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DaFranker comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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This also explains a lot of things. People regard IQ as if it is meaningless, just a number, and they often get defensive when intellectual differences are acknowledged. I spent a lot of time doing research on adult giftedness (though I'm most interested in highly gifted+ adults) and, assuming the studies were done in a way that is useful (I've heard there are problems with this), and my personal experiences talking to gifted adults are halfway decent as representations of the gifted adult population, there are a plethora of differences that gifted adults have. For instance, in "You're Calling Who A Cult Leader?" Eliezer is annoyed with the fact that people assume that high praise is automatic evidence that a person has joined a cult. What he doesn't touch on is that there are very significant neurological differences between people in just about every way you could think of, including emotional excitability. People assume that others are like themselves, and this causes all manner of confusion. Eliezer is clearly gifted and intense and he probably experiences admiration with a higher level of emotional intensity than most. If the readers of LessWrong and Hacker News are gifted, same goes for many of them. To those who feel so strongly, excited praise may seem fairly normal. To all those who do not, it probably looks crazy. I explained more about excitability in the comments.
I also want to say (without getting into the insane amount of detail it would take to justify this to the LW crowd - maybe I will do that later, but one bit at a time) that in my opinion, as a person who has done lots of reading about giftedness and has a lot of experience interacting with gifted people and detecting giftedness, the idea that most survey respondents are giving real answers on the IQ portion of the survey seems very likely to me. I feel 99% sure that LessWrong's average IQ really is in the gifted range, and I'd even say I'm 90%+ sure that the ballpark hit on by the surveys is right. (In other words, they don't seem like a group of predominantly exceptionally or profoundly gifted Einsteins or Stephen Hawkings, or just talented people at the upper ends of the normal range with IQs near 115, but that an average IQ in the 130's / 140's range does seem appropriate.)
This says nothing about the future though... The average IQ has been decreasing on each survey for an average of about two points per year. If the trend continues, then in as many years as LessWrong has been around, LessWrong may trend so far toward the mean that LessWrong will not be gifted anymore (by all IQ standards that is, it would still be gifted by some definitions and IQ standards but not others). I will be writing a post about the future of LessWrong very soon.
Looks like Aumann at work. My own readings, though more specifically on teenage giftedness in the 145+ range, along with stuff on ASD and asperger, heavily corroborate with this.
When I was 17, my (direct) family and I had strong suspicions that I was in this range of giftedness - suspicions which were never reliably tested, and thus neither confirmed nor infirmed. It's still up in the air and I still don't know whether I fit into some category of gifted or special individuals, but at some point I realized that it wasn't all that important and that I just didn't care.
I might have to explore the question a bit more in depth if I decide to return into the official educational system at some point (I mean, having a paper certifying that you're a genius would presumably kind of help when making a pitch at university to let you in without the prerequisite college credit because you already know the material). Just mentioning all of the above to explain a bit where my data comes from. Both of my parents and myself were all reading tons of books, references, papers and other information along with several interviews with various psychology professionals for around three months.
Also, and this may be another relevant point, the only recognized, official IQ test I ever took was during that time, and I had a score of "above 130"² (verbal statement) and reportedly placed in the 98th and 99th percentiles on the two sections of a modified WAIS test. The actual normalized score was not included in the report (that psychologist(?¹) sucked, and also probably couldn't do the statistics involved correctly in the first place).
However, I was warned that the test lost statistical significance / representativeness / whatever above 125, and so that even if I had an IQ of 170+ that test wouldn't have been able to tell - it had been calibrated for mentally deficient teenagers and very low IQ scores (and was only a one-hour test, and only ten of the questions were written, the rest dynamic or verbal with the psychologist). Later looking-up-stats-online also revealed that the test result distributions were slightly skewed, and that a resulting converted "IQ" of "130" on this particular test was probably more rare in the general population than an IQ of 130 normally represents, because of some statistical effects I didn't understand at the time and thus don't remember at all.
Where I'm going with this is that this doesn't seem like an isolated effect at all. In fact, it seems like most of North America in general pays way more attention to mentally deficient people and low IQs than to high-IQs and gifted individuals. Based on this, I have a pretty high current prior that many on LW will have received scores suffering from similar effects if they didn't specifically seek the sorts of tests recommended by Mensa or the likes, and perhaps even then.
Based on this, I would expect such effects to compensate or even overcompensate for any upward nudging in the self-reporting.
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I don't know if it was actually a consulting psychologist. I don't remember the title she had (and it was all done in French). She was "officially" recognized to be in legal capacity to administrate IQ tests in Canada, though, so whatever title is normally in charge of that is probably the right one.
Based on this, the other hints I mention in the text, and internet-based IQ tests consistently giving me 150-ish numbers when at peak performance and 135-ish when tired (I took those a bit later on, perhaps six months after the official one), 135 is the IQ I generally report (including in the LW survey) when answering forms that ask for it and seems like a fairly accurate guess in terms of how I usually interact with people of various IQ levels.