Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis has a new book coming out titled “
You can imagine how a pitch like this probably sounded great to publishers a year or so ago, But Musk is never actually mentioned in this excerpt. Instead the focus is on Marilyn vos Savant who became known as the smartest woman in the world after her reported IQ score of 220 (she took the IQ test at the age of 10) was leaked to the Guinness people and publicized.
Thanks to all the publicity, vos Savant met her third husband, Robert Jarvik, who had developed a pioneering model of an artificial heart. Jarvik had his own story of being overlooked: Before ultimately enrolling in medical school at the University of Utah, he had been rejected by 15 other institutions. He tracked down vos Savant after seeing her on the cover of an airline magazine, and she agreed to a date after finding a picture of him taken by Annie Leibovitz. They quickly became an item, and eventually took up residence in New York.
At their 1987 wedding, the rings were made of gold and pyrolytic carbon, a material used in Jarvik’s artificial heart. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave away the bride…
Vos Savant’s life perfectly illustrates how genius can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She was a housewife raising her children in total obscurity, until she was labeled a genius. And then she became one.
As Lewis sees it, the kind of people who have a high IQ score can be broken into three basic groups:
…those with unusually high intelligence fell into three groups: the well-adjusted middle class, who were able to use their talents; those living marginal lives, working in manual or low-paid jobs and reading textbooks by night; and finally the dropouts, whose families had had no idea how to support their brilliant children, and might have gone so far as to treat them as a “performing animal, or even an experiment.”
And of those three, it’s the ones in category #2 that are most likely to care about joining Mensa or some other high IQ group. In other words, it’s the smart people who don’t have a lot to show for their intelligence otherwise.
As part of the writing process, Lewis took two IQ tests, an older one that mostly involved rotating shapes and a newer one that was more about verbal reasoning. The payoff is that she doesn’t reveal her results.
Sorry—I’m not saying; we already know I’m not a genius, but I’m not an outsider either, so they don’t matter. My time researching Langan, Raniere, and the others convinced me that IQ testing has narrow scientific uses, but it is a false god.
I think it’s easy to overvalue IQ and there’s nothing more boring than someone who brags about it, but I also think it’s measuring something real. You can just tell when you’re talking to someone who is unusually smart. It’s not just that they know things and remember things, they’re also clever in real time. In my experience smart people are often funny and interesting.
That doesn’t mean that everyone with a high IQ will get a Ph.D. and become a billionaire. Obviously most of them won’t because that kind of success is a lot more rare than smart people.
Still, there’s a reason so many Ivy League schools reinstated the SAT last year, despite pressure not to do so from progressives. The schools found that, without those tests, they had a harder time judging who would be up to the workload. Too many of the students they admitted without test scores dropped out or failed out.
Anyway, genius may be political in some cases and it may be overstated, but it does exist and it very often benefits a lot of people.
