I have written before about a high-moder I have talked with off and on. His story is perhaps interesting, so I will retell it here. He’s not a client, nor has he been — we just talked as associates from time to time. He was never trying to hide his story, except from his employers, and we’ve talked about him here or on another site before. He’s recently dead and I wanted to review his life a bit.

“Tim” was an interesting fellow. He always felt like a high-moder (in that way that you can feel people’s mode just by being around them) but I could never get a solid bead on it. I did a test CIP interview with him but it had the problems that some folks’ do and wasn’t code-able. That may be a problem with my technique but I think he also saw the world in a different way.

He was certainly intelligent, as far as those measures go. His IQ fell between 170 and 180 (IQ is an estimate rather than a set number over time) which is high but nothing amazing, as many people told him over his adult years. I’m not sure what IQ actually measures, and many people argue that it’s useless. It may be, but it seems to me that there is probably a difference in thinking between someone who has been professionally scored in Tim’s range over many years versus someone who scores consistently around average. Which is 120? I can’t remember. I think “genius” is something like 165, so Tim was a few points ahead of Mensa membership.

My point there is that this probably showed that Tim had a different way of thinking. I think that this point is relevant to my discussion of him, as we will see.

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