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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I dunno about other colleges, but Caltech you earned the degree. Many students dropped out because of the workload. There were a couple that were able to coast through, but they had IQs easily over 160.

They didn't do legacy admits as far as I knew.

But what it's like today, I have no information.

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You should be extremely skeptical of people who claim to have tested IQs above 130 and also believe those tests are not inherently noisy at the top end. Many modern tests lump everyone with 130+ into the same category [1]. An IQ of "easily over 160" is not a clinically valid finding by any standard IQ test that I am aware of.

This is because standard IQ tests are generally designed to measure around the median of the distribution (70-130), and so there is a lot of variance in measurement at the top end. If you happen to have a bad testing day and you make a dumb mistake, your measured IQ might drop by a fairly large number of points -- or, conversely, if you got lucky and guessed right, your measured IQ could be much higher than reality.

For example, the original Raven's Progressive Matrices says [2; page 71]

> For reason's already given, Progressive Matrices (1938) does not differentiate, very clearly between young-children, or between adults of superior intellectual capacity.

where "superior intellectual capacity" is defined as an IQ of ~125 or higher, and (if I am interpreting it correctly), the table on page 79 of [2] says missing a single question could drop a 20-year old from scoring 95 percentile to scoring 90 percentile. That's 5 IQ points on a single question! If you had a bad day, or didn't get enough sleep, you could test significantly worse than your actual "IQ."

Anyone that actually has an IQ of 160 with even a modicum of self awareness should understand that the IQ test they took is inherently noisy at the top end of the scale because sometimes people have off days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#IQ_classific...

[2] https://rehabilitationpsychologist.org/resources/SPM%20with%...

Consider that Hal Finney was next door to me in the dorm. I've never met a smarter fellow.

I agree that actually measuring his IQ would have been a dodgy idea, but there was no doubt he was a unicorn. He himself never made any claims about it. It was just something you realized about him after a while.

I agree with you that smart people exist, and I have met a few in college as well.

The main thing I want to add is that using IQ to quantify intelligence at the top end of the scale is scientifically bogus and in my opinion harmful because it validates depressed / insecure / chronically online people who use their "160 IQ" as a way to put down other people or to peddle pseudo-scientific nonsense. Those people often need genuine psychiatric help and (in my opinion) such validation only harms them.

I'm sure that Hal Finney was exceptionally smart, though. :)

Hal hid his intelligence. You'd never know it until you got to know him. He was well-liked, and even put up with the likes of me. (A lot of techers put up with me, and even generously helped me to not flunk out. I had a lot of growing up to do.)

I would have had a lot less trouble with Quantum Mechanics if I'd realized that nobody understands it, it's just that the math works. I thought it was just me that thought it was crazy.

I've heard MIT was similar. But their graduates have never had quite the prestige and easy in to influential circles as the boys (eventually girls, too) down the street.

Same at Georgia Tech.

It was easily the most work and effort I had to put into anything, tons of peoole dropping/failing out, and the average GPA for most students was not that hot. Definitely not close to the well-known Harvard-tier 3.65+

Thats the exception then; at Stanford all you need to graduate is a pulse.

In CS/CE/math/physics?

Walter, can you give a rough timeframe to go with that anecdote?

late 70's

It was the same in the '90s. Something like a third didn't make it through in 4 years, although a long tail managed it in 5 or more.

A classmate dropped out in his sophomore year, and 10 years later asked to come back and finish. Caltech said sure, and aced the courses and earned his degree.

I asked him, were you smarter after 10 years? He laughed and said nope, he was just willing to work this time!

(Another gem about Caltech - once you're admitted, they'll give you endless chances to come back and finish. Your credits did not expire.)

One of my friends finally graduated after 6 years there. He endured endless students mumbling "7 years, down the drain!" as they passed by. (The line was from Animal House.)

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