IQ Is a False Concept: Ordinary, Normal Lives Have Little to Do with IQ

IQ Is a Pseudo-Concept: The Lives of Ordinary, Normal People Have Little to Do with IQ

If you say that people like Gauss and Ramanujan had extraordinarily high IQs, that their brains were unlike those of ordinary people, perhaps that makes sense.

But attending Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan, or Shanghai Jiao Tong; joining the University of Science and Technology of China’s Special Class for the Gifted Young or Huawei’s “Genius Youth” program; winning competition gold medals; entering Tsinghua’s Yao Class; or becoming a mathematics or physics professor—these things have little to do with IQ. They mainly come down to luck along the way.

I’ve written this countless times: who doesn’t work hard, and who doesn’t have some intelligence? The whole journey is basically a matter of luck, or the opportunities fate happens to bring.

Your family of origin mustn’t be too dysfunctional (poverty is nothing to fear; toxicity is). Your educational environment mustn’t be too poor (even being in the four provinces of Shanxi, Shandong, Henan, and Hebei needn’t be a problem—you may still be lucky enough to encounter some good teachers, or books and guidance from elders and older siblings). You need a little luck getting started in your field, and a little luck choosing your skill stack and academic direction.

If your academic and professional focus remains uninterrupted from ages 16 to 26, you’ll be ten years ahead of others in professional competence. (Most people’s mathematics stops at age 16.) In some circumstances, employers are of course willing to hire these “genius” students. Behind that label are fundamentals, academic grounding, habits of thought, and social habits cultivated by a whole sequence of fortunate circumstances. (Though their abilities and development are not necessarily strong in every respect; students at elite universities also often have particular psychological problems.) Google has a blind faith in elite universities, geniuses, and intelligence tests, yet over the past ten years it has become increasingly mediocre.

But even once you’ve reached that point, how well you get on still depends on the opportunities that follow. Which civil engineering student at Tsinghua or Tongji wasn’t once a golden child? Then the industry disappeared. Who working in finance doesn’t have an impressive résumé? Yet the industry is this low-grade, and the pay is this low. Those working in telecommunications at Huawei and ZTE studied mathematics so hard along the way and memorized so many formulas, but now their industry is struggling. At the leading military research institutes, the entry requirements are high and the work is difficult; who there doesn’t have some sense of idealism? Yet the overtime is intense and the pay is low. By contrast, the barrier to becoming a code monkey isn’t particularly high, nor is the material particularly difficult to learn, but working as a programmer at a major tech company has already become one of the most fortunate paths available to ordinary people. (Earn in ten years what people in other industries earn in thirty, then retire.) Students who entered university in the 2010s study much harder and have far more internship experience than we university students of the 2000s did, but the opportunities have dried up. In the past, even master’s graduates could stay on at their universities and benefit from expanding enrollment. Now even PhDs returning from prestigious overseas universities struggle, facing “up or out” promotion systems. —Who doesn’t work hard? Who lacks intelligence? Who hasn’t had some luck? Fate toys with everyone.

In 2017, I read the *Series on the Generation of Science and Technology Leaders Who Founded the People’s Republic*, going through biographies of dozens of academicians. There was an interesting pattern: several had taken a year off school because of illness or other circumstances. Afterward, they were older than their classmates, which made them seem exceptionally mature and confident. They became class monitors and leaders in secondary school and university, gradually developing into commanding figures in science and technology. Reasoning backward, those who start school early develop physically and mentally later than their classmates and are more prone to feelings of inferiority. Of course, some instead study desperately in pursuit of a sense of superiority. This, too, is fate toying with people.

Once you get to university, you realize that secondary-school courses in mathematics, physics, English, and so on really aren’t very difficult. Later on, looking back at university, you feel the same way. As long as something has been printed in a book intended for a broad readership, hundreds of thousands or millions of people have generally already studied it. Experience has shown that most people have the intelligence to understand it; the question is simply whether circumstances give them the opportunity to follow that path.

I previously wrote *Moving Beyond Your Original Environment* (your family of origin, initial education, and original industry and workplace; your original social, cultural, and media environments; your original psychological patterns, ways of thinking, social habits, and ways of life). Many ways of thinking do not arise from within us; they are instilled by the outside world. People have different luck and different depths of karmic obstructions, so their degree of awareness differs.
How many bright, hardworking children have been swallowed up by fate? In the village, a whole bunch of children all have runny noses and suck their thumbs. Their lives later turn out differently—is that really down to individual effort? To IQ? It all depends on the opportunities that come their way.

Those who try to resist and manipulate fate are all the more likely to be toyed with and mocked by it. Zhuangzi speaks of being at peace with one’s time and accepting one’s fate, letting things follow their natural course. People possess innate wholeness; it does not reside in external possessions.

The complicated situation created by private ownership, tournament systems, all kinds of environments hostile to humanism, all kinds of karmic entanglements and psychological conditions, and so on—after another two or three hundred years, once communism has arrived, people will see the truth and meaninglessness of many of these things from the past. IQ is merely a set of elitist ideological beliefs. As though it were fair.