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Nornagest comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: Yvain 11 October 2014 06:39AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 13 October 2014 05:21:11AM 2 points [-]

Yeah, I'd expect some pretty serious regression to the mean, or more accurately to slightly above the mean, going on with the group-of-adults method. People of low intelligence hang out with other people of low intelligence and probably have a slightly inflated opinion of their relative capabilities; likewise for people of high intelligence. But people outside your social circle are totally invisible.

At least, assuming people actually use the group-of-adults method, which I don't really expect them to.

Comment author: Vaniver 13 October 2014 01:25:35PM 0 points [-]

At least, assuming people actually use the group-of-adults method, which I don't really expect them to.

That is, you would expect people to say "well, I want my IQ to be 145, so let's calculate the percentile for that, and then use that percentile to calculate the group size"? Or that they'd just leave the question blank?

Comment author: Nornagest 13 October 2014 04:40:31PM *  3 points [-]

I'd expect a lot of people to leave the question blank if there are other IQ questions. I'd also expect a lot of people to work backwards from scores, more or less formally -- I don't think I'd expect many people to actually do the math or track down a normal distribution calculator, but thinking like "well, I got 99th percentile on that standardized test in high school, so I'll say 100" would probably be common.

To be fair, that's probably more accurate than what you'd get by counting up the number of people you know who're smarter than you.