So you’ve learned you’ve got a “pitifully” low IQ. How worried should you be? | Hacker News Reader

So you’ve learned you’ve got a “pitifully” low IQ. How worried should you be?

vox.com

21 pointstelotortium24 comments

From the author's (funnier, better) blog post on the subject:

>Second, the people who get low IQ scores, are shocked, find their whole world tumbling in on themselves, and desperately try to hold on to their dream of being an intellectual – are not a representative sample of the people who get low IQ scores. The average person who gets a low IQ score says “Yup, guess that would explain why I’m failing all my classes”, and then goes back to beating up nerds. When you see someone saying “Help, I got a low IQ score, I’ve double-checked the standard deviation of all of my subscores and found some slight discrepancy but I’m not sure if that counts as Bayesian evidence that the global value is erroneous”, then, well – look, I wouldn’t be making fun of these people if I didn’t constantly come across them. You know who you are

That doesn't look funny or better to me, that looks bitter and hateful for no reason. This person thinks half the world spends their time beating up nerds?

I'll just give you the context and you can decide for yourself: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-w...

IQ tests are a bit biased aren't they? I mean, I score around 140 because I'm really good at spatial stuff, but I sucked socially. It took me into my thirties to really catch up with other people, to the point where I could truly fit the management role I wanted, and I'm still learning how to diplomacy in upper management.

My friends joke that I'm a sociopath or autistic, and my decisions have been called 'crazy' many times, and the only way I overcome social awkwardness is to treat everything as a joke. I have close friends whom I rarely talk to, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame a higher score for that. In a way, it's nice to be able to retain information and to be good at words and numbers, to be able to entertain myself (saves a lot of $$), but man, the first 25 years of my life (I'm 31 now) were such a struggle socially. There's deep-rooted feelings of anger at rejection, and I cling to a higher score as one of my main source of pride. (Yes, I'm jealous of people who have even higher IQs.)

Then again, my mentor who is at least one standard deviation higher seemed to have had few troubles socially.

That's a dumb joke. You might have one of those conditions, and proper diagnosis and understanding of how your mind works can be a gateway to therapy that helps you achieve your life goals with less frustration.

High IQ doesn't make you have low EQ. Some people have both high or both low or one of each.

Real IQ tests (i.e. not ones with portraits of Einstein on them) cover a few more areas than spatial awareness. This makes them a useful diagnostic tool sometimes -- as a personal anecdote, there is a huge difference in my score if you remove the processing speed parts, which apparently is evidence in favour of ADHD.

But even so, they are hugely limited in determining many very important qualities. Like social skills.

It's just another number we can calculate that happens to be relatively fixed by genetics and has some predictive power. But so is your height, and nobody raves about that.

Employers and mating partners rave a lot about height. But height doesn't control the mouth and hands, so it can't make you talk about itself like brain features can.

Do you believe IQ is directly linked to the lack of social skills?

I have always had a problem assuming everyone else gets what I am trying to imply, even with shorter sentences - but over the 26 years of my life I learned that was not true at all.

So essentially my learning of "why do I suck at socialising" had always been linked to learning "what are people not aware of", rather than somehow being "socially incapable".

It's a different part of the brain. Social skills like this are called theory of mind. The spectrum part of autism spectrum includes a trade-off between attention to explicit detail and an awareness of overall bacground context.

IQ scores says nothing about your social skills. Nor does it say anything about how well equipped you are at difficult topics such as math. What it more or less does is give some kind of rating on how good you are at correctly figuring stuff out on your own in comparison with other people.

So in short:

1. You don't have to be a math genius but you still can have a high IQ (this is why most standardized/Mensa IQ tests are centered around pattern recognition == "how well you are equipped to correctly figure something out")

2. Many terrible socially awkward people have extremely high IQs, but this doesn't have to be a prerequisite as such.

It feels a bit off to say that "IQ is real". It gives a false sense that something fundamental is being measured. The tests are real, and the correlations are real.

One might argue that a more practically consequential question is what happens when this same argument gets extended to achievement tests, or admission tests, such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, or LSAT?

Some high-IQ societies accept achievement test scores as IQ tests. For example the Triple 9 Society accepts a pre-2005 SAT score of 1520 or higher as equivalent to an IQ of 146 or something (if I remember correctly). And I think some societies accept LSAT scores, though some have 'insufficient ceilings.'

I'm a bit ashamed to have wanted to join one of these societies. To be fair, I just wanted to meet intelligent women. I looked at some of their pictures and there were like 95% men over the age of 40.

At work my mind automatically tries to guess people's IQs. I'm probably really bad at it, but I think I know when someone's REALLY below average. They ask questions that don't make sense, sometimes it seems like it's their first day on the job, etc. As frustrated as coworkers are in dealing with them, and as much as people claim IQ doesn't matter, if they are at one standard deviation below the mean, I can't help but feel society has to find a way to make sure they are taken care of.

Civilized society does indeed have to find a way to make sure everyone is taken care of, including the "more intelligent" and less physically capable people, even if they go around calling people stupid - which is something that would certainly get them killed prior to the advent of civilization.

I've been tested at 159, and I often ask stupid questions at work and feel like it's my first day :(

I joined Mensa and wasn't too impressed. Their attitude towards intelligence is like that of a teenage boy who thinks he knows how to drive fast just because he has a car with a big engine. Skill and effort are required, not just raw mental horsepower.

If you want to meet intelligent women, look for women doing well in any academic, professional, or social organization.

IQ topic is popular on hackernews. I wonder if people with well-above intelligence have preoccupation with IQ more than others.

According to http://xkcd.com/715 the normal curve for people googling their IQ is positioned significantly differently than the actual intelligence curve

lol thanks for sharing this. These are all great.

I think the causality may be the other way around.

Having a preoccupation with IQ tests will get you a high IQ test score. Because being very familiar with IQ tests violates the assumptions of IQ tests.

I’ve always assumed that this is why people who talk about their high IQ scores are insufferably dull.

How do you even get tested these days? I got tested when I was 13 in a classroom setting many moons ago (not in the U.S.), and no one in the class knew it was IQ test.

I moved to the U.S. shortly afterward and I don't recall being tested.

IQ discussion has always seemed to me a little like talking about how much money you make with other people. The solid numbers as a mark of "who is better or worse than you" can be uncomfortable. Taken to a statistical level things become even more awkward, not something easy to discuss with most people.

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