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ChristianKl comments on Stupid Questions August 2015 - Less Wrong
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I was recently at a bar with some friends, most of which are from the same physics PhD program as me. We had a discussion about how hard it is to spend all your time around unusually intelligent people, and then go out into the real world and have conversations with normal people. It seems to be intelligence-related, because it's usually much easier to have a conversation with, for example, a psychology grad student from Singapore than with a fashion designer who lives in the same city as me.
Is this just because we have no practice talking to people of average-ish intelligence?
Is it because intelligence gaps are inherently difficult in social settings?
Is there some factor other than intelligence that's causing this?
Are we just socially inept?
(Is this more of an open thread question or stupid question?)
On what basis do you believe that fashion designers have lower IQ?
I will admit that when I wrote that, I was going off of blurry memories of seeing test scores. I will also admit that I kind of regret introducing the topic the way I did. I wanted to convey that I was comparing people who were both similarly removed from me culturally, but were from populations that would generally have different average intelligence from each other.
In that description, I was referring to literally just "some person who said they are in the fashion industry". This includes fashion designers, accountants, HR people, photographers, janitors, (materials engineers? computer graphics engineers?) etc. But sure, let's go with fashion designers.
Using IQ <==> SAT/GRE conversion tables, if you look up test scores for entering visual arts majors (I think that's what a college-educated fashion designer would study?), they average about 115 IQ, whereas GRE scores for entering psychology PhDs predict about 125-130 IQ (this one's hard, because I can only find "scaled" composite scores, rather than raw composite scores). This is about a one standard deviation difference.
I mainly believe in using SAT and GRE scores as a proxy for IQ because Scott Alexander believes in this enough to pay attention to it on the LW census. Also, I have skimmed some literature on it. I've not examined it carefully, and I'm interested to hear dissenting opinions.
This seems like clear evidence that your average college-educated fashion designer has a higher than average IQ, by a full standard deviation. Evidently, your average psychology PhD student (at the two competitive schools I looked at) has an IQ nearly a full standard deviation above that. Although what I said looks like the kind of thing someone would say if they thought fashion designers were stupid, that wasn't my intent.