The masturbatory "we're smart" threads

The BBQ Pit
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[QUOTE=Voyager]
So, if there is a hypothesis offered that someone has an IQ of 160, what evidence would falsify it, and what would tend to confirm it in your opinion?
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There isn’t any for individuals. I think you are very bright and you are an established Doper. If you told me that you had an IQ of say, 155, I could easily believe that and take it at face value. If a whole string of obscure Dopers chimed in to say that they had an IQ ranging from 135 to 170 a betting man would know that something is amiss. That is just the way those types of threads go. We have confirmed liars in the lowest temperature threads and most other extreme threads. That is just a reality both on message boards and face to face. People lie about these things. It is just a fact of human nature. I may not be able to disprove that a given Doper has and IQ of 165 but I do know that a string of people that report extremely high numbers may have a number of liars in it just by the extreme unlikelihood of statistics alone no matter what the population.

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[QUOTE=askeptic]
…maybe a little humility will make you more likeable…
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Physician, heal thyself.

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[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
There isn’t any for individuals. I think you are very bright and you are an established Doper. If you told me that you had an IQ of say, 155, I could easily believe that and take it at face value. If a whole string of obscure Dopers chimed in to say that they had an IQ ranging from 135 to 170 a betting man would know that something is amiss. That is just the way those types of threads go. We have confirmed liars in the lowest temperature threads and most other extreme threads. That is just a reality both on message boards and face to face. People lie about these things. It is just a fact of human nature. I may not be able to disprove that a given Doper has and IQ of 165 but I do know that a string of people that report extremely high numbers may have a number of liars in it just by the extreme unlikelihood of statistics alone no matter what the population.
[/QUOTE]

That’s a very reasonable answer. It is possible that some very smart Dopers hide their accomplishments for reasons of anonymity. A “Whoo, I just got a Nobel Prize” thread would kind of give it away, right. :slight_smile: There are also plenty of Dopers (some on my side of various issues) who clearly don’t have very high IQs. I’d be curious to find out what the real median and means are, but we’ll never know. I’m pretty sure it is above average, I’m dubious about it being 130.

BTW, thanks for the compliment.

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[QUOTE=j666]
Someone else posted earlier, but I can’t find it, that telling a child s/he is ‘gifted’ might make them lazy. In my experience, ‘gifted’ kids are pushed harder, and encouraged to push themselves. Sometimes that doesn’t work, as another poster off this page was talking about.

[sorry if I misrepresented anyone’s post]
[/QUOTE]

That was my post about what to tell kids (unless there was another one?). I’m not sure how well I stated my earlier post. It’s not that telling a kid that they’re “gifted” makes them lazy, it’s that they think then that it’s some talent that they have. They stress out when they come to a problem they don’t understand, because they think their “talents” aren’t up to par. If you tell a kid who really is gifted that they got where they are by working hard, then they will continue to work hard and they will take pride in their work. You can’t take pride in a talent. Well, you can, but it’s not as satisfying as taking your pride from your own hard work.

This thread just reminded me: I was tested for the “gifted” class, too. My mother took me to the test on the wrong day, but they tested me anyway. They gave me a packet of papers with little scribbles on them. For each scribble, I was supposed to draw a picture, using the scribble for inspiration, and then title the picture. I had a lot of fun, but I only got through 7 or so pictures when they called time, and there were a heck of a lot more. They never called back.

(Did anyone else get tested like this? It seems so weird to me, thinking back on it now. How do you grade something like that objectively?)

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What does the OP have against masturbation?

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[QUOTE=Voyager]
a lot of the claims of 180 I’ve seen here have been obvious jokes, so let’s ignore them. I’m sure some claims of 160 were jokes also, but maybe not all. While it is true that very few people have an IQ of 160, that is still over 8,000 people in the country as a whole. This kind of place is a bit self-selecting for high intelligence, you’d expect a couple to show up.
[/QUOTE]

Well, to be honest, I don’t think so. Just by sheer random chance you would assume a group of 5000 people will have a few super high IQs, but selecting for slightly above average IQs not not necessarily mean it selects for very high IQs. This kind of place selects for a certain subset of Internet users who are intellectually curious, but why isn’t it equally reasonable to hypothesize that people who are extremely smart spend too much time on other things to kill time here? Surely, top neurosurgeons, rocket scientists and literary giants are spending their time fixing brains, building spacecraft and writing great novels?

It’s perfectly within the bounds of reason - and in fact I suspect it to be the case - that this board would select for people with IQs not lower than average but not so high they they would be likely to be employed in other pursuits - in other words, that it would select for people who lie between 100 and 130. That would be a very smart crowd indeed, but wouldn’t necessarily have very many super-smart people.

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[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]

What I DO think MIGHT be true is that there may be some correlation between aptitude/achievement test scores and IQ test scores. That is, if you take a kid who scored very well on an aptitude/achievement test, and you give them an IQ test, you probably can expect to see a higher-than-average IQ. Whether it will be slightly higher than average or way higher than average, I don’t think you would know…I doubt very highly that you could predict what the specifc score will be.
[/QUOTE]

However, if someone has a truly exceptionally high SAT score (top very small percent), which is presumably a statement of fact, even if one that you can’t easily verify for an anonymous internet stranger, it makes the claim that they have a similarly high IQ quite plausible, imho at least.
In general, I think people are assuming that whoever the 6,000 (or however many) people in the US who have IQs>160 are, they all must be nobel prize winners or 5-language-speaking renaissance men of some sort. Whereas I’d bet good money that a fairly high percentage of them have jobs like “being a particularly bright but not famous programmer at google”. Why would people of that sort NOT post on the SDMB? Or to ask that question in a bit more group-conceited way, if a person of that sort was going to want to post on a social internet discussion board, which some people enjoy and some don’t, why that board not be the SDMB? I’m quite sure it’s not the case that someone with an IQ > 160 is automatically such a driven focussed superior person that they have no interest or time for pursuits such as internet-message-board-posting.

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[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
However, if someone has a truly exceptionally high SAT score (top very small percent), which is presumably a statement of fact, even if one that you can’t easily verify for an anonymous internet stranger, it makes the claim that they have a similarly high IQ quite plausible, imho at least.
[/QUOTE]
Could be. But, the converter linked to here gives a specific score, not a range. If it was a range, I might have bought into it a little more readily, but an exact number, no way.

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[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
Uh…I think we are talking past each other here. I have now stated twice (and this is the third time) that I do not believe that aptitude test (or call them achievement tests if you want) scores can be converted accurately to IQ test scores. I said it, then you “corrected” me and stated the same thing. Then I said that I agreed with you. Now you are here “correcting” me again. Just so there is no more confusion, let me state categorically that I agree with you on this issue.

My point was that they are NOT IQ tests, they are NOT designed to measure IQ, and they DON’T convert accurately to an IQ score, at least, not as far as I have ever heard.
[/QUOTE]

Sarahfeena it’s important to be concise, achievement tests do not convert to IQ. :stuck_out_tongue: I jest!

I apologize for any confusion my post may have caused. I should have reinforced the fact that we are in agreement.

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IQ inflation posts are hilarious and common all over the net, not just on the SDMB (though they’re clearly here, too).

Perhaps IQ inflation posts are the way to keep cosmic balance on the Internet. Something has to balance out weight description deflation in personal ads, where “average” really means chubby, “a little extra” means flat out fat, “curvy” means obese and “more to love” means huuuuuge.

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[QUOTE=Marley23]
No, I mean we went to school (on a Saturday, I think) and took a multiple choice Stanford-Binet test.
[/QUOTE]

Multiple choice Stanford-Binet? I’ve never heard of a thing. All of the intelligence tests I know of are administered orally on a one-on-one basis. Are you sure it was a Stanford-Binet? Do you recall any of the questions? How many sections there were? I’m not picking on you–I’m just genuinely interested.

-Wolfian, M.Ed school psychology (not that I’m using it)

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[QUOTE=zweisamkeit]
IQ inflation posts are hilarious and common all over the net, not just on the SDMB (though they’re clearly here, too).

Perhaps IQ inflation posts are the way to keep cosmic balance on the Internet. Something has to balance out weight description deflation in personal ads, where “average” really means chubby, “a little extra” means flat out fat, “curvy” means obese and “more to love” means huuuuuge.
[/QUOTE]

I know a guy who is a mark for every snake oil salesman in the world. He told me his IQ, according to an online test. Turns out his result makes him a genius.

The “standard error of measurement” for some of these online tests must be huge. It isn’t necessarily that people are outright lying…they just repeat what they’ve been told.

I wonder where the profit is for some of these on-line charlatans.

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[QUOTE=RickJay]
Well, to be honest, I don’t think so. Just by sheer random chance you would assume a group of 5000 people will have a few super high IQs, but selecting for slightly above average IQs not not necessarily mean it selects for very high IQs. This kind of place selects for a certain subset of Internet users who are intellectually curious, but why isn’t it equally reasonable to hypothesize that people who are extremely smart spend too much time on other things to kill time here? Surely, top neurosurgeons, rocket scientists and literary giants are spending their time fixing brains, building spacecraft and writing great novels?

It’s perfectly within the bounds of reason - and in fact I suspect it to be the case - that this board would select for people with IQs not lower than average but not so high they they would be likely to be employed in other pursuits - in other words, that it would select for people who lie between 100 and 130. That would be a very smart crowd indeed, but wouldn’t necessarily have very many super-smart people.
[/QUOTE]

I went to MIT, and we spent our time on as many worthless pursuits as anyone.

But I thought of a way to estimate Doper intelligence - at least to some extent. I mentioned Jeopardy. I forget how many Doper Jeopardy players we have, but it is at least 25, which is 0.5% of the total. Now, if there are 150 million Americans who might be on Jeopardy, 0.5% of that is 750,000. How many people have actually been on? I’d estimate 2 a day (the champion comes back) or 10 a week or about 500 a year. Over 20 years, that is 10,000, or about .007%. If we considered Dopers a random sample of the population, we’d expect fewer than one Jeopardy contestant. Instead we get 80 times more than chance. I need to get to my statistical software to know for sure, but I think the hypothesis that our population resembles the population as a whole is refuted.

Now this doesn’t prove anything, but it strongly suggests that there are lots of Dopers to the far right of the intelligence curve, however you count intelligence. I don’t think we have many if any on the far left, no matter how it seems sometime.

Assuming you have a representative sample when you do not is probably the biggest mistake people make in sampling (viz. the Literary Digest poll) and I think a lot of you are making it.

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Part of the problem, I think, is that I misunderstood your original post. I saw the question ‘‘Who decides?’’ as a rhetorical attack on KoS’ positon instead of a genuine question, so I didn’t respond to the question so much as try to explain I thought his position had merit. Sorry for muddying the waters.

[QUOTE=Roo]
First, how do we decide what contributing to the world means? Did the scientists who created the atom bomb contribute to the world under your definition? Do the panhandlers on the street?
[/QUOTE]

This is one of the reasons I believe there’s inherent danger in imposing one’s moral obligations on others. Who can say?

[QUOTE=Roo]
Second, from my understanding, if the individual in question gets to decide what they want to do with their lives, that is indeed a subjective moral standard
[/QUOTE]

Yes. I never mean to imply otherwise.

[QUOTE=Roo]
If you allow other people to decide on what they want to do but then judge them for not meeting your standards that are not explicit, that’s something else, I think.
[/QUOTE]

Social consciousness of judgmental asshattery? Maybe a bit of both.

[QUOTE=Roo]

Let’s say you have a friend who is totally gifted at housecleaning–she can clean anything, does it wonderfully and loves doing it. But because housecleaning only pays 1/3 of what bookkeeping does, she decides to do the bookkeeping. She is not good at bookkeeping and certainly doesn’t enjoy it, but she’s able to put food on the table and clothe her kids. Is she morally deficient and a self-centered asshole that she’s not using her housecleaning skills?

Another example.

There’s a guy that’s really smart and breezed through medical school and was really great at helping patients. He was a very competent and skilled doctor for a few years, but after a few years, he got overwhelmed with the stress of having people’s lives depend on his decisions. So he decides to stop doing that and takes up carving tree sculptures for very rich people, who use these sculptures for their fancy parties. Does this man get your moral censure and your labeling? And if so, are you advocating that we all do the same?
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With both these examples, I would say that attitude makes all the difference in the world. There are plenty of ways to be a loving person–‘‘productivity’’ being just one of them. For example, how good of a parent is my friend? She might be bookkeeping for a living, but what is she doing in her spare time? Re: the doctor example, I would never suggest anyone sacrifice their personal happiness for the world’s good. Even from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint, the little good one person might be able to disseminate to many individuals probably wouldn’t cover for the sheer misery of the person contributing. But there is a difference between pushing yourself too hard/being genuinely stressed and miserable and being a lazy self-centered jerk.

And no, I don’t advocate that everyone have the same moral standards. They are just mine. I try to shy away from moral imperatives, but the one I’ve always had a hard time shaking is ‘‘love.’’ At the core, KoS seemed to be saying that being an active loving person is more important than being smart. I agree with that.

You really have challenged my thoughts on this matter, though, so thanks.

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[QUOTE=Wolfian]
Multiple choice Stanford-Binet? I’ve never heard of a thing. All of the intelligence tests I know of are administered orally on a one-on-one basis. Are you sure it was a Stanford-Binet? Do you recall any of the questions? How many sections there were? I’m not picking on you–I’m just genuinely interested.
[/QUOTE]

I have a pretty clear memory of a seal reading “Stanford-Binet” on the test, for whatever that’s worth. I don’t recall any particular questions, other than a memory that some of them involved geometric patterns. Basically I remember just enough about the whole experience - one of the guys sitting next to me, asking a guidance counselor about my score, the number she gave me - to be sure that I did take a test at that time.

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What are you brainiacs arguing about anyway? That the SDMB is on average brighter than the general population? Of course it is. The simple fact that you need a) a computer b) $15 to join and c) an interest in discussing such intellectual topics as ‘Batman vs whoever’ and ‘I hate my $6.50 an hour call center job’ means that this board will skew towards the cream of the intellectual crop.

Unfortunately, the only thing I was able to do with my intellect was mostly channel it into smartass comments. :frowning:

Scoring high on an IQ test is nice, however the whole point of being smart, getting good grades and getting a good education is so that you can choose tthe kind of living you want to make for yourself working with people who will interest and challenge you. The alternative is that it will be decided for you and there’s a good chance it will be a tedious, monotonous, possibly dangerous job working with people who never had the ability to do anything else.

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I must have expressed myself badly, or I’m misreading others. Insofar as we’re talking about the ordinary world and not some hypothetical situation in which we’re debating a duty to aid, I have nothing whatever to say about what talents, abilities and skills a person chooses to develop, or use, or how and when s/he does so. There is also an important obligation to one’s own happiness, after all, and while I might be able to summon the arrogance to direct others to ignore it in favor of my view of what they can and should do, I’d need some time to work it up, and probably some beer too. A person’s mind and body and abilities belong to him or her alone. Step too far away from that principle and you reinvent totalitarianism; another inch, and you’ve got slavery.

What I was trying to discuss was not social engineering, but simply the praiseworthiness of attributes vs. actions. The world record in the clean-and-jerk, and an IQ of 160 – okay, a hundred fifty-nine and a half – are both examples of vast amounts of individual human power employed in the service of generating a number on a clipboard. I can be impressed by either one, but they’re both really just expressions of potential. My capacity for admiration gets involved only when the potential gets employed, and I do care a little bit about what for. I find the use of modest talents for good purposes much more impressive than the mere existence, displayed for my applause, of greater talents.

The point of it all (Aha! I found it!) being that while I like hearing about how smart everybody is (no sarcasm – I do), I like it best when it comes in the form of a story about a difficult problem and how the poster managed to solve it, especially if they can also tell it without condescension but so I can mostly understand it. I’m less fond of a microscopically-accurate rendering of their position on the clipboard followed up by a lament about the dullards all around them.

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[QUOTE=msmith537]

Scoring high on an IQ test is nice, however the whole point of being smart, getting good grades and getting a good education is so that you can choose tthe kind of living you want to make for yourself working with people who will interest and challenge you. The alternative is that it will be decided for you and there’s a good chance it will be a tedious, monotonous, possibly dangerous job working with people who never had the ability to do anything else.
[/QUOTE]

Amen. I know plenty of people smarter than me who’ve never done anything really exciting intellectually in their lives. The push and desire to be challenged come from a totally different part of the brain than pure intelligence. If power was allocated based on order of IQ we’d be in an even bigger mess than we are today.

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[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
This is one of the reasons I believe there’s inherent danger in imposing one’s moral obligations on others. Who can say?
[/quote]

Exactly. But it seems to me that when one makes judgments about other people’s choices, they are imposing their moral obligation on others.

For example, if someone decides that sex before marriage is unacceptable and keeps that vow themselves, that’s not imposing one’s moral obligations on others. But if they hold others in contempt for not holding the same standard, it seems to me that that’s imposing their moral obligation on others.

You lost me. In the example, there’s only you and someone who hasn’t met your moral standard.
Whose social consciousness?
Who is judgmental?
Who is displaying asshattery?
And both of what?

We’ve come full circle back to the original question I asked.

Where is the line drawn and who gets to draw it?

Please note that attitude, intention, and the feeling of being genuinely stressed are really hard to determine from the outside. . .sometimes even from the inside.

Just wondering, under your moral standard of loving, is it loving to proclaim someone to be a “lazy self-centered jerk”?

Under Buddhism (which I’ve seen you reference elsewhere), my understanding is whatever your answer to the last question, the “someone” applies to you as well.

From my point of view, having a moral imperative of love is a contradiction in terms. One can have a moral standard of love which they apply only to themselves, but once it’s applied to others, it becomes an oxymoron. If the other person complies with the standard, they do so, not out of love, which involves choice, but out of fear. It would only be coincidental if they complied out of their own desire simultaneously with the command.

Great! Glad to hear it. You’re welcome.

I hope that the questions you’re asking have far-reaching ramifications in a positive direction.

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[QUOTE=Voyager]
I don’t think we have many if any on the far left, no matter how it seems sometime.

[/QUOTE]

It’s usually just one on the far left, but they’re very loud.