LessWrong IQ Survey

I think the prejudice exists for a reason, and the reason is this:

Intelligence, in general, correlates positively with success at life. However, speaking about one's own intelligence correlates negatively with success at life.

Of course there are many situations where this rule is misapplied. There is a difference when someone asks me about my IQ and as a matter of fact I say a number; and when I come into a room saying: "hey guys, let's talk about IQ and about how the world should worship the most intelligent people... and by the way, my IQ is XYZ". Yet, a careless observer may evaluate the first situation as the second one. Especially on the community forum where LessWrongers ask LessWrongers about their IQ -- if you see us as individuals, it is more like the first case, but if an outsider sees us as a community, it is more like the second case. The problem is not LessWrongers talking about their IQs, the problem is LessWrongers asking. Especially asking repeatedly in a short time frame.

The data you gathered here will be highly unreliable. First, it's self-reporting. What prevents me from taking the test, getting result 90 points, and reporting 190? Nothing. Second, self-sampling. Who is more likely to take the test: readers who usually get high values on IQ tests, or readers who usually get low values. Third, just the idea of an online IQ test makes me shiver -- the internet is full with fraudulent tests, or tests made by mentally unbalanced people with almost zero knowledge of psychometrics -- and the tests that pretends to reliably measure values above the usual IQ tests are very unlikely to be methodologically correct. It is about statistics: If you want to speak e.g. about "1 in 1000" intelligence level, you better callibrate your test on a few thousand randomly selected people. How likely are they to fill your test seriously, unless you pay them? How much is paying them going to cost you? How likely are you then to provide the resulting test and calibration online for free?

So the consequences of our breaking this prejudice will be 1) gathering data with almost zero reliability, and 2) looking like IQ-obsessed losers to outsider. I see nothing empowering in that.

If we are going to break a prejudice, at least let's make in a way that makes sense. If we are going to publish a result that e.g. 70% of LW readers have IQ above 130, and 20% are above 150, let's use a methodology a former psychology student would not find obviously flawed.

I think discussions of how to capitalize on intelligence might be interesting and worth while. That's got nothing much to do with discussing what the actual statistical distribution of IQ is among the LW population; all that needs saying about that is that it turns out that LW has quite a lot of high-IQ people.

(What would be said in a discussion of how to capitalize on IQ-style intelligence? Non-obvious careers in which such intelligence turns out to be highly advantageous. Typical weaknesses that accompany high IQ, and how to use abilities that correlate with IQ to overcome them. Classes of problems that turn out to submit more or less readily than you'd expect to the kinds of thinking that high-IQ people are good at. I don't know whether any of this would be unobvious enough to be worth it, but it seems at least an order of magnitude more productive than yet another Oh Grandmother, What A Big IQ You Have discussion.)