> I will use 100% of my Bitcoin profits to build churches for Jesus Christ in every nation.
> “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)
Something tells me maybe he doesn't actually have an IQ of 276.
So 270 would be 11 standard deviations above normal so 1 in 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people.
It‘s as if you would say 150% of all people are female. That is impossible, not just unlikely.
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.
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.
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.
When you go from 30 seconds to 15 seconds to solve a problem, that's noticeable. But when you go from half a second to a quarter of a second, the difference doesn't really matter.
So a lot of IQ tests have some sort of ceiling where the only thing they can tell you is "Yeah, it's more than this".
“Top out” can be interpreted many ways. It depends on how they are used.
Modern tests are fairly accurate up to 2sd (70-130). The tests start wavering in accuracy between 2sd and 3sd (55-70 and 130-145).
Over 3sd, and the only thing one can confidently say is that the examinee is most likely lower or higher than 3sd (55 and 145). The tests just don’t have enough data points to discriminate finely beyond those thresholds.
Let me further say that, on the high end, there are very few jobs for which I would make any selection decision based on how high an IQ score (or proxy thereof) is over 130. There are other variables, many of which are easier to measure, that are better predictors of success.
All of this doesn’t even take into consideration that there is relatively more type II error/bias in IQ results — that is, there are plenty of people who score less than their theoretical maximum (e.g., due to poor sleep the previous night), while there are relatively fewer people who score much higher than their theoretical maximum.
Many years ago, while unemployed, I was sent for a intelligence and dyslexia test (because of the very same perceived waste of potential that the article talks about). I was not dyslexic but scored above the range that the intelligence test could measure. The professor(I believe he was moonlighting for research funding) performing the test talked about the upper range tests, but said they were very long, required specialists to conduct and there's seldom any reason to investigate where you are in the upper range.
Then we went on to waste a huge amount of time talking about human perception and I remember describing an idea that finally seems to be feasible because the new Steam VR headset does it and calls it Foveated rendering.
I can't specifically recall the date of this but the tester was recording results on his palm pilot, which was a flash new thing at the time.
IQ 160 means that you are 1 in 30,000 of your age group. That means that to calibrate a test that can measure that high, the authors had to test more than 30,000 people in each age group (depending on what statistical certainty you need, but it could be 10x the number for reasonable values). Not sure how large the age groups typically are, but the total number of people necessary for calibration is counted in millions. You have to pay them all for participating in the calibration, and that's not going to be cheap.
And with values greater than IQ 160, the numbers grow exponentially. So I am rolling to disbelieve than anyone actually calibrated tests for such large numbers. (Especially once the numbers start to exceed the total population of Earth, which is around IQ 190.)
Con artist skill of 276, maybe.