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TonyZa's avatar

I have a trivial objection which is the best I can do with my IQ. 137 is not the self-reported IQ among readers of the blog slatestarcodex but the self-reported IQ among those who answered the IQ question in the survey. I've been reading that blog since march 2013 and never bothered to fill the survey. Low conscientiousness. It's very likely those who did answer the IQ question are a self selected group and differ from the general readership on various metrics including caring about IQ enough to take a decent test.

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uf911's avatar

Re: how common is IQ testing in US schools~

From my experience, it was at least somewhat common in flyover states.

Between 4.5-7 years old I was in public schools in North Dakota, Michigan, Kansas, and Florida. In the 80’s each of these states had gifted programs in public schools, and each gave an IQ test to determine eligibility. I forget what the min age was by state for these programs, and can’t find that data for that time on the web. My rather mediocre public school in rural Florida gave me an IQ test a few months after I moved there, in second grade, and entered the gifted program. My mom told me later that the kindergarten teacher in Michigan had proposed testing me (thanks, Mr Panconi), but was rejected by the principal because the MI gifted program started at a later grade. My little sis (t-4y) was also in that goof-off gifted program. Between the two of us, it’s the only time we’ve taken a formally administered IQ test.

Current:

There is a gifted program in Texas public schools, with formally administered IQ tests given. We raised our daughter in Taiwan (white American ex-pats, zero East Asian genetics AFAIK), she didn’t start school in the US until 9th grade, so we said “don’t bother with going into gifted, it’s mostly a waste of time.” So her IQ hasn’t been measured, and if our lives are any pattern, pretty good chance that she won’t.

Second anecdote: my wife and I were both required to take the PSAT in Florida in 8th grade, around 1990. My daughter, now 16, was ‘invited’ to take the PSAT in 10th grade in Texas. That seems late to me. The SAT score that I got in 10th grade is the one I used for applying to college.

Re: “there’s a universe of deeper content available for people, it doesn’t seem like people with particularly high IQ would inordinately land on SSC/ACX.”

There is a huge amount of primary content, but most sucks. Scott is exceptionally good at putting thoughts together that include nuance that spans multiple and sometimes highly disparate sources. And this is extremely rare, IMO.

I read published research articles (and Arxiv preprints) across a science-centered but wide spectrum of domains on a weekly basis, for fun. Parsing most papers requires more effort than necessary, in no small part because of the formulaic structure that virtually always ends up going light on digging into the nuances of lines of reasoning or methods in citations, and the silly style of journal-ese that people publishing papers always seem to use. Conversely, about 15 years ago I mostly stopped reading Science, Nature, MIT Review and the other big-name journals and aggregators once they became overtly politicized. Finding very readable, adequately deep analysis of new science and became very difficult. There are more than a few similarly minded folks I know, who read SSC/ACX because it’s somewhat singular.

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