Oh, then it was a misunderstanding. I thought you were (like me) amused by the poll result suggesting that the intelligence of the average person here is in the upper 99.865-th percentile.
(Just to get the feel for that number, belonging to the same percentile of income distribution in the U.S. would mean roughly a million dollars a year.)
Both can be power-law or Gaussian depending on your “perspective”.
There are roughly as many people with a IQ over 190 as there are people with an income over 1 billion USD per annum. By roughly I mean an order of magnitude.
Generally IQ is graphed as a Gaussian distribution because of the way it’s measured—the middle of the distribution is defined as 100. Income is raw numbers.
And since the correlation between the two is about 0.4, that would suggest an income of 1.2 standard deviations above the mean, or about $80,000 a year in the US, not controlling for age. Controlling for age, I suspect LWers have approximately average income for their level of intelligence (and because regression to the mean is not intuitive, it feels like we should be doing far better than that).
Oh, then it was a misunderstanding. I thought you were (like me) amused by the poll result suggesting that the intelligence of the average person here is in the upper 99.865-th percentile.
(Just to get the feel for that number, belonging to the same percentile of income distribution in the U.S. would mean roughly a million dollars a year.)
Hmm.. Isn’t the intelligence distribution more like a bell curve and the distribution of income more like a power law?
Both can be power-law or Gaussian depending on your “perspective”.
There are roughly as many people with a IQ over 190 as there are people with an income over 1 billion USD per annum. By roughly I mean an order of magnitude.
Generally IQ is graphed as a Gaussian distribution because of the way it’s measured—the middle of the distribution is defined as 100. Income is raw numbers.
(edited to move a scare quote)
Upvoted for the quality of the analogy, although I also agree with you.
Well I’m also amused by that, to be sure.
And since the correlation between the two is about 0.4, that would suggest an income of 1.2 standard deviations above the mean, or about $80,000 a year in the US, not controlling for age. Controlling for age, I suspect LWers have approximately average income for their level of intelligence (and because regression to the mean is not intuitive, it feels like we should be doing far better than that).