Probably.
@W.D.Clinger reports its origin in this post.
This table comes from: the
IQ and Chess strength website
Where it was copied from Kevin O'Byrne, who styled himself as
Kevin of the Teachers and was
remembered less than fondly by many of those who knew him. The
Q and Chess strength website expressed skepticism about that table, using it only to motivate the following prose:
If this is true, then I guess all us slaves to our conditioning had better hope that the conditioning is good conditioning! Now that the vast majority of readers are feeling suitably outraged, it is time to present...
At trial, a witness testified that O'Byrne had been hospitalized three times for paranoid schizophrenia. (
The Times, 18 August 1993, p. 3)
The table as reproduced on the chess web site says the scores should be interpreted according to a standard deviation of 15. This is common for modern tests. 160 on this scale is +4σ. The test psychometrics don't work at high or low extremes because the questions are calibrated to reveal the most difference near the middle of scale. To distinguish people with, say, 150 and 170 scores respectively you would need a greater preponderance of very hard questions that most normal people would miss. These very hard questions would serve to separate the 170 geniuses from the 150 simpletons.
So no, it doesn't make sense to assign all those wildly fanciful properties to scores that differ only by 5 points up in the 99.997-ish-th percentile.
