A high IQ makes you an outsider, not a genius

The first extract from The Genius Myth is here!

Happy . . . Wednesday!

Breaking into the usual schedule to say that the first look at The Genius Myth is now available on The Atlantic. For the extract, I chose the chapter on ultra-high IQ, and how those who possess it are more likely to define themselves as “outsiders” than “geniuses”. A gift link, allowing you past the paywall, is below.

Helen

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty

The Perils of An Ultra High IQ (The Atlantic)

Today, because of their infighting and their members’ lack of worldly success, high-IQ groups have become kind of a joke. But their history helps illuminate why intelligence alone does not necessarily yield sublime works. In the 1980s, when some of these groups’ members were asked to propose a term for the intangible quality that distinguished them from everyone else, none chose genius, according to a contemporaneous account by Grady Towers, a stalwart of the high-IQ community. “When asked what it should be called, they produced a number of suggestions, sometimes esoteric, sometimes witty, and often remarkably vulgar,” Towers wrote in 1987. “But one term was suggested independently again and again. Many thought that the most appropriate term for people like themselves was Outsider.”

Towers believed that those with unusually high intelligence fell into three groups: the well-adjusted middle class, who were able to use their talents; those living marginal lives, working in manual or low-paid jobs and reading textbooks by night; and finally the dropouts, whose families had had no idea how to support their brilliant children, and might have gone so far as to treat them as a “performing animal, or even an experiment.”

The first group did not get involved with high-IQ societies, Towers thought, because their intellectual and social lives were already full. “It’s the exceptionally gifted adult who feels stifled that stands most in need of a high IQ society,” he wrote, adding that “none of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded.”

The predominance of the lonely, frustrated, and socially awkward in ultrahigh-IQ societies was enough, he wrote, “to explain the constant schisms that develop, the frequent vendettas, and the mediocre level of their publications. But those are not immutable facts; they can be changed. And the first step in doing so is to see ourselves as we are.”

Grady Towers was murdered on March 20, 2000, while investigating a break-in at the park in Arizona where he worked as a security guard. He was 55.

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Regular Bluestocking service resumes on Friday. In the meantime, British readers can pre-order The Genius Myth with a 10 percent discount by using the code GENIUS10 at Bookshop.org. For American readers, the link is here.

Stephen Bush described The Genius Myth as “a fascinating account of how we define brilliance, worth and intelligence, and why that can be dangerous: you’ll never hear the word, or look at people described as geniuses, in quite the same way again”. Adam Buxton called it “lucid, funny and fascinating.” Kirkus Reviews described it as “unsettling, amusing, and prescient; a much-needed audit of a consuming idea”.

See you on Friday! Also, come argue the toss with me on my book tour — find tickets by searching for the venue and my name.