It's 1789.

The French Revolution just happened.

The country is in chaos.

People's heads are getting chopped off.

Everyone is panicking.

But there was a bright side to all of it.

Kids started going to school at the age of 6.

But soon after schools noticed a problem.

Not all the students were equal. Some students were smart, average, and some struggled to keep up.

That's when Alfred Binet created a test to measure students's analytical and computational skills and memorization.

That's when the IQ test was first born…

His idea?

To classify kids into 3 categories and give each category of student the education and help they need.

But Binet believed that a student's true intelligence cannot be determined by a piece of paper or a number.

"Your mental ability cannot be determined by grades". — Alfred Binet

But not everyone agreed with Binet.

Lewis Terman one of the most influential people when it comes to the IQ world, disagreed with Binet.

The Dark History of IQ

Lewis was a genius.

Based on his words, he used to always be the smartest kid in the class, and his classmates were the reason why he couldn't develop his skills faster than anyone.

Because of that, he became an extremist.

He imagined a society that was structured based on IQ.

And in 1921, he did a study that is now known as one of the most famous studies in psychology: Terman's Study of Gifted.

Terman got 1521 children who had an IQ of 135 or more—he followed their lives until they became adults just to prove Benit's opinion was wrong and that intelligence isn't just a score on a test, but it also determines your fate.

The top 25% would be the 'experts' in different fields.

And the top 5% would be the leaders and presidents.

But since Termin was an extremist and racist, he excluded the poor (because he thought if you were smart, there's no way you'd stay poor), and the minorities (Latinos and African-Americans).

He also joined protests that demanded that those people should get sterilized.

But Termin didn't stop there. He also applied his philosophy to his family.

He made everyone in their family take an IQ test (except the maidens because they're “poor”)—he organized everyone's sitting place based on their results.

His son, Frederick, sat on the head of the table (because he was the smartest one).

Meanwhile, his granddaughter and her mother sat next to the maidens, because they got the least IQ…

But there was a player who was more interested in IQ than Terman was.

That player is called U.S.A…

U.S.A & IQ

During WW1 the U.S. army needed to recruit an army—but they didn't want to recruit anyone who would make it a pain in the ass to train.

So they invested heavily in R&D and came up with new methods of measuring IQ. The U.S kept conducting IQ tests and research for more than 100 years and they came to a conclusion:

It is illegal to recruit anyone who has an IQ of less than 83 points.

I found this a little strange. Because it is commonly known that anyone who goes to the army is 'dumb'.

So why did the U.S. turn potential soldiers away from their army?

Especially when they're the 'policemen of the world'.

Because people with IQ points lower than 83 will always struggle to do simple repetitive tasks and will need constant supervision and training.

But if you see it from another perspective, it's cuz of money (no surprise here).

If you do a cost-benefit analysis, you'll find the cost of training someone who has an IQ less than 83 is more expensive than what you can get out of them (it's a negative ROI).

Gotta love capitalism lol.

But there's something scary about this fact.

It means that people below who have less than 83 IQ are seen as 'useless' and can't do basic jobs…

That's almost 54 million Americans who are going to be jobless, have no place in society, and we have no solution for them…

Making Smart Babies Is The Solution?

A few years ago, I came up with a completely illiterate and non-scientific hypothesis about intelligence:

Smart parents will have kids that are smarter than them.

Turns out, that if both parents are smart (high IQ), their child might be smart too, but not as smart as them—the child’s IQ will be lower than the average IQ of both parents.

And if both parents aren't as smart (low IQ), their child would be smarter than them—the child’s IQ will be higher than the average IQ of both parents.

This just throws Terman’s societal structure (of only having high-IQ people reproduce to make a ‘smarter’ society) in the bin.

But why is that?

Because of something called The Normal Distribution.

I know this far too well, I used to get a 30/100 when I was in engineering and ended up with an A because everyone else did worse than me…

Basically the normal distribution sees where the majority of people fall under.

So if we have a society where only the geniuses can reproduce (just like what Terman was imagining), then with each generation, our kids will be dumber, until they become so dumb, that they fall below the average and then we'll have smarter kids.

Mother Nature is weird like that…

Intellignece & Success

I always used to think that your success depended on your parents.

If your parents were successful and wealthy, then you'll also grow up to be just like them (wealthy and successful).

But in 1994, Herrnstein and Murray found that IQ outperforms parental socioeconomic status in predicting success.

Saunders (another researcher) also did 2 independent studies and saw that IQ is a better predictor for occupational success than parental socioeconomic status…

That's great news for you and me, it means that we still have hope in being wealthy. If your IQ is high (115+), then you have a good chance of being successful.

There were also countless meta-studies (large-scale studies) that compared parents' academic success and work with IQ.

Again, IQ was a better predictor of success than your parents’ socioeconomic success.

If you're interested in the correlation here they are:

• IQ and education success: 0.56

• IQ and occupation success: 0.43

• IQ and salary success: 0.2

Now these facts pissed a lot of people off.

Because the general idea of "if we provide everyone with the same opportunities and education, then IQ won't matter."

Or the other argument of "if you work hard on yourself, then you can find opportunities"

…again, that doesn't work, cuz a person with a higher IQ will learn concepts, skills, and process information faster than someone who has a lower IQ.

Now, I don't know what my IQ is. All I remember is doing these free IQ tests when I was a kid and I used to get 122 IQ, how accurate were they? I don't know…

but what I do know is that I found engineering to be easy… and based on science I should have at least an IQ of 115 (maybe I'm higher, who knows?)

But when we compare people with high IQs with each other, things start to change and they're not as predictable as you'd think.

So researchers from the University of Laussane, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California did a study on 379 midlevel executives measuring their effectiveness as leaders.

Their finding?

IQ isn't a very good predictor of excellent leadership.

The graph is scary I know, but you just need to know that IQ and leadership isn't a linear relationship.

Let's say we took people with high I (120+) and compared them with each other, then IQ doesn't play that big of a role.

That's because IQ only gets your foot in the door, but what happens if everyone else is just as smart as you?

How do you beat them?

That's where EQ and emotional intelligence comes in—your ability to manage yourself and your relationship with other people.

Intelligence & Happiness

When I was a kid, I saw an episode from The Simpsons that stuck with me.

Homer gained 50 IQ points. Learned new languages. Solved complex problems. Knew how to solve any problem (financial, political, etc).

But his friends hated him.

He was doing things that were 'right' and were supposed to help the people around him but his friends started disliking him because he always looked like he was 'showing off' and that he knew everything.

The only person who liked to spend time with Homer was his daughter, Liza, mainly because she was also smart.

But when Homer became ‘smarter’ than her, she started disliking him…

That's when Homer realized that being smart only made him miserable despite being successful.

She decided to become dumb again by putting a crayon back in his brain…

Another good example is Einstein.

He’s one of the best physicists in the world. He came up with general and special relativity and solved countless physics problems that no one else could've solved.

But he sucked with women.

He would always cheat. Get into arguments. Get misunderstood.

He didn’t understand that women are emotional humans and not rational (like him).

He couldn't understand why remembering his wife's birthday was so important. Or what she was wearing when they went on their first date.

I guess this is the price you have to pay for being smart—you become so logical for people that you can’t understand them.

Being smart and successful means being miserable.

Miserable because you're not 'normal', you're always an outsider looking in.

Miserable because you see things that other people can't see and understand.

Miserable because no one else is seeing the problems with society like you do.

This is why Nietzche was so misunderstood. He was too far ahead of his time.

Galilliuo got his head chopped off because he said the world isn’t flat and people disagreed with him—aka, he was 'too smart' for his time.

But is it true?

Are smart people more miserable?

After reading more than 30 different large-scale studies, turns out the rumor of smart people being miserable is a myth.

The higher your IQ is, the happier you'll be.

But countries that have high IQ and individualism (countries like the U.S., Canada, Europe, etc) are even happier.

That's because those countries focus on the "Self" more. Your decisions are driven by self-serving motives.

Your decisions are autonomous. Your happiness is derived from positive emotions that come from having a sense of pride, joy, and feeling exceptional about yourself.

But in collectivistic countries (Japan, Indonesia, India) the individual puts the community before themselves.

Their sense of pride comes from the feeling of being accepted by the community.

Now, there is a lot of nuance to IQ, happiness, success, and wealth, but I cannot fit them all in one newsletter without boring to death with studies and research.

And with that said…

That's all for this week.

Next week, I'll be doing a deep dive into stoicism and how it became a modern-day scam.

— Hussain "The world's smartest self-proclaimed engineer" Ibarra

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PS:

Not IQ isn't the only predictor of success, wealth, and happiness.

Conscientiousness is another strong predictor of success, wealth. and happiness.

One thing I learned during my days in engineering, a 'dumb' student would get better grades than a smart student if the smart student didn't study hard for the test.

But measuring conscientiousness is hard because it's not as easy as IQ. You can't just give them some random tests and put a number on it like with IQ.

It's the same as how you can't measure how creative someone really is, you can't measure how conscientious someone really is.

So the best predictor we have now for living a fulfilling and meaningful life is IQ.

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PPS:

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