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This is just a brief Quora answer that makes the unevidenced assertion of Tao having a 230 IQ and then quotes from Wikipedia a bunch. I don't think IQ tests can

• scarmig 9y ago
  An IQ of 230 would be 8.66 standard deviations above the mean. Off the top of my head, that should be rarer than one in a trillion. I'm not a hard IQ skeptic, but there's nothing predictive or meaningful about any IQ over 150 or so, even in a strictly statistical sense. It's a tool built and validated against the bulk of the population, not extreme outliers.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • Grue3 9y ago
    >that should be rarer than one in a trillion. You're assuming that the tail of the statistics behaves like in normal distribution. In practice this is incorrect (see "black swan theory"). Various sports that employ statistics (cricket, baseball, etc.) sometimes have a single player who strays from bell curve in a ridiculous way. For example Don Bradman's batting average in cricket [1]. [1] https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-cricketing-genius-make-him-a-statistical-outlier https://www.statslife.org.uk/sports/1989-did-don-bradman-s-c...
    • scarmig 9y ago
      IQ is a synthetic measure that follows a normal distribution by construction. To the extent that measurements of IQ in a population via test deviate from a normal distribution (with, say, fat tails), that's a reason to doubt the validity of that particular test in that domain.