# Chris Langan - fact or fiction? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 16, 2012, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862 "2012-10-16T08:22:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Standarduser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@Standarduser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Standarduser)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/1 "2012-10-16T08:22:13Z")
Its said on Outliers that “he could match jimi hendrix playing lick by lick by the age of fifteen” which sounds to me like a load of crap. I mean - just the physical endurance thats required to play electric guitar correctly would take him a couple of months - physical endurance has nothing to do with IQ! If he was so great at guitar - why wouldnt he just preform for money, considering he was broke as hell? If he read so much philosophy, why he was such a wuss ifront of his teachers? Shouldnt philosophy help you build character? Did he even demonstarte all these abilities? The jimi hendrix licks, the drawing ability etc? ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 8:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/2 "2012-10-16T08:57:06Z")
Don’t know the answer, but I wouldn’t rely on Outliers as a source of information. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/3 "2012-10-16T10:47:50Z")
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Langan are mentioned in several previous SDMB threads: > **[Malcolm Gladwell: Fact or Fiction?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=494343)** > > In the interest of full disclosure: I read “The Tipping Point” when it first came out, but don’t remember much. I haven’t read “Blink”. I haven’t read “Outliers”, but I have read a few things about it. In it, Gladwell argues that the reason Asian... > **[Chris Langan, the Smartest Man in America = Crackpot?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=634868)** > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher\_Langan Interview: Part 1: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ak5Lr3qkW0 Part 2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD3sVYZgkRA Part 3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA0gjyXG5O0 This guy was featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”... There’s a little bit of discussion of Chris Langan in this thread, but it’s mixed together with much else: > **[Is There a God?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=630218)** > > Article here. While the cosmological argument is a good start, it’s been given a savaging from Kant and Russell (here for example). Not to mention that the idea that the idea that there could be an infinite chain of causes being an affront to logic... Would it be sufficient to say that discovering the truth about Chris Langan is a very complicated matter, and we’re unlikely to do it in this thread? Chris Langan would make an interesting subject for a long book requiring lots of detailed investigation. Why don’t you write that book? ---
**Author:** ![iamnotbatman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/858c86/32.png) [@iamnotbatman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamnotbatman)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/4 "2012-10-16T11:43:28Z")
From one of those threads, there were [links](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14575060&postcount=76) to a message board where Chris is caught in the act of using meaningless complex strings of big words in an attempt to sound smart. Take it for what its worth, but it’s worth a read for a good laugh. My take: he has a fairly high IQ and uses it to troll people, and other than being successful in that, he is not very remarkable. ---
**Author:** ![Surreal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eada6e/32.png) [@Surreal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Surreal)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/5 "2012-10-16T14:51:27Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Don’t know the answer, but I wouldn’t rely on Outliers as a source of information. I wouldn’t consider anything written by Gladwell to be reliable source of information. Steven Pinker explains why here: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?pagewanted=all](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?pagewanted=all) > [@](#): > > An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Surreal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eada6e/32.png) [@Surreal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Surreal)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/6 "2012-10-16T15:11:37Z")
Here’s another review of Gladwell’s pseudointellectual _Outliers_: > **[Mister Lucky](https://newrepublic.com/article/63687/mister-lucky)** > > Malcolm Gladwell's fairy tales. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/7 "2012-10-16T15:53:47Z")
The characteristics that define success rarely coincide directly with intelligence, and probably not with other talents. (how else do you explain Donald Trump? Keanu Reeves? Many other “successes”?) the addage that success is 90% prespiration is probably true, and luck is in there somewhere. Colonel Sanders embarked on his career at 65, and so on. The only really true thing I got from Gladwell was that the 10,000 hour rule has a lot of validity, but IMHO it is not a fast rule. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/8 "2012-10-16T18:27:54Z")
What does the book say about him playing like Hendrix? I mean, an average 15 year old could, with someone teaching him, learn to play a few Hendrix licks. A very exceptionally talented 15 year old who’d grown up listening to Hendrix and spent wayy too much time playing guitar could probably learn to imitate Hendrix well enough that for 30 second stretches it would be hard to tell him apart from an unreleased Hendrix recording (which is really the only non-subjective test I can imagine). But Wikipedia says Langan was born in 1952, and Hendrix’s first single was released in 1966 (but didn’t chart in the U.S.), while his first album was not released until May, 1967. Unless Langan was hanging out in bars in NYC or London, he couldn’t even of heard Hendrix until he was 15. I don’t know, but I’m smelling the back end of a male cow here. ---
**Author:** ![Nazarene](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c57346/32.png) [@Nazarene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nazarene)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/9 "2012-10-16T18:38:00Z")
IQ does not give you finger strength or calluses or muscular memory. This sounds like a load of crap to me. Eddie Van Halen - Great guitar player. One of the best ever. You see him talk in interviews and he’s dumb as a bag of hammers. Musicianship is not just an intellectual understanding of music. This guy sounds like a con artist. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/10 "2012-10-16T19:42:32Z")
Any independent documentation that he got a perfect SAT? How many people do? IMHO many of thoses sort of tests (a) suffer from takers’ overanalysis of the question - if you think too hard, you’ll get it wrong and (b) the answers are not really what you think they are. They are not put together by the same intellectual level as some of the takers. ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2012, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chris-langan-fact-or-fiction/637862/11 "2012-10-16T20:24:40Z")
I did know a guy who got 820 on his SAT math score, when 800 was the maximum. Evidently they gave you the extra 20 if you also answered all the test control questions correctly too (the questions they add to test themselves, or to try out before the next version). I didn’t believe him, and he showed me the results. It looked just like mine, only with a higher number. It would have been hard to forge, especially at the time. The guy was really smart, too, but couldn’t think outside the box much. One data point. Make of it what you will. I do believe it’s possible to be too smart for the test, and get answers wrong because you undstand the questions better than those who created them. Luckily, that’s not my problem!