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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

Cause (in case I’m smart enough at all) I have no courage to risk and implement a working thing by myself, while seeing others just do something much easier/simpler than any of my ideas and get their share. You don’t get anything by not trying, trust me on that.

Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000

Do iq tests even work this way? I think there is not enough points to add up to 1000 or at least 200.

Edit: And even then, this iq thing is irrelevant to your whole life, because our minds are mostly sleeping, being carried around by waves of automatic thoughts, whose iq is minimal.

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> Cause (in case I’m smart enough at all) I have no courage to risk and implement a working thing by myself

The risk of the same action (e.g. spending a year on getting a startup to work out) differs based on your background, too.

Let's say you make minimum wage. That reduces the amount of money you can invest in your startup, lowering the chances of success while also shortening the runway. The risk here is might even be homelessness.

If you are backed by a reasonably wealthy family, you can invest more and your runway is longer, making it more likely to succeed (or at least fail not that hard). The risk here is having "wasted" one year of your life.

This doesn't even take into account other factors like family/friend connections.

Of course there are always counter examples to this, I'm just talking about probabilities.

Good point. I’ve come up with a similar strategy: no wealth, but have a handful of life-years in savings before starting something. If it doesn’t work out in a year, there is still a good safety net and time to re-evaluate. Heh, it must be much easier to reason about when you have backup just by default.

No that's not how it works. 15 IQ pts is 1 standard deviation. So a 115 is 83rd percentile, 130 is 97.5 percentile, and 145 is 99.85 percentile. 1000 would be 60 standard deviations, so there aren't even enough humans on earth to establish what that is.

Oh, I see. Thanks!

No they do not. I think the author was making a point that peoples' IQ can not differ by 2 or 3 levels of magnitude but their wealth can and often does differ by 3-9 levels of magnitude.

They work following a standard deviation so 99% of the population have an IQ lower than 135, 99.6% lower than 140, etc. So maybe, among the billions of people who ever lived on the planet or will live in the future, someone will have an IQ of 200.

Anyway, IQ is just a tiny aspect of intelligence, which is a loosely defined term.

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