Three Sigmas to the East

About 1-in-50 people may pass the Mensa test requirement of having an IQ of 130. But at the third sigma to the right of the mean, it’s 1-in-600 (145 and up). And at the fourth, it’s 1-in-30,000. In Dutch, we call such people hoogbegaafd, which means highly gifted, but I despise this term. The intelligent individual is burdened, not gifted. I prefer the phrase “high-cognitive person” or HCP as in hiccup.

IQ tests measure how well one grasps visual, verbal, or numerical abstractions but IQ doesn’t ...