Stephen Hawking, scientist: “People who boast about their IQ are losers”

When a man who reshaped modern cosmology shrugs at the idea of revealing his IQ, it feels like something worth paying attention to.

In a 2004 interview with The New York Times, the late, great Stephen Hawking was asked the question that tabloids love: what is your IQ? His reply was blunt. “I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

Coming from the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the line still lands with force, long after his passing. Hawking, who died in 2018 at 76 after living for decades with ALS, had little need for such measures. He wrote A Brief History of Time, brought black holes into living rooms around the world, and predicted what we now call Hawking radiation. If intelligence were a currency, his receipts were public, and he didn’t need to comment further.

Hawking and the intelligence hierarchy

What stands out to me is not only the sharpness of the remark, but the subtle ranking behind it. IQ, after all, is a fairly blunt metric, a simplified attempt to quantify something far more complex. According to Mensa, it attempts to measure mental agility, usually with 100 as the average score. But this in itself is not an achievement. No one improves the human condition by scoring well on a test.

Hawking seemed to understand that once you have a body of work, the scoreboard changes. As a child or student, numbers and rankings may be the only available signals of potential, with some young inventor-like exceptions. As an adult, though, your record speaks louder. Discoveries, books, institutions built, lives influenced. These are harder to fake and don’t just come with a number attached.

• Stephen Hawking: “Quiet and silent people are the ones who have the strongest and loudest minds”

Who boasts about their own IQ?

The line also points to there being something rather revealing about who feels compelled to advertise their IQ. If someone has led groundbreaking research, built companies, or written transformative works, an abstract number fades into irrelevance. If, however, the accomplishments lag behind the self-image, the temptation to wave around a scorecard grows stronger. Anyone come to mind?

Hawking resisted the mythology of genius. In that same interview, he noted that there is a continuous range of abilities, not a clean dividing line between ordinary and extraordinary. The media crave superheroes. Reality is subtler.

In an era when certain public figures have been eager to publicize their supposed intellectual superiority, Hawking’s remark feels less like a joke and more like a standard. Real intelligence does not shout. It builds, questions, revises and, occasionally, smiles at the absurdity of keeping score.

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