Here’s mine, and it’s one you can’t talk about in front of most audiences: people with serious high intelligence (IQ 145+) are a maltreated minority.

In our society, it is not enviable to be at that level. It is a social disability and it seems to be crippling in about 50 percent of cases. Intelligence above IQ 145 is very rare; most people meet a handful. I’ve met a couple hundred such people and they tend to be a bit weird… and almost always have terrible childhoods.

As humans, we evolved in groups of about twenty people, which means we look at the 95th percentile for leadership, but the 99.9th percentile is a freak– perhaps some other species– that must be killed with fire.

Sure, there are high-IQ people who become rich inventors, hedge fund quants, and esteemed professors. (There are plenty of people who achieve those things without notable intelligence, too.) For each of those, though, there are several who go nowhere. Sometimes it’s their fault (drugs) and sometimes it’s not. I’ve met several IMO medalists who have been utterly raped in the non-meritocracy of the corporate world.

Also, the problem’s only getting worse. In the 1980s and ’90s, the 145+ didn’t often end up running companies, but they’d be tracked for R&D jobs where they could find useful work. These days, corporations don’t really have the capacity to recognize talent, so you often find out that an IMO gold medalist got assigned bullshit and put on a PIP, which should literally never happen… but does, because the shot-callers in the corporate world are so inferior these days.

Societies invariably function in ways that disadvantage their most capable people, and if this process could be stopped, you’d likely see economic growth double or triple. We really don’t gain anything by pounding the crap out of our best people. That being said, I don’t know how one goes about convincing an entire society to stop doing so.