Free Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

its purest and most distilled form—the genius. For years, we’ve taken our cues from people like Terman when it comes to understanding the significance of high intelligence. But, as we shall see, Terman made an error. He was wrong about his Termites, and had he happened on the young Chris Langan working his way through
Principia Mathematica
at the age of sixteen, he would have been wrong about him for the same reason. Terman didn’t understand what a real outlier was, and that’s a mistake we continue to make to this day.
    3.
    One of the most widely used intelligence tests is something called Raven’s Progressive Matrices. It requires no language skills or specific body of acquired knowledge. It’s a measure of abstract reasoning skills. A typical Raven’s test consists of forty-eight items, each one harder than the one before it, and IQ is calculated based on how many items are answered correctly.
    Here’s a question, typical of the sort that is asked on the Raven’s.

    Did you get that? I’m guessing most of you did. The correct answer is C. But now try this one. It’s the kind of really hard question that comes at the end of the Raven’s.

    The correct answer is A. I have to confess I couldn’t figure this one out, and I’m guessing most of you couldn’t either. Chris Langan almost certainly could, however. When we say that people like Langan are really brilliant, what we mean is that they have the kind of mind that can figure out puzzles like that last question.
    Over the years, an enormous amount of research has been done in an attempt to determine how a person’s performance on an IQ test like the Raven’s translates to real-life success. People at the bottom of the scale—with an IQ below 70—are considered mentally disabled. A score of 100 is average; you probably need to be just above that mark to be able to handle college. To get into and succeed in a reasonably competitive graduate program, meanwhile, you probably need an IQ of at least 115. In general, the higher your score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’re likely to make, and—believe it or not—the longer you’ll live.
    But there’s a catch. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. *
    “It is amply proved that someone with an IQ of 170 is more likely to think well than someone whose IQ is 70,” the British psychologist Liam Hudson has written, “and this holds true where the comparison is much closer—between IQs of, say, 100 and 130. But the relation seems to break down when one is making comparisons between two people both of whom have IQs which are relatively high....A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180.”
    What Hudson is saying is that IQ is a lot like height in basketball. Does someone who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball? Not really. You need to be at least six foot or six one to play at that level, and, all things being equal, it’s probably better to be six two than six one, and better to be six three than six two. But past a certain point, height stops mattering so much. A player who is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter. (Michael Jordan, the greatest player ever, was six six after all.) A basketball player only has to be tall
enough
—and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold.
    The introduction to the
1 vs. 100
episode pointed out that Einstein had an IQ of 150 and Langan has an IQ of 195. Langan’s IQ is 30 percent higher than Einstein’s. But that doesn’t mean Langan is 30 percent
smarter
than Einstein. That’s ridiculous. All we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics, they are both clearly