Ultra-intelligence reminds me of a conversation I had with friends years ago about super humanity -- probably after a night of drinking and too much sci-fi about genetically engineered superior humans.

We decided that a person capable of at least 10% above human maximum (or human average, I can't really remember) in at least two or three areas or 25% in one would count as "Super human". This excludes most hyper-specializers like Olympic Sprinters, or professional chess players.

Here's a fun video of the kind of deltas we were thinking of with professional American football players http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8tYqT9GDd8

10% isn't all that much, but we felt like a person who could run an under 9 second 100 meter and had an Eidetic memory for example, would qualify as a classic super human.

But IQ, IQ was hard. We couldn't decide about IQ. IQ is normalized at 100, fussy to test, and has questionable meaning. But suspending all those questions for a bit, given an "average" IQ of 100, a 10% or even 25% delta isn't really all that impressive at 110 or 125, not even Mensa levels. But let's take the top .1% of IQ, around 145, a 10% increase there is about 160 and a 25% increase is just north of 180 and now we're talking. Kim Ung-yong definitely qualifies as a single ability super human.

Somebody with an IQ >160 should qualify for certain. After all a 60 point delta from mean the other way leaves you with an IQ of 40 and we're talking about pretty severe disability.

So somebody who could run a sub-9 second 100 meter and had an IQ of say...170 would be super human by this completely arbitrary thinking.

In the comics, people with these kinds of abilities, even as limited as this definition suggests, wear oddball costumes with the underwear on the outside and capes and either try to take over the world or try to save it.

But in the real world, what people with abilities even close to these kinds of metrics end up doing is decidedly banal and often somewhat narcissistic.

Fast runners just...run fast against other fast runners...they don't generally patrol cities and run down purse snatchers like the flash. Heavy lifters see who can lift the heaviest thing, they don't generally crack open burning buildings and fight thugs saving orphans like the Thing. People with both talents get organized into groups and end up seeing who can move a ball towards one end of a field over another. The really clever ones will parlay their fame into side businesses and open a burger restaurant or a theme bar or a line of sports oriented active wear.

These folks aren't curing cancer, or stopping Fascism, or ending poverty, or worse, even trying to take over a moderate sized piece of real-estate and become Emperor of the Bronx or something.

For the super smart, there's definitely work for them to do, but it's pretty limited stuff and you really have to like physics or math to do it. And let's be honest, Mensa and Mega aren't exactly wowing the world with a prolific output of revolutionary world changing ideas.

I think partially because it's hard to go off and do the kinds of fantastic exceptional things that the general populace thinks you could do if you were super powered. Running a little bit faster still doesn't absolve you vigilante laws, but it can get you a Gold medal and some cereal advertising deals. Being ultra-smart doesn't mean you don't have to deal with averagely smart people to get anything more complex than tinkering done. Nobody so far is so smart than they can hack their way through the rest of dim-witted humanity like Ozymandias from the Watchmen.

History has shown that people with exceptional intelligence (at least as measured by IQ) also go on to do rather hum-drum things.

- Marilyn vos Savant writes a 2 inch high weekly column where she gives advice and helps people solve Supermarket brain teasers and Freshman probability problems.

- Scott Adams created a mildly observant comic strip about working in a professional office environment

- Asia Carrera made a career of getting filmed while having sex and playing videogames

- and on and on, a look at some lists of known ultra-IQ folks shows a list of comedians, some more porn actresses and models, actors, some pro-wrestlers, a bunch of fiction writers etc.

There's very, painfully, few people who occupied their time with something that really moved humanity up a notch and even most of those are debatable.

Hell, HN is full of people who I'd guess are in the 90+ percentile and most of what we do here is pontificate and build chat apps so people can share pictures of their cats.