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According to many websites, Younghoon Kim has an IQ of 276, the highest in the world. For example, the last source states:

YoungHoon Kim from South Korea has the world’s highest IQ 276 in history...

Is this true? I never heard of him before. Many of the sources are Christian newspapers.

Specifically, I would like to know whether he took an official IQ test, whether the result is reliable, and whether it is really the highest recorded IQ globally.

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    A key thing for answers to address here is going to be "whose definition of IQ?" Mainstream IQ tests have maximum scores around 160, and it's not even clear what scores above that would mean. This individual claims accreditation from various societies I've never heard of, so I guess the question is whether those societies have any credibility or independence, or if they're just promotional fluff. Commented Aug 8 at 18:39
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    You've broken the sentence into individual one link per word. Can you please post the skeptical claim that you doubt in the question and attribute it, instead of making us follow those links to find the claim? And what's an 'official' IQ test? Commented Aug 8 at 18:50
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    Further down that page fom the World Mind Sport Council it says "In Mega Society, the world’s highest IQ society which was the only one listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, YoungHoon was officially recognised as having an intelligence of one in a million in the world." (my bolding) Commented Aug 8 at 19:04
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    Claiming an IQ of 276 is a self-defeating claim, as it (by definition) implies an intelligence present in only 1 of 10^31 individuals. Anyone with such high intelligence should immediately realize the silliness of such claim both in terms of its statistical absurdity and the clear impossibility of establishing such a fact. Ergo anyone claiming an IQ of 276 does not have an IQ of 276. Commented Aug 8 at 23:45
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    @WeatherVane: an "intelligence of one in a million" would correspond to an IQ of 171 or more, the 0.999999-quantile of a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Few IQ tests are calibrated well in this range, because you need an incredible amount of calibration observations at the extreme tails. Commented Aug 9 at 10:29

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There is no evidence that Younghoon Kim has the highest IQ in the world.

VICE Journalist Ralph Jones investigated Kim's claims and was unable to find any evidence that Kim had scored 276 on any IQ test. The various members of high IQ societies that Jones interviewed unanimously agreed that the IQ score Kim claims he has could not be accurate.

I highly recommend reading Jones' article for a thorough analysis of Kim's claims, but here are a few excerpts that really sell how little confidence anyone has in the veracity of Kim's IQ score:

“My impression is that YoungHoon Kim is a megalomanic, pathologically lying impostor,” said Paul Cooijmans, 60, a Dutch high-IQ expert whose self-made online tests are well-regarded in the high-IQ world.

Over the months I’ve spent looking into Kim’s claims, not a single expert has said they believe he has the world’s highest IQ score. We know, however, that his score is fairly high. I hear from the former chairperson of Mensa Korea that Kim is a member. “I cannot disclose his exact IQ score,” wrote Eunjoo Lee via email. “However, he does not have a special IQ score, at least within Mensa standards.”

Not long after my interaction with Kim I finally saw some of his scores for the first time, thanks to Dr Jason Betts, 53, an Australian who runs the World Genius Directory (“the who’s who of the high-IQ world”). When Kim learned that I wanted to reveal the contents, he said that I did not have permission. But high-IQ experts said it’s not possible to get a score of 276 from the numbers in the document. Even Betts doesn’t believe Kim has an IQ score higher than 175. Chris Leek of Mensa called any attempt to extrapolate 276 “a nonsense”; Cooijmans commented, “I see no justification for him claiming an IQ of 276”; and Antjuan Finch [an American IQ expert] said, “It’s wrong,” estimating from the data that Kim’s real score should be between 160 and 172.

[Brazilian high-IQ expert Hindenburg] Melao Jr, who thinks Kim’s true score will be around 170, said, “Kim does not belong to the ranks of the top 1,000 most intelligent individuals alive, just like none of the other people who made similar claims before him.” Besides, he added, “Almost all of the 100 most intelligent people alive do not participate in any high-IQ society.”

In addition to there being zero expert confidence in Kim's claims, Kim himself has repeatedly refused to furnish evidence of an IQ score of 276. Once again, per Jones' article:

The problem with Kim’s response [to Jones' inquiries for evidence of his IQ] is that he hasn’t provided any proof to “brain championships” or Guinness World Records. Raymond Keene is president of the World Memory Championships—an organization on which Kim frequently leans to legitimize his score. Despite not seeing any evidence of his score, Keene made Kim the vice-president of the World Memory Championships after Kim contacted him out of the blue. “I’m always interested in supporting people who want to promote IQ,” Keene said. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s on the side of the angels. He’s trying to increase global intelligence and global mental power.” Marek Kasperski, the president of the World Mind Sports Council—organizers of the World Memory Championships—has also never seen any evidence of Kim’s score.

In response to Jones' article, Kim has questioned Jones' journalistic integrity, threatened legal action against Jones and VICE, and, most notably, failed to produce any evidence that he earned the IQ score he claims to have.*

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I admit that it is possible that Kim earned a score of 276 on some IQ test. However, he has never established which IQ test he used, nor, once again, has he ever publicly revealed his test results or had such results confirmed by an independent body. If Kim truly has an IQ of 276, it would be trivial for him to publish evidence of this claim and discredit Jones' article. The fact that he has not done so, in my opinion, casts serious doubts on Kim's reliability in this area; the fact that he has instead resorted to insults and legal threats further diminishes my ability to take his claims seriously.

*Note that the two links here are to pages on the website of the GIGA Society that, according to Jones, was founded by Kim in an attempt to discredit and/or redirect web traffic from Paul Cooijmans' Giga Society, which was founded 25 years prior to Kim's GIGA Society. These two articles are written in an impersonal third-person and claim not to be written by Kim himself, but the extreme defensiveness on display is suspect, to say the least.

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    At some point in the VICE article, he explains that the value of 276 was obtained by applying strange mathematics to an actual score of 210. Commented Aug 8 at 21:11
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    While I believe this article is on the money, as a skeptical answer, I think this relies too much on one journalistic source. In particular, it's a chain of self-proclaimed "experts" all the way down, with Jones both pointing out how they lack rigour and asking them for their opinion on Kim's claims. Commented Aug 9 at 11:31
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    @IMSoP maybe a better word than strange is deceptive: it's like saying 'we have reached record hot temperatures of 68 degrees in Europe!' while its actually 20 degrees Celcius. Commented Aug 10 at 0:54
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    I earned a score of 276 on some IQ test. Although I don't know how much we can trust the results of a test scribbled on a napkin that I found on the side of the road. Commented Aug 10 at 12:41
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    @IMSoP The other issue with "properly" debunking Kim's claims is, as you said, the preponderance of "self-proclaimed 'experts'" in this area. The problem is that there are very few real, credentialed experts in the area of IQ, at least in part because of IQ's undeniable historical connections to eugenicist movements. Even among contemporary academics who study IQ, the subject of interest is statistical measures of population IQ, not individual IQ. In short, Jones is not the silver bullet in discrediting Kim; however, in my opinion, Kim's refusal to furnish evidence is that silver bullet. Commented Aug 11 at 13:50
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I cannot provide evidence that it is false, but I can say a few things about IQ from which you can infer beyond reasonable doubt that it is not true.

First, you ask about highest IQ "in the world", which is funny because if you go by the purely statistical definition that IQ is a normally distributed quantity with mean 100 and standard deviation 15, then an IQ of 276 corresponds to about 1 in 10³¹ (see below), whereas the world has only about 10¹⁰ people, so this person would have the highest IQ in 10²¹ worlds like ours. (10⁻³¹ is the approximate value of the cumulative distribution function at 276, which is the ratio of all people with an IQ of 276 or greater; see cdf(276) and erfc(-88-√2)).

For a test to be accurate at such a value, it would need to be sufficiently "difficult" that even a statistically significant number of people close to IQ=276 still get enough questions wrong that you can differentiate between them. In other words, you would need a decent number of people taking the same test and being at least in the same order of magnitude of IQ, which for 276 would not be the case even if every human in history had taken the same test.
EDIT (thanks @user71659 for bringing it up): A good way for designing tests where more people get more things wrong, thus improving contrast, is by imposing a time limit (see e.g. Mensa IQ challenge).

With the assumption of a Gaussian(µ=100, s=15), the distribution is symmetric around 100, which means that the fraction of people having an IQ>200 is the same as the fraction of people having a negative IQ. An IQ>276 is as frequent as an IQ less than negative 76.

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    The 276 is apparently based on using an "SD24" scale - that is, calibrated to use 24 points per standard deviation rather than 15. Converted to an SD15 scale, it's a still implausible but slightly less ridiculous 210. Commented Aug 9 at 11:12
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    @IMSoP: good point, though that "slightly less" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. We still get 1.12*10^-13, which is still more than the total number of homo sapiens that ever lived. Commented Aug 9 at 11:25
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    Also, there's nothing intrinsically impossible about a negative IQ score, any more than a negative temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit, or a negative volume in decibels - IQ isn't an absolute scale, so "below 0" is no more special than "below 20". In fact, the choice of 100 as the average score, rather than 0, is rather arbitrary; it would perhaps be more logical to talk of an IQ of "-23" rather than "77". Commented Aug 9 at 12:49
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    @IMSoP The problem is that the definition of the scale has changed over time. It was originally conceived, as the name suggests, as a quotient of supposed "mental age" and "chronological age" — and only meant for use in children, since of course there's an upper limit to sensible values for "mental age" (i.e. we don't uniformly get smarter as we get older, even into old age). Expressing that quotient as a percentage made a certain amount of sense. But as interest grew in measuring the adult population, and phenomena such as the Flynn effect were discovered, that all got upended. Commented Aug 9 at 14:48
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    @RonJohn that's a definition for sure. A more common definition of normalization would have mean 0 and SD 1, making the score a z-score. Commented Aug 9 at 23:01

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