[ExI] didn't know he was at the party... was: RE: Wrath of the Old Ones

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 12:00 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> While discussing IQ with my undergrads I pointed out that IQ geniuses are
> in every population.  Does that mean that somewhere in deepest Africa is a
> pygmy with a bone through his nose who has an IQ of 190 and is potentially
> the greatest mathematician since Fermat?  Yes it does.  Maybe there isn't,
> but there could be.
>

### Highly unlikely. The IQ of pygmies is estimated at 53. I don't know the
standard deviation of IQ among pygmies but if it was the same as among
normal populations, an IQ of 190 would be more than 9 sigma above their
average. I tried to use a couple of online normal distribution calculators
but none were designed to go so far off the mean and all of them gave 0 as
answer. As an example, an 8 sigma outlier is found with a probability of
4x10e-13.

Considering that the number of pygmies is less than a million, we can be
expect with a likelihood of > 1-((4x10e-13)/1000000)= 0.9999996 that there
are no pygmies with an IQ of 190 or higher.

Of course, this is a silly calculation - IQ tests are not properly normed
for outlier populations, both far below and far above the average, so the
true likelihood of extreme genius among pygmies is unknown but certainly
very low.

Rafał
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