I missed this thread till just now. I wish I had jumped in earlier. The man from Korea profiled in the article recounts, "I was famous for having a 210 IQ," and that's what generated all the publicity. But in fact, an IQ score that high could not possibly be a validated IQ score from a currently normed test. There must have been some mistake in administering or scoring the test, back in the day, and the same is true of any other report you have ever seen of an IQ score above 200. (No IQ score above 200 is a validated, currently normed score comparable to other IQ scores. Not one, not any. Scores above 200 are bogus, at least insofar as they purport to be comparable to the scores from IQ tests that most people hear about.)

Let's see which Wikipedia articles have been revised to fight the myths about high IQ scores, and which merely perpetuate them. Let's see, "High IQ society"[1] correctly reports that "The highest reported standard score for most IQ tests is IQ 160, approximately the 99.997th percentile (leaving aside the issue of the considerable error in measurement at that level of IQ on any IQ test).[2] IQ scores above this level are dubious as there are insufficient normative cases upon which to base a statistically justified rank-ordering.[3][4] High IQ scores are less reliable than IQ scores nearer to the population median.[5]" all of which is true. I can remember when that article was much more misleading about how IQ scores work.

The Wikipedia article "Marilyn vos Savant"[2] correctly reports "Alan S. Kaufman, a psychology professor and author of IQ tests, writes in IQ Testing 101 that "Miss Savant was given an old version of the Stanford-Binet (Terman & Merrill 1937), which did, indeed, use the antiquated formula of MA/CA × 100. But in the test manual's norms, the Binet does not permit IQs to rise above 170 at any age, child or adult. And the authors of the old Binet stated: 'Beyond fifteen the mental ages are entirely artificial and are to be thought of as simply numerical scores.' (Terman & Merrill 1937). ...the psychologist who came up with an IQ of 228 committed an extrapolation of a misconception, thereby violating almost every rule imaginable concerning the meaning of IQs."[12]

"The second test reported by Guinness was Hoeflin's Mega Test, taken in the mid-1980s. The Mega Test yields IQ standard scores obtained by multiplying the subject's normalized z-score, or the rarity of the raw test score, by a constant standard deviation, and adding the product to 100, with Savant's raw score reported by Hoeflin to be 46 out of a possible 48, with a 5.4 z-score, and a standard deviation of 16, arriving at a 186 IQ. The Mega Test has been criticized by professional psychologists as improperly designed and scored, "nothing short of number pulverization."[13]"

But, yeah, if we get beyond the premise that the man in Korea ever had such a high IQ score (he may have been told the number, but the person who told him made some kind of mistake), then we can reflect on the issue of what we expect from children after they are told they have high IQ scores. Is it a failure simply to make an honest living and take care of a family? I think not. Very high IQ or moderately high IQ, the path to genius also involves a lot of hard work, opportunity, and not a little luck.[3] I think the man profiled in the article has done just fine and has nothing to be ashamed of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_IQ_society#Entry_requirem...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fam...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius#IQ_and_genius