How any given person capitalizes on their mental powers will depend on just what those mental powers are. But it seems pretty clear to me that there's much more variation between different LWers than there is uncertainty in just where the average is. (From what I've seen it seems pretty much certain that for most measures of IQ, (1) the average among active LWers is somewhere between 120 and 140 and (2) the range is at least ~120 to ~160.) What discussions would we have that would need to be much different depending on whether the average IQ here is 120 or 140, but that wouldn't end up being useless for most of LW in either case? And suppose we nail down very accurately what the average IQ here is by some particular measure. That still won't tell us much, because whatever you may say about g there's plenty of variation in how smart people are smart. [...] That isn't what I meant; sorry if I was unclear. I was intending to cover "who's got the biggest IQ", "what is our average IQ", "how much does our IQ vary", and basically the whole range of discussions that are about characterizing LW IQ measurements. I just don't see that there's much value to those discussions beyond the level (which we've already reached) of observing that the LW population is at least one or two standard deviations smarter than average according to typical IQ measures, because anything that would be invalidated by not having more precise knowledge of the LW population average is equally invalidated by the fact that the average is only an average and actual LWers are different in many different directions.