Update

iq.md

@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
 Please wear a hard hat when reading this page.
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-IQ (intelligence quotient) is a non-perfect but [still kind of useful](good_enough.md) measure of one's intelligence, it is a numeric score one gets on a standardized test that tries to estimate his intellectual ability at different tasks ([logic](logic.md), [memory](memory.md), language skills, spatial skills, ...) and express them with a single number. The tests are standardized and the scoring is usually tuned so that the value 100 means average intelligence -- anything above means smarter than average, anything below dumber than average. IQ is a quite controversial topic because it shows intellectual differences between [races](race.md) and sexes and clashes with [political correctness](political_correctness.md), there is also a great debate about "what intelligence even is" (i.e. what the test should measure, what weight should be given to different areas of intelligence), if it is even reasonable to simplify "intelligence" down to a single number, how much of a cultural bias there is (do we really measure pure intellectual capacity or just familiarity with some concepts of our western culture?) and the accuracy of the tests is also highly debated (which can be an issue if we e.g. start using IQ tests to determine who should get higher education and who shouldn't) -- nevertheless it's unquestionable that IQ DOES correlate with intellectual abilities, IQ tests are a tool that really does something, the debates mostly revolve around how useful the tool is, how it should be used, what conclusions can we make with it and so on. Basically only people with the lowest IQ say that IQ is completely useless. The testing of IQ was developed only during 20th century, so we don't know IQs of old geniuses -- if you read somewhere Newton's IQ was 200, it's just someone's wild guess.
+IQ (intelligence quotient) is a non-perfect but [still kind of useful](good_enough.md) measure of one's intelligence, it is a numeric score one gets on a standardized test that tries to estimate his intellectual ability at different tasks ([logic](logic.md), [memory](memory.md), language skills, spatial skills, ...) and express them with a single number. The tests are standardized and the scoring is usually tuned so that the value 100 means average intelligence -- anything above means smarter than average, anything below dumber than average. IQ is a quite controversial topic because it shows intellectual differences between [races](race.md) and sexes and clashes with [political correctness](political_correctness.md), there is also a great debate about "what intelligence even is" (i.e. what the test should measure, what weight should be given to different areas of intelligence), if it is even reasonable to simplify "intelligence" down to a single number, how much of a cultural bias there is (do we really measure pure intellectual capacity or just familiarity with some concepts of our western culture?) and the accuracy of the tests is also highly debated (which can be an issue if we e.g. start using IQ tests to determine who should get higher education and who shouldn't) -- nevertheless it's unquestionable that IQ DOES correlate with intellectual abilities, IQ tests are a tool that really does something, the debates mostly revolve around how useful the tool is, how it should be used, what conclusions can we make with it and so on. Basically only people with the lowest IQ say that IQ is completely useless. The testing of IQ was developed only during 20th century, so we don't know IQs of old geniuses -- if you read somewhere (including this article) that Newton's IQ was 200, it's just someone's wild guess.
 
 IQ follows the normal [probability](probability.md) distribution, i.e. it is modeled by the [bell curve](bell_curve.md) that says how many people of the total population will fall into any given range of IQ score. Though this has been challenged too, one of the basic laws of human stupidity says that the probability that someone is stupid is independent of any other of his characteristics (education, profession, race, sanity, ...). There are various IQ scales, almost all use the Gaussian (bell) curve that's centered at 100 (i.e. 100 is supposed to mean the average intelligence) and have [standard deviation](standard_deviation.md) 15 (but other have been used as well) -- this is what we'll implicitly suppose in the article from now. This means that about 2/3rds of people will fall in the range 85 to 115 but no more than 1% will have IQ higher than 145 or lower than 55. Sometimes you may also encounter so called **percentile** which says what percentage of population is below your IQ.
 
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ TODO: more details, history, where to measure (web vs Mensa vs SAT etc.)
 
 **If you think you're smart, you are dumb**, see the infamous [Dunning Kruger](dunning_kruger.md) effect -- becoming smarter comes with feeling dumber and dumber, becoming more humble and less self confident as you just see all the new things you didn't even know you don't know -- Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers of all times and possibly the smartest man of his time, famously summed this up by saying "I know that I know nothing". A fool thinks he is close to knowing everything -- he admits he doesn't know everything, but he thinks he knows like 90% of what the smartest people on Earth know because he didn't even step over the borders of obtaining the basic knowledge, that border is as far as he can see and he doesn't know beyond it lies an infinitely large plain of knowledge into which some managed to get kilometers ahead of him, they are so far away he has no idea anyone can even get that far. It's similar to how the better we explore the space, the more we see how tiny we are -- not long ago we might have thought our galaxy was the whole Universe, now we know it's just a tiny speck in a cluster that's itself just a small speck in the observable Universe which is a nothing in the scale of the whole infinite Universe. Self confidence implies extreme stupidity. Also note that feeling dumb doesn't imply being smart but admitting retardedness is a prerequisite for being smart.
 
-**Is IQ a useful measure and if so, how important is the score?** This is the controversial question discussed over and over, modern "inclusive" society dismisses IQ as basically useless because it points out differences between [races](race.md) etc., some rightist are on the other hand obsessed with IQ too much as it creates a natural hierarchy assigning each man his rank among others. True significance of IQ as a measure seems to be somewhere in between the two extremes here. As it's always noted about IQ, we have to remember the term "intelligence" itself is fuzzy, there doesn't and cannot exist any universal definition of it, so we have trouble even grasping what we're measuring and however we define intelligence, it usually ends up hardly even correlating with "success" or "achievements" or anything similar, so firstly let's see IQ just as what it literally is: a score in some kind of game. Furthermore intelligence is extremely complex and multidimensional (there is spatial and visual intelligence, long and short term memory, language skills, social and emotional intelligence etc.), capturing all this with a single number is inevitably a simplification, the score is just a projected shadow of the intelligence with light cast from certain angle. IQ score definitely does say a lot about some specific kind of "mathematical" intelligence, though even if designed to be so, even in this narrow sense it isn't anywhere near a perfect measure -- though a minority, some mathematicians do score low on IQ tests (Richard Feynman, physics Nobel Prize laureate had famously a relatively low score of 125). It's perhaps good to keep the "IQ tests as a game" mindset -- intelligent people will be probably good at it but some won't, performance can be increased by training, there will be narrowly focused autists who excel at the game but are extremely dumb at everything else etc. Having IQ score predict what we normally understand to be "intelligence" is like having height, weight and age predict how good of a soldier someone will be -- there will be some good correlations, but not nearly perfect ones. Some general IQ range will be necessary for certain tasks such as [programming](programming.md), but rather than +5 on an IQ score things such as education and personality traits will play much more important roles in actually achieving something or creating something good; for example curiosity and determination, the habit of thinking about everything in depth, nonconformity, a skeptical mind, all these are much more important than being a human calculator -- remember, the cheapest calculator will beat the smartest man in multiplying numbers, would you say it is more intelligent?
+**Is IQ a useful measure and if so, how important is the score?** Firstly if you are insecure about your own IQ then just stop that shit -- you know yourself, you know if you're good at math or writing or whatever else you try to do, do you need a piece of paper padding you on the back or something? That's completely pointless, the only thing worth of discussion is IQ as some standardized tool of estimating intellectual abilities of other people on a bigger scale, e.g. as some kind of filter in education (with small groups you can really just interview the people and see if they're dumb or not, that's also more reliable than IQ tests). In this of course the question of the validity of IQ is a controversial one, discussed over and over. Modern "inclusive" society dismisses IQ as basically useless because it points out differences between [races](race.md) etc., some rightist are on the other hand obsessed with IQ too much as it creates a natural hierarchy assigning each man his rank among others. True significance of IQ as a measure seems to be somewhere in between the two extremes here. As it's always noted about IQ, we have to remember the term "intelligence" itself is fuzzy, there doesn't and cannot exist any universal definition of it, so we have trouble even grasping what we're measuring and however we define intelligence, it usually ends up hardly even correlating with "success" or "achievements" or anything similar, so firstly let's see IQ just as what it literally is: a score in some kind of game. Furthermore intelligence is extremely complex and multidimensional (there is spatial and visual intelligence, long and short term memory, language skills, social and emotional intelligence etc.), capturing all this with a single number is inevitably a simplification, the score is just a projected shadow of the intelligence with light cast from certain angle. IQ score definitely does say a lot about some specific kind of "mathematical" intelligence, though even if designed to be so, even in this narrow sense it isn't anywhere near a perfect measure -- though a minority, some mathematicians do score low on IQ tests (Richard Feynman, physics Nobel Prize laureate had famously a relatively low score of 125). It's perhaps good to keep the "IQ tests as a game" mindset -- intelligent people will be probably good at it but some won't, performance can be increased by training, there will be narrowly focused autists who excel at the game but are extremely dumb at everything else etc. Having IQ score predict what we normally understand to be "intelligence" is like having height, weight and age predict how good of a soldier someone will be -- there will be some good correlations, but not nearly perfect ones. Some general IQ range will be necessary for certain tasks such as [programming](programming.md), but rather than +5 on an IQ score things such as education and personality traits will play much more important roles in actually achieving something or creating something good; for example curiosity and determination, the habit of thinking about everything in depth, nonconformity, a skeptical mind, all these are much more important than being a human calculator -- remember, the cheapest calculator will beat the smartest man in multiplying numbers, would you say it is more intelligent?
 
 { Also consider this: even if you're average, or even a bit below average, you're still [homo](gay.md) sapiens, so as long as you're not a [feminist](feminism.md) or [capitalist](capitalism.md) you'll always be the absolute top organism in intelligence, a member of by far the absolutely most intelligent species that ever appeared on [Earth](earth.md), your intelligence greatly surpasses great majority of living organisms. If you are able to read this, you already possess the great genius, you mastered language and are among the top 0.1%, there's no need to compare yourself to others and aim to be in 0.01% instead of 0.02%. Rather think about what good to do with the gift of reason you've been given. ~drummyfish }