Why “IQ” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
IQ tests? Very good. But most are in the dataset so it's not very meaningful
by brokensegue · Sep 4, 2026
We are basically random. 2% of population by top IQ test result has pretty much very similar distribution in all aspects to 100% of the population. It's not a high bar to be fas…
by scotty79 · Sep 4, 2026
IQ strongly correlates with many real world outcomes that people tend to associate with being more "intellectual". IQ has precise definition. It's what the tests measure. Intell…
by scotty79 · Sep 4, 2026
By looking at interactions of people in Mensa I feel like 2% of top IQ is actually too low bar to notice anything particular about "high" IQ people. We are still pretty random i…
by scotty79 · Sep 4, 2026
Whatever the people who came up with IQ intended isn’t really relevant to the question of whether IQ measures intellect. At best is is loosely correlated. Very loosely.
by adastra22 · Sep 4, 2026
Is it a serious question? IQ tries to quantify the positive correlation between the results of all intellectual tasks a person takes (AKA positive manifold).
by red75prime · Sep 4, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "iq" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "iq" over time.
An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. Originally, IQ was a quotient obtained by dividing a person's estimated mental age, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person's chronological age. The resulting fraction was multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score. For modern IQ tests, the raw score is transformed to a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. This results in approximately two-thirds of the population scoring between IQ 85 and IQ 115 and about 2 percent each above 130 and below 70. Read more on Wikipedia