Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nostrademons 4745 days ago
Alex3917 brought up the same point in the other sub-thread where I raised this, and my response was basically "What's the point then?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5915459

Yes, you can define a concept as a normal distribution centered at 100 with a standard deviation of 15. But if you claim that this concept can be measured with IQ tests, and then the observed distribution of IQ scores doesn't match the predicted curve - it's the curve that's wrong, not the tests.

The studies that the "fat tail" results were from all used the Stanford Binet L-M test, which has a ceiling of around 230.

1 comments

Sit back and think about this for a second, if you define IQ in some other fashion you can't really have multiple IQ tests just the score on one specific test. As to having problems with a specific test, just because a specific laser rang finder has issues does not mean we need to redefine the inch.

PS: There is no way they had enough data to support an IQ rang up to 230. Do you bave any idea how many people you need to sample to have 50 people with an IQ between 205 and 220.