I saw this tweet going viral. This reads as a reframing of the adage “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” often attributed to Carl Sagan. People mistake their own “IQ bubble” as evidence that no one is significantly smarter than they are, leading them to overestimate their own intelligence. How do you know that you’re not just fooling yourself?
I've had a hypothesis for a while I call "The IQ Bubble."
Basically, unless you work in an exceptionally public facing role, adults will never encounter anybody with an IQ >15 points higher or lower than themselves.
Separately, I've observed that people either act as they… https://t.co/361enqFsjM
— J.T. Alexander (@JTAlexander_) March 16, 2026
Hence, evidence. The point of statistics is to make inferences about unobservable data based on evidence. If you have sufficient evidence (e.g. a large enough sample size and accomplishments) there is nothing wrong with asserting you’re among the smartest. The masses were predicting Trump’s tariffs would crash the economy, or that Bitcoin >$110k was a good investment. Or in 2020, that “flatten the curve” would work. It’s not that high of a bar when this is what passes for “expertise”. Even some objectively “reputable” smart people predicted the economy would crash under Trump, either term. It’s not just selection effects–if you can ascertain based on public information where everyone stands, those who are wrong all the time should be positioned lower than those whose models or worldviews are correct.
IQ is a topic always fraught with trepidation about breaking unspoken social graces. It’s like talking about money. With social media, there is more openness about finances. But 30+ years ago, it’s hard to overstate how taboo the subject was. You had to just pretend that such differences of wealth didn’t exist among friends, family or other acquaintances who you spent everyday with, so it’s not like it was possible to keep this a secret for long. There were always signs that some friends or family members were wealthier than others, despite efforts to downplay those differences.
Likewise, it should be no more socially frowned upon for someone intelligent to acknowledge that fact, than it is for a tall person to simply state that they are tall. No one gets mad when someone lists their height on a dating profile, since this is seen as socially advantageous and simply acknowledging a fact. Likewise, downplaying intelligence can disadvantage society by keeping cognitive capital constrained or underutilized. Keeping up this charade of feigned ignorance is so exhausting, in all respects of life. Why not just be transparent, and if some are offended, so be it?
In my case, such evidence is skill at forecasting and money management. But as described in “The rise of the lock-in guy,” the distinction of ‘being the best forecaster and stock trader’ isn’t something that is apparent early in life, unlike, say, being good at sports. Finance attracts the best minds in the world from top schools competing for what scraps of ‘alpha’ that remain in an increasingly efficient and interconnected global economy. To be among the best at it in such a crowded field with little effort on my part, by intuiting the optimal strategy of shorting Bitcoin to hedge, has to signify something in terms of IQ. I was saying this even as far back as 2021. Had you bought Bitcoin five years ago to this day, you made only 5-10% and on top of 50-75% drawdowns, lagging every asset class. My mistake was not doing this in 2021.
Despite not having any obvious standout talent, I often left the impression on others of being the smartest person they had ever met. I was incredulous when told such. I would respond, “I’m alright.” I suspect this was because I was good at listening. When someone was talking, I often already knew what they were going to say next, and by that point I had already developed a solution to their problem in my mind. But there were other clues. For example, I could ace an exam cold by skimming the textbook during lunch, or learn something simply by passively listening in the background without taking notes, or read text almost as fast as I could move my eyes down the page and recall it.
Looking back, that was the correct assessment. I shouldn’t have been so dismissive to sound polite or modest. That actually has the opposite intended effect. Not taking a compliment comes off as aloof or cold.
With finance and macro forecasting settled, now I’m trying to pivot to math, which has a higher IQ bar. No one takes Christopher Lagan’s claims of having the highest IQ seriously, in part because the CTMU is not regarded as a valid scientific theory. Online, reactions to mentions of the CTMU range from derision to skepticism. The hallmark of ‘crank research’ is not only that it’s wrong, but that it does not build off of earlier work. It exists in a vacuum of the author’s imagination. Mine is different in that it actually fits into the literature and builds on it.
The idea behind the math challenge, which I embarked on a few years ago, is to produce original research to lend evidence to this assertion, as IQ tests have a low ceiling. It’s all done at this point, having cleared an impasse a few months ago for a problem that left me stumped for awhile, and I got a paper out of it. (feeding Chat GPT or other programs a simpler version of the problem, which is a good place to start, did not work). Yes, arXiv is not peer reviewed (I had already secured four endorsements to submit earlier on the site, so there is some quality control) , but if you know anything about the process, that can easily take years. Journals not uncommonly can hold on to papers for many months and still reject them. At least the last two papers prove open conjectures and present new theorems.