Member-only story
For my father intelligence was all that mattered. Ever since my brother Charles was diagnosed to be a gifted child all he talked about were IQ and intelligence research. High IQ apparently strongly predicts good grades, a good career, and even health and mortality and stuff.
His favorite story is Kim Ung-Yong a Korean with an official IQ of 210. Just six months old he was already speaking fluent Korean and at age 3 wrote essays in German and English. Then he would hug Charles and look at me with this question in his face.
I hated that I wondered if I could reach my little brother in anything? When I was young me and my dad were best buddies. He never even cared much about IQ or whatever. When my brother started reading at just 2 years old everything changed.
Suddenly I was forgotten and soon after I was the slow one. Once when I got a C in math he didn’t even look at my paper and just told Charles that an ape is believed to have an IQ of 40. I hated his sarcasm.
Once at dinner when he started talking about intelligence or “G” he’d say — G stands for general intelligence and scientists say it exists because apparently most IQ tests correlate — whatever — he was talking about it and then drew up this graph on a piece of paper saying: “look boy this is the distribution of intelligence of all people in town 0.1% of…
