# Curse of the High IQ: Fact of life or just Wishful thinking? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 10, 2016, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/curse-of-the-high-iq-fact-of-life-or-just-wishful-thinking/748579 "2016-03-10T20:27:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2016, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/curse-of-the-high-iq-fact-of-life-or-just-wishful-thinking/748579/103 "2016-03-21T04:30:05Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > iLemming writes: > > \> Did not the actors Jodie Foster and Dolph Lundgren, and even the infamous > \> ‘buffoon president’, George W. Bush, sport IQ’s around the 160 mark…? > > Do you have evidence for any of those claims? Yes, Foster and Lundgren are pretty smart. Foster graduated from Yale with a magna cum laude degree, but there’s no publicly available evidence that I know of that her I.Q. is 160. Dolph Lundgren got a master’s in chemical engineering and was about to start on a Ph.D. in that subject at MIT when he quit to become an actor, but there is also no publicly available evidence that his I.Q. is 160. People can get those degrees without having I.Q.'s of 160. If you have some real evidence that those two were given I.Q. tests in school that showed they have I.Q.'s of 160, then you broke into the schools and stole private information, so you’re under arrest. > > If you had said that those two had I.Q.'s of at least, say, 140, I might believe you. But 160 is far above what’s required for those fields. By definition, only one person in about 31,000 has an I.Q. of 160 or higher. More precisely, 160 is four standard deviations above average. Average is a 100 I.Q., and each standard deviation is 15 points of I.Q. That’s the definition of I.Q. I.Q. is not measured by a yardstick, where it’s possible that the average height of people might be increasing or decreasing over time. Each time a new I.Q. test is written, it is normed by giving it to, say, 100,000 people. The score on that test that (approximately) just three people get is the one that defines who has an I.Q. of 160 or above. It’s essentially impossible to create an I.Q. test that measures an I.Q. above 160 because that would require norming the test on more than 100,000 people, and it’s too hard to give an I.Q. test to that many people. So if you read in the news that someone has an I.Q. above 160, you’re reading nonsense. > > George Bush graduated from Yale and from Harvard Business School. It doesn’t take an I.Q. of 160 to do that. If you had claimed that he must have an I.Q. of at least 130, I might believe you. If you’re claiming that you know that he scored 160 on an I.Q. test, you must have broken into his school and you’re under arrest. > > \> I believe it comes down to whether one has honed their abilities and focused them > \> from an early age – a 200-IQ potential which is not trained or exposed to that > \> which they could otherwise master, will still be a 200-IQ dullard. > > Do you know how rare a 200 I.Q. is, even theoretically? Even if it were possible to give every human being who has ever lived (about 100 billion of them) an I.Q. test, a 200 I.Q. is, by definition, the highest I.Q. that could assigned, and only one person could have that I.Q. A 200 on an I.Q. test is six and two-thirds standard deviations above average (since 200 is 6 and 2/3 times 15 above 100) by definition. Six and two-thirds standard deviations is just about one in 100 billion. Silly question but isn’t that only true if human intelligence fits a normal distribution? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2016, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/curse-of-the-high-iq-fact-of-life-or-just-wishful-thinking/748579/104 "2016-03-21T04:36:48Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > He claims he took it multiple times and got the same score. > > The valedictorian thing doesn’t strike me as unbelievable given the amount of variation in public school quality and the way some schools choose valedictorians (I’ve heard of schools having five or six valedictorians). One of the schools in my district has 30 or more. Let’s just say lots of tiger moms and intense pressure. One valedictorian admitted that she cheated, and said most of her friends did also. Created a giant uproar (though probably not better conditions.) But we have spent a lot of time discussing a somewhat suspect case. > [@](#): > > I don’t think test practicing is “cheating”, though. Or at least it is no more cheating than any of the other things that parents do to prepare their kids for the rat race, like teaching their two-year-olds how to read. > > Even if it is cheating, I really can’t blame the parents for doing this to their kids. I find it eye-rolly, but I still can’t blame parents for being afraid about what will happen if they kids don’t get labeled “gifted”. Parents generally want the best for their kids, and the gifted do tend to get first dibs at the good stuff. Studying for the SATs etc. I see. But if an IQ test is an accurate measure of intelligence, studying should not help, and if it results in a significant mislabeling, it might hurt. The halo effect exists for sure, but a kid not as smart as advertised by a significant amount is either going to wind up in a job where the expectations are going to cause stress or be labeled as not living up to his or her inherent talents. > [@](#): > > I once got a score on the GRE that was as impressive as an IQ of 85 because I made the mistake of skipping breakfast and getting lost on the way to the test center (which meant I was very anxious and upset). The score was bad, but at the time I thought it accurately reflected my abilities because I hadn’t done well on the SAT either. So I guess I thought I was a dumb person masquerading as a smart person and the jig was finally up. But I took it again a month later, without the tears streaking down my face, and I did a whole lot better. > > So I guess that’s why I don’t put a whole lot of stock in test scores. I put some stock in them. But I don’t think they represent a fixed quantity. I think I’ve had nightmares that sounded like that. 😃 And it is why ETS gives all high school students two shots at least. And only count the best. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2016, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/curse-of-the-high-iq-fact-of-life-or-just-wishful-thinking/748579/105 "2016-03-21T04:54:50Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > The skills needed to pursue an advanced science degree today are nothing like the skills needed 20-30 years ago. Would I have had the patience to run a program using punch cards? I really don’t know. I think I would have had the ability, but the prospect of feeding punch cards into the reader at three in the morning–only to have to do it all over again the next night because I screwed something up–might have seemed too daunting to me given the amount of subdued passion I had for my research topic. Today, I can write an R script in five minutes after a brief consultation with Google and have my results section written by dinner time. What required a genius intellect in 1974 can be easily accomplished by an average person in 2016. I did feed my programs in by punch card 45 years ago. It is not all that different from typing on a terminal, except that you have to write things out in advance. The big difference is that you had to wait hours, not seconds, for a response, and that was true even when I was able to edit a file to submit to a batch run. On the other hand back then you checked what you were submitting a lot more because the cost of a mistake was so great. I work with lots of smart people doing complicated things who can’t program worth a damn even though they have had classes and even though it would be beneficial to them. It is not a tool they feel comfortable using. Google does not make intelligence and knowledge unnecessary. My wife makes a good bit of money writing on-line encyclopedia entries using sources open to anyone. But most people wouldn’t understand the sites or see what is important. It is just like writing - being able to publish an e-book does not make you a good writer. ---
**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:** [March 21, 2016, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/curse-of-the-high-iq-fact-of-life-or-just-wishful-thinking/748579/106 "2016-03-21T05:06:05Z")
octopus writes: \> Silly question but isn’t that only true if human intelligence fits a normal \> distribution? Whether human intelligence “really” fits a normal distribution (in any sense of “really”) is irrelevant. All that’s relevant to the norming of the raw scores from an I.Q. test is whether it’s possible to rank the scores of everyone who took the test on a linear scale. Since the raw scores are the numbers of questions correctly answered, they can be ranked linearly. If there should be too much bunching up of raw scores at some place on the curve, the test is rewritten to fix that. Fitting something to a normal curve, regardless of whether that something “really” does match a normal curve, is pretty common. There has been some discussion as to whether intelligence “really” fits a normal curve and what that means: > **[Does human intelligence really follow a normal distribution?](https://www.quora.com/Does-human-intelligence-really-follow-a-normal-distribution)** > > Answer (1 of 7): The answer is that we don’t know. Some areas of human endeavour follow a power law distribution and it is possible that human intelligence does, too. There’s an interesting and highly credible article which analyzes different human... > **[Does IQ in people follow a normal distribution?](https://www.quora.com/Does-IQ-in-people-follow-a-normal-distribution)** > > Answer (1 of 6): Not unless you select a benign sample of people, or a really large sample. > > When one tests normal school children, or college applicants, or even healthy inductees into the armed forces, these are not random samples in any sense of... [http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/normalcurve.htm](http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/normalcurve.htm) [http://www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2012/article/view/159](http://www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2012/article/view/159) ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2016, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/curse-of-the-high-iq-fact-of-life-or-just-wishful-thinking/748579/107 "2016-03-21T05:32:25Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > octopus writes: > > \> Silly question but isn’t that only true if human intelligence fits a normal > \> distribution? > > Whether human intelligence “really” fits a normal distribution (in any sense of “really”) is irrelevant. All that’s relevant to the norming of the raw scores from an I.Q. test is whether it’s possible to rank the scores of everyone who took the test on a linear scale. Since the raw scores are the numbers of questions correctly answered, they can be ranked linearly. If there should be too much bunching up of raw scores at some place on the curve, the test is rewritten to fix that. Fitting something to a normal curve, regardless of whether that something “really” does match a normal curve, is pretty common. There has been some discussion as to whether intelligence “really” fits a normal curve and what that means: > > [https://www.quora.com/Does-human-intelligence-really-follow-a-normal-distribution](https://www.quora.com/Does-human-intelligence-really-follow-a-normal-distribution) > > [https://www.quora.com/Does-IQ-in-people-follow-a-normal-distribution](https://www.quora.com/Does-IQ-in-people-follow-a-normal-distribution) > > [http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/normalcurve.htm](http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/normalcurve.htm) > > [http://www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2012/article/view/159](http://www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2012/article/view/159) Thank you for the explanation. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/curse-of-the-high-iq-fact-of-life-or-just-wishful-thinking/748579.md?page=5)