Christopher Langan: the other guy with the "highest" IQ on the planet.

OP here. Without opining one way or another about the debate happening here...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1158589

...I'd just like to let you all listen to what someone with an IQ that high actually sounds like. Regardless of which side you come down on, let us not forget that these people are not inhumanly, insolubly brilliant. Like all other people, they and their brains are puzzles, and when we measure their (or our) intelligence, it is NOT certain what it is that we're measuring.

And by the way, it's often said that such-and-such the historical figure was supposed to have an IQ of like 180, but I would also like to remind everyone that these figures were given by an assistant to Lewis Terman, whose ill-fated and decades-running IQ experiment successfully proved that IQ doesn't actually indicate how successful one is at much of anything, INCLUDING doing sort of computation except those types that appeared on the test. Those figures were manufactured before we had any indicator that really smart people like Einstein have necessarily high IQs. Just a thought. Lewis Terman. Look him up.

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBmnjD4Fw2U&feature=relat... Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-cOe6AxtdE&feature=relat...

His website: http://www.ctmu.org/

Two unrelated comments:

1) In the book "Outliers" there's an interesting profile of Langan that looks more closely at the ways in which Langan has been unable to capitalize on his genius, and why.

2) Am I the only person who thinks Errol Morris is the worst filmmaker on the planet? The constant filler images and incessant, droning new age music makes me want to crucify the innocent.

Reminds me of a segment I once saw (60 Minutes? years back) about a mailman with an IQ of 145. He didn't see any reason to knock himself out just because he was born 'that way'. Happy doing what he was. What more is there?