A couple of your examples are dubious. Christopher Langan in particular seems like an outright fraud. You could have looked at larger sample sizes, e.g. the SMPY.
OK Tove, you name a number of people here who "have" IQs of 190, 200, and higher. But I don't believe any of them actually have those IQ levels. To be technical, IQ is something one scores, rather than has, but assuming IQ is a trait that one can possess, I still don't believe most of these scores.
There's a rarity chart here that says how common such people should be at https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQtable.aspx which says that IQ 200 is the upper 99,9999999987% of people - in other words, one out of over 76 billion people. You are reporting on the existence of more than one such person, but 76 billion is more than the number of people who have been alive since IQ testing began. The number of such people we would expect to have ever lived is zero.
I do believe that these people are widely reported as having ultra high IQs. And I'm willing to believe that at one point, according to some test, maybe some of them really did score that high, but even that is something I'm not sure of. What I don't believe is that most of them truly *have* an IQ this high.
How would one even design a test for people who are so rare? Wouldn't you need one of these special, one in 76 billion people to be able to design the questions? Most IQ tests have ceilings on them - upper bounds where no one can score above. A common ceiling is 160 IQ. But even approaching these ceilings, the score starts to be less meaningful, so (depending on the test) scores above 150 can be imprecise. https://www.verywellfamily.com/ceiling-effect-1449173
You point out many people with reported IQs of 190, 200, and above have few accomplishments, and argue that, therefore, IQ is more a measure of pattern recognition than thinking ability. But what would we conclude if, in fact, these claims about their IQ were just silly?
What about this paper? It does suggest ever increasing returns to iq https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659390782510604290?s=46&t=_UUM4ozB1KcaD5mygp8y5w
A couple of your examples are dubious. Christopher Langan in particular seems like an outright fraud. You could have looked at larger sample sizes, e.g. the SMPY.
OK Tove, you name a number of people here who "have" IQs of 190, 200, and higher. But I don't believe any of them actually have those IQ levels. To be technical, IQ is something one scores, rather than has, but assuming IQ is a trait that one can possess, I still don't believe most of these scores.
There's a rarity chart here that says how common such people should be at https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQtable.aspx which says that IQ 200 is the upper 99,9999999987% of people - in other words, one out of over 76 billion people. You are reporting on the existence of more than one such person, but 76 billion is more than the number of people who have been alive since IQ testing began. The number of such people we would expect to have ever lived is zero.
I do believe that these people are widely reported as having ultra high IQs. And I'm willing to believe that at one point, according to some test, maybe some of them really did score that high, but even that is something I'm not sure of. What I don't believe is that most of them truly *have* an IQ this high.
How would one even design a test for people who are so rare? Wouldn't you need one of these special, one in 76 billion people to be able to design the questions? Most IQ tests have ceilings on them - upper bounds where no one can score above. A common ceiling is 160 IQ. But even approaching these ceilings, the score starts to be less meaningful, so (depending on the test) scores above 150 can be imprecise. https://www.verywellfamily.com/ceiling-effect-1449173
You point out many people with reported IQs of 190, 200, and above have few accomplishments, and argue that, therefore, IQ is more a measure of pattern recognition than thinking ability. But what would we conclude if, in fact, these claims about their IQ were just silly?