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Bongo comments on Theoretical "Target Audience" size of Less Wrong - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: Louie 16 November 2010 09:27PM

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Comment author: Bongo 17 November 2010 07:25:50PM *  5 points [-]

I know rationalists who seriously claim that we shouldn’t spend effort trying to grow LW because over half of the people smart enough to even follow the conversation (much less add to it) are already here.

That would mean LW posters are 200 out of 500 million. That is, about 99.9999th percentile. That is, about IQ 172. Also, everyone in the Mega Society hangs out on LW.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 November 2010 08:57:48PM *  4 points [-]

A more plausible argument would be that there are other preconditions such as values, spare time, peculiarities in processing social signalling, ect. that are in conjunction with an appropriately high IQ met by a group on the same scale of magnitude as LW.

Also getting the real number of people with nearly any IQ level is tricky. The global IQ distribution is badly non-Gaussian due to many factors.

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