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As an analogy, I think of IQ a bit like horsepower in a car. You can measure power a few different ways, they're all correlated but slightly different, and bigger numbers don't always translate to more actual speed on the road. A lamborghini has a lot of horsepower, but so does a digger.
Strictly speaking, IQ predicts educational capacity. It's correlated imperfectly with a bunch of other positive mental attributes, but bigger numbers don't always translate to more intelligence in the real world, and at the extremes the statistical selection effects are strong.
At the high and low ends, IQ is dysfunctional. Above a certain high threshold, more IQ has negative real-world effects, many of the "smartest" people in the world can't manage their own lives, stay employed or be understood by normies. Even our distant patron Scott looks and sounds either insane or stupid in person. Very bright guy, but a total weirdo IRL, and I'm pretty weird myself.
A society with an average IQ of 120 or 130 would have incredible human capital, a society with an average of 170 would collapse in about six minutes. To bring it back around to my analogy, most of us don't actually want a thousand-horsepower supercar to drive. Roads full of Bugattis would be a nightmare. A bit more speed than average is fine, but as you get faster, there's fewer and fewer places you can drive, and fewer and fewer uses until you get to something like a drag racer, which is fast as hell, and totally useless.
I'm a bit odd, but tradesmen tend to be so it's not obviously due to brains. Is this actually true? I'd thought that Chris Langdon and Ted Kaczynski were exceptions that test the rule- sure, very high IQ individuals are more likely to be oddballs that make strange decisions due to tail effects, but Terrence Tao and Bill Gates were more typical examples.
Let me put it this way, everyone sat in a circle in a room, and Scott moved his swivel chair out into the hallway and spun in a circle while he talked, so all you saw of him was his knees swing past the doorway every three seconds. Plus, that scintillating mind in print is entirely incomprehensible in conversation. It was interesting, but if I didn't already know from his writing that he was smart, I'd have thought he was seriously mentally ill, or perhaps autistically retarded.
Which it is my assertion that very high IQ basically is.
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