Christopher Langan
American autodidact (born 1952)
Summary
Christopher Michael Langan is an American horse rancher and former bar bouncer, known for his purported high intelligence and for a high score on the Mega Test, a self-administered, untimed, non-standardized IQ test that he took under the pseudonym Eric Hart. Under that name, Langan was formerly listed in the Guinness Book of Records high IQ section alongside Marilyn vos Savant and Keith Raniere, who had taken the same test. The record was discontinued in 1990, as high IQs are considered too unreliable to document as world records. Langan was later a subject of Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, in which Gladwell discussed why Langan's reputation for high intelligence had not led to greater conventional success. Langan has no degree, having twice dropped out of college. The book compared him with J. Robert Oppenheimer and focused on the influence of their respective environments on success.
Originally created by 24.13.68.141
5/27/2005, 5:00:23 AM
Modified
6/2/2026, 4:09:55 AM
Recent revisions
use lower case for "far-right"
/* */ He's embraced beyond outlier right
-cr
There is simply not enough information here for a section about Langan's religious and theological views. As per my previous reversion of Brown, she simply watched his interview and picked out a sentence for that article. There is no synthesis. The interview is likewise without synthesis. To merit a section, secondary sources should discuss his religious views. Good luck finding anything that is not, in fact, about the CTMU (section above). Per [[WP:ONUS]] please don't restore without consensus
/* References */ per talk
No, see previous edsum and talk section "Redvaldsen renorming". I have challenged this inclusion on several grounds, and thus, per [[WP:ONUS]], "The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on editors seeking to include disputed content." Please discuss in talk and get consensus for your change.
Add 1999 20/20 testing detail (no specific IQ figure reported) to IQ section; note 2002 CTMU publication in PCID (ISCID journal) in CTMU section
Add peer-reviewed Redvaldsen (2020) re-norming to IQ section; split religious/theological content into its own section and remove duplicated God/soul/afterlife sentence; fix citation markup (BBC Science Focus), Guinness title italics, DEFAULTSORT typo, stray refend bullet; copyedit
/* Religious and political views */ Emily Brown is [[WP:UNDUE]]. This is not an interview *with* Brown and Langan, she is just a writer who watched his Youtube interview and then picked out a sentence she liked, and reported without synthesis.
/* Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe */ This part is about the CTMU and not religious or political views. Neither is it clear that he has religious views beyond his god of the CTMU.
/* IQ testing */ Reference was removed
I don't think that was a better summary of the main text as it loses things like the 9/11 truth movement and attention from the alt-right
duplication
Undid revision [[Special:Diff/1356513394|1356513394]] by [[Special:Contributions/JarvisIQ|JarvisIQ]] ([[User talk:JarvisIQ|talk]]) Redvaldsen is already refererred to at the end of the first paragraph of the IQ testing section. Additionally I have concerns about this paper that I'll add to talk, but it is, in any case, unnecessary repetition
Add 2020 Redvaldsen analysis of Mega and Titan Test score accuracy
Rescuing orphaned refs ("baffler" from rev 1356303959; ":0" from rev 1356303959)
Split CTMU from religious and political views; add sourced Christian media coverage of Langan's God-related comments.
Remove redundant threshold sentence after chronology clarification.
Clarify chronology of Mega Test attempts, pseudonym use, membership threshold, and one-attempt design.
notable for scoring highly (as Hart), not for simply taking the test.
