Weird to read over the Twitter threads like "I just can't believe all these historical figures reputed as great geniuses had IQs as high as 140", because like, I test around 175. People can be smart! Someone's gonna be the long tail.
If you had an IQ of 175, that would mean that you were 5 standard deviations from the mean -- which is not impossible, but would mean that you were one of the smartest 2300 or so people in the world.
I am somewhat skeptical of this. Partially out of a sense that I find it more likely that I am talking to someone who would tell implausible lies about their IQ than that I am talking to someone with an IQ of 175. Partially out of a sense that I just think that you would probably be more notable in other ways if you were really that smart.
I was enough of an outlier they were concerned with the test’s validity so they retested me with a few others with different methodologies, they all came back between 174 and 178. They told me that put me somewhere between a 2 in a million people level and 1 in 2 (so that’d be between about 15,000 and 4,000 people on earth).
This was 2nd grade but I’d take one occasionally later and it was still on track.
You think you’d have heard of me, huh? How many of the other 2299 can you name? Like I said, someone’s gotta be the long tail.