If you have hundreds of thousands, sure they are, don’t you think?
Doctors aren’t selected at random from the population at large. To get into medical school, they had to take a g-loaded standardized test (the MCAT.)
Sheer numbers wouldn’t guarantee it.
Now I’m curious: does anyone have a good argument, and/or empirical evidence, for why doctors IQs would, or would not, be normally distributed?
The coursework and study involved (both during pursuit of an undergraduate degree, as well as a medical degree), as well as the need to take a standardized test like the MCAT (at least in the U.S.), would likely weed out most potential candidates who were not particularly academically adept (for which there might be some correlation with IQ).
Within the community of actual medical doctors, there’s undoubtedly some sort of bell curve distribution of IQ, but I’m not sure that it’d look anything like a true normal distribution, since it’s a subset of the general population, and at that, it’s a particular subset which probably does skew towards the higher IQ end of the general population.
Re: doctor’s IQ
Even with a large sample size, distributions can be skewed. For example (making up numbers) the mean doctor IQ might be 115, but individuals with an IQ over 130 are over represented compared to the general population, and those with an IQ below 100 are under represented. But because most doctors have an IQ around 110 the mean is in the lower part of the distribution.
There can even be a floor effect. Perhaps nobody with an IQ below 95 can ever get through medical school.
Medical school is going to select on intelligence. For two people with equal wealth and grit, the one with a 130 IQ is going to find medical school easier than the one with a 115 IQ (in general; on average; for spherical, frictionless doctors, etc.) This is going to create a selection bias, which can skew the distribution. So the distribution of IQ among doctors will be different than the distribution in the general population.
If passing medical school was random with respect to IQ, then you’d expect a normal distribution of IQ. A silly example: Graduating medical school is probably distributed randomly in relation to a person’s favorite NFL team, so you would expect that popularity of NFL teams among doctors would be very similar to popularity of NFL teams in the general population.
Well, yeah. Some are 95, some 105, some 125 but all are above 90.
That what we thought as well.
But is it true?
The question doesn’t really make much sense. Intelligence is not something that is measured by the relative amounts of anything. That is, something that is 20 feet long is not just longer than something that is 10 feet long, it is twice as long. Something that weighs 30 pounds is not just heavier than something that weighs 15 pounds, it is twice as heavy. Something that travels 400 miles per hour is not just faster than something that travels 200 miles per hour, it travels twice as fast. But someone with an I.Q. of 150 is (assuming that I.Q. actually makes sense) smarter than someone with an I.Q. of 75, but they are not twice as smart (or 3 times as smart or 10 times as smart or 1,000 times as smart or anything else like that). The I.Q. scores 150 and 75 are points on a normal curve, not amounts of anything, nor do they correlate with amounts of anything. I.Q. scores tell you how smart you are in comparison with other people, but they don’t directly measure anything.
Furthermore, look up the Flynn effect. An I.Q. of 120 on an I.Q. test in 1923 is not equivalent to a score of 120 on an I.Q. on an I.Q. test in 1987. The same is true for any I.Q. score and any year. Your I.Q. score only tells you how smart you are relative to a particular group of people in a particular year.
Exactly.
There is a threshold, a gate. That threshold is the selection process. Speaking as someone who has been through the process I can serve as proof that you do not have to be a genius to get into and to complete med school. You have to be smart enough though. And after meeting that threshold, making it or not has more to do with many other factors. Discipline, habits of mind, intellectual curiosity, desire … privilege, luck …
So most in med school are, like I was, just smart enough, because in the general population there are lots more of us who are just smart enough than there are those with genius level IQ. And there are a few of those outliers on the high end because of course they were able to get through that gate too. But there are fewer of them than there are those like me, who were just smart enough. Because outlier geniuses are rare. And of them many have other ambitions than premed and med school and residency.
TLDNR?
The population above the threshold is skewed, not normal, and the physician population reflects that skew: more who are closer to the middle and fewer the higher up you go.
Are we talking about a janitor working at the most prestigious technical college in the whole world, sneaking around at night and finishing other people’s formulas that only one or two people in the world could do and then lying about it?
No, there’s nothing “wrong” with being a janitor. It just seems to me that it would be kind of a waste if you possess an IQ in the top 2% of the population.
I remember a comedian who said, “I’m as tall as Larry Bird, but I play like Big Bird.”
There’s a lot of high intellect (and other natural talents) “wasted” in this world, in this country … for lack of opportunity. People more than smart enough but in schools and communities that don’t create the situation for the seed to grow to its potential. Having the chance the encouragement to reach your fullest potential is a privilege that not everyone gets.
Of course it does. Variance in any trait can be large or small.
This straw man is entirely your construction. I never suggested anything so facile and obviously wrong as this.
IQ scores certainly do correlate with “amounts” of something, even if it cannot be quantified in such a straightforward manner as a trait like height - a physiological phenomenon, the cognitive capacity of our brains. I’m not claiming that there is any perfect or unique way to quantify it, but it clearly is something that varies quantitatively. And it is something that can vary “a lot” or “a little” in a population. OP’s question is interesting and we can certainly try to think about it - just how large is the difference in ability between someone with IQ (say) 1 sd below vs 1 sd above the population mean?
There is no way to say what the difference in I.Q. between one standard deviation below the mean (which would be 85 for a 100 mean with a 15 standard deviation) and one standard deviation above the mean (which would be 115 for a 100 mean with a 15 standard deviation) would be except to say that it’s one standard deviation below versus one standard deviation below. Every time a new I.Q. test is written, it has to be given to a large sample of people of some particular status (an age range, a location range, and a year when the test is given). According to the Flynn effect, this has changed quite a bit over time anyway. The meaning of an I.Q. score is the location on a normal curve for that large sample and nothing else.
Anyhow, getting a PhD is really a bad example for intelligence, since it requires a lot more than just intelligence, like the willingness to delay the gratification of getting a decent salary for years and the desire to do research. Both my daughters are pretty smart. One had no desire to go to grad school, the other loved it and loved doing research.
Plus it is easier for people with relatively lower intelligence to get PhDs from some schools (legit ones) than others.
I can give you a personal example.
In college I had a classmate who was much more intelligent than I was. We had a 400 level chemistry course together. I’d go to all the lectures and study outside of class. He’d skip all the classes, and never study until an hour or so before the exam. They had notes you could download and print off, so he’d skip class then learn the notes before the test.
So over the course of 4 weeks or so (the period between tests), I’d spend about 20 hours learning for this particular class (in between sitting in lectures and outside study). He would study 1 hour total, and he would consistently do better than I did on tests.
So in 1 hour he could absorb and process complex information better than I could in 20 hours. However his IQ was probably as a guess only about 20-30 points higher than mine.
By the same token I remember in a 100 level biology course I took as a much smaller college, I was kind of in his position. I could easily pick up the material while some of my classmates took a really long time to get it. I’d absorb more info in a much shorter time, and comprehend it better than classmates.
I don’t know how they would measure the complexity of information, or how long it takes you to process and understand it, but even with (numerically) small changes in IQ there seem to be meaningful changes in information processing. But again, I don’t know.
Another thing is its my understanding that the higher your IQ, not only do you absorb info faster and you can handle more complex info, but you are better able to teach yourself independently. The lower your IQ, not only does it take you longer to learn and the info can’t be as complex, but you have to be walked through each step by someone else. The higher your IQ goes, the more able you become to learn things independently without someone walking you through how its done.
FWIW, the guy who was in my 400 level class got into med school, but I don’t think he is actually a doctor now. I say that because he was incredibly lazy. Thats one of the negative side effects of a really high IQ. Since society is built for people with an IQ of 90-110, when you have a really high IQ you don’t have to work for things and a lot of it (especially academics) just comes easily. As a result you never learn how to be self disciplined or develop a good work ethic. One time we were talking and he said ‘I wish I had actually tried in college, I could’ve gotten into a place like Harvard instead of just the state medical school’. But no matter how smart you are, you can’t make it through residency on IQ alone. You have to put in 80 hours a week even if you’re John Von Neumann
I used to do IQ tests like others do sudoku, it was fun, and I got better and better at it, but I doubt I became more intelligent. But it got me thinking about the tests themselves, and I noticed something that I did not understand: many tests have a limited number of questions, mostly under 200 in total. By chance alone you would answer (assuming 4 multiple choice answers) about 50 questions right. If you aced it, you would have 200 right answers. So you would have between 50 and 200 right answers to put a number on the candidate’s IQ. From my experience, many questions were very easy to answer, so I guess most people would get about 100 to 150 questions right. That leaves just 50 questions to score the high IQs. That is not enough to measure the difference between an IQ of 130 and an IQ of 140, let alone an IQ of 164. The test suggest a precision in their results that is not measurable with the instruments and data at hand.
I also doubt that the IQ follows a normal distribution, because a normal distribution should be symmetrical around the mean. It probably comes close in the middle range, say between 80 - 120 points. But I believe that this symmetry breaks down at the extremes: there is not a person with an IQ of 40 for every person with an IQ of 160, few and far between as those may be, and if we count the people in a vegetative coma, where I postulate an IQ of zero, there are not the same amount of people with an IQ of exactly 200. And should someone ever measure an IQ over 200 someone should have a negative IQ to uphold the symmetry, which is absurd.
But still I enjoyed solving the tests for a while. Haven’t done it for a long time, it becomes boring with repetition, and the online ones are often artificially hard or trivial.
We don’t count “people in a vegetative coma”. The IQ score, by definition, is a relative score of the population who takes the test, with 100 being the mean. The vast majority (over 60%) score within 1 standard deviation of the mean (85 to 115).
I don’t have the data to suggest whether your doubts are correct regarding the distribution.
I’m also not sure what the actual format of an IQ test looks like. But some years ago I did take a battery of cognitive tests. My college professor suggested in because he thought I might be suffering from ADHD (turns out the testing showed I was really smart and he was just boring as fuck 
).
Anyhow, as I recall, most of the questions weren’t “multiple choice” such that you could guess at them. Some were timed responses like solving a puzzle or recalling a spoken string of numbers or letters. Ultimately showing ability along a variety of axis.
I kind of look at IQ and cognitive tests similar to measurable physical skills like height or your 100 yard dash time. They demonstrate certain skills and can translate to advantages for certain activities. But they don’t necessary mean you will be (or want to be) a great basketball or football player.
Probably not the case, but since I have diagnosed adhd I can relate to the example guy entirely and he even shows several main symptoms.
I had awful grades from elementary school, through middle school and I barely finished high school, I had seemingly extreme laziness, I always postponed everything until the last possible moment (until I’d get stimulation to study, to not fail the class), but otherwise I couldn’t care less for studying.
I didn’t learn anything in technical subjects and I was only good in subjects I was highly interested in. I remember an example of a test in history where I didn’t learn before the test, unlike A grade students that did, yet I scored the most points in the entire class. This was because I was hyperfocused onto the lessons that were interesting to me and remembered everything without studying and reviewing from books and notes.
At the same time, before getting an adhd diagnose I was told by a psychologist that my iq was around 122, I learned English (I’m from east Europe and never even visited an english speaking country) and Russian almost entirely on my own, I learned 3d modeling and I could beat most people in historical or geographical arguments, but I still managed to have a D in math in 4th year of elementary school and ever since, despite sitting still and attempting to do my best in those subjects that didn’t interest me.
Then there’s Marilyn vos Savant. Says Wikipedia:
Savant was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under “Highest IQ” from 1985 to 1989[3] and entered the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame in 1988.[3][13] Guinness retired the “Highest IQ” category in 1990 after concluding IQ tests were too unreliable to designate a single record holder.[3] The listing drew nationwide attention.[14]
Guinness cited vos Savant’s performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test. She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet, Second Revision test at age ten.[7] She says her first test was in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score.[7]
That high score may have helped her earn an Mrs. degree—she married Robert Jarvik, MD who developed the artificial heart. Here she was on David Letterman…flirting with him, no less:
