Because my mother firmly believed that IQ tests torpedo motivation—“If it’s low, you won’t try; if it’s high, you won’t try”—I’ve refused to let my children take them. So a certain mystique has attached itself, for my son anyway, to the beguilingly false empiricism of an “intelligence quotient.”
At some point, he revved up my Quora account to read answers to questions about what he imagined was the exhilarating experience of having a high IQ, and for months I was notified every time the cream of the cognitive crop on Quora was perseverating on the burdens of lofty intelligence—or whatever it is that those woolly tests measure.
Heavy are the heads, it seems, that tote around the brains: “Others can’t keep up with me.” “I get bored easily.” “Sometimes I feel lonely in a world of clinical morons.”
On and on reeled the frustrations and sorrows, until at last the laments of the galaxy minds seemed to run out. Some time passed. And then the Quora algorithm served up a second wave of IQ musings.
Well, well, well. This wave was something else. The essays were mesmerizing, the work of a group of IQ test-takers who had been—it seems—exiled from the high table. Strictly by the numbers, the exiles were the actual elites: a vanishingly small group of people who are so acutely self-assured that they are willing to write candidly about their low and average IQ test scores.
What!? Compelling was too weak a word for this gold mine of self-awareness. Because of the childhood prohibition, I don’t know my IQ and never will, but my SATs were average, and plenty of subjects bewilder me. I also don’t identify with the lonely Mensa genius troubles, so, Occam’s razor, I work on the assumption that like 98 percent of the population, I have an average IQ. With that tight math in mind, I figure the smart thing—the averagely intelligent thing anyway—is to read about the lives of people whose IQs are in the range of most people.
The Quora question that intrigued me was this: “What is it like to have a low IQ? What problems do people with low IQs face every day, apart from social stigma (if any) or pressure from family (if any)? What are some success stories and stories of family support and love?”
The most upvoted reply, a mini masterpiece, came from a user with a melodious writing style. He goes by Alex C. Lee on Quora, and he told me that he took the test twice and scored 96 and 98. (One hundred is dead average on many tests.) Though Lee likes to say street smarts serve a person better than IQ, he doesn’t doubt that the IQ number means something—and that, whatever it is, it has affected his life.
“My hobbies are usually no-brainers like watching YouTube video clips,” he writes. “I lack intellectual pursuit. I just want to get work done and get my money. I won’t do research for the sake of my curiosity.”
Memorably, he concludes his essay by stressing his flat indifference to ideas: “I only talk about ideas in class, or whenever I have to. Once I went out for a drink with a classmate. He learned that I was an English major, so he kept trying to discuss thoughts by Ferdinand de Saussure and Theodor Adorno. I was like, ‘Please … give me a rest!’”
But that’s rushing to the end. The first lively move Lee makes is to find irony on the knife’s edge of lived experience and would-be science. “My personal belief,” he writes, “is that biologically, IQ only makes a marginal difference—slightly varied speed of processing information.”
Even as he italicizes “biologically,” Lee flags his conclusions as derived not from science but from arbitrary convictions. The foregrounding of his subjectivity stands in stark contrast to the ex cathedra proclamations of the high-IQ-scoring Quora users, who tend to say things like, “The Arborescent Thinker jumps from topic to topic in their head, seeing the connections between stuff, and then the connections of the connections, and so on and so forth.”
When Lee invokes velocity of processing power, he converts IQ from a weapon in a race/class/gender blood sport into a tool—a value-neutral speedometer.
It’s a tool with consequences, though. Where many high-IQ opiners provide straight memoir, Lee attends to the needs of the questioner, who’s concerned with how to love someone with a low IQ score. He doesn’t mince words when discussing the hard road of kids like himself.
Teachers and parents get impatient, Lee explains, and even use epithets; moreover, a tendentious intelligence hierarchy from the American eugenics movement still casts a long shadow. But there can be an upside for low- or average-IQ kids determined to prove themselves: They learn to work. Lee, who wrote his honors thesis on George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss, has very much not had his motivation torpedoed. He actively enjoys, as he says, “challenging and repetitive work, but only if the challenge can be overcome by practice instead of a good brain.”
Then comes Lee’s forthrightness when he describes balking at “learning new stuff.” This should offer readers of any IQ score (or none) a feeling of profound liberation.
“My peers learn wine-tasting while I get drunk from my favorite Long Island iced tea,” Lee writes. “My peers learn yoga while I lie in bed playing with my phone.” Sing it, brother. “To be honest, playing videogames all the time at home sounds pretty good to me, if I don’t have to go to school or work.” He also doesn’t finish many of the novels he starts, doesn’t like to draw, and seldom goes to museums or art galleries. Because—oh yes—“I don’t appreciate aesthetic stuff.” Is Alex C. Lee the first honest witness to the human condition or what?
Like “Elias Lazar,” whose bio says he studied at the University of Vienna and who writes that he scored around 80 on an IQ test, Lee has trouble following directions, including the rules of games. (Lazar writes that he records people when they give him oral instructions, so he can privately play back their words over and over till he gets it.) “It’s impossible for me to ‘pick up’ something,” as Lee puts it. “I’m not a fast learner. When I learn a language, I have to systematically study, writing it down and getting familiarized.”
Hold up: When I learn a language.
I asked Lee about this. “My first language is Mandarin,” he explained. “I know English well.” (Clearly.) Then he added, “I know a bit of French and German too,” and that he’s written in French on Quora. Could it be that Lee is learning far more at what he perceives as his tortoise pace than his peers with their Mensa speeds? Languages are an intriguing case, since unlike much of mathematics, vocabulary cannot except in rare cases be learned a priori. (Where you might derive the surface area of a triangle from a couple of measurements, you mostly don’t know a word till you encounter it.) Any test that fails to register that talent and tenacity is itself a failure.
And of course it is. Lee is right that we’re in the thick of eugenics almost the moment we acquiesce to the implausible conceit of fixed Intelligenzquotient, as the phantom human quality was originally dubbed in Germany in the early 1900s. A hundred years later, Adam Hampshire, Roger Highfield, Adrian Owen, and Beth Parkin wrote an article for the journal Neuron debunking the notion that a unitary, measurable “intelligence” even exists.
“The idea that populations can be compared using a single measure of intelligence is dead,” Highfield wrote in WIRED at the time. The IQ test, it seems, is about as scientifically rigorous and reliable as the zodiac.
But as with astrology, what’s illuminating are people’s emotional and ideological responses to the possibility of universal typologies of personhood. Where astrology offers visual psychedelia, dream states, and oneness with the firmament, other typologies like the IQ arouse the left brain. And it seems that zillions of people still cotton to the idea of ranking our intellects, from top to bottom, the ingenious to the comatose, the gods to the rocks.
Any impulse to hit a global intellectual leaderboard is best seen as a chance not to sit for an IQ test and thus apply for someone else’s eugenics experiment, but instead to ask what you want from your mind, and what you get from it—as well as to reflect on what others might want and get from theirs. Musing about the sinister fiction of the IQ is also a chance (as your pals drone on about Adorno and wine) to attend closely to the strange neural effects in your skull that never have shown up on a test—and never will.
My son stopped caring about the test. He’s headed to high school with the right idea: His brain, like everyone’s, is eccentric and unrankable. As for Lee, he just graduated from law school. “Despite my double-digit IQ,” he told me, “I’m actually eligible for Mensa membership. They accept anyone with an above 95 percentile LSAT score. I’ve got a 98th percentile LSAT score. As long as I want to pay the money, I can probably join.”
I’m betting Lee is way, way too wise for that.
Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is a regular contributor to WIRED.
This article appears in the October issue. Subscribe now.
