But why should that be? If you're a scientist, you are dependent on getting funding to do experiments, and the experiment showing something interesting. Neither of these things is very connected to intelligence, beyond that low IQ people will not be likely to get to the start line.

If you're an entrepreneur, you also have to do a bunch of things that are more social than smarts. Basically your life is going around meeting people and getting them to either invest or build something or buy something. Is it useful to be smart? Sure. But it isn't as useful as, say, having the right connections from school, or a family with a sensible budget so you can concentrate on building rather than finding food.

Pretty much the only area where being super smart works is pure maths, and even there you really want to be born in the parts of the world where the economy can support a young person on that path.

Then there's the transmission to suit your engine. A super smart person still needs to be mature enough to consume the intellectual royal jelly that develops them towards where they will make the greatest contribution. You won't just know what to do just because you're smart, you need to be shown what the interesting problems are. You need to have motivation, and motivation is often what you actually see when you meet someone impressive.

The way I think of it, the smart and useful people are plenty. Courses are taught so that universities can get a sensible number of people through some amount of content. Being smarter than your average student at a prestigious college is nice, but it mostly buys you some free time. Being at the cutoff is terribly stressful, but that guy is still pretty accomplished and useful for most things that we consider elite.

It’s a sonnet of sorts about the curse of intelligence in an increasingly insane world, a reminder that brilliant people can be absolute monsters, and that the only person who can bring you contentment in life is yourself.

Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers.

What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-smartest-man-predicts-b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong

Is that true? How is that even possible? Like, biologically.

Paul Erdős is the only outsider intellectual on that list, IMO.

(Also note that ő and ö are different!)

This is my favorite video mocking Langan, made by someone smarter than him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57IN9sBhYyg

it's hard for me to not reject the article already for it's click bait headline...

ps: 170 is 4.666 std dev, about 10^-6. that's very rare, hard to measure but at least real.

Or to quote the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking: "People who boast about their IQ are losers".

A lot of people are smart, but don't get much brilliant work done. Even more people do a lot of work, but aren't very smart about it.

To be a genius with important contributions, you need to have both the brains and the work ethic.

I often think about exposure to music, and the fact that Einstein liked to play around on his violin. My suspicion is that this was more than just a hobby – and that these context switches, and exposure to different types of creative thought, all played into his discoveries.

It correlates to 7.3 sigma, meanwhile 7-sigma event has a probability of approximately 1 in 390 billion. We only have 8 billion humans on Earth.

These absurd claims about IQ is almost evidence that the claimant are nowhere close. For starters, any IQ tests are not going to be normalized to that range because it is impossible to normalize to that range as there are 0 realistic samples.

It's not just that IQ allows you to succeed. It allows you to navigate the modern world. I see people having trouble with pointers, simple abstractions, basic diagrams, or statistics and wonder: what am I missing? And I'm no von Neumann to not miss anything.

I think wisdom and peace is more valuable than raw IQ and I think Zhiyu and Ung-yong and even Langan realized this, wanted nothing to do with "The Machine", and chose their life trajectories accordingly.

The other thing that’s occurred to me lately is how some “impressive” resumes and experience just won’t be possible about nation state level backing. So yeah, if you’re going to talk about games, be aware that there’s always more than one at play.

It seems like 210 IQ has proven to be plenty for him, although measurement of his IQ and intense childhood pressure may not have been beneficial to him.

Does "IQ" measure something particularly useful or meaningful?

(I think, at best, it's a very incomplete measure of something quite vague and ill-defined.)

I.e. the idea that IQ is some innate fixed quality has evidence against it. It seems obvious that this is the case, given that people get their children tutors so they can do better at IQ tests to get into schools...

[1] https://www.psypost.org/major-iq-differences-in-identical-tw...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...

But I think it's much more likely that intelligence itself is just a bit overrated amongst "intellectual" / white collar types, as in, people that define their identity and self-worth by how smart they are, or think they are.

At the end of the day, being disciplined, sociable, focused, or even just having a narrow set of interests is probably more of a recipe for success than mere raw intelligence. And ironically I think there are a lot of people that would be more successful – in careers, personal relationships, etc. – if they were a little bit less intelligent.

But talking about intelligence always brings visceral reactions. While we readily admit that someone can be stronger, or taller, the need to somehow negate that people can be genuinely smarter is somehow evil.

Also I disagree with comments saying we don’t have a good definition of intelligence. We have several but to me the most important is to plan ahead, and then be able to successfully improvise when the plan goes wrong.

The modern world makes a lot of money off psychological vulnerabilities. Better to know yours than be unaware and played.

But at the end of the day, we do not have an inherent value. I wonder if people that get hung up on these metrics and what value they seemingly hold either that a person is a whole person, not just some measurement about them. The world's tallest man also has a favorite food, favorite color, and hobbies. He has friends and family. The metric you assigned to him is not the totality of the man.

I say this because recently I've been struggling with work and I feel like I have to say to myself sometimes, I am more than just a source of income and health insurance to my family. To someone who isn't in my situation, it might seem silly, but it has been scary and stressful and in some ways I did say to myself, you have value because you provide. But we have money saved, and are in a stable situation, and I could always find a new job, but my ego assigned value to the job regardless despite my best efforts at pretending that I don't play games with corporations. The stress that keeping a 9 to 5 causes in my mind is entirely self-inflicted by me.

I guess what I'm saying is that I should value other things about myself more highly, or maybe even not value anything about myself if that makes sense. What value is there in in measuring my success, as long as I am honest about my efforts and happiness?

I will never conquer the entire world by 25, or have a billion dollars, so maybe I need to learn to measure less and focus on true personal accountability and happiness instead. Hopefully that's a simple task...

> Instead of competing in real games,

Define real games.

I can’t think of one genius that became really famous and successful that also didn’t have to work their friggin’ as s off or who had everything handed to them, or who didn’t have to collaborate with or appeal to normies to get ahead in this world.

“It’s a long way to the top if you want to Rock ‘n Roll”

The first part of the article puts down a person whose IQ is in the 140-180 range. If you read about the person, that part makes sense as an opinion.

The second part of the article explains that the person referred to in the title, the alleged 210 IQ, has chosen a middle manager job because it makes them happy.

> I'm trying to tell people that I'm happy the way I am.

The author never explains the problem they have with this person.

Instead, I think the title should be more along the lines of "an IQ of 176 does not make you a good person". I guess people would not engage if the conclusion was obvious? The baiting title is totally misplaced.

Actually, the whole treatment of Kim Ung-yong is even worse than I make out in this comment. I am left with a really negative impression of the author.

Since the 90's he is feuding with Rick Rosner, when they both edited the Mega Society’s journal Noesis, over the title of smartest guy. They both took an untimed Richard Hoeflin test (that maybe only a few hundred people have actually taken and therefore impossible to norm) with completely arbitrary scoring criteria and self-assigned “record setting” IQs.

Neither has any outstanding intellectual contributions to their name. They are weirdos who have made "being smart" their identity.

Nassim Taleb's book starts out as self indulgent, self aggrandizing nonsense. It's basically summed up as "probability won't help you when something happens that hasn't happened before". You don't say, what an incredible insight for the first 40 pages.

All that raw power and no way to direct it in a useful manner.

Every smart person I've met in life so far has known that humility is key if you want other smart people to take you seriously. And to let your work speak for yourself.

It's somewhat similar to those YouTubers who help homeless people on camera. It's a paradox where if it's done on film it seems more self serving than generous but if it wasn't on film no one would know.

But there is a difference. Instead of going on film, smart people can produce actual works for others to read and validate.

High IQ low EQ folks often struggle in careers and life because they’re “right” but can’t get anything done.

The most successful tend to be high-ish IQ but with enough EQ to get things done. Those folks are unstoppable.

Smart comes in a lot of flavors.

Aced the SAT as a teen, and interned at JPL, etc. Got a free full ride, wherever he wanted. He got his undergraduate at CalTech. Ph.D at Some midwest college -a good one, but can't remember which one -may have been Urbana-Champagne.

His mother was adamant that he have as normal a childhood as possible. She deliberately kept his K12 at a normal pace.

He's now a regular professor at a fairly good college (but not an Ivy League one).

He's married, has a kid, and two cats. Has a great life.

Part of me wants to say "What a waste!", but that part needs to get smothered with a pillow.

He's quite happy, and is doing something that he really wants to do.

Most of us could be so fortunate.

I've found "I.Q. smart" to be overrated. It opens a lot of doors, but it can also get in the way.

Many of my heroes have 2-digit IQs.

They don't check your memory association skills. You mostly solve patterns and logic puzzles, but future questions don't refer to the previous ones.

He used to come back from the local Mensa chapter meetings with the best stories. According to him, watching a room full of geniuses try to solve basic organizational issues was exactly like attending the annual meeting of a very dysfunctional condo board. Same arguments, same confusion, just with a higher average IQ.

He took a custom “iq” test of 48 questions, scored average, then retook the test knowing the questions, and got 47 right.

"Success" is hard to nail down. Is it academic success? SES succes? Job performance? It's all over the map.

However we know that :

IQ is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.

Conscientiousness is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.

Low neuroticism is correlated with the above somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2, with many definitions and studies being near the top of that range.

And there are other "personality" metrics that have been studied. It is very easy for someone who has an exceptional IQ to be sert back by neuroticism for example and exceptional IQ is near useless if the person does not have the conscientiousness to follow through on tasks, these people will likely be exceptional a "shallow" tasks.

I think this is well trodden ground.

But I agree with what the author is trying to say: Intelligence is not enough to be successful. No one is going to pay you to "be smart". You have to do something with that intelligence that is worthwhile.

Which is why you have people like Richard Feynman who famously had just "an above average" IQ while contributing greatly to several fields of math and science.

Now, it could be that Feynman just didn't care about the test when he took it. Because he intuitively knew that "being smart" wasn't enough. You had to apply yourself. You have to put in the work and there are no real shortcuts.

Being successful is a multifaceted thing and there are many pitfalls. And the real trick seems to be avoiding as many pitfalls as possible. Being smart helps, but it's not a guarantee.

lordnacho mentioned people think of intelligence as magic, and that's a good way to put it. Every other quality we have as people is not really disputed. If you're taller, we acknowledge it. If you're faster, we can test it. If you're stronger in your arms, we can test it. Etc. And we accept the results. And we accept that if we want to change things, we have to do the work.

But not intelligence. For some reason, no one can be smarter than anyone else. And everyone has to be smart in something. And if you're smart in one thing, you can't be smart in others. We invent things like EQ, street smarts, book smarts, etc to try and put everyone on equal footing. But a lot of times, people who have higher IQs also have higher EQs. And when people talk about "street smarts", what they're really describing is a sort of institutional knowledge that can only be gained by living in an area as often these "street smarts" are highly local to a certain subset of streets. And people often mistake trivia for intelligence. They think knowing a fact makes one smart. It makes one knowledgeable. And often having a lot of knowledge can be beneficial to those with higher intelligence. But high intelligence is often apparent even in those with little knowledge. For instance, my wife is a special education teacher and she has a non-verbal autistic child in her class. He clearly does not have a lot of knowledge, but he's apparently very intelligent. He can work things out. He can make references. He grasps concepts quickly. He gets frustrated by his own inability to articulate his thoughts.

For example if you read the biography of Von Neumann, it's remarkable that he was able to focus and work in the most noisy and distracting environments.

In my view, people who are able to question the legitimacy or applicability of IQ as a general measure of "intelligence", an idea that is highly contextual, are probably intelligent. They are at least smart enough to question social conceptions and to recognize the contingent nature of such conceptions. People who uncritically view IQ as some kind of unassailable proof of "intelligence" may be good at solving certain classes of known problems but, I really am not surprised that they may lack the imagination to contribute meaningful things to society, as a blind faith in a measure developed by fallible human beings is indicative of limited thinking /creativity.

Obviously someone can score well on an IQ test and question its validity as a signifier of intelligence, just as one can score poorly and place a strong degree of faith in it—but the way someone approaches it, in either case, is a very telling indicator of their own intellectual biases and limitations.

Saying someone is poisonous (watch this two hour YouTube video for why) is cheap.

> But Langan is clearly a smart guy. He probably cleared 140+ on an IQ test. He speaks like a book.[1]

where that last sentence is a link to a local-TV segment

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-788Upky2Y

Langan's only recorded lines in that TV segment are:

> Bonjo! 'Mon, boy! > I think it's about, uh, 20 horses, two llamas, two cows. > This particular paper's on something called a conspansive manifold. > It's a-a theory that studies the relationship between mind and reality. In other words, what's out there in the real world, how does the mind relate to it? > Yes. [/] You don't. [/] It's not that simple. I happen to know there's a heaven, because I know you can use your will to create things. In other words, do you continue to exist after you die? Absolutely. Nothing in this universe is wasted. Nothing ever ceases to exist, not really. The essence always remains preserved. > We, ah, didn't have a lot of money. And the old man was always in need of money, so we had to go with a worklist. > Well, as a matter of fact, I had to fight my way through high school. > There's the foal, and there's Star, his mother. > I mean, why am I not a famous politician, or a, a, a, financier? filthy rich? Ah, some of the business things don't mean that much to me. I'd rather have some meaning in my life, and this is how I get it. [/] In construction, ranch hand, farmhand, cowboy, firefighter — I worked for the forest service about four years. Um, just anything I could get my hands on. > Jeannie was very very taken with the beauty of the place. As a matter of fact she started crying, she was looking at it, and I realized then I couldn't say no. > No, it can't be done. > There's a sort of mind that I call a garbage-trap sort of mind. [/] Usually that kind of mind does not belong to a person who is capable of deep thought. > Sometimes it's hard to find the words when somebody expresses love. When I went to visit my mother, for instance — she's been a little bit ill lately — I had to tell her that I loved her, and she told me that she loved me, and, and then there was a long period of silence, because what can you follow that up with?

That doesn't qualify as "speaking like a book" in my book. I'd be interested to see videos of people who do habitually speak in well-formed sentences; I'm sure such people exist, although (from that one five-minute TV segment) Langan doesn't seem to be one of them.

I was recently asked, "Did people in the past really talk like that?" (i.e. in complex sentences like they do in the dialogue of your average 18th- or 19th-century novel) and I unfoundedly opined that while the answer was probably "no, the literary style is always an exaggeration of the natural speaking style; 21st-century people don't speak exactly like their novels, either," it seemed plausible to me that when all your educated people start their careers studying Latin grammar and rhetoric for several years, they do end up with more unconscious respect for grammatical structure and therefore more of an ability to generate complex yet well-formed sentences on the fly. I'd be interested to see what the experts think.

Redirecting an unhealthy obsession with being the smartest person in the room, to just being as self-reflective as possible is far healthier for well being, but I think also it improves outcomes.

Of course you need a base level of IQ too, but if you're reasonably smart just being able to take a step back and ask if you're being reasonable, if you might be wrong, why someone feels the way they do about you, this makes you much better at any task that involves some level of collaboration – which the vast majority of tasks do.

People who just have high IQ might on average be good at reasoning on their own, but their ability to reason with others – playing into their strengths and knowledge and into that of others is what allows them to exceed beyond their IQ in terms of outcomes.

For what it's worth, I find Langan really interesting. He's clearly a smart guy, but also delusionally self-confident in himself.

And I kinda get that honestly. I've had a few official IQ tests in my life and I'm pretty confident I have a fairly high IQ. I know I've found in most cases I'm well served to not pay much attention to what the average person thinks about most things, but when I find people who think well, especially if they have more knowledge in some area than myself I become obsessively self-critical when I feel we're unaligned on something. Generally speaking in these cases I'm likely to be wrong.

My guess is that Langan doesn't do this. Perhaps he feels (mostly correctly) that trusting himself is generally the better strategy than trusting what anyone else thinks. Still, it's surprising he hasn't worked this out. Maybe there's more going on there.