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whowhowho comments on Einstein's Superpowers - Less Wrong
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Not only do I agree, but I can't even envision what such “impressive supporting evidence” could be. I would be extremely surprised if anyone who had more than a vague idea of what Einstein did claimed to be as smart as him with a straight face; even if someone I thought was actually in the same league as him said that, I'd assume they are in jest or out of their mind -- indeed because such a statement would pattern-match a crackpot. (IME, people who are both extremely intelligent and very arrogant may say stuff like “99.99% of the people are idiots”, but they hardly ever say “I am as smart as $famously_smart_person”.
And BTW, I don't think many laymen by “Einstein” mean “someone as smart as the 60th smartest person in my home town of 60,000” -- they usually mean “one of the friggin' smartest people ever”.
What's rarely appreciated is that Einstein also lucked out, besides being 1 in 10^? genius. A lot of things went right for him early on. On the other hand, a lot of things went wrong for him later on, and so he was left out of the mainstream scientific progress, save for his incisive QM critique.
Nearly there: you can't predict backward from success to raw (non domain specific) ability, for just the same reason you can't predict forward from high IQ to success in arbitrary field.
But you can predict forward from high IQ to success in an arbitrary field, at least to some degree. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_outcomes.
They're not the same, but they do correlate (which is why it's not pointless to define g in the first place); now, due to regression to the mean, someone better at theoretical physics than 99.999999% of the population (and no, I don't think that's too many 9s) is likely not also better at general intelligence than 99.999999% of the population -- but I very strongly doubt that the correct number of 9s is less than half that many. (Anyway, I'm not sure it'd make sense to define g precisely enough to tell whether someone's 1 in 10^6 or 1 in 10^9.)