Here is my take: I would say someone with COG or INT 30 is by current standards a "genius": they can understand concepts that most of us never "get", rapidly figure out complex problems or understand large bodies of information, make use of information from the Mesh in such an effective way that it acts as an extension of their knowledge and thinking. They are at the limits of what we can imagine as human. Being a genius does by no means rule out stupidity or silly/bad ideas, they just get expressed in much more clever ways. And it does not mean they produce Einstein/Newton-level insights: most never focus on truly important problems. Motivation and ambition are required to truly excel. But since there are so many more people at this level around than today, the overall effect is still enormous. COG/INT 40 is posthuman. This is the kind of thinking we do not see today outside fiction: people solving crimes in their head, deducing what other people will do with uncanny precision and having clever plan B's for all eventualities, setting up statistical models on the fly to make the right decision, keeping 20 things in memory simultaneously. Very hard to play or GM. Fortunately many supergeniuses like this tend to focus their intelligence on even narrower domains than the mere geniuses; transhumanity has not yet had any universal supergeniuses.

IQ (and presumably physical performance) tends to be distributed as a Gaussian distribution (the bell curve). Most are close to average (68% are within one standard deviation), and then there are rapidly diminishing tails of high- and low-performers. Only 0.1% are above three standard deviations. But this is not the same as actual success. It is well documented that in science productivity is very skew (Lotka's law) - one in a hundred scientists produce a hundred times more paper than the others. This also goes for research impact: most scientists have very little impact, but a few have enormous effects. An interesting survey is Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment" where he used ranking methods to get lists of the top scientists and artists. Again, the distribution is very uneven in space, time and level of effect. And measuring success in wealth, again produces a very skew distribution (lognormal with a power law tail). By this kind of success measures, most of the population matter very little. Not even when they are actually smart, accomplished or well-off. I think the conclusion should be that actual stats are like IQ: nice to have, equipped with a well-defined mean and not too many extreme outliers. I doubt Einstein would have scored amazingly high on an IQ test (just very high). But when it comes to make a splash in the world and history many factors need to come together: ambition, good aptitudes, the right question or right situation, beating the competition... and that produces a very skew situation. Einstein had about four super-insights (Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, special and general relativity; the first three in the same year), which is four more than nearly all scientists, and three more than most famous scientists. What does this mean in RPG terms? I think it means that high aptitudes are not the measure of the superiority of a character, just a sign that they have one less stumbling block to greatness. A COG 40 character can understand Einstein's thinking easily, but whether they can conceive of an equally profound question to solve depends on other factors.

benji wrote:

RE Human Average: I've worked out human average in EP to be 13 for all traits. The slightly-below average range is 10-12, the slightly above is 14-16. Between 6 and 9, and between 17 and 20 would be exceptional traits, while 5 and lower and everything above 21 would be statistical outlier. So Einstein, say, would possibly have an exceptional attribute trait and a natural COG around 25. It's also possible that some people had naturally higher traits but ran in to the limits of a flat. This is best viewed in terms of SOM. An exceptional athlete might well understand their own movement well enough to do something truly amazing, if only their body weren't so limited. But it could also work with things like COG and INT. I remember someone describing watching the French Philosopher Derrida lecture, and how he would seem constantly frustrated because he was just barely able to understand the ideas he himself was coming up with. This could be the experience of having a COG of 25 in a Flat: there's a brilliant idea just outside of your grasp, if only your brain was structured in such a way to understand it. This also balances out fairly well for character design. Everyone has enough points to at least be average in everything and then excel in a handful of areas, or (if you do 15s across the board) be a little above average at everything, which is itself pretty extraordinary.

Out of curiosity, how did you come to the conclusion of that number for a human average?