Meet Younghoon Kim, he is a media personality known for being right wing, Christian, and another one of those Trump lapdogs, 65 of his tweets start with “As the World’s Highest IQ Record Holder” and he really likes tweeting about Trump and Generative AI. He allegedly has the “World's Highest IQ Record,” boasting an IQ of 276. Honestly, it would be hard to miss, considering every form of social media he has directly mentions it with both his Instagram and Twitter handle having the word IQ in it. How could you disprove it? Clearly on his Instagram it says that Official World Record, World Memory Championship, and TPM a peer reviewed journal have all confirmed it. Unfortunately, all of the sources I just listed have essentially no reputability.

 

First, let's start with the Official World Record; sadly, I have to break it to you that world record companies' primary interest isn’t keeping tabs on human accomplishment, but rather the same thing as every other company, which is making money. For example, Guinness World Records allow you to submit any records at any time, but there's no saying when they’re going to actually get to any given submission, but let's say you’re a corporation looking to get some PR points with the audience of easily influenceable elementary schoolers. Well, what if you forked over some money and the folks at Guinness sent over someone to advise you and even judge your records? They might even give your company its own page in their book that no one reads anymore, all for a small price of 12 000 to 500 000 USD1. Back to Official World Records, their business model is essentially the same as Guinness, if you’d like to get a judge with their “fast track service” you would need to pay a fee of 375 euros, considerably less than Guinness but when you consider that the writers of their articles: Yasir Ali and “David” (yes there's only 2 of them) create a constant stream of the worst writing you’ve ever read, exerts being: “Official world record As February was coming to an end, the team saw a window of great weather, and therefore it was agreed that the event would take place on Saturday 3rd of March”., Tthis is written in first person 10 years after the record was set, and by someone who did not actually break the record2.  Multiple articles come up twice while going through their record list, and in their about section they include a “Wall Street Article” which leads to an article in the journal “Meer” which absolutely is not located on Wall Street. The article is written by Paolo Fabiani, who studies philosophy and pedagogy. If we look for any credibility, wow! We can see he has an interview about his five records in mental calculation and memorization, and upon closer look the article was written by PAOLO FABIANI. HE INTERVIEWED HIMSELF.3 To shorten this side tangent, official world records also has multiple articles copied word for word from other sites4 they have multiple lines in their about section that read as instructions such as: “And the registries, put a control and register in an internal book and in the web page.” completely unintelligible, no notes. The link to their “Founding Principals” straight up does not work.5 I think we can strike out Official World Records as a credible source for his IQ but if that isn't enough, reading the actual article written about Younghoon, its only sources are Younghoon’s website “United Sigma Intelligence Association” or USIA, I wish that name was fake. It also includes an image of David Ventura Aparicio, a member of USIA’s council and the president of Official World Records, you know it's a credible source when the owner has a direct beneficial connection with the recipient.6 Also, both of the links sourced lead to the same page, but that’s neither here nor there. Next on the list is World Memory Championship, World Memory Championship is a competition created by Tony Buzan where competitors memorize info in a time period, I’d go into more depth, but it’s ungodly boring. What's important is that obviously Younghoon has never officially won any of the championships, instead he has been awarded a Certificate of Title of being “The 2nd Tony Buzan”... ok! Below this award as a supposed proof of his deservingness is his entire paper he wrote about his IQ, as to say the article that Younghoon Kim wrote about Younghoon Kim’s IQ. This website is the only place I've found the paper, every other site has the paper withdrawn for being “Out of scope” or personally withdrawn by Younghoon Kim himself, and honestly it's the dumbest thing I've ever read. 

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Part Two:

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We start with the funniest admission of guilt possible, he admits that the testing used the WISC-V for his test, WISC standing for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. He used a child's test for his IQ test. He’s 36. Next, we get to the point that he doesn’t actually have an IQ of 276, even based on a child's test. The way an IQ scoring works is that it's measured in Standard Deviations, but that's a big word so we’re going to go with “steps” to contextualize this a bit more. When testing someone's IQ, the mean IQ is set as 100, and the test result you get is measured in steps from the mean, each of these steps being 15 IQ points. This would mean that 2 steps would be an IQ of 130 and -1 steps would be an IQ of 85. So how would you artificially inflate your IQ if you were given these parameters? If you answered make the steps bigger, you should probably never go into any field of research, but you’re right! For Kim's test he actually scored 7.33(repeating) steps above median, but his steps are instead using steps of 24, making his results insanely inflated, his actual score using the commonly used steps of 15 would be an IQ of 210, still high but remember this is a children's test. This score would actually put him lower on his “top 10 highest IQ’s” page from giga society (another one of his clubhouses) putting him under Terence Tao, Marilyn Vos Savant, and Christopher Hirata.7 Did they use skewed step too? Probably, but I'm too lazy to check that. He also cites the rarity of his score due to the many other clubhouses of insecurity he’s a part of, including Mega Society, which he has since left due to their “support of an alleged sex offender and extreme racial discrimination through eugenics”.8 Yikes. Does this paper show any of the actual testing he underwent? No! Is it peer reviewed? Also, no! Are there any coauthors aside from the guy the article is literally about? Yeah, you get the point.9,10 That’s World Memory Championships dealt with, finally Peer Reviewed Journal: TPM, surprisingly he is actually published on TPM, his article “MODELING AND PSYCHOMETRIC EVALUATION OF AN EXCEPTIONALLY HIGH IQ SCORE OF 276 IN A SINGLE CASE STUDY” doesn’t actually validate his IQ score in any way rather it uses his IQ score to call for a complete revamp in IQ testing because of his specialness. It really is just him talking about how special he is for scoring high on a test made for children. There's so much more about him that's just insanely stupid, he seems to of stolen the Giga society thing (a club for people with high IQs) from another guy Paul Cooijmans, someone who makes IQ tests and has a bachelor's degree in guitar. Academically Kim is an honorary professor, in creative thinking at Tony Buzan Academy, cognitive education and leadership at European City University whose address is quite literally an alleyway11.  His little boy band at USIA also has an article trying to disprove a Reddit thread (this is real).12  His entire life just boils down to such a funny grift because really all he does is push the same narratives that other right wings grifters do as in posting interaction bait and bouncing on trumps [thing] but he went through this entire process of writing and publishing papers just to suck at his grift and fall off after a few months.