I have always despised the term “pseudointellectualism” since there isn’t exactly a set of criteria for a pseudointellectual, nor is there a process of accreditation for becoming an intellectual; the closest thing I’m aware of is, perhaps, a doctorate, but the world isn’t exactly short of Ph.D.s who put out crap. There are numerous graduate programs where the GRE/GPA combination to get in is barely above the undergrad averages, for example.
alfredmacdonald
Karma: 92
I don’t think anyone on Less Wrong has lied about their IQ. (addendum: not enough to seriously alter the results, anyway.) If you come up with a “valuing the truth” measure, LessWrong would score pretty highly on that considering the elaborate ways people who post here go about finding true statements in the first place. To lie about your IQ would mean you’d have to know to some degree what your real IQ is, and then exaggerate from there.
However, I do think it’s more likely than you mention that most people on LessWrong self-reporting IQ simply don’t know what their IQ is in absolutely certain terms, since to know your adult IQ you’d have to see a psychometricist and receive an administered IQ test. iqtesk.dk is normed by Mensa Denmark, so it’s far more reliable than self-reports. You don’t know where the self-reported IQ figures are coming from—they could be from a psychometricist measuring adult IQ, or they could be from somewhere far less reliable. It could be that they know their childhood IQ was measured at somewhere around 135 for example, and are going by memory. Or they could know by memory that their SAT is 99th percentile and spent a minute to look up what 99th percentile is for IQ, not knowing it’s not a reliable proxy. Or they might have taken an online test somewhere that gave ~140 and are recalling that number. Who knows? Either way, I consider “don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to cognitive imperfection” a good mantra here.
126 is actually higher than a lot of people think. As an average for a community, that’s really high—probably higher than all groups I can think of except math professors, physics professors and psychometricists themselves. It’s certainly higher than the averages for MIT and Harvard, anyway.
About the similarity between self-reported IQ and SAT scores: SAT scores pre-1994 (which many of the scores on here are not likely to fall into) are not reliable as IQ test proxies; Mensa no longer accepts them. This is because it is much easier to game. I tutor the SAT, and when I took the SAT prior to applying at a tutor company my reading score was 800, but in high school pre-college it was only in the mid-600s. SAT scores in reading are heavily influenced by (1) your implicit understanding of informal logic, and (2) your familiarity with English composition and how arguments/passages may be structured. Considering the SAT has contained these kinds of questions since the mid-90s, I am inclined to throw its value as a proxy IQ test out the window and don’t think you can draw conclusions about LessWrong’s real collective IQ from the reported SAT scores.
The IQTest.dk result may have given the lowest measure, but I also think it’s the most accurate measure. It would not put LessWrong in the 130s, maybe, but it would mean that the community is on the same level of intellect as, say, surgeons and Harvard professors, which is pretty formidable for a community.
YeahOKButStill has an interesting take on the interaction between philosophy done in blogs and philosophy done in journals: