The IQ is as reliable and rigorous as the zodiac

(Wiki photo)

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 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.