"The IQ of Napoleon and contemporaries" Topic

The Cox IQ data were taken from…Volume II: The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses by Catharine M. Cox from Genetic Studies of Genius edited by Lewis M. Terman. Copyright 1926, Stanford University Press.

The Intelligence Quotient scores are on the Stanford-Binet scale. The scores listed are based on biographical data (including school rankings, anecdotes, works written, etc.) from data up to 26 years of age…

According to Cox, "The correction attempted in the present report is a crude approximation…: it indicates a point below which the true IQ probably did not fall…"

…IQ tests have had to be revised several times…as time passes, new generations start to get higher scores on the older tests…specifically for the Stanford-Binet Test (in the U.S.), there has been a gain of about 0.3 IQ points per year….To make the correction we can calculate the effect from 1916 to the year 1986 (years of the original and current versions of the Stanford-Binet test).

Name // Adult IQ // IQ with Flynn Effect
Goethe // 210 // 188
Pitt (the Younger) // 190 // 168
Byron // 180 // 158
Coleridge // 175 // 153
Carnot // 170 // 148
Marat // 170 // 148
Robespierre // 170 // 148
Beethoven // 165 // 143
Canning // 165 // 143
Fouche (Fouché) // 165 // 143
Mozart // 165 // 143
Canova // 160 // 138
Danton // 155 // 133
Marmont // 150 // 128
Nelson // 150 // 128
Soult // 150 // 128
Blucher (Blücher) // 145 // 123
Jackson. A. // 145 // 123
Moreau // 145 // 123
Napoleon // 145 // 123
Bernadotte // 140 // 118
Vauban // 140 // 118
Murat // 135 // 113
Ney // 135 // 113
St. Cyr // 135 // 113
Massena (Masséna) // 125 // 103

I don't know what's funnier, that Blucher's IQ was the same as Napoleon's or that Massena's was 103.

link

I can't decide whether this ranks just above or just below some shrink psychoanalyzing someone he's never met, but saw on TV or read about.

The first rule of analysis is that when you don't have worthwhile data, you don't pretend that you do.

I don't know what's funnier, that Blucher's IQ was the same as Napoleon's or that Massena's was 103.

Wait, why isnt history's most famous general ever on the list? How could they include Napoleon and Bluecher and forget him? But they included Soult and Massena? I wonder if you have to hit a certain level before being able to be ranked? Maybe 103 is the cut off point?

I mean, Mon dieu! and it just aint cricket!

Well, I guess from the methodology described you could calibrate your estimates, by doing one off the same data for someone whose IQ you do know, or can test. If they come out close to one another often enough, it tends to vindicate your methods or at least point to reasonably proxies for IQ.

So it may not be as whacko as it at first might appear.

Anecdotally Canova strikes me as the smartest: as a sculptor, he got paid to sit and look at Pauline Bonaparte naked for hours on end. Nice work if you can get it.

The surprise, for me, is Vauban — suspiciously low.

The one thing that IQ tests measure accurately is the ability to score in IQ tests.

The surprise, for me, is Vauban — suspiciously low.

I hear he liked to keep a low profile.

A real IQ test is actually a pretty good predictor of future financial success and staying out of jail--better than education and parents, I'm told.

But they can't give these guys IQ tests. Since they can't measure their classmates, how much is class standing worth? And stray comments by contemporaries? Combined with "works?" Not to mention falsifiability. (There's no necessity to take anyone seriously if there is no possible way to prove him wrong.)

I don't doubt that even after 200 years, we can reasonably observe that some of these people were very bright and some brighter than others. But to put a number on it, to three significant digits? Preposterous!

And of course as the scale only goes up to 210 there's no Duke of Wellington.

Pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience

Completely agree. I looked at the web site and the data was compiled in 1926. IQ testing has had a bad rap in England ever since I was a wee lad.

Wellington is there (I presume), as Wesley, scoring 160/138, putting him above Napoleon …

John

I could be wrong about this, but I've never run into anyone with a score much above 170 who didn't bounce around 15 or more points from one test to another. Even in normal ranges, you can test someone the next day and get four or five points difference. And that's people they could actually test. For this, they might just as well have put their pictures in envelopes and has a psychic "read" them.

I'd be surprised if you ran into many people with an IQ above 170. The odds of a person on the S-D test scoring that high are roughly 1 in 165,000 so that makes, again roughly, only 2,000 of those individuals in the U.S.

I kind of like 4th Cuir observation.

I wonder how they would rate Gen N.B. "Get thar firstest with the mostest" Forrest?

Book smarts to not necessarily a great general make.

And I cringe at Ney (really just a human bayonet) scoring above Massena.

And I cringe at Ney (really just a human bayonet) scoring above Massena.

Oh, he was impulsive, no doubt, and probably suffering for PTSD among other things, but he wrote a very competent set of instructions to his troops in 1803. It is worthy of study. Massena never did.

The definition of IQ given us in grad school was ‘the measure of the ‘likelihood' of someone doing well in school'. Absolutely no guarantee of educational, or any other, success, lie in the owner's future. YMMV.

Yes, Lascaris--but not evenly distributed among the population, one suspects. According to Cox here, you could have found three of them in some of the same meetings c. 1792, or a couple of them critiquing one another's verse. But every time I've read of an actual tested high-level type, there's been quite a bit of variance from one test to another. Which is why even if these people had actually been tested I couldn't take the gradations seriously.

"This person, whom I've never met or tested, but I read something about, is five IQ points smarter than this other person I've also never met or tested." Really? And you know this even though the people you actually do test have that much variation one day to the next?

People who firmly express dubious facts with great certainty and impossible precision are not experts. They are at best unwise and at worst charlatans. Or maybe that should be the other way around.

Oh I agree with you Robert Piepenbrink that this information seems, at best, to be extremely unlikely to be accurate. I'd be surprised if they were all within +/-20 points of reality. Now obviously I'm just pulling that out of the air but the methodology of trying to review published writings, which may or may not have been written by the principle, to derive an IQ, which is already a measurement with significant variance, seems just as pointless as my random guess! :)

To be fair, I think the researchers are aware of these limitations. They did after all say that the scores "indicates a point below which the true IQ probably did not fall", i.e. Massena was no lower than an adjusted 103.

I don't think the Wesley mentioned is Welly Baby. I think it's more likely John Wesley, the hymnsmith.

Agree with the reservations re IQ generally. It doesn't test verbal reasoning, so Shakespeare could probably have rated as a genius or retarded on the basis of his ability to solve quasi-mathematical puzzles. His abilities as a dramatist wouldn't be taken into consideration. Mathematically-minded people tend to think it's a killer argument that you can't "prove" Shakespeare is better than Dan Brown, of course.

I don't know if this tale be true or no, but this thread seems an appropriate place to put it: apparently, a team of European or American (i.e. "Western") anthropologists, or perhaps psychologists, maybe fifty years ago, tested the inhabitants of a settlement somewhere in West Africa using the kind of "non-verbal reasoning" questions found in typical IQ tests, and found the natives scored very, very low. According to the story, the elders of the village then devised a test for the visitors; the only question I recall – perhaps the only example given – was to estimate how many llittle bowls would be required to fill a very big container with water, grain, sand or whatever. The women of the village got the number almost exactly, certainly within a bowlsful or so; the scientists all failed miserably. No doubt they would have been termed "morons" in the local language.

I don't think the Wesley mentioned is Welly Baby. I think it's more likely John Wesley, the hymnsmith.

Sorry,4th Cuirassier, I think you mean Charles Wesley, the Hymn Smith, John, his older brother was the founder of what became known as 'Methodism', and was a gifted speaker.

@ Herkybird

You're spot on. I got my Mesleys wuddled :-)

McLaddie, Did Ney actually write them or did Jomini (who was an ADC to Ney for a time)ghost it for him?

We spend way too much time worrying about how to measure intelligence and who is the smartest of them all. From my experience it's not about how smart people are but how stupid they are. Stupid can confound things like genius can never contemplate or dig its way out of. Thus, it isnt how many smart people you have, it's more about how few idiots you have that makes things tick.

Remember: Genius has its limits but Stupid is bottomless.

>>We spend way too much time worrying about how to measure intelligence and who is the smartest of them all.

Smoothest seems to be all the rage these days.
Thought I'd bring back a year old relic, just becuz…

And yes, gross intellectualism makes not a whit of difference, if you can't get to bloody work ON TIME___!!! (one of my ex-staff).
~d

I suspect my IQ would rank above a pencil and below Napoleon.

I don't know where my other personal characteristics would rate; such as:
Force of will
Judgment
Courage
Tenacity
Multitasking
Stamina
Fortune
Luck
Wit
Wisdom
Military acumen
Charisma

I know I'll never have a period of history or a series of wars named after me.

Wellington isn't on the list because he was a member of the hereditary aristocracy. The study excluded aristocrats who followed military or political careers.

Hahaha, Wellington didn't make the cut.

Memorable thread if only because it's original intent backfired…like a Wile E Coyote exploding carrot.

The study excluded aristocrats who followed military or political careers.

Generalfeldmarschall Graf Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher ?

The study excluded aristocrats who followed military or political careers.

Napoleone di Buonaparte, Emperor of the French?

Wellington is excluded because he doesn't count as a genius;
the list was about "Eminent Geniuses born from 1450 to 1850"

"Calculating" the IQ of dead people? I'm surprised these highly capable academics can spare time away from their models that were 99% certain that three quarters of the population would have died of Covid by the end of March 2020?

Catharine Cox's study is online here:

link

The two works she used to establish the list and ground rules are also online:

Havelock Ellis: A study of British Genius (Cox borrowed his ground rules, including 'no hereditary aristocracy')

link

And James Cattell's article listing the 1000 most 'eminent men' in history – from which Cox drew her candidates. Cattell assembled his list by simply measuring the length of articles in a sample of six biographical publications:

link

Cattell's list actually measures fame, not ability. What Cox did was try and assess whether the early lives of her chosen sample from Cattell showed a development of 'genius' that led to the later fame. Hence the exclusion of royalty, and of hereditary aristocrats that followed traditional aristocratic careers in politics or the military. It was deemed there was no way of 'scientifically' calculating the advantage that noble birth might have given them in those spheres, and therefore no reliable way of comparing their early development to commoners.

Blucher makes the list because he was the son of an Army Captain. While his family may have considered itself noble, it was hardly hereditary aristocracy.

Same with Bonaparte – while he had sufficient noble background to meet the conditions of the Segur Decree, this is an ocean away from the advantages the hereditary aristocracy of France enjoyed in their careers.

You could argue that both Blucher and Bonaparte owed their military careers to 'accidents of birth' that not everyone around would have enjoyed: Blucher gained a cadet position through his father, while without the four generations of nobility required by the Segur Decree Bonaparte would have had to enlist as a common soldier and hope to make it as an officier de fortune (good luck with that one). However, this is hardly on a level with a gaggle of princelings who get to command divisions, corps or whole armies before they can shave.

'Hahaha, Wellington didn't make the cut.'

No, but he did make the cut for the list of 'People on the winning side at Waterloo'.

While there is a strong correlation between IQ and success in society, I suspect being a military commander needed other qualities as well, such as leadership. However I suspect you could use IQ to determine problem solving skills, so a high IQ commander could look at a situation map and quickly determine what to do. But when it came to commanding troops you need a kind of belligerent confidence to inspire your troops, which is not related to IQ. Perhaps that was what was wrong with Napoleon at Waterloo. He may have had the IQ, but lacked the Elan.

The other factor was experience, someone with a high IQ but minimal experience would be unable to use that IQ to solve problems, while someone with experience would have seen it before, even if IQ was lower.

As for IQ changing over time, the factor seems to be complexity surrounding the individual. The more problems to solve when a young lad/lass the higher your IQ would become. A farmer in Europe in the 1800 would have a rather simple, if grim life, which may not require much in the way of IQ. You can see the same with folks in the developing world today. Thus, you need to look at the lower score in the list if you wish to compare these folks with folks from the developed world today.

However as a soldier could be recruited as young as 16 and, if French, expect to be involved in the complexity of war for many years, I wonder if the IQ developed in a manner similar that that of someone living in a technological complex world today. I suspect not, but you never know.

You could argue that both Blucher and Bonaparte owed their military careers to 'accidents of birth' that not everyone around would have enjoyed: Blucher gained a cadet position through his father, while without the four generations of nobility required by the Segur Decree Bonaparte would have had to enlist as a common soldier and hope to make it as an officier de fortune (good luck with that one). However, this is hardly on a level with a gaggle of princelings who get to command divisions, corps or whole armies before they can shave.

I tend to agree. While Blucher may have been lucky enough to get a reasonable position, he was also skilled enough to avoid being dismissed after Jena. Once the guns start firing, the luck of birth is quickly stripped away and merit becomes king, unless your army is not interested in winning.

Zhukov is a good example, if it was not for the war Stalin would of never allowed him to become so popular. It weird he was responsible for the execution of Beria, the man who was probably responsible for Stalin's death.

No, but he did make the cut for the list of 'People on the winning side at Waterloo'.

Awwww, the real reason some people want to talk about Waterloo:

Wargamer: "Hey, how many cuirassiers were there at Waterloo?"

Dangerous Intellectual: "The British Won"