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Comment by RickJWagner | Hacker News Reader

Lots of reasons, I suspect.

Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter. They are subject to thinking they’ve got it all figured out, when really they don’t. Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.

Then there are other attributes like discipline. A very smart person with little discipline could easily end up in a worse state than someone with good discipline and less intelligence. Sort of the Forest Gump model, if you like.

Superior intelligence is absolutely a gift. But not the only kind of gift, and not necessarily the best one. Ask someone like Stephen Hawking.

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Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.

I'm pretty sure he never said that. He has become like Einstein, where people have projected their beliefs onto him.

Here’s one his quotes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/12/heres-the-iq-score-warren-bu...

I don't think Warren Buffet is the last word on this.

The top of the IQ stratosphere is functionally unusual.

Set a room full of 130s on a hard problem. When they get stuck, adding more 130s won't help.

Throw a >160 into the room and see what happens.

>160s don't necessarily think they have it all figured out. But as long as they're functional - not always easy - their raw ability at certain tasks is qualitatively different to those closer the norm.

I've occasionally had dealings with these people. They really do understand things phenomenally quickly, and some of them can turn their insights into gold.

It’s funny you picked 160.

Buffett famously said “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ. Rationality is essential”

Buffett said it in the book, “Warren Buffett Speaks.”

He also said if you do have an IQ of 160, you might as well give away 30 points, they’re not going to help you be a better investor.

Maybe he’s wrong, but at this time he’s regarded as one of the most successful investors ever, if not the very best.

>It’s funny you picked 160.

no, it's not anything like a coincidence or a quote of Buffet.

People always say "160" as the example number because the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler series IQ tests are among the most commonly used and they have a maximum score of 160.

That alone is not enough, you also need to know the std dev is 15 or 16. Therefore, 160 is 4 sd's above the mean which, regardless of the thing you are measuring, is very difficult to measure without massive numbers of sample points because the population density becomes very sparse.

there are other intelligence tests, some top out at 200, but you have to know the SD for that to be useful.

Interesting.

Per Google, the current world’s highest IQ belongs to Younghun Kim, with 276. That’s disputed, of course.

Next up is Terence Tao with 230.

I guess there isn’t a single standard.

> Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter.

This is patently untrue. My middle school kid finished Calculus 1/2 last year and got a 5 on AP without breaking a sweat. He’s taking college calculus this year and we need to figure out what math he’s going to do next year already. He has friends who are younger and even more advanced.

There are genius level kids that are at another plane of intellectual existence. It’s quite something to see.

> There are genius level kids that are at another plane of intellectual existence. It’s quite something to see.

It does not require genius level intelligence to do Calculus. It takes a genius to discover Calculus in the first place. Genius refers more to curiosity in my opinion, and not being able to do something at a young age.

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