The Truth about IQ
There are so many bad takes about IQ going around.
The normie mind is attracted to bad IQ takes like a junkie to white powder baggies. And yet they don't even know what it actually means!
The biggest misconception about IQ is that it measures intelligence. That's not true! IQ measures only part (admittedly a large part) of one half of intelligence - the fluid component. IQ doesn't measure knowledge, wisdom, rationality, etc. You can have a high IQ on multiple good IQ tests and still be ignorant, unwise and irrational. It's much harder to have a lower IQ (much less than 100) and be wise, knowledgeable and rational but it's not impossible, especially within one or two special domains.
The second big misconception is that the numbering scale is totally made up. There aren't 100 or 150 "IQ points" out there to grab. It's a made up scale that just represents 1/15th of a standard deviation on the frequency distribution of all humans from a relevant population, which is usually taken to be a bell shaped curve with mean 100 and standard deviation 15.
85 IQ = μ - 1 σ
100 IQ = μ + 0 σ
115 IQ = μ + 1 σ
130 IQ = μ + 2 σ
145 IQ = μ + 3 σ
IQ is measured using written tests with many questions, and a large sample of scores from many test takers are used to calibrate the test. I think there's some broad appreciation that the points are "on a curve", but then people will say something like "Imagine if an AI had an IQ of 5 million!"
An IQ of 5 million is ontologically incapable of being meaningful. It would mean a score on tests equal to +300,000 standard deviations, which is simply not something that can exist because it would imply a human population vastly greater than you could fit in the entire universe to even define it.
In practice, you can't really measure IQs above 145 IQ = +3σ that reliably.
The third big big misconception is the idea that when you read or are told an IQ value it must be real. That's not true! People make it up all the time, either by flat out lying or by creatively reinterpreting a childhood IQ test which is not valid as an adult, using a low quality online IQ test which typically 'glazes' your score to make you feel good and share it or by just vibing/repeating rumors. For example, Google reports that John von Neumann has an IQ of 190, corresponding to +6σ. But when you calculate this, it's 1 in 1 billion rarity - obviously no test has been taken by a billion people so you can't know that someone is exactly 1 in 1 billion at it.
This brings us to the fourth and perhaps worst misconception: the idea that IQ is like a power level and the human with the highest number will be the best at everything. That's not true: the people who are best at something will probably have high IQ, but not the highest IQ. There's a great Less Wrong article pointing out why this: when two things are correlated (but not perfectly), the largest value of one thing will not coincide with the largest value of the other thing. This is called "the tails coming apart".
The human obsession with status makes IQ into a status hierarchy, incentivizes people to lie about their IQs to appear "better", and makes people fantasize about smart, capable people having outrageously high IQs that are impossible to even measure and statistically extremely unlikely to be true. Then in reaction to this, some people start denying that IQ even exists, talking about "multiple intelligences" which is pseudoscientific bunk, and makes people sad and angry about IQ as a subject.
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