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The problem here is that you extrapolate too much from what I said. I didn’t said it’s unlikely that you’ll meet anyone smarter in JPL, the noble prize awards o
by dogma1138 8y ago
The problem here is that you extrapolate too much from what I said.
I didn’t said it’s unlikely that you’ll meet anyone smarter in JPL, the noble prize awards or in the annual meeting of the Prometheus society.
I said you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter even at places that select for higher IQ this includes work places and school.
Sure Princeton with its I don’t know 6000-8000 student and faculty body likely has people with IQ of 145 or higher but Princeton on its own isn’t a likely place to be even if you are in the top 2% of the IQ distribution.
The popilation of the top 50 or so schools is about 700,000, and even those are not the only places that are selectively for higher IQ any higher education institutions would be.
If we take my rough numbers then you have about 1 in 7 chance on paper however that counts for the entire population bracket of 18-35 if we take the median age of those schools which is 23 then we have only a pool of 34,000 to work with which now brings up the chance to about 1 in 20.
Now higher IQ above a certain range which isn’t even “high” actually increases your chances of dropping out of both collage and high school it also correlated to higher likelihood of both clinical and social personality disorders and many other issues that can hinder one from becoming well adjusted.
I would honestly put the average “likelihood” of meeting someone at those places with a 145 IQ or higher to be about 1/50 if not worse and the further you go from there while still being perfectly in the domain of a highly selective organization it’s going to get worse.
This also doesn’t take into account that there seems to be something that is called “islands of intelligence” which means that despite the predictive distribution due to standard deviation IQ isn’t exactly linear and you might have more people with 138 IQ for example than 134.
There is a debate if this is due to how we are testing and scoring IQ or is this an actual trait of intelligence.
And ofc the “plastic” IQ decreases with age and for different people it decreases at different rates which again makes it problematic to really well account for.
However I still stick by my initial point that 130-135 is exceptional and you are quite unlikely to meet people smarter than you (as I said by a whole bracket) in life, at least not on a day to day basis even if you study or work at places that already select for a higher IQ as long as again those are your average selective place.
Want to meet someone with an IQ probably in the high 150s? Well it’s easy enroll in Stanford and go to one of Susskind’s classes that guy is probably up there.
But again I’m talking about normal day to day interactions for an average person with a 135 IQ at an average above average IQ selective place such as a work place or a collage.