Curse of the High IQ: Fact of life or just Wishful thinking?

Great Debates
83

Wait: isn’t the OP just saying “hey, if you are an outlier in some way, you are more likely to experience challenges with fitting in with non-outliers – and that is regardless if you are an outlier in one direction vs. another.”

So yeah, IQ is imperfect, at best, for predicting success, or as a true measure of applicable smarts, etc. But it is very likely that folks who score very high AND very low on IQ tests are likely be outliers in some way. The OP has nothing to do with the efficacy of the IQ as a score per se.

I would assume this to be true of anyone with an Outlier Capability. If you are far MORE artistic, focused on leadership - or have far LESS than average of those types of capabilities, you will have challenges, too.

I mean - this makes sense, right? Outliers can struggle to conform with norms. So it goes.

84

This is my thinking too. But it’s hard for me to imagine that an outlier athlete (on the upper extreme) would have a whole lot of challenges.

85

In this country, we tend to have a belief that success is a matter of “heart”, “desire”, “moxy”,“attitude” or plain old “hard work”. We discount the advantages of raw ability, natural talent and innate aptitude. It’s pretty clear why. It’s much more palatable to believe that we can all be Olympic athletes or astronauts or CEOs if only we had will and the right set of circumstances rather than have it be pre-ordained by the skills and abilities we were born with. And sometimes that is true.

But, IMHO, “becoming valedictorian with an IQ of 85” (assuming it’s true) understates the reality of having a low IQ. IQ85 might become valedictorian by working 3x as hard as IQ130. But that also means IQ85 doesn’t have time to pursue extracurricular activities, sports, a social life and other activities that make him a more well rounded and successful person.

In the working world (at least the one I work in), you often don’t have time to “work harder than everyone else”. You are often given more work than most people can handle and you have to complete it in a timely manner. Sure, someone who is less intelligent can probably still do the same work. But it takes them longer and they will make more mistakes.

It’s like the story Rudy. Most people take away a message of “if you work hard enough and believe in yourself, you can achieve your goals.” I take away a message of “if you focus all your attention on achieving a goal you have no aptitude or ability for, with enough hard work someone may throw you a bone out of pity to contribute in an absolutely meaningless way.”

86

Thank you for the reference on differences even within the highest percentile. That was interesting.

I thought the point about-120-doesn’t-matter was either in Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns or the update in 2012, but can’t find it there.

At any rate, an excellent perspective on the interaction of genes and environment on IQ comes from this paper:

Apologies - I can’t find a PDF of the full text.

87

I have heard enough stories where superior athletes are treated like meat, used up and tossed away that I have no trouble seeing them treated differently. Same with people who are Outlier Attractive. It presents its own troubles and risks of being taken advantage of.

88

I kinda disagree with this. Yeah, in one breath we’ll tell a kid that he can be whatever he wants to be as long as he puts his mind to it. But in the very next breath, we do actually worship true genius–placing the Albert Einsteins, Thomas Edisons, Steve Jobs, and Michael Jordans up on a pedestal.

I think it questions just how much IQ matters when an individual has other stuff going for them. Which is not the same thing as saying IQ doesn’t matter.

True. Everything has a trade-off. I’m guessing that’s probably why IQ130s have an easier go at it than IQ85s and IQ160s. The IQ85 guy has to work harder than his peers to just stay in their wake. But IQ160 person has to work harder to keep sane. Loneliness, boredom, frustration, alienation, anxieties–I’d expect the super smart person to deal with these emotions much more intensely than someone who doesn’t even know what existential angst is.

I work in government, where it isn’t uncommon for people to be bogged down with assignments since we don’t have to meet very many hard-and-fast deadlines. I’ve got a coworker (who is teh gifted according to him, but whatever) who works on the weekends quite frequently so he can catch up on stuff. And even that isn’t enough. For someone who tends to work rather swiftly (perhaps because I’m not a technophobe, but again, whatever), I find his plodding nature very frustrating. But it doesn’t matter in the long run. He has found a career where slowness is not a liability, though incompetence would be.

A guy with an IQ85 would be handicapped in a field like yours. But in government, he would do fine. I know that sounds like I’m disparaging government, but I’m not.

If I had a kid with an IQ85 and he told me he wanted to be a doctor, I wouldn’t try to dissuade him. I’d be honest with him and let him know that it would require a lot of hard work and fortitude, and that he’d have to develop a hard skin. I wouldn’t tell him that if he worked hard enough, he’d definitely become a doctor. But I wouldn’t tell him not to bother trying either. I’ve always believed that if you aim high but you fail, chances are you will at least land on a spot that was higher than where you started.

89

I think the equivalent for outlier high IQ people would be investment bankers, lawyers, management consultants and Silicon Valley tech workers. The environment for these firms is such that they look for the “best and brightest” from top schools and then make them work 100 hours a week “paying their dues” in hopes of a big pay-day in 5-10 years. But the high turnover rate due to burnout and “up or out” policies typically means few of these hires will ultimately reach the point of getting those massive paydays.

90

I have no idea what my IQ is, but would not be surprised if it was non-exceptional. Why? It’s not like I suck at test taking. Learning has pretty much always come easy for me. I’ve pretty much always succeeded in difficult academic environments as well, and I’m at the top of the pack at work. But I don’t assume my IQ is higher than my peers.

One reason is because I’m very big picture in how I view things. Details that many smart people seize upon and often get hung up on for hours, I either triage as possibly important but non-urgent (or unimportant and non urgent) or I’m fairly blind to. Sometimes this is bad (like when I leave typos in coverletters) but most of the time this orientation has helped me succeed. I process things quicker than others in my team because I know what really matters to the organization and what doesn’t. I initiate projects that are likely to lead to recognition, because I can see beyond my immediate interests. My decisions are rarely challenged by my superiors because I can connect dots that my very bright colleagues often fail to connect. Intelligence has definitely factored into my success (as has luck), but more than that is my ability to see the implications of my actions on the larger system and accomodate accordingly.

I do think this explains why the correlation between IQ and success starts to break down at a certain point. It’s a rare individual who is both detail-oriented and big picture. Intelligence is found in both, but those with high IQs are probably more inclined to be holding lots of noisy data in their head. This noise could make them less suited for jobs that require decisive thinking and long range planning.

91

cite?

92

While mowing my grass a few minutes ago, it occurred to me that the value of being innately smart–however you want to define this–is going to continue to decline as technology evolves. We’ve all got an auxillary brain in the form of smartphones and/or tablets that we carry around with us at all times of the day. Someone with an IQ of 85 might be slow compared to an IQ 130, but computers level the playing field to a certain extent. Anyone can be “smart” nowadays as long as they know what search terms to put into google and know how to use spell and grammar check.

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.

93

I can’t really agree with the notion that “high” intelligence quotient necessarily implies a “gift”. The tests are merely indicators of one’s mental acuity, an ability grasp a wider range of intellectual subject matter and perhaps that thus can be accomplished in a lesser time than it might take those lower down on the scale. I personally cannot attest to having any “talent” per se (which I am aware of), but I repeatedly score 160~170 on a Mensa approved I.Q. testing PC program and similarly on other tests (*the purely pattern recognition base tests vary and they also use different numerical scales, so it’s difficult to compare differing tests). Sure, I think if I’d been pouched at a tender age and had whatever skills I have laying dormant parleyed into something specific, I might have develop a talent for that. But that could be said of almost anyone and I do not feel as though a high - “high” clearly being a relative definition; I almost feel uncomfortable using such a term and only do so because it was quoted by the OP - IQ denotes one as being gifted in any particular way.
(NB: 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…? :confused:)

Moreover, gifted people usually span ‘eccentric’ (Einstein) to ‘savants’, often of the ‘idiot’ variety: a U.K. man has 20,000 piano compositions memorised and can play them, but cannot dress himself – an example I cite taken from a pertinent documentary I caught recently. Then you have those who aren’t necessarily ‘handicapped’ in any obvious way and display one or more very particular talents: There is a Chinese program entitled The Brain: China which has people accomplishing mind-boggling tasks – e.g., walls of indiscernible murals of Rubik’s Cubes, each with (guessing) 1000 cubes (three, approx. 3m x 3m walls) > fellow is given a minute to ‘memorise’ the order > he’s turned away from the boards while a single square (not entire cube, just a single coloured square) is changed somewhere on the boards > he is then given a minute to find the change > finds the correct one almost immediately…! :eek:

So, I think I’m living proof that a “high” IQ (relative to whatever the mean is) does not always come entrained with a unique talent or talents. 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.

However, I do concede that those who might weigh in closer to the 100 mark, can grate the patience of those of a higher IQ and so you do tend to find yourself ‘leaving your brain at the door’ when in social situations with such people; not enjoying the same entertainment they do; having a better / more detailed grasp of concepts; fashioning your opinions based on a wider gamut of information et al.. I think the most famous of all fairy tale books elucidates the ironical nature of “intelligence” best:

‘For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.’
(Ecclesiastes 1:18)

94

I don’t know if that’s true. Heck, you could make precisely the opposite argument… 40 years ago, someone with a sky high IQ was taking the same CS course as someone with a normal IQ, but the fact that they both had to waste 85% of their time dicking around with punch cards, which is basically just manual labor, gave the high IQ guy less time to actually really shine.

Similarly, google now gives us instant access to every fact that exists. Who can take better advantage of that, a person of normal intellect or someone who is better at making connections between seemingly disparate data points?
Both of those arguments might be total BS. But it’s hard to know what effect a change in technology or tools will have without actually measuring it.

95

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.

96

True. The ability to run punch cards through a reader is more of a testament to one’s patience and attention span than their intelligence.

Or is it?

I mean, I can’t imagine that Einstein would have been successful if he couldn’t endure some tedium. And how many hours did Galileo have to spend behind his telescope? It seems to me true genius requires having such a laser sharp focus on a particular problem that the word “tedious” doesn’t exist to them like it does for the “normals”.

I imagine that if I had to run a stack of cards at three o’clock in the morning for the fifth time, I’d be constantly thinking, “What the hell am I doing?! I really don’t care if setae length on nematodes varies with light and the fungal content of their diet. This is stupid. Science is stupid. Nematodes are stupid. I’m stupid. Kill me now.”

Whereas a genius would have a much more interesting question than mine and thus would care a whole lot more about finding the answer. Maybe they would only have to rerun their cards once, because they would have more motivation to get them right in the first place.

Computers have made it a whole lot easier for schlubs (like me) to be scientists. All of my older colleagues took classes in Fortran and C+ when they were in grad school. But I didn’t have to when I was in school because the programs I had at my disposal all had a nifty GUIs. And today, if you want to do something beyond the GUIs, you can just go to Google and copy-and-paste someone else’s script. And look like a genius, despite having a non-genius IQ. This probably seems like cheating to someone who had to do it the “hard” way.

97

We worship them, but we also tell people they can be just like them so long as they work hard, study, train, eat the right breakfast cereal, do whatever trick some stupid click-bait site tells them. Do you ever read those “So and so survey these top Google execs to find out what made them successful” stories?

No one ever says you can be like Michael Jordan if you just try these secret tips. And yet we act as if the difference between Steve Jobs and Simple Jack is just a couple of mnemonic devices.

Perhaps. My point was simply that without the underlying mental horsepower, in some fields you will simply be unable to keep up with the work load. In fact, some fields are designed to weed those people out.

Well sure. I’m a management consultant. We are paid to be “hired brains”. Not just brains, but we have to have the social skills to go into a completely unfamiliar environment and get a bunch of powerful strangers to believe we know what the hell we are talking about. Our entire hiring process is designed to weed out people who aren’t smart, creative problem solvers.

But the companies and government agencies we consult for are pretty much like you describe. The people don’t need to be as smart because they don’t need to come up with creative solutions to complex problems. They need to follow their narrow job description as accurately as possible.

Heck, that was an issue for me when I briefly left consulting to go work at a Fortune 500 company in management. Giving someone in corporate a week to do a task that should take one of my consulting associates an hour was “not giving people enough time to do their job”. Success in that environment is not based on creativity or intelligence. It’s basically just sitting in a cubicle for decades weathering any layoffs and getting your mandatory promotion every few years.

98

Yeppers. That’s one of the reasons I like working where I work - lots of people who are roughly as smart as I am, and some who are clearly smarter than I am, in the terms that our corner of the world views such things.

Same thing about the Dope, too. There’s a reason I’ve been hanging around this zoo for 17 years. People here are smart and quick and widely knowledgeable, and funny as all get out. Can’t beat that for a crowd to hang out with.

99

Emotional intelligence is a far more accurate predictor of success than raw IQ. Business is driven by relationships and friends do business with friends. People with high IQs typically have difficulty relating to the the regular folk (like me) because they are thinking on a totally different plane most of the time.

100

Other than membership in organizations like Mensa, are there any direct benefits you can get by having a high score on an IQ test? E.g. are there schools that admit students solely (or at least primarily) on the basis of high IQ? Are there companies that hire people based on their IQ and not on degrees or years of experience? Any countries where you can get a work visa on the basis of high IQ?

It seems that there could be value in doing something like that. Since IQ supposedly represents learning potential and ability to make sense of a confusing world, I could understand a decision to hire an inexperienced person with an IQ of 120 as opposed to an experienced one with an IQ of 100 as the high IQ person is likely to learn the material quickly and eventually leave their 100 IQ rival in the dust.

101

ProDentite writes:

> Emotional intelligence is a far more accurate predictor of success than raw IQ.

This isn’t clear at all. I tried to find some websites that gave some references to scientific articles about this subject, and I couldn’t find anything definite one way or another. There are papers claiming one is more important and papers claiming that the other is more important. I think the best one can say is that they are both important to success.

robert_columbia writes:

> Other than membership in organizations like Mensa, are there any direct benefits
> you can get by having a high score on an IQ test?

Basically, no. There may be some selective elementary schools that administer I.Q. tests to applicants, but they presumably have additional requirements. Almost certainly no university selects its students on the basis of an I.Q. test. No countries hands out visas on the basis of I.Q. It’s doubtful that any company hires on the basis of an I.Q. test. Only organizations like Mensa use I.Q. tests to select its members.

102

You aren’t seriously suggesting intellect has no impact on outcome. I grow up dirt poor in a non optimal and one may say quite often dysfunctional household. We were in the bottom 5% socio-econonomically. Now the wife and I are in the top 1-2%. The main reason I finished high school and was able to get college degrees was due to higher than average intellect and innate test taking ability.