Strictly speaking, a normal distribution doesn’t cap, neither at 0 nor at 200. Maybe the scores achievable by standardized tests do, of course.
Comment on Anon is a child prodigy
lime@feddit.nu 4 hours agoi mean, iq is a normal distribution. it caps at 200. 160 represents the 99.996th percentile, and above that the error bars are so large that the result is uneless.
Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
lime@feddit.nu 2 hours ago
they usually cap at 150. but yeah it’s not a hard cap, it’s an asymptotic curve. statistically the chance of getting 201 or higher is the same as getting -1 or lower.
taiyang@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I was going to mention the same thing. Even the “smartest man alive” would be in those useless upper bounds.
To explain that upper bounds issue to others, imagine being the top score on a leaderboard. Some of that’s going to be random chance and other factors, even if most of the time you score in the top 1% of scores consistently.
mech@feddit.org 3 hours ago
It’s not capped, really. But the claimed 250 IQ would be 10 standard deviations from the mean, so he’d be the most intelligent person in a population of ~10^24 people.
~10^11 humans have ever lived on earth.
bampop@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
The most likely explanation is that he was from outer space
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Smells like von neumann