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Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius
Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius. I've been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it's so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley. Vos Savant hasn't made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys. That all changed in 1985, when The Guinness Book of World Records published her childhood IQ score. How its authors obtained the record is murky: An acquaintance once told the Financial Times that he'd urged her to submit her result as a way of making her famous. [Read: How smart people actually talk about themselves] 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. A news report has them telling their guests that they were relieved to meet each other, because they found most people difficult to talk to—the implication being that mere mortals were not on their wavelength. The honeymoon would be spent in Paris, they revealed; vos Savant would write a screenplay for a futuristic satire, and Jarvik would continue researching his 'grand unification theory' of physics. Yet despite their superior brains, vos Savant's screenplay was never made into a film, and Jarvik—who, according to a New York profile of the couple, thought the Big Bang theory was 'wrong' and the theory of relativity was 'probably wrong'—did not revolutionize physics. What did happen, though, is that on the back of her anointment in Guinness, vos Savant built a career as a professional genius. She wrote books such as the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest and Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks. Billing her as 'the smartest person in the world,' Parade magazine gave her an advice column, where she answered readers' queries and published puzzles. (She didn't respond to my attempts to contact her through the magazine.) Her specialty was logic problems—which showcase the particular type of mental ability most readily identified by IQ tests. In one column, she provided a solution for an apparently insoluble conundrum, the Monty Hall problem. Angry readers wrote in to correct her, but she stood firm. 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. She embodied what I call the 'genius myth,' the idea that humanity contains a special sort of person, what Samuel Johnson's dictionary defined in 1755 as 'a man endowed with superiour faculties.' Seeing yourself as such can be poisonous: Think of the public intellectuals who embarrass themselves by straying far from their area of expertise. Think of the smart people who twist logic in impressive ways to convince themselves of crankish ideas. Think of, say, a man who has had great success in business, who decides that means he must be equally good at cutting government bureaucracy. One of the cruelest things about the genius myth is that its sufferers cannot understand their failures: I'm so clever. I can't possibly have screwed this up. I prefer to talk about moments of genius: beautiful paintings, heartbreaking novels, inspired military or political decisions, scientific breakthroughs, technological marvels. Nowhere are the downsides of the genius myth more obvious than in ultrahigh-IQ societies. I don't mean Mensa, which began in England after the Second World War; it asks only that members are drawn from the top 2 percent of the population. Even more rarified are groups such as the Mega Society, which was limited to people with 'one-in-a-million' intelligence. Vos Savant made the cut. The funny thing about ultrahigh-IQ groups is that they quarrel and schism with a frequency otherwise reserved for doomsday cults and fringe political movements. An exhaustive online history of the high-IQ movement, compiled by the blogger Darryl Miyaguchi in the 1990s, recounts the story of the Cincinnatus Society, which admitted only those with an IQ higher than 99.9 percent of the population. It usurped a previous group with the same criteria, called the Triple Nine Society, which was itself a breakaway faction from another group, the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. From the start, Mega was riven by infighting. In the 1990s, it merged with another society and announced that members would have to retake the entry test. This prompted something close to a civil war, and by 2003, the various factions in the high-IQ movement were so splintered that a dispute over who could use the group's name ended up in court. The loser in that case, Christopher Langan, has a Facebook group where he outlines his 'Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe,' as well as his belief that George W. Bush staged the 9/11 attacks to stop people from learning about Langan's cognitive-theoretical model of the universe. In another post, he wrote that humanity was failing because 'rich libtards' were 'pandering like two-dollar whores to the degenerate tastes, preferences, and delusions of the genetic underclass, the future of humanity be damned.' Is Langan smart? Yes. Is he insightful about humanity, or at least fun to be around? Perhaps not. Another onetime member of Mega was Keith Raniere, whose local paper, the Albany Times Union, claimed in 1988 that his self-administered test proved his intellect was 'one in 10 million.' In 2020, he was sentenced to 120 years in prison over the abuse he perpetrated as the leader of a cult called NXIVM. This operated according to a 'master and slave' hierarchy in which no one ranked higher than Raniere, who was known as 'Vanguard.' Some of NXIVM's disciples were branded with Raniere's initials. (Prosecutors also branded the group a pyramid scheme.) As the cult collapsed, many of Raniere's early claims to genius came under new scrutiny. Had he really learned to read the word homogenized off a milk carton at age 2, and understood quantum physics by 4, as a news reporter had suggested in 1988—and was he also an avid juggler who needed only 'two to four hours of sleep'? People began to wonder, and then noticed something potentially important: The Mega test was not supervised, could be taken at home, and had no time limit. Draw your own conclusions. Today, because of their infighting and their members' lack of worldly success, high-IQ groups have become kind of a joke. But their history helps illuminate why intelligence alone does not necessarily yield sublime works. In the 1980s, when some of these groups' members were asked to propose a term for the intangible quality that distinguished them from everyone else, none chose genius, according to a contemporaneous account by Grady Towers, a stalwart of the high-IQ community. 'When asked what it should be called, they produced a number of suggestions, sometimes esoteric, sometimes witty, and often remarkably vulgar,' Towers wrote in 1987. 'But one term was suggested independently again and again. Many thought that the most appropriate term for people like themselves was Outsider.' [Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk] Towers believed that 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.' The first group did not get involved with high-IQ societies, Towers thought, because their intellectual and social lives were already full. 'It's the exceptionally gifted adult who feels stifled that stands most in need of a high IQ society,' he wrote, adding that 'none of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded.' The predominance of the lonely, frustrated, and socially awkward in ultrahigh-IQ societies was enough, he wrote, 'to explain the constant schisms that develop, the frequent vendettas, and the mediocre level of their publications. But those are not immutable facts; they can be changed. And the first step in doing so is to see ourselves as we are.' Grady Towers was murdered on March 20, 2000, while investigating a break-in at the park in Arizona where he worked as a security guard. He was 55. In 1990, The Guinness Book of World Records retired the highest-IQ category, conceding that no definitive ranking was possible, given the limitations of and the variation among the available tests. This new mood of caution means that vos Savant's Guinness record will remain untouched. If, that is, it was a record at all—critics have been arguing about the validity of her result for decades. Why does the superlative matter? Because vos Savant couldn't and wouldn't have become a 'genius' without the label being pinned on her first. Attention was paid, and then more attention followed, because if people were looking, then there must have been something worth looking at, surely. That should make us wonder if the same process happens in reverse. Do children who struggle at school get the message that they aren't 'academic,' and lose interest and enthusiasm? By thinking about IQ, I was venturing into one of the most bitter battles in 20th-century social science. In the decades following the development of standardized tests, the 'IQ wars' pitted two factions against each other: the environmentalists and the hereditarians. The first believed that IQ was entirely or largely influenced by surroundings—childhood nutrition, schooling, and so on—and the second argued that IQ was largely determined by genes. In America, these became synonymous with two extreme positions: hard-left advocacy for pure blank-slatism and far-right belief in racial hierarchy. The hereditarians were tainted by the fact that so many of them dabbled in the murky waters of race and IQ—extrapolating beyond the observed differences in average IQ scores across various countries to the suggestion that white people are innately and immutably smarter than Black people. One example would be the Nobel Prize–winning engineer William Shockley, who followed what now seems a very modern trajectory: years of real achievements, including his involvement in the invention of the transistor, followed by a second career of provocative statements and complaints about what we would now call 'cancellation.' Shockley's views on white racial superiority were coupled with his advocacy for eugenics. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he argued that people with 'defective' genes should be paid not to reproduce. As he put it: '$30,000 put into a trust for a 70 IQ-moron, who might otherwise produce 20 children, might make the plan very profitable to the taxpayer.' But the environmentalists went too far in their claims too. Most geneticists now acknowledge that IQ is partially heritable, even though progressive activists attack almost anyone who says so out loud. When the geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden began to advance the arguments she would later turn into her 2021 book, The Genetic Lottery—which argued for social equality but conceded that genes influence educational attainment—The New Yorker reported that she was subjected to 'parades of arguments and counterarguments, leaked personal e-mails, and levels of sustained podcasting that were, by anyone's standards, extreme.' Fascinated by the dangerous allure of IQ—its promise to provide a definitive ranking of human intellectual worth—I decided to sit for an IQ test myself. At the exam site, I was one of two dozen adults, plus a couple of children. One was reading a book called Why the West Rules—For Now, which didn't assuage my worries about the political overtones of this debate. The question of what exactly IQ tests measure—and how accurately they can deliver judgment—is one that's wrapped around inflammatory questions about group identity, as well as a lively policy debate about the best system of schooling. It is no accident that so many IQ researchers have ended up endorsing scientific racism or sexism. If humans can be reduced to a number, and some numbers are higher than others, it is not a long walk to decide that some humans are 'better' than others too. In 2018, Christopher Langan wrote an obituary for Koko, a celebrated gorilla that he said could sign 1,000 words and therefore had an IQ between 75 and 95. 'Koko's elevated level of thought would have been all but incomprehensible to nearly half the population of Somalia (average IQ 68),' Langan wrote on Facebook, citing dubious research about that African country. 'Obviously, this raises a question: Why is Western civilization not admitting gorillas? They too are from Africa, and probably have a group mean IQ at least equal to that of Somalia.' Langan was featured in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which attributed his lack of academic success to his chaotic, violent upbringing and the reluctance of educational authorities to extend him the same sort of grace and understanding a middle-class child might receive. But Langan has found other answers for why he did not fulfill the glorious destiny written in his genes. He blames affirmative action and a society controlled by 'globalists' and 'banksters.' Inevitably, he has a Substack. As for me, I took two IQ tests that day. The first was a test designed in 1949 to be 'culture fair,' meaning that there were no language- or logic-based questions, only shape rotation. What became immediately apparent is that the test selects heavily for speed. The strict time limits mean you simply don't have time to luxuriate over questions, turning them over in your head. Now, you could argue that quickly grasping concepts is exactly what intelligence is. But you'd also have to admit that some of history's greatest breakthroughs came from years of careful observation and rumination. That first test convinced me that whatever an IQ test is measuring, it can't be genius—that label we are so keen to bestow on people with singular achievements. It doesn't measure showing up day after day. It doesn't measure the ego necessary to insist that you're right and everyone else is wrong. And it doesn't measure the ability to market yourself as the spirit of the age. [Read: A reality check for tech oligarchs] The second test was more recent, having been updated in 1993, and leaned heavily into verbal reasoning. What I noticed here, first, was how arguable some of these questions were. Is idle a synonym for inactive or a synonym for lazy? Both, surely—it can be used as a pure descriptor, as in 'an idle engine,' or to convey a value judgment, as in 'the idle rich.' My desire to argue with the test maker only increased in the analogies section, where the example given was: 'Trousers are to boy as skirt is to … ?' The supervisor read this out with some embarrassment, assuring us that the language was 'traditional.' Things got worse. The logic puzzles in the final section included one about an explorer who might have been eaten by either lions or 'savages.' Another question asked me to work out what my surname would be, based on clues about family relationships, and clearly rested on the assumption that women all took their husband's name, and so would their children. Full of feminist zeal, I prissily ticked the box labeled 'It is not possible to know what my surname is' and resigned myself to losing points. What were my 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. Vos Savant, who is now 78, made a career of being the smartest person alive, because she had a number to prove it. Once she was hailed as a genius, vos Savant was one. Nothing about her changed, but her life did. As big a brain as Stephen Hawking had little time for this kind of thinking. In a 2004 Q&A with The New York Times Magazine, the physicist was asked what his IQ was. 'I have no idea,' he replied. 'People who boast about their IQ are losers.' This article was adapted from The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, which will be published in the United States on June 17. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
4 days ago
- General
- Atlantic
A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius
Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius. I've been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it's so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley. Vos Savant hasn't made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys. That all changed in 1985, when The Guinness Book of World Records published her childhood IQ score. How its authors obtained the record is murky: An acquaintance once told the Financial Times that he'd urged her to submit her result as a way of making her famous. 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. A news report has them telling their guests that they were relieved to meet each other, because they found most people difficult to talk to—the implication being that mere mortals were not on their wavelength. The honeymoon would be spent in Paris, they revealed; vos Savant would write a screenplay for a futuristic satire, and Jarvik would continue researching his 'grand unification theory' of physics. Yet despite their superior brains, vos Savant's screenplay was never made into a film, and Jarvik—who, according to a New York profile of the couple, thought the Big Bang theory was 'wrong' and the theory of relativity was 'probably wrong'—did not revolutionize physics. What did happen, though, is that on the back of her anointment in Guinness, vos Savant built a career as a professional genius. She wrote books such as the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest and Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks. Billing her as 'the smartest person in the world,' Parade magazine gave her an advice column, where she answered readers' queries and published puzzles. (She didn't respond to my attempts to contact her through the magazine.) Her specialty was logic problems—which showcase the particular type of mental ability most readily identified by IQ tests. In one column, she provided a solution for an apparently insoluble conundrum, the Monty Hall problem. Angry readers wrote in to correct her, but she stood firm. 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. She embodied what I call the 'genius myth,' the idea that humanity contains a special sort of person, what Samuel Johnson's dictionary defined in 1755 as 'a man endowed with superiour faculties.' Seeing yourself as such can be poisonous: Think of the public intellectuals who embarrass themselves by straying far from their area of expertise. Think of the smart people who twist logic in impressive ways to convince themselves of crankish ideas. Think of, say, a man who has had great success in business, who decides that means he must be equally good at cutting government bureaucracy. One of the cruelest things about the genius myth is that its sufferers cannot understand their failures: I'm so clever. I can't possibly have screwed this up. I prefer to talk about moments of genius: beautiful paintings, heartbreaking novels, inspired military or political decisions, scientific breakthroughs, technological marvels. Nowhere are the downsides of the genius myth more obvious than in ultrahigh-IQ societies. I don't mean Mensa, which began in England after the Second World War; it asks only that members are drawn from the top 2 percent of the population. Even more rarified are groups such as the Mega Society, which was limited to people with 'one-in-a-million' intelligence. Vos Savant made the cut. The funny thing about ultrahigh-IQ groups is that they quarrel and schism with a frequency otherwise reserved for doomsday cults and fringe political movements. An exhaustive online history of the high-IQ movement, compiled by the blogger Darryl Miyaguchi in the 1990s, recounts the story of the Cincinnatus Society, which admitted only those with an IQ higher than 99.9 percent of the population. It usurped a previous group with the same criteria, called the Triple Nine Society, which was itself a breakaway faction from another group, the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. From the start, Mega was riven by infighting. In the 1990s, it merged with another society and announced that members would have to retake the entry test. This prompted something close to a civil war, and by 2003, the various factions in the high-IQ movement were so splintered that a dispute over who could use the group's name ended up in court. The loser in that case, Christopher Langan, has a Facebook group where he outlines his 'Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe,' as well as his belief that George W. Bush staged the 9/11 attacks to stop people from learning about Langan's cognitive-theoretical model of the universe. In another post, he wrote that humanity was failing because 'rich libtards' were 'pandering like two-dollar whores to the degenerate tastes, preferences, and delusions of the genetic underclass, the future of humanity be damned.' Is Langan smart? Yes. Is he insightful about humanity, or at least fun to be around? Perhaps not. Another onetime member of Mega was Keith Raniere, whose local paper, the Albany Times Union, claimed in 1988 that his self-administered test proved his intellect was 'one in 10 million.' In 2020, he was sentenced to 120 years in prison over the abuse he perpetrated as the leader of a cult called NXIVM. This operated according to a 'master and slave' hierarchy in which no one ranked higher than Raniere, who was known as 'Vanguard.' Some of NXIVM's disciples were branded with Raniere's initials. (Prosecutors also branded the group a pyramid scheme.) As the cult collapsed, many of Raniere's early claims to genius came under new scrutiny. Had he really learned to read the word homogenized off a milk carton at age 2, and understood quantum physics by 4, as a news reporter had suggested in 1988—and was he also an avid juggler who needed only 'two to four hours of sleep'? People began to wonder, and then noticed something potentially important: The Mega test was not supervised, could be taken at home, and had no time limit. Draw your own conclusions. Today, because of their infighting and their members' lack of worldly success, high-IQ groups have become kind of a joke. But their history helps illuminate why intelligence alone does not necessarily yield sublime works. In the 1980s, when some of these groups' members were asked to propose a term for the intangible quality that distinguished them from everyone else, none chose genius, according to a contemporaneous account by Grady Towers, a stalwart of the high-IQ community. 'When asked what it should be called, they produced a number of suggestions, sometimes esoteric, sometimes witty, and often remarkably vulgar,' Towers wrote in 1987. 'But one term was suggested independently again and again. Many thought that the most appropriate term for people like themselves was Outsider.' Towers believed that 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.' The first group did not get involved with high-IQ societies, Towers thought, because their intellectual and social lives were already full. 'It's the exceptionally gifted adult who feels stifled that stands most in need of a high IQ society,' he wrote, adding that 'none of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded.' The predominance of the lonely, frustrated, and socially awkward in ultrahigh-IQ societies was enough, he wrote, 'to explain the constant schisms that develop, the frequent vendettas, and the mediocre level of their publications. But those are not immutable facts; they can be changed. And the first step in doing so is to see ourselves as we are.' Grady Towers was murdered on March 20, 2000, while investigating a break-in at the park in Arizona where he worked as a security guard. He was 55. In 1990, The Guinness Book of World Records retired the highest-IQ category, conceding that no definitive ranking was possible, given the limitations of and the variation among the available tests. This new mood of caution means that vos Savant's Guinness record will remain untouched. If, that is, it was a record at all— critics have been arguing about the validity of her result for decades. Why does the superlative matter? Because vos Savant couldn't and wouldn't have become a 'genius' without the label being pinned on her first. Attention was paid, and then more attention followed, because if people were looking, then there must have been something worth looking at, surely. That should make us wonder if the same process happens in reverse. Do children who struggle at school get the message that they aren't 'academic,' and lose interest and enthusiasm? By thinking about IQ, I was venturing into one of the most bitter battles in 20th-century social science. In the decades following the development of standardized tests, the 'IQ wars' pitted two factions against each other: the environmentalists and the hereditarians. The first believed that IQ was entirely or largely influenced by surroundings—childhood nutrition, schooling, and so on—and the second argued that IQ was largely determined by genes. In America, these became synonymous with two extreme positions: hard-left advocacy for pure blank-slatism and far-right belief in racial hierarchy. The hereditarians were tainted by the fact that so many of them dabbled in the murky waters of race and IQ—extrapolating beyond the observed differences in average IQ scores across various countries to the suggestion that white people are innately and immutably smarter than Black people. One example would be the Nobel Prize–winning engineer William Shockley, who followed what now seems a very modern trajectory: years of real achievements, including his involvement in the invention of the transistor, followed by a second career of provocative statements and complaints about what we would now call 'cancellation.' Shockley's views on white racial superiority were coupled with his advocacy for eugenics. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he argued that people with 'defective' genes should be paid not to reproduce. As he put it: '$30,000 put into a trust for a 70 IQ-moron, who might otherwise produce 20 children, might make the plan very profitable to the taxpayer.' But the environmentalists went too far in their claims too. Most geneticists now acknowledge that IQ is partially heritable, even though progressive activists attack almost anyone who says so out loud. When the geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden began to advance the arguments she would later turn into her 2021 book, The Genetic Lottery —which argued for social equality but conceded that genes influence educational attainment— The New Yorker reported that she was subjected to 'parades of arguments and counterarguments, leaked personal e-mails, and levels of sustained podcasting that were, by anyone's standards, extreme.' Fascinated by the dangerous allure of IQ—its promise to provide a definitive ranking of human intellectual worth—I decided to sit for an IQ test myself. At the exam site, I was one of two dozen adults, plus a couple of children. One was reading a book called Why the West Rules—For Now, which didn't assuage my worries about the political overtones of this debate. The question of what exactly IQ tests measure—and how accurately they can deliver judgment—is one that's wrapped around inflammatory questions about group identity, as well as a lively policy debate about the best system of schooling. It is no accident that so many IQ researchers have ended up endorsing scientific racism or sexism. If humans can be reduced to a number, and some numbers are higher than others, it is not a long walk to decide that some humans are 'better' than others too. In 2018, Christopher Langan wrote an obituary for Koko, a celebrated gorilla that he said could sign 1,000 words and therefore had an IQ between 75 and 95. 'Koko's elevated level of thought would have been all but incomprehensible to nearly half the population of Somalia (average IQ 68),' Langan wrote on Facebook, citing dubious research about that African country. 'Obviously, this raises a question: Why is Western civilization not admitting gorillas? They too are from Africa, and probably have a group mean IQ at least equal to that of Somalia.' Langan was featured in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which attributed his lack of academic success to his chaotic, violent upbringing and the reluctance of educational authorities to extend him the same sort of grace and understanding a middle-class child might receive. But Langan has found other answers for why he did not fulfill the glorious destiny written in his genes. He blames affirmative action and a society controlled by 'globalists' and 'banksters.' Inevitably, he has a Substack. As for me, I took two IQ tests that day. The first was a test designed in 1949 to be 'culture fair,' meaning that there were no language- or logic-based questions, only shape rotation. What became immediately apparent is that the test selects heavily for speed. The strict time limits mean you simply don't have time to luxuriate over questions, turning them over in your head. Now, you could argue that quickly grasping concepts is exactly what intelligence is. But you'd also have to admit that some of history's greatest breakthroughs came from years of careful observation and rumination. That first test convinced me that whatever an IQ test is measuring, it can't be genius—that label we are so keen to bestow on people with singular achievements. It doesn't measure showing up day after day. It doesn't measure the ego necessary to insist that you're right and everyone else is wrong. And it doesn't measure the ability to market yourself as the spirit of the age. The second test was more recent, having been updated in 1993, and leaned heavily into verbal reasoning. What I noticed here, first, was how arguable some of these questions were. Is idle a synonym for inactive or a synonym for lazy? Both, surely—it can be used as a pure descriptor, as in 'an idle engine,' or to convey a value judgment, as in 'the idle rich.' My desire to argue with the test maker only increased in the analogies section, where the example given was: 'Trousers are to boy as skirt is to … ?' The supervisor read this out with some embarrassment, assuring us that the language was 'traditional.' Things got worse. The logic puzzles in the final section included one about an explorer who might have been eaten by either lions or 'savages.' Another question asked me to work out what my surname would be, based on clues about family relationships, and clearly rested on the assumption that women all took their husband's name, and so would their children. Full of feminist zeal, I prissily ticked the box labeled 'It is not possible to know what my surname is' and resigned myself to losing points. What were my 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. Vos Savant, who is now 78, made a career of being the smartest person alive, because she had a number to prove it. Once she was hailed as a genius, vos Savant was one. Nothing about her changed, but her life did. As big a brain as Stephen Hawking had little time for this kind of thinking. In a 2004 Q&A with The New York Times Magazine, the physicist was asked what his IQ was. 'I have no idea,' he replied. 'People who boast about their IQ are losers.'
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Yahoo
What is storm-watching and where should you try it?
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK). There's nothing new in feeling awe in the face of nature's grandeur. The Romantics were enraptured by it back in the 19th century. English artist JMW Turner stirred the soul by painting brooding skies of biblical proportions, while philosopher Immanuel Kant explored the sublime — that profound blend of terror and wonder evoked by observing natural phenomena like a raging thunderstorm. However, curated storm-watching tourism didn't really take off until 1996, when the original of cult-classic movie Twister sparked a whirlwind of interest in extreme weather. That same year, the Wickaninnish Inn opened its doors in Tofino, on the rugged western coast of Vancouver Island. Inspired by childhood memories of marvelling at the region's wild winter storms with his family, owner Charles McDiarmid envisioned a sanctuary where visitors could embrace — not escape — Tofino's furious season, when Pacific storms unleash monster waves that tower up to 20ft high. Perched on a bluff facing an uninterrupted ocean expanse (the next landmass is Japan), the inn was designed for full immersion. Every one of its 75 rooms has huge windows built to withstand 100mph winds, while crackling fireplaces and thick wool blankets create a hygge vibe. Guest rooms also come stocked with waterproof gear so adventurous types can brave the conditions, because in Tofino, there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing. It was a bold concept. 'People thought we were crazy to market these wild winter maelstroms as a reason to visit,' Charles admits with a laugh. The gamble paid off. Between November and February in its opening year, the hotel's occupancy rates surged from 30% to 58%. Guests, initially attracted by the novelty, discovered something more profound. 'It's about escaping the city and appreciating how special our natural environment is,' Charles reflects, noting that, regardless of their ages, his guests share a common trait: an adventurous spirit. The success of Wickaninnish Inn sent ripples through Tofino and its neighbouring town, Ucluelet. Embracing the rise of storm-watching tourism, Vancouver Island rallied behind the concept. Hotels including Crystal Cove Beach Resort, Long Beach Lodge Resort, Black Rock Oceanfront Resort and SookePoint Ocean Cottage Resort all cater to squall-seekers, with their beachfront locations, surf-friendly waters and luxurious-yet-cosy atmospheres. BC Ferries Vacations also runs tailored storm-watching holiday packages when the weather outside is frightful, including both transport and accommodation at well placed hotels. Meanwhile the Tourism Tofino website highlights the best spots for windswept beach walks, plus a cosy inland sauna to warm up in afterwards. The strategy has proven successful, as the once-quiet fishing villages of Tofino and Ucluelet have evolved into year-round adventure hubs. Between November and March, traditionally considered the off-season for tourism, Tofino's hotel occupancy now consistently ranges from 46% to 58%, a trend that's remained steady for the past six years. Yet, while many islanders welcome storm tourism, safety remains a concern. Liam Ogle, a guide with Long Beach Nature Tours, warns travellers not to underestimate the risks posed by extreme weather, especially in the era of climate change. 'Forest trails can be dangerous with falling branches, and coastal areas pose risks due to storm surges,' he cautions. Before venturing out, he advises checking the Coast Smart website for safety tips. 'Nature here is both intense and beautiful. Respect for Mother Nature is deeply ingrained in the local community.' While Vancouver Island's Wickaninnish Inn may have pioneered storm-lashed travel, hold onto your hats, because its influence has spread around the world. In BC'S capital, Victoria, the tourist board has rebranded harsh winters as 'cosy season', creating suggested itineraries for visitors that incorporate blustery hikes to lighthouses followed by candlelit meals. Also embracing the philosophy that foul weather is subjective, Washington State's Long Beach Peninsula is celebrated as a prime spot to view a king tide — a rare, supersized tide that occurs when the gravitational forces of the moon, sun and Earth align to amplify tidal ranges. Closer to home, and proving that gale-force getaways have stepped into the world of luxury, the five-star Headland Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, rolls out the red carpet with storm-watching breaks featuring a spa overlooking waves crashing against the rugged cliffs. A third of the hotel's winter guests check in specifically for their storm-watching package. Whether braving high winds on a driftwood-strewn beach in Tofino or witnessing the majestic furore through binoculars from the comfort of a hotel room, it's safe to say a certain kind of traveller is drawn to nature's wildest moments. 'There's a mesmerising contrast between the raw power of a storm and its undeniable beauty — one which is both awe-inspiring and humbling,' states Charles. 'Experiencing such forces first-hand is a stark reminder of nature's immense scale and our own infinitesimal place within it.' Published in the Coastal Collection 2025 by National Geographic Traveller (UK).To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).
National Geographic
04-05-2025
- National Geographic
What is storm-watching and where should you try it?
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK). There's nothing new in feeling awe in the face of nature's grandeur. The Romantics were enraptured by it back in the 19th century. English artist JMW Turner stirred the soul by painting brooding skies of biblical proportions, while philosopher Immanuel Kant explored the sublime — that profound blend of terror and wonder evoked by observing natural phenomena like a raging thunderstorm. However, curated storm-watching tourism didn't really take off until 1996, when the original of cult-classic movie Twister sparked a whirlwind of interest in extreme weather. That same year, the Wickaninnish Inn opened its doors in Tofino, on the rugged western coast of Vancouver Island. Inspired by childhood memories of marvelling at the region's wild winter storms with his family, owner Charles McDiarmid envisioned a sanctuary where visitors could embrace — not escape — Tofino's furious season, when Pacific storms unleash monster waves that tower up to 20ft high. Perched on a bluff facing an uninterrupted ocean expanse (the next landmass is Japan), the inn was designed for full immersion. Every one of its 75 rooms has huge windows built to withstand 100mph winds, while crackling fireplaces and thick wool blankets create a hygge vibe. Guest rooms also come stocked with waterproof gear so adventurous types can brave the conditions, because in Tofino, there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing. It was a bold concept. 'People thought we were crazy to market these wild winter maelstroms as a reason to visit,' Charles admits with a laugh. The gamble paid off. Between November and February in its opening year, the hotel's occupancy rates surged from 30% to 58%. Guests, initially attracted by the novelty, discovered something more profound. 'It's about escaping the city and appreciating how special our natural environment is,' Charles reflects, noting that, regardless of their ages, his guests share a common trait: an adventurous spirit. Whether braving high winds on a driftwood-strewn beach in Tofino or witnessing the majestic furore through binoculars from the comfort of a hotel room, it's safe to say a certain kind of traveller is drawn to nature's wildest moments. Tofino's storm-season boom The success of Wickaninnish Inn sent ripples through Tofino and its neighbouring town, Ucluelet. Embracing the rise of storm-watching tourism, Vancouver Island rallied behind the concept. Hotels including Crystal Cove Beach Resort, Long Beach Lodge Resort, Black Rock Oceanfront Resort and SookePoint Ocean Cottage Resort all cater to squall-seekers, with their beachfront locations, surf-friendly waters and luxurious-yet-cosy atmospheres. BC Ferries Vacations also runs tailored storm-watching holiday packages when the weather outside is frightful, including both transport and accommodation at well placed hotels. Meanwhile the Tourism Tofino website highlights the best spots for windswept beach walks, plus a cosy inland sauna to warm up in afterwards. The strategy has proven successful, as the once-quiet fishing villages of Tofino and Ucluelet have evolved into year-round adventure hubs. Between November and March, traditionally considered the off-season for tourism, Tofino's hotel occupancy now consistently ranges from 46% to 58%, a trend that's remained steady for the past six years. Yet, while many islanders welcome storm tourism, safety remains a concern. Liam Ogle, a guide with Long Beach Nature Tours, warns travellers not to underestimate the risks posed by extreme weather, especially in the era of climate change. 'Forest trails can be dangerous with falling branches, and coastal areas pose risks due to storm surges,' he cautions. Before venturing out, he advises checking the Coast Smart website for safety tips. 'Nature here is both intense and beautiful. Respect for Mother Nature is deeply ingrained in the local community.' Guest rooms at Wickaninnish Inn in Tofino come with waterproof gear and huge windows built to withstand 100mph winds. The global appeal of wild weather While Vancouver Island's Wickaninnish Inn may have pioneered storm-lashed travel, hold onto your hats, because its influence has spread around the world. In BC'S capital, Victoria, the tourist board has rebranded harsh winters as 'cosy season', creating suggested itineraries for visitors that incorporate blustery hikes to lighthouses followed by candlelit meals. Also embracing the philosophy that foul weather is subjective, Washington State's Long Beach Peninsula is celebrated as a prime spot to view a king tide — a rare, supersized tide that occurs when the gravitational forces of the moon, sun and Earth align to amplify tidal ranges. Closer to home, and proving that gale-force getaways have stepped into the world of luxury, the five-star Headland Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, rolls out the red carpet with storm-watching breaks featuring a spa overlooking waves crashing against the rugged cliffs. A third of the hotel's winter guests check in specifically for their storm-watching package. Whether braving high winds on a driftwood-strewn beach in Tofino or witnessing the majestic furore through binoculars from the comfort of a hotel room, it's safe to say a certain kind of traveller is drawn to nature's wildest moments. 'There's a mesmerising contrast between the raw power of a storm and its undeniable beauty — one which is both awe-inspiring and humbling,' states Charles. 'Experiencing such forces first-hand is a stark reminder of nature's immense scale and our own infinitesimal place within it.' Published in the Coastal Collection 2025 by National Geographic Traveller (UK). To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Yahoo
How to plan a classic summer adventure in the Alps
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK). Mother Nature had one of her wildest moments shaping the Alps, which thrust up millions of years ago when the African and Eurasian tectonic plates collided. These peaks rip across Central Europe for 700 miles in a whirl of limestone turrets, glacier-frosted summits, dense forests and misty waterfalls. As they do, they run through eight countries — Monaco, France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany and Slovenia — and around mighty rivers like the Rhine and Po. These mountains' rugged terrain and ever-changing weather once struck fear into those who had to cross them. Hannibal led his Carthaginian army and 37 elephants across rocky, icy heights to invade Italy in 218 BCE. Countless blizzard-battling troops, blister-footed pilgrims, and farmers and traders tugging mules and sleighs followed. Then, the nature-loving Romantics triggered a fascination with the region in the late 18th and 19th centuries; it had that blend of savage wilderness and stormy weather they so prized. Poets, writers, painters and composers flowed in, from Goethe and Shelley to Wordsworth and Strauss. Finally, Alpine tourism boomed in the mid-19th century. The Alps featured as a stop on the Grand Tour, and recreational skiing gained popularity. Queen Victoria trotted up Rigi mountain in central Switzerland on horseback, reportedly jotting in her diary: 'We are amused!' The Alps became the holy grail for intrepid climbers looking to make their mark. For everyone else, cogwheel railways began to unzip the heights. Today, you can walk along suspended bridges from peak to peak, or fly at speed down a high-altitude zip-line. You can take a cable car to swing in front of the north face of Switzerland's Eiger mountain, or at eye level with 4,806m (15,767ft) Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the range. You can sit back and breeze through Alpine countries on a multi-day train ride, or strike out on a hut-to-hut hike into the realms of eagles and ibex. The Central Alps, which extend across Switzerland, Italy, Austria, France and Germany, are especially popular, with some resorts open year-round and easy international connections. Over the centuries, legends have been born and made here. Olympic medallists; classic books from Johanna Spyri's Heidi to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; and Hollywood blockbusters like The Sound of Music, The Italian Job and stunt-laced Bond movies. Why? Just look around you. Inspiration is everywhere. And part of it stems from the fact that — despite the centuries of exploration and advances in engineering — these mountains can never truly be tamed. Their wonder is as much about what can see as what you can't: the peaks that lie beyond. Start point: WilderswilEnd point: Schynige PlatteDistance travelled: 72 milesAverage length: 10 days With the big three of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau reaching as high as 4,158m (13,642ft) above cloud-wreathed valleys, timber chalets clinging to cliffsides, and flower-freckled meadows, the Jungfrau Region is the Swiss Alps of your mind's eye. And there's no better way to dive into these mountains than by lacing up your boots on the 10-day, hut-to-hut Tour of the Jungfrau hike. As you give the day-trippers the slip, you'll quickly find yourself in landscapes where only the echo of cowbells, whistle of marmots or sound of footfall on rock interrupt the silence. Beginning at Wilderswil village — accessible from the local hub of Interlaken — and ending at the nearby Schynige plateau, the hike is instantly spectacular, taking you clockwise from giddy viewpoints to summits, glacial lakes, meadows and booming waterfalls. This being Switzerland, the paths are well-kept and have clear red-and-white waymarks, but don't expect a walk in the park. This trek presents a challenge, with rugged trails, steep ascents and descents, and an overall 19,700ft of elevation gain. You'll be hiking five to seven hours a day, but with the richest of rewards. 1. Faulhorn Despite having a name that translates to 'Lazy Rock', Faulhorn has an 8,795ft summit that has to be earned by clambering over scree, boulder-dotted passes and high moors. It's worth it for the views of glacier-frosted Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau; jewel-blue lakes Thun and Brienz; and, on clear days, Germany's Black Forest and France's Vosges. Refuel over a tasting platter of regional cheese and ham on Berghotel Faulhorn's terrace. 2. First The trail whips through meadows to the small lake of Bachsee and beyond to the 7,165ft summit of First. Towering above the village of Grindelwald, First ramps up the action with its Cliff Walk, a suspended metal walkway bolted to the cliff face, peering across to the Eiger's north face. Dart down to the valley on a zip line, mountain cart or jumbo scooter. 3. Gleckstein Hut Dawn breaks in a blaze of gold-pink at Gleckstein Hut, one of many huts where you'll sleep en route, pinned to the flanks of the snow-polished Wetterhorn at 7,601ft. After the steep hike up here, you'll be glad of a hearty plate of rösti potatoes topped with bacon, Alpine cheese and fried egg. Rise with the first clatter of karabiners to see the sunrise, and perhaps glimpse an ibex. 4. Eiger Trail No peak captivates more than the 13,015ft Eiger, a fang of rock and ice. Climbing it is strictly for pros, but you can get incredibly close to its mile-high north face on the two-hour Eiger Trail. The path runs like a thread-vein through pastures from the hamlet of Alpiglen to Eigergletscher railway station, passing wild streams and falls. 5. Mürren Floating atop the western rim of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, Mürren village has dark-timber chalets and dress-circle views of the Jungfrau Alps. Walk the Blumental Panorama Trail, looking out for Alpine blooms like gentian and edelweiss, then stop at a dairy farm to buy mountain cheese for a picnic. 6. Schilthorn It's a steep, tough, dizzying hike up to the 9,741ft fang of Schilthorn. But at the top, perched like an eyrie above a rolling sea of peaks, its revolving restaurant Piz Gloria has 360-degree views reaching from Titlis to Mont Blanc. Arrive first thing to see golden light falling in curtains across the Jungfrau range. That cinematic backdrop hasn't gone unnoticed — the peak starred in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Start point: Munich, GermanyEnd point: Milan, ItalyDistance travelled: 490 milesAverage length: 10-14 days Bounding effortlessly over viaducts, cresting mountain passes and skimming the shores of turquoise lakes, train travel in the Alps is pure edge-of-your-seat drama. Forget driving, this is the way to go, with trains running like clockwork and panoramic windows framing scenes of pastures, forest-cloaked slopes, rivers and church-topped villages between glacier-frosted mountains. Providing you've factored in ample time, you can stop off as you choose. This is the big itinerary: a 10-day to two-week escapade, traversing four countries and dropping you into the heart of the Alps, including many of the best-known destinations. A convenient gateway is Munich in Germany, where you can chug to Füssen in the Bavarian Alps in two hours before nudging into Tyrol in Austria. Then, drop south west into the Engadine Valley in Switzerland and beyond to mellower climes in Sondrio, Italy, finally flying out from the hub of Milan. You'll look forward to riding Switzerland's UNESCO-listed Bernina and Albula lines, which negotiate 196 bridges and viaducts and burrow through 55 tunnels. But highlights along the way are numerous and varied, from fairytale castles to riverside cities and medieval towns. Chances for outdoor adventure and relaxation abound, too, be it glacier hiking, white-river rafting or taking part in a high-altitude yoga class. 1. Füssen The Alps rise high and thickly forested as the train breezes through Bavaria to the pastel-painted town of Füssen, snug against the Austrian border. The big-hitter is hilltop Neuschwanstein, the whimsically turreted, 19th-century schloss that was the vision of 'Mad' King Ludwig II. Fresh from a £17m makeover, it's never looked better. Reutte, a bus or taxi ride across the border, is a two-and-a-half-hour train ride from Innsbruck, with one change. 2. Innsbruck In the capital of Tyrol, your gaze is instantly drawn to the jagged Nordkette Alps north of the city, which sneak into every photo. You can reach the summits by hopping in a space-age funicular designed by Zaha Hadid. Otherwise, wander the Altstadt (old town), looking out for the Golden Roof, a late-gothic oriel with 2,657 fire-gilded copper tiles; the baroque cathedral; and the lavish state apartments of the Habsburg palace, Hofburg. 3. St Anton am Arlberg The Arlberg Alps razoring above St Anton are Austria at its wildest. Famous for hardcore downhill skiing and apres-ski parties in winter, this resort raises pulses in summer with hiking and biking trails threading high through meadows and pine forests to summits, plus mountain yoga and white-water rafting on the rapids of the Inn River. 4. Landwasser Viaduct Listen out for the 'wows' as the train leaps spectacularly from cliff to wooded cliff across the single-track, six-arch, 213ft-high Landwasser Viaduct on the UNESCO World Heritage Albula line to St Moritz. Shortly after, you'll pull into Bergün, an instant heart-stealer with its Romanesque church and Engadine-style chalets festooned with oriel windows and sgraffito decoration. Stop off here for away-from-the-crowds hikes in the Alps of Parc Ela, Switzerland's biggest nature park. 5. Pontresina Clasped between the glacier-capped daggers of the Bernina range, the village of Pontresina in the Upper Engadine is five miles east of more famous St Moritz. Rock climbers and ibex are in their element in these wild mountains. For a taster, try the two-hour Morteratsch Glacier Trail, edging the deeply crevassed blue ice. Or ride Muottas-Muragl funicular for views of 4,049m (13,284ft) Piz Bernina, the highest peak in the Eastern Alps. 6. Sondrio With mellow weather, chiming bell towers and piazza-side cafes filled with lilting voices, Sondrio is a welcome shot of Italy. Shouldering up to the Rhaetian Alps and just a whisper away from the Swiss border, the town's centro storico has a medieval castle, rustic stone houses and Renaissance palazzi. Climb through terraced vines to the hillside 15th-century Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Sassella. Published in the May 2025 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).
