[SkyMarshal]

> The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s.

Sounds like you're just making this up. Have any studies on this or something not anecdotal?

[bradleyjg]

IQ talk is funny like that. It’s intended to give a science-y sounding veneer to whatever argument is being made but because actual studies are a lot of work, people just throw around numbers with nothing more than “common sense.”

Given that it’s all “common sense” people ought to skip the veneer and just say “more intelligent”, “less intelligent”, “much more intelligent”, and so on. That’s more honest rhetoric.

[HyperSane]

IQ is a real thing, finding a linear negative relationship between lead levels in children and IQ was the smoking gun to prove that lead was harmful.

[bradleyjg]

I don’t claim it isn’t real. What I claim is that people like to throw around random made up facts involving IQ to make their arguments seem science-y and that they ought not to.

[kelseyfrog]

I'll go on the record to say that IQ is as real as any other social construct like money, God, or nationality. Depending on your predilection that can range from worthless to "party of the fabric of reality itself."

[HyperSane]

IQ isn't a social construct. It is a actual quantitative measure of how well the brain can process information. This is why lead blood concentration causes a predictable decrease in IQ.

[kelseyfrog]

You can measure how much money you have in your bank account and money is a social construct. Spending money leads to having measurably less money. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

You might be confusing "social construct" with fake. That's not at all what I'm saying.

[LudwigNagasena]

Does that assertion suppose to convey any information? It seems you can put any random nouns into your comparison and the meaning won’t change.

> as any other social construct like cheese, boat races or reading

> as any other social construct like HackerNews, children or milk

> as any other social construct like cars, transgenderism or pencils

> as any other social construct like social, construct or like

[kelseyfrog]

> Does that assertion suppose to convey any information?

Yes, I'm assuming you're familiar with the topic.

[dragonwriter]

> finding a linear negative relationship between lead levels in children and IQ was the smoking gun to prove that lead was harmful.

Lead toxicity was identified more than 2000 years before the first IQ test, and was rather extensively studied during the Renaissance. The combination of blood lead and IQ tests was important in quantifying the existence and impacts of particular kinds and levels of environmental exposure that had been assumed to be forms of levels that would not be hazardous, but it was not important to identifying lead as a toxin.

[HyperSane]

I guess I should have said "proving leaded gasoline and paint" was harmful.

[cabalamat]

If you live in a society where most people go to university, and average IQ is 100 (by definition it was when it was normed) then you're going to get people with <100 IQs going to university, and some of them will graduate.

[zamadatix]

We're not in such a society though. Ignoring master's, bachelor's, and decent grades to just focus on a lower bar of "people with associate's degrees regardless of grades" we're still shy of 50%, even if we restrict to younger age groups like 25-30 years old.

[eigenvalue]

Here is a chart I found in a minute of searching: https://imgur.com/a/MenAVtj

[ineedasername]

That image lacks an obvious source or any explanation for methods of how the data was gathered and I can find no record of a study or context that corresponds to this image.

What I can find is a wikimedia entry with the image but no attribution except the "US Census" and no actual link to any publication put out by the Census Bureau. The archive link goes to a page that does not actually contain this graphic, or the data necessary to generate it, making it a bit suspect to begin with.

The census also don't systematically collect IQ scores or themselves administer IQ tests, making the details, data, and methodology of any study they produce paramount to interpreting this barebones graph. The title of the graph itself is borderline ridiculous, awkwardly stated at best and downright deceptive:

IQ tests are not a requirement for graduating college, and taking them at all is relatively uncommon these days.

As it stands, this image is worthless without context, and that context is oddly elusive except for an anonymous wikimedia post that did not cite the source with any specificity required to authenticate it.

[bombastry]

This image is even more worthless than it seems. The post on Wikimedia is an original work. Its description states: "As the percentage of graduates increases the minimum IQ to include at least that percentage of graduates inherently decreases. Since 2000 the intelligence required to be a college graduate has been less than the intelligence required to graduate from high school in 1940, based on a standard distribution."

It seems the author took the the percentage of the population that graduated high school/college each year and then found the corresponding percentile on an IQ bell curve and used those as the y-values. This methodology only makes sense if you assume that high school/college graduates are exactly the highest IQ population and that everyone who does not graduate isn't intelligent enough to do so. This chart also almost certainly doesn't normalize IQ over time, even though IQ is constantly redefined so that 100 is average while raw intelligence scores have increased over time [1].

What this chart actually shows is the highest possible IQ of the graduate with the lowest IQ in a given year, a statistic that seems to have dubious value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[ineedasername]

You’re right it is worse. It looks like they assumed college-going students would approximate the standard distribution of scores for the population as a whole, which… no. An awful assumption for an activity where academic ability is a primary gatekeeper at the same time that they’re attempting to apply a metric of IQ essentially as a proxy for academic ability/knowledge/whatever. (“Whatever” because the entire concept of intelligence is filled with varying definitions)