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Well, indeed... I've often argued that there are two necessary "components" to intelligence: a brain that is good at "connecting the dots", and lots of "dots" - i.e. information. Either one without hew other renders you, effectively, not very smart. You could have the brain of Einstein, but without a decent memory it'll do you little good. (This is my excuse anyway, and I'm sticking to it!) Conversely, you could be like that girl in your school...
All of which is, though interesting, all slightly beside the point, or the question, I was asking. Which is how smart is average? Intuitively we think, well, average is average, so... but I suspect that actually average is pretty stupid. I know the question is kind of meaningless - like asking how red is red? - but maybe put it his way: compared to chimpanzees, how smart is the average (IQ-100) human? I suspect the factor, though large, is not as great as we'd like to believe.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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The Chimpanzee question is awesome!
Back in the old days, they separated us from monkeys/apes by saying that we could not only USE tools, we could make tools for specific use. That separated us.
Then, they found a monkey break a branch, strip the leaves off of it, smooth it out, and stick it into an ant hole, to eat the ants.
I believe they went back and changed the definition.
Finally, I like the phrase "reasonably intelligent". 100 on the IQ test is kinda meaningless, because we work in standard deviations above and below to actually tell us who is a genius and who is an idiot.
For me, it implies that some expected to be able to THINK, not just answer questions, but a certain amount of critical thinking. Also, they do NOT have to refer to their name tag EVERY Time they introduce themselves 
So, the basic definition of average intelligence is someone who should be trainable to perform some specific set of activities in a time comparable with anyone else randomly picked from a population.
This gets to the heart of your question: Why? Why do you want to know? To find/filter people. To understand if your expectations (like those we place on our children, family, friends) are reasonable?
Why does the exact definition of Average Intelligence matter? Furthermore, a study of who succeeds in life shows that "grit" is a better determination of success than IQ.
Personally, I believe IQ to be a flawed system. But it is what we have.
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Why? No real reason - I wasn't trying to start a scientific debate, just a conversation.... we humans like to think we're smart, and some of us are (many a good deal smarter than I - I am not trying to blow my own trumpet here), I just got to wondering: how smart is the average person, really? And I suspect the (totally unscientific) answer is: not very, or certainly not as smart as we like to think.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Well, Almost everyone starts by considering themselves Above Average today!
But this is probably not a representative forum. As developers, we usually suffer higher than average IQs. Abstraction and Problem Solving require intelligence.
Most Average or below average people drop out.
When someone knows they are not that smart, they usually refer to themselves as average.
So I would argue here that most people on the forum are above average, with some FAR above average, as that is who tends to be drawn into programming.
I think average intelligent human beings are, overall, pretty smart comparatively so. The ability to appreciate music, read, write, communicate with a complex language, and learn slang are difficult for most primates.
Try teaching a small child how type words when they don't know how to read/write yet, you will quickly appreciate how smart average really is.
Of course, go to McDonalds, and you might experience it from the other end of the spectrum when placing your order, or watching them make change
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(as far as I understand) IQ tests cover a broad range of intellect testing. Like BMI, it can provide false positives. Amazing at maths, but terrible memory for directions, average score.
most jobs you mention are the result of specialisation. In fact all your examples require no inteligence, as they are the starting point.
application to university VS gaining a univerity degree
course to become airline pilot VS active commerical pilots license
learning C# programming is for anyone VS being a professional (earning money for the job) c# programmer
studying lay VS practice law
on the practice law point, I would assume above average for a number of areas. I think it like this, only need 1 layer to cover 500-1000 people or 0.1% of the population need layer skills.
if bell-curve intelligence in a population. manual low skill work requires more then 50% of your population. (slowly being less in mechanised world)
and your so called average group will be about the range of 30%-70% of the population.
So someone with below then average intelligence (based around IQ test) could be a commercial pilot if they cover the skills needed for being a pilot.
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application to university VS gaining a univerity degree
which is why my question as: how would they fare (do) in a university application? Would they get in or fail? Same with the other questions: eg
someone with below then average intelligence (based around IQ test) could be a commercial pilot if they cover the skills needed for being a pilot.
would an average person be able to cover the skills required to be a pilot?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Wombaticus wrote: would an average person be able to cover the skills required to be a pilot?
well, no I guess. Commercial Airline Pilot is a specialist job. But you do not need to have average or above intelligence to specialise.
Wombaticus wrote: how would they fare (do) in a university application? Would they get in or fail?
similar, loads of people get into university, but drop outs in the first year are high. With a mix being due to not what they were thinking. Getting in is easy. Staying in is a different question. Then coming out with a low score, well they got a degree.
is someone with a top result high school results dumber then someone with a bottom result university degree?
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First,
The actual definition of Intelligence is really hard to pin down.
So, given that, how do you measure it. The guy who recites PI to a million decimal places (or some really large number), cannot drive a car. he can learn a language in days, though.
Next,
Why does the concept exist? As a sorting system to sort out those who might have more cranial capacity than others. The keys are simple. Ignore the average. The system is designed to find people one ore more standard deviations ABOVE OR BELOW.
Meaning, who do we give SPECIAL ATTENTION to? Keep BOTH groups away from the Glycerin and Nitric Acid. The dumb ones will drink it, and the smart ones will mix it. BOTH ending badly. LOL
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Well indeed - but see my answer to loctrice[^] above
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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I've been thinking about thinking for a very long time and working on a book entitled, "Insights on My Mind".
There is, unfortunately, no true definition of "intelligence" universally agreed upon.
It's one of those terms like "consciousness" or "spirituality". People think they know it when they see it, but no one can pin down all the constituent pieces and processes.
So, while I do respect your honest question, its premise is as invalid as any test that purports to measure it.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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Yes, I know all this - but I wasn't asking for a definition of intelligence, nor was my question dependent upon it. See my answer to loctrice[^] above.
It was never meant to be a science question...
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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IQ scores aren't an absolute measure of intelligence, it's a relative scale. 100 is average by definition: if half of people score lower than you and half score higher, you score 100. That doesn't say anything about how "intelligent" in absolute terms 100 is: if the general population becomes more intelligent then you would have to be more intelligent to score 100.
Scoring 100 simply means that you took a general aptitude test that about half of people would score lower on and half of people would score higher on. That's all. It can be taken as a relative indicator of mental ability, but there's no specific quantity of brainpower that is 100 IQ. 100 is simply defined as average by averaging scores through statistical sampling.
BTW, this is why IQ tests are notoriously unreliable at the high end: so few people fall into the super high range that you can't get a good statistical sample to use as a gauge. The difference between say 180 and 200 IQ is pure guesswork, the tests can't really score that high because not enough people on the planet can hit that range to provide a good dataset for calibrating those scores (not unless you tested the entire planet, anyway).
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Yes, I know all this... it wasn't the question though! Please see my previous answers above...
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Oh OK, I just read the OP and thought that was what you were asking.
By asking how smart an average person is, what you're really asking is how smart people are in general. Since we're (apparently) the smartest beings that we're aware of, we're pretty much all off the charts from that perspective. In general, a person of average intelligence is very intelligent indeed and capable of most things that humans can do.
Also, being average has some real advantages, because we live in a world built for the average. It's not an easy world to understand for those who are too far below or above average. I've known some super-intelligent (but not autistic) academics who were absolute basket cases when it came to relating to people and navigating the everyday world, so in some ways it can be too much of a good thing.
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I tried to say pretty much the same things. You said it so much better!
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It's the difference between:
- Med school versus Arts
- F35 versus Flight Simulator
- Programming versus coding
- Corporate versus real estate
- No brains needed; just good genes
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You have really asked the wrong question. Average intelligence is probably pretty good for doing most things humans need to do (or we would be extinct by now). I submit the more appropriate question (assuming Gaussian distribution) is how tight the standard deviation is. Given that the number spread is small (seem to recall 70 is considered severely challenged and I would submit most above 136 are also severely challenged but in a different way), it is likely that most of the population is extremely close to 100. I am going to guess that 70 is 3 standard deviations below and 136 is 3 standard deviations above. That puts *a lot* of people very close to 100! That also means those just below 100 are just as smart as those just above for all practical purposes.
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Yeah but... you (and just about everyone else) is answering the wrong question - it isn't that I asked the wrong one, though perhaps I could have put it better. However, your point
Average intelligence is probably pretty good for doing most things humans need to do (or we would be extinct by now)
is a good one - and begs a question close to what I was originally asking: is it still good enough for the modern world?
Yes, we were smart enough to crawl out of the caves and build a technological world and grow it to a population of 7 billion and growing.... But are we smart enough to survive it?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Your clarification makes a difference. I think we are probably doing just fine. We haven't killed off each other yet and, as StatementTerminator observed, we are getting steadily smarter as a species (no data other than bias to support that claim). I think we are getting smarter at a rate that lets us expand boundaries without doing too awfully much that we might characterize as a stupid idea in retrospect.
I think the answer to your modified question is yes. We seem to be muddling along quite nicely with most people arguably happy with their lives and slowly making the world a better place for their kids and grandkids. I think if it weren't good enough, we would be imploding as a species pretty rapidly.
After I posted, it occurred to me that "good enough" is the right answer to "How smart is average?". Average smarts is good enough for just about everything to have a productive, happy life and do worthwhile things.
modified 9-May-16 12:21pm.
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Well.. I'm not sure we aren't imploding....
We seem to be muddling along quite nicely with most people arguably happy with their lives
"Most people"? From a global perspective, most people lead pretty desperate lives though, like grass growing in cracks in the pavement, it's amazing how many people manage to smile though it. There's little even "quite nice" about much of what's going on in much of the world. And even in the West, freedom and democracy (the limited form of it we have) is facing some real threats, to which it may well succumb. And most of these threats are ones we have brought upon ourselves - not so smart, really. And have we, as a species, got what it takes to deal with the global issues such as climate change - the effects of which could be quite enormous? I am far from convinced that we have.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Society is created largely by and for the average, who are the vast majority of the population. On the whole we have the intelligence to deal with the challenges we face. Where we fail is with greed and myopic thinking, and this is actually more of a problem with the highly intelligent: it's the really smart ones who exploit the rest of society for individual gain.
For instance, the burning of fossil fuels which has led to climate change wasn't a stupid thing to do for those who were driving it, they profited well and got exactly what they wanted. There's plenty of evidence that energy companies knew quite well the consequences of what they were doing, they were plenty smart enough to realize that, as well as realize that they could profit from it while leaving others in the future to pay for the consequences.
Intelligence isn't the problem in society, it's the lack of caring about other people.
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But if this lack of caring has catastrophic consequences, as climate change could do, then from a species point of view, the actions that led to it can not be called intelligent. The short term gain of the few at the expense of the species - even if not terminal decline, at least a heavy price - is not very smart, really.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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When asking about IQ scores you are talking about individual intelligence. Projecting intelligence onto the species as a whole is a bit of a stretch, the species is set of genetic code not a thinking being.
There is nothing to say that intelligence is necessarily good for a species if the goal of a species is survival and reproduction. Bacteria aren't very intelligent, but from a survival standpoint they have us beat don't they?
To put it another way, what is smart for the individual may be bad (or "dumb") for the species in the aggregate. We are much more likely to wipe ourselves out by being too smart than not being smart enough.
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Those who think human intelligence is not measurable in the aggregate are mistaken. One can argue successfully only about how accurately it can be measured, what measure is best, and how useful the assessed IQ of a single individual is. Human intelligence appears to be normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15 points, so that 65% of the population measures between 85 and 115.
That means most of the population is pretty freakin' average.
That means for every engineer with an IQ of 135, there is a developmentally disabled person with an IQ of 65. I don't see a lot of either walking around.
That means that an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein with an IQ of 200+ comes along once or twice in 100 years over the whole world, so the poster who thinks his IQ is 200 has much to prove.
It means China, with its population of 1.2 billion, should generate Einsteins at a rate four times that of the United States. This applies to mere geniuses too, of which there are significantly more. This should worry anyone concerned about US competitiveness in the world.
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Well, you have to consider the fact that most of those geniuses are likely born into grinding poverty and are lucky to survive to adulthood, let alone get an education and make use of their brains. For the sake of competitiveness, providing things like health care, education, and opportunity matter a lot more than the size of the talent pool.
China may understand this better than the US though, since they seem to be trying hard to improve those things while the US has been going backwards for decades.
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