Hes definitely higher IQ than people think. Pretty much all of these people are high IQ.
Even Kanyes mom was a college professor who chaired the English dept at Chicago State University. To be super successful in the music industry in the way Kanye has been requires a lot of higher order thinking. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he was in the top 2 percent or so of black IQ, like 120+.
Interesting survey though, I wonder which ones were most accurate. Coincidentally I know for a fact my dads iq is 127 (he’s a VP of global manufacturing & logistics at a well known company, for reference).
Kanye was a good painter when he was a little kid also and Tate too was actually a nerd when he was a kid, there's a newspaper article of him winning a junior chess tournament and he aced his exams for the uni in the UK. His father also spoke 5 languages fluently.
Kanye also has a lot of dumbness points to his record. His mother died in one of the single stupidest celebrity orbiter deaths of all time; she refused to recover at the hospital after having extensive, elective plastic surgery. Instead, the care was entrusted to her idiot nephew, who abandoned her so he could attend a fuck-mothering babyshower instead. Kanye blamed all this on the surgeon, who certainly wasn’t blameless, but he was way less at fault than both Kanye’s mother and cousin.
This was ’08. Before he’d totally fried his brains on drugs.
As I replied on another comment, Yarvin has said in interviews that he skipped multiple grades in school. That’s exceptionally rare, so I knew he was likely significantly higher than your run of the mill 130iq “gifted” kid. Most of these people are 130+, but without specifics beyond just their education and writing it’s tough to tell 130 from 160.
Yarvin mentioned in some post recently he had the same IQ as the Unabomber, which Google reports is 167. Yarvin hasn't elaborated on it as far as I know.
I agree with you but there are definitely traits outside of IQ and equally as important when it comes to being a public intellectual, especially advocating for a cause like Yudkowsky. Yarvin for example doesn’t have the same type of communication skills imo.
My take on this is that people vastly underestimate how smart many popular writers are, and how much that contributes to their output.
130 IQ doesn't get you the kind of quality writing on technical subjects that many of these guys put out. Say what you want about Noah Smith, but my lower bound for him would be 140 (that should tell you something about the hardware Emil is probably working with).
In terms of raw intellect of people who are currently alive, it's hard not to see Robin Hanson and Gwern as gross underestimates. Gwern's writing reminds of me a bit of Chris Langan's (albeit much less insane), so it wouldn't surprise me if he was in that vicinity.
Gwern actually had on his website at one point (I can't find it - either he reorganized his site or removed it entirely) that his SAT score was high, but not the absolute max, and estimated his IQ based on the SAT score as being in the mid-130s. It's possible Gwern put it there as disinformation, or just that the SAT is not very good at distinguishing people at the top end of IQ - I had a higher SAT score than Gwern self-reported, and I'm about the same age and pretty sure I took the same format, but I don't have his level of obsession, so I'm definitely not a genius.
Isn’t this all just garbage in-garbage out because most people are clueless about real IQ scores and have never taken a properly administered and normed test? Pretty sure most people think it’s linear like school grades and just assign “a bit more” IQ to some they think is “a bit more” smart.
I would think people are good at favoring in the normal distribution into their estimates. But, the median being 130 for people who are clearly much higher, is not a good sign, agree.
IIRC, similar experiments existed, when teachers were asked to estimate intellect of student they knew in real life, and then the average was compared to actual IQ test.
I doubt anything above 130 iq would help much with substack writing, unless your substack was about theoretical physics or whatever. So it doesn’t surprise me that there are a lot of estimates around there or slightly above. 130 puts you in the top 2% of the population.
I wish I'd taken an IQ test back in the day. At 39 I think there is too much cognitive decline to know what my peak might have been. I always scored around 95th percentile on standardized tests, but those are usually too knowledge-based to say anything about IQ. I'm probably firmly in "midwit" range.
I do think I've gained wisdom and knowledge with age. But definitely not as intelligent as I once was.
Gwern is plainly smarter than ASC, but ASC has him beat in trait psychoticism (maybe) and the type of unenviable phenotype that makes someone desperate for approval & hence apt to produce a lot.
These are way too low. Newton comes in at 160, which is +4SDs. Over 10,000 people in the United States are over 160. There are not 10,000 people in America with more intellectual horsepower than Isaac Newton. There’s a strong case to be made that there are 0 in history. A more accurate estimation would have exceeded the limit of 200.
In some cases, we have public statements of their IQ, and the estimates are way lower. Aella has been tested at 140, Hanania has suggested he’s around 145, and in this thread you can find people providing better estimates of Yud and Yarvin.
I’m surprised at how bad people were at this given the community’s obsession with IQ. Even numbers like 160 aren’t that rare, and this is a selection of some of the era’s (and history’s) foremost intellects.
Greg Cochran says he was in the top half percent of scholastic achievement tests like SAT, GRE etc. back in the day. He also said he got over 700 SAT Math without prep. There are some reasonable estimates about IQ-old SAT/GRE conversions and this puts him above 145 easily.
Scott Alexander probably has an uneven cognitive profile due to lower correlation of sub-factors among high ability people. Guessing ASC has near 3std for verbal ability and lower (1.5-2sd) quant ability. If I'd have to take a shot I'd say his FSIQ is 134-135.
Semi-relatedly, one of the more interesting pieces of data I saw was that the average IQ of an Oxford math PhD is 128 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5008436/), so I guess you don't have to be exceptionally gifted to be very good at math. So "[X] is very good at math, s/he must be 140+" (which is an heuristic lots of people use) might be misleading and biased the results. idk.
1. Good heuristic is that anyone who talks about how smart they are probably isn't that smart.
2. Scott is probably a lot smarter than that.
3. Nowhere do I see scores in that study, and n=19.
4. In British universities, especially at elite ones, the postgraduates are normally much less impressive than the undergraduates. It's not like the United States where PhD's are super hard work and you need to score well on a GRE or GMAT just to get in. Most people doing postgrads at Oxford are just rich kids who graduated from lesser known universities that have parents who are happy to pay any amount to have Oxford on their child's CV. Furthermore, for mathematics, Oxford is one of the easiest prestigious universities to get into for math as you don't have to take the STEP exams (testing for top 2% of math students in the country) to get in. All the top math students in the UK go to either Cambridge or Imperial College London.
As I wasn't smart enough to know who all these people even were let alone how smart they are, I slunk back into my midwittery to read about the Dunning-Kruger effect on Wiki...again.
gwern, Scott Alexander, and Aella all strike out as people whose IQ scores would dramatically underestimate how smart or prolific they are.
I would expect them to underperform tests that MIT students or Physics PhD students would perform *well* on, even if they are *on net* more impressive than MIT students or Physics PhD students
Also there's no way in hell Eliezer has a lower IQ than Scott Alexander (even though Scott Alexander is plenty smart)
Despite being one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, Edward O. Wilson famously scored in the 120s on an IQ test. I'm not surprised. The cognitive archetypes of Scott Alexander and gwern and AellaGirl are probably similar to EO Wilson (gwern once mentioned he was "too lazy" to learn linear algebra)
Firstly, ancient thinkers aren't likely to be much smarter than everyone else in the modern day; they were big fish, yes, but in a much smaller pond. Just looking at, for example, Razib, I find it very hard to believe Raz is less intelligent than Kant, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Diogenes of Sinope. Is Razib *really* almost two standard deviations below Newton. The same reasoning works for you, Emil.
Secondly, equating creativity with trait psychoticism is terrible; I know Eysenck loved Psychoticism, but his tools for measuring it were abysmal, and even modern correlations between P and creativity are not high. Openness to Experience plays a bigger role in creative genius than susceptibility to mental illness.
Thirdly Scott Alexander is (well, was) totally rad, but not because his IQ is amazing or because he's borderline psychotic. What Scott does have is phenomenal verbal ability, and a good social network. It never hurts to have a little help from your friends!
I think you could safely lift the cutoff from 70 to 100 and still keep all potentially accurate guesses. Probably even 110. Would be cool to see a table for the median guesses per lower cutoff increment.
Asking people to estimate IQ is not a good idea. Even though the rank order seem good enough.
In order to give a good IQ estimate you need to know what the mean and standard deviation is. And you need to know how the normal didtribution works.
Better to ask people "He is 1 in a N smart, estimate N". I bet you would get some one in a million estimates that way (160 is one in 30,000 - they are everywhere!)
He mentions in interviews the he skipped a few grades in school. If you’re in a good school district i feel like it’s exceptionally rare for a kid to skip a grade, and even rarer to skip multiple. You have to be WAY smarter than your run of the mill gifted kid. This was a give away that lead me to rate him among the highest.
I mean the rigid age based grade system that American schools use is pretty arbitrary. In theory there’s plenty of people who could skip grades if the system were more flexible. In practice that it’s exceptionally rare. No one with an iq of 120, or even 135 is skipping a grade in the US.
Didn't know that. At least at my private school, you could skip grades and/or courses if you did the exams for the courses a grade or more ahead of you.
Interesting. Are you in America? That’s definitely not a thing in public schools here, at least not where I live. Once you get to age 13 or so you do get placed in classes based on your ability, so there’s normally plenty of challenge for really bright students. In my graduating class of ≈400 there was only 1 kid who had skipped a grade, he ended up being our salutatorian. I feel like he was iq of 160, while our valedictorian who hadn’t skipped a grade I would guess was about 155.
Interestingly enough, Andrew Tate’s father was a chess grandmaster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emory_Tate
Hes definitely higher IQ than people think. Pretty much all of these people are high IQ.
Even Kanyes mom was a college professor who chaired the English dept at Chicago State University. To be super successful in the music industry in the way Kanye has been requires a lot of higher order thinking. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he was in the top 2 percent or so of black IQ, like 120+.
Interesting survey though, I wonder which ones were most accurate. Coincidentally I know for a fact my dads iq is 127 (he’s a VP of global manufacturing & logistics at a well known company, for reference).
Kanye was a good painter when he was a little kid also and Tate too was actually a nerd when he was a kid, there's a newspaper article of him winning a junior chess tournament and he aced his exams for the uni in the UK. His father also spoke 5 languages fluently.
Ye clearly has a high IQ.
There is no way Andrew Tate has any kind of remarkable IQ.
I’m sure some smart people pretend to be dumb, or they don’t care what others think.
Kanye also has a lot of dumbness points to his record. His mother died in one of the single stupidest celebrity orbiter deaths of all time; she refused to recover at the hospital after having extensive, elective plastic surgery. Instead, the care was entrusted to her idiot nephew, who abandoned her so he could attend a fuck-mothering babyshower instead. Kanye blamed all this on the surgeon, who certainly wasn’t blameless, but he was way less at fault than both Kanye’s mother and cousin.
This was ’08. Before he’d totally fried his brains on drugs.
Curtis Yarvin's IQ is public at 167.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's can be pretty well estimated at 165 based on his public "Midwest Talent Search" results:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010309014808/http://sysopmind.com/eliezer.html#timeline_the
As I replied on another comment, Yarvin has said in interviews that he skipped multiple grades in school. That’s exceptionally rare, so I knew he was likely significantly higher than your run of the mill 130iq “gifted” kid. Most of these people are 130+, but without specifics beyond just their education and writing it’s tough to tell 130 from 160.
Did they provide evidence for this?
Yarvin mentioned in some post recently he had the same IQ as the Unabomber, which Google reports is 167. Yarvin hasn't elaborated on it as far as I know.
I should have made more clear, I estimated Yudkowsky's based on his "Midwest Talent Search" results–which used the SAT, a good proxy for IQ, especially when he was taking it, but not the same: https://web.archive.org/web/20010309014808/http://sysopmind.com/eliezer.html#timeline_the
Maybe Yudkowsky made it up. Maybe he hyped himself up to believe that it's true. At face value that would be more likely than a 165 IQ.
It’s certainly possible, though I think your prior against his IQ being 165 is too strong.
Public intellectual stuff seems exceptionally cognitively demanding.
I agree with you but there are definitely traits outside of IQ and equally as important when it comes to being a public intellectual, especially advocating for a cause like Yudkowsky. Yarvin for example doesn’t have the same type of communication skills imo.
Both Fuentes and Spencer are vastly underestimated probably due to them being controversial in the community.
Quote something smart Fuentes has said.
My take on this is that people vastly underestimate how smart many popular writers are, and how much that contributes to their output.
130 IQ doesn't get you the kind of quality writing on technical subjects that many of these guys put out. Say what you want about Noah Smith, but my lower bound for him would be 140 (that should tell you something about the hardware Emil is probably working with).
In terms of raw intellect of people who are currently alive, it's hard not to see Robin Hanson and Gwern as gross underestimates. Gwern's writing reminds of me a bit of Chris Langan's (albeit much less insane), so it wouldn't surprise me if he was in that vicinity.
"... so it wouldn't surprise me if he was close to 200".
The probability of having an IQ of 200 is 1 in 75,000,000,000 (rounded).
The number of people who have ever lived on earth is about 110,000,000,000.
After reading his blog, it wouldn't surprise me.
IQ 200 ist NOT the 99.998th percentile.
It is the 99.999999999th percentile!
Gwern actually had on his website at one point (I can't find it - either he reorganized his site or removed it entirely) that his SAT score was high, but not the absolute max, and estimated his IQ based on the SAT score as being in the mid-130s. It's possible Gwern put it there as disinformation, or just that the SAT is not very good at distinguishing people at the top end of IQ - I had a higher SAT score than Gwern self-reported, and I'm about the same age and pretty sure I took the same format, but I don't have his level of obsession, so I'm definitely not a genius.
Yeah, Noah Smith also did his undergraduate at Stanford with distinction
in Physics*
Isn’t this all just garbage in-garbage out because most people are clueless about real IQ scores and have never taken a properly administered and normed test? Pretty sure most people think it’s linear like school grades and just assign “a bit more” IQ to some they think is “a bit more” smart.
I would think people are good at favoring in the normal distribution into their estimates. But, the median being 130 for people who are clearly much higher, is not a good sign, agree.
Legit Raven's 2 is easily available. I got 129, tho admittedly I didn't properly self-administer it (sleep deprived, and drugged near the end lol).
IIRC, similar experiments existed, when teachers were asked to estimate intellect of student they knew in real life, and then the average was compared to actual IQ test.
I doubt anything above 130 iq would help much with substack writing, unless your substack was about theoretical physics or whatever. So it doesn’t surprise me that there are a lot of estimates around there or slightly above. 130 puts you in the top 2% of the population.
I wish I'd taken an IQ test back in the day. At 39 I think there is too much cognitive decline to know what my peak might have been. I always scored around 95th percentile on standardized tests, but those are usually too knowledge-based to say anything about IQ. I'm probably firmly in "midwit" range.
I do think I've gained wisdom and knowledge with age. But definitely not as intelligent as I once was.
IQ tests adjust for age :)
Gwern is plainly smarter than ASC, but ASC has him beat in trait psychoticism (maybe) and the type of unenviable phenotype that makes someone desperate for approval & hence apt to produce a lot.
Gwern is also very tall. Tall dudes are chill. There may not be a Napoleon complex, but there is a Peter the Great simplex.
These are way too low. Newton comes in at 160, which is +4SDs. Over 10,000 people in the United States are over 160. There are not 10,000 people in America with more intellectual horsepower than Isaac Newton. There’s a strong case to be made that there are 0 in history. A more accurate estimation would have exceeded the limit of 200.
In some cases, we have public statements of their IQ, and the estimates are way lower. Aella has been tested at 140, Hanania has suggested he’s around 145, and in this thread you can find people providing better estimates of Yud and Yarvin.
I’m surprised at how bad people were at this given the community’s obsession with IQ. Even numbers like 160 aren’t that rare, and this is a selection of some of the era’s (and history’s) foremost intellects.
Maybe most very smart people are smart enough to not want to be public intellectuals.
Greg Cochran says he was in the top half percent of scholastic achievement tests like SAT, GRE etc. back in the day. He also said he got over 700 SAT Math without prep. There are some reasonable estimates about IQ-old SAT/GRE conversions and this puts him above 145 easily.
Scott Alexander probably has an uneven cognitive profile due to lower correlation of sub-factors among high ability people. Guessing ASC has near 3std for verbal ability and lower (1.5-2sd) quant ability. If I'd have to take a shot I'd say his FSIQ is 134-135.
Semi-relatedly, one of the more interesting pieces of data I saw was that the average IQ of an Oxford math PhD is 128 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5008436/), so I guess you don't have to be exceptionally gifted to be very good at math. So "[X] is very good at math, s/he must be 140+" (which is an heuristic lots of people use) might be misleading and biased the results. idk.
1. Good heuristic is that anyone who talks about how smart they are probably isn't that smart.
2. Scott is probably a lot smarter than that.
3. Nowhere do I see scores in that study, and n=19.
4. In British universities, especially at elite ones, the postgraduates are normally much less impressive than the undergraduates. It's not like the United States where PhD's are super hard work and you need to score well on a GRE or GMAT just to get in. Most people doing postgrads at Oxford are just rich kids who graduated from lesser known universities that have parents who are happy to pay any amount to have Oxford on their child's CV. Furthermore, for mathematics, Oxford is one of the easiest prestigious universities to get into for math as you don't have to take the STEP exams (testing for top 2% of math students in the country) to get in. All the top math students in the UK go to either Cambridge or Imperial College London.
As I wasn't smart enough to know who all these people even were let alone how smart they are, I slunk back into my midwittery to read about the Dunning-Kruger effect on Wiki...again.
n = n -1
gwern, Scott Alexander, and Aella all strike out as people whose IQ scores would dramatically underestimate how smart or prolific they are.
I would expect them to underperform tests that MIT students or Physics PhD students would perform *well* on, even if they are *on net* more impressive than MIT students or Physics PhD students
Also there's no way in hell Eliezer has a lower IQ than Scott Alexander (even though Scott Alexander is plenty smart)
Despite being one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, Edward O. Wilson famously scored in the 120s on an IQ test. I'm not surprised. The cognitive archetypes of Scott Alexander and gwern and AellaGirl are probably similar to EO Wilson (gwern once mentioned he was "too lazy" to learn linear algebra)
There's no Dean Simonton here
Source for "too lazy"?
Three comments here:
Firstly, ancient thinkers aren't likely to be much smarter than everyone else in the modern day; they were big fish, yes, but in a much smaller pond. Just looking at, for example, Razib, I find it very hard to believe Raz is less intelligent than Kant, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Diogenes of Sinope. Is Razib *really* almost two standard deviations below Newton. The same reasoning works for you, Emil.
Secondly, equating creativity with trait psychoticism is terrible; I know Eysenck loved Psychoticism, but his tools for measuring it were abysmal, and even modern correlations between P and creativity are not high. Openness to Experience plays a bigger role in creative genius than susceptibility to mental illness.
Thirdly Scott Alexander is (well, was) totally rad, but not because his IQ is amazing or because he's borderline psychotic. What Scott does have is phenomenal verbal ability, and a good social network. It never hurts to have a little help from your friends!
I think you could safely lift the cutoff from 70 to 100 and still keep all potentially accurate guesses. Probably even 110. Would be cool to see a table for the median guesses per lower cutoff increment.
Asking people to estimate IQ is not a good idea. Even though the rank order seem good enough.
In order to give a good IQ estimate you need to know what the mean and standard deviation is. And you need to know how the normal didtribution works.
Better to ask people "He is 1 in a N smart, estimate N". I bet you would get some one in a million estimates that way (160 is one in 30,000 - they are everywhere!)
v. surprised yarvin is not higher! dude is defnly a genius imo.
He mentions in interviews the he skipped a few grades in school. If you’re in a good school district i feel like it’s exceptionally rare for a kid to skip a grade, and even rarer to skip multiple. You have to be WAY smarter than your run of the mill gifted kid. This was a give away that lead me to rate him among the highest.
Yeah - he graduated from Brown at age 19-20
I mean the rigid age based grade system that American schools use is pretty arbitrary. In theory there’s plenty of people who could skip grades if the system were more flexible. In practice that it’s exceptionally rare. No one with an iq of 120, or even 135 is skipping a grade in the US.
Didn't know that. At least at my private school, you could skip grades and/or courses if you did the exams for the courses a grade or more ahead of you.
Interesting. Are you in America? That’s definitely not a thing in public schools here, at least not where I live. Once you get to age 13 or so you do get placed in classes based on your ability, so there’s normally plenty of challenge for really bright students. In my graduating class of ≈400 there was only 1 kid who had skipped a grade, he ended up being our salutatorian. I feel like he was iq of 160, while our valedictorian who hadn’t skipped a grade I would guess was about 155.
It seems meng hu and cremieux have great math ability. I think they are 130+