Even a small difference translates into enormous ratio between numbers of people, several standard deviations from the mean...
A distribution with mean 100 and st. dev. 14 will exceed one with mean 90 and st. dev. 16 for all x between about 93 and about 170, and there aren’t that many people with IQs over 170 anyway.
But can we detect such a tiny difference as between std dev 14 and std dev 16 ? After we have to control for really many factors that are different between groups in question?
Also, that was my point, at the level of very high (one in million) intelligence, i.e. actual geniuses, the people you’d call genius without having to detect them using some test. I have a pet hypothesis about the last biological change which caused our technological progress. Little mixing with Neanderthals, raising the standard deviation somewhat.
The IQ test I think get useless past some point, when the IQ test savants that solve it at such level (but can’t learn very well for example, or can’t do problems well that require more of parallel processing), start to outnumber geniuses.
A distribution with mean 100 and st. dev. 14 will exceed one with mean 90 and st. dev. 16 for all x between about 93 and about 170, and there aren’t that many people with IQs over 170 anyway.
But can we detect such a tiny difference as between std dev 14 and std dev 16 ? After we have to control for really many factors that are different between groups in question?
Also, that was my point, at the level of very high (one in million) intelligence, i.e. actual geniuses, the people you’d call genius without having to detect them using some test. I have a pet hypothesis about the last biological change which caused our technological progress. Little mixing with Neanderthals, raising the standard deviation somewhat.
The IQ test I think get useless past some point, when the IQ test savants that solve it at such level (but can’t learn very well for example, or can’t do problems well that require more of parallel processing), start to outnumber geniuses.