SL's average IQ decreasing?

I do believe the OP was referring to the average IQ *within Second Life*.

Agreed! I've met several people that signed up very recently that are extremely creative and/or intelligent.

It's a mixed bag. I can only hope the creative and intelligent people stay and the morons get tired of SL soon.

Very much to the point. Although, I sometimes feel like English is second nature to me (I often dream in English and fail to express myself correctly in Swedish because I can't find the correct translation to a certain English phrase bumping around inside my head), it happens regularly, quite regardless, that you're unable express yourself in a manner aspired for.

Chatting is very fast-paced, and pretty often you find yourself not entirely pleased with the compromise formulation you're forced to throw out. Especially when you're tired, you can often hear the tone of utter stupidity creeping around your choice of words. This is when your language tends to get simplistic and somewhat bland (because it's easier), you might even appear infantile, and of course, that does you small honour.

Then there are traps laid out everywhere in the form of differing cultural curricula that you really can only get into if you spend time in the setting. For instance, I often try avoid joking, becasue it's very hard to be genuinely funny in a foreign language. The risk of making a fool of yourself on the other hand is ever present. And you can totally forget about poetry *lol*.

Rambling, rambling, rambling... oh by the way, my IQ typically lands in the "120-129 Superior 6.7%" range, so don't blame me if you sometimes fail to take notice of that.

Times like this I start thinking I must be living (in SL) in some separate reality. I have a place on the 'mainland'...the Zen center in Teal and Rose...it's listed as 'open to the public'...its been around a few years now. I've never had any trouble there. People come and go. We talk some. Some people I just don't pay attention to and they go away. No problem. No need for a government. No need for a separate sim. Maybe its just that I'm too dumb to notice?

One of my interests is the Church-Turing thesis, and how one distinguishes one person from another without ever seeing their face - based on writing styles (which most people have unconcious idiosyncracies in) and behaviour. One of the pressing problems of SL politics is, how does one distinguish between X person and their alternate persona? It's something I've been aware of since 1991 - on USENET, bulletin boards, etcetera.

How does one distinguish between two different people who have the same (Ruth) avatar and who produce no chat text but are both griefing the same location? Without access to TCP/IP logs (which we're not getting), one doesn't.

How does one come to a sense of knowing someone else even though their actual skin has never touched? I have had people tell me that I don't know people whom I have never been in the same zip code as. Pity for their shortcoming.

This thread has been a fun read and, while I've been verified, I do not yet have any monetary investment into SL. So I may have a new perspective.

I feel that many new residents, like myself, are used to the "traditional" video games that place an emphasis on exploration. In those games if I see a building I expect to be able to go in and poke around, and maybe take whatever I want. SL is a break from that mentality, but I think it's important to understand where many people are coming from.

With my limited time in SL, I see it as an attempt to bring real world culture into an online gaming environment. When people enter from a different perspective, it doesn't make them less intelligent, it just simply means they are conforming to a different set of social rules from other online subcultures that they've been exposed to.

With that said, I understand and respect the desire for privacy within certain areas. You've invested time, money, and emotional energy to create relationships and locations that you value. Some newbie running around your house threatening an abortion would certainly be uncalled for, inconsiderate, and unwelcomed.

I am currently trying to get oriented in SL and wade through all the features available. But as soon as I do, I will definitely stop by and visit you all in Caledon.

I don't think this is anything surprising, although some data to back it up would be more than welcome. But purely as an exercise...

1) SL is a "niche" game. For you to do anything of "value" in this world you need to have building or scripting capability. Doing these kinds of things is only of interest to a small percentage of the population, especially because it is not only the fact that you can do these things, we are also stating that you actually have fun doing it.

To be really good in these skills requires some brains, specially in the area of spatial awareness which is one of the things that IQ tests measure strongly. It is fairly easy to assume that SL, at the time of launch, would attract people with IQ above average.

2) SL has grown, there are other things to do in SL now than simply building. One big part of it is socializing so SL has gone "mainstream". The more socializers we have, the more socializers will come.

3) Socializers are not "dumb". Some will have high IQ some will not. That is ok since they're here to have fun, not to show how smart they are. We can only speculate that as we get out of the niche and into the mainstream the doors will be more open to all kind of people instead of only the smart ones, of course the average will go lower.

4) Why are you worried? There is an income of new citizens that don't know and don't care about building, designing or coding. It is up to the old players to show them what can be done, and since they can't be bothered ... time to make some $L selling it.

This is just my idea, but hey... I'm new here!

Not true - there are plenty of people who make some value out of being entertainers. There are people who only design the games, and hire others to build them. There are some of us who have almost zero building skills, scripting skills, etcetera but chewed through most of the concepts behind them and dabbled so as to better understand other concepts that may have building/scripting as a prerequisite.



And who have a penchant for open-ended games, social environments, people, political experiments... *cackles* SL is a novelty in many areas.

That is precisely what I said. Except that the entertainers/socializers/etc came after the builders... and caused this.

Anyway, and like I said at the top, it is hard to make real judgement without real measures.

On the one hand, I agree wholeheartedly -- and in fact, I pay close attention to and make a sort of private study of the speech patterns and behaviors of people with whom I come into contact in SL. As well, there are people (such as Mistress) whom I feel I've come to know very well over time.

On the other hand, I think it's a dangerous mistake to come to believe that you can't be misled or be otherwise mistaken. I don't mean to say that that's necessarily what you believe; I just feel it's an important point to highlight while on that subject.

As for the original post, IQ alone is a poor measure. It determines, as I understand it, only how quickly you can assimilate and process information. It doesn't automatically follow that you actually then go out of your way to assimilate any information at all or that anything you do learn is at all useful or even necessarily true.

A person with an extremely high IQ could still end up hopelessly ignorant (or hopelessly misled). Conversely, a person with a relatively low IQ could still learn a great deal, albeit perhaps not so much as the person with the higher IQ could have learned. It's also possible for a highly intelligent person (or really anyone at all) to fall into the trap of becoming arrogant. Nothing guarantees ignorance faster than an unwillingness to learn and to believe that you could be mistaken about something.

Quite aside from all that, I find the concept of intelligence testing itself somewhat questionable. No, I can't claim to have studied it in any great detail, so I'm not speaking as any kind of subject-matter expert. Nor do I think it's completely useless by any stretch. I do, however, wonder how certain we can be that important aspects of intelligence aren't partially or even totally missed by such testing.

Ok folks, go knock yourselves out

http://www.highiqsociety.org/iq_tests/



Once done, grab an airsickness bag and then read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

YOUR IQ SCORE IS:

129



Your score places you in the top five percent of the population. This qualifies you for membership in the International High IQ Society ( <---- ha ha ... I rather think not )

Yay, so I scored high enough on some egghead's precious test to join a "look at us; we're smart" club. Annnd? This proves what about me exactly ...?

I wonder if the site tracks you to make sure you don't take it again and try for a different result? I believe I shall try again and find out.

Oh, but just for fun, here's what it costs to be in the "look at me; I'm smart" club:









Too funny.

Good news! I got smarter!




YOUR IQ SCORE IS:

131

Your score places you in the top five percent of the population. This qualifies you for membership in the International High IQ Society.

Actually, this is about normal for me. I did once get scored at like 151 or something and once at 117, but I guess I hover around 130-something. I'm still not joining that society.

'Kay, now what I really want to see is Finning's score. I expect a rather high number.

Is 23 gude?

wow ur pretti smart lolollololool!

Okay, okay, I admit it! I love tests and quizzes, even if I doubt that they really reveal as much as they're believed to reveal!

And darnit, I've already gone, so it's someone else's turn to do this thing!

Having an extremely high IQ is not the wonderful gift that everyone makes it out to be. It isolates you from everyone else. I heard somewhere that if your IQ is higher than someone else's by more than 30 points, they simply won't be able to understand what you are talking about because your brains function is such different ways. It's been my experience that's pretty much true.

This can be maddening. At first you try to make them understand, even though it's just not possible. So you run around in circles trying to explain it to them till finally you throw your hands up in the air and give up. Then after a while you finally realize that you really just don't have anything in common with “normal” people, so you tend to withdraw from society in general.

As for the comment on how a high IQ doesn't matter in the real world, that's a load of crap. At my last job I was so burned out that I never gave more than 75% of my true potential, I goofed off a lot and basically half asses my way through most things. Yet I still consistently received outstanding evaluations, was promoted twice within six months and was considered one of the best employees in the office (out of about 50 or so). So don't tell me my IQ doesn't matter when I can fuck off half the day and still do better than “normal” people who are working as hard as they can.

Don't even think of calling me an arrogant, elitist bitch either. You brought it up, not me. I never tell anyone my IQ anymore, it just freaks them out and makes them avoid me like I am some kind of weirdo (which I suppose I am).

Embarassingly: 122.

I knew none of the trivia questions and some of the visualisation questions I just blanked on. Then again, it's 4 in the morning and I can't sleep.

*sigh*

So much for making this fun.

Isolates you? Sure, in a way it does. But unless you happen to be Maralyn Vos Savant, you can probably locate someone else more or less on your level fairly easily if you try when you want a serious discussion, and for more casual conversation, any courteous person will do. If you give them half a chance, "ordinary" people can be perfectly wonderful and surprisingly varied and interesting. (Good grief, that sounds elitist. Please, I don't mean it that way. )

For that matter, even if you do have an extremely high (say, 160+) IQ, that doesn't automatically mean you can't relate to others. I think there's an unfortunate tendency to believe that anyone with extremely high intelligence must be somehow completely incapable of social interaction. There may be a strong correlation there simply because anything that sets you apart from the crowd makes it harder to fit in, but it isn't impossible to learn to relate to people just because you're much more intelligent than the average.

Nor, again, is IQ automatically any measure of knowledge or especially success. It's perfectly possible for a truck driver to have an IQ of 170 and absolutely no ambition whatsoever (although he/she might still be the world's most well-read truck driver), while even someone with just an IQ of 110 but with tons of ambition and drive might become very successful and even be assumed to be more intelligent than he/she really is.

Wait, is this their standard test or their "TA3"? I got the 122 on the TA3. I got a 144 on their "IQ eCMA". Bleah. Same test but with questions that require less advanced trivia/knowledge.

I agree with Vares. It's nigh-on impossible for me to communicate with many people intellectually. I'll think of something 'astounding' and bring it to people and their normal response is " .... *cricket chirp*" When people ask "What are your interests?" and one replies "Teaching computers to be sentient"*, they look at you like you're straight off the SciFi channel.

*Not that I'm likely to succeed in my lifetime. Nor is it my only interest, but the rest of them are equally as non-common to most people.

Okay, that makes more sense and is more in line with what I expected. Yes, I meant the eCMA, and yes, I anticipated a result like this.



As an aside, and purely out of curiousity, do you worry about the impact of the world's looming energy crisis and the lack of any available alternative fuel sources with ERoEIs comparable to what cheap oil provided (save, perhaps, nuclear) on that goal of yours? That is to say, it sounds very exciting, but aren't you at all worried that it won't do any good when/if the lights literally go out on industrial civilization for the very last time?

Edit: I tried the TA3 and scored 111. Definitely a more difficult one. And now off to bed before I simply pass out anyway.

I don't think the lights are going to go out on industrial civilisation. I think a lot of people are going to be spending a lot of time walking/bicycling/riding rather than driving 1.5 /tonne/ machines 5-15 miles to and from a job 5 days a week. Nuclear's not a good option save for a society that can already invest energy in digging, processing, and disposing - and with those steps taken into account, it may not even be a good investment then.

We have a lot of energy hitting the planet right now. We have ways of capturing it. They're just not as inexpensive as sucking crude out of the ground and (with the infrastructure already in place and paid for mostly) refining it. But there are a lot of nice advances in materials science for solar that could come into play in a few years' time, if integrated circuits stop using all the silicon.

Aw don't despair man ... just few more months in these forums and you'll be like new! Although I admit it used to go faster with such IQ deterrents like Billy or Blaze, we have to make it up in volume now (don't skip any thread about prim babies especially)