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amacfie comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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So people just got silly with the IQ field again.
Anyone expecting otherwise was also being silly.
I'd almost rather see SAT scores at this point.
That'd be problematic for people outside the US, unfortunately. I don't know the specifics of how most of the various non-US equivalents work, but I expect conversion to bring up issues; the British A-level exams, for example, have a coarse enough granularity that they'd probably taint the results purely on those grounds. Especially if the average IQ around here really is >= 140.
SAT scores are going to be of limited utility when so many here are clustered at the highest IQs. A lot more people get perfect or near-perfect SAT scores than get 140+ IQ scores.
Yeah, but the difference is that the majority of people actually have SAT scores. It's pretty easy to go through your life without ever seeing the results of an IQ test, but I suspect there's a big temptation to just give a perceived "reasonable" answer anyway. I would rather have a lot of accurate results that are a little worse at discriminating than a lot of inaccurate results which would hypothetically be good at discriminating if they were accurate.
Note that in addition to being US-centric, the SAT scoring system has recently changed. When I took the SAT's, the maximum score was 1600, as it had two sections. Now it has 3 sections, with a maximum score of 2400. So my SAT score is going to look substantially worse compared to people who took it since 2005... and let's not even get into the various "recentering" changes in the 80's and 90's.
A majority of US people perhaps. Aargh the Americano-centrism, yet again.
Two obvious questions missing from the survey btw are birth country, and current country of residence (if different).
It's hard to conceive of a mindset which would allow writing that sort of generalization with cringing. Don't people have a prejudice trigger that pops up whenever you they say something like that? The same way it pops up whenever you are about to put your foot in your mouth and say something prejudiced about sex or race?
No, no they don't. Quite often it seems like they're not all that inhibited about saying something prejudiced about sex or race; they just disclaim it with "I'm not racist/sexist, but..."
Unless there's a particular reason to expect LWers in the U.S. to be significantly smarter or dumber than other LWers, it should be a useful sample.
Actually, how should one measure own IQ ? I wouldn't know a reasonable place where to start looking for it, as the internet is full of advertising for IQ measurements, i.e., lots of intentional misinformation. Especially avoiding anything restricted to a single location like USA - this makes SAT's useless, well, at least for me.
mensa. Or a qualified psychologist
Or people only have old results from when they were kids, when being at all bright quickly gets you out of range.