Midwits as impostors

the alternative take

I’ve never liked midwit theory, applied to political views or to other areas of life. There’s little evidence that highly intelligent people have a distinct subset of political beliefs, the only case where it held was in a cohort of White midwesterners born in 1940, where highly intelligent people were less likely to be right wing in comparison to what would be expected from the mean trend. And, as can seen from the scatterplot, right/left identification had very little to do with measured intelligence.

from here. Fit is made using restricted cubic splines. Male fit barely passes statistical significance (p = .02), though the female fit does (p < .001). If I recall correctly, ‘right wing self-identification’ is a combination of considering oneself a republican and a conservative.

That aside, I could see how midwits exist on an archetypal level, where they share certain features in common with each other that are not shared by people outside that range. Take IQ and social behaviour, for instance:

from here

from here

People who have IQs in the 110-125 and >125 ranges behave in pretty similar ways: they rarely drop out of high school, become poor, or commit crime. Anecdotally, in terms of verbal fluidity, a lot of people who are below average in intelligence will give indirect signals of low intelligence pretty quickly: delayed responses, simple vocabulary, low dimensional mental models, or a lack of interest in abstract subjects. But past that threshold, it starts to become much more difficult to tell people apart.

I have three adult siblings: one older brother, who was always at the top of his class, did very well on the ACT, and maintained a 4.0 GPA in computer science at a well-known school; an older sister who does reasonably well on standardized tests (80-90th percentile); and a younger sister who had her IQ tested and scored 116. Of these, the brother is clearly the smartest.

If my memory were wiped and I met each of them in person for a day, I would not be able to tell which of them was the the most intelligent. But over the years, there are several cues I’ve picked up that distinguished my brother from my siblings:

1. He’s much better than them at video games. You could chalk this up to the sex difference, but the difference is too large for this to be the case.

2. He is able to recall events that occurred a long time ago in a level of detail that is inmitable.

3. I can discuss abstract/political subjects with my sisters without much effort; with my brother, it’s a little different.

4. My brother has no intelligence-related insecurities, despite having a neurotic personality.

Which gets me to my theory of midwits — the archetypal midwit is the imposter: on paper, they behave like highly intelligent people, but they are not one of them.

When I see people try to define what a midwit is, they will often not define it based on IQ or even intelligence, but based on a tendency to be pedantic, obsessed with intelligence, oversocialized, full of themselves, or status-seeking. Which is odd — there are a lot of really smart people who possess those traits, which indicates that “midwit” has to some extent degraded into a generic term of derision. Being called a dimwit is not effective because the average person thinks they are of above average intelligence, so now people have pivotted to calling others what they think they are: midwits, a much more wounding insult.

What is the IQ range for a midwit?

Previously, I thought that people stop being midwits when their reasoning becomes more reliable than that of the consensus. There is a problem here: the quality of consensus-based reasoning differs substantially based on the context. On the SAT, the most selected answer for each question would correspond to the right answer the vast majority of the time, but this is going to be less true for poorly defined problems like the existence of God or the nature of morality.

Now, I would define the range in accordance with the impostor theory: the point at which the midwits and the cognitive elites separate. The biggest candidate I see here is the ability to be an outlier in a cognitively demanding field — a midwit could be a decent scientist, but he would never be as successful as a genuine genius like Isaac Newton or Francis Galton.

To this day, I have not seen a top scientist who has scored as low on an IQ test as E.O. Wilson, who claimed to have an IQ of 123. William Shockley scored at 119 as an adult, but he scored twice above Wilson as a child (125 and 129), so I’d guess he’s more intelligent. It’s concievable that there exists an equally eminent scientist who’s less intelligent, but has never had their IQ tested; even if this were the case, it’s unlikely that the score would be much lower. In the early 50s, Roe tested the IQs of some of America’s most high achieving scientists (including BF Skinner and Luis Alvarez), and found that their scores on her three tests had the following ranges:

Verbal ability: 121 - 177 (median: 166)

Spatial ability: 123 - 164 (median: 137, score correlates at -.4 with age)

Mathematical ability: 128 - 194 (median: 154)

Some have cast doubt on the tests and statistical assumptions Roe used to calculate these numbers, though based on priors the estimates cannot be that inaccurate. If the correlation between IQ and performance in cognitively demanding fields is strong within the general population (.6), then people who are 5 standard deviations above the mean in performance would have an average IQ of 145, assuming a perfectly linear association.

The IQs of the Nazis who were trialed in Nuremberg have also been tested using a much more rigorous test, the Weschler-Bellevue test:

from here

There are only three scores below 120: Fritz Sauckel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Julius Streicher. Of these, Sauckel was in the Nuremberg trials primarily for his role in the concentration camps and Streicher was just a schizoposter. Kaltenbrunner, however, was an extremely high ranking officer, having been the head of the Nazi equivalent of the CIA and the President of the Interpol.

The Nazis did not select their leaders based on IQ, but based on the usual traits that tend to be selected for in organizations: loyalty, competence, social accumen, and personal connections. Yet, of the Nazis trialed at Nuremberg, 18 out of 21 had IQ scores that were above the 90th percentile. This doesn’t necessarily mean that some super special thing happens to people after they reach that percentile, in fact, this is roughly the distribution that would be expected from selecting an small elite using a mechanism that was only moderately correlated with IQ. However, it does mean that any person with an IQ of below 120 or so is almost never going to be seen at the very top of a large, cognitively based hierarchy.

From the available information, the upper limit at which people stop being midwits is somewhere between 115-125, while the lower limit is 105-110. Vox Day, the person who first used the term, proposed the limits were 105-120, which seem reasonable.

Anecdotally, the following tendencies and behaviors code as midwit:

1. Smart enough to understand rules and expert opinion, but not smart enough to question them. If they do question authorities, they devolve into crankery.

2. Having an intelligence-related insecurity, which is more common in those raised in a high class background or those who work in a professional job. 115 IQ plumbers from Wyoming are generally not insecure about their intelligence.

3. Trying too hard to look smart. Even if they are vain, highly intelligent people don’t need to try hard to look smart, so they don’t bother trying. Most midwits, however, do not do this.

4. Getting through college is a challenge for them, and they have to rely on some kind of trick like studying consistently, relying on peers, cheating, or retaking classes to graduate.

5. Can think in a complex and detail-oriented manner, but find it difficult to judge when this is the right way to tackle a problem. This is where I think the spirit of the midwit meme comes through, that a midwit will not know when to scale the complexity of a solution to the problem involved, but that highly intelligent and unintelligent people will arrive at a similar solution if the problem involved has a very simple solution.

There are some midwit stereotypes that, in my experience, do not hold up:

1. Midwits, do not, in fact, strongly identify with their intelligence. That’s more commonly seen 125+ IQ maladaptive people.

2. Conformity: midwits and highwits have about the same levels of conformity. If there is a difference, it’s not a large one.

3. Pedanticism: this trait is found among the highly intelligent as well.

4. Status-seeking: like in the case of conformity and pedanticism, this can trait can also be found in the highly intelligent.

5. Leftism: midwits and highwits are about equally left wing.

On a semi-related note, there are terms for people who are merely above average in class, attractiveness, and intelligence; this is not the case for other traits like confidence or aggression. It could be argued this is a function of importance, though people don’t have the equivalent terms for fitness or happiness. Which makes me think that if people go out of their way to use a term to denote people in the middle of the distribution, that means that what the word denotes something that is real on a phenomenological or archetypal level.