politicartoons | Mod post

"Of course, it is impossible that you could ever be wrong."

No, just probable that I'm wrong significantly less often than nearly everyone in this comm. For it to be otherwise, there would have to be an incredibly strong self-selection bias for participation here. The comm would have to be composed almost entirely of people so far into the top half-percentile of general intelligence, so far above me because of the steepness of the curve at the high end, that I don't even recognize their intelligence as intelligence. If such people exist at all, I'm sure they're far too busy to post here.

No, just probable that I'm wrong significantly less often than nearly everyone in this comm.

Based on no verifiable evidence.

The comm would have to be composed almost entirely of people so far into the top half-percentile of general intelligence

Assuming, of course, that you are that intelligent.
Which, frankly, I don't agree with that premise. You remind me most of Vox Day (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale), who speaks just as often on the subject of how much smarter he is than the rest of plebes. Your politics, belief on race, and belief on women match his as well.

Relevant quote from the entry: He claims to be a member of Mensa and to have an IQ "Over the so-called 'genius' threshhold." If true, this demonstrates at least one of two things: Showcasing how allegedly smart people can make a living saying very stupid things, or that the IQ test is severely overrated as a measure of actual intellectual capacity. Or he may be lying.

I, on the other hand, recognize that Mensa is a joke, and would never join it, let alone brag about it. You realize they admit people above the 95th percentile, right? Talk about plebes.

Edited 2014-09-09 19:02 (UTC)

Ah, yes, here we have the exaltation of yourself over Mensa. Truly you are a towering intellect; Stephen Hawking is a mere imbecile in comparison to your glorious mentality. Yadda, yadda, you're repeating yourself. Preen like a peacock all you like; I await more solid indicators.

It's an objective fact that Mensa is not a very remarkable thing to consider beneath oneself. By its own standards, one person in twenty could be a member. I love how you jump from that to my thinking I'm superior to Stephen Hawking. That kind of exaggeration and extrapolation is your typical response to everything I say. And you wonder why I have such a low opinion of your intelligence.

That kind of exaggeration and extrapolation is your typical response to everything I say.

Yes, it's this very neat thing called hyperbole, and I love to use it with people who I think are full of shit.

And you wonder why I have such a low opinion of your intelligence.

You have a low opinion of everyone's intelligence, if they don't agree with you. Why the shit should I care what your opinion is of me? You act, as I've mentioned, like Vox Day - and every other cat-piss man I've ever encountered IRL. You're always right, you always know so much more than the educated/credentialed/expert/those with a shit-ton of experience, you talk incessantly about these nebulous accomplishments you can't back up - shit, as far as I'm concerned, you're no different than a mall ninja (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mall_ninja) talking about how accomplished you are in the use of a katana and how you can kill people with one chop of your hand.

And whether you intend to or not, that's how you come off to everyone here. But, of course, we're all to blame for our lowly and deficient perceptions of you.

My claims are not that remarkable, and therefore your certainty that I'm lying is not justifiable. At least one person in two hundred is capable of the things I claim. Got that? I consider about one person in two hundred my superior. Because of the steepness of the curve at the high end, three or four people in a thousand are as devastatingly superior to me as I am to someone at the ninety-fifth percentile, and as someone at the ninety-fifth percentile is in turn to someone at the eightieth. So no, I do not believe myself to be an infallible god of the universe. Your hyperbole is uncalled for.

More importantly, the implications of my claims should not require proving that I am telling the truth about myself specifically. All the important implications, including the veracity of my sweeping generalizations, follows from the existence of a class of people who are capable of doing the things I claim to be capable of.

My claims are not that remarkable, and therefore your certainty that I'm lying is not justifiable.

Whether something is "remarkable" or not is not relevant. All that is relevant is, is there evidence to bolster your claim? Is that evidence contradicted by competing evidence? Without evidence, I have no reason to assume you are telling the truth or are anything more than another Internet Tough Guy.

At least one person in two hundred is capable of the things I claim. Got that?

How did you determine that statistic?
What polling method did you use? What was the pool and the population?
What is your certainty? A 95% +/- 4%?

All the important implications, including the veracity of my sweeping generalizations, follows from the existence of a class of people who are capable of doing the things I claim to be capable of.

A class I have yet to see evidence of, which only exists by your assertion.

"A class I have yet to see evidence of . . ."

Then you are blind.

As far as I'm concerned, you and everyone else here is no different than any other person I have encountered in private or public IRL in the course of my IT work. This is unsurprising. It is my experience that all human beings, including myself, are interchangeable and disposable, which is why I currently work towards replacing all non-management/upper-class jobs with robots, automation, and intelligent software. I am VERY happy about the coming elimination of 95%+ menial positions.

The bottom 80% or so are indeed interchangeable and disposable. If you're one of them, it would explain why you're completely unaware of how the top quintile lives.

The bottom 80% or so are indeed interchangeable and disposable.

So are the top 20%. Do you know what you and I and the rest of humanity are? We're bio-robots, with inefficient organically grown-over-time programming. In the future, we will be able to correct that.

If you're one of them, it would explain why you're completely unaware of how the top quintile lives.

*shrugs* If it please you to think of me as such. You automatically dismiss those you deem inferior as such anyway, regardless of the actual correctness of your assessment.

Nevermind your outrageous claims of being able to singlehandedly author econometric textbooks or build Obamacare.gov for 50k, lolz at the super genius math!
At the 95th percentile the IQ is ~125. At 99.5th, it is ~139. A difference of ~14 points. At the 99.7th (3/1000), the IQ is ~141 or a difference of 2 points.

The point scale is not linear, genius. It describes the distribution of performance values, not the relative magnitude of the performance values.

Edited 2014-09-09 20:35 (UTC)

No shit, Sherlock. Now why don't you go reread what you wrote and figure out why what you said was so devastatingly stupid. A super genius should have no problem with that.

You should take your own advice.

Lolz super genius keep it up

Please calculate the slopes of a bell curve and explain how the right tail's slope is decreasing at a rate at all comparable to what you've described, super genius

Wow. You really don't have the first clue what an IQ score is.

The bell curve is the distribution of scores. The performance level associated with those scores is not a bell curve; it's a power law curve. There's barely any difference in actual knowledge between a score of 70 and a score of 115, but there's a gigantic difference between a scores of 145 and a score of 150.

Prove it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-debunks-idea-that-human-performance-fits-on-a-bell-curve-2012-5
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-of-the-bell-curve-look-for-the-hyper-performers/

These articles actually misrepresent the implications of the research. The bell curve is real; it just doesn't represent what most people think it does, as you have so amply demonstrated.

I composited the images from the second article to explain the research better.

If there were someone in this community who was smarter than you (if such a person could exist at all), what do you suppose that super-smart person would think about the way you're going on and on about your own superiority?

Anyway, I wouldn't underestimate the power of self-selection here. Everyone participating in this community has self-selected for being engaged - or even entertained - by verbal reasoning and is more proficient in written language than the average person. Most of us are also highly practiced in debating issues of a political nature, an exercise which further attracts a certain set of proficiencies. Finally, we're LJ hold-outs, so we can be kind of obsessive.

I admit I find it a bit puzzling that you should be so adamant and direct about your putative superiority, when addressing a group of people you take to be inferior. I assume you already understand that doing so can't possibly be an effective rhetorical strategy for convincing others, whether stupid or otherwise. If your purpose is to be abusive - well, surely you can see how that's working out; people are less offended, chastised, or hurt by your flagrancy than amused. And you've said that you think it extremely unlikely that anyone in this community could be smarter than you are, so it's not as though you're appealing to them or trying to amuse them, whoever they might be.

So what's the point of it? You keep saying you're so extraordinarily intelligent, but the very statement undermines its apparent truth.

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