This was shown in a study of adult graduates of New York City's Hunter College Elementary School, where an admission criterion was an IQ of at least 130 (achieved by a little over 1 per cent of the general population) and the mean IQ was 157 - "genius" territory by any scaling of IQ scores, and a level reached by perhaps 1 in 5000 people. Though the Hunter graduates were successful and reasonably content with their lives, they had not reached the heights of accomplishment, either individually or as a group, that their IQs might have suggested.
These kinds of stories bother me, especially because of the assumption that anyone with an IQ over 130 who doesn't win a Nobel prize is somehow failing to live up to their "genius." Yeah, right. All you need for a Nobel is an FSIQ of 157! Poof! There it is! I just invented a cure for death because I'm so incredibly brilliant!
I'm going to add a second gripe about new stories about children with IQs of, say, 160. These stories seem to require use of the following terms:
* Genius
* the next Einstein
* so brilliant that...
Look, I know that an IQ of 160 is really high. But by my estimates, if the rarity is about 1:30K, we have 10,000 people with IQs at least this high running around the US right now, and over 200,000 in the world. Plus, there have been many others since, say, Newton's time. Sure, 200,000 in six billion isn't a lot. But it's a lot of people compared to, say,
Nobel prizes awarded or
great novelists or even the broader
first authors on major Nature/Science papers.
I guess this stuff shows how poorly understood IQ is, especially by the general population (and/or the people who write this stuff).
Val
