The thing about the normal distribution is that it's the distribution with the least information content. It has really little to do with real-world complex pro

The thing about the normal distribution is that it's the distribution with the least information content. It has really little to do with real-world complex processes, and fitting real world phenomena to one typically ends in frustration and wildly incorrect estimates of likelihoods of samples. Intelligence (as measured through some test) being representative of a process that has minimal conditional structure underlying it seems pretty fishy to me. I'd expect intelligence to be more of an asymmetric distribution, with the vast majority of people being above the threshold of, say, catatonia; most people being under "genius" level, and a blip for geniuses that have really changed humanity's capabilities as being pretty far to the upper bounds, but with incredible impact on the group. Something like a "6 sigma" intelligence on a normal distribution would probably show up a lot more often on the skew distribution I have in mind. Although, this might be measuring something like E[f(intelligence)] where f is a convex impact-measuring function of intelligence