Sports stars and musicians will come up a lot. There have been numerous pro athletes who were illiterate, some of them even had college degrees. Not necessarily dumb because of being uneducated, but some of them definitely were sub par. The same with musicians and some other artists. Was it Brittany Spears wasn’t clear about whether tuna was a fish or a chicken? And several people considered idiot-savants were musicians. Some of these are people who would not simply score low on IQ tests for lack of effort or because their brains have been baked with drugs, they’d be truly dumb, but still very high performing in other ways.
Enter “40”, and it says “Give me a beat”
National Lampoon ran a memorable article on boxing in the early 1980s which featured a parody of those computer-simulated boxing matches that were popular a few decades earlier: a computer simulation to determine the all-time smartest heavyweight champion. Due to the number of contestants being an odd number, Leon Spinks was matched in the first round against the Norelco “Blender with a Brain”. He lost, because the blender had four functions (chop, slice, dice, puree) to Spinks’ three (eat, sleep, take cocaine).
I remember that, my wife and I still joke about people who would lose to the ‘blender with a brain’.
Almost certainly not true. Despite being 97 years old, General Yeager maintains an active Twitter account which appears to be completely coherent. How many of us would be able to pull that off if we lived to be that age?
https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author
Yeager was not considered to be an astronaut because he lacked a college degree. That’s a requirement even today and they pretty much only hire astronauts now with a MS or MD or PhD.
That explains why he was so contemptuous of the astronauts. “They will be sitting in monkey poop.”
Quite a few people who apparently through their own efforts have attained to a seat in Congress, which does not even seem possible considering how blatantly ignorant and stupid they are.
Muhammed Ali supposedly had an IQ of 78 according to an Army test.
Another thread recently mentioned that war hero Audie Murphy may or may not have had low intelligence, but was certainly only poorly educated.
Back off, man. Yogi never said half the things he said.
Kate Smith, emblematic of the special post-9/11 relationship between God and the USA, could not read or write.
That’s the first I’ve heard this, and I can’t find anything online about it. Could you elaborate?
This was a widely stated belief during her lifetime, when fact checking was problematic. Like you, I could find nothing to verify it, but also nothing about her formal schooling that would dispel it. Many people of her generation had formal schooling but were not functionally literate, including those with dyslexia, who would be regarded as illiterate.
I had a close adult friend who was dyslexic, she succeeded in earning a hair-dressing certificate by having her classmates read the texts to her, but had no meaningful capacity to read and write.
England’s King Henry VI was crowned when he was only nine month old, and his father, Henry V, died. England was ruled by a series of regents when Henry VI was a child. He tried to take over as an adult, but screwed up things left and right. He is variously described as “very shy,” “feeble-minded,” and later “insane.”
He seems to have been educable, and was literate, and I guess, was not in any way “successful” by the OP’s definition, since he was king because he was born a crown prince.
I have always wondered if he had a form of autism, with good language, but high anxiety levels, exacerbated by the pressure he was under, and it led to increasingly frequent autistic meltdowns.
Autistic people don’t have low IQs, albeit, on standardized tests, many of them test low, because the tests are normalized on non-autistic people. If they are retested individually by people who know how to test autistic people, they suddenly become normal, or even bright.
Just an interesting case I thought was worth mentioning.
Henry VI undoubtedly suffered from mental illness from about age 30. This may have come from his maternal grandfather Charles VI of France (who became seriously mentally ill) because some of the symptoms were similar.
However, Henry VI was certainly not unintelligent. He was unsuited to be a king - people at the time said he was more suited to be a monk - but he spoke and wrote in fluent English, French, and Latin, and nobody ever claimed there was ever any problem with his education.
There are a number of documents by Henry VI relating to his foundation of Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. He took an active personal interest in both, and laid out in detail how they should be organised and run, and how King’s College Chapel should be built. It was all reasonable and sensible, and was carried out to a large extent, long after his death. You might argue that others drafted all this in his name, but there is no evidence of that. There is clear and deep concern throughout for the well-being of the scholars, choristers, fellows and staff at his foundations, both physical and spiritual.
He is still highly respected at both institutions.
A prayer written by Henry VI is regularly sung to this day, both at Eton, and in the Chapel of King’s College:
*Domine Jesu Christe, qui me creasti, redemisti, et preordinasti ad hoc quod sum, tu scis quæ de me facere vis. Fac de me secundum voluntatem tuam cum misericordia. Amen. *
Lord Jesus Christ, who created and redeemed me and preordained me to be what I now am, you know what you want to do with me. Do with me according to your will, with mercy. Amen.
That would be Jessica Simpson:
I suspect she comes close to qualified.
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Her sister got a PhD when she was in her 70s.
While that is supposedly true according to his own words, I know someone who knew him quite “well” as in alone time and the man was definitely intelligent.
I don’t know how well a dyslexic country boy in the 1950’s or 1960’s would be expected to do on an IQ test, but I wouldn’t think they would be scoring very high.
^^I remember Howard Cosell talking about Ali, and I remember him saying in regards to his literacy, “Still barely able to read and write his own name.” I know Cosell and Ali had an adversarial schtick when they were together, but he seemed to be saying this on the level. I’ve never seen or heard anything that corroborated this. Ali’s family was more or less middle class. And Thomas Hauser, who wrote the defining book on Ali, doesn’t mention Ali’s literacy, but does say that his paternal grandparents could read and write.