IQ, Modesty, Hard Work, and Luck

An excellent tweet by Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) about IQ:

I like his immodesty here, in giving himself credit:

To be a world-class performer – the kind of person who wins a Nobel prize, or a Fields medal, or just upends the industry he works in the way I did – you have to be genetically gifted, you have to work your ass off, and you have to be lucky.

It’s stupid how smart people are expected to downplay their intelligence, or conform to society’s expectations of smart people being modest about their intelligence. If someone has quantifiable results or evidence indicative or predictive of having an exceptionally high IQ, I don’t see what is wrong with unhesitatingly saying so. If other people are offended or find it uncouth, that is their problem, not yours. From the post, “People with >160 IQs must exist“:

Additionally, someone claiming to have an IQ above 160, or claimed >160 IQs of historical figures are not necessarily wrong if sufficient evidence or reason is supplied, such as exceptional ability at g-loaded endeavors. So given the limitations or absence of tests, evidence or ‘works’ is the next best thing to go on.

It’s like, if someone aspires to play in the NBA or NFL, or land any high-paying prestigious and competitive job, being too modest would be a disadvantage. You would want to proudly and confidently showcase your skills to impress the recruiter, not be too modest. Smart people can also use their abilities to help others, such as math tutoring and financial advice, having done both myself.

Too much attention is focused on the downsides or pitfalls of overconfidence or unearned confidence (e.g. the Dunning-Kruger effect), but not on the other extreme, where being too modest or conveying epistemological uncertainty does a disservice to people who need help or would otherwise benefit. Being too modest means society cannot avail itself of this expertise.

In April 2025 when the stock market was crashing due to the tariffs, my dad wanted to sell. I told him to ride it out, as I was certain Trump would backtrack. Sure enough, he did. Applying my expertise saved him a lot of money. Had I said “I dunno…I know nothing…your guess is as good as mine,” this would have projected no confidence, and he would have sold at the worst possible time. Or more practically, when someone hires an electrician or plumber, do they want someone who has no confidence in his abilities?

Continuing, he says:

You are born competing towards excellence with 8.2 billion people. The most important single determinant of how well you will do in that competition is how rapidly and precisely your brain can process information.

If we’re talking the Nobel Prize (especially in a STEM field) or a Field’s Medal, then this already excludes 99-99.9% of the population, in which your competition is limited to other top researchers. This does not make it easier, but in nominal terms, is not that many people either.

One way we know this is that people with extremely high ability in any of these areas tend to be cross-talented in others as well. Above a certain IQ level, polymathy is the rule rather than the exception. If the “multiple intelligence” theories that keep getting revived every few years were true, we wouldn’t observe this – the super-bright would live in much more separated silos.

Yes, the theory of “multiple intelligences” refuses to die, because so many people want to believe it’s true. This is not wrong in the sense that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, but this is not the same as saying everyone is equally intelligent. This only serves to move the goalposts. On a hierarchy of abilities, someone who can understand a higher abstraction of concepts compared to someone else, can reasonably be assumed to also be smarter. So even if everyone has talents, not all talents are equal in terms of conceptual difficulty.

The last piece of unpleasant news is that genetic gifts and hard work don’t suffice either. You have to be lucky.

This is the most difficult part for me to write about. It wouldn’t be helpful for me to talk about the specific ways I was lucky, because the way the lightning strikes is so random and individual

To the contrary, as the success of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers demonstrates, people are actually perfectly fine with the hard work and luck aspect of success, but are much more ambivalent or even hostile to the IQ or talent part. Believing that luck and effort are more important than innate ability gives hope or shifts the blame away from the individual, hence the appeal of that message, compared to the immutability of IQ. Online, nowadays, thankfully the level of delusion is not as bad as seen in the ‘real world’. Except for some holdouts on the left, more people are coming around at least on Twitter.

I however think he puts too much emphasis on the roles of hard work and luck. Those matter to some extent, but I think he oversells it. People who are smarter are better able to find shortcuts or patterns to bypass having to do as much work, while still achieving superior results. Instead of having to read lots of research reports, I was able to quickly hone in on winning strategies, like buying the dip during the Trump tariffs in April, instructing my dad to not sell, shorting Bitcoin as hedge, and so on. I didn’t need much practice or effort to arrive at those correct decisions.

Regarding luck, if someone is overwhelmingly much smarter, they will almost always be able to find something to apply their talents and excel. Even if they miss out on some opportunities, they can quickly get up to speed on something else, so it’s statistically likely something will work eventually. For example, someone who is a quant may transition to a lucrative AI start-up. Being smart means less reliance on luck in this sense, as smarter people learn faster.

Thousands of people follow stocks or Bitcoin, yet I was among only a handful of individuals to come up with consistently profitable strategies, whether it was investing in leveraged tech ETFs in 2016 when far fewer people at the time had that idea, or shorting Bitcoin a a hedge against tech stocks, which has continued to work really well. Or the math paper, in which used new methods to close a 28 year gap between my paper and the penultimate paper. I think IQ played some role in these, especially the latter given how math is especially ‘g-loaded’.

Erik’s accomplishments are more notable, and he has a Wikipedia page. As he would agree, luck played some role in his own success. But not being as famous does not diminish the accomplishments of other high-IQ people. Acclaim is much rarer than having a nominally high IQ, as Lewis Terman and Leta Hollingworth’s studies showed, in which in the aggregate the participants were more successful compared to the average-IQ control group, but few achieved any acclaim.