This is off the beaten path, but there's been some Twitter conversation recently about "great man" theories of history and how you can, for example, figure out the IQs of historical individuals in the first place.
As it happens, there's a very famous study of historical figures written a century ago by IQ pioneers Catharine Cox and Lewis Terman. They use various ways of estimating IQ without directly measuring it, and if you're interested in how they do it the best bet is to read their book. In short, though, they rigorously investigated childhood precocity, schoolwork, and the nature of later accomplishments to make their estimates.
Cox's original book included 300 historical figures. A complete list is here. I chose 50 fairly randomly for the chart below. Note that the IQs have been adjusted from Cox's original estimates to reflect what they'd be on a modern IQ test rather than on the older scale originally used by Cox.
There are some interesting things here. It's not surprising to find Leibniz and Newton with stratospheric IQs, but who would have guessed a British prime minister would match them?
Byron, Dickens, and Hugo are surprisingly brilliant writers. Ditto for Madame de Staël of salon hosting fame. Beethoven was smarter than I would have guessed, while my personal favorite Benjamin Franklin was less so. Many generals and political leaders (Bolivar, Napoleon, Washington, Lee, Cromwell, Grant) have pretty pedestrian IQs but obviously it didn't matter. IQ might make the mathematician, but not the leader, who needs more than just IQ to succeed.
In case you're wondering just how rare high IQs are, here's a quick summary:
For example, this means there's about one person in the US with an IQ above 190 and perhaps a dozen in the entire world.
On the other hand, if you have a piddling IQ of 145, there are more than 300,000 just like you in the country. Don't get cocky.
Charlotte Brontë and Madame de Staël were old white males? ...
See also: George Eliot
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IQ numbers don't really go that high in any meaningful way. See https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is for more details.
+1
IQ culture/worship is one of the oldest cons around.
I've gotta disagree with you on this one.
First, this specific Cox/Terman book is garbage. But it's really illustrative garbage. Because the authors begin with a completely erroneous view of IQ—that it's invariant across life, that it's primarily the result of genetics alone, somehow separable from the complexity of interaction with environment, etc—they reach the conclusion that you can basically back out of various reports of "geniuses" in their youth an estimate of what their IQ was in adulthood. The book is like a reductio ad absurdum of the bad old science of intelligence.
To me, the most interesting thing about IQ that has been learned since the era when this book was written is that the IQ of the whole population can change dramatically over the course of history—and has. In industrialized societies it has gone way up. This probably has something to do with the greater complexity of society over time in ways conducive to IQ.
The result is that a "genius" who took an IQ test at the start of the era where we have any reliable IQ testing (late 19th century when tests were used in military recruitment) would be at the very bottom a century later. (This is the "Flynn Effect.") Literally, if you take a man born in the UK in 1877 who scored at the 90th percentile on an IQ test, someone answering those same questions right and wrong who was born in 1977 would count as being in the *5th* percentile. Everybody's IQs are just that much higher.
Now does that mean that everyone today is way smarter than everyone born a century earlier? Doubt it. A lot of people a century ago who got any education memorized and could recite blocks of text longer than most people today ever attempt. There are probably a lot of other things they were better at than we are. Identifying trees? But we have gotten way, way better at the specific kinds of manipulation involved in IQ.
Ok, too long a comment. But my point is that, while the graph is fun, the underlying data here is total garbage, and IQ is a much more interesting subject than the old "genius" studies had any idea about.
"This probably has something to do with the greater complexity of society over time in ways conducive to IQ."
Probably has to do with better maternal, fetal and neonatal nutrition.
Probably has more to do with the fact that "IQ" is a ridiculous concept that is almost entirely meaningless. We take something incredibly complex and difficult to even define called "intelligence" and attempt to assign it a single number. It's absurdity on top of absurdity.
Exactly! I came to the comments to make a similar point, but your second sentence says it all.
Tell us you know nothing about the science of IQ without saying you know nothing about the science of IQ.
Initial hypotheses were generally that there were multiple intelligences and that people would have different scores on different intelligences. You test for this by giving people big batteries of tests with questions that you think test different kinds of intelligence and doing cluster analysis to find sets of questions on which performance is correlated better than with overall test performance. Results have been a big fat zero.
In addition, IQ correlates with reaction time (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372394441_Relationship_between_Intelligence_and_Reaction_Time_A_Review_Study) which strongly suggests that it is tied to quality of core neurological function, not better programming or specialized brain structures.
This is frankly a surprising result. I would have expected higher IQ to be from development of better programming of the brain to live in complex societies with money (necessitating math) that was genetically selected for. Instead it seems to be based on the same neurological qualities that make someone a better hunter, fighter, etc. and that have presumably been selected for in all societies since the dawn of intelligence.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hate the IQ people so much.
"This probably has something to do with the greater complexity of society over time in ways conducive to IQ."
Or perhaps because IQ tests use the ability to perform certain tasks as a proxy for "intelligence." The more people in society with experience performing those tasks (or similar tasks), the higher the raw scores.
The Flynn Effect shows up in IQ tests on infants. This argues against your hypothesis.
"Ok, too long a comment " is the only part I disagree with.
British prime ministers Pitt and Gladstone were famous for being smart, while Disraeli was famous for being charming.
The saying about them was, if you spoke to Pitt you walked away thinking that you had just spoken to the smartest man in England, but if you spoke to Disraeli, you walked away thinking that you yourself were the smartest man in England.
Re Disraeli,
In my darker moments, I think that is some of Trump's appeal. People think - "... if this idiot can be president, then maybe I can be too!"
The pitfall in that logic is that in some very dangerous real ways Trump actually CAN'T "be President".
Obviously, he can occupy the office; he's there. But his performance of the office the first time was very much the result of the durability of the "habits of governance" that he and his supporters have set out to destroy since his loss in 2020.
He is faced with a conundrum of which he has no awareness: his success at destroying the structures and norms which produced decent results from his first three years' tenure ensures that the effects of his wrong-headed beliefs will produce RAPID and catastrophic results this time.
"The guard-rails" were much more deeply embedded in the government than just the "wise men" in the political super-structure which has traditionally been the fiefdom of the incumbent President. In fact there was indeed a "Deep State" of motivated, skilled, and ethical professional experts at all levels of government which acted like skilled mariners keeping the ship of state steaming on an even keel.
Stupidities like DOGE are the reason that cannons had two sets of constraints on ships-of-the-line. A "loose cannon" did far more damage to its own ship than most properly tethered ones did to the enemy. To mix nautical metaphors a bit, Trump is like Captain Ahab whose frothing hatreds brought The Pequod low. He is in real-time slashing the restraints on the cannons as he turns to do battle with an overwhelmingly superior fleet.
He was never of presidential "timber".
Ya think?
The sooner Trump actually does things like these insane million dollar ship charges and the tariffs he campaigned on and mentioned about a thousand times the better. MAGAts will find out who really pays those taxes. The economy will predictably crash.
The effects of Musk's trashing of government programs and employees hasn't had the effects yet that it will have, both in jobless people and lack of services, most of which on balance go to MAGA states.
It's like the story of the guy selling a mule. He said it was obedient. What's the two by four there for? Oh you have to get his attention first.
Unfortunately Donald lies constantly about everything.
lol (& +1)
The obvious caveats re IQ apply here.
How are you doing, Kevin? Need a health update.
Yeah, cool. Now let's figure out what kind of car George Washington would drive and what Karl Marx's favorite flavor of Doritos would be.
In other words, this is stupid.
only if you take it seriously
How high would your IQ have to be to design a test that could reliably and accurately test people with IQ's above 160 (say)?
Seems a bit unfair to Ulysses S. Besides leading the Union army he wrote a still well regarded 800 page memoir, completing it while he was dying of throat cancer.
That Robert E Lee was listed ahead of Grant seems to show that be a big red flag about how accurate this things are.
Recalls the old saw about FDR--a second rate intellect but a first rate temperament. Of the two I'll take temperament. (Robespierre IQ 148? Lot of good that did him.)
Grant's temperament:
"A general officer came in from his command at this juncture, and said to the general-in-chief, speaking rapidly and laboring under considerable excitement: "General Grant, this is a crisis that cannot be looked upon too seriously. I know Lee's methods well by past experience ; he will throw his whole army between us and the Rapidan, and cut us off completely from our communications."
The general rose to his feet, took his cigar out of his mouth, turned to the officer, and replied, with a degree of animation which he seldom manifested : "Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."
I'd guess Karl would go for the flamin' hot cheetos, and George would drive a Subaru with lots of leg room. And the written "IQ" tests have long been criticized for their cultural bias, and for not testing things beyond book larnin'. Which is why I did well, back in the day.
Nah, George would drive a Cube.
George would drive a one ton crew cab 4 x 4 pickup with a diesel engine. Hew as a very successful farmer before becoming a general.
And Benedict Arnold would drive a "Cyber" truck like all the other traitors.
I don't believe the low IQ for Ulysses Grant (108). He was a talented mathematician at West Point. And his memoirs, which were edited, convey (for me) a clear, logical narrative in his voice.
Napoleon was interested in geometry and communicated with prominent mathematicians of the day (Napoleon's Theorem probably wasn't his creation).
It's a fun little exercise, and I haven't read their methodology, but I think it's pretty silly to expect anything meaningful from this. The idea that you could accurately estimate IQs of historical figures based on what little information we have is pretty silly.
(And also, all this came up just because Nate Silver was once again showing his rather foolish biases.)
It comes up constantly as a proxy for 'merit', especially when characterizing 'those people' who supposedly don't have it. Is it any wonder when Silver takes yet another bite at that apple?
With all the caveats of how IQ is as much a silly parlor game as a Briggs-Meyers test it’s still interesting to note that the highest ranked president is one not often given a lot of credit.
First of all, glad to see you are doing well enough to get back to your regular posting. May you have a full recovery as soon as possible.
Now about this list, one thing that the usual bigoted assholes (because its always bigoted assholes who try to make this point) miss when they highlight the genius of all those white men (with a couple of exceptions here and there), is that regardless of how smart or not they were, what those lists mostly reflect is the constraints of those societies.
For most of that history women were not allowed to work or participate in these fields, so even if there was a female genius on par with say Newton, odds are that she spent her life cooking and cleaning for a husband that probably thought he was smarter than her simply because he was a man. Same goes for non-Europeans. There were contemporary geniuses in multiple fields in other parts of the world that were completely unknown to Europe, or for which Europe did not care to acknowledge, and because militarily Europe reigned supreme it was easy to dismiss as less advanced any society and individuals from them, that wasn't on par with Europe militarily, since how smart could they be if they could be conquered via warfare and a big assist from mother nature via transmittable diseases?
Finally, it's also worth pointing out that nearly every single one of these people was part of the upper class of their time. So their wealth and status allowed them to devote time to study or participate in whatever field they felt like without having to worry about mundane things like how to put food on the table.
+25.
You are obviously correct on women. Note however that there is (disputed) evidence that variability of intelligence is higher in men. This makes sense of some genes that determine intelligence are on the X chromosome. Men only have one X chromosome bite women have two, giving an averaging effect.
For non Westerners this is less clear.
1. You need to explain why the west developed faster if not due to higher intelligence.
2. You need to argue that a more complex society with money, complex contracts, larger social networks due to better transport and communications, etc did not select for higher intelligence or, if it did, that there was not enough time for it to have a significant impact on intelligence before other parts of the world were subject to similar selective pressure.
BTW, human selection due to civilization is well documented. For example, alcoholism is much less prevalent in people who's ancestors had more access to fermented and distilled alcohol than those who did not. This appears to be mainly for genetic reasons.
the idea of accurately estimating the IQs of distant historical figures seems on it's face absurd to me.
Only two Ninja Turtles made the list?
Nice! (Made me laugh.) And exactly the level of seriousness this "study" deserves.
The most remarkable person I have met would probably manage around 130-140 on an IQ test, but had efficient perception in processing and comprehension - he was also the most successful person I have known. No one who met him would say "This guy is bright" in the first hours of knowing him. He remains a road-blocking challenge to my understanding of intelligence.
And then there's John von Neumann. You can, if determined, reduce most highly-regarded historical figures as merely gifted specialists, fairly or not, if you use the right lens, but von Neumann is resistant to that treatment.
Edward Teller: "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us" - von Neumann was the person they called to the Manhattan Project when they needed someone really smart to solve something they were confused about.
I'd add Lionel Messi as another example of the difficulty of quantifying intelligence. How does one athlete in a sport see so many things which no other does?
There's a line about von Neumann's time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: "There were three kinds of mathematics colloquium presentations at the Institute: the kind that everyone in the audience understood, the kind that only the speaker and von Neumann understood, and the kind that only von Neumann uunderstood."
Enrico Fermi speculated that Teller, von Neumann and the other bright engineers and scientists who claimed to be “Hungarian” were actually aliens from Venus. His reasoning was that they were all unworldly smart and spoke a native language no one could understand.
Where is Einstein?
Many physicist feel Einstein’s gift was not his basic intelligence, but rather his ability to think outside the box and come up with whole new paradigms. Goes back to the difficulty of characterizing intellectual ability with a single number.
This list AFAIU is historical figures not tested via conventional means. Einstein's IQ is not a mystery.
IQ may not be that precise, but certainly we can roughly sort out people among
Below average
Average
Pretty Clever
Awesomely Smart
I’m happy to see Michael Faraday on the list of Awesomely smart. He self educated by reading books that he was binding at work. Then he figured out how electricity and magnetism behaved. This information was codified in by George-Clerk Maxwell.
I also think of Isaac Newton who needed a way to talk about his ideas for gravity so he invented calculus. There is a story about him being asked for a copy of his notes on calculus. He said he couldn’t find them so we would just work it out a gain.
Another is Paul Dirac, one of the awesomely smart crowd. In school every time they presented some idea in physics there was a footnote that Dirac had worked out the relativistic form of the equation.
There was a joke about him. After he dies and goes to heaven he asks God why the electron has the mass it does. God starts writing equations on a board to explain it. After a while Dirac interrupts God to say “No, that’s not right.”
I spent a career doing cognitive testing, and IQ tests can provide a great deal of important information. Two caveats, though: 1. The tests need to be administered and interpreted by a skilled tester, and 2. Of all the information the tests can provide, the top-line full-scale IQ score is the single least interesting and useful.
Also (and I guess this would be 3), IQ tests tend to discourage divergent thinking. You score highest by giving the same answer as the rest of the world.
A few not in the list but probably extremely high: Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Maxwell.