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Comment by brohee | Hacker News Reader

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray estimates that there will always be 14 per cent of children in the top 5 per cent of the IQ distribution curve who are the offspring of parents with below-average IQs. Admittedly, that’s not much when you consider that the remaining 86 per cent will have parents with above-average IQs,

It really makes me wonder about the author IQ.

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Why?

Because it's stupidly wrong. He misses the possibility for average people to have high IQ children. The sentence parses as : 14% high IQ children are from lower IQ couples, 0% are from average IQ couple, 86% are from high IQ couple...

It also dismisses the existence of mismatched IQ couples, and highly intelligent men with a hot air head isn't unheard off, and nowadays women have their toy boys too...

> It also dismisses the existence of mismatched IQ couples

Yep, IQ has a higher statistical variance in men than in women, basically guaranteeing that there will be couples with IQ mismatches, going both directions.

In probability , the fraction of the population at exactly 50%ile is approximately 0.

It's prose. When you say someone is of average height, you usually mean within a standard deviation of average, not that the person is exactly the locale appropriate average height... At best that sentence is very poorly worded, at worst the author is a shining example of regression to the mean.

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