Weird to read over the Twitter threads like "I just can't believe all these historical figures reputed as great geniuses had IQs...
Weird to read over the Twitter threads like “I just can’t believe all these historical figures reputed as great geniuses had IQs as high as 140”, because like, I test around 175. People can be smart! Someone’s gonna be the long tail.
Like yeah, there’s a whole bell curve to it!
“Well the only people I’ve met below 70 had Down Syndrome, that doesn’t count”.
Yeah, I’ll let you know first time I meet someone above 130 without autism.
Also all the people like “they said I was impressively smart but didn’t give a number” yeah, my dad was the school district lawyer, probably better at squeezing things out of state employees than most.
People saying stuff about scores being normalized by age yeah, like I said they retested me occasionally (just one, not the whole battery) and I heard it held up, though I never heard numbers again, hell maybe it DID go down with older better sampling and keeping subjects from anchoring on the first score was part of WHY they don’t give that stuff out freely. Who knows.
Well, you hear so many unsubstantiated claims about high IQs on the internet, and it’s just weird that if you’re in enough comment sections you regularly meet 200-300 out of the 80 most intelligent Americans alive today.
So people just tend to take these claims with a giant grain of salt (compared to a few SDs down, like claiming a 140-150, where a 1:~2500 chance on the upper end seems reasonable in the right circles given base rates).
You must see how being part of the ~33k most intelligent humans to have ever lived and one of the ~2.5k most intelligent humans alive today is kind of an extraordinary claim that most people would only accept with equally extraordinary evidence.
Yeah, though it is funny the people like “I wouldn’t expect to first encounter someone anomalously intelligent on rat-adj tumblr”
That is exactly where I would expect