What’s your IQ?

I don’t care, because most people’s understanding of IQ is ill-founded and wrong.

All the belligerent guys online who insist they have a high IQ? I suspect many of them haven’t actually taken an IQ test at all.

Not a proper one, anyway. Official IQ tests, whatever their limitations, are highly-refined scientific tools. They take a lot of time, and cost a fair amount of money.

Basically, I would be beyond amazed if actual IQ tests, and all they involve, have become so widely accessible that @BigNutzz32998762 on Twitter/X and his countless peers who brag about their 178 IQ have been genuinely, properly assessed.

Also, given how IQ actually works, if countless random people were scoring ridiculously high on real IQ tests, wouldn’t they have to recalibrate the underlying assumptions, to keep the average as 100?

Point is, if so many people were scoring extremely high on official IQ tests, their scores would be reduced, to conform to the bell-curve. Because it’s mathematically impossible for everyone to be ‘above average’.

I haven’t taken a full, proper IQ test myself — I’ve had my IQ extrapolated from my scores on long, complex standardized tests, like the SAT and GRE. I’m not going to say what it was, because I know the limitations and fallacies of these kinds of tests, and because it was forty or fifty years ago, and my brain has been constantly changing.

The one thing I know is that people who brag about their IQ are never very intelligent.

You know what else is silly? People who declare that the conformation of your chromosomes determines your identity, your behavior, and your role in society. I know for a fact that almost no one has had their karyotype done — the exceptions are cases where there is evidence of a serious heritable anomaly — so the knowledge about chromosomes is practically negligible among the general public.

Even worse: people who have opinions on the contributions of genetics on IQ.

Forget IQ. As we all know, the proper way to score intelligence is by birthdate.

I can verify this by personal experience. I was born on 9 March, my wife was born on 10 September.