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Forbes magazine just came out with their annual list of the 400 richest Americans and, for the 21st year in a row, Bill Gates tops the list, with over $80 billion. Just to qualify for the Forbes 400 this year, you need about $1.5 billion. It’s interesting to speculate on what Bill Gates’ IQ might be. In India, Gates was asked exactly that, though he didn’t give a number:
Way back in 1997, columnist Dan Seligman wrote the following:
It seems marvelously symbolic that William H. Gates III, the guy listed as number one on The Four Hundred, has an obviously breathtaking IQ. The figure 170 keeps getting into print, which would make him almost certainly the highest on this list or any other list you’re likely to be looking at soon. To be sure, one occasionally sees conjectures that Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s executive vice president, worldwide sales and support, is in the same IQ league as Bill himself. Ballmer is number six among The Four Hundred. It also seems symbolic of the new order that their company has made IQ a public and explicit criterion for hires of senior personnel.
Anyhow, it seems reasonable to view The Four Hundred as a subset;an especially lucky subset;of the emerging cognitive elite.
One wonders where the 170 figure originated. I remember leafing through one of Gates’ biographies and seeing a quote from a teacher estimating his IQ to be about 160 or 170, but no actual test score was cited. So my guess is that’s where the 170 figure started. It’s also been widely reported that Gates scored a perfect 800 on the math section of the notoriously difficult old SAT (before the test was dumbed down circa 1995). Reports about his verbal score are a little inconsistent. For example, biographers Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews write:
Toward the end of the year, Lakeside senior classman Bill Gates took on a different marketing project: the selling of William Henry Gates. Potential customers? College admissions officers. Bill had scored 800 on his math SAT and five achievement tests (although only in the low 700s on the verbal SAT), and he put it, “I wanted to know which personality of mine would appeal to the world at large.
This would imply an overall SAT score in the low 1500s (which is spectacular for the old SAT) however in this Q&A, the interviewer states the Gates got an even more impressive 1590, and asks Gates if he ever wonders what question he got wrong. Gates replies:
The truth is, that was the verbal SAT. I got 790 the first time. I told my parents their vocabulary wasn’t large enough. I was criticizing them. So I did go back and take it and do better the next time.
Kind of clever how Gates managed to look like he was answering the question without actually confirming or denying the 1590 score. Assuming Gates did score 1590 on the old SAT, then according to the Prometheus MC Report (see section 8.3.3), that equates to a WAIS IQ of 169, or roughly 170. Even if he only scored around 1500, that would still equate to an IQ of 151 (99.97%ile). Either way, the man is likely smarter than the average Ivy League professor, the average Nobel prize winning scientist, and any American president of the last 100 years.
However even the old SAT might not have contained enough truly novel and complex problems to gives Gates an accurate test score. More informative are the opinions of his classmates at Harvard who actually got to observe him compete in an extremely high level academic environment. Despite writing a fairly negative book about Gates, Paul Allen admits his former friend was brilliant, stating:
I was decent in math, and Bill was brilliant, but by then I spoke from my experience at Washington State. One day I watched a professor cover the blackboard with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was O.K. with being a generalist.
For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester, and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his Ph.D. at 16.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to 30 hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in 10 million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Is Harvard math really so selective that even one in a 100,000 talent plus hard work only gets you a B? If so, it would imply Gates has an IQ of 164.
An anonymous commenter on Steve Sailer’s blog wrote:
Regarding Gates academic ability, I think the general consensus from people who knew him at Harvard was that he may not have the very best at mathematics, but that he was second to none in computer science. He was taking graduate courses as a freshman and apparently never taking notes and blowing the curve for the rest of the class. A doctoral student said that Gates would just sit with his arms behind his back and correct the algorithms being written on the board anytime the prof made a mistake. He also said everyone else in the class hated him, but that he would ask him questions on occasion, and that his answers were always penetrating and beyond anything this guy could have thought of on his own.
Gates apparently wrote an outstanding paper in theoretical computer science that solved a problem presented to him a math class that he co-authored with his professor who is now at UC-Berkeley.
Sounds like Gates has an IQ of at least 160 and possibly 170. Considering the average American has an IQ around 100 and the average self-made billionaire has an IQ around 130, is it any wonder Gates became the richest man in America? Compared to Gates the average self-made billionaire is mildly retarded, and the average American is so profoundly retarded they can not even feed themselves. Becoming the richest man in the country must have been like taking candy from a baby. At his peak, he was the first centibillionaire in world history, and probably would still be that rich had potentially jealous government officials, perhaps eager to take a nerd down a peg, decided not to go after him.
I really admire Gates because instead of being the typical high IQ nerd who just sits around playing computer games or working in academia, he decided to go out into the real world and compete with the alpha males at their own cutthroat game of Darwinian capitalism…and he beat the living shit out of them!
Pumpkin Person 
@Pp – I agree that Gates must have very high intelligence – but at very high intelligence levels, people don’t have ‘an’ IQ score in the singular – they have a fairly broad spread of IQ scores (plural) according to which component test is reported.
So the ultra high IQ of Bill Gates will be on the maths-type sub-tests – whereas the ultra high IQ of CS Lewis certainly would not be – since he could not pass a 16 year old maths exam which he took many times (and which would have kept him out of Oxford if he had not been exempted due to war service)
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/tolkien-and-lewis-which-was-most.html
In other words, at high levels, IQ cannot be equated with g – and people do not have ‘an’ IQ (singular) but several IQ measures (i.e. several spceific congnitive test scores) which might be more than an SD apart.
You (like a lot of IQ experts) seem very confident in the reality of Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR) as a strong phenomenon. I’m agnostic on the matter, because I think we could find lots of low IQ analogues to CS Lewis (idiot savants for example); but even if SLODR is every bit as strong as its proponents suggest, I would still conceive of high intelligence as a single entity; just a complex multifaceted one:
The concept of intelligence as a single trait predated the discovery g, and the first IQ test was not created with g in mind.
This may sound paradoxical, but if you define intelligence as the mental ability to adapt, then people can still be ranked along that single dimension, even if they adapt using a different and uncorrelated talents. Indeed, biologists have long ranked animals on intelligence, even though the concept of an inter-species g very rarely comes up in animal psychology.
@Pp – I think you misunderstand me.
I am not denying the reality of g – far from it!
I am denying the ability of IQ tests to measure high g – it is just a fact that among many people with very high g (NOT idiots savants, who have low g) the IQ test subsets are all over the place.
This is common sense as well – among acknowledged geniuses the relative deficits of ability are very marked.
What happens is, I think, very simple – g increases up to a physiological maximum of brain processing efficiency (but our ability ot measure this is imprecise and prone to interference by things that reflect test performance and not g) – and abilities beyond that are specific (and probably correlated with relative enlargement of specific brain functional-structures, perhaps somewhat at the expense of other structures-functions – could we but measure this).
So Bill Gates might have g in the top 0.1 percent, but special mathematical-type abilities in the top 0.01 percent, verbal abilities in the top 1 percent – or something like that; Lewis might be something like g in the top 0.1 percent, verbal abilities in the top 0.001 percent but maths only in the top 10 percent .
All of this grossly inflates the IQ scores of some very able people – and especially of precocious child prodigies – since the IQ is estimated from their best abilities, as measured by their best test or performances – pretty much ignoring their relative deficits. This is a real ability, but it is not *general* intelligence.
Also, g is very unlikely to be normally distributed at the extremes, and not at the high end. If there is a physiological ceiling for g, then this would mean there would be some degree of negative skew in high average IQ populations with a lot of people coming up against the limit; whereas in low average IQ populations there may be essentially no people who reach the ceiling (as, for example, in some aboriginal hunter gatherers or the pool of them – with IQ about 60 relative to the UK norm – where there is no evidence of any maximum g individuals ever).
I am not denying the reality of g – far from it!
I didn’t mean to imply you were denying the reality of g; I meant to imply you were denying the reality or importance of super high g. In other words, I meant to imply you believed in Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR):
http://www.cogn-iq.org/?p=478
My point was that even if g becomes unimportant or non-existent at extremely high levels, we might still be able to rank brilliant people in terms of a single intelligence, because the notion of a single intelligence is not necessarily dependent on all the parts of intelligence being positively correlated.
I am denying the ability of IQ tests to measure high g – it is just a fact that among many people with very high g (NOT idiots savants, who have low g) the IQ test subsets are all over the place.
I agree 100%. This could be interpreted as SLODR or it could just be some kind of regression effect. For example, if two subtests correlate 0.5, and you’re +5 SD on subtest A, then on average you’ll be only 0.5(+5 SD) = + 2.5 SD on subtest B, but if regression is the only cause of high IQ subtest scatter, then we should see analogous subtest scatter among extremely low g people (assuming the tests have sufficient floor and ceiling in both extreme groups, which they almost never do).
This is common sense as well – among acknowledged geniuses the relative deficits of ability are very marked.
Indeed. Einstein learned to talk very late; Bertrand Russell was reportedly incapable of learning how to make a cup of tea, Feynman was not a great speller. Even Bill Gates was supposedly not brilliant at the puzzle known as petals around the rose:
http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
What happens is, I think, very simple – g increases up to a physiological maximum of brain processing efficiency (but our ability ot measure this is imprecise and prone to interference by things that reflect test performance and not g) – and abilities beyond that are specific (and probably correlated with relative enlargement of specific brain functional-structures, perhaps somewhat at the expense of other structures-functions – could we but measure this).
Yes, this is what I assumed you were getting at…I just lumped this theory in with SLODR for simplicity. And I agree that g (or at least certain biological determinants of g) do indeed max out at some point, but I always always assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that this happens at such high levels that it affects extremely few:
But given all the anecdotes about acknowledged geniuses being sub-brilliant in some areas, it could max out a lot lower than I think, or this could just be a regression effect I described above.
All of this grossly inflates the IQ scores of some very able people – and especially of precocious child prodigies – since the IQ is estimated from their best abilities, as measured by their best test or performances – pretty much ignoring their relative deficits. This is a real ability, but it is not *general* intelligence.
Yes, the tendency of people to only report their best score does create an absurd amount of IQ inflation. The most revealing IQ scores are those the public figure did not disclose himself.
Also, g is very unlikely to be normally distributed at the extremes, and not at the high end. If there is a physiological ceiling for g, then this would mean there would be some degree of negative skew in high average IQ populations with a lot of people coming up against the limit;
Agreed.
@Pp “My point was that even if g becomes unimportant or non-existent at extremely high levels, we might still be able to rank brilliant people in terms of a single intelligence, because the notion of a single intelligence is not necessarily dependent on all the parts of intelligence being positively correlated.”
Ummm, I’m not sure if I can follow this reasoning. I probably agree that the way of deriving general intelligence scores from multiple measures of cognitive ability is NOT a direct measure of intelligence. But I’m not sure how relevant that is here. Either way, I would say that real g is the thing we are interested in – albeit we can only get at it indirectly and imprecisely. Specialized abilities are something else – constrained by g, but dissociable from it to some extent.
wrt ‘regression to the mean’.
It is important to explain what is being meant by this term, *causally*, because it is used in several ways some of which are not valid.
(e.g. intelligence does NOT in reality regress to the population mean between parents and children – this is an artefact of measurement imprecision. Valid and precise measures of intelligence show that real g is inherited from parents real g to a high degree, with no ‘regression’.)
As commonly used, rttm is not really an explanation for anything – just a suggestion that some longitudinal test measure changes are test-artifactual, and do not reflect underlying reality.
Ummm, I’m not sure if I can follow this reasoning. I probably agree that the way of deriving general intelligence scores from multiple measures of cognitive ability is NOT a direct measure of intelligence. But I’m not sure how relevant that is here. Either way, I would say that real g is the thing we are interested in – albeit we can only get at it indirectly and imprecisely. Specialized abilities are something else – constrained by g, but dissociable from it to some extent.
I’m just making a distinction between g and intelligence. g is defined as the single biggest source of variation in intelligence within a specific population at a specific time, but it’s theoretically possible to be highly intelligent (as conventionally defined) and not have high g, and to be unintelligent and not have low g.
For example, people with fetal alcohol syndrome do not have low g, but they have low IQ scores and are considered unintelligent by society because they can’t cope with their environment. Their low IQ is biological (prenatal damage), but not genetic, and thus not related to g (which is related to genes in most studies); though I imagine there are also rare genetic conditions that affect IQ without affecting g.
From a Darwinian perspective, intelligence is simply the cognitive ability to adapt (problem solving; behavioral flexibility), so in theory it doesn’t matter whether you’re mentally adaptable because you have high g or whether you’re mentally adaptable because you just happen to have a lot of special talents. Either way, you’ll score high on a large well rounded IQ test. BUT if your adaptability is not based on g, it will be very hard to get an accurate sample of it, since scores will vary erratically from one test to another, which was ultimately your point all along.
wrt ‘regression to the mean’.
It is important to explain what is being meant by this term, *causally*, because it is used in several ways some of which are not valid.
All I mean is that if the correlation between abilities is imperfect, regression to the mean by definition occurs (since correlations are just the slope of the line of best fit in a scatter plot when both variables are expressed as Z scores). It implies nothing about causation.
(e.g. intelligence does NOT in reality regress to the population mean between parents and children – this is an artefact of measurement imprecision. Valid and precise measures of intelligence show that real g is inherited from parents real g to a high degree, with no ‘regression’.)
Well the correlation between the mid-parent IQ and the adult IQ of offspring is said to be 0.6. Of course as you say, IQ tests are imprecise (typically have a g loading of 0.85), so correcting this correlation for imprecision (0.6/085) raises it to 0.71. So I would still expect a lot of regression. For example parents with an average g of +3 SD should have adult kids with an average g of (0.7)(+3 SD) = + 2.1 SD, and of course adult with an average g of +3 SD should have parents with an average g of +2.1 SD. Regression works both ways which causes so much confusion around this topic.
Of course it’s possible my numbers are off because different studies give different correlations, but I see no theoretical reason why there should be no regression, since all normally distributed genetic traits seem to regress to the mean from parents to offspring, so why wouldn’t g?
As commonly used, rttm is not really an explanation for anything
Yes, it’s just a mathematical necessity of imperfect correlations. It tells us nothing about the cause of the correlations or their imperfections. Some IQ experts have invoked it to argue that ethnic IQ differences must be genetic because the children of high IQ parents from different ethnic groups regress to different means. Of course this is a terrible argument, because the exact same thing would happen if ethnic differences were 100% environmental.
@Pp – I can’t argue this out in a blog post – but I suggest you discuss this issues with Michael W.
1. general intelligence is a real attribute, indirectly measured – it is not just a statistical construct
2. “From a Darwinian perspective, intelligence is simply the cognitive ability to adapt (problem solving; behavioral flexibility), so in theory it doesn’t matter whether you’re mentally adaptable because you have high g or whether you’re mentally adaptable because you just happen to have a lot of special talents. ” That’s not right – it does matter. General intelligence has a different selection pressure, a different reason for evolving, than does specific talents – and it does a different thing.
3. Get him to explain regression to the mean – what it is and isn’t.
Bruce,
Yes it would indeed be interesting to see whether Michael agrees or disagrees with what I said about intelligence & regression & what reasons he gives
Interesting. Compared to Kaczynski, whose parents were average Americans, Bill gates parents were in high iq jobs. The same can be said about Carlos helu, whose father was a prominent businessman.
Perhaps, the success of helu and gates is the result of having high iq parents that can sympathize and teach success.
I doubt Gates would have still become the richest person had he not had successful parents, even with his spectacular IQ. He likely would have never went to prestigious Lakeside high school where he met his future business partner Paul Allen and would never have been exposed to computers at a young age, which were extremely rare in those days.
He might have still made the Forbes 400; just as number 400 instead of as number one.
I don’t know if his parents actually taught him to be successful though, but perhaps, since it’s rare to be that business savvy so young.
Another interesting high IQ person to compare Gates to is Chris Langan:
Pumpkin person, would you say verbal iq is more important than spatial iq I’m terms of acquiring wealth at high iq levels? Bill gates strikes me as having more verbal abilities than visuospatial because he graduated towards computer science over math.
Pumpkin person, would you say verbal iq is more important than spatial iq I’m terms of acquiring wealth at high iq levels?
I would imagine so; just based on the ethnic distribution of the Forbes 400 (ashkenazi Jews: Verbal > Spatial) are far more conspicuously over-represented than East Asians (Spatial > Verbal) even though their overall IQ’s are similar.
But I don’t know if that would relate to Gates or computer skills.
Regression to mean, like EVERYTHING, seems need parsimony and the wiser answer (reversion than principal assumptions of scientific methods) to be analysed correctly.
Higher intelligence is part of variation of cognitive traits. In families with more probabilities to have harmonious or interesting genetic combinations to produce higher intelligence’s profiles, seems obvious, have more genes or traits that will can produce these phenotypes.
Some families have more probability to combine average intelligence’s profiles than higher intelligence’s. Personalities profiles also have important influence.
Human phenotypes is like a paintures. You can combine different colors and nuances to produce different paintures.
My opinion is, in families with very higher ”risk” to produce geniuses or very creative or intelligent peoples, have also more chance to produce children with autism, schizophrenia, psychopathy or ther extreme profile integralized personalities.
You have lower probability (isn’t mean absent probability, is important highlight) to produce average, higher or super higher intelligence’s profiles and higher probability to produce lower intelligence.
You have average probability to produce lower or higher and super higher intelligence’s and higher probability to produce average intelligence’s.
You have higher probability to produce higher or super intelligence’s (obviously, higher intelligence hereditarity is more probable to be pass to next generation than super higher intelligence’s)
You have higher probability to produce super higher intelligence’s and to produce all kind of non-adaptative phenotypes or extreme phenotypes.
You have two types of integralized personality-intelligence’s profiles. Higher chance to comorb with anomalous lateralization (genius and creative) and lower chances, on all intelligence levels.
Higher intelligence’s profiles is recessive because is less selected and majority of complex recessive phenotypes tend to have disadvantages because is like a natural resources and ”normal and lower profile ones” is like a industrialized products. But recessivity and dominance are both relatives.
In summary (joke, lol), majority of families and couples have more probabilities to regress to mean but there minority them can have more probabilities to sustain higher intelligence’s phenotypes inside its families or lower intelligence’s phenotypes and families with more chance to produce geniuses, have more probability to produce extreme phenotypes like autism, criminality etc…
You have bell curves of probabilities to each level of intelligence. My longer and humble opinion.
Bill Gates is obviously very smart, both in a general g sense and in terms of sub-faculties like quantitative ability, but I think his smarts play only a minor (but still significant) role in his being the richest person in the world. Steve Wozniak, who had a math SAT of 800, designed and built the first Apple computer (and arguably invented the personal computer). But he probably would never have become a billionaire had he not met a guy named Steve Jobs, also a smart man but one who had formidable verbal talents and emotional intelligence (he pressed his engineers to do things that they insisted could not or ever be done). There are likely many inventors and tinkerers whose creations either never saw the light of day or who simply let others become rich whilst they focused on further invention. Silicon Valley is full of such people. We just don’t hear about them.
Back to Gates: I remember using Microsoft OS (MS-DOS) and Microsoft software back in the early 80s. The stuff was not the best that was out there; it simply had massive marketing, thanks to the business talent that Microsoft assembled. One could then say, Well it takes a smart person to identify the best talent. Could be, but don’t discount the connections Gates had from Harvard and his elite prep school and also from his father’s corporate entourage as a prominent attorney. This is not a knock on plutocrats; it’s simply hard to grow a business–even very bright people fail, and Gates had access to some very bright and rich people. Circa 1980, there were few personal computers and no standard operating system. Microsoft got the lock on this business by being first (much like Sony got the lock on personal music players by being first), and within a few years, MS got its IPO, making Gates a billionaire.
Papapearson,
I think a lot of super IQ people could be billionaires, presidents, nobel prize winners; but for whatever reason aren’t motivated. For years I couldn’t understand this & kept badgering an IQ 180 Promethean I knew about why he wasn’t rich, given all the advantages. One day he snapped & said:
“To be brutally honest, I could play. I could win. And I know it so completely that it doesn’t even interest me.”
Perhaps when you’re that brilliant, success is like taking candy from baby. He just felt there was more to life than dominating less able people.
Pumpkin go read the Intelligence paradox By satoshi Kanazawa. That right there was the perfect example of the paradox.
In my opinion lack of testosterone. There is no other logical explanation.
Lack of testorone makes him hot want to compete. Theres your answer!
not
Of course it’s subjective, but the most impressive of the super rich I’ve heard in interviews is Soros. It’s not his political philosophy borrowed from Popper. He just seems very smart.
Whereas Gates impresses with his intensity and passion for what he does.
USA has the most wealthy people in the world, especially super wealthy.
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/10/15/where-do-the-worlds-wealthiest-people-live/
“Overall, the U.S. was home to around 14.2 million millionaires, or more than 40% of those in the world.”
“Credit Suisse estimates that there were some 128,200 individuals whose net worth exceeded $50 million, with around half of them living in the U.S. ”
Do you think this correlated with their IQ?
In other words, your odd to be millinonares is much higher in USA than anywhere else.
4% Americans are millionaries. Excluding children or any one younger than 18 (25% population), you get 5% adults are millionaries. Exculding miorities, 7% white adults in USA are millinaries..
When people talking about wealth in term of verbal vs spacial IQ, I also believe verbal IQ help to create wealth.
But it is spending type of method to create wealth. Most wealth is created through trade which is basically something most people want to buy into. In market economy, it is suplly/demand ratio creating the value. If you spend million dollars to buid a house which no body want to buy, that house market value is zero. On the other hand, a good Jewish saleman can sell free air to idiots; Then the free air which the saleman spent zero money on it worth a lot of money in the eye of idiots.
Sale skill is heavily verbal skill depending which is about manipulatin of idiots or average IQ people. It is actually helpful to be near average IQ with strong verbal skill to get the sale jobs done.
The reason Hitler Nazi hated Jew due to such strong sale ability. In Nazi eyes, Jews did not create any real value (buiding house, producing grain, manufacturing goods). Jews were only parasites who steal value created by other people. Thus they want to eradicate parasites. Marxists believes the same thing. But Marxists do not limited parasites to particular ethnic groups. In Marxists eyes, all capitalists are parasites.
However, salepeople are needed in a market economy. Certainly they get larger share of wealth due to their special position. You really do not have to be smartest to be rich.
You really do not have to be smartest to be rich.
Of course not, but we should expect at least a moderate correlation between IQ and money, because intelligence is arguably the mental ability to adapt:
The reason brain size tripled in the last 4 million years of our evolution is that the bigger brained primates were able to adapt situations to their advantage and come out on top. Small brained primates were not able to get enough food to feed themselves, their family, and their tribes, so they died out, leaving the big brained primates as the survivors.
Today, instead of food, we chase money, but the same concept should hold: the bigger brained and higher IQ should be the most adaptable and thus acquire the most resources on average. The main difference is we now have a social safety net, so even those who lack the intelligence to exploit the environment to their advantage, can still pass on their genes to the next generation, often more prolifically than the rich do.
Intelligence didn’t evolve so we could create value for society, it evolved so we could dominate the competition and exploit the unintelligent. We see this all through nature. Humans are the most intelligent animal on Earth and we’re also the richest animal on Earth, partly because we use our smarts to exploit the stupidity of animals, using them as food, clothing, entertainment and transportation. In Africa, the least intelligent (pygmies) are servants to the more intelligent farmers.
Of course the most intelligent people are also the most likely to rebel against their evolutionary impulses, which is why a lot of smart people use their intelligence to benefit society, instead of just benefiting themselves. But since benefiting society makes them feel good (and look good), they are still just benefiting themselves, but doing so indirectly & helping others in the process.
We should not assume what we want is what other want.
For some, it is money.
For other, it is living space.
Some wnat to be remembered as first to climb, land, ect
It is like taste for food. What we like might not be what other like.
No all smart people think money as goal of their fullfilment. Some one might just want get that nobel prize while other might just enjoy solving puzzle as fun.
As for myself, I only started chasing money after I no longer enjoy unreliable income as scientist. If I could get reliable income (getting tenure in college soon) to secure my life, I might never chase big money. Certainly once I started chasing money, I put over 80% my effort on capitolist activity with all investment/business to handle. Within 10 year, I get my financial independence (no need to work for other to make money). I have a cousin who had lower test score than me. But he set his goal in college to become some one on Wall-street with strong verbal skill. Now he is chairman of a large European hedge fund with several million dollars anuual income. He acknowlaged that he might not be as intelligent as I am. In his words, we have different goals in life.
So do not assume we want the same thing in life.
No all smart people think money as goal of their fullfilment. Some one might just want get that nobel prize while other might just enjoy solving puzzle as fun.
Very true, and the smartest person I ever corresponded with couldn’t care less about money, and we argued about this all the time, because to me, money is not a specific goal, it’s a tool that can buy almost any goal, so I’ve always struggled to understand why so many brilliant people don’t seem to understand this.
But once I was out of college and in the real world, I started to understand their disinterest in money. I was focused only on the benefits of money, and not on the hard work and time it takes to make it; and as Marilyn Vos Savant said, our time is worth infinitely more than our money.
Still, I think if one really has an IQ in the stratosphere, they should be able to get rich quite easily, with very little effort. Imagine if you put an average person in a world where everyone else was mentally retarded; they could easily become the richest person there without even trying, so it seems kind of dumb not to take advantage of that. On the other hand, a world of the mentally impaired would probably have nothing worth buying, so maybe from the perspective of a Genius, there’s very little our dumb society can produce that he’d be interested in buying, so why make money?
“Imagine if you put an average person in a world where everyone else was mentally retarded; they could easily become the richest person there without even trying”
True. Some Chinese peasants (in their 60s with very little education) who could not survive in China went to one of poorest continent and striked rich there (on BBC program).
Some of my own uneducated relatives also immigrated to several third wolrd countries and came back wealthy.
“so it seems kind of dumb not to take advantage of that. “. Well, remember the violence of class struggles and genocide of market dominant minorities (book: world on fire). Think again. Hiding as middle class have its advantage also. As superwealthy, you have to watch your back all the time. Lots of anxiety. Making money on average folk can be viewed as smart business, exploitation, corruption, stealing, cheating, ect. All depending on which angle you look is from. For losers, bad words apply.
Maybe there is reason some super smart people do not want to be super rich “minority”
My wealthy hedge fund cousin has extrovert personality, is very out-going, highly verbal and social, with degree in law. He could not live a life without party. He was always surronded himself by a large cycle of friends before he became wealthy.
After he became rich, he lived a few years of life like those nouveau riche with conspicuous consumption (owning private jet) and showing off with his average friends and relatives. Now, he cutted off all previous friendship and relatives. The trouble with average relatives and friends are mounting (most in form of request of financial help, loan, aid ec). He was forced to live a life style of introvert with home and social cycle detached from most people. Remember self-actualization characters? If you are introvert by nature, it is a bless. If not, it is a suffer.
I am not sure wether he is truely happy to live a life very different from what he used to be. There is a price to pay for him who never thought what could happen after becoming wealthy.
I am not sure wether he is truely happy to live a life very different from what he used to be. There is a price to pay for him who never thought what could happen after becoming wealthy.
Well money is a powerful tool, but like any complex tool, if you don’t know how to use it to your advantage ; you’ll end up hurting yourself.
But that doesn’t mean the tool isn’t incredibly useful when used deftly .
pumpkinperson, your thoughst about what malcolm gladwell said in his book outliers, how bill gates was also at the right place at the right time?
Rivsdiary,
I do think Gates was lucky but you have to know what to do with luck. So the smarter you are, the luckier you get, or the further your luck goes. Smart people tend to be in the right place at right time because ability tends to create opportunity.
Malcolm Gladwell is a great writer, but you could retrospectively argue that any successful person was in the right place at the right time; by definition! At a certain point it’s just unfalsifiable pseudoscience. Stephen Pinker called it post-hoc sophistry
”Smart people tend to be in the right place at right time because ability tends to create opportunity”
Nope, many times it is not true, look to our politicians, ”artists”… they are in right place in a right time.
Look to our stupid social and ”oiconomiths” problems!!
Nope, many times it is not true, look to our politicians, ”artists”… they are in right place in a right time.
Look to our stupid social and ”oiconomiths” problems!!
Politicians don’t generally care about social problems. The problem they’re motivated to solve is how to stay in power as long as possible & so they use their IQ to figure out how to suck up to lobbyists & special interest groups & the media. Not saying all politicians are geniuses but many top ones are above 130 IQ
“Sounds like Gates has an IQ of at least 160 and possibly 170. Considering the average American has an IQ around 100 and the average self-made billionaire has an IQ around 130, is it any wonder Gates became the richest man in America?”
the part i had a problem with is “is it any wonder Gates became the richest man in America”. i realize your post is meant to be more inspirational than purely literal, but still, here you are indirectly stating that the reason gates is the richest is because he has the highest IQ.
and yet a bit later you write “I really admire Gates because instead of being the typical high IQ nerd who just sits around playing computer games or working in academia” — so then which is it, is he the richest because of his incredibly high IQ, or were there other factors at play, and if so, what are those factors? you don’t seem to be curious about that, instead you sound content going with the simple answer.
again, it’s not a big deal, i enjoyed your post, i just wanted to point that out because it was bugging me.
so then which is it, is he the richest because of his incredibly high IQ, or were there other factors at play, and if so, what are those factors? you don’t seem to be curious about that, instead you sound content going with the simple answer.
Yes, that was a bit contradictory. I think the major non-IQ factors in his success that separate him from other equally high IQ nerds that just sit around playing computer games all day were an interest in business and an extremely competitive personality. I think a lot of high IQ nerds don’t find business all that intellectually stimulating and thus would rather read about physics and perhaps nerds also have less testosterone (slower life history; more K) and this makes them less competitiveness and ambitious than the typical man. Gates for whatever reason got the best of both worlds (a super high IQ nerd with the competitiveness and ambition of an “alpha male” )
”The problem they’re motivated to solve is how to stay in power as long as possible & so they use their IQ to figure out how to suck up to lobbyists & special interest groups & the media”
Iq + psychopatic personality.
”Not saying all politicians are geniuses but many top ones are above 130 IQ”
Higher iq = higher % to be genius, NOT…
Higher iq= genius
Many genius can be average and lower iq (low functioning genius or savant)
Genius is somebody with very greater capacity, necessarily don’t require higher iq but is very common this correlation between higher ability and iq, very common, not total.
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Bill Gates scored as high as I did???!!!! He’s so FUCKING stupid. I was watching him on TV talking about disease, and he’s SO FUCKING STUPID.
trolololololol…………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Pumpkin do you have any evidence Marsha scored ‘170 IQ’?
She claims to have got the same score on the old SAT as Bill Gates, which equates to an IQ of 170. Plus she claims to have aced the Wechsler as a kid, and I sent her verbal abstract reasoning test to take and she was off the scale. Never seen anyone who can think so flexibly.
Do you know that she actually took the test/didnt cheat on the test you sent?
There is some evidence I see that she would be quite smart. But as she hardly comments beyond 1 or 2 sentences its impossible to know.
Only way she could have cheated is if someone super smart told her the answers and did so immediately, which seems unlikely.
Send me that same test, I’ve scored perfect on every test I’ve ever taken. Challenge me.
Create a throwaway email i can sent it to.
Send me that same test, I’ve scored perfect on every test I’ve ever taken. Challenge me.
Impressive. PP, you should do an analysis of the result he get on the test, with the screenshots and all. You should also do one of Marsha.
It could be interesting to know how these 2 extremely brilliant people thinks.
It’s not everyday we can talk to geniuses.
What I understand from Gates elusive testimony is that :
First year, he took math55 class only, where people are tought 6 years in 1 (like the math class in Princeton Bezos spoke about, but even more demanding). He did all he could but out of the 20 who finishihed it, he was behing a couple of students and got a B+. That was Allen prediction, at Harvard, you could find smarter kids than you, Gates said No way (very HBD …). He was such a cocky liberal (HBD) he asked the first year to be with an African students and an international students. But the second year, after having unsucessfully compete against Andy Breiterman, from Baltimore, the best in math, Gates wanted to move in a room with him. What is impressive is how this guy build up relationships in order to grow. Now Breiterman is a tax partner in a Low Firm probably making 3 M dollars a year but has never done math.
Second year, he changes completely and decided to never attend classes he has signed up for and to attend this other classes. Gates amuses himself he was the most vocal student in a Brain cognitive class who happened to take their exam in the same class as combinatory math he has signed up for, and they thought he was composing in the wrong group. He aced all exams except one in organic chemistry (wich is cleary intensive knowledge and IQ linked). Cleary, he went to Harvard to be the best math student and he was not, and then after touring the university he saw there was not much challenge for him and went for somehting else.
So he is probably an extremely motivated 150-155 IQ but not more.
For me, what is very interesting in this is that :
1) Gates always wanted to be number one and that’s why Allen told him to go to MIT or Princeton for math and not to Harvard math55
2) He was really willing to learn : in the human dimension by asking to share the room with a afro-american student + international students instead of staying in the white& jewish group (as in the gifted school)
3) Then he switched quicky to a second option where he could be best while bonding with the best mind from the classe in didn’t ace as he wanted to.
4) He was working 36 hours non stop, sleeping 10, and then going back to work.
5) He was average at poker too but managed not to loose money and kept attending all parties, socializing with the others guys.
This is this mixture of openmindedness and ambition, combined with a 1 in 10 000 IQ, that made him really unique and fit to recreate the corporate world.
If he had had +120 more IQ points, at 170-175, he would have found no challenge and much less bonding enthousiasm I believe.
Another point wich is very “jewish” practical mind is that probably the material from the classes he signed up had all been covered by math55. But the other students who succeeded in math55 generaly did research in math and took phd level classes. That’s seems obvious with the combinatory exam Gates speak about. That allowed him to freely shop and assess all Harvard classes without risking to fail. Good strategy too.
This source implies he was the greatest math mind at Harvard:
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-story-about-bill-gatess-intelligence-2015-11
Paul Allen estimates Gates was above the one in a hundred thousand level at math (math IQ 164):
When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in 10 million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
But keep in mind Gates was also brilliant verbally (at least according to the SAT), so one can see how his combined IQ on the SAT was 170. Ironically the SAT may have underestimated his ability because its math ceiling (which Gates hit) is lower than its verbal ceiling (which Gates almost hit) although there’ve been some conflicting reports about his SAT scores.
– Thats IT (algorithmic) and not math. There is no doubt he was number one at that. It’s due to a combination of IQ and the many hours he had invested in this since a young age and specially in algorithmic. This part is also very good for someone balanced like Gates with high verbal/symbolic IQ.
– Allen saying he was 100 times less gifted than other in math is what we should take. There is no 1 in 10 M at Harvard. If he was 1 in 10 K in math (150 IQ) and maybe 3/4 were at 1 in 1 M (I doub it , but let’s image that’s true) with 170 IQ, they crushed him (like the tax lawyer Parner).
– Probably 4/5 people were to math what was Gates to IT. I underestimate that. So they crushed him in math as he crushed the other people in IT. Obviously, in the 1965-75 period, they would have been more wizz kid investing in math than in IT, so Gates could really dominate.
– I like the anecdote of a IT professor who got Gates reprimanded for using for commercial purposes Harvard material. It is exactly the opposite scenario to the Winklevoss twins, meaning Harvard wasn’t so entrepreneurial as that time, and forms did matter.
—> 150 IQ + an alpha-male attitude + a desire to grow and learn being an eternel student + a good wealthy/healthy family did the job + no extreme neuroatipycity (quite frequent among geniuses) did the best job in the world.
In fact the sorty about Gates is exactly the story you reported (and analyzed) about Bezos, except Bezos was upfront about it and Gates isn’t really. You only have to had 5 points to Gates.
There is no doubt he was number one at that. It’s due to a combination of IQ and the many hours he had invested in this since a young age and specially in algorithmic.
You could claim the same for the people at Harvard who were better at math than Gates. That they only beat him because of the many hours they had invested since young age.
Allen saying he was 100 times less gifted than other in math is what we should take.
When did Allen ever say that?
And here’s more evidence of Gates being one of the smartest at Harvard:
In this vein, perhaps the best story comes from his and Gates’ performance in a core graduate Microeconomics course at Harvard, taught by future Nobel laureate, Michael Spence. According to Gates, “the professor allowed you to bet your whole grade on the final if you choose.” As a result, neither Gates nor Ballmer ever went to class very often, and instead chose to cram for the final only in the week before. Ballmer earned the second highest grade in the course, falling just short of Gates, who earned the top score.
Pumpkin,
– I didn’t say Gates wasn’t one of the smartest at Harvard. If you have a 150 IQ in a place where the average is 125, among 4 times 1 500 undergrads, you’d be the 15 most intelligent one out of 4 years and one of the three most intelligent one each year. Classes being given each year, you are compared mostly with 1 year intake. With 145 IQ, he would be one of the 50 most intelligent one of your year class
– You quoted yourself Alen saying that Gates was at 1 in 100K in math whereas some students were at 1 in 1M or even 1 in 10M. That’s 100 time less. Obviously, not 100 less smart, but we were speaking about is IQ percentile ratio. I believe it to be in the 145-150 area (5 points more than Bezos who had the same experience in the formar Quantum mechanics class of Princeton PHY208 as Gates had in math55.
I estimated bezos’s IQ based on math performance because i didn’t know his SAT scores but with Gates we actually supposedly know his SAT score so such indirect estimates are redundant.
But if you want to apply the same logic to Gates, you can’t assume the average IQ at Harvard is 125 because Harvard students are largely selected based on math talent (math is half the SAT) so the average math IQ at Harvard would be quite a bit higher than 125.
– If there were 2 students doing this bet, he was 1 out of 2.
– Even if it’s the results that counts in real life, you can’t compare grades obtained this way with the one of all the other students to evaluate an IQ ability, the main parameters being in this shot his risk taking strategy and his interest in getting the class at first try objectives. I understood that after his math55 experience, he was very cocky with all classes passing only exams from classes he didn’t attend (and vice versa)
Yes Pumpkin. it doesn’t change anything to the Allen comments analysis. Let’s say Harvard math is top 1% or 136 IQ. Then, i count that roughly in my head, the top 5 students out of 1500 (maybe there were less) are in the 1 in 15 000 level (155 IQ) and the 1st one in the 75 000 level (162 IQ). So you are far away both from the 1 in 1M and a fortiori 1 in 10M of Paul Allen. That’s why if you keep the fact that some students belonged to 10 times or even 100 times more rare a percentile.
So Harvard math elite can’ really be more than a bunch of people in the high 150 IQ except if they have some special way top spot them through math olympiad (but even there, i think it is also more of 140 IQ + crystallyzed intelligence).
As you said, 160 is a rare, so you don’t find them around except if some went for them, and that don’t happen (+ I guess severe mental illnesses become more frequent passed a certain level, it is just an intuition, and that even reduced the group number).
I think Allen was assuming 100% of the top math minds in the country ended up at harvard, and whatever shortfall would be made up for by foreign students, so in his eyes, top 5 at harvard equals top 5 among all 4.5 million or so americans the same age as gates
Yes, that would be the case either if average math IQ at Harvar was 148 IQ (sd15) or if they had a particular way to spot the top math geniuses.
That’s why, even with an average math IQ of 140, dividing it by 10, seems to be a fair guesstimates .
Then it was wise for Harvard math team to downgrade the level of math55 to selecting 45/55 people instead of 20. You get read of the people, either geniuses like Breiterman or prestige seekers like Gates, who arent really interested in math for the long term and research but want to get some fun or challenging reward.
Someone mentioned in a comment once that programming is actually more to do with verbal IQ than math IQ. I think the logic is that programming is semantic logic where you learn a way of expressing a function or to issue commands and that.
If thats true, it explains bill being great at programming but not the best in the country at math. That might explain why he is a good businessman more generally.
I don’t know, someone said (maybe Steve Shoe?????) that programming is highly correlated with algebra ability. Or that a simple algebra test is the best predictor of success in programming.
I notice that the elite level math guys tend to be easy to find. But I would imagine its very hard to hit the ceiling in verbal tests and therefore find these people.
I can have very variable performances in verbal tests if I overthink the question. I think you can make an analogy work with a lot of things for example.
I don’t think learning languages necessarily tells you whether you have high VIQ. You can speak 5 or 6 languages and have very poor semantic logic or propositional logic. The best way to find high VIQ types for me is to talk with them for 5 minutes and throw random topics into the conversation. But for quant types I’d be looking for test scores.
I found a very honest interview of Bradford Delong and Andrei Schleifer on math55 at Harvard. DeLong, son of two Harvard professors, explained he had already studied half of the program. That’s why Schleifer thought he was a genious, because he had memorized the solution (that’s so model of Delong to recognize). And Schleifer himself, who was struggling to speak english because he came in the USA at 16 yo, said math55 permanently disabused him of being a math researcher .
Schleifer is ranked n°1 economist by idea/repec among the top 50 000 publishing economist. So he is 4 sd above a gourp of people who are + 2sd above the mean. I think creativity is the main factor here. So I would give a correlation of 0.55 to 0.65 with IQ. That’s between 3.3 and 4 sd for Shleifer. Averaging gives 155 IQ. It seems that you really needed 160 IQ to navigate math55 without previous knowledge. That confirms what I though. Gates must have been slightly lower than Schleifer aroung 150 IQ.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/6/4/andrei-shleifer-and-j-bradford-delong/
https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html
Certainly math55 has been killing lot’s of vocation for math and creating many for the rest (economics, physics, IT etc. ). And you see the importance of personal choice. The one who navigated through it with no difficulty did Harvard Law school and Tax.
And Bradford Delong who was credited has being the only man capable of reading a book in 20 minutes and understanding and memorizing everything is a very famous and interesting blogger but is ranked 677 economists in the world. That’s very high but at the same time, it teaches to take peoples impression with some skepticism when it’s about alleged intelligence super-power.
Interesting to see that Schleifer was an economic and entrepreneur disaster, with probably low moral sense and low business acumen. He got Harvard and Summers (who i believe in the only one is a +160 IQ there) into big big troubles but the intellectual, and maybe ethnic solidarity, saved him and allowed him to bounce back. Wich is a good thing. It looks like that Summers has been so good to so many people. He really was a blessing for Harvard.
((((Summers))) wasn’t a blessing to the world when he told Bill to deregulate the financial industry and sign NAFTA to reduce american incomes by 20% to what they would have been without yo no soy coolies in every town.
I have another indice of Bill Gates IQ not being above 145. He participated in the Putnam competition in math and we know he entered Harvard with the aim to acing the math55 and being a math genious. In that competition were there is in averaege 2500 people, he was 95th candidate (Ballmer said that). It can be verified because the name of the top 100 scores are in the American mathematical monthly (I suppose it’s how Ballmer knew all Harvard students individual ranking)
The competition data is interesting. Students are given 12 problems to solve in 6 hours and each problem is valued 10 points. 30% of the test takers get 0. 20% get 1 or 2 points. The fellows are the 5 top scorers. In 1996, the 5 best scores were among 76 and 98 out of 120. One girl was the first one in 56 years (meaning 1 girl vs. 279 boys). As she said she had resolved only 8 problems and the last one in 10 minutes, she has probably a score of 76 (many girls are perfectionist and could score higher if they went for points, meaning she was 5th or 4th).
This test is also a strong contradiction to the claim that Feynman could have a 125 IQ. Another interesting aspect is that many students who ace the test ends up being top university professors or work for prestigious institutions like NASA. MAth55 teachers Elkies won the competition 4 times.
It is much more interesting than Mega or Titan test, but it’s not culture free. I believe – as Langan is interested in math for his CTMU purpose – he could really have showed off his abilities by acing this competition, if he could. This would have given an aura of credibility to his theories and would have opend him a path to academia.
PS in wiki :
– In 2003, of the 3,615 students taking the exam, 1024 (28%) scored 10 or more points, and 42 points was sufficient to make the top percentile.
– it is typically attempted by students specializing in mathematics, but the median score is usually zero or one point out of 120 possible, and there have been only four perfect scores as of 2010.
– One of the winne, Venn Poytress is a Calvinist theologian and scholar
– The two only girls in the group are romanian. The second one, Cariani waq two times fellow 2003 and 2004
– Lots of jewish, some asian and loads of name from scandinavian/german origin.
Since 2010, it’s much more asian. Loot at the MIT team, all of them are east asian. The teacher, Bjorn Poonen, was 4 times medalist. From his name, he must be dutch/scandinavian, but he looks mixed race. Maybe with people from India (Dutch in India mixed more than Afrikaans).
http://news.mit.edu/2015/students-win-putnam-math-competition-0410
I don’t see how asian won’t dominate the world in the near future.
I have another indice of Bill Gates IQ not being above 145. He participated in the Putnam competition in math and we know he entered Harvard with the aim to acing the math55 and being a math genious. In that competition were there is in averaege 2500 people, he was 95th candidate (Ballmer said that
Scoring in the top 4% of a group with an average higher math IQ of 140ish, indicates a higher math IQ way above 145.
And why do you keep ignoring the fact that he scored IQ 170 on the SAT?
The group being self selected, by just doing math, their must be a lower average (half get 0), like 130 math knowledge IQ. Probably the sd is higher let’s say 20. That would give Gates a 160 math IQ. So with a correlation of 0.75 with g, you would find a 145 score .
For SAT, your right, I forgot he had a 1590. But I don’t believe the report from promotheus is correct, for estimating IQ based on scholastic scores (Other high IQ societies use the same more or less). It would be 170 if correlation with g were perfect . With a 0,65 you get a 145.
What is sure it that they are many indicators he is very high (>99.9). What is probable is that he is not extremely high (99.99), above 155, because of math55 & Putnam score .
But even if Gates and Buffet are 145-150 boys, it’s already a very good sign for correlation among IQ and success . It doesn’t contradict your theory .
For SAT, your right, I forgot he had a 1590. But I don’t believe the report from promotheus is correct, for estimating IQ based on scholastic scores (Other high IQ societies use the same more or less). It would be 170 if correlation with g were perfect . With a 0,65 you get a 145.
The SAT’s g loading is probably higher than 0.65. Keep in mind that the SAT’s correlation with official IQ tests underestimates its g loading because official IQ tests are not perfectly g loaded themselves.
In any event, IQ 170 doesn’t mean you scored 170 on a perfect measure of g (which doesnt exist) it just means you score 170 on highly g loaded tests.
Intelligence can’t be directly measured the same way height can, so IQs are just measures of how well you scored on strong proxy measures. So by definition Gates has an IQ of 170 because that’s how he scores on highly g loaded tests, even though he would score lower on a theoretically perfect measure of g.
Yes . So averaging my two guesstimates with SAT, 145 for math55 10th position, 150 for Putnam 95th position and 170 for a near perfect SAT score, you get a better approximation of his intelligence that would be 155. It would be great if some other objective data are discovered.
I wanted to ponderate the average (because I believed it’s a lower one for SAT than Putnam), that’s why I considered a 145 g for a 170 SAT score, but it’s not necessary because the 3 tests are highly correlated . It would be very different if we took wealth or business achievement that would have to be ponderated.
Scoring 95th out of over 4 million 18-year-olds in America equals Putnam IQ of roughly 161 (U.S. norms), assuming roughly 100% of the top talent in America took the test, and whatever shortfall was made up for by foreign talent.
And assuming about 0.65 correlation between the SAT and Putnam, averaging 166 on both tests equals a composite IQ around 173. I ignored the math55 data point because I assume it just redundantly measures the same talent as Putnam, but is not an actual psychometric test and thus would water down our accuracy.
Yes.
Still one detail, are you sure any high IQ society as ever accepter an SAT score to discriminate above 160 IQ. I read Prometheus accepted 1530 (pre-1995) as a 160 IQ, but there a long stretch to go, to say that the test would be able to discriminate at higher levels. I believe its noise. My personal opinion is that the SAT questions are so easy, and so predictable and trainable, that it can’t discriminate above 150. Maybe there are some Hoeflin data about that, the guy was a SAT advocate.
But still, I must admit that correlation between both test can’t be perfect, and in consequence the composite score would be more than the average of both score, thus placing Gates higher than I thought (my guesstimate would be 2 times 150 and I guess it would give a 155 if correlation is 0.65 (I haven’t calculated, just relying on intuition)). That’s very high.
There was a Promethean who argued the SAT (old or new) doesn’t measure g beyond 1400, however Hoeflin found a very high correlation between the Mega Test and self-reported SAT, which implies the SAT is g loaded at the highest levels.
Yes my guts tell me the same as your Promethean guy (SAT is link with g up to 1% and working habit up to 0.1% and nothing above )
Just had a quick look at Hoeflin table. He says there is no correlation above 4.25 sd among Mega and SAT. He uses a 16sd scale but in the sd 15 it would be 163.75. So even with Hoeflin bullish hypothesis, it would not be 170. But the correlation is interesting. I have not seen how he calculates the 1 in 100k score in SAT though (neither the data he has and the hypothesis he makes) .
Yes my guts tell me the same as your Promethean guy (SAT is link with g up to 1% and working habit up to 0.1% and nothing above )
Two people can get the same score on the SAT: the first person by solving all the hard questions but making silly mistakes on the easy questions. The second person by solving all the easy questions, but failing all the hard ones. The second strategy probably shows less g but perhaps becomes the only strategy once you exceed 1400 because the item difficulty stops increasing, so the only way to score higher is to make fewer dumb mistakes. So Gates probably earned his one in a million SAT, not through solving any one in a million problem, but through one in a million ability to avoid blundering a bunch of one in a hundred problems. It’s a one a million cognitive performance nonetheless, though perhaps not an especially g loaded one.
Just had a quick look at Hoeflin table. He says there is no correlation above 4.25 sd among Mega and SAT.
I don’t think he says that. He just equated SAT to Mega scores using intervals of 0.25 and 4.25 was the highest point for which he had enough data.