[Answered on Quora.com by Michael Rios]
I have worked extensively with gifted students. The difference between a student with 125 IQ and 150 IQ is vast—even a different *kind* of thought process. So the person with 125 IQ simply does not have certain faculties that are native to the person with IQ 150. That doesn’t mean that they can’t accomplish a lot, have happy life, and make important contributions to their work or to society in a variety of ways. But they will never come up with a revolutionary physics theory or solve one of the Millennium Prize math problems. Or probably make important contributions to any major academic field.
Some people will say, “But what about Feynman? He only had an IQ of 125.”
Feynman’s claim of a 125 IQ is highly suspect. Feynman was a jokester and a bullshit artist—albeit a brilliant one. The title he chose for his own book was "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"; this should give anyone a clue-by-four about how seriously he took things like IQ—or much of anything else other than teaching and researching to the best of his awesome ability.
There are no public records of any of his IQ tests. If the 125 score was real, without knowing which test, which standard deviation, and his health at the time, the number means nothing. Some tests had an SD of 5, which would make a score of 125 equal to a score of 175 on modern tests. And Feynman, a dedicated iconoclast, would have been completely capable of deliberately f*cking with the test for the hell of it.
Feynman was famous for saying whatever he thought would get a reaction, and he *loved* telling the story that he only had an IQ of 125.
From Forbes: “Feynman certainly encouraged this legend about his IQ: it was perfect for a joker like himself. He was notoriously disdainful of organizations such as Mensa and was a born iconoclast and critic of authority.”
No one with an IQ of 125 could have accomplished *half* of what Feynman did.
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