Creole Tomato, nice coming out post. Thank you too much. 
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll say again that intelligence (as somewhat reflected in IQ scores) is not randomly distributed. The high school I went to was big (1500 in my graduating class) and also had the highest test scores in New York, besides the specialized schools like Bronx High School of Science. The reason was certainly demographic.
I don’t know the IQs of everyone in the school, but I know of two with IQs of 160 or above in the 60 or so who were in the elite classes (and there were other feeder junior highs with no doubt high IQ kids also.) Before you scoff, I’ll report some facts that are not open to dispute. Of the 60 kids in these classes, 3 went to MIT, 2 to Yale, 1 to Princeton, 2 to Harvard, just off the top of my head. Remember that women were not allowed in Harvard yet, and Yale and Princeton had just begun to admit women, so I bet more would have gone later.
Datum two. New York had a Regents Scholarship exam, on general knowledge. The papers published the high scores. The #1 and #2 scores in Queens came from this group of 60 - who were also in the top 20 for the entire state.
A mechanism explaining this is simple to come up with. When you look for a house, in California at least, you are presented with the test scores for the various high schools in the area. Those parents with higher than average intelligence are going to focus on moving to these areas as opposed to other factors. Thus, over time you will get a clumping of bright kids, and the conditional probability of a second very high IQ kid in a class with one high IQ kid is relatively high.
I knew the count of GATE identified kids in our school district (thought not their names, of course) and I kept our membership records, and I can assure you that the GATE population was not evenly distributed across the district.
Could you please try to give a reason for your claims other than you don’t seem to able to believe in the clumping of high IQ students?
Another thanks to Creole Tomato for the post. I ran a Games Night for the GATE kids in our district, and I think I could probably identify them reasonably well - though anecdotal evidence like this is worthless. Talent manifests itself in ways obvious to skilled observers - I think Gladwell might actually be right here. I do know that when my daughter went to an audition with a manager to see if she could act, the initial screen was to have each kid say “I love Cheerios” - and that was good enough to eliminate 95%. We got good at identifying kids who could act also, just from being around them (though not as good as a professional.) The one kids who we sent to our manager went on to have a pretty good (if short term) career. People are quite good at recognizing peers.
I’m still waiting for Sister Vigilante to tell us about her high school. She is the only one that can tell us about it. Until she replies (and no one else, so don’t tell me what you think she is going to say), I have nothing further to say. Sister Vigilante, what high school did you go to? How big was it? Was it selective in some way? Did its students tend to go to top colleges much more than average? What year did you graduate?
What you seem to be saying, Voyager, is that since you can come up with some strained reason that this improbable situation could be true, then I should be obligated to accept your reason. The fact that Sister Vigilante is the only one who would know if this high school is the way you describe is irrelevant to you. You figure that I’m not worthy of a reply from Sister Vigilante, since my questions are, in your opinion, too worthless for her to bother with.
Let me preface by saying, sorry again about my unduly snippy tone before.
The problem, to me, is that if (as opposed to speeds, weights, distances, whatever) we don’t have a clear prior notion of what the meaning is of statements such as “The difference in intelligence between A and B is larger than/smaller than/equal to the difference in intelligence between C and D”, then the question of whether intelligence is actually normally distributed is not merely unsettled. It is, in fact, meaningless, just as meaningless as asking about a population’s mean religion or maximum hair color or other such things. Without some clear such notion (even one which would leave us unable to measure ratios between intelligence differences directly, so long as it at least told us what, conceptually, such ratios would even mean), the results of IQ testing are at best merely ordinal data and not interval data, and it does not make sense to speak of the mean and standard deviation of ordinal data. This is why I think the usual way of reporting IQ is far more misleading than useful. (Note that this concern does not arise with, say, the example of running times, because there is a clear notion of what it means for one difference in running time to be larger than another difference in running time; indeed, there are clear notions of how to identify differences between timespans as timespans themselves, and what it means for one timespan to be larger than another, and so on, giving running times the structure of a one-dimensional vector space, much more than merely the structure of a linear order)
Well let me preface by saying that the apology is appreciated and no worries.
And I both understand the issues you are raising and appreciate the link you provided. But your issues are really more questioning the assumptions that underlay using IQ as a proxy of intelligence, more than the issue of a bright person being able to tell that someone is not as bright with the same facility that an average person can identify someone as “dull”. For that latter discussion perhaps we can rephrase it as follows: would a person who is so “bright” as to rarely have others around them of the same intellect would be able to spot an extremely high intelligence poser as easily as an average person can tell that someone is on the lower edge of the intellectual normal range - however we can hypothetically validly measure “intelligence.” And that subject we have all said our thoughts on.
So let’s expand the discussion and not accept the various assumptions that allowed us to converse as if IQ was a true representative of something that we call general intelligence.
The problem then becomes even a bit fundamental than your issue: in reality we have no objective measure of this thing called “general intelligence” or even a convincing argument that it exists in any definable way other than tautologically - the skill that allows one to do well on an IQ test, which happens to correlate to a significant degree with academic performance and success. Intelligence really can only be thought of in context of the sort of problems that are asked to be solved and consequently “general” intelligence is a misleading phrase as it is general only in a very narrow manner. If we, however, accept that IQ tests measure performance on IQ tests and nothing more, then its scores distribution is near normal by definition of test design. Would percentile ranks be more honest than S.D.s to discuss them? I am not sure. Your link notwithstanding.
Okay I’ll just explain this from the beginning. I took an IQ test when I was 14, in a class designated to be for the smartest kids in the grade. (Psychology 101 was the class.) I scored above 160, as did my friend by 5 points, and the highest was above 170.
This was in 1985.
Does that help or not? I don’t know.
My high school was a matter of where we lived. It was a regular school, pretty small. South Cobb High School, you can look it up. I have no idea of the other aspects. It wasn’t a “target” school for smart people. Just a regular school. I graduated high school in 1989. College in 1995 (scheduling issues). I don’t know the rest, did you check out which of your classmates went to top colleges? I don’t see what my high school experience has to do with anything.
And I don’t see what any of this has to do with the original post.
O.K., this is the Wikipedia entry for South Cobb High School:
It has less than 600 students per grade. It’s a public high school. It doesn’t draw students from outside the school district. (There’s now a magnet school there, but it opened long after Sister Vigilante graduated.) As far as I can tell from Googling, it’s a reasonably good suburban high school but has no particular reputation as being a great one.
Sister Vigilante says that on this I.Q. test that the school gave, she scored 160, a friend scored 165, and someone else scored above 170. She doesn’t know the rest of the scores, but other people may have scored above 160 also. Sister Vigilante says that when she took an I.Q. test from Mensa at some later point, she scored 145.
If we assume that the I.Q. scores on the test that the high school gave where people had scores of 165 and 170 were equally exaggerated as the 160 score, their real scores would have been more like 149 and 153. Having three people in a grade with 600 students in it with scores of 145, 149, and 153 is actually fairly good. A score of 145 or above occurs about 0.135% of the time, which is about 1 person in 741. A score of 149 or above occurs about 0.0538% of the time, which is about 1 person in 1660. A score of 153 or above occurs about 0.0233% of the time, which is about 1 person in 4290. This by itself would indicate a pretty good high school. Sister Vigilante doesn’t say if anyone else scored above 160 on the high school test (which I’m assuming would actually be more like 145 on a standard test), so maybe there were some other good scores. This is quite reasonable for a good high school.
Having three scores of 160, 165, and “above 170” is quite unlikely though. As I said before, a score of 160 or above occurs about 0.00317% of the time, which is about 1 person in 31,500, a score of 165 or above occurs about 0.000745%, which is about 1 person in 134,000, and a score of 170 or above occurs about 0.000151% of the time, which is about 1 person in 662,000. This would be extraordinarily rare. This is why I think that the test given in Sister Vigilante’s high school was probably giving exaggerated scores. I suspect that the scores on any standard I.Q. test would have been about 145, 149, and 153, rather than the wildly improbable 160, 165, and 170.
Creole Tomato writes:
> The difference is extremely pronounced in the exceptionally (IQ of 160-179) and
> profoundly gifted (IQ > 180). Studies have repeatedly found that these
> individuals have significant socio-emotional barriers, and greater adjustment
> problems in that they are often unable to find true peers.
How did someone even manage to find enough profoundly gifted people to be able to say anything about them? The percentage of people with I.Q.'s of 180 or over is about 0.0000049%, which is equivalent to only about one person in 20,400,000. That means that there are only about 15 such people in the U.S. and only about 320 in the world. How could you find enough profoundly gifted people to be able to do a scientific study of them? There’s no I.Q. book that allows you to look up all the people with I.Q.'s above a certain level. There are probably a fair number of them who either have never taken an I.Q. test or else took one in which they topped out at 160 and nobody did a further test.
I had the same thought, and went and looked it up. It appears the data is ultimately from a study “Children above 180 IQ, Stanford-Binet: Origin and development” by L.S. Hollingworth in 1942. Presumably, such performances would not be interpreted as the same scores today.
Attitude would have a much greater bearing on telling and appreciating jokes than I.Q. ever would.
Do this mind test for yourself.
Imagine a genius, with an I.Q. of 160 telling a redneck joke to someone with an I.Q. of 90 or vice versa. No problem.
Now imagine anybody telling a feminist joke to a feminist. Sorry. She’d just try to bust your gonads, and call you everything but a human being.
Same for a homosexual hearing a homosexual joke.
This is of course not far removed from telling a liberal a joke about metrosexuals.
Then there is Chris Rock who tells any audience he wants a racial joke about blacks, even using the dreaded * word. He gets away with it. Whites, never.
The primary reason is that leftists have no sense of humor, only a victocrat mentality of condescending arrogance. They’re just better than anybody else.
Cite?
[Moderator Warning]
OrvilleWright, political jabs are prohibited by the General Questions rules. Don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The weirdest thing about Orville’s post is that the last line is a complete non-sequitur. I actually did a double-take.
On the other hand, I did learn the word victocrat.
Well yeah, but how he used it showed that he doesn’t know what it means … which is funny in a condescending and arrogant way.
One can see where the mistake comes in, though. If you’ve heard the word, but don’t know what it means, it’s easy to assume (in a condescending and arrogant way) that it actually means something, rather than being just a made-up political slur. 
Actually, fanatics of any stripe have no sense of humour. I had been peripherally involved in a real union (which included the types that call each other “brother”) and what apsses for humour among them is simply not funny - just a badly misstated put-down of what they perceive as “the enemy” which they think everyone should laugh at. The liberal put-down above is a perfect example of the sort of “facile and incorrect humour aimed at the enemy” that I saw a lot of.
Meanwhile I know a few gays; they have no problem with gay jokes and even crack them themselves; my perception of that group is that being openly out and funny about it is a defene mechanism, but does not interfere with their sense of fun. Feminists? The sweet and kind ones also have a sense of humour. Ditto for strongly religious types.
This same failure of a sense of humour works generally for any single-minded fanatic who thinks of only one issue, whether smart or dumb. Which brings up an interesting point, relevant to the OP - senses of humour vary greatly among people and are not necessarily connected to intelligence - except that smart people probaby get more and more vaired types of jokes.
And… how do you measure or judge the intelligence of someone who is demonstrated a very good general problem solver, but focussed to the point of willful blindness on a point of view that has obvious (to me, at least) logical fallacies?
Whut?