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RobertLumley 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.
we will all be brain-dead in 70 years.
It's true that the downward trend can't go on forever, and to say that it's definitely going to continue would be (all by itself, without some other arguments) an appeal to history or slippery slope fallacy. However, when we see a trend as consistent and as potentially meaningful as the one below, it makes sense to start wondering why it is happening:
IQ Trend Analysis
I was mostly just trying to point out that you are extrapolating from a sample size of three points. Three points which have a tremendous amount of common causes that could explain the variation. Furthermore you aren't extrapolating 10% further from the span of your data, which might be ok, but actually 100% further. You're extrapolating for as long as we have data, which is... absurd.
One, I am used to seeing the term "sample size" applied to things like the people being studied, not a number of points done in a calculation. If there is some valid use of the term "sample size" that I am not aware of would you mind pointing me in the correct direction?
Two, I am not sure where you're getting "three points" from. If you mean the amount of IQ points that LessWrong has lost on the studies, then it was 7.18 points, not three.
Two points per year, which could be explained in other ways, sure. No matter what the trend, it could be explained in other ways. Even if it was ten points per year we could still say something like "The smartest people got bored taking the same survey over and over and stopped." There are always multiple ways to explain data. That possibility of other explanations does not rule out the potential that LessWrong is losing intelligent people.
Not sure what these 10% and 100% figures correspond to. If I am to understand why you said that, you will have to be specific about what you mean.
Including all of the data rather than just a piece of the data is bad why?
Three points referred to the number of surveys taken, which I didn't bother to look up, but I believe is three.
10% and 100% referred to the time span over which these data points referred to, ie. three years. Basically, I might be OK with you making a prediction for the next three months (still probably not) but extrapolating for three years based on three years of data seems a bit much to me.
Oh I see. The problem here is that "if the trend continues" is not a prediction. "I predict the trend will continue" would be a prediction. Please read more carefully the next time. You confused me quite a bit.
If you're not making a prediction, then it's about as helpful as saying "If the moon crashes into North America next year, LW communities will largely cease to exist."