Why Eminence Is a Bad Measure of Intelligence

I saw this going viral, from New York Magazine:

The article was universally panned on Twitter–in large part because of this passage:

“When your intelligence is the foundation of your self-perception, failing to achieve feels like soul death,” writes Katie Arnold-Ratliff. But if the limited amount of information we have about gifted kids long-term is any indication, most lead, at best, ordinary lives of modest accomplishment. A 35-year study of 677 gifted children found that by age 50, only 12.3 percent had reached a level of “eminence,” defined as “full professors … Fortune 500 executives … judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers.” This means 88 percent never did.

The author downplayed this as being insignificant, despite 12.3% being significantly higher than the baseline. This demonstrates that IQ does matter.

But at the same time, no one can agree what eminence means. I would argue at bare minimum you need a Wikipedia entry to be considered eminent. By this definition, eminence is much rarer than 12%. If we’re talking about a true leading researcher or expert, they’re probably one in hundreds of thousands, if not one in a million.

Also, eminence is highly dependent on luck and connections anyway, and it doesn’t even reliably select for the most capable people. You really think NYTs or Washington Post writers are the best in the world at their jobs? As we saw during Covid or failed predictions from 2016-2026 of promised economic collapse due to Trump, these “experts” are overrated and bad at their jobs. During Covid, the experts were initially saying to not wear masks, and then flipped-flopped. Or the failure of “flatten the curve”. School closures and “SAT optional” proved disastrous, and were similarly endorsed by experts.

This is not to only pick on “the left;” many pro-Bitcoin people on the libertarian-right with large brands were wrong about Bitcoin, which has massively underperformed everything since 2021. Or wrong about hyperinflation or US dollar collapse. [Although they were eventually right about gold, which has done really well the past few years.]

Those with big platforms tend to give the worst advice or are wrong all the time. Building a brand requires promotion, timing, luck and connections, which are orthogonal to competence. From the posts, “Fixing the Expertise Misallocation Problem” and “Why the Loudest Voices Give the Worst Advice,” I have observed people who are the smartest and most accurate tend to be much more obscure.

There are many high-IQ people who are successful in stealth mode . They don’t care about eminence or being seen. Statistically, this is what you would expect: in a world of 8 billion people, the odds are the best people will be obscure. For example, about forecasting and trading, I was right about Space-x keeping its IPO gains and bitcoin crashing (among many other examples). I challenge anyone to find someone with a more accurate public record. I don’t think such an individual exists.

As the meme says, “it really do be like that sometimes.” Sometimes the best person at something is totally unknown. This is possible for domains where early identification of talent is impossible or filtering mechanisms are weaker, compared to sports, where outliers are easily identified in childhood and encouraged to keep practicing. Or music or chess prodigies, who are easily spotted and trained.

In my case, there were no obvious signs aside from just being smart, but this was not pinned down to any specific talent or skill. This passage stood out:

At the same time I was also a big reader, and could easily polish off 300-page books in a weekend. Some really struggle at reading–such difficulty was a totally alien experience to me. Other examples are found here.

Only much later, after decades of not doing much of anything impressive, did I become the best macro forecaster and trader. This was a totally unexpected life trajectory. Steve Sailer, for example, originally aspired to be a music critic. After a stint in corporate advertising during the ’80s, a turn of events led to a career as a hugely successful blogger and early thought leader for the “HBD movement”.

There is a wide range of successful outcomes for high-IQ people that fall short of eminence. These include lucrative but relatively obscure careers in finance or software engineering, degrees from elite institutions, entrepreneurial success, or even building a large following on social media, (e.g., as a fitness influencer or in a niche like AI).

Social media status for non-celebrities (actors and other famous people have social media status merely from existing) is also correlated with IQ, with smarter people tending to have more followers and influence, even without any obvious credentials, promotion, or branding. The success tends to be entirely organic. Examples include “@kitten_beloved,” who describes how he was a gifted kid, and now as an adult has an account with 26,000 followers:

Companies such as Jane Street and Citadel employ thousands of largely unknown high-IQ people, in which secrecy is part of the job description. Or in the case of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, creating what is known as “rationalism,” and are successful writers in their own right.

Again, as my own life shows, widening the criteria for success beyond some narrow definition of eminence, IQ does matter. Wall Street attracts the best minds from all over the world from top universities and physics and math programs. As some random guy online to develop the best hedging method, shorting Bitcoin, must mean something in terms of IQ. Or in regard to Space-X, the consensus by the media and other experts was that it would crash after its IPO or a harbinger of a bubble, but the stock is at $200 vs its $135 debut.