A 138 average doesn’t seem far-fetched at all to me. A little bit of self-serving bias is inevitable, but I highly doubt the real average is e.g. in the 120s. This random website I found says that the average IQ of an Ivy League student is 142. I go to a school that isn’t as good as most Ivys but is better than some of them. I would guess the average IQ of a student here is 135-ish. The average LW poster seems much, much smarter to me than the average person at my school.
Yeah, I’ve moved a bit towards your sort of position because of the 2013⁄14 results. That said, I don’t have an impression of LWers being way, way smarter than other students I encounter in real life.
(I’m also still leery of the poor correlation between education level and IQ, which cropped up again in the latest survey. To go into tedious detail: among those aged ≥29, 25 people with a high school education or less gave a mean IQ of 139.5, and 155 people with more education gave a mean IQ of 140.2. And Nornagest’s suggestion to look at the high end now gives a less statistically significant result than last year. The 24 oldsters with PhDs gave a mean IQ of 142.4, and the other 156 non-PhDs gave a mean IQ of 139.8.)
A 138 average doesn’t seem far-fetched at all to me. A little bit of self-serving bias is inevitable, but I highly doubt the real average is e.g. in the 120s. This random website I found says that the average IQ of an Ivy League student is 142. I go to a school that isn’t as good as most Ivys but is better than some of them. I would guess the average IQ of a student here is 135-ish. The average LW poster seems much, much smarter to me than the average person at my school.
Yeah, I’ve moved a bit towards your sort of position because of the 2013⁄14 results. That said, I don’t have an impression of LWers being way, way smarter than other students I encounter in real life.
(I’m also still leery of the poor correlation between education level and IQ, which cropped up again in the latest survey. To go into tedious detail: among those aged ≥29, 25 people with a high school education or less gave a mean IQ of 139.5, and 155 people with more education gave a mean IQ of 140.2. And Nornagest’s suggestion to look at the high end now gives a less statistically significant result than last year. The 24 oldsters with PhDs gave a mean IQ of 142.4, and the other 156 non-PhDs gave a mean IQ of 139.8.)