AM on July 23, 2001


Wow, hincandenza, that's awesome! I hated my required statistics & probability course (and I'm a math minor), but I'm beginning to rethink things. Where did you learn the formulae for IQ scores? I really need to see that stuff.
posted by Eamon at 8:46 AM on July 23, 2001


"various security agencies'
A movie comes to mind. a french spy(?), bufoonish, drunken leaks, it had nick nolte or someone, some flick from the journalist genre. (killing fields, salvador, welcome to sarejevo,deadline,a year of living (very) dangerously etc.) Sun-tzu might categorize him as an expendable.
posted by clavdivs at 9:47 AM on July 23, 2001


doh
posted by clavdivs at 9:47 AM on July 23, 2001


clavidvs, movie=under fire
posted by chrismc at 9:52 AM on July 23, 2001


a much neglected genre..."spy who came in from the cold". Lecarres' best. (the movie was superb) 'russsia house' is a great film(i feel true to the book), what a frikin web.
posted by clavdivs at 10:03 AM on July 23, 2001


Eamon: Search the web for "z score" and "IQ", and I'm sure you'll find plenty of good descriptions of how they are calculated. The basic math is that the test score is normalized to create what's called a Standard Score, which is why we get the "median IQ is 100" and standard deviation is 15 (for the Wechsler test; Stanford-Binet and a few others used 16) for most tests. Standard deviations are useful things; they let us figure out the rarity of a particular score, i.e. the percentile rank, assuming a bell curve distribution. The number of standard deviations from the norm is also known as the z score, so a z score of 1 means IQ=115 (1 x 15), a z score=-2 means IQ=70 (-2 x 15), a z score=2.67 (2.67 x 15) means IQ=140, etc..

A standard normal curve, aka "bell curve", has known percentile ranks for all z scores, and there's a large formula to figure out the exact percentile rank for any z score. The first three to remember are that an IQ of 115 (1 SD above the norm) is a percentile rank of 84.1, IQ=130 (2 SD) is 97.7, and IQ=145 (3 SD) 99.8. So an IQ of 145 makes you- in theory- among the "smartest" 2 out of 1000 people. It's worth noting that these calculations are used for a variety of things; you could easily say that someone's height or weight was a z-score of 2, meaning they were in the top 2.3 % of people based on height or weight.

It's worth noting that generally any scores beyond 3 SDs above or below the norm are called outliers, meaning scores so out of the ordinary that they are discarded as statistically meaningless but worth further investigation (most IQ tests have a "ceiling" between 160-167). At 4 SDs you'd have an IQ of 160, or percentile 99.996, but at an IQ of 167, just 7 points higher, is percentile 99.9996, 10 times rarer still (and a rarity of 4 in a million, a nonsenical proposition since before that level of rarity there'd be little difference in actual intelligence). So you can see that beyond a certain point, the significance of a few points becomes so huge, any accuracy or meaning in testing becomes non-existent. My personal feeling is that an IQ of 160 is basically as smart as people get- there doesn't seem to be much difference at that point in how "smart" people are, that they are all about equally smart...

By the time you get into the alleged IQs of 180+, you'd be talking about not only a meaningless notion, but a rarity of occurence that changes an order of magnitude for every point of IQ. Assuming there ever was a "smartest person who ever lived", they'd have had an estimated IQ of 210 by definition (but what, do we quibble over whether Einstein was smarter than Newton? Or Goethe over JS Mill?). In Excel, you can use the NORMDIST function to figure out exact percentiles- the Excel help file has the exact formula written out- but safe to say it refused to calculate beyond 8 SD, or 1 in a quadrillion; after that, it started rounding to 1, making a score of 228 or 250 a virtual mathematical impossibility in a world population of only 6 billion... :)
posted by hincandenza at 1:31 PM on July 23, 2001



Did anyone else notice that while he was heading up the cryogenics firm, his girlfriend's name was Thaw?
posted by topless at 1:14 PM on July 24, 2001


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