Estimating the IQ of Luigi Mangione

An unidentified man assassinated the CEO of a health corporation using a silenced handgun and fled the scene. Rumour has it that, either through either a photo of him putting down his mask or a tip from a McDonalds worker, the authorities were able to pin the crime down on a suspect called Luigi Mangione.

His twitter account, goodreads account, linkedin and whatnot have been identified and this is what we know:

• He follows 73 people on twitter, mostly tpot/IDW/centrist adjacent people with the occassional odd face like my friend Max from minordissent, the Lindy Man, and Jash Dholani.

• On substack, he followed 12 people: Max, Hunter Ash, Pico Paco, Sam Harris, Jon Haidt, and a couple of other people I do not recognize. Largely the same crowd, but with a more dissident right bend.

• He went to Penn and got a masters in CS.

• Rich parents.

• Valedictorian.

• Jacked.

• 5’10’’ / 150 lbs.

• He has a manifesto where he says his motivation was to get back at the health industry for screwing over his mother for not covering her when they promised to.

• Some people speculate that he did ayahuasca and got mentally screwed over by it. Based on the available evidence, it’s possible, but I think people are promoting the theory because of the legendary Landshark tweet, not because it’s a plausible story.

Most of this information available (e.g. assassinating a CEO, height, weight) is not predictive of intelligence, so I will ignore it for now. Some of the other information here, however, is reasonably predictive of intelligence, notably being a valedictorian, having rich parents, and graduating from an ivy league university.

I estimated a year ago or so that the average Ivy league student has an IQ of about 130 based on one scientific study and the expected average from the mean SAT/ACT scores + regression to the mean. Given that he’s a White guy with wealthy parents, the admissions system was working against him, so it would be reasonable to infer that his SAT/ACT score was impressive.

The school he went to has 1400 students in PK-12, so about 100 students per grade, making him a 1/100 at that particular school.

Mathematically, assuming:

• He has an SAT score above 1500 (99th percentile) (or the ACT equivalent), and that performance on that test correlates at .8 with IQ.

• That he’s at least a 1/100 in academic ability, and that academic ability correlates at .7 with IQ (note: grades and IQ correlate at .69 after correcting for artefacts).

• He did get a masters beyond that, but I doubt that further education predicts IQ very much within Ivy league students.

His expected IQ is 139 with a SD of 9.

set.seed(1)
g <- rnorm(60000000, mean=0)
sat <- 0.8*g + rnorm(60000000)*sqrt(1-0.8^2)
gr <- 0.7*g + rnorm(60000000)*sqrt(1-0.7^2)

subby1 <- data.frame(g, sat)
subby1$gr = gr
subby2 <- subset(subby1, (subby1$sat > 2.23) & (subby1$gr > 2.23))
> mean(subby2$g)*15
[1] 38.8091
> sd(subby2$g)*15
[1] 8.887565

The verbal take

I made the mathematical estimate based on information that is easy to quantify, but there is a lot about him that suggests a reasonable level of intelligence, such as his wealthy parents and ability to write:

from here

He also wrote an essay about why Christianity’s rise over Paganism was due to selection (aka genes) when he was 15, which is pretty bold. I skimmed over it and it looks decent.

Rumour has it, he pulled down his mask once to flirt with a girl, and that contributed to his capture. Regardless of whether that is actually true, it would be haughty to assume low levels of intelligence from making one silly mistake when there is more information available that suggests high levels of intelligence.

I would estimate his IQ to be minimum 130, maximum 160 based on the fact that people that smart are extremely rare, though there is no information available to suggest that he must be less intelligent than that.