I did a bit of googling, and it really surprised me. I thought the social science IQs would be lower on average than the STEM IQs, but I found a lot of conflicting stuff. Most sources seem to put physics and maths at the top of the ranks, but then there's engineering, social science and biology and I keep seeing those three in different orders. If you split up 'social science' and 'humanities', then humanities stays at the top and social science drops a few places, presumably because law is a very attractive profession for smart people (high prestige and pay) and law is technically a humanity. I'm not very confident in any of my Google results, though - they all looked slightly dodgy - so I'm not linking to any and would love it if someone else could find some better data.
I don't think it's an argument for disregarding social science, even if we did find data that showed all social scientists are stupider than STEM scientists. I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education. If education really does attract a lot of stupid people, I think that is cause to try and raise the prestige and pay of education as a profession so that more smart people do it - not to cut funding for schools. (Though the reason education is so lowly ranked for IQ could be that a lot of countries don't require teachers to have education degrees, you get a different degree and then a teaching certificate, so you only take Education as a bachelor's if you want to do Childhood Studies and go into social care/work.)
It's clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we're just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do. So, even though the IQ of people in social sciences is lower on average than the IQ of people in physics, we shouldn't conclude that social science is worthless - I think we should conclude that efforts must be made to get more smart people to consider becoming social scientists.
I also don't think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist. Being a successful mathematician requires a lot of processing power. Being a successful social scientist requires a lot of rationality and a lot of carefulness. If you're trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer, nor will you have to worry about the line your circle is drawn with being a sentient line and deliberately mucking up your results. Social scientists don't need as much processing power to throw at problems, but it takes a lot of care and ability to change one's mind to do good social science, because you're doing research on really complicated high-level things with sentient agents who do weird things and you were probably raised with an ideology about it. Without a good amount of rationality, you will just end up repeatedly "proving" whatever your ideology says.
To make physics worthwhile you need high IQ; without that, you'd produce awful physics. To make social science worthwhile, you need to be very very careful and ignore what your ideology is telling you in the back of your mind; without that, you produce awful social science. Unfortunately, our society's ability to test for IQ is much better than our society's ability to test for rationality, which could explain why more people get away with BS social science than they do with BS physics. (The other explanation is that there are both awful social science papers and awful physics papers, but awful physics papers get ignored by everyone, whereas awful social science papers are immediately picked up by whatever group whose ideology they support and linked to on facebook with accompanying comments in all-caps.)
If you're trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer,
That might actually have been a problem once. Apparently the Pythagoreans had serious problems with irrational numbers...
A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)
If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.
Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!