I am a 23 year old female with a IQ of 76. Ask me anything
A gentle reminder that about half the population has their IQ below the average (“about” because average≠median, yes, nerds, I know)
Having it below 100 is nothing to worry about, just like having anything below average is.
average≠median
Intelligence is thought to have a normal distribution, in which case the mean, median, and mode are all equal.
Also “average” can technically refer to any measure of central tendency.
Okay, you successfully outnerded me :D
I found this thing earlier that says that the average IQ in America (where I’m from) is 98.
https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/average-iq-in-usa-1710768833-1
it is set at a median of 100 regularly, and is not actually a good measure of anything remotely useful. its use in social sciences is extremely problematic. dont worry about some number, just be.
An important aspect to remember about IQ scores is that they are not meant to be a measure of how intelligent you are, but more about how you process information and, thus, how easily/quickly you learn new information. You’re still “intelligent,” it may just take you a little longer to “get it” when learning new things, though. That’s ok, as long as you’re learning!
Also remember that an IQ score is a predictor of performance, not a limit.
iq isnt even any of theose things, it’s incredibly contested as a metric for anything and a waste of time at best to concern yourself with.
It’s an accurate description based on what I learned while earning my degree in psychology.
Honestly most metrics in psychology aren’t useful individually. But Pop Psych doesn’t teach you that because then they couldn’t sell you on these online IQ tests that are completely invalid to begin with.
there is cultural inertia and systemic racial biases that encourage its use in psychology as well. we agree it’s not useful individually, but it’s also not useful for populations, as it doesnt measure the things it is regularly and pervasively used to represent. even moreso iq at a population level is absolutely rife with cultural and systemic biases that make it easy to mistest even for those very well informed and well intentioned. We simply dont have models of intelligence mature enough to do this sort of intelligence metricising. Just because someone can envision an experiment or useful pursuit doesn’t mean there are tools necessary to perform it adequately.
Thank you for expanding on your position. I’d say that’s a pretty accurate assessment with IQ and other psych tests from what I learned and saw in college/internships. Psychology is a soft science, and I didn’t like the idea of trying to gauge things like “intelligence” (What does that even really mean?) on a numbered scale. I was more of an abnormal/forensic psych student.
Probably for the best I ended up in networking - I’ve got shit people skills.
Yeah i have found that a lot of the frustrations about soft sciences come from my last point, well intentioned people trying to do experiments that we simply dont yet have the tools to perform as well as they need to be. interesting about the career path! i am not super closely familiar with the field so itEs always interesting to hear where people end up!
Thank you, I had a lot of people complimenting me on my English and grammar and saying that I can’t be low IQ. I love those comments. It has taken me a lot of effort to improve on my English which is hard with dyslexia. I’m proud of the progress I’ve made in the past 5 years. Modern technology helps the lot. The voice to text feature on my phone is a big help and writing down words I can’t spell also helps.
Dyslexia probably explains a good part of the IQ test result actually. IQ tests are notoriously terrible at measuring intelligence of people with something like dyslexia as far as I know.
Why am I the way I am? Why can’t I just be like everyone else? I hate having learning disabilities. Every day of my life I wonder what my life could have been if I didn’t have all these things wrong with me. It feels like I was never meant to be born. I hate the person I am.
You said in another comment that you deal with misinformation online by just waiting for it to get debunked.
I have completed a masters degree at university. An IQ test showed my IQ is higher than 130. People around me consider me a pretty smart guy.
I have never even thought of your way to deal with misinformation. It’s the simplest thing too, just wait. It’s brilliant too, because it almost never fails and anyone can do it without any practice or training. The source of the misinformation doesn’t matter, if it was spread via the news or on a forum online doesn’t matter… It always works.
It might actually be the perfect solution to this problem. And I never even thought of it! When I read your comment my first thought was “Oh my god that’s brilliant”.
You might not be very intelligent. But you do seem wiser than most. Everyone has their own shortcomings, their insecurities, stuff they hate about themselves. For you it’s your intelligence, for others it is how athletic they are, or their looks, or maybe they really want to grow a beard, they think they’re not sexy enough, not nice enough, want children but can’t have them, or maybe they wake up worrying about their micropenis every day.
I can’t tell you to just love yourself and who you are. I know it’s not that simple. Looking at this in a different way than you probably have all your life is not easy!
I can only offer you this: my girlfriend has an uncle with a severe learning disability, severe autism and he also had a stroke when he was young. He went from an already not very smart carpenter to effectively a man with the brains of a five year old, unable to drive anymore and not able to do his job anymore.
He had to be placed in a care home. He “works” by folding envelopes or sorting lego pieces. And someone needs to explain that to him too, almost every day, again and again.
His brother, my girlfriends dad, is what I can only describe as a shithead. He was violent to her, ignored her wishes and was just cruel. She was traumatized by her youth, because her mother died young because of an accident and he quickly married again, to a total bitch this time. She hates her dad with a passion.
This uncle however is not violent. Never has been either. If another person who is in the care home hits him (some are sadly aggressive and get angry easily), he doesn’t react back. They told him he can push them away, but he refuses. They sent him on a self-defense course, which he did, but he refuses to use what he learned. He says he doesn’t want to.
There isn’t a fiber in that man’s body that is violent. He is never angry with others. He is always happy to see us and enjoys the little things in life.
I consider him a good man. I consider him better than a lot of people I know who are perfectly normal. And that’s probably what he will be remembered for: that he was a good person.
Your friends aren’t your friends because you’re not smart. They probably just like who you are. And if my girlfriend’s uncle can be a good person and happy in life, then I believe that you can be too.
I wish you all the best.
How did you manage to win Georgia’s 14th Congressional district??
I see this is a dig at some politician you don’t like. Pretty funny
Marjorie Taylor Greene, in case anybody was wondering.
Have you given any thought to entering politics?
No
You really should
Definitely. We need some smarter people in office.
I’ve personally known PhD’s with learning disabilities who excelled where others did not. They told me, independently from each other, that it was determination and hard work that got them ahead of everyone else, not intelligence. They simply worked harder than everyone else. It’s not intelligence that gets you ahead, it’s the effort that you put into it.
Easier said than done. I was never the best student in school at best I only ever got B’s and C’s and I had to repeat the 7th and 9th grade. I was a super senior I graduated at age 20. I understand I’m not as impressive as other people but I’ll be dammed if I didn’t work my ass off for what I’ve got.
I’d hire someone that’ll work their ass off sooner than someone who was a slacking smart ass. Hard work makes the world go around!
How much you offering?
what’s your source of news?
how do you know what to trust in life generally?
“what’s your source of news?”
The internet
“how do you know what to trust in life generally?”
Wait a little bit to see if it gets debunked.
Wait a little bit to see if it gets debunked.
Honestly a pretty smart strategy. Wiser than most.
Thanks
thanks for the reply
What else was I going to do
it had been almost a day since you started the AMA so i thought i missed the boat
Just because the thread is a day old doesn’t mean I logged out of my account
For what it’s worth, free IQ tests are notoriously bad for evaluating general intellectual capacity, and tend to evaluate visual pattern recognition.
On top of that, you can learn how IQ tests are evaluated and score higher on them in a matter of seconds.
For example:
The answers are in the diagonals.
For this example, on the diagonals are the number of dots.
For this example, on the diagonals are the arrow directions.
Having this knowledge can easily boost your IQ score by 10.
In any case, intellect has many different facets; memory retention, memory recall speed, emotional intelligence, motivation, visual/spacial, verbal, etc.
There are people who are Mensa certified geniuses who can’t hold a conversation to save their lives, or boast to others about their score, which is… really dumb.
Is that the intended solution to the question, or just some sort of hack? For me, when solving that, I notice the arrows are rotating clockwise when viewing each row left to right, and that each row contains a triangle with 1, 2, and 3 dots. Same answer, very different strategy.
I followed the exact same logic.
That is the logic reasoning it is supposed to test. Deduction to find the relationships.
Most IQ tests specify that the patterns only go horizontally and vertically, so yeah I think your answer is the intended one.
IQ tests generally start out easy, and have multiple solutions to account for different pattern recognition.
The later questions will only have one correct way to solve the question.
The reason I demonstrated the method of solving the question this way is because many IQ tests rely on this format.
Many people will look at the columns and rows, but not the diagonals, thus, why having the knowledge is a huge boost.
Know what you’re talking about. There’s a guy on YouTube who’s in a similar situation to me called Mark Malloy. He talks a lot about IQ maxxing shall we say.
I just found this video by him.
It perfectly encapsulates what I’m talking about, when I say motivation is a part of intelligence. A raw IQ of 150 is functionally useless, and letting that potential go to waste is… really dumb.
This guy Mark, is motivated to attain gainful employment so he can sustain himself, and is trying to improve his intellect in the meanwhile, which demonstrates a intuitive wisdom most people lack.
Yeah that’s him…
I’ve been working on my motivation it’s hard but I give myself goals. I would love to have a higher IQ somehow.
I watched a few of Marks videos and I’m not convinced he is as stupid as he believes himself to be, just read the comments on his videos.
Through my life I’ve been told by people I’m smart, which gave me an ego, and lead me to being an asshole to people I deemed less intelligent.
Later in life I began to resent the association, and I almost reflexively deny any assertions that I am anything other than slightly above average.
As aforementioned, getting stuck on how intelligent you are is the wrong metric to evaluate your personal worth. I wish that instead of being told I’m smart, that people praised me for my effort.
For example, if there was a word I’ve wrote which you don’t know the meaning of, look it up - that’s a very simple way to improve your vocabulary, which helps to improve how you navigate your own mind.
I feel that encouraging growth is far more important than telling someone they have some kind of innate talent, and it’s something I live by.
If I can offer one resource for you to study to “have a higher IQ”, it’s learning about logical fallacies.
To put it simply, people are stupid because they fail to recognize flaws in their own thinking. With the link I’ve given you, click on each fallacy and try to think of a time when you’ve committed that fallacy.
It can be a bit wordy, so don’t worry if you don’t entirely understand the definition. Try to infer the meaning by reading the examples in bold at the bottom of each fallacy.
Even very intelligent people are not immune from logical contradictions, so don’t be disheartened if you begin to recognize you’ve got some bad habits.
And whatever you do, if you notice someone else committing these fallacies, keep it to yourself. Too many people learn basic epistemology (study of knowledge itself) and think they’re capable of debating others by dismantling the other persons arguments by citing their fallacies. This is… (say it with me)… really dumb!
Do you think that there is like an opposite to the Dunning/Kruger effect were really smart people think of them selves as dumber than they really are
Absolutely, though I wouldn’t say it’s an opposite Dunning/Kruger, just that smart people are further along the x-axis.
Having the knowledge to understand how much you don’t know is both a blessing and a curse.
The curse: It is hard to project a true sense of authority, because to yourself, you do not believe you’re competent enough.
The blessing: humility. You understand that everyone fits on the graph somewhere.
There is the impostor syndrome.
I’ve tended to score suspiciously high on most aptitude/iq type tests my entire life (70s kid, among the earliest ADD diagnoses, etc) and tbh i think I am quite a lot dumber than those tests imply.
Show of hands all y’all “talented and gifted” kids that never did nuthin …
*edit: to be clear, I don’t think ‘raw intelligence’ or anything similar necessarily confers a lot of life benefits. It can, but doesn’t always or maybe even most of the time.
This resource is also very helpful.
It explores biases which virtually everyone holds, and might be easier to understand than the other link.
If you put both diagonal directions in would you increase by 20 or fail?
Nah you average it. 10+10/2
/s
+15? Totally worth it!
No more questions but this was fascinating and you seem like a super cool person with a lot of depth. Thanks for being vulnerable here
Thank you and you do too
Did you feel or believe that you might have a below average IQ before you took the assessment ?
I did my first IQ test when I was 14 and I did don’t expect the results
Are the results from what you can remember similar to what they are nowadays?
Thank you for answering so many questions. This is a very interesting thread.
Do you feel supported by your parents and friends IRL or rather misunderstood?
No problem
“Do you feel supported by your parents and friends IRL or rather misunderstood?”
By parents definitely not but with friends I feel very misunderstood. They always use words like “R*traded” “sped” and “spaz” and they always use low IQ as a insult. Not against me but just as general banter. They don’t know about my IQ or learning disabilities so it’s very isolating to hear them say those things as I am all of them.
How did you test your iq and did what did you expect of the results?
I got a test from MENSA and I was expecting the results as I did another IQ test when I was 14
Googling Mensa: Mensa international:
This online test gives an indication of general cognitive abilities, represented by an IQ score of between 85 and 145, where 100 is the population average.
Did you take this test? If yes, how was your result below the lowest value?
She misunderstood the number.
I don’t know what Mensa is and if they have different types of tests or smth
Unfortunately, that part of the test, was also part of the test.
Thank you for this AMA it is very interesting to get your viewpoint.
I have many questions, feel free not to answer them if you don’t like them.
When have you discovered that you are different? What happened? Why did you take IQ tests?
Can you share story about something that is different between you and average people?
Is your memory worse or just the thinking process?
Do you have any idea why your IQ is so low? Is it just coincidence or something happened while you were young?
How can I recognize that someone has low IQ? How should I act when I meet someone with low IQ, should I use simpler sentences or simpler ideas?
Thank you.
“When have you discovered that you are different? What happened? Why did you take IQ tests?”
I was always slower then other kids my age. When I was 14 I was made to do an IQ test by the teachers in my school when I discovered my IQ at the time was 73.
“Can you share story about something that is different between you and average people?”
There’s plenty. When I was 18 somebody asked me how to spell something and I just couldn’t spell it and I broke down in tears. It was pretty embarrassing.
“Is your memory worse or just the thinking process?”
I think it’s both. My memory isn’t very good and my thinking process is very limited.
“Do you have any idea why your IQ is so low? Is it just coincidence or something happened while you were young?”
I think my mom drank while she was pregnant. Which explains why I’m different then my brothers and sisters. I don’t know if that’s true though maybe I just lost the genetic lottery.
“How can I recognize that someone has low IQ? How should I act when I meet someone with low IQ, should I use simpler sentences or simpler ideas?”
Not really, IQ isn’t immediately obvious like other disabilities and if you meet someone with low IQ just speak and treat them like there anyone else.
Your responses suggest a higher score in language, is your 73 the average of all the test areas? Such as math, etc.
My 73 score was when I was 14 it’s now 76. I don’t know the average IW of my area.
Thank you for sharing your story, it must be a difficult life. Life is hard with 120, I barely make it, I can not even imagine your case especially together with NPD.
I have seen your other AMA about NPD, and I can understand “trauma”. I “only” had really bad decades long depression and anxiety and have found way out of it with good therapy (which is rare).
Good luck to you, I hope you will have some luck further on.
Thank you for your understanding. I don’t think all mental illness’s are caused by trauma. I don’t know where my NPD or HPD came from. I really wish I could be like everyone else. I feel like I’m being sabotaged from within.
… treat them like they’re anyone else.
FTFY
Is this a meme? Context, man…
Do you eat your toast butter side up or butter side down?
What is blood waffling about?
How did you find out about Lemmy? It seems it’s mostly a niche place for tech nerds and commies and you don’t seem to be either? Also what keeps you here? Wouldn’t the NPD push you towards more popular platforms?
Sorry for asking so many questions - your experience sounds very unique and you actually seem very eloquent and thoughtful.
“How did you find out about Lemmy?”
I looked up Reddit alternatives and it came up. Reddit has a bad reputation and it’s got too many rules. It’s impossible to post anywhere cuz you never have enough karma.
“It seems it’s mostly a niche place for tech nerds and commies and you don’t seem to be either?”
Well, I was pretty interested in programming a few years ago because of game modding.
“Also what keeps you here?”
Same things that keep me anywhere. Interacting with others and the interesting communities.
“Wouldn’t the NPD push you towards more popular platforms?”
It has been proven that people with NPD use social media more. I’m no exception I have accounts on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, twitter and SnapChat.
“Sorry for asking so many questions”
It’s no problem that’s what I’m here for.
“your experience sounds very unique and you actually seem very eloquent and thoughtful.”
Isn’t everyone’s? And thank you I’ve worked on words and spelling for a while now.
what kind of iq test did you take? was it recent and have you only taken the one?
“kind”? Isn’t it just one IQ test that everyone takes? It was 5 years ago when I was 19. I did another one when I was 14 and I scored 73 on that one.
Not to discount your struggles or anything, but…just so you know…IQ tests are biased against neurodivergent people. I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Level 1) last summer, and one of the tests in the battery they administered to me was an IQ test (WAIS).
About a month after the tests, I went back to get my results. The doctor went into lots of details, but a couple thay stood out were that I had autism and that they clocked my IQ at about 124. The IQ score shocked me as I was a member of American Mensa after scoring well into the 99th percentile on both of their intelligence tests. The doctor clarified that I shouldn’t hold any stock in IQ tests as an autistic person because they aren’t well designed for neurodivergent people since our strengths aren’t usually as balanced as they are for neurotypical people.
I thought I’d mention this since you have ADHD!
I like to think that actually I’m a super genius who actually has a IQ of 240 or something.
There’s a bunch of different ways to test IQ, and most if not all tests are known to be pretty flawed. The concept of intelligence being something that can be compared on a single numeric scale is in itself pretty much bullshit - there are different types of intelligence, and the tests tend to focus on random things like pattern matching.
A bunch of “high IQ” people are barely functional on a day to day basis. Basically low scores on an IQ test indicates that you lack the skills to do that exact test - I wouldn’t read too much into it.
Edit: Read another comment where you elaborate and don’t want to come across as dismissing your experience at all, I can see that it’s frustrating when people keep insisting it doesn’t matter. But having completed my PhD and having met a lot of people that would do incredibly well in IQ tests, I can safely say many of them too face significant challenges in lives deriving from their lack of situational awareness and understanding of for example social situations.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s not entirely useless. Obviously stuffing someone’s intelligence into a single number is a lossy conversion, but IQ correlates with many things that make it a useful measurement. To dismiss this is to dismiss the real science behind it.
If it isn’t intelligence and what is it then? It’s undeniable that some people are better mentally than others. Like obviously someone with down syndrome is going to have less knowledge then someone without down syndrome. Right?
Not necessarily.
IQ tries to measure intelligence on one dimension, which is usually pattern matching. In reality a bunch of different things go into what we consider intelligence. Social intelligence and emotional intelligence are two big ones, that are often completely unrelated to pattern matching. But even within what one would consider “book smart” there’s a bunch of variation - someone could be incredibly smart in some ways and unbelievably dumb in others.
I think the variation within the chess elite is a good example. They are all intelligent in a way that would rank them favourably in IQ tests. Some of them are also brilliant people, but others buy into propaganda or conspiracy theories, some of them may be sexist and backwards, and some of them it’s almost a wonder they know how to breathe.
Another example is practical vs theoretical skills. A lot of theoretically intelligent people would be completely helpless in practical tasks like building something or fxing a broken machine.
There’s something particularly weird about watching academics deal with practical problems. Their stupidity can be unbelievable.
I think a lot of people with downs syndrome can have pretty high emotional intelligence for example, where they can empathize and relate to the feelings of other people.
