A high IQ only gets you so far

And it may make you an outsider

Excerpt: "Who has the highest iq in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius.

I’ve been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it’s so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley.

Vos Savant hasn’t made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys.

That all changed in 1985, when The Guinness Book of World Records published her childhood IQ score. How its authors obtained the record is murky: An acquaintance once told the Financial Times that he’d urged her to submit her result as a way of making her famous.

Thanks to all the publicity, vos Savant met her third husband, Robert Jarvik, who had developed a pioneering model of an artificial heart. Jarvik had his own story of being overlooked: Before ultimately enrolling in medical school at the University of Utah, he had been rejected by 15 other institutions. He tracked down vos Savant after seeing her on the cover of an airline magazine, and she agreed to a date after finding a picture of him taken by Annie Leibovitz. They quickly became an item, and eventually took up residence in New York."