gwern comments on Is love a good idea? - Less Wrong

1 Post author: adamzerner 22 February 2014 06:59AM

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Comment author: gwern 22 February 2014 11:07:43PM *  7 points [-]

145+ IQ (13/1000ths): 93 million

I'm guessing that's from a base of 100? If so, you're off by almost a standard deviation there: the mean world IQ is very far from Western normed 100s. IIRC, the population weighted estimate from the Lynn national IQ estimates puts the global mean at maybe 90. That's going to affect the tails like 145+ a lot.

Comment author: trist 23 February 2014 02:20:07PM 0 points [-]

Of course... I thought 100 was meant to be the global mean. Lynn set Great Britian's mean, nothing like a flexible definition!

The (not very good) data doesn't bear out a 90ish global mean though, the sub-90 IQ countries are much lower population than over 90. To be pessimistic I'd take another half sigma. (92.5)

  • World Population: 7 billion
  • 145+ IQ (1/4200): 17 million
  • Male (1/2): 8 million
  • College-aged (1/10): 800 thousand
  • Normal weight (3/5): 480 thousand

Actually useful numbers may be able to be obtained by using more locale specific filters.

Comment author: Creutzer 23 February 2014 04:51:48PM *  3 points [-]

Who exactly cares about intelligent people half-way across the globe anyway, when personal relationships (and the possibility of finding people with whom those are possible) are the issue?

Comment author: gwern 23 February 2014 09:27:15PM 2 points [-]

You can meet them online, or move to other countries. Personally, for such an estimate I'd be looking only at Anglophones: learning a language just to increase one's dating pool seems pretty far to go for love.

Comment author: trist 23 February 2014 06:36:48PM -1 points [-]

Hence the actually useful numbers bit! Yet I do care to some extent, if for some reason I end up there in future, just less then everyone here and now. Maybe one could weight populations by inverse distance?

Comment author: [deleted] 01 March 2014 11:46:58AM 0 points [-]

OTOH, a linear combination of Gaussians with a standard deviation of 15 and different means will not be a Gaussian and will have a standard deviation larger than 15. So a naive calculation as in trist's comment below will be an underestimate.