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Confessions of a Stupid Genius
Surviving the toxic cult of IQ
When I was a kid my mum got me to do an IQ test from a magazine. This showed that my IQ was 172. That is ridiculous. My IQ is not 172. This was Woman’s Day or some such thing, and no doubt the test was intended to guarantee that no parent would walk away without a gifted child. It’s just that when a very intelligent child did it, they ended up as a certified Einstein. My mother got very excited by this, and at some point after this told me gravely, “You are… what some people call a genius.” Thanks, mum! That certainly won’t cripple me forever! Some time later she must have thought better of this — maybe I’d done something stupendously dumb — and decided to tell me in the car one day, “You’re not a genius, you know.” Like I’d started that whole thing! It was all very confusing.
Genius or not, I was the Anointed One among me and my two brothers. I could read at three, made oracular philosophical remarks around the same age about how we knew whether waking life was a dream or not, and generally freaked people out. And as I’ve written about before, my great-grandfather was Max Born, a close friend of Einstein who won the Nobel Prize for physics, so there was that. No pressure, as they say. My older brother resented and hero-worshipped me in equal measure, and held onto the idea that one day I’d win my own Nobel Prize…
