Estimating the IQ of Vitalik Buterin
After a lot of diggging, I managed to find that Vitalik was one of 7 winners of the CCC gold medal in computing in which about 2000 people participated. These students are definitely selected for IQ/technical ability, but it’s difficult to determine by how much. Taking the average of the generous (perfect slection for technical ability, so 7/384627 (people born in 1994 in canada)) and uncharitable (same as the population mean, so 7/2000) results in an estimate of 3.41 ((2.696844+4.129224)/2). As there is technically no ceiling, it is assumed to be a minimum of 3.41, not an exact estimate of 3.41.
Electronics Information has a g-loading of 0.74 in the ASVAB, which seems a little high, so a g-loading of 0.6 will be assumed for this ability.
He is also very wealthy - a net worth of about 540 million according to various sources. The conventional z-score I use for people with a wealth of ~100M is 4, for billionaires this should be 5. As is custom with extremely wealthy people, I will assume he has a wealth z-score of above 4.
Assuming a correlation between self-made wealth and IQ of 0.35 and a g-loading of computational ability of 0.6, Vitalik has an IQ of about 149 with a standard error of 11.8.
set.seed(288)
g <- rnorm(80000000)
iq <- 0.6*g + rnorm(80000000)*sqrt(1-0.6^2)
c1 <- 0.35*g + rnorm(80000000)*sqrt(1-0.4^2)
subby1 <- data.frame(iq, c1)
subby1$g = g
subby2 <- subset(subby1, (subby1$c1 > 4) & (subby1$iq > 3.41))
mean(subby2$g)
sd(subby2$g)
#eliges <- subby2$g
eliges <- append(eliges, subby2$g)
mean(eliges)
sd(eliges)