What's with the modesty about stats?

[Desthro]

To be honest, the modesty about stats is a general rule of thumb... there are numerous instances of people who are obviously super-intelligent. IQ 16 is high, but I sincerely doubt it is the highest. Also, let's say we find a child who is remarkably brilliant, say IQ 18. Insanity right? This child though, merely doesn't have enough world experience to warrant defaults in several skills, which is what defaults were meant to convey. You MIGHT know the answer to this, or know how to do it because you could have learned it. At age 6, I really doubt that child is going to know how to do certain things. That can be modeled with some sort of disadvantage, I forget what it is called... Anyway.

16 IQ might be the highest real-world IQ without limitations as modeled in GURPS, but IQ 17+ is probably out there. And how would one know if they had IQ 19 and -4 levels of Per and Will, along with a crippling learning disability?

Just putting that out there.