Item — HN Reader

Well, it is mathematically impossible. Traditional IQ tests have a mean/median of 100, and follow a normal distribution with standard-deviation of 15 points.

So 270 would be 11 standard deviations above normal so 1 in 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people.

1 comments

So it is possible, and you just calculated the probability of that happening.

It's possible in the same way its possible that you will spontaneously phase through the floor due to a particular outcome of atomic resonance. Possible, but so unlikely it almost certainly has not, nor ever will happen.

Might something a small as a grain of sand have phased through a solid barrier as thin as a piece of paper somewhere on earth, at some point over billions of years? Sure. Paper is still pretty thick, and a grain of sand is enormous on the atomic scale, but it's at least in the realm of practical probability. When you start talking about cum(P) events in the realm of 1/1e30 you simply can't produce a scenario with that many dice rolls. If our population was 8 quadrillion and spanned a 40,000 year empire we would likely still never see an individual 11σ from the mean.

The probability is exactly zero by definition. The maximum score on a test is a raw score of 100%. Tests are normalized to have the reported scores fit a normal distribution. An out-of-distribution score indicates an error in normalizing the test.

In other words, the highest IQ of every living person has a defined upper bound that is dependent on the number of living people and it is definitionally impossible to exceed this value. Reports of higher values are mistakes or informal exaggerations, similar to a school saying a student is one that you would only encounter in a million years. By definition it is not possible to have evidence to support such a statement.

The maximum IQ score anyone can get depends on the total number of people who have taken IQ tests so far. Even if every single person alive today took an IQ test (which is absurd in itself), the maximum IQ achievable would be between 190-197. In practice, I'd guess the maximum is somewhere between 170 and 185 (millions to tens of millions of IQ test results which were recorded).

Even then, you need special tests to distinguish between anyone with IQ higher than about 160 - all those people get the same (perfect) score on regular IQ tests.

So: claiming to have an IQ of 276? Bullshit. The guy whose parents claimed he scored 210 on an IQ test? Also bullshit. To get 210, there would have to have been ~500 billion IQ test results recorded.

How many people would you estimate exist?

Between 8 and 9 billion. But "impossible" means a chance of zero, and 8 billion / 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 > 0, so it's not impossible. The chances that he's lying or delusional are vastly higher of course, but that's no reason to use "impossible" incorrectly.

Impossible is almost always a colloquialism, almost everything is possible is you accept a low enough probability of success. We are talking about something less likely than almost anything else ever called impossible.

No, I think you are misunderstanding. IQ does not describe the likelihood of someone being that smart. It just means you order a number of people by their „intelligence“, the one in the middle is defined as 100 and then it depends on how many other people are in that line which IQ number the person at the end of the line gets. So it’s impossible because the definition of IQ is such that a certain number doesn’t come up without a certain number of measurements.

It‘s as if you would say 150% of all people are female. That is impossible, not just unlikely.