I’m sure Spidercrab will be along shortly to tell us every CEO and board is telling the market their stock is overpriced when they elect to pay dividends instead of repurchasing shares or whatever, but knocking $12 billion of market capitalization off your company with a single tweet seems like a pretty obvious breach of duty.
I mostly test people from disadvantaged backgrounds so I don’t see a ton of huge scores. I think the highest I’ve seen is a 139 (~99.5 percentile) on the WISC-5, which maxes out at 160. Someone who tests for gifted and talented qualifications would see more than I do in the 130+ range, but scores of 140+ are a lot more common on the internet than in reality.
The following is TMI for anyone not interested in this stuff, but I’m compensating somewhat for firing off my initial phone comment without sufficient background. Below is a hypothetical dataset from the WISC-V. This gives me a good idea about general intellectual capacity and potential career choices, but also relative skill strengths/weaknesses and the likelihood of additional factors (e.g., ADHD, anxiety, fine motor performance deficits) that might need additional testing.
| WISC-V | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Verbal Comprehension | Scaled Score | Percentile | |
| Similarities | 10 | 50 | |
| Vocabulary | 12 | 75 | |
| Visual-Spatial | |||
| Block Design | 8 | 25 | |
| Visual Puzzles | 10 | 50 | |
| Perceptual Reasoning | |||
| Matrix Reasoning | 13 | 84 | |
| Figure Weights | 10 | 50 | |
| Working Memory | |||
| Digit Span | 11 | 63 | |
| Picture Span | 9 | 37 | |
| Processing Speed | |||
| Coding | 8 | 25 | |
| Symbol Search | 11 | 63 | |
| Composite | Standard Score | Percentile | Classification |
| Verbal Comprehension | 106 | 66 | Average |
| Visual Spatial | 94 | 34 | Average |
| Fluid Reasoning | 109 | 73 | Average |
| Working Memory | 100 | 50 | Average |
| Processing Speed | 98 | 45 | Average |
| Full Scale | 102 | 55 | Average |
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If I could pick my own IQ, I think I’d pick about 115. High enough to succeed but low enough not to question anything.
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If you knew someone scored 164 in the late 1980’s as an 8 or 9-year-old child testing for a gifted program, would you say it’s more likely they were administered the SB-IV or SB-L/M (or maybe something else)?
Not a terrible spot to be. I don’t mean to imply that IQ is a perfect datapoint either. There are plenty of other factors that contribute to success and well-being. But the reality is that we don’t have a ton of great measuring sticks for human potential, so IQ (properly assessed and interpreted) remains one of the best we have.
Emotional regulation, interpersonal skills, optimism, grit/resilience, etc. are all obviously important as well.
I’m fine admitting what I don’t know, and I’m not certain I know this. I was born in the 80s, and there’s not a ton of value in knowing previous assessments (I’ve only used the SB-5). That said, I think the main critique of the L-M was that it tended to overinflate scores relative to other measures. I’d assume a 164 would be more likely with that form?
Either way this such a specific question that I suspect I’m not the only psych here.
Edit: Unless this question is either based off your personal experience or pulled from some 20-year-old textbook.
Edit 2: I may have wrongly assumed this was an overly-obscure “prove you know what you’re talking about” type of question, but I’m happy to look into this further if you’re genuinely interested for personal reasons.
I was gifted in like 7th grade but idk about now
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Seems like everyone’s a 99%er on the Wonderlic, if nothing else.
There aren’t any standardized norms that would allow me to use forum posting as a valid measure, but I’d certainly guess that the forum average is higher than most - and with at least a decent proportion of genuinely gifted people.
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Yes I think the LM form is what gives us the whacky stuff like “Ask Marilyn has an IQ of 230” or whatever? Are there any modern instruments that could even potentially return a score that high? It just sounds like a Things Boomers Say completely made-up number. For example:
Q: What are your thoughts about Elon Musk [CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity] and what he’s doing?
Munger: I think Elon Musk is a genius and I don’t use that word lightly. I think he’s also one of the boldest men that ever came down the pike. Put me down as saying I’ve always been afraid of the guy whose IQ is 190 and he thinks it’s 250. I like to think there’s a little of that risk with Elon. He is a certified genius.
more like Musk is actually in the 250-280 range but thinks he’s 5000
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Flynn effect must really be taking the shape of Moore’s Law then.
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Gotcha. The SB-5 has an extended scale that goes up to 225, but it’s almost never used. A 160 IQ is like 1/30,000+ and most psychologists will never test someone anywhere near that high. There are other tests that scale pretty high, but most of those “x has a 200+ iq” claims are either nonsense, hearsay, or an “estimate” from someone who may or may not be qualified to make one.
Re: the main topic, I’m not sure about Musk. I haven’t spent nearly enough time watching or thinking about the dude to make any sort of educated assessment, but I’m not convinced he’s a super-genius. He might be better at pretending to be smart than he is at being smart.
This is what I’m interested in. How does the extended scale happen and what does it entail?
It’s just a different type of calculation (drawn from raw scores) for people who hit the ceiling or floor via the traditional scoring method.
I hope my iq is 96.
Racists, mostly. IQ is more resilient to environment than some other factors (e.g., math achievement), but it is absolutely affected.
The cumulative disadvantages of a minority kid surrounded by community violence, bouncing between low-SES foster homes, and suffering from PTSD + stereotype threat are just immense.
So with concession to BoredSocial’s point, IQ is a decent measure when understood in-context and within the bounds of what it’s intended for. But it quickly becomes lousy when media tries to use it (by itself) as a measure of personal quality, or of how much one should be respected.
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I didn’t know who she was but when I clicked through to her twitter bio, I laughed.
https://twitter.com/LorenaSGonzalez/status/1259287879177531392
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Funny how now the conservatives jump on the musk bandwaggon because he threatens to leave California because of these terrible liberals. I hope they also buy his electric cars after he trashed his companies reputation.
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Why did you laugh? She’s actually pretty awesome and gets shit done in CA.
from 2016, but…
Gonzalez has written California’s “Motor Voter” law for automatic voter registration, co-authored the law that raised the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, sponsored the law requiring school kids to get vaccinated and marshaled support for the nation’s strictest law aimed at closing the gender pay gap, as well as proposing a bill this year to expand overtime for farmworkers.