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by marginalia_nu 206 days ago
The tallest man in history was 8'11".

If a 14' man shows up, an absurd outlier even among outliers, is all we're able to conclusively say that he is taller than 8'11"?

1 comments

Yeah, this is a mistake everyone makes, and it is difficult to explain to people who didn't study statistics.

The short version is that intelligence is an ordinal value, not a cardinal value. You can say that person A is more intelligent than person B, but not that person A is exactly 3.14515x more intelligent than person B.

Intelligence is simply measured in percentiles, that's all. You can't be more intelligent than 100% of the population. The 100% of the population is the population of Earth. You cannot get a higher IQ score than that.