I don’t care, because most people’s understanding of IQ is ill-founded and wrong.
All the belligerent guys online who insist they have a high IQ? I suspect many of them haven’t actually taken an IQ test at all.
Not a proper one, anyway. Official IQ tests, whatever their limitations, are highly-refined scientific tools. They take a lot of time, and cost a fair amount of money.
Basically, I would be beyond amazed if actual IQ tests, and all they involve, have become so widely accessible that @BigNutzz32998762 on Twitter/X and his countless peers who brag about their 178 IQ have been genuinely, properly assessed.
Also, given how IQ actually works, if countless random people were scoring ridiculously high on real IQ tests, wouldn’t they have to recalibrate the underlying assumptions, to keep the average as 100?
Point is, if so many people were scoring extremely high on official IQ tests, their scores would be reduced, to conform to the bell-curve. Because it’s mathematically impossible for everyone to be ‘above average’.
I haven’t taken a full, proper IQ test myself — I’ve had my IQ extrapolated from my scores on long, complex standardized tests, like the SAT and GRE. I’m not going to say what it was, because I know the limitations and fallacies of these kinds of tests, and because it was forty or fifty years ago, and my brain has been constantly changing.
The one thing I know is that people who brag about their IQ are never very intelligent.
You know what else is silly? People who declare that the conformation of your chromosomes determines your identity, your behavior, and your role in society. I know for a fact that almost no one has had their karyotype done — the exceptions are cases where there is evidence of a serious heritable anomaly — so the knowledge about chromosomes is practically negligible among the general public.
Even worse: people who have opinions on the contributions of genetics on IQ.
Forget IQ. As we all know, the proper way to score intelligence is by birthdate.
I can verify this by personal experience. I was born on 9 March, my wife was born on 10 September.
PZ, send your IQ score to MENSA, maybe they will let you join. ; )
I once spoke at a MENSA convention. Didn’t like it. Creepy vibes and a lot of pompously stupid people.
Just anFYI…
The other folk who’ve had their karyotypes done are those who took genetics courses that taught the skill.
Had my IQ tested as a kid. Somehow the child psychologist concluded from an above average result that my rather varied grades and the fact that I was a 10 year old dealing with insomnia and nearly constant anxiety were not signs of a problem at all.
#3: Old people maybe. We forbid karyotyping of our students, because we’re not equipped to deal with potential psychological trauma.
I remember a multiple-choice IQ test that I took back in the sixth grade (mid 1950s). My teacher thought I was some kind of mathematical genius because I correctly identified the symbol for square root. No, I didn’t know what a square root is; I just knew that all the other answers were wrong.
PZ @2: it varies depending on the local group. The SATs that I took near the end of high school were good enough to get me into Mensa. I was living in Pittsburgh when I joined; and the local group was lots of fun. I let my membership expire shortly after moving to St. Louis because I was very well aware of how stupid I was compared to how smart others in that local group thought they were. 8-)
I’m a Leo—obviously (he said looking like some house cat).
I recently had an IQ test done as part of a neurological exam. I don’t take much store in the results. I know I’m much, much dumber than average.
When it coems to IQ I recommend reading Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
The issue of even defining what intelligence is is a big one..
I only know that a decade or two ago I measured comfortably above the average of what most people think that the other average person scores. So that’s good enough for me.
Bit hazy about which one it was, though. Recall, maybe?
I was rejected for membership in MENSA but they recommended I apply at their sister organization, DENSA.
Robert Westbrook: I remember Densa. Most of us in the Pittsburgh local group thought that we’d be good candidates for that one.
If you have to brag about how high your IQ allegedly is, it generally means you haven’t done anything worthy of intellectual accolades. Like get a degree or something. That’ll tell me more than some number.
When I was a kid my parents were convinced there was something wrong with me. I was a “handful.” Read at an adult level, couldn’t hit a baseball. I remember going to the college in town to take tests. They let me wander through the labs unescorted while my parents and the shrinks talked in hushed tones. I still remember the smell of the labs, or it’s my old labcoat in my closet.
Turns out I was really bright and nearsighted. Still can’t hit a baseball, though.
Being then English, I had my IQ tested when I was about 11. My parents hoped to send me to the “public” [i.e. private] school my dad had attended but they weren’t sure they could afford it so had me take the various tests, including IQ, that could qualify me for a grammar school, i.e. a state school that took the kids they hoped would attend a university. (The system has since changed, for the better.) Anyway the test implied (I forget the actual number) that I could probably be trained to be a plumber or some such. Since I was already on a fast track — my headmaster wanted me to sit an Eton scholarship because he frankly wanted that feather in HIS cap — I laughed. My parents vetoed Eton, fortunately, but the school I went to, Mill Hill, did award me the top academic scholarship, so that’s all right then.
I had my IQ tested in the U.S. Army. According to them, it’s 140. I hadn’t even left the testing room when a major came out and asked me to join him in his office. He pitched my joining the Army Security Agency (which I later heard was melded into Military Intelligence). I hemmed and hawed and said I’d think about it. I didn’t think I would pass the security screening. I later decided to become a medic instead.
My SAT scores would have qualified me for MENSA, but I have never had an interest in joining. Having a high IQ score is not really a common interest, and the organization has Special Interest Groups that are all over the map, including anti-abortion, evangelical christianity, Mormons, pagan occult witchcraft, and parapsychology. Ask your Ouija board why I’m not interested.
I participated in full IQ tests 2 or 3(?) times, growing up; I was a faculty child, and in the 50s and 60s we were basically considered to be a pool of easily accessible guinea pigs. Honestly, it was just another way I was burdened with other people’s expectations. As a teen, I thought about joining MENSA, but every MENSA member I met was boring and arrogant so I decided it would be no fun. Virgo, natch. My late spouse constantly amazed me with a brilliant ability to perceive things forward, backward, and inside out, effortlessly. Pisces. So.
(I was not told my scores, but happened to find out accidentally. Knowing my limitations, I was not as impressed as others seemed to be, and it seemed obvious that IQ was not a useful measure of anything except proficiency at taking tests.)
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misuse of “IQ scores” at the opposite end of the scale — when evaluating whether someone is “too dumb to be subject to the death penalty.” Y’all would be shocked and appalled at the arguments in appeals and briefs, and live in court both between the lawyers and with “expert witnesses”, over five-point variations (the legal-system-accepted accuracy limit in and around an “IQ” of 70, the “constitutional cutoff” established by courts populated almost entirely by judges, and assisted almost entirely by “best and brightest” clerks, who’ve never taken linear algebra, a calculus-based/aware course in statistics, or even multivariate calculus‡) in IQ score that drive literally life-or-death decisions.
I count myself lucky that I’ve never been involved in one of those fiascos; I would probably get sanctioned for treating the court not with contempt, but as beneath it. I especially would not have looked forward to explaining that a difference of 5 points out of 70 is proportionally equivalent to a difference of 13 points out of 178…
‡ Not so fun fact: The last US Supreme Court justice with a STEM undergraduate degree, or even minor, graduated with an M-only-no-science-above-sophomore-level degree in 1929, when Bohr atoms were still accepted in undergrad-level courses with a mild caution that there was New and Interesting Work showing otherwise (not to mention a quarter of a century before DNA’s structure was understood). But at least he was “from” Minnesota…
There is the great joke about tRUMP’s IQ. His test result came back: it was a negative number.
Also, we have the results of his administration members’ tests. Their IQ in total doesn’t hit 3 digits.
And, anyone who is well-read on the subject knows that IQ tests are faulty; they are biased in so many ways, including favoring the knowledge base of well-off white kids.
Decades ago, a guy I knew said I should take the tests to see if I qualified for membership in mensa. He was so arrogant and self-absorbed, I didn’t want to belong to any group where he was a member.
Also, my magic 8 ball said I shouldn’t believe in astrology!
@20
When interpreting the result, did you remember to correct for Mercury retrograde?
It’s impressive how many very smart people are complete idiots.
@21 Reginald Selkirk asked me: When interpreting the result, did you remember to correct for Mercury retrograde?
I reply: Why? I thought ‘Mercury retrograde’ meant it had to repeat a semester in elementary school.
Besides, I’m just intelligent enough to realize that I’m not as intelligent as I would like to be.
IQ tests are terrible, but some school districts use them to disqualify racial undesirables. I don’t know if that is ongoing – the Trump administration seems to be doing all the moves to directly re-segregate the schools on race/wealth lines. [school desegregation is one of the most effective anti-racism move, which is why racist parents are so against it]
Re: PZ Myers @ #2…
My late wife was once invited to a MENSA meeting. Her comments about it were similar to yours, with the added comment that, so far as she could determine, most of what the people there were talking about was, “If I’m so smart, why can’t I get laid?”
My GRE score in 1984 was high enough to qualify for MENSA. I knew better, but attended one meeting hoping to meet single women. The meeting turned into a shit show. Almost everyone told you their number within 10 seconds of meeting you. The whole thing was a collection of arrogant, loudmouth people even more awkward than myself. I was pitied for not having a number, but using the GRE score. They really pushed taking the test. The really crazy thing was the number of special subgroups they had for Bible thumpers, paranormal bullshit, and right-wing politics. Glad I left without paying dues. I failed to mention to them that in spite of the great GRE score, I had taken a PSAT in 9th grade that suggested I not go into science and instead become a historian or school teacher, or just learn a trade. I saw other kids openly weep when the PSAT test results were passed out.
“Leo: Confident leader with razor-sharp wit”
Hmm, not sure about that. Maybe I should say “Remarkably unconfident follower who says fuck a lot.”
Easy enough to do one online: https://www.mensa.org/mensa-iq-challenge/
I once had my karyotype done (it was apparently quite expensive to my insurer). It confirmed that I’m one of the relatively few people whose chromosome count (46 as usual) is smaller than their shoe size number in the EU shoe size scale (most adults are ca. 40-45, I’m almost 50).
(For context, the European equivalent for the US expression “room temperature IQ” is “shoe number IQ”)
Many years ago I took a practice MENSA test that I found in a science magazine. My score was literally off the charts–correlating to an IQ well above 150. Okay, I’m pretty smart, but I don’t think I’m that smart.
My feeling was that MENSA wants to convince moderately intelligent people to join their ranks and become dues-paying members. I could be wrong. Maybe I am a genius–one of my “hobbies” is to take four-digit numbers and work out the prime factors in my head. I read science magazines. I read history textbooks.
Or maybe I wouldn’t score so high on their real test. Who cares? I have little use for organizations, and I’ll always be suspicious of MENSA.
I got invited to join MENSA as a result of my SATs, but nothing I’ve ever heard about the organization makes me feel like I missed something when I turned it down.
Yeah…This is a topic that is near and dear to me. I have come to sum it up by saying, simply, “According to science, I am 3-standard deviations above the norm which makes me statistically improbable.” I refuse to attach any specific meaning to it, except to say that it’s all “according to science.”
As a kid in school I was tested (by a psychologist) twice. They tested me in 3rd grade threw me into the “gifted” program in 4th grade. Thinking they had made a mistake because I hadn’t done anything during my time in those classes and were threatening to kick me out, they re-tested me again in 6th grade where they apparently learned that there was no mistake. I never knew what the “numbers” were, only having a letter from the school saying I was in the top 2%, but I overheard my dad once say that it was “astronomical.”
I began rejecting formal education in the 4th grade, due to excruciating boredom, and that was complete by 8th grade when the school wasn’t going to let me graduate junior high to go on to high school because I “had done nothing” and was flunking every class except PE and a few science classes I liked. I always knew enough to ace the tests, and scored high on the regular aptitude tests they gave at the time, though one time I decided to buck the system and intentionally answered every question wrong as an act of rebellion. I got in trouble with the school counselor over that one.
I did have a few generous teachers who took the time to nurture me, but not enough to make a difference. At home, my parents just assumed I would be granted scholarships to go to any university I wanted and would eventually become a doctor, though my only passion was for music, which they didn’t nurture. Eventually, I stopped attending school altogether in high school, except for a few classes that interested me. I still aced the exams, but I never did any of the work. I had to drop out in 11th grade. When I approached my parents about attending college, they pled poverty, thinking I should have gotten full ride scholarships. I did go to college sporadically, but mostly followed my interests and never pursued any sort of a degree. I think most of my credits were in Japanese Language and Asian History, seeing as I was living in Japan at the time. The most valuable course I ever took was a Logic and Fallacies course (PHIL 105), which finally gave a name to the things that were already in my head.
Meanwhile, over the years, I engaged in a lot of self-study and was a voracious reader. My parents had an extensive library, made up of science books, history books and a lot of classic literature. I can’t say I read every book, but I did make a huge dent in the collection. I absorbed everything, and usually only needed to be told something once and it would stick.
Later in life, about 29 or so, a friend “challenged” me to get into MENSA, so I took their tests. She paid. I planned to disappoint her by failing the exams, so showed up to the tests legally drunk (pretty severely drunk, actually). There was an 8-point gap in the scores, but both qualified me, and one of them landed me in the 99.9% category. I joined, but thought the people were assholes and very haughty and rude. Then, I met one very creepy dude in his 40s who was balding and had 3-teeth who kept trying to get a young female member (fifteen or sixteen) to sit on his lap. The dude carried a business card with his picture on it that didn’t list a profession, but only said he was a MENSA member. Yeah, I was outta there in a hurry.
So, what’s the deal? I know there’s something different about me and how I process information. I’m sort of a self-educated polymath, and while I can’t say I’m an expert at anything, usually anything I devoted myself to, I became “pretty good” at. I did teach myself how to write code and made a fairly good career out of software engineering. While I was working faster and producing more than my colleagues, and my application design was often unique, efficient and highly organized and never had a bug or broke, I never really tooted my own horn about it and didn’t seek reward. Management didn’t care, except that they were results oriented and saw that I gave them what they wanted without understanding the beauty of my underlying design, so I never really advanced in the field. Close friends said that they were intimidated by me, but I don’t think I was ever unduly arrogant about my work.
I really can’t pin down where things went wrong. I know people saw something in me, but I guess they had little power to do anything about it. Often, I feel like Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting,” with some scenes from that movie actually being from my own life experience, without the abuse. But, unlike him, I never had mentors like a cool professor, hip psychologist or a beautiful doctor in training like Minnie Driver to guide me onto the path of prosperity.
But, what I do know is that there are probably thousands out there like me. People of extraordinary talent and skill who never really amounted to much. I can’t say I’ve met any, but I also realize I can’t be the only one.
In either case, I’m reticent to discuss it. People close to me kinda know, and some say I’m the smartest dude they ever met. But I’ll be damned if I understand what it all means. I have been as humble as possible about it all of my life, probably mostly in denial, hoping to just be a “normal” person instead of a “brainiac.” It wasn’t until later in life that I began to embrace it, but I’ll be damned if I know what to do about it.
Pertinent to the article of course, I am dubious of most claims of high IQ. While I think Elon Musk may certainly be up there, I’m not worshipful of him about it and I keep telling people not to put much stock in it. I find that he has a lot of science-fiction-y ideas and has thought about a lot about things that I do, like space travel, singularities, AI and other stuff, but it appears that he and I have reached different conclusions about those things and his arrogance sickens me. What’s he got that I don’t? (Not that I would ever seek to be a billionaire…)
Anyway, I just felt like venting a bit. It’s like an albatross around my neck, so to speak. I simply don’t know what to make of it except to say that I can see the difference between me and my peers. At the age of 64, I can’t be bitter about it. But, I do wonder what will happen to all the kids that are coming up who are just like I was. Is our educational system more attentive and better able to find these younglings and nurture their talents?
I just believe intelligence manifests itself in different ways, and sometimes in ways that aren’t considered very traditional.
Back in the day I had a cab driver friend who was a member of MENSA, but admitted that he wasn’t all that intelligent, he just had a natural talent for test-taking.
For myself I’ve always known by observation that I’m smarter most people but I’ve never felt the need to quantify it or for external validation. The opposite in fact. In grade 1 the teacher always had to tell the class that I got a perfect score on the quizzes, which was every time, and I didn’t like the attention so I started purposely putting a few wrong on each test.
@32
Recently, I find myself going back frequently to a quote from the movie Forrest Gump:
Stupid is as stupid does.
I know I’m stupid.
At the age of 15, insecure and desperate to show how clever I was, I took a couple of official IQ tests under controlled conditions, and did rather well.* I joined MENSA and was thus anointed as the Chosen One of Extra Cleverness.
It took me two weeks to realise I was paying a group of people to tell me how clever I was, therefore they were much cleverer than me, and I wasn’t really very clever. I discontinued my membership.
Two weeks.
Two.
Proof of stupid. A smart person wouldn’t have joined. A smarter person wouldn’t have even bothered.
Louis
*It is, by the way, possible to train to do IQ tests well. A fact I learned a few years later, but I’d grown up by then so wasn’t hideously traumatised about my Specialness Status being diluted to Ordinary. ;-)
#28: I mentioned that I was invited to give a talk at a MENSA meeting…I didn’t mention that I was paired with an intelligent design creationist in a session about the origin of life. That annoyed me.
PZ, No. 2, I was at that Mensa meeting where you spoke; in Detroit if I recall correctly.
I’ve been a member of Mensa for 40 years and served in national and international office. I can’t disagree with a lot of the negative comments here. But in its defense, Mensa serves an important niche for smart people who have trouble finding kindred souls elsewhere. We tell the same jokes and tend to have the same personality types. It’s kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys from the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas special.
As with any other organization, it’s largely what you make of it. Sure it has creepy people, as do most other organizations, but one simply learns to avoid them and hang out with the good people. Sure it has people with some strange beliefs and world views, but it also has people who are deep and profound thinkers about the world who are well worth knowing. Where else could I have dinner with Isaac Asimov, Anton LeVey, and Madalyn Murray O’Hair? And since most people believe what they believe for non-rational reasons anyway, why would you expect Mensans to be any different?
It’s a crazy family, but it’s a family. By the way, the single most popular seminar at that Detroit convention was why do smart people do stupid things. Everyone wanted to attend that one.
My IQ – Ani DiFranco
Let’s arm wrestle
Intelligence can be judged in all kinds of ways.
The Christian high school I went to did a lot of things wrong, but they did do one thing I’m grateful for.
In Grade 10 they got us to do some tests of intelligence and aptitude for vocational guidance.
Apparently I did OK, but what I’m thankful for is that they never told me a number: they just said “you can do whatever you decide to do”.
How much more freeing is that than any single number?
I did the Mensa IQ test about 40 years ago with my boyfriend, and it took about two hours. It was his idea, and he was a bit miffed that although we both qualified for mensa easily, my IQ score was 3 points higher. As I say, that was 40 years ago. I’m sure it’s much lower after general aging and cancer treatment, but I’m still fairly good at the kind of intelligence measured by IQ tests – and still a complete idiot at some kinds not measured by them. We never joined Mensa.
But I think I know what’s up with not-very-bright people bragging about their IQ scores. A while ago social media had lots of adverts for free online IQ tests. I took a look at one. It was very short and looked utterly unscientific, and you had to put in your email address and a few details like date of birth to get the results. In other words, give up some of your data. I got the impression that the results were designed to be very flattering, so that people would share their score and thereby advertise the test, so they could get more personal data to sell.
So perhaps these “geniuses” took one of those tests, and believed the result?
freeline @37: yeah, like I said @6, it depends a lot on the local group.
The Pittsburgh group in the late ’70s and early ’80s was mostly just a bunch of folks who liked to hang out together. Sometimes we’d walk around a museum; once we went spelunking; but mostly we just partied at the Local Secretary’s house. One couple, a union electrician and a special-ed teacher, were particularly close friends.
The St. Louis group was a mixed bag. We hosted a Regional Gathering in ’87 that was pretty good, and I was part of a contract bridge foursome no member of which was more than an average social player. Unfortunately, there were also quite a few folks who were rather impressed with themselves.
This discussion has me thinking that I might rejoin just to see what the St. Louis local group is like these days.
Off-topic: I’m watching my local TV news while I’m writing this; and the current story is “NWS pauses non-English severe weather alerts”. I guess warning “those people” of danger is way too “woke”. Why am I not surprised?
A perennial bored daydreamer in school, I had my IQ tested when I was about 11, and I’m told it was pretty high. All it got me was being told from then on that I was an underachiever, in part because I could get a decent grade in just about anything without trying, and did not figure it was worthwhile to kill myself to get better, when I could be reading or rambling in the woods or farting around in the machine shop instead. Schools kept giving us standardized tests, and I kept getting high scores (or so I was told) and I kept not caring very much, which made most teachers hate me.
Later, looking for a college transfer, I took the GRE aptitude test at the end of my freshman year at a branch of UConn (my wife, who went to another branch, calls it “Husky High.”). I was 18, full of coffee, my first drive to New York City. I was on top of the world, in my new-to-me rusty Peugeot, listening to “Hot Town, Summer in the City” on the radio, looked at the test and thought to myself “someone guessed all the questions I know the answer to!” I swear, whatever possible questions I might know the answers to, those were the questions I got. I was never that good at math but even on that I scored somewhere around the 75th percentile of college graduates, and the verbal was above where they stopped putting in figures. I read much later that that score, being from 1966, would get me into Mensa any time without further ado. I did get the transfer, and enjoyed a couple of years of better school and my short, “get-out-of-system” stint of city life, though it did get me fighting the draft a year earlier too.
I have no idea whether there’s any Mensa group near here, and never bothered to find out. I do still enjoy reading and farting around in the shop.
I’d like to think I’m actually pretty smart anyway, but it would not surprise me a whole lot to find that a significant part of that has to do with being good at taking standardized tests. Or just lucky.
freeline@37–
I flirted with MENSA in my late teens, mostly from reading Asimov’s articles enthusing about it, before deciding it wasn’t for me. Basically I was uncomfortable with a “club for high IQ people”, which struck me as definitionally elitist and likely to be prone to self-congratulatory bias. (I can’t speak from experience because I never joined.) This was before I had read up on the limitations of IQ testing, although my mother, a clinical psychologist, had already warned me that the test was prone to misinterpretation and abuse.
To me there are better options. Choose a social group that takes an interest in intellectually active fields — chess clubs, bridge clubs, astronomy clubs, maths clubs, electronics clubs, ecology volunteer groups, etc. Whatever takes your fancy. The selection is for people who find these things interesting, which means you’re going to have a lot more in common with other members than a unidimensional score on a flawed test that likely wasn’t administered properly.
Not that it actually means anything, but Albert Einstein was born on March 14, which makes him a Pisces and not a Virgo.
Another quick point: in olden days, the standard of professionally trained psychologists was to report high IQs as “130+” because the test gets more inaccurate the further you get from the norm. The standard normal curve is an exponential function, so as you move into the wings, tiny differences in test performance lead to massive differences in test score. It’s the same reason radiocarbon dating is only considered accurate from roughly 300 years ago to 50,000 years ago. Outside that range, tiny variations lead to massive error margins.
So when someone claims to have an IQ of 180, it’s equivalent to saying they’ve carbon-dated an object to well outside the limits of C14 testing. That is, it is paradoxically unintelligent to claim such intelligence.
Another statistical argument: IQ is defined as a normal distribution with mean=100 and s.d.=15, which means an IQ of 180+ (i.e. 5.3+ s.d.) will occur in roughly 1 in 60 million people. So there should only be 5 or 6 such people in the entire US.
[meta]
OK… just putting this here:
(There’s a House MD episode to that effect, chrislawson)
Oh no, not Pisces! That’s me. Although, I’m old enough at this point that the whole IQ thing seems pretty played out even if it did matter. I did learn from experience personal and otherwise that smart doesn’t mean wise.
I do think IQ has some validity. But not nearly what people think.
It is about how good you are at what Kahnemann calls system 2 thinking. Most of us do not do a lot of that. We spend most of our lives using the “easy” system 1 thinking.
High IQ people can be trained to be good at intellectual pursuits. But they will still hold as many stupid ideas as anybody else. Rationality can be trained as well. But it has very little til do with IQ.
I would love to see someone developing a rationality test. I think it would be a lot more useful than IQ tests.
BTW.
The cut-off for most certified high-end IQ tests is about 150 (std. Dev. 15). If someone claims a measured IQ higher than that, it pretty much is guaranteed to be in a non-certified (homegrown) test. There over-150 crowd is simply too small to statistically validate the tests.
I also qualified to join Mensa in my late teens/early twenties. I did it mostly to verify or otherwise what my parents teachers had been telling for a long time (that I could “do better”). I don’t recall gettiong an actual score, only that I fulfilled the requirement of being in the top 2%. I haven’t really thought about since then. I certainly don’t bring it up in conversation.
“People who boast about their IQ are losers” – Stephen Hawking
@Chrislawson #48,
180? Rookie numbers. My IQ was over 9000. And my mummy told me I was special. ;-)
Louis
Abstract:
“Grandiose narcissists typically pursue agentic goals, such as social status, competence, and autonomy. We argue that because high intelligence is a key asset for the attainment of such agentic goals, the concept of intelligence should play a prominent role in grandiose narcissists’ self-regulation and social behavior. We review the relevant literature and report evidence in support of this claim. Grandiose narcissists consider intelligence to be an important resource that leads to benefits across life domains, they tend to maintain and defend illusory positive intellectual self-views, and they are extremely motivated to appear intelligent to other people. Thus, even though grandiose narcissism is essentially unrelated to objectively assessed intelligence, intelligence nevertheless plays an important role in the way grandiose narcissists think, feel, and behave. We discuss potential implications for social relationships and point toward avenues for future research.”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721420917152
So you take a series of tests and then they average the results. Do high IQ people have difficulty remembering more than one number? Or are they frustrated by the chaos that would result from knowing somebody scored much higher on one test but slightly lower on the others?
My IQ test: if you can derive Kepler’s laws from Newton’s laws without looking anything up, you’re smart. If you can’t, you’re not smart. A totally unbiased criterion!