Quite The Audience, Here and There

I have always been impressed by the audience I have attracted here, so that even though the numbers have gone down over the last few years (My snarky take is that I was not pure enough on Trump support and Covid skepticism - which is ironic because Trump was not very pure on Covid skepticism),  I still have some amazing folks. Some of you I know personally, and others I can make guesses about your intelligence from your vocabularies and abstract thinking or your education/employment/accomplishments.  I wondered if IQ 150 was actually the average here.  I decided that was too rich, but 141, which is 99th percentile is the likely centerpoint here. Remember that because that distribution tails off as it moves along the graph, we do not take the mean for such things, but the median. Even if you have no test scores from ASVAB or SAT/ACT to back it up, if you are following along her, you are at least at the margin for Mensa (130 or 132, depending on SD).

I feel very proud for having a site visited by such as thee.

So it did set me on my heels a bit when I looked at the survey data for Astral Codex Ten, where he was only secondarily looking for IQ but was instead trying to compare different schooling outcomes among public. private, religious, homeschooled, and unschooled readers. The survey data indicates that his average audience has an SAT around 1500+, which is about IQ 146 new scoring. (Old scoring, add 50 SAT or 5 IQ points). Well, people lie, and they misremember in once direction more than another, and they describe things very carefully and technically (I have have done that) in a misleading way - such as Chuck Schumer's supposed 1600 SAT, which is suspect. He is likely very high but not that. People also self-select for surveys and other concrete-answer request.

Well, that's just an amazing number, up into the range of 99.75th percentile.

The audience here also seems to be harder-working and more judicious than I am, which are force-multipliers for IQ. Also probably nicer and under better emotional control. Wisdom, both in the Medieval and D&D sense, is better than all. Put your energy there.