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Ok, which of the following is closest to your beliefs? 1. Tech people are of approximately average intelligence, and we should be able to see this in IQ

Ok, which of the following is closest to your beliefs? 1. Tech people are of approximately average intelligence, and we should be able to see this in IQ or other tests. 2. Tech people are of approximately average intelligence, although IQ and other tests may say otherwise; those tests are all bad. 3. Tech people are of substantially above average intelligence. I would suggest SAT/ACT scores as the most obvious and least-confounded alternative to IQ tests. More-confounded alternatives would include grades, rate of having a college degree, rate of attending an elite college, rate of having advanced degrees, size of vocabulary... As for social awkwardness, I think that is less well-studied than intelligence, but you could imagine constructing a survey with questions that attempted to measure what you cared about. For example: "How many friends do you have?" "Were you bullied in school?" "Would you feel excited or apprehensive about attending a party where you didn't know anyone else?" "Do you find it easy to make new friends?" "Do you think others enjoy your presence at parties?" (Some questions like these have in fact been used to estimate "extroversion".) And I would ask a similar question here: do you really think tech people are average, and, if so, do you think this would likely be seen in the results of simple questionnaires?

giraffe_lady 5y ago
I don't have an opinion about the average intelligence of software developers and you've clearly thought a lot more about this than I care to. But the person made a pretty straightforward assertion about us being, in aggregate, normal. And you pretty much went straight for the calipers, which I just don't think was helpful or necessary. That's all that's happening here, I'm not trying to formally debate you about the truth of these different statements. Just pointing out that software devs are overall a pretty normal group of people.
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- Jensson 5y ago
  > I don't have an opinion about the average intelligence You probably missed that this sub thread just concerns the intelligence part of the top post. It said that software engineers are neither superior with respect to intelligence nor are inferior with respect to social skills. The poster you argue with choose to argue against the first point, you try to say that he is wrong since the first point is valid. The points aren't really connected, so even if the second point is valid the first point might still be wrong. On HN threads going off-topic is normal and should be expected. So just because the outer discussion only concerns social part it is still fine to poke hole in parts of people comments like this. The first person to bring up intelligence was the top post anyway, there was no reason to do so, but now they did so we have this subthread.
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giraffe_lady 5y ago

I don't have an opinion about the average intelligence of software developers and you've clearly thought a lot more about this than I care to. But the person made a pretty straightforward assertion about us being, in aggregate, normal. And you pretty much went straight for the calipers, which I just don't think was helpful or necessary. That's all that's happening here, I'm not trying to formally debate you about the truth of these different statements. Just pointing out that software devs are overall a pretty normal group of people.

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Jensson 5y ago
> I don't have an opinion about the average intelligence You probably missed that this sub thread just concerns the intelligence part of the top post. It said that software engineers are neither superior with respect to intelligence nor are inferior with respect to social skills. The poster you argue with choose to argue against the first point, you try to say that he is wrong since the first point is valid. The points aren't really connected, so even if the second point is valid the first point might still be wrong. On HN threads going off-topic is normal and should be expected. So just because the outer discussion only concerns social part it is still fine to poke hole in parts of people comments like this. The first person to bring up intelligence was the top post anyway, there was no reason to do so, but now they did so we have this subthread.
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