Item — HN Reader

Where are you getting that IQ data from? I go to one of the Ivies and have never had an IQ test nor have most of my peers I would imagine.

(That said I agree with your premise, my peers at school aren't significantly more intelligent than my high school classmates who went to good, but not great, private and state colleges).

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I had an unhealthy obsession with IQ testing. A phase long ago. I remember reading that the average Harvard IQ tested at 130 and the other Ivies in the mid-120s. You can guess based on SAT figures, noting that extracurricular factors (paradoxically) decrease the IQ/SAT correlation (people who beat a top school's extracurricular game are more likely than average to have prepped for SATs and have scores that overstate their IQs). So a 1500 average SAT (out of 1600) ends up mapping to a group average IQ around 130, even though a typical individual with a 1500 SAT is probably around 140 IQ.

These numbers fluctuate and it's quite possible that the increasing usage of socioeconomic/extracurricular criteria has decreased the gap.

Ah interesting. Did you find any notable results? My understanding is that IQ (as a proxy for intelligence) matters up to a certain cutoff and beyond that its importance drops off (i.e. you might want the person who writes the software for the airplane you're riding to have a 130 IQ, but beyond that the quality of the work doesn't improve much).