210 IQ Is Not Enough
142 comments
·November 20, 2025lordnacho
ghostpepper
I like the car analogy for IQ. Having an engine with 50% or more horsepower above the people around you is only useful if you know how to handle it, how to steer, etc.
The transmission is another great analogy, IMHO for communication skills. Applying full power to the tarmac from a dead stop is a great way to spin your tires.
danans
> If you're an entrepreneur, you also have to do a bunch of things that are more social than smarts
High social attitude is "smarts". It has arguably been more central to our evolution and survival than "book smarts".
hackingonempty
Hear Hear! If you have the Social Intelligence and work hard to cultivate relationships you can become President of the United States, even if you think you have a good idea to stop a respiratory virus by injecting disinfectant.
stego-tech
A really good litmus test of individual perspective and maturity, here. Already seeing comments nitpick specific arguments or points, which is itself the trap to shine a light on those individuals more obsessed with arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success, rather than self-reflecting on said definition and asking whether or not this definition fits who they are or want to be as a person, or their desired achievements and goals in life.
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.
tetris11
Dunno - I think it's hard for a lot of us who rolled the dice on our interests early on, picked the winning combo of CS + Finance, and then just raced ahead in the career ladder over our peers as software work consumed the world.
Now it's ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of us seeing the writing on the wall, and wondering whether we were anything special at all.
(The answer of course is no, but it's a tough pill to swallow)
stego-tech
As a former gifted kid who has had their fair share of struggles around identity, competency, and success, having to redefine each multiple times as the world shifts around me and ladders are either yanked up or burned down just as I arrive to climb them:
It sucks. It sucks ass. It has lead to many a night shouting in rage, anger, depression, and malaise. It continues to incense me as I see reprehensible actions receive phenomenal rewards in the short term for inflicting harm, and ignorance of their consequences of the long-term. It sucks.
You’re not alone, at least, and acknowledging that reality helped me rally around more social causes as I accepted that individual success was more luck than talent or effort, at least at present. It doesn’t really get easier to accept that reality either, even as I work to create a better one that’s built more around objectivity than individuality. Still, I’ve been far calmer, more productive, and even happier as I acknowledge the reality around me instead of reject it out of some notion of “specialness” or exceptionalism.
Acknowledging the reality around you is, in its own way, quite liberating, even if it’s also frustrating and lonely at present.
gh0stcat
I sort of relate. I suspect the misplaced confidence one can develop from early successes in one's career eventually manifests as a lot of beliefs needing to be unlearned later in life (especially when facing challenges requiring resilience). I think I am a better person for it (and that is the point).
amfarrell617
But isn’t being special rather… lonely?
tetris11
When you're a rising star, they blend narcissistic personality disorders into your paycheck. The only metric you need in order to feel that societal love, is a good performance review and a bonus.
nonethewiser
The observation in this article is part of a more general principle: Happiness isn't a single variable equation. It directly parallels the observation that "money doesn't buy happiness." 210 IQ will never be enough. $20M dollars will never be enough.
This article is interesting to me because I see people falsely equivocating money with happiness all the time, and pretty much never see it with IQ. I didn't realize it was a thing.
mattgreenrocks
I always love the articles that end up holding mirrors to some of the commenters. :)
srid
> arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success
You say 'external' meausures, but these do manifest as internal identities - all of which collectively form your social identity: https://srid.ca/identity/social
gessha
High int, dump stat wis
gdubs
Intellectual horsepower is just one element. If you're trying to build the world's fastest car, you can't just grab the world's most powerful engine and call it a day. If you can harness it, sure – it could provide an edge. But there are a lot of other elements that come into play.
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.
MichaelZuo
It’s probably even simpler… they simply don’t have that much “intellectual horsepower” in the first place.
It just’s an artifact of testing methodologies that can’t resolve very lumpy or spiky intelligence.
And therefore ends up being confused with genuine supergenius which is more correlated to the total area under the curve, so to speak.
neuralkoi
This reminds me of Liu Zhiyu who won a gold medal for China at the IMO in 2006 and was offered a full scholarship to MIT but turned it down to become a monk.
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.
koakuma-chan
> According to Yoo, by the time he was 1, her son learned both the Korean alphabet and 1,000 Chinese characters by studying the Thousand Character Classic, a sixth-century Chinese poem.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong
Is that true? How is that even possible? Like, biologically.
ip26
Not sure it is, so I assume a lot of stretching of the truth is involved. Most twelve month olds struggle to support their head, are just learning to shape their mouths to form syllables, and have only had eyes capable of resolving letters on a page for a few months. IQ won’t make blurry images sharp, or your neck muscles stronger.
yossi_peti
> Most twelve month olds struggle to support their head
I don't know about the other claims, but this one is false. It would be somewhat concerning if a 6-month-old struggled to support their head.
dmd
If a 12 month old can’t support its head that’s a big problem. That’s a 4-6 month milestone. 12 months is starting to walk.
jjcob
My son started walking at 8.5 months. He's got a 3.5 month head start on those 12 month walking late bloomers. I have very high expectations. I wonder where his walking skills are going to take him one day, but this comment worries me because he has so far not shown any interest in the Korean alphabet.
swid
My nephew was reading at age two… he is obviously a very special kid, but no one really pushed him to do that. Apparently this would kind of freak people out in public.
I’m not sure if reading before age one is biologically possible, but I have a surprising data point in my life, so who knows.
nonethewiser
Bullshit detectors are blaring. Asian parent embellish the intelligence of their child without any verification. From what I understand Kim Ung-yong himself said many of the stories about him when he was young were misunderstood or exaggerated.
I guess it's not clear what they mean by learned the alphabet. Could point to the character and say the sound I guess? Know their meaning (you couldn't verify this easily if they cant talk)?
It's considered prodigious to be able to read at 3. I guess recognizing characters is short of that, but barely. And at 1? Im open to more information but I see no reason to think its true.
jimmygrapes
Age reckoning in South Korea (and other east Asian countries) is quite different than what you might expect. Age 1 in this context could be up to 3; if year 1 is your birth date and you age up at the new year, you could be "2 years old" while being alive for only 3 days. It could also work the other way around if they follow one of the other methods. Pretty interesting and not yet fully standardized!
koakuma-chan
Thanks, I'm gonna start using East Asian age reckoning to indicate how many professional years of experience I have.
klodolph
> Langan has not produced any acclaimed works of art or science. In this way, he differs significantly he differs significantly from outsider intellectuals like Paul Erdös, Stephen Wolfram, Nassim Taleb, etc.
Paul Erdős is the only outsider intellectual on that list, IMO.
(Also note that ő and ö are different!)
BurningFrog
When I was at Google a long time ago, the hiring criteria were simple: Smart, and gets things done.
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.
abetusk
To be clear, if the quality and quantity of output of the hard worker exceeds someone who works hard and is smart about it, smart and hard would be preferable?
827a
The "world's smartest man" very recently predicted on X that Bitcoin would hit $220k by the end of the year. [1]
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...
stavros
> As World's Highest IQ Record Holder, I expect #BITCOIN is going to $220,000 in the next 45 days.
> I will use 100% of my Bitcoin profits to build churches for Jesus Christ in every nation.
> “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)
Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276.
maeln
While it seems unlikely, I wouldn't find it impossible (edit: learning more about IQ score, yeah 276 is definitly BS). You can be "intelligent" as in very good at solving logic puzzle and math problem, and the most obtuse and subjectively dumb person when it comes to anything else. It might be less likely but definitely happened. I have met people working in very advanced field having the perspective and reflection of a middle schooler on politics, social challenges, etc. Somewhere also clearly blinded by their own capacity in own field and thought that it would absolutely transfer to other field and were talking with authority while anybody in the room with knowledge could smell the BS from miles away.
etempleton
Depends on the exact "IQ" test but many do not have an upper bound. The thing to understand about IQ tests is that they were designed and are primarily used as a diagnosis tool by psychologists to identify learning deficiencies. There really isn't much evidence that having a 180 vs a 140 IQ means a whole lot of anything beyond one's ability to take that specific test. If anything, having an extremely high score outside of the normal range may indicate neuro-divergence and likely savant syndrome. Some people are savants in specific ways - working memory, pattern recognition, language skills, etc. IQ tests certainly test several different categories of intelligence, but also certainly leaves out a few other known forms of intelligence.
stavros
I'm not saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because it's impossible for someone who says that stuff to be smart, I'm saying he doesn't have 276 IQ because people who say that stuff tend to also lie about their IQ.
HappySweeney
Don't legitimate IQ tests top out at 160 for adults?
bena
Usually. There's diminishing returns the higher you go. The difference between 150 and 175 is much smaller than 125 and 150.
When you go from 30 seconds to 15 seconds to solve a problem, that's noticeable. But when you go from half a second to a quarter of a second, the difference doesn't really matter.
So a lot of IQ tests have some sort of ceiling where the only thing they can tell you is "Yeah, it's more than this".
fn-mote
> Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276.
Con artist skill of 276, maybe.
jagged-chisel
You’re assuming he’s not playing at the Next Level(R)
null
lnxg33k1
“What about second breakfast?” (Tolkien 27:3)
Arch-TK
This is a weird argument.
First off, we don't have a good way to actually measure an individual's intelligence. IQ is actually meant to correlate with g which is a hidden factor we're trying to measure. IQ tests are good insofar as you look at the results of them from the perspective of a population. In these cases individual variation in how well it correlates smooths out. We design IQ tests and normalise IQ scores such that across time and over the course of many studies these tests appear to correlate with this hidden g factor. Moreover, anything below 70 and above 130 is difficult to measure accurately, IQ is benchmarked such that it has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Below 70 and above 130 is outside of two standard deviations.
So, in summary, IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. What you're doing here is pointing at some random guy who allegedly scored high on an IQ test and saying: "Look at how dumb that guy is. We must be really bad at testing."
But to say we don't know what intelligence is, is silly, since we are the ones defining that word. At least in this sense. And the definition we have come up with is grounded in pragmatism. The point of the whole field of research is to come up with and keep clarifying a useful definition.
Worth also noting that you can study for an IQ test which will produce an even less correlated score. The whole design and point of IQ tests is done with the idea of testing your ability to come up with solutions to puzzles on the spot.
raincole
> his self-reported IQ of 276
In other words, this news is a completely irrelevant piece of information.
r_lee
This guy is a fraud, he isn't measured by any legit institute, only by some random one which stated he is intelligent and he claims he was measured at 276 IQ.
He's low-key just trolling at this point, aaying he wants asylum in the US and making videos about how jesus/God is real with some scientific methods etc.
Just go check out his YouTube you'll see what I'm talking about.
herval
> IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence.
IQ means a lot of things (higher IQ people are measurably better at making associations and generating original ideas, are more perceptive, learn faster, have better spatial awareness).
It doesn't give them the power to predict the future.
codingdave
It is less meaningful than that. It identifies who does well at tests for those things. That is not the same thing as being "better" at such things, it often just means "faster". IQ tests are also notorious for cultural bias. In particular with the word associations, they often just test for "I'm a white American kid who grew up in private schools."
And I say this as one of the white amercian kids who did great on those tests. My scores are high, but they are not meaningful.
arethuza
When I was a young kid my eldest sister (who was 17 years older than me) was an educational psychologist and used to give me loads of intelligence tests - so I got pretty good at doing those kinds of tests. I actually think they are pretty silly, mostly because I generally come out very well in them...
Ekaros
It somewhat indicates better pattern recognition so I might give them advantage on predicting things in general. Not that it will make them prophets or oracles. But Prediction from higher IQ person is more likely to be correct. Not that world cannot be illogical and go against those predictions.
greener_grass
How would you measure these?
- making associations
- generating original ideas
- more perceptive
...
"spatial awareness" I can see though
programjames
> 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.
Speak for yourself, not all of humanity. There are plenty of rigorous, mostly equivalent definitions for intelligence: The ability to find short programs that explain phenomena (compression). The capability to figure out how to do things (RL). Maximizing discounted future entropy (freedom). I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
axxto
How do you measure the capacity for improvisational comedy? How do you measure a talent for telling convincing lies? How do you measure someone's capacity for innovating in a narrative medium? How do you measure someone's ability for psychological insight and a theory of self? How do you measure someone's capacity for understanding irony or picking up subtle social cues? Or for formulating effective metaphors and analogies, or boiling down concepts eloquently? How about for mediating complex, multifaceted interpersonal conflicts effectively? How do you measure someone's capacity for empathy, which necessarily involves incredibly complex simulations and mental models of other people's minds?
Do you think excelling in any of these doesn't require intelligence? You sound like you consider yourself quite intelligent, so are you excellent at all of them? No? How come?
Can you tell me which part of an IQ test or your "rigorous, moslty equivalent definitions for intelligence" capture any of them?
> I hate how stupid people propagate this lie that we don't know what intelligence is, just because they lack it. It's quite convenient, because how can they be shown to lack intelligence when the word isn't even defined!
null
__s
tbf you started with what intelligence is in rejecting their claim of being the smartest: ability to predict the future
Levitz
This isn't even that. If I'm a person others may take as a reference and I hold Bitcoin, it is in my interest to publicly state that Bitcoin is going to increase in value, because that in itself makes it increase in value and it's good for me.
blfr
The fact that you can do poorly (by external measure) despite high IQ doesn't really mean much. It correlates well with a swath of positive outcomes and I'd still take legitimate 150 IQ (for myself, for my kids) over virtually any other real-world ability. I think only looks are even in the running here.
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.
ChrisMarshallNY
My wife's nephew is the smartest person I've ever met (and I've met a lot of really smart people).
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 really 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.
HardCodedBias
Well of course it is not enough. This is well known.
"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.
cmiles8
IQ and EQ are two different things often not found in the same individual. IQ is being smart enough to know that something is happening. EQ is being smart enough to be able to convince other humans to do something about it.
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.
hshdhdhj4444
IQ and EQ are different things that we have labeled.
There are probably a very large number of skills along other vectors that we haven’t identified/labeled that are equally, more or less important.
Retric
IE and EQ do however positively correlate with each other in the general population. So it’s a little questionable what’s actually being measured with outlier IQ’s.
People think of intelligence as some sort of magic. They ascribe all sorts of ability to intelligence, as if being smart should make you influential.
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.