In The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs, Scott revises his estimate of the average LessWrong IQ from 138 to 128. He doesn’t explicitly explain how he arrived at this number, but it appears to be an average of the demographics norm method (123) and the SAT method (134). However, using the information in his post, the SAT method doesn’t actually yield 134 but rather 123.

Here's the breakdown: a median SAT score of 1490 (from the LessWrong 2014 survey) corresponds to +2.42 SD, which regresses to +1.93 SD for IQ using an SAT-IQ correlation of +0.80. This equates to an IQ of 129. Subtracting 6 points (since, according to the ClearerThinking test, the IQs of people who took the SAT and remember their score is ~6 points higher than the group average) brings the adjusted IQ estimate to 123.

The ClearerThinking test also provides a way to [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 28th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hEdTLjvWzJPcS7PpY/the-average-rationalist-iq-is-about-122

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The average rationalist IQ is about 122” by Rockenots

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“The average rationalist IQ is about 122” by Rockenots