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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

100 is defined as an "average" IQ, yet I suspect everyone on this site is quite a bit above that, likely in the 110-120 range and skewed heavily upwards, and have not actually interacted constantly on a long term with someone who has a ~100 IQ, much less a ~92 IQ.

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It's actually somewhat amazing how isolated you can get from the average person if you stick to settings & persuits associated with "intellectuals". I recall ended up in a friend group of 8 people once that included 3 geniuses.

Sometimes you really have to take a step back and realise that you're not as normal as you feel. You can spend your time on hackernews feeling very insecure and then apply 5% of what people talk about here and then the average person will treat you like you invented fire.

Fun fact: Ivy League students who attended public high schools hold sharply lower opinions of what "average people" are able to do than do students who attended private high schools.

To this end: I’ve astonished a number of peers who did the straight to a 4-year track with a anecdote about only 22% of my community college “Critical Thinking” class passing the first midterm, which covered very simple truth functions and negation. To this day it sticks with me.

Remember the 100 includes those with mental disabilities or borderline disabled. If you are in a building without people with mental disabilities then the IQ is likely some amount above 100.

So when you think of your highschool class you shouldn't think 100, but rather 105. So even though 100 is the average of the population it can be on the lower end in a professional or academic setting.

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