What do you think the average IQ of this forum is?

[donotdespisethesnake]

No one is able to define what intelligence is, even less how it works. Generally speaking, it is "that thing that humans do well". Measuring it is like trying to rate astronauts, before anyone had been in space. Doctors had no clue what to test for, so they just tested everything stressful they could think of and come up with a score. It turns out anyone reasonably fit can travel in space, you only need specialists for certain things like landing, so piloting skills.

Certainly elements of intelligence are tested by IQ tests, like logical reasoning, spatial awareness etc, but otherwise an IQ score is like nailing a pudding to a tree. Even if you do it, it doesn't tell you how good the pudding is.

[NivagSwerdna]

If I was smart I would be spending my time doing something useful rather than reading this thread.

80 is my guess.

[JPortici]

Yours was the 80th post, since it can't be a coincidence you are awarded an extra 80 points of IQ. Congratulations

[SeanB]

And I should eat more spicy breakfasts. Hmm... what's the best spice for muesli?

I would recommend a little cinnamon for the flavour, and some nice Lord of the Ring salsa as the zing. I use it as salad dressing, it really makes the salad light up, though leaving it on for long does tend to cause severe wilting of the lettuce. Add just before serving, and do not store any left over, which is not a problem. Also works nicely as a pick up for scrambled eggs and bacon as well.

[wraper]

If I was smart I would be spending my time doing something useful rather than reading this thread.

80 is my guess.

80 IQ means mental impairment.

[rs20]

Want to improve your IQ? I've been led to believe that Texas Instruments offers some pretty good IQ modulators.

( Sorry )

[vk6zgo]

Hence the basic IQ formula of IQ= 100% * developmental_age/chronological_age.

As per the above, when I was 10 years old I considered I was as smart as the guy next door who was 23 years old. Consequently I thought I had an IQ of 230.  Serves me right for reading too much stuff from the adult side of the local library at that age. Clearly remember poring over books about refrigeration and air conditioning, TV servicing, automotive exhaust emission control, rockets, sound recording, Manhattan Project etc etc etc.

And didn't we all do that, back when we had a real world instead of a virtual one?
Kids don't know much at all these days.

An apparent effort to help solve this which I saw the other day, was an "educational toy" which purported to show kids how a car engine worked.
It was suitable for kids up to 13 years old.

Hell! When I was 11, I knew how an Otto Cycle I.C. engine worked, & by 13, had helped to pull a real one apart, repair it & place it back into service.

[vk6zgo]

In general, the technicians in an electronics company have an average IQ well below the graduate engineers. Many of the questions and responses on this forum suggest a lot of technician grade people are here. My experience with amateurs interested in electronics is the interest spreads across all IQ levels, and there seems to be a high proportion of amateurs here.

Congratulations on reviving the EEs -vs- Technicians discussion.

Your comments come over as elitist in the extreme, as well as poorly conceived.
There are many reasons why people choose to become Technicians rather than go to University & get an EE degree.

Foremost among these are lack of funds, responsibility for a young family or ailing parents.

To just say in effect:- "Techs lack the intelligence to become Engineers" neglects the large number of people who have, after some years in a Technical role, gone to University & done just that.

Others have gone on from Tech work to found businesses, do Degrees in some totally different field, or become experts in again, some other esoterica.

I have worked with very good & quite poor EEs, & have seen little sign of any innate intellectual superiority in either case.

[Halcyon]

And I should eat more spicy breakfasts. Hmm... what's the best spice for muesli?

Cinnamon, nutmeg, ground ginger?

[hamster_nz]

Hence the basic IQ formula of IQ= 100% * developmental_age/chronological_age.

As per the above, when I was 10 years old I considered I was as smart as the guy next door who was 23 years old. Consequently I thought I had an IQ of 230.  Serves me right for reading too much stuff from the adult side of the local library at that age. Clearly remember poring over books about refrigeration and air conditioning, TV servicing, automotive exhaust emission control, rockets, sound recording, Manhattan Project etc etc etc.

And didn't we all do that, back when we had a real world instead of a virtual one?
Kids don't know much at all these days.

An apparent effort to help solve this which I saw the other day, was an "educational toy" which purported to show kids how a car engine worked.
It was suitable for kids up to 13 years old.

Hell! When I was 11, I knew how an Otto Cycle I.C. engine worked, & by 13, had helped to pull a real one apart, repair it & place it back into service.

It's all a conspiracy to reduce the available labor pool, and hide that we no longer have scarcity for the essentials of life in first-world countries.

Once we have AI flipping burgers everybody will have to stay in education studying "sales administration" and "vehicular engineering" until our brains have "fully matured" at 30, then spend 40 years working in retail to pay of student loans so we can just retire for 5 years before dying.

What we don't need is intelligent people, what we need active consumers to drive economic growth!

(Poe's law may apply to this post).

[Cerebus]

In general, the technicians in an electronics company have an average IQ well below the graduate engineers. Many of the questions and responses on this forum suggest a lot of technician grade people are here. My experience with amateurs interested in electronics is the interest spreads across all IQ levels, and there seems to be a high proportion of amateurs here.

Congratulations on reviving the EEs -vs- Technicians discussion.

Your comments come over as elitist in the extreme, as well as poorly conceived.
There are many reasons why people choose to become Technicians rather than go to University & get an EE degree.

Foremost among these are lack of funds, responsibility for a young family or ailing parents.

To just say in effect:- "Techs lack the intelligence to become Engineers" neglects the large number of people who have, after some years in a Technical role, gone to University & done just that.

Others have gone on from Tech work to found businesses, do Degrees in some totally different field, or become experts in again, some other esoterica.

I have worked with very good & quite poor EEs, & have seen little sign of any innate intellectual superiority in either case.

It's just the "Rupert" effect. Officers ("Ruperts") think they run the Army, sergeants know that sergeants do, everybody else believes the sergeants. Wise junior officers ask their sergeants for an opinion of what to do, and then order them to do exactly what they just suggested. ("Very good, carry on sergeant" is sooo much quicker and simpler to say than giving complicated orders.) Some Army officers never learn this, these are almost always the very same officers who still insist on being called "the Major" or "the Colonel" down the pub after they've retired. Same in enginerding, just substitute graduates and technicians. If we bandied titles about like the Germans do then I suspect some people would insist on being called the equivalent of "Herr Doktoringenieur" down the pub after they retired.

[coppice]

In general, the technicians in an electronics company have an average IQ well below the graduate engineers. Many of the questions and responses on this forum suggest a lot of technician grade people are here. My experience with amateurs interested in electronics is the interest spreads across all IQ levels, and there seems to be a high proportion of amateurs here.

Congratulations on reviving the EEs -vs- Technicians discussion.

Your comments come over as elitist in the extreme, as well as poorly conceived.
There are many reasons why people choose to become Technicians rather than go to University & get an EE degree.

Foremost among these are lack of funds, responsibility for a young family or ailing parents.

To just say in effect:- "Techs lack the intelligence to become Engineers" neglects the large number of people who have, after some years in a Technical role, gone to University & done just that.

Others have gone on from Tech work to found businesses, do Degrees in some totally different field, or become experts in again, some other esoterica.

I have worked with very good & quite poor EEs, & have seen little sign of any innate intellectual superiority in either case.

I did say technician grade, not technicians.

[Cerebus]

In general, the technicians in an electronics company have an average IQ well below the graduate engineers. Many of the questions and responses on this forum suggest a lot of technician grade people are here. My experience with amateurs interested in electronics is the interest spreads across all IQ levels, and there seems to be a high proportion of amateurs here.

Congratulations on reviving the EEs -vs- Technicians discussion.

Your comments come over as elitist in the extreme, as well as poorly conceived.
There are many reasons why people choose to become Technicians rather than go to University & get an EE degree.

Foremost among these are lack of funds, responsibility for a young family or ailing parents.

To just say in effect:- "Techs lack the intelligence to become Engineers" neglects the large number of people who have, after some years in a Technical role, gone to University & done just that.

Others have gone on from Tech work to found businesses, do Degrees in some totally different field, or become experts in again, some other esoterica.

I have worked with very good & quite poor EEs, & have seen little sign of any innate intellectual superiority in either case.

I did say technician grade, not technicians.

Eh? You say you did not say "technicians" when there is, in black and white, a quote there with you saying it. 

[BradC]

Hell! When I was 11, I knew how an Otto Cycle I.C. engine worked, & by 13, had helped to pull a real one apart, repair it & place it back into service.

I gave my 3 year old a 30cc Ryobi 2 stroke, a bag of spanners and permission to destroy. He learned that spark ignitions hurt, got the plug out, the head off, the carb mostly to bits and drove a pile of left over IKEA screws into any available holes. He knows what a head is, what a piston is, what a spark plug is and what hurts. I call it cheap education, and I reckon he's going to be a *lot* smart than me (if I can help it).

But I was the same. Rebuilt my lawnmower at 13 and could tell the difference between leaded and unleaded by taste (maybe that's why he'll be smarter than me!)

I do like him watching the iPad though. He gets all sorts of ideas of things he'd like to build and away we go.

[LaserSteve]

Might want to watch what you say about techs vs. graduate engineers.  A few CEOs of major semiconductor firms started out on the line or in R&D  as techs..
Just saying...  The real question is whether a tech or engineer is in the right place for them and the company according to their skills and willingness to learn.

Steve

[CatalinaWOW]

I suspect this forum has a pretty high intelligence level, measured by IQ or any way you want to.  It isn't a random sampling of the human race so there is no reason to expect it to average 100 IQ.  One reason I feel this way is that my IQ has been measured at Mensa levels and I have encountered a large number of people on this forum who I evaluate as substantially smarter than me.  And only a few people who need to be spoken to quietly and calmly while explaining the operation of a broom.

[Buriedcode]

It isn't a random sampling of the human race so there is no reason to expect it to average 100 IQ. 

No but the reason the average is always 100 is because results are normalized around 100.  Whilst this isn't always done after the fact, tests are tweaked to provide this based on the target population.  Then there is also the problem of age.  You can't have "one test to rule them all" because it would either make those who succeeded in higher education seem like geniuses, or make children appear to have learning difficulties.  So there is often 'fiddling' done to normalize and bring results around a set value within a population attempting to account for differences in age (and failing, which is why there are different tests for different age groups).  If we're just talking about forum members, then that's the population, it is meant to be relative (to compare forum members results with other forum members), not absolute, which is why it is so often abused and has lost much of its meaning.

It is also where much of the controversy comes from - comparing mean scores from one demographic to another is used to somehow show a difference without in any way showing what the myriad causes of those differences are, and using that (its a number, its maths, it can't be wrong!) to justify political ideology..  Aside from highlighting the availability of education, perhaps a cultural persuasion for education, it's fairly meaningless, because it was never intended to compare apples on oranges where there are vast differences across the population.

Again, not saying it has no value, just that it has limited application.  Its just a pity it is still widely seen as an accurate measure of "smarts".

[Beamin]

The whole IQ thing is a load of bollocks, but to answer the question I would have thought around 125. There's some pretty clever people here.

For now its the best thing we have like democracy.

Like a sliced bread.

The interesting part is what kind of monotone circle jerk stamp it is.

I assume my IQ is more than 80, since I managed to open the computer. Btw. I do recognize it indicates something in statistical and scientific way, but in the meantime it definitely doesn't give the whole picture.

  I often read the political comments on you tube and wonder how those people remember to breathe. They will contradict themselves in the same statement And use Capital letters In the middle of sentences. Best part is they call YOU stupid or assume the person is an American voter when some have not even been to America.   

[expinkolator]

I would have guessed 120, but, having skimmed through this thread I'll knock 10 points off.

You should watch some of Jordan Peterson's lectures to understand how well IQ is understood and measured and how effective a predictor it is of various life outcomes.

Trying to pretend people are not born smart and dumb is as foolish as pretending they are not born short and tall.

[Elasia]

If I was smart I would be spending my time doing something useful rather than reading this thread.

80 is my guess.

I think I lost 80 reading this thread lol

[Nusa]

Trying to pretend people are not born smart and dumb is as foolish as pretending they are not born short and tall.

Actually, everyone is born short. A six-foot baby would kill the mother before birth.

[Elasia]

Trying to pretend people are not born smart and dumb is as foolish as pretending they are not born short and tall.

Political correctness. Along with hypocrisy and non coexisting gesture of exporting American democracy made my mind that I'm not living in this country.

My first year in US: this is a good place.
My second year in US: fuck Chinese communist government.
My third year in US: wait a minute.
My fourth year in US: I'm moving back to China.

If not that I had agreed my professor to work for him as postdoc for a while and the fact that I bought a house before I made my mind, I would be long gone.
After I use up my OPT, I will not do the H1B and EB3 shit. I'm done with it.

i dont blame you.. China has taken on a lot of what America used to be and took the good parts to merge into their own society.  A bunch of us yanks unfortunately are not cultured enough to think other places might actually just be better.  Europe and China have a ton more employee protections anymore.. not to much of a fan of the sole leader till death theme going on over there right now but sure as hell beats the shitshow we got from putin quite literally playing his trump card on America..

[wraper]

shitshow we got from putin quite literally playing his trump card on America..

You should watch less of CNN if you care about your intelligence. IMO propaganda on US TV is sort of Soviet Union style, if not worse. The difference is that Soviet people had a clue they were fed with BS.

[Elasia]

shitshow we got from putin quite literally playing his trump card on America..

You should watch less of CNN if you care about your intelligence. IMO propaganda on US TV is sort of Soviet Union style, if not worse. The difference is that Soviet people had a clue they were fed with BS.

I gave up cable long ago... and yeah thats mostly why personally, if anything i tend to watch the BBC.. MSNBC for the blues, Fox for the reds, and CNN is like that loud annoying car salesman screaming at you over the radio

[steverino]

... and CNN is like that loud annoying car salesman screaming at you over the radio

It's funny, I always feel CNN's website is yelling at me when I occasionally visit it.