In 2017, I took an Uber in Boston to the airport. The driver was a young Russian. We talked about our backgrounds, and he mentioned “oh, you must be very smart to be a scientist”. Then he brought up that there might be a few extremely smart people, in the world, like with an IQ of 400, which control everything because they see through it all.
Intelligence is difficult to define, but one definition is the adaptability to solve new situations. My preferred definition is different, and comes from reading a book about sheep, who try to achieve a task but are hindered by getting distracted and forgetting. I’d say intelligence is the ability to hold and rationally follow a chain of thought in your mind for a sustained time.
Intelligence can be trained and improved, but you also need the luxury of being free of distractions to focus and plan.
Reasoning alone is not worth much though, you need knowledge. One example is the debate of Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. Sam Harris tries to reason from first principles and definitions. Noam Chomsky, additionally, builds on deep background information about world history, political activities, and cultural contexts. Sam Harris tries to put this messy reality away to argue cleanly, and this fails to be convincing.
So let’s imagine an individual with extreme intelligence and knowledge. Could that individual bend the world to their will? I think there are obstacles: People just do random things and are not consistently rational to be influenced. Influencing people’s behaviour is not easy. You need to be a social person (or a psychopath I suppose), some people call this emotional intelligence or EQ. But even then, people are defaulting on their habits and culture. Finally, this influencing does not scale. To change one countries’ policy, you need to build alliances spanning hundreds of people. Unless you are lucky and powerful people already want to do what you want them to do (but then what is your influence?), or you have hard work ahead of you.
When I was a teenager, the Mensa organisation (IQ>130) was spoken about in a similar tone as the Illuminati (they were Bavarian by the way). I met some of them, they were highly into chess, quirky, and a bit on the spectrum.
My main problem with IQ is that if you start talking about IQ, you have already lost: you are reducing your self to a single number and implicitly accept it as a way to quantify your worth. So I never took an IQ test. It’s dumb. I’m glad the world moved on from it.
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