Chris Langan's View On Intelligence

Chapter 3 challenges the standard view on intelligence and how we treat it in our world. The chapter starts out by reciting some history and introduces a man named Chris Langan who is on a game show. The game show is called 1 vs. 100 were the contestant battles it out against the studio audience for 1 million dollars. The reason Chris Langan is brought on the show because he is known to possess an amazing IQ, and because of this he garnered a good amount of fame for it. He has always possessed high intellect the writer tells the reader that at a young age he was able to achieve intellectual feats that his peers of even higher age would struggle with. The first part of the chapter ends with the writer telling the reader he won two-hundred fifty-thousand
dollars and decided to hang it up and take the money ending his introduction into the chapter. The chapter continues with the writer starting a new idea on how we should view intellect and uses and old experiment as his base. The experiment dealt with gathering the best minds around the area that only achieve genius level IQ scores and track them throughout life. He makes the case throughout the chapter that to be successful that only a certain amount of intelligence has to be obtained, around 115 and above. He makes an example by using the colleges of the last 10 noble prize winners and points out that most of them are known as just good colleges, and one would think they would be all most all would be the ivy league schools of the world. The chapter ends by giving examples of how they should try to test intelligence using forms of test that place more importance on creativity and how they could use it in the business world. Chapter 4 continues this concept of intelligence but instead focuses on how one was raised and how that affected how they turned out.
This chapter deals with the family environment and how it changes the fate of these gifted people. The two examples are listed as the previous chapters’ character Chris Langan and the new comer to the book Robert Oppenheimer. They then give the backstory to how Robert achieved his success and prominence in the world, while also showing the backstory of Chris Langan and how each differed. When looked at there is one thing that is abundantly clear one got breaks one got the short end of the stick. One was raised with attention and care for their education, while the other was raised in a broken house were education was the least thing focused on. This allowed Oppenheimer to become good with working with people and conversation, while on the other hand Langan became the opposite and did not garner the skills to get out of situations. This means someone even with the best mental intelligence can’t maximize their potential if they are not able to talk through
situations. Chapter 5 deals with culture and work while centering around the man named Joe Flom.
This chapter starts out like the rest and shows how from reached the success that he enjoys today. They talk about his academic success and how being in jewish family around the time of depression that led to him eventually starting up his own law firm during a time Jews were being discriminated against. Going back and examining his peers they see that they went through many of the same struggles Flom went through but never achieved his level of success as he did in fact they some of them never even got hired. The reason why he achieved the success is answered again with one simple word opportunities. It is seen that with maybe luck of the draw he was born at the right time. Because he was born during the great depression he is able to compete in a job market with low competition, and to add to that he was able to be in career that was going into his specialty. The chapter continues by going into the concept of the jewish culture of the families and how this helped raise the kids. they take an example of a young couple that went to New York for new opportunity and by working themselves up from the bottom were able to live a meaningful life. This sort of work ethic is then instilled in the kids and the next generation is helped by it and this becomes another advantage for those kids making them outliers. As Gladwell says they do not become successful in spite of their poor origins they
become successful because of their humble origins. This means like everything else in their lives this is an important part of who they were and where they went.