Adam Strandberg

More on IQ (since this is, once again, starting to have political implications). Anyone who spends time around truly smart people—including in domains such as physics where the Team IQ would expect it to dominate—*knows* it doesn't matter.

Like the Yale Younger Poet, the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge (first in the Mathematical Tripos) is remarkably *non* predictive for future success. In the Westinghouse/Intel/Regeneron STS, you're more likely to win the Nobel Prize if you don't place in the top ten.

I think @nntaleb hits one of the many problems with this measure—it has no right-hand tail. It gets much, much worse when you consider humanistic scholars. Emerson: high IQ? Quine and Putnam are excellent examples of what happens when that group philosophizes.

Thought has a deeply emotional component, for example. Someone whose affects are integrated into their intellectual life has the potential to do profound, world-changing work. This has little to do with passing exams, except in as much as those who can demonstrate Sitzfleisch.

Winston Churchill: high IQ? Martin Luther King? George Eliot? You can, of course, identify the significant figures who clearly *would* test well, so let's do that—it's super-fun.

John Donne, definite good tester (though I think would not make Senior Wrangler, and definitely would not win the Yale Younger Poets.)