
230 IQ: Terrence Tao Is the Smartest Person in the World - jkuria
https://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-smartest-person-in-the-world-2/answer/Arman-Siani?share=1
======
daveFNbuck
This is just a brief Quora answer that makes the unevidenced assertion of Tao
having a 230 IQ and then quotes from Wikipedia a bunch. I don't think IQ tests
can even measure above 200.

~~~
scarmig
An IQ of 230 would be 8.66 standard deviations above the mean. Off the top of
my head, that should be rarer than one in a trillion.

I'm not a hard IQ skeptic, but there's nothing predictive or meaningful about
any IQ over 150 or so, even in a strictly statistical sense. It's a tool built
and validated against the bulk of the population, not extreme outliers.

~~~
Grue3
>that should be rarer than one in a trillion.

You're assuming that the tail of the statistics behaves like in normal
distribution. In practice this is incorrect (see "black swan theory").

Various sports that employ statistics (cricket, baseball, etc.) sometimes have
a single player who strays from bell curve in a ridiculous way. For example
Don Bradman's batting average in cricket [1].

[1] [https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-
s-c...](https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-cricketing-
genius-make-him-a-statistical-outlier)

~~~
scarmig
IQ is a synthetic measure that follows a normal distribution by construction.
To the extent that measurements of IQ in a population via test deviate from a
normal distribution (with, say, fat tails), that's a reason to doubt the
validity of that particular test in that domain.

------
sjhcanada
Fire up Excel and enter these: A2 enter the IQ score you are interested in B2
=NORM.DIST(A2, 100,15,1) C2 =1/(1-B2) C2 will show the group size you are the
top "1" of 195 IQ is the top IQ for a group of 8 billion people 197 (Walter
O'Brien's supposed IQ on "Scorpion") = top IQ for 19 billion people 230 IQ is
impossible.

------
sjhcanada
Reference for this [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/827371/description-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/827371/description-of-the-normdist-function-in-excel)

------
bradknowles
No. Negative. Nope. Absolutely no. I say unto thee, “nuh-uh”.

230 is not the highest IQ that I have heard of.

IQ is not a good measure of “smartest”. It is racially biased, gender biased,
and geographically biased.

~~~
programmarchy
An IQ test may not measure "smartest" since there are many definitions of that
word, but I don't see how the test itself is biased.

It simply measures a number we call general intelligence which happens to
strongly correlate with academic/career achievement, income, and a variety of
social outcomes.

IQ may have different distributions across genders and races, but on an
individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs will have
similar life outcomes, so where does the bias come in?

~~~
h0l0cube
> on an individual level a white person and a black person with similar IQs
> will have similar life outcomes

Do you have any evidence to back up that claim?

~~~
programmarchy
Alright, I could not find the exact study I had in mind, but did come across a
summary of the history of research in this area, which touches on what I was
talking about:

THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186.102&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

See around pages 240-243, Section 3: Mean Race–IQ Differences: A Global
Perspective

> Many critics claim that Western-developed IQ tests are not valid for groups
> as culturally different as sub-Saharan Africans (e.g., Nell, 2000). The main
> evidence to support a claim of external bias would be if the test failed to
> predict performance for Africans. Even if tests only underpredicted
> performance for Africans compared with non-Africans, it would suggest that
> their test scores underestimated their “true” IQ scores. However, a review
> by Kendall, Verster, and von Mollendorf (1988) showed that test scores for
> Africans have about equal predictive validity as those for non-Africans
> (e.g., 0.20 to 0.50 for students’ school grades and for employees’ job
> performance). The review also showed that many of the factors that influence
> scores in Africans are the same as those for Whites (e.g., coming from an
> urban vs. a rural environment; being a science rather than an arts student;
> having had practice on the tests; and the well-documented curvilinear
> relationship with age). Similarly, Sternberg et al.’s (2001) study of Kenyan
> 12- to 15-year-olds found that IQ scores predicted school grades, with a
> mean r .40 (p .001; after controlling for age and socioeconomic status
> [SES], r .28, p .01). In Rushton et al.’s (2003) study of African and non-
> African engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand, scores
> on the Advanced Progressive Matrices correlated with scores on the Standard
> Progressive Matrices measured 3 months earlier (.60 for Africans; .70 for
> non-Africans) and with end-of-year exam marks measured 3 months later (.34
> for Africans; .28 for non-Africans). Figure 1 shows the regression of exam
> marks on test scores for these university students.

~~~
h0l0cube
> will have similar life outcomes

I think my argument with you rests probably rests in the wording. I'm not
willing to delve into each paper listed to check the controlled variables and
selection biases, but a number are biased towards students already in
universities, and one explicitly controls for socio-economic status. Even then
I would like to see whether life outcomes in term of income, health,
incarceration rates were measured in countries where Africans are the
minority.

But it's my guess that you weren't so much interested in the similar life
outcomes, but the correlates of IQ to competence being similar between African
and non-African people.

