What's wrong about talking about how smart we are?
There is a widespread prejudice against acknowledging your own intelligence.
"It's sends a bad signal." Does it? Or is there a widespread prejudice against acknowledging your own intelligence?
Oh. You already knew that. Yes, it does send a bad signal, and it sends such a signal precisely because there is such a prejudice. Normatively, the prejudice seems like a bad idea, but descriptively, such a prejudice exists and it would be foolish to violate it.
I think you've motivated me to start a thread or two.
I expect you'll get downvoted; this thread is only tangentially related to discussing our intelligence (in that collecting empirical evidence is fairly noble) and it's at -3 at time of posting.
You think it's better to send a signal that we consciously kowtow to irrational prejudice against us?
Does this prejudice empower us, or disempower us? Does bending to it empower us, or disempower us?
Being right where the prevailing prejudice is wrong is exactly the kind of signal I often like to send - it attracts the right kind of people.
The latest survey shows that the average LessWronger who entered his SAT or ACT is roughly in the top 0.11%. This is insanely high. For comparison, top 2% can be Mensa members. I do not know the correlation between SAT/ACT and IQ, but I know it's fairly high. Anyway, I'm very curious to see the average score on a real, culture-fair IQ test. Those are the only two tests that are free, online, correct and culture fair, from what I know.
http://www.cerebrals.org/wp/tests/jcti/
http://www.etienne.se/cfnse/
Many people would prefer not to have people knowing their scores. That's great, but please please please do post it anonymously. Especially if it's a low one, but not if it's low because you rushed the test.
JCTI might take a while, so I recommend keeping your answers on Notepad in case you want to leave it and continue later.
Edit: I have included polls, thanks to the commenters.
Post your score here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fqq/average_iq_on_lw/7yad/