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Yes, I know all this - but I wasn't asking for a definition of intelligence, nor was my question dependent upon it. See my answer to loctrice[^] above.
It was never meant to be a science question...
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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IQ scores aren't an absolute measure of intelligence, it's a relative scale. 100 is average by definition: if half of people score lower than you and half score higher, you score 100. That doesn't say anything about how "intelligent" in absolute terms 100 is: if the general population becomes more intelligent then you would have to be more intelligent to score 100.
Scoring 100 simply means that you took a general aptitude test that about half of people would score lower on and half of people would score higher on. That's all. It can be taken as a relative indicator of mental ability, but there's no specific quantity of brainpower that is 100 IQ. 100 is simply defined as average by averaging scores through statistical sampling.
BTW, this is why IQ tests are notoriously unreliable at the high end: so few people fall into the super high range that you can't get a good statistical sample to use as a gauge. The difference between say 180 and 200 IQ is pure guesswork, the tests can't really score that high because not enough people on the planet can hit that range to provide a good dataset for calibrating those scores (not unless you tested the entire planet, anyway).
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Yes, I know all this... it wasn't the question though! Please see my previous answers above...
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Oh OK, I just read the OP and thought that was what you were asking.
By asking how smart an average person is, what you're really asking is how smart people are in general. Since we're (apparently) the smartest beings that we're aware of, we're pretty much all off the charts from that perspective. In general, a person of average intelligence is very intelligent indeed and capable of most things that humans can do.
Also, being average has some real advantages, because we live in a world built for the average. It's not an easy world to understand for those who are too far below or above average. I've known some super-intelligent (but not autistic) academics who were absolute basket cases when it came to relating to people and navigating the everyday world, so in some ways it can be too much of a good thing.
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I tried to say pretty much the same things. You said it so much better!
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It's the difference between:
- Med school versus Arts
- F35 versus Flight Simulator
- Programming versus coding
- Corporate versus real estate
- No brains needed; just good genes
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You have really asked the wrong question. Average intelligence is probably pretty good for doing most things humans need to do (or we would be extinct by now). I submit the more appropriate question (assuming Gaussian distribution) is how tight the standard deviation is. Given that the number spread is small (seem to recall 70 is considered severely challenged and I would submit most above 136 are also severely challenged but in a different way), it is likely that most of the population is extremely close to 100. I am going to guess that 70 is 3 standard deviations below and 136 is 3 standard deviations above. That puts *a lot* of people very close to 100! That also means those just below 100 are just as smart as those just above for all practical purposes.
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Yeah but... you (and just about everyone else) is answering the wrong question - it isn't that I asked the wrong one, though perhaps I could have put it better. However, your point
Average intelligence is probably pretty good for doing most things humans need to do (or we would be extinct by now)
is a good one - and begs a question close to what I was originally asking: is it still good enough for the modern world?
Yes, we were smart enough to crawl out of the caves and build a technological world and grow it to a population of 7 billion and growing.... But are we smart enough to survive it?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Your clarification makes a difference. I think we are probably doing just fine. We haven't killed off each other yet and, as StatementTerminator observed, we are getting steadily smarter as a species (no data other than bias to support that claim). I think we are getting smarter at a rate that lets us expand boundaries without doing too awfully much that we might characterize as a stupid idea in retrospect.
I think the answer to your modified question is yes. We seem to be muddling along quite nicely with most people arguably happy with their lives and slowly making the world a better place for their kids and grandkids. I think if it weren't good enough, we would be imploding as a species pretty rapidly.
After I posted, it occurred to me that "good enough" is the right answer to "How smart is average?". Average smarts is good enough for just about everything to have a productive, happy life and do worthwhile things.
modified 9-May-16 12:21pm.
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Well.. I'm not sure we aren't imploding....
We seem to be muddling along quite nicely with most people arguably happy with their lives
"Most people"? From a global perspective, most people lead pretty desperate lives though, like grass growing in cracks in the pavement, it's amazing how many people manage to smile though it. There's little even "quite nice" about much of what's going on in much of the world. And even in the West, freedom and democracy (the limited form of it we have) is facing some real threats, to which it may well succumb. And most of these threats are ones we have brought upon ourselves - not so smart, really. And have we, as a species, got what it takes to deal with the global issues such as climate change - the effects of which could be quite enormous? I am far from convinced that we have.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Society is created largely by and for the average, who are the vast majority of the population. On the whole we have the intelligence to deal with the challenges we face. Where we fail is with greed and myopic thinking, and this is actually more of a problem with the highly intelligent: it's the really smart ones who exploit the rest of society for individual gain.
For instance, the burning of fossil fuels which has led to climate change wasn't a stupid thing to do for those who were driving it, they profited well and got exactly what they wanted. There's plenty of evidence that energy companies knew quite well the consequences of what they were doing, they were plenty smart enough to realize that, as well as realize that they could profit from it while leaving others in the future to pay for the consequences.
Intelligence isn't the problem in society, it's the lack of caring about other people.
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But if this lack of caring has catastrophic consequences, as climate change could do, then from a species point of view, the actions that led to it can not be called intelligent. The short term gain of the few at the expense of the species - even if not terminal decline, at least a heavy price - is not very smart, really.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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When asking about IQ scores you are talking about individual intelligence. Projecting intelligence onto the species as a whole is a bit of a stretch, the species is set of genetic code not a thinking being.
There is nothing to say that intelligence is necessarily good for a species if the goal of a species is survival and reproduction. Bacteria aren't very intelligent, but from a survival standpoint they have us beat don't they?
To put it another way, what is smart for the individual may be bad (or "dumb") for the species in the aggregate. We are much more likely to wipe ourselves out by being too smart than not being smart enough.
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Those who think human intelligence is not measurable in the aggregate are mistaken. One can argue successfully only about how accurately it can be measured, what measure is best, and how useful the assessed IQ of a single individual is. Human intelligence appears to be normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15 points, so that 65% of the population measures between 85 and 115.
That means most of the population is pretty freakin' average.
That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around.
That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove.
It means China, with its population of 1.2 billion, should generate Einsteins at a rate four times that of the United States. This applies to mere geniuses too, of which there are significantly more. This should worry anyone concerned about US competitiveness in the world.
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Well, you have to consider the fact that most of those geniuses are likely born into grinding poverty and are lucky to survive to adulthood, let alone get an education and make use of their brains. For the sake of competitiveness, providing things like health care, education, and opportunity matter a lot more than the size of the talent pool.
China may understand this better than the US though, since they seem to be trying hard to improve those things while the US has been going backwards for decades.
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That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around.
I encounter plenty of people with IQs of 135, in programming and physics (occupationally), law (a former SO was a law professor who once told me "you're pretty smart, and you're not even a lawyer"), and Mensa (132 on Stanford-Binet, which has an SD of 16, is the minimal requirement for entry).
That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world,
Not really. I know two brothers, both of whom have over IQs over 200. One scored in the top 100 on the Putnam exam and got his PhD in algebraic topology from UCLA when he was 23. Through him I met a fellow who scored in the top 10 on the Putnam. IQ tests are child's play for people at that level.
Mathematician Terence Tao and physicist Chris Herata purportly have IQs over 220, and Guinness listed Korean engineer Kim Ung Yong at 210 and Marilyn vos Savant at 228 (they no longer have a highest IQ category because of unreliability at those levels). Oh, and Einstein, while of course brilliant and deeply insightful, is estimated to have had an IQ about the same as Stephen Hawking's -- 160. IQ measures something, but it isn't the thing folks like that have.
so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove.
Yeah, internal evidence strongly indicates that he's lying. It's particularly amusing that he claims that he missed the Mensa entrance by 1 point (despite other people claiming that Mensa scores are inflated by 20% so as to qualify more people and thus make more money -- bwahahah) because his multiplication and division were rusty, and making the age old excuse of people who fail odd-one-out tests that the correct answers are chosen arbitrarily.
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That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around.
I encounter plenty of people with IQs of 135, in programming and physics (occupationally), law (a former SO was a law professor who once told me "you're pretty smart, and you're not even a lawyer"), and Mensa (132 on Stanford-Binet, which has an SD of 16, is the minimal requirement for entry).
That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world,
Not really. I know two brothers, both of whom have IQs over 200. One scored in the top 100 on the Putnam exam and got his PhD in algebraic topology from UCLA when he was 23. Through him I met a fellow who scored in the top 10 on the Putnam. IQ tests are child's play for people at that level.
Mathematician Terence Tao and physicist Chris Herata purportly have IQs over 220, and Guinness listed Korean engineer Kim Ung Yong at 210 and Marilyn vos Savant at 228 (they no longer have a highest IQ category because of unreliability at those levels). Oh, and Einstein, while of course brilliant and deeply insightful, is estimated to have had an IQ about the same as Stephen Hawking's -- 160. IQ measures something, but it isn't the thing folks like that have.
so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove.
Yeah, internal evidence strongly indicates that he's lying. It's particularly amusing that he claims that he missed the Mensa entrance by 1 point (despite other people claiming that Mensa scores are inflated by 20% so as to qualify more people and thus make more money -- bwahahah) because his multiplication and division were rusty, and making the age old excuse of people who fail odd-one-out tests that the correct answers are chosen arbitrarily.
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Member 12023988 wrote: because his multiplication and division were rusty
More to the point, anyone with an IQ in the 180 range would not have to remember or even be taught how to do multiplication and division. Someone on that level would be able to quickly derive methods for doing so on the spot, easily.
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Well, that's not "more to the point", because it's not me who was explaining why he failed the test questions, I was simply quoting his explanation. As I said, his moronic and dishonest explanation that his multiplication and division were "rusty" was "particularly amusing". As I wrote elsewhere,
Quote: There's no division on these tests that even a halfwit can't do in their heads, and even if there were such problems, manual multiplication and division are trivial rote procedures that high IQ brains don't forget. People with 200 IQs can visualize in multiple dimensions; they don't struggle with arithmetic. If this person scored 200 on "official" tests, how did he manage that with such poor skills, and why did he do so much worse on a test that purportedly has scores inflated by 20%? These are the sorts of obvious questions that people with average IQs don't bother to ask.
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here is some quantitative data that might actually give you some insight into your question:
[^]
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I work with software engineers and other technologists, so my world is populated by folks with average IQ well above 100 - probably 120's. I was tested at 160 in grade school, but only got middling grades through high school because I was much more interested in tearing around the farm on my dirtbike. However, when I got excited about electrical engineering I got top grades because I started studying. My university grades would not have been possible without both the CPU and the effort.
Is a high IQ test score meaningful? Not in isolation - but it certainly indicates potential.
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Wombat:
(a) IQ score determines individual success pretty much in proportion to the prevailing level of meritocracy.
(b) Ie, rigidly structured societies heavily dampen IQ sorting. In history we can often find the top strata of some societies infested with complete maroons.
(c) Wombats have square poop. I have one that often browses through my back yard, leaving scat.
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It's actually quite an important question - as "dumb" jobs get automated the entry level for having a real job gets higher. That means that a growing number of people must be unable to find work. So their lives can - to them - lack validation. If I were one of them I would get angry. So when a person of average intelligence can't find something meaningful to do, all hell might break loose.
Needs a better brain than mine to re-engineer society.
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Is a Stormtrooper poker night just a Game of Clones?
Did anyone notice a theme this week?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
modified 6-May-16 11:18am.
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Sigh. I'd been looking forward to being distracted by "The Thought". You've sunk solo.
(Modified: just fixed a typo)
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
modified 6-May-16 14:56pm.
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