Political Memes

if an IQ of 100 is average, and you had an IQ of 100, you could say that you're smarter than 50% of people, right? Let's call those people (the ones you're smarter than) group A. It also means that you're in a group "top 50% of smart people", which is just all the people smarter than those in group A. We'll call it group B. Now, let's say your IQ is 79. That means that now you're only smarter than 8.1% (based on the picture) of people. Group A is much smaller because there are far fewer people stupid enough to be stupider than you. On the other hand, you're in group B, which consists of the 91.9% of people who are smarter than group A; I.e. almost everyone.

Of course, it's important to remember that IQ tests are not considered by everyone to be fair assessments of real intelligence, but hopefully the example above helps explain what the statistics in the post actually mean.

If you come in 91st place, you are still in the top 91.

Which is better - being in the top 1% or the top 99%?

The “smarter than” measurement, while vague, suggests the person is not has smart as most everyone else. Say you have 100 people in a room, then this guy is smarter than only 8. So that leaves about 91 other people who are smarter than him.

So I’m not sure how this person could also be considered in the top 91.9% of anything. At least not without having more information.

Here is a discussion about percentages and percentiles that may be of help.

I could be wrong; I’m not the best of math. The above is my understanding (or lack thereof).

91.9% of people have an IQ of at least his level.

Being in the top 92% isn't saying anything good about you - it only means that you're guaranteed to have a score higher than at least 8% of the people

So in a group of 100 people, this guy would have a better score than 8 of them. Basically - he saw the 91.9% as "I'm in the top 8%" but really he had it backwards.

If 100 IQ is average, you could have 50 people with a 40 IQ and another 150 people with a 120 IQ. Those would average to 100. Adding one extra person with a 79 IQ would make that person smarter than 50 people, but still below the average of 100 within the group of 200 people, for example. That 79 IQ would be in the top 75% of the group, but still below the average. Just depends how the group is distributed.

They're in the top 91.9%, but they're in the 8.9th not in the 91.9th percentile. Having a high percentage is bad (you're stupider than that many people) but being in a high percentile is good (you're smarter than that many people).

I'm thinking a lot of people confuse those two concepts.

It makes more sense when they're giving results that would be under 50%, which is why it's phrased that way: "top 40%", etc. I think they expected to always be giving numbers under 50 since above average people might be more likely to take an IQ test.

I've seen people take online IQ tests and assert they've got an IQ in the 200-300 range. shrug This never seems to correlate with anything material. Like, I don't see these people doing particularly well in school or at the office. They certainly aren't climbing the ranks of management or killing it in the stock market.