“…all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average…”
Maybe I should leave?
I sort of get why there is so much of this on the board, but it also makes me a little nauseated.
First of all, The Dope is a place where intelligent people hang out. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose most of us are in the 130 IQ range, I wouldn’t call that stretching things at all. A lot of the people on this board were probably high achievers in high school and college, and as such probably felt pretty damn isolated and weird for their interests as kids. Setting aside the whole issue of intelligence, I’m just saying that what I cared about fundamentally was so far removed from what other kids my age cared about it was very difficult to relate to them. I was into morality and reading. Outside at recess I sat on the blacktop and read books and thought about morality, spirituality, integrity… I wanted more than anything to be an intellectual and a good person. People noticed that, and they decided it made me weird.
Fortunately I wasn’t totally socially awkward. I picked up on the fact that my aloofness was alienating people right away, and if there’s one thing I value more than being smart, it’s being part of a community. I actually remember the exact moment it dawned on me how I was coming off, too–6th grade. I stopped ‘‘knowing it all’’ and started listening. And I found out pretty quickly that my peers had some pretty amazing talents and strengths, even the so-called ‘‘low achievers.’’
Because I wasn’t an asshole about it, people accepted me. I didn’t realize to what extent they had accepted me until my senior year, it was a pleasant surprise to find so many people that I barely ever interacted with had a lot of respect for me because I learned not to be that conceited jackass–I’d like to think not only superficially, but that internally I am willing to admit my weaknesses and celebrate others’ success and acknowledge when they do better than me without feeling threatened.
Also, in spite of being academically talented, I was incredibly ignorant. I went to a terrible school. I didn’t know anything about philosophy, history, or politics, until I got to college–verily I say unto you, I entered college without even knowing what capitalism was. Even things I thought I was good at challenged me in college. I went from a very comfortable easy ride in a class of 124 students to feeling pretty average and unimportant in a class of 8,000.
Ok, what I’m trying to say is, you remember how Lisa Simpson was always so disheartened by the anti-intellectualism of her peers? And remember when she met that little girl next door who – gasp! – had the same interest as hers? And then watched in horror as her new friend smeared her all over the floor academically?
That’s pretty much what the Straight Dope is like for me, and it’s probably that way for a lot of folks. We find ourselves simultaneously ecstatic and insecure as hell. It took me a long time to get up the courage to start posting here. I never learned formal debate. I took some philosophy classes but nothing that would serve me in any measure on this board – I ran screaming from symbolic logic, for example. The kind of intelligence I think I possess isn’t really the sort that is showcased on a message board. I naturally gravitate toward MPSIMS and IMHO because it deals with issues like applied morality and life experience, but that stuff is considered ‘‘lowbrow’’ by many posters here.
So it doesn’t really surprise me when people start bragging about their intelligence – we have an atmosphere that is at once relief and insecurity rolled into one. Sometimes I feel like I should somehow justify my existence on this board in the same way. I try not to act on that impulse, because it’s really meaningless and pointless.
College really beat the snob right out of me, to be honest. Many of the students at my university could give me a run for my money. I learned to define myself in other ways, to build on less immediately gratifying strengths (like perseverance, discipline and compassion, for example.) I have always been a very insecure person, even academically. I was always crossing my fingers for that ‘‘A’’ and really truly believing I might not get it, even in high school. I totally believe there are a large percentage of posters on this board who probably are the same way. They are told they’re smart, but they need little evidences to confirm it because they are worried it might explode in their face.
So I understand both sides of the coin. I understand the desire to prop yourself up with academic achievements/intellectual giftedness, because it is a natural instinct to want attention when society values something you have. But I also understand that I don’t know everything… or really very much at all compared to many people who frequent this board… and I am really okay with that.
I’d just like to say, olivesmarch, that I enjoy reading your posts. You contribute more than you think you do.
I never understand why people are afraid of posting in GD. I think we miss out on good contributions because of that.
Nice link, never saw that before. I’m damn smart. My combined SAT was 1350, which according to this scale gives me an IQ of 139. This would have been back around 1975, before all the drug-induced brain damage.
… huh, I’m intrigued by this. Is there any possibility that there are different scales which measure these things differently, or have they been reorganised over time, or something? The reason I ask is that I have a family member who I remember being formally tested back in the mid-eighties or thereabouts and scoring somewhere in excess of 160. (I heard this from my parents, not the girl herself, so it’s unlikely it was down to exaggeration/bragging.) And… I mean, she was obviously a bright kid, but I’m pretty certain she wasn’t/isn’t in the “smartest person in England, EVER” category. Or at least, she hasn’t won any Nobel prizes as yet. So I’m kind of confused now. Could they have been using a different measurement scale? Were my parents lying for some bizarre reason? Or am I really of supergenius genetic stock? 
(Seriously though, as for myself I have no idea about my IQ and no real desire to know. I’m smart enough to dress myself in the morning and make a cup of coffee without injuring myself; I figure that’s all I really need. I don’t have any particular problems with people discussing their own IQs though; I just tend not to open those threads.)
I’ll post what I posted in the other thread. Unless you’re a freakin rocket scientist, brain surgeon, investment banker nobel prize winning economist whatever, maybe you aren’t really all that smart in the grand scheme of things.
And even if you ARE that smart, what the fuck does it matter if you are so socially maladusted that you have no friends or so physically awkward that you can’t toss a football around?
Look, I’m a pretty smart guy (97% according to Tamerlane’s little applet which seems about right from what I remember from where the scientists tested my brain). Doesn’t really matter though because as soon as I graduated from high school, I’m constantly in a race with other people just as smart or smarter than I am. I’d rather be the dumbest guy in a room full of geniuses than the smartest king of the morons.
Besides, sometimes it’s nice to keep your talents hidden so you can occassional pull them out when they are needed and hit one out of the park, so to speak.
No, I’d say that’s extremely unreasonable. 130 is a very high IQ; even if you were to assume SDMB skews above average, 130 is WAY above average. Depending on the test, only about one in 50 people are at 130 or higher. You’re essentially claiming that the average Doper is an actual, honest-to-God genius, and that’s just not reasonable to assume (and, if I may be brutally frank, does not fit my perception of the average intelligence of folks present on the board.) I think the term “genius” is not being appreciated for what it really means, and how rare it really is, if you’re suggesting that’s the norm here.
115 is very smart. Someone with an IQ of 115 is a full standard deviation above the mean; it would be saying quite a lot to say that the average IQ on the SDMB was 115. A large group of people with an average IQ of 115 would be noticeably full of bright people. 130 is something you would likely only find in a group of people systematically selected for very, very high intelligence.
The frequency with which people claim IQs of 130 and above which you will find here (and anywhere the subject comes up, I suppose) is just not reasonably likely unless you were polling, as msmith suggests, rocket scientists or neurosurgeons or something.
Of course, there are something like 5,000 regular posters here. (There are tens of thousands registered but I don’t think most of them post regularly.) It is a virtual certainty, just doing the math, that we do have a number of people above 130, and even as high as 160 and a handful above that, but even assuming a brighter than average crowd, having MOST of them at or over 130 is just not believeable.
Well, there’s two problems with this:
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Basing assumptions about the social perception of intelligence on how Presidential elections go is just plainly freakin’ nuts. It’s not a meaningful or representative data sample at all. It’s like basing your assumptions of how family dynamics work just by watching sitcoms broadcast on ABC.
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It’s false. Bill Clinton was renowned for his intelligence - Rhodes Scholar and all that - and beat two opponents who did not have intelligent personas (not that Bush 1.0 and Dole are stupid men, but smarts wasn’t a part of their sales pitches to the American public.) Jimmy Carter was certainly not viewed as being dumber than Gerald Ford.
My SAT score of 1460 from 1972 translates to 151 on the Weschler scale, and it does translate into some success in my job (electronic tech). It never helped me with anything else in life, really except that I seem to be better at handling money than most of my peers. I’m still socially backward, at the age of 52.
I think I’d give up at least 40 points to be able to come up with stories like Sampiro’s, for instance.
It’s worth noting that people tend to confuse knowledge and intelligence. There are a lot of highly knowledgeable people here, and I think that’s what folks are picking up on when they claim that the average doper has an IQ of 130.
Or that dopers do well on tests… including tests that claim to measure intelligence.
Half of the popular kids in my high school were also in honor society, so being smart didn’t automatically make anyone an outcast. It was usually the under achievers who were picked on all the time. Like the guy who was a freshman the year I was - and still a freshman when I graduated.
It’s interesting that you bring up sports, though. Besides out baseball team being #1 one year in their division, our sports teams were nothing to brag about. In fact, when I was a sophomore our basketball team made the news for finally breaking an 87 game losing streak. We didn’t have football or hockey teams, either. From TV and movies I get the impression that it’s usually jocks who pick on the smart kids, and we didn’t really have any, so there’s that…
And highly specialized knowledge at that. That’s easy to develop with the right interests, but knowing a lot of obscure trivia ( or obscure knowledge, if you don’t want to, ahem, trivialize it ) only implies enough intelligence to be literate and to have some intellectual curiosity about something. Which is nothing to sneeze at, but hardly implies near-genius.
Yesterday as I was fooling around on the internet with one of those stupid quiz things, I realized I no longer remember how to compute the area in a triangle. Which I guess with the argument above, means I’m just sinking back into the morass of ignorance, rather than getting dumber, like I occasionally feel ;).
Well said. People’s lack of understand of bell curves just slays me when it comes to this topic. Ten points tacked on here or there doesn’t mean what they think it does.
IQ tests were never meant to give blue ribbons to the people that score the highest. They break down at the very thin stratosphere at both ends of the spectrum so a 160 versus a 170 becomes mostly uninterruptible. I firmly believe that have a solid theoretical base as well a practical purpose but that isn’t it. They are meant to sort students into groups within a reasonable range. Some may require some type of special ed and others may require gifted classes. The vast majority just stay in the middle.
At the beginning of one school year, our principal had us take an intelligence test full of items to be rated on a scale from 1-5. “I enjoy doodling,” and “I like to take things apart” were among them, as I recall.
The premise was that if you like doing certain things, you’re probably good at them. (Inventing details here)—I don’t doodle much or decorate the house or things like that, though I do play guitar and sing…my artistic IQ was about average. But I like to do word puzzles, and I like quotations and reading, so my verbal IQ was high. If I recall correctly, the test didn’t generate a number, but rather, a qualitative description.
I noticed other people posting that they didn’t think their achievements were that big of a deal because others could have done the same if they’d put their minds to it. Overachieverism aside, maybe intellect is A) a muscle that you can choose to develop or not—I’ve known some people who didn’t seem to have hobbies or interests that piqued their curiosity—and B) a different muscle for different people—like successful artists who don’t spell well or rocket scientists who can’t figure out how to get a date.
Of course we can’t know everybody well enough to see where their intelligence lies and even when we do get to know them, we not be bright enough in their realm of intelligence to recognize it as such.
True, though technically mental retardation makes it not a bell curve, correct?
No, it absolutely does. That is a major purpose of them.
Are you admitting you don’t understand bell curves and standard deviations? :dubious:
The curve flows down both from the left and the right. A person who is in the 2nd percentile has a mirror image counterpart in the 98th percentile.
The issue with modeling intelligence as a bell curve is that the bell curve assigns a non-zero probability to someone having an IQ of less than -20, even though that’s impossible.
As I understand it, the MR population is higher than what the bell curve would predict. It is as if the tail has a tumor or tumors. My psych prof said that some have theorized this is due to environmental factors, e.g. lead poisoning, that messes with the natural order. Admittedly I had that course some time ago and haven’t kept up with the literature on the issue, so it’s possible that there has been a resolution of the data.
I think my grip on bell curves, standard deviations, stanines, z-scores, etc. is okay.
Don’t you think that is a trivial point though? Any normal curve goes out to infinity. However, that isn’t something we need to worry about in the real world. If you could score an IQ test up to 1000 and someone gets that score legitimately then the odds would be something like 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That just isn’t something we mortals need to be concerned with. The extreme low end of the scale just ends up with people in a persistent vegetative state or simply a dead hamster that retired from the SDMB. Again, that isn’t something we need to be concerned with as a practical matter.
I think what people are calling “masturbatory” is mostly just curiousity from NightRabbit and others. NightRabbit did put quotes around “smart,” and asked not just about being smarter than everyone else, but about feeling smart in general. So I think she knew the sensitivities of the topic. And while I’m only reading that thread for the first time right now, I’m seeing a lot of parody in it and a lot of perspective from people who long ago learned that academic gifts aren’t everything. I don’t see a ton of people looking to prove their superiority.
olivesmarch4th made a terrific post, so I don’t have much to add. Being told you’re smarter than the majority of your peers can be isolating, or maybe it’s the aftereffects that are isolating. Kids are hungry for praise - I know how bad I was about that - and I think a lot of them naturally start looking down on their peers after being told they are smarter. (Some never get over it!) Maybe getting picked in school has more to do with social cluelessness than it does with just “being smart,” but there’s a nontrivial overlap between being smart and being socially clueless, particularly for kids. I think NightRabbit was just curious about people who’ve had similar experiences.