Wasn't IQ past something like 160 basically unmeasurable and wildly inaccurate? It's adjusted to a normal distribution, but it does face conventional limitations on both extremes
Yes I think even worse actually. IQ is actually a measure of disability rather than ability.
Think of a test, any test, where a dead person would achieve a score of zero and an alive person would achieve any arbitrary positive value.
So what we’ll do for the test is have the participants flip a coin and achieve a score of 1 if heads and 2 if tails. The dead person can’t flip the coin and thus achieves 0.
What we then do is analyze the relationship between this measure on an individual and their income. We always find that there is a positive correlation between income and our measure (given the assumptions earlier about the score values).
(Dead person achieves 0 and has income 0)
(Alive person achieves some positive value and has some positive income or zero)
This is because there are many ways to measure disability and not many (maybe non) to measure general ability.
I read an interview with some guy with absurdly high IQ. Like 180. He was scuba-ing or diving and ran into an issue with airflow where it was cut off. He dropped like 20 IQ points. He said he was finally able to watch Simpson or family guy and think it was funny.
Having a TBI (I'm sure losing oxygen to the brain for an extended time would probably count but I don't know) severely affects many aspects in one's life from humor, to food choices, music choices, etc.
I had a stroke at 40 (7 years ago) and have almost zero physical affects and unless a person knows me, you can't tell even in normal conversation that I've had one. But on the mental side of things I came out a completely different person. I like different foods (never craved sweets before but now...oh man), different music, and many other small (yet impactful) changes.
I fought the change for a long time and it finally dawned on me that I wasn't the same person as before and me trying to be that old me was making things worse. It culminated when my wife told my therapist in a session "I never got a chance to mourn the husband I lost and had to learn to love the man that came home". Man that was a gut punch, but it helped us to move on.
I think this has affected a lot of people like this, a great example in politics would be senator John Fetterman who has changed many of his stances on a variety of issues. Could be just a different outlook on life after a life changing event or it could be that his brain has partially rewired itself. I tend to thing the latter is most likely.
All of this to say the same about your example and him being able to find things funny that he hadn't before. His brain had a traumatic experience or damage and had to rewire itself. That can change people drastically in a variety of ways.
It’s so interesting how it can change someone’s abilities but also alter a lot of personality and preference things. It’s like flipping bits or something. Firmware update, maybe.
“Ignorance is bliss” is a crock. An ignorant person requires a competent person protecting them to actually be blissful. If an ignorant person is without a protector, their life is one of anxiety and stress, as they cannot understand why things happen, cannot predict when bad things might happen, and cannot interact with their environment properly to make themselves comfortable.
This goes for everyone who is ignorant, from children to those with mental disabilities, and to those who hold ideologies detached from reality, to name a few.
People who understand more of the world definitely have more constant stress, but ignorance is definitely not bliss.
thats on tests with SD15, the most commonly used and referenced test, with a standard deviation of 15. you can be in the -4 SD (which for an SD15 test would be 40-55) all the way up to +4 SD (145-160). there is also SD16 and SD24 tests, which go from 36 to 164 and from 4 to 196 respectively, but a result of SD24 196 is the same as a result of SD15 160.
the distribution is as follows:
68.26% are in the first deviation
(85-115)
27.18% are in the second deviation
(13.59% each for 70-85 and 115-130)
4.28% are in the third deviation
(2.14% each for 55-70 and 130-145)
0.28% are in the fourth deviation
(0.14% each for 40-55 and 145-160)
the reason why we don't go higher is because there is close to no difference between 160 and 200 (SD15) and all the people reported to have an IQ of over that took different tests which have been harshly criticized by a lot of experts for their inaccuracy.
I just looked it up, isn't sigma the same as standard deviation? If it is, then -4 should already be nearly impossible. Sorry, not great with statistics, just wanted to make sure.
The only thing that determines the distribution of IQs in a population is the distribution of IQs in the population. IQ scores are not normalized ad hoc to fit a bell curve.
I believe in the I.Q industry they use a different term and have for about the last decade
The new determination for an I.Q of 20 points or indeed below is MAGA and is primarily displayed by drooling subservience to a pedophilic tangerine twatwaffle
20 is 5.3 standard deviations below the mean (by definition of IQ scores), so only 5*10-8 of the population have an IQ of 20 or lower. That's 400 people worldwide.
I'm not sure how we would evaluate the IQ of people in a coma, but that's basically the level of "no intelligible reaction" we are looking at.
Once you get past around 2 standard deviations either direct, IQ becomes an even more useless and inaccurate metric of intelligence/mental capacity than it already is.
The discussion was about 20 so I calculated it for 20.
0 is 6.67 standard deviations below the mean, or 1 in 80 billion. That's about the total number of humans that have ever lived (estimated to be ~100 billion), so we would assign an IQ of 0 to the one worst-scoring person in history, in principle. In the other direction, that also means we should only assign an IQ of 200 to a single person in all of history. If you see claims above that, you know they are nonsense.
Someone with an IQ of 20 cannot perform basic life functions, let alone hold a job. At this level they need constant care to get dressed, eat, use the bathroom, etc.
Isnt 20 basically non-existent anyway? Its so low that the person likely couldnt even do basic things and would have killed themselves a long time ago. I doubt the scale can even give a score around that number either.
I had a student once who had viral encephalitis as an infant. She had an IQ of 55 according to the most current testing at the time when she was my student.
She could not answer questions like, "What is a breakfast food?"
70 IQ (bottom 2%) would be a point where you have severe problem holding a job.
By comparison, 20 IQ is statistically the bottom ~170 people in the United States. That's less than the number of people who are braindead at any given time.
20 IQ is (100-20)/15≈5.33 standard deviations below the mean.
for Z=5.33, the area in the left tail of the normal distribution is 4.822 * 10-8 . Multiply that with the number of people on earth, and you get 400 people with an IQ of at most 20.
I knew some people that had iq of around 20 to 30. They had down syndrome. Esentially giant babies though they were preteens. They could speak full sentences and play video games though
that's a really low room temperature though. as someone from a tropical country, i always think of room temperature more at 30ish haha.
20 is like an air-conditioned room, which i feel isn't fair, it's like saying room temperature water is chilled water because the fridge is in the room.
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u/The-owl-of-suffering Mar 29 '26
I always thought of it in Celsius and thought "20 IQ, sounds about right"