[deepnotderp]

I think you're putting too much faith into IQ.

Shockley only had an IQ of ~125 (even though he became an eugenicist...).

More importantly, Feynman used his low IQ score (124 I think) to show how useless the IQ test was as a predictor of intelligence.

[abtinf]

IQ mean is 100 and stddev is 15. He was in the top 5.5% of human intelligence.

[juki]

There are tests that don't use a standard deviation of 15. Feynman might have done, for example, the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test[1], which has a standard deviation of 24.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell_Culture_Fair_III

[pedrosorio]

What Shockley and (especially) Feynman did is well beyond a 95th percentile of ability.

[true_religion]

Ability isn't well distributed to where it can have a maximal benefit in a given field. It's often said that people as smart as Einstein (and Feynman) are currently living and dying on subsistence living farms.

What hasn't been said, but is equally true, is that people as capable in physics as Einstein as currently working as waitresses in No Where, Idahoe. Or they're slaving away as bit-actors in Hollywood because that's what they love.

Or they're sitting behind a computer, typing away on HN, never to know that they're potentially amazing theoretical physicists simply because their 7th grade teacher turned them off to the idea of physics in general so they studied computer science instead.

Until there's some kind of test that tells you your aptitudes at very subject, you'll always have people pick suboptimal paths to excellency and something other than what they absolutely theoretically could have been best at.

[networked]

There is an ongoing minor controversy around Feynman's IQ score. See Steven Hsu here for some context: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einste....