Medians? The distributions would be more interesting.
If your IQ is 130-135 statistically you are “smarter” than nearly anyone you meet in your life, in fact considering that 140-145 is at the 0.1% statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter by a distribution point even at places that skew towards a higher IQ due to selection bias.
Half the population is below 100 IQ with over a third being between 85 and 100.
Top higher education institutions only score slightly above 115 on average 130 which is a whole bracket over that is exceptional even for places that are selectively biased towards higher IQ scores.
If you are in the top 2% of anything in life you are quite exceptional.
For comparison being in the top 2% of any Olympic sport would land you a spot in most Olympic teams.
And to be clear this isn’t about if IQ is a good indicator of performance or not but rather about how people evaluate themselves.
If placing yourself in the top single digit percentiles is considered modest than I think we need to redefine modesty.
I think this is off by multiple factors of 10? 2% is really not THAT high..
In any sufficiently large city you can probably find 98 other players you are better than..
2% of top performers in their sports can qualify for an Olympic (summer games) team spot.
And no we’re not even talking about extreme cases like those that happen in the winter games from time to time.
Also remember your selection pool if you think the top 2% of professional competitive swimmers in say 100M can’t get into the olympics again check their scores vs the Olympic qualifiers.
We are already discussing a relatively very small pool of subjects here.
Being in the top 2% of performers in a given sport qualifies you national and even international achievements, if you chose to follow that or not it’s up to you.
But in any case top 2% of any group is by definition exceptional.
This is just nowhere near true.
85-115 is considered “normal” with 85 being the lower limit for what one would consider a functional adult and 115 is the upper limit around which most of the successful professionals will be hanging around.
Scoring in the top 2% of correctly normalized and clinically evaluated IQ tests is quite exceptional.
Page 4 has a graph. Since harvard and other elites average applicant math + reading is at least 64, probably closer to 70, IQ ia likely to be 125-130.
In fact if we take your study then the 120-130 IQ range correlates to an ACT score range of between ~20 and ~70.
If we take the ACT numbers they had for “study 2” which was conducted on 150 psychology students in a private university which is a highly selective group already you have an IQ range of 100-120 with the majority being between 105 and 115.
A normalized average IQ across the three main domains (verbal, spatial and math) of 130 or higher is unlikely even for Harvard, the only real good study we have for Harvard is the Carson study which used psychometric tests to measure IQ and it got an average of 122 amongst PHD graduates in exact sciences.
For all intents and purposes a clinical psychometric IQ score of 130 is exceptional even for elite school, STEM PHD graduates.
Two points:
- +3 sd puts you at the 99.7th percentile, not the 99.9th. 140 would be much less rare than that.
- The places that select for high IQ contain many, many people with IQs over 145. Princeton admits 6% of those who apply, not 6% of those aged 15-20. With 350,000,000 people in the US, applying a 0.1% filter will leave you with 350,000 people. With 20,000,000 people aged 15-19, that filter will leave 20,000. Princeton admitted ~1,300 last year.
If you never meet anyone with an IQ above 145, you're not in an environment that selects for high IQ people.
Even universities that select for higher IQ are not considerably higher than the normal upper limit look at the ACT IQ correlation study that was linked here or the Carson study.
There are 472,489 people in the US which have an IQ of 145 or higher when you count for the portion of those who will be students say age 18-35 you get about 100,000 now spread those around the best 50 schools in the country and you still get a pretty low percentage even if all of them enroll into higher education.
Compare your earlier claim, "statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter". That is the opposite of the truth. If you are at a place that selects for high IQs, you are very likely to meet multiple people with IQs greater than 145. You are very unlikely to manage to avoid those people.
> sorry for rounding up
You were closer than I was, so touché. That said, the accurate figure is still quite far from your rounded estimate; while it may look like 99.86% is close to 99.9%, a 0.14% cutoff selects 40% more people than a 0.1% cutoff would.
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.
for the purposes of the survey it seems like some respondents didn't know how the IQ scale works, they probably assumed 130 is just above average.
It's very frustrating when most of the people you meet are dumb (out of your perspective).
Something about 110 IQ would be much better.