I had to look up Terman and SMPY [1].

I scanned it, and it seems to suggest that IQ 'is kind of bunk' - that it's more effective to evaluate mathematical reasoning, alone.

But, what I find more interesting is that not all mathematically precocious achieve, and very many achievers were not mathematically precocious. So, what's going on in the middle?

It's cool to see that 2000 kids out of 400M were high achievers, but how do we get, say, 1M high achievers out of the next 400M?

[1] https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubi...

Also, the data from SMPY seems odd.

I took their achievement percentages (# of individuals in top positions 40 years later), and did some rough calculations.

The SMPY cohorts seemed to perform much better than if one had randomly selected a 'top %1' individual from the total U.S. population. So, either the longitudinal study had an effect on the cohorts, or their original sampling method was biased.

By filtering out the 399M and telling them they suck (eg on standard test) so they should not even try. Then you'll have 1M of post traumatic survivors to label as high achievers.

Well that's what schools do today.