This is why I don’t really buy anybody who claims an IQ >160. Effectively all tested IQs over 160 likely came from a childhood test or have an SD of 20 and there is an extremely high probability that the person with said tested iq substantially regressed to the mean. And even for a test like the WAIS that claims to measure up to 160 with SD 15, the norms start to look really questionable once you go much past 140.
I think I know one person who tested at 152 on the WISC when he was ~11, and one person who ceilinged the WAIS-III at 155 when he was 21. And they were both high-achieving, but they weren’t exceptionally high-achieving. Someone fixated on IQ might call this cope, but they really were pretty normal people who didn’t seem to be on a higher plane of existence. The biggest functional difference between them and people with more average IQs was that they had better job prospects. But they both had a lot of emotional problems and didn’t seem particularly happy.
This is why I don’t really buy anybody who claims an IQ >160. Effectively all tested IQs over 160 likely came from a childhood test or have an SD of 20 and there is an extremely high probability that the person with said tested iq substantially regressed to the mean. And even for a test like the WAIS that claims to measure up to 160 with SD 15, the norms start to look really questionable once you go much past 140.
I think I know one person who tested at 152 on the WISC when he was ~11, and one person who ceilinged the WAIS-III at 155 when he was 21. And they were both high-achieving, but they weren’t exceptionally high-achieving. Someone fixated on IQ might call this cope, but they really were pretty normal people who didn’t seem to be on a higher plane of existence. The biggest functional difference between them and people with more average IQs was that they had better job prospects. But they both had a lot of emotional problems and didn’t seem particularly happy.