How smart is average?
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Your clarification makes a difference. I think we are probably doing just fine. We haven't killed off each other yet and, as StatementTerminator observed, we are getting steadily smarter as a species (no data other than bias to support that claim). I think we are getting smarter at a rate that lets us expand boundaries without doing too awfully much that we might characterize as a stupid idea in retrospect. I think the answer to your modified question is yes. We seem to be muddling along quite nicely with most people arguably happy with their lives and slowly making the world a better place for their kids and grandkids. I think if it weren't good enough, we would be imploding as a species pretty rapidly. After I posted, it occurred to me that "good enough" is the right answer to "How smart is average?". Average smarts is good enough for just about everything to have a productive, happy life and do worthwhile things.
Well.. I'm not sure we aren't imploding.... >We seem to be muddling along quite nicely with most people arguably happy with their lives "Most people"? From a global perspective, most people lead pretty desperate lives though, like grass growing in cracks in the pavement, it's amazing how many people manage to smile though it. There's little even "quite nice" about much of what's going on in much of the world. And even in the West, freedom and democracy (the limited form of it we have) is facing some real threats, to which it may well succumb. And most of these threats are ones we have brought upon ourselves - not so smart, really. And have we, as a species, got what it takes to deal with the global issues such as climate change - the effects of which could be quite enormous? I am far from convinced that we have.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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OK, so 100 is the average intelligence. Without really thinking about it, one kind of assumes that average is... well, you know - meh, average. Not smart, not stupid, just... average. But actually, has anyone done any studies to really get a handle on just what average intelligence amounts to? (Other than answering IQ tests...) 'cos I think it's probably pretty damned stupid. I'm asking this in all seriousness - not trying to have a rant. What **is** average intelligence - just how smart (or dumb) is someone with an IQ of 100? For example - how would such people fare in: applications to an average university a course to become an airline pilot learning to program in C# studying law running for public office (ha ha just joking with that one!) ..this sort of thing... [edit] just to be clear: I am not looking for a scientifically rigorous answer - the question doesn't have one, I know that. Just.. as the title says: how smart is average?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
Those who think human intelligence is not measurable in the aggregate are mistaken. One can argue successfully only about how accurately it can be measured, what measure is best, and how useful the assessed IQ of a single individual is. Human intelligence appears to be normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15 points, so that 65% of the population measures between 85 and 115. That means most of the population is pretty freakin' average. That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around. That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove. It means China, with its population of 1.2 billion, should generate Einsteins at a rate four times that of the United States. This applies to mere geniuses too, of which there are significantly more. This should worry anyone concerned about US competitiveness in the world.
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Well.. I'm not sure we aren't imploding.... >We seem to be muddling along quite nicely with most people arguably happy with their lives "Most people"? From a global perspective, most people lead pretty desperate lives though, like grass growing in cracks in the pavement, it's amazing how many people manage to smile though it. There's little even "quite nice" about much of what's going on in much of the world. And even in the West, freedom and democracy (the limited form of it we have) is facing some real threats, to which it may well succumb. And most of these threats are ones we have brought upon ourselves - not so smart, really. And have we, as a species, got what it takes to deal with the global issues such as climate change - the effects of which could be quite enormous? I am far from convinced that we have.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
Society is created largely by and for the average, who are the vast majority of the population. On the whole we have the intelligence to deal with the challenges we face. Where we fail is with greed and myopic thinking, and this is actually more of a problem with the highly intelligent: it's the really smart ones who exploit the rest of society for individual gain. For instance, the burning of fossil fuels which has led to climate change wasn't a stupid thing to do for those who were driving it, they profited well and got exactly what they wanted. There's plenty of evidence that energy companies knew quite well the consequences of what they were doing, they were plenty smart enough to realize that, as well as realize that they could profit from it while leaving others in the future to pay for the consequences. Intelligence isn't the problem in society, it's the lack of caring about other people.
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Society is created largely by and for the average, who are the vast majority of the population. On the whole we have the intelligence to deal with the challenges we face. Where we fail is with greed and myopic thinking, and this is actually more of a problem with the highly intelligent: it's the really smart ones who exploit the rest of society for individual gain. For instance, the burning of fossil fuels which has led to climate change wasn't a stupid thing to do for those who were driving it, they profited well and got exactly what they wanted. There's plenty of evidence that energy companies knew quite well the consequences of what they were doing, they were plenty smart enough to realize that, as well as realize that they could profit from it while leaving others in the future to pay for the consequences. Intelligence isn't the problem in society, it's the lack of caring about other people.
But if this lack of caring has catastrophic consequences, as climate change could do, then from a species point of view, the actions that led to it can not be called intelligent. The short term gain of the few at the expense of the species - even if not terminal decline, at least a heavy price - is not very smart, really.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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But if this lack of caring has catastrophic consequences, as climate change could do, then from a species point of view, the actions that led to it can not be called intelligent. The short term gain of the few at the expense of the species - even if not terminal decline, at least a heavy price - is not very smart, really.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
When asking about IQ scores you are talking about individual intelligence. Projecting intelligence onto the species as a whole is a bit of a stretch, the species is set of genetic code not a thinking being. There is nothing to say that intelligence is necessarily good for a species if the goal of a species is survival and reproduction. Bacteria aren't very intelligent, but from a survival standpoint they have us beat don't they? To put it another way, what is smart for the individual may be bad (or "dumb") for the species in the aggregate. We are much more likely to wipe ourselves out by being too smart than not being smart enough.
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Those who think human intelligence is not measurable in the aggregate are mistaken. One can argue successfully only about how accurately it can be measured, what measure is best, and how useful the assessed IQ of a single individual is. Human intelligence appears to be normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15 points, so that 65% of the population measures between 85 and 115. That means most of the population is pretty freakin' average. That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around. That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove. It means China, with its population of 1.2 billion, should generate Einsteins at a rate four times that of the United States. This applies to mere geniuses too, of which there are significantly more. This should worry anyone concerned about US competitiveness in the world.
Well, you have to consider the fact that most of those geniuses are likely born into grinding poverty and are lucky to survive to adulthood, let alone get an education and make use of their brains. For the sake of competitiveness, providing things like health care, education, and opportunity matter a lot more than the size of the talent pool. China may understand this better than the US though, since they seem to be trying hard to improve those things while the US has been going backwards for decades.
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Someone once said I was below average. I though he was being mean, but it was just his default mode.
That will go over some heads.
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Average persons give average solutions to problems, whereas better-than-average individuals give better solutions. Meaning the same sort of solution as most others came up with under the same conditions. Well, most problems have solutions that are gradient of a worst to best choices; the mind can pare these down to a set of multiple choice answers. The answer most people give is the average. On the one hand a problem may have only one solution that everyone can come up with, like how to open a bag of potato chips. On the other hand it could be difficult to determine how a great solution is any better than an average solution, like a Windsor tie knot. Dumb persons usually know that they are using a poor solution. They have a creeping feeling that something is amiss in how they are dealing with a situation. Usually they can rely on the observations of an average individual to help them, correct them, and likely save them from trouble. Correcting a dumb person does not make a person any better than average one. Assumedly, smart persons are those persons that correct the solutions of average persons. This being a robust planet of average people, this sort of intelligence correction is of very little use, and is generally discouraged. Luckily, you're asking about average people :-D and not smart people :( . Let's be frank about this though. On earth there are a few goals to which ninety-nine percent of the people yearn and strive: To be rich, and carefree! 'Nuf said. So what are the average results for any person in the world today probably describes a concept of averagicity. This concept boils down to an order of priorities. Which comes first and last? 1) Cut lawn. 2) Drink tea. 3) Study code. What's the best time to masturbate? Winter? Or summer? Answers describe us, and our destiny. Average prioritization yields average life. Rebellion is futile. Good luck
Remain Calm & Continue To Google
Of course, stupid people don't realize there's a problem at all...
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Perhaps I shouldn't have brought up IQ tests, as we all know they're pretty arbitrary and useless... what I'm after getting a handle on is just how smart is the average human being? Or, as I titled the post: how smart is average?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
It would be smart to think about what sort of answer you can expect to that question, and why you would or wouldn't accept the answer as factual. For instance, if I made some claim about the ability of people with 100 IQs to program in C#, how could I possibly prove it, and why would you choose to believe it ... other than being predisposed to doing so. BTW, the people making claims about Mensa and its tests are lying. The person claiming to score 185-200 on "official" tests has never done any such thing if he failed to qualify on a Mensa test, which has a much lower standard (132). Mensa test scores are most certainly are not inflated by 20% ... Mensa administers standardized Stanford-Binet and Weschler tests, using trained proctors, but also accepts proper documentation of results on other tests. The "Which of these things is not like the other?" questions do not have arbitrary answers ... that is a common excuse of people who fail, but there is an objectively right answer, with an explanation that most people accept when it is pointed out to them. And really, "I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years"? There's no division on these tests that even a halfwit can't do in their heads, and even if there were such problems, manual multiplication and division are trivial rote procedures that high IQ brains don't forget. People with 200 IQs can visualize in multiple dimensions; they don't struggle with arithmetic. If this person scored 200 on "official" tests, how did he manage that with such poor skills, and why did he do so much worse on a test that purportedly has scores inflated by 20%? These are the sorts of obvious questions that people with average IQs don't bother to ask. And no one in Mensa ever talks about their test scores, in part because they're smart enough to realize that they are likely to end up on the wrong end of the comparison. The chatter about bragging rights and Mensa wanting your money is sour grapes and largely downright stupid ... if Mensa were inflating scores in order to get more members to make more money, they would do away with the entry requirements altogether. And again, Mensa uses standardized proctored tests, the same ones used by psychologists. No, sorry, this is just the common phenomenon of random not terribly bright people lying on the internet.
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How would you measure average IQ other than having lots of people taking IQ tests? It is what it is. One metric amongst many. Probably not much use for anything other than applying to Mensa these days. Very few education systems bother to measure it any more. Based on thousands of the tests, average is simply the peak of the bell curve which arises from the results. That score is then normalised to 100 for the assessment of future tests. It is not an absolute, by any means. The Mensa qualification requires a score which places you in the top 2% of the population. The score required is probably very different now from when I took the test in 1984 (yes, I passed, though I've never been an active member).
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
Because of social sorting, you probably have not had extensive interactions with very many people with an IQ of 100. If you were to do so, you would probably find them to be relatively stupid. But why believe me, or anyone else responding to your question? Be a scientist, figure out how to identify some people with 100 IQs, and go interact with them and see for yourself.
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Interesting - thanks. >> •They learn math by memorizing a lot of examples and get confused if the same question is asked with different numbers. When I did maths at school our teacher always made us (as part of our coursework) define things in at least three ways - eg a equilateral triangle is one that has all its sides the same length; has all its angles the same; is symmetric about the bisector of any of its angles. That sort of thing. Good mental exercise, I always thought.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
> define things in at least three ways - eg a equilateral triangle is one that has all its sides the same length; has all its angles the same; is symmetric about the bisector of any of its angles The latter two aren't definitions, they are theorems. The definition of an equilateral triangle is a polygon with three interior angles (i.e., a triangle), the sides of which are equal in length (i.e., equilateral). There's a good "mental exercise" ... breaking things down into parts, seeing what the parts are, seeing their relationships, and attending to details.
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Nobody knows, so what they do is give the test to a whole lot of people, and then by looking at the "average" of the number of correct answers, that determines what gets assigned as "100." Of course, that average has undoubtedly been going down as technology and our education systems dumb down people. Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
> Nobody knows, so what they do is give the test to a whole lot of people, and then by looking at the "average" of the number of correct answers, that determines what gets assigned as "100." You didn't understand the question. > Of course, that average has undoubtedly been going down as technology and our education systems dumb down people. Smart people know better than to mistake their beliefs for facts, and they certainly know better than to have no doubt about those beliefs. As it turns out, you are incorrect, and it has been necessary to make IQ tests harder over the years in order to keep the mean at 100: Flynn effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[^]
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OK, so 100 is the average intelligence. Without really thinking about it, one kind of assumes that average is... well, you know - meh, average. Not smart, not stupid, just... average. But actually, has anyone done any studies to really get a handle on just what average intelligence amounts to? (Other than answering IQ tests...) 'cos I think it's probably pretty damned stupid. I'm asking this in all seriousness - not trying to have a rant. What **is** average intelligence - just how smart (or dumb) is someone with an IQ of 100? For example - how would such people fare in: applications to an average university a course to become an airline pilot learning to program in C# studying law running for public office (ha ha just joking with that one!) ..this sort of thing... [edit] just to be clear: I am not looking for a scientifically rigorous answer - the question doesn't have one, I know that. Just.. as the title says: how smart is average?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
here is some quantitative data that might actually give you some insight into your question: [^]
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OK, so 100 is the average intelligence. Without really thinking about it, one kind of assumes that average is... well, you know - meh, average. Not smart, not stupid, just... average. But actually, has anyone done any studies to really get a handle on just what average intelligence amounts to? (Other than answering IQ tests...) 'cos I think it's probably pretty damned stupid. I'm asking this in all seriousness - not trying to have a rant. What **is** average intelligence - just how smart (or dumb) is someone with an IQ of 100? For example - how would such people fare in: applications to an average university a course to become an airline pilot learning to program in C# studying law running for public office (ha ha just joking with that one!) ..this sort of thing... [edit] just to be clear: I am not looking for a scientifically rigorous answer - the question doesn't have one, I know that. Just.. as the title says: how smart is average?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt. "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
I work with software engineers and other technologists, so my world is populated by folks with average IQ well above 100 - probably 120's. I was tested at 160 in grade school, but only got middling grades through high school because I was much more interested in tearing around the farm on my dirtbike. However, when I got excited about electrical engineering I got top grades because I started studying. My university grades would not have been possible without both the CPU and the effort. Is a high IQ test score meaningful? Not in isolation - but it certainly indicates potential.
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Those who think human intelligence is not measurable in the aggregate are mistaken. One can argue successfully only about how accurately it can be measured, what measure is best, and how useful the assessed IQ of a single individual is. Human intelligence appears to be normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15 points, so that 65% of the population measures between 85 and 115. That means most of the population is pretty freakin' average. That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around. That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove. It means China, with its population of 1.2 billion, should generate Einsteins at a rate four times that of the United States. This applies to mere geniuses too, of which there are significantly more. This should worry anyone concerned about US competitiveness in the world.
> That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around. I encounter plenty of people with IQs of 135, in programming and physics (occupationally), law (a former SO was a law professor who once told me "you're pretty smart, and you're not even a lawyer"), and Mensa (132 on Stanford-Binet, which has an SD of 16, is the minimal requirement for entry). > That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, Not really. I know two brothers, both of whom have IQs over 200. One scored in the top 100 on the Putnam exam and got his PhD in algebraic topology from UCLA when he was 23. Through him I met a fellow who scored in the top 10 on the Putnam. IQ tests are child's play for people at that level. Mathematician Terence Tao and physicist Chris Herata purportly have IQs over 220, and Guinness listed Korean engineer Kim Ung Yong at 210 and Marilyn vos Savant at 228 (they no longer have a highest IQ category because of unreliability at those levels). Oh, and Einstein, while of course brilliant and deeply insightful, is estimated to have had an IQ about the same as Stephen Hawking's -- 160. IQ measures something, but it isn't the thing folks like that have. > so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove. Yeah, internal evidence strongly indicates that he's lying. It's particularly amusing that he claims that he missed the Mensa entrance by 1 point (despite other people claiming that Mensa scores are inflated by 20% so as to qualify more people and thus make more money -- bwahahah) because his multiplication and division were rusty, and making the age old excuse of people who fail odd-one-out tests that the correct answers are chosen arbitrarily.
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Those who think human intelligence is not measurable in the aggregate are mistaken. One can argue successfully only about how accurately it can be measured, what measure is best, and how useful the assessed IQ of a single individual is. Human intelligence appears to be normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15 points, so that 65% of the population measures between 85 and 115. That means most of the population is pretty freakin' average. That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around. That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove. It means China, with its population of 1.2 billion, should generate Einsteins at a rate four times that of the United States. This applies to mere geniuses too, of which there are significantly more. This should worry anyone concerned about US competitiveness in the world.
> That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around. I encounter plenty of people with IQs of 135, in programming and physics (occupationally), law (a former SO was a law professor who once told me "you're pretty smart, and you're not even a lawyer"), and Mensa (132 on Stanford-Binet, which has an SD of 16, is the minimal requirement for entry). > That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, Not really. I know two brothers, both of whom have over IQs over 200. One scored in the top 100 on the Putnam exam and got his PhD in algebraic topology from UCLA when he was 23. Through him I met a fellow who scored in the top 10 on the Putnam. IQ tests are child's play for people at that level. Mathematician Terence Tao and physicist Chris Herata purportly have IQs over 220, and Guinness listed Korean engineer Kim Ung Yong at 210 and Marilyn vos Savant at 228 (they no longer have a highest IQ category because of unreliability at those levels). Oh, and Einstein, while of course brilliant and deeply insightful, is estimated to have had an IQ about the same as Stephen Hawking's -- 160. IQ measures something, but it isn't the thing folks like that have. > so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove. Yeah, internal evidence strongly indicates that he's lying. It's particularly amusing that he claims that he missed the Mensa entrance by 1 point (despite other people claiming that Mensa scores are inflated by 20% so as to qualify more people and thus make more money -- bwahahah) because his multiplication and division were rusty, and making the age old excuse of people who fail odd-one-out tests that the correct answers are chosen arbitrarily.
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How would you measure average IQ other than having lots of people taking IQ tests? It is what it is. One metric amongst many. Probably not much use for anything other than applying to Mensa these days. Very few education systems bother to measure it any more. Based on thousands of the tests, average is simply the peak of the bell curve which arises from the results. That score is then normalised to 100 for the assessment of future tests. It is not an absolute, by any means. The Mensa qualification requires a score which places you in the top 2% of the population. The score required is probably very different now from when I took the test in 1984 (yes, I passed, though I've never been an active member).
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
> The score required is probably very different now Um, no. The qualification is and was 2 standard deviations above the mean, which is a score of 132 on the Stanford-Binet. What has changed is the questions and the scoring, which are modified over time to keep the mean at 100. That implies that the tests have gotten harder, because IQs are rising (the Flynn Effect). As for what IQ means aside from being a normalized score on an IQ test ... numerous studies show correlations between IQ scores and various other attributes, such as SAT scores, income, wealth, and so on.
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> That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around. I encounter plenty of people with IQs of 135, in programming and physics (occupationally), law (a former SO was a law professor who once told me "you're pretty smart, and you're not even a lawyer"), and Mensa (132 on Stanford-Binet, which has an SD of 16, is the minimal requirement for entry). > That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, Not really. I know two brothers, both of whom have IQs over 200. One scored in the top 100 on the Putnam exam and got his PhD in algebraic topology from UCLA when he was 23. Through him I met a fellow who scored in the top 10 on the Putnam. IQ tests are child's play for people at that level. Mathematician Terence Tao and physicist Chris Herata purportly have IQs over 220, and Guinness listed Korean engineer Kim Ung Yong at 210 and Marilyn vos Savant at 228 (they no longer have a highest IQ category because of unreliability at those levels). Oh, and Einstein, while of course brilliant and deeply insightful, is estimated to have had an IQ about the same as Stephen Hawking's -- 160. IQ measures something, but it isn't the thing folks like that have. > so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove. Yeah, internal evidence strongly indicates that he's lying. It's particularly amusing that he claims that he missed the Mensa entrance by 1 point (despite other people claiming that Mensa scores are inflated by 20% so as to qualify more people and thus make more money -- bwahahah) because his multiplication and division were rusty, and making the age old excuse of people who fail odd-one-out tests that the correct answers are chosen arbitrarily.
Member 12023988 wrote:
because his multiplication and division were rusty
More to the point, anyone with an IQ in the 180 range would not have to remember or even be taught how to do multiplication and division. Someone on that level would be able to quickly derive methods for doing so on the spot, easily.
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Meh, I've taken plenty of IQ tests, both official and online... They all put me in the 185-200 range... Except when I was really bored and decided to join Mensa... I took their admission test (Didn't have any of the paperwork from the few of those IQ tests that were "official"), and missed qualifying by one point. (In my defense, their "Which of these things is not like the other?" questions were really "Which of the several obvious answers to this is the one we decided is correct?", and I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years) So to summarize, I'm pretty sure all intelligence testing is complete crap... And to summarize the summary of the summary, as DNA said, people are the problem.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)Not on a professionally supervised Stanford-Binet or Weschler you didn't. Just because a thing (on-line thing, yes?) says "IQ Test" don't mean didley-squat. A couple points: (a) Professionally valid IQ tests are increasingly unreliable above 150. But getting a score over 150 means that you are really, really smart. (b) The IQ scores you boast of above are higher than Gary Kasparov, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. Anyone scoring that high will cause a local ripple and people would want to talk to you, and re-test you (the "unreliabilty" thing) So, to summarize, I think I will discount your opinion of IQ testing, because it seems pretty obvious that you have never (other than Mensa) been "properly" tested. Good to know that you are on the A-Ark :) (at least, they told you it was the A-Ark, right? But the guys who told you it was the A-Ark, they aren't on board are they?)
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> The score required is probably very different now Um, no. The qualification is and was 2 standard deviations above the mean, which is a score of 132 on the Stanford-Binet. What has changed is the questions and the scoring, which are modified over time to keep the mean at 100. That implies that the tests have gotten harder, because IQs are rising (the Flynn Effect). As for what IQ means aside from being a normalized score on an IQ test ... numerous studies show correlations between IQ scores and various other attributes, such as SAT scores, income, wealth, and so on.
Member 12023988 wrote:
numerous studies show correlations between IQ scores and various other attributes, such as SAT scores, income, wealth
... but average people don't know that :)