It's not even about serial killers, but about people whose minds are beyond what our society is built to include. Most 160+ IQ people, I assume, are weird and quiet and nice enough. But I'm sure they struggle with making many (any?) real (normal?) relationships with other people. And many go crazy or something like crazy-adjacent. Look at how many philosophers went nuts.
The human animal is both incredibly limited and endlessly boastful. It's a helluva combination, and to people to be waist-deep in that kind of society, who sees obvious (to them) ways to make everything better, but not have a voice...yeah, that's going to bother you. Might not gonna value each human life as much as you should. Might not care too much about repercussions if you're already going crazy in isolation in your own house - prison or death might not seem like such major deterrents.
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But I'm probably wrong.
You claimed that 160+ IQ is a detriment, and that's why there are so many serial killers and people who collect their own toenail clippings at that IQ.
I asked for evidence. You've given me your own conjecture.
Given that a 160+ IQ is 4 standard deviations above the mean, it should be prevalent in about 1 in 30,000 people, or about 11,000 people overall in the US with an IQ at that level. If it turned them into serial killers, wouldn't we have a lot more serial killers?
Of course then you'd think that it would be impossible for them to relate to anyone, since they're so rare.
But being a 160 doesn't necessarily mean you ONLY can relate to another 160. If you assume you can make meaningful and strong relationships with people up to one standard deviation above or below yourself*, finding people of IQ 145 opens you up to about 1 in 750 people, or 440,000 people in the US with that level of intelligence.
But I'd postulate that the modern world actually helps to correct for that. People of high IQ cluster. They find their way into academia and think tanks. They find their way into places like Silicon Valley, or NYC, or DC, where they can find other people of high IQ.
Maybe in 1800, having such a high IQ might not have ever given you an outlet to express it, or other people similar to yourself, and I can imagine that would be very lonely. But this isn't 1800, and it's a lot easier to find other people of high IQ to cluster with. Once you have a few, then the pressures of the world being built for the center of the bell curve rather than the long tails is a lot easier to deal with.
Again, I see it in my own office. In a company with hundreds and hundreds (heck, with our acquisitions we could be over a thousand) PhDs, and many ultra-smart people w/o PhDs, I see the folks who are at the upper end of the distribution even within our own company tend to cluster and hang out with each other. Because they have found people close enough in intelligence and interests to relate to.
Either way...
You made the statement.
Do you have any actual evidence that extreme high IQ is correlated with sociopathic behaviors such as being a serial killer? I'm sure we could come up with anecdotes (Ted Kaczynski, for example), but we could also come up with killers who were just crazy and not extreme IQ (the DC Sniper).
* I don't have empirical evidence for a one-standard-deviation difference being a guide for being able to meaningfully relate to someone. However, in my own experience that tends to be about the range I've found personally. Someone beyond that on the low range, I find they can't keep up with a conversation and can't add any meaningful insight... Even worse, there's often a Dunning-Kruger effect where they can't shut up and keep saying things they THINK are meaningful or interesting, and they're not. Beyond the upper end of the range, I just ask questions and shut up and listen and hope I learn something. I've had that situation where I have something to add and you get that stare in which you realize they've already thought of that, debunked it, and why am I wasting their time?
