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"Think of how smart the average person is. Now realize that half of them are dumber than that."
-- St. George (Carlin)
(Yes, I know that's technically the median, not the average, but the average idiot doesn't know what a median is)
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And (subject to your caveat) half are also smarter....
"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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Technically, the "average" intelligence is not the midpoint. So half of people are not necessarily smarter or dumber than the average. To get that grouping, you use the median, or middle value, which is defined, statistically, as the value that separates the highest half from the lowest.
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It is true, statistically speaking, that the median, rather than the mean, is the value of a continuous property which divides a population into two groups of the same size, one above, and one below. It is also true, however, that, for properties which are (statistically) normally distributed within a population, the median will be equal to the mean. Intelligence (or, at least, I.Q.) is normally distributed within the human population, so it is valid to assume that the median is equal to the mean.
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There is very little in our world that cannot be done, to some degree or another, by people with an IQ of only 100, so they would be able to do all of your examples. Your score on an IQ test doesn't make you good at something, it merely means you score well on IQ tests. What you do with your intelligence is the thing that matters.
Put another way, scoring high on IQ tests isn't a very marketable skill 
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Perhaps I shouldn't have brought up IQ tests, as we all know they're pretty arbitrary and useless... what I'm after getting a handle on is just how smart is the average human being? Or, as I titled the post: how smart is average?
"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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What are smarts good for, actually? Near as I can tell, they help you grasp situations faster, and to see more deeply into them. The problem is, that training and experience make a bigger difference. A really smart person may be able to perform better than most people on a larger variety of tasks, but they will be unlikely to perform better than an experience average person on a given task.
So maybe that's the answer you're looking for -- smarter people can perform adequately on a larger variety of tasks.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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It would be smart to think about what sort of answer you can expect to that question, and why you would or wouldn't accept the answer as factual. For instance, if I made some claim about the ability of people with 100 IQs to program in C#, how could I possibly prove it, and why would you choose to believe it ... other than being predisposed to doing so.
BTW, the people making claims about Mensa and its tests are lying. The person claiming to score 185-200 on "official" tests has never done any such thing if he failed to qualify on a Mensa test, which has a much lower standard (132). Mensa test scores are most certainly are not inflated by 20% ... Mensa administers standardized Stanford-Binet and Weschler tests, using trained proctors, but also accepts proper documentation of results on other tests.
The "Which of these things is not like the other?" questions do not have arbitrary answers ... that is a common excuse of people who fail, but there is an objectively right answer, with an explanation that most people accept when it is pointed out to them. And really, "I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years"? There's no division on these tests that even a halfwit can't do in their heads, and even if there were such problems, manual multiplication and division are trivial rote procedures that high IQ brains don't forget. People with 200 IQs can visualize in multiple dimensions; they don't struggle with arithmetic. If this person scored 200 on "official" tests, how did he manage that with such poor skills, and why did he do so much worse on a test that purportedly has scores inflated by 20%? These are the sorts of obvious questions that people with average IQs don't bother to ask.
And no one in Mensa ever talks about their test scores, in part because they're smart enough to realize that they are likely to end up on the wrong end of the comparison. The chatter about bragging rights and Mensa wanting your money is sour grapes and largely downright stupid ... if Mensa were inflating scores in order to get more members to make more money, they would do away with the entry requirements altogether. And again, Mensa uses standardized proctored tests, the same ones used by psychologists. No, sorry, this is just the common phenomenon of random not terribly bright people lying on the internet.
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Well, 12023988, there is a lot of dross in this thread.
I am sure I have seen "average IQ" people coding C# (and other languages). No, it wasn't pretty, but they were paid to do it.
Y'see, there are an awful lot of "average" people in Management, making the hiring decisions.
I recall one case (obviously a "diversity" hire) where I rewrote a program of hers.
This was a positive mentoring exercise. No pressure, lead by example etc.
We went over the two versions of code. To be honest, you people have NO idea how bad her code was.
The problem was, neither did she. Even after the mentoring session, she still had no idea.
She was at that company for just over a year, and job-hopped over to another company - pay rise and promotion included.
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I know some people who are not that smart but have made a lot of money. I know some really smart people that have no idea how to boil an egg. It's all relative.
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How would you measure average IQ other than having lots of people taking IQ tests? It is what it is. One metric amongst many. Probably not much use for anything other than applying to Mensa these days. Very few education systems bother to measure it any more.
Based on thousands of the tests, average is simply the peak of the bell curve which arises from the results. That score is then normalised to 100 for the assessment of future tests. It is not an absolute, by any means. The Mensa qualification requires a score which places you in the top 2% of the population. The score required is probably very different now from when I took the test in 1984 (yes, I passed, though I've never been an active member).
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Yes, but as I've said elsewhere, I'm not after a handle on IQ per se, but on just what it means, non-scientifically, to say someone is of average intelligence. Linguistically it wouldn't be a dreadful insult to call someone average, but actually perhaps it is...
"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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Surely your first problem is not to define 'average' but to define 'intelligent'. What do you class as intelligence? The world is full of people stuffed with book-learning who get lost coming out of Woolworths. When I taught briefly in the 80s I had a class full of kids who'd probably never get any kind of formal qualification but could all take apart a radio or a TV set and make incredible things from the parts. When the BBC's Horizon team interviewed new physics graduates in the 90s they discovered that something like 3/4 of them couldn't use a battery and a piece of wire to illuminate a lightbulb! And a Huffington Post poll in 2013 found that college graduates were equally as likely to believe that aliens had visited Earth as their non-academic contemporaries.
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Quote: Surely your first problem is not to define 'average' but to define 'intelligent'.
The thirteenth person to reply to this post 
Remain Calm & Continue To Google
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The score required is probably very different now
Um, no. The qualification is and was 2 standard deviations above the mean, which is a score of 132 on the Stanford-Binet. What has changed is the questions and the scoring, which are modified over time to keep the mean at 100. That implies that the tests have gotten harder, because IQs are rising (the Flynn Effect).
As for what IQ means aside from being a normalized score on an IQ test ... numerous studies show correlations between IQ scores and various other attributes, such as SAT scores, income, wealth, and so on.
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Member 12023988 wrote: numerous studies show correlations between IQ scores and various other attributes, such as SAT scores, income, wealth
... but average people don't know that 
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Because of social sorting, you probably have not had extensive interactions with very many people with an IQ of 100. If you were to do so, you would probably find them to be relatively stupid. But why believe me, or anyone else responding to your question? Be a scientist, figure out how to identify some people with 100 IQs, and go interact with them and see for yourself.
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Since in the Netherlands we approximately sort people by their IQ (really by learning ability, but it's strongly correlated) in different categories with their own school type, we can track this sort of thing. Someone with an IQ of 100 would probably go to Vmbo-KB or -GL. Where do these people end up? as Mediocre Office Drone, in distribution, doing manual labor (where they are then of above average intelligence), that sort of thing.
- applications to an average university:
hell no, they automatically don't meet the requirements by having done the wrong type of school. - a course to become an airline pilot:
would fail miserably - learning to program in C#:
they actually do this, on the level of "code monkey". Apparently those are in demand though. - studying law:
yep, but on the level with which you become an office drone with some knowledge of the law. - running for public office:
We give Geert Wilders sh*t for having done MAVO (vmbo before the name change), but his IQ is not officially known as far as I could find.
Some other fun bits:
- They're listed here[^] as "can reach learning objectives thanks to the structure offered by the teacher", "can follow instructions for 10 minutes", "limited planning ability", "cooperation only under supervision"
- What they learn in 4 years is assumed to be known by VWO students after their introductory year where you don't learn anything.
- They consume more alcohol, drugs and tobacco than VWO students and start younger.
- They learn math by memorizing a lot of examples and get confused if the same question is asked with different numbers.
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Interesting - thanks.
•They learn math by memorizing a lot of examples and get confused if the same question is asked with different numbers.
When I did maths at school our teacher always made us (as part of our coursework) define things in at least three ways - eg a equilateral triangle is one that has all its sides the same length; has all its angles the same; is symmetric about the bisector of any of its angles. That sort of thing. Good mental exercise, I always thought.
"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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define things in at least three ways - eg a equilateral triangle is one that has all its sides the same length; has all its angles the same; is symmetric about the bisector of any of its angles
The latter two aren't definitions, they are theorems. The definition of an equilateral triangle is a polygon with three interior angles (i.e., a triangle), the sides of which are equal in length (i.e., equilateral). There's a good "mental exercise" ... breaking things down into parts, seeing what the parts are, seeing their relationships, and attending to details.
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Nobody knows, so what they do is give the test to a whole lot of people, and then by looking at the "average" of the number of correct answers, that determines what gets assigned as "100."
Of course, that average has undoubtedly been going down as technology and our education systems dumb down people.
Marc
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Nobody knows, so what they do is give the test to a whole lot of people, and then by looking at the "average" of the number of correct answers, that determines what gets assigned as "100."
You didn't understand the question.
Of course, that average has undoubtedly been going down as technology and our education systems dumb down people.
Smart people know better than to mistake their beliefs for facts, and they certainly know better than to have no doubt about those beliefs. As it turns out, you are incorrect, and it has been necessary to make IQ tests harder over the years in order to keep the mean at 100:
Flynn effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[^]
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Flynn effect - quite true.
It may be an artefact of generally increasing childhood health, nutrition etc.
When the greatest proportion of "the population" (choose yours) has roughly the same conditions as the previous generation, the Flynn Effect will become very interesting.
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My experience is that intelligence is wide spread. Some who are good in logic and mathematics, are really bad in art, sports or craftmanship.
I dont like people who got an attest about 130++ and think other people are stupid. 
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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IQ testing (professionally supervised tests) are PREDICTIVE.
Any given set of high-IQ people will have better life-time outcomes in all sorts of areas (health, wealth, longevity among others).
Their outcomes will be rather better than any given set of "average" people.
Their outcomes will be immensely better than any given set of very low IQ people.
There are NO tests for art, craftsmanship or sport that are predictive. None. Except for IQ tests of course
(Forget physical tests you morons - of course you it helps to be to be tall to play Basketball, and to have two legs to play football).
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