Intelligence is at a premium in fields that demand high cognitive skills. For many highly intelligent people, the existence of others who might be even more intelligent poses a threat to their supremacy. An example of the anguish experienced by those in the top intellectual echelon was captured in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. When Fields Medalist, Professor Gerald Lambeau, acknowledges that the young janitor at the University, named Will Hunting [played by Matt Damon] has superior mathematical talent, he says:
I can’t do this proof. But you can, and when it comes to that it’s only about, … it’s just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I’m one of them… Most days I wish I never met you… Because then I could sleep at night, and I wouldn’t have to walk around with the knowledge that there’s someone like you out there… And I didn’t have to watch you throw it all away.
Stephen Hawking often dismissed IQ tests as irrelevant, but during the early stages of his ALS, it is reported that he continued to take IQ tests to ensure that it was not affecting his intelligence.
Similarly, Jeff Bezos, a short time after arriving at Princeton, discovered that for the first time in his life he was not the most gifted student in the class. Biographer Mark Leibovich reported an interesting turning point in the direction of his career path:
One night during his freshman year, Bezos was struggling over a partial differential equation he had to complete for a quantum mechanics class. After a few hours of frustration, he and his study partner visited the dorm room of a classmate, who glanced at the equation and said, “Cosine.”
“After we expressed some incredulousness,” Bezos says, “he proceeded to draw three pages of equations that flowed through and showed that it was cosine.” It led to a realization: There were people whose brains were wired to process abstract concepts in a very graceful way, and Bezos was not one of those people. “It was initially devastating,” he says, “very, very, troubling.”
These are only a couple of examples, but they match what I have observed in my colleagues in mathematical research. Intelligence is the Holy Grail of those who seek to solve the problems that no one else has been able to solve. They regard their IQ score as a number that ranks them in intelligence relative to the others and in their ascent into the stratosphere of achievement are less concerned about the mass of humanity below them on the IQ scale than they are about the few that are higher. An IQ is perceived to limit their fantasies about their real intelligence.
These comments are, of course, generalizations. Many highly intelligent people are not in the hunt for stellar achievement in the intellectual domains, just as many superb athletes are not aiming at the Olympics. However, as ambition increases, finite limits become increasingly feared.
