-Thief 3, some Hammerite (paraphrased)
IQ is a meme, and once you get away from the ivory tower and see how everyone else has to make it, you realize just how jacked the entire thing is. The thing in this case being the prestige class. Noblis oblige is dead, the new money is stark raving mad, the old money couldn't give a shit more. Nobody has any more of a clue than anyone else, and the executable bad idea is valued over and above the good idea that just doesn't seem quite ready to crystallize yet.
The biggest curse in my opinion is to see and grok the magnitude and nature of the problems but to not be in a position to do much about them besides trying to explain it to a handful of people and hope a couple understand, are in a spot and mindset to do something about it, take it, and run with it. It's kind of like being a Chief or high level enlisted in the armed forces from what I gather. Too busy getting things done to keep the status quo moving, but also facilitating bottom up information propagation and nudging the command structure in the right direction via reality checks.
Oh... The dreams that have died from learning how the world really works. They are a plenty.
Source for the story, please?
> But they had carried their luxury to such a pitch that they had taught even their horses to dance at their feasts to the music of the flute. Accordingly the people of Crotona, knowing this, and being at war with them, as Aristotle relates in his History of the Constitution of Sybaris, played before their horses the air to which they were accustomed to dance; for the people of Crotona also had fluteplayers in military uniform. And as soon as the horses heard them playing on the flute, they not only began to dance, but ran over to the army of the Crotonians, carrying their riders with them.
-- Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
The Aristotlean source he cites is lost.
Which magazine / when? It sounds like this might actually contain some insight into the thinking of the magazine's editors, which could be interesting (so long as one is careful to assign no truth value to the content).
Edit: Googling has led me to a few, all citing this one paper from 2006. Political Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Aug., 2006), pp. 511-526 TLDR: The methodology is a bit loose, taking biographical achievements in earlier life and correlating them with people of known intelligence who did similar things. This leads to the perhaps-unsurprising result that they were all estimated at above-average IQ. I'm not sure why a 2006 paper would be turned into article fodder now.