I am a 23 year old female with a IQ of 76. Ask me anything
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Do you eat your toast butter side up or butter side down?
What is blood waffling about?
For what it’s worth, free IQ tests are notoriously bad for evaluating general intellectual capacity, and tend to evaluate visual pattern recognition.
On top of that, you can learn how IQ tests are evaluated and score higher on them in a matter of seconds.
For example:
The answers are in the diagonals.
For this example, on the diagonals are the number of dots.
For this example, on the diagonals are the arrow directions.
Having this knowledge can easily boost your IQ score by 10.
In any case, intellect has many different facets; memory retention, memory recall speed, emotional intelligence, motivation, visual/spacial, verbal, etc.
There are people who are Mensa certified geniuses who can’t hold a conversation to save their lives, or boast to others about their score, which is… really dumb.
Is that the intended solution to the question, or just some sort of hack? For me, when solving that, I notice the arrows are rotating clockwise when viewing each row left to right, and that each row contains a triangle with 1, 2, and 3 dots. Same answer, very different strategy.
IQ tests generally start out easy, and have multiple solutions to account for different pattern recognition.
The later questions will only have one correct way to solve the question.
The reason I demonstrated the method of solving the question this way is because many IQ tests rely on this format.
Many people will look at the columns and rows, but not the diagonals, thus, why having the knowledge is a huge boost.
I followed the exact same logic.
If you put both diagonal directions in would you increase by 20 or fail?
Nah you average it. 10+10/2
/s
Know what you’re talking about. There’s a guy on YouTube who’s in a similar situation to me called Mark Malloy. He talks a lot about IQ maxxing shall we say.
I just found this video by him.
It perfectly encapsulates what I’m talking about, when I say motivation is a part of intelligence. A raw IQ of 150 is functionally useless, and letting that potential go to waste is… really dumb.
This guy Mark, is motivated to attain gainful employment so he can sustain himself, and is trying to improve his intellect in the meanwhile, which demonstrates a intuitive wisdom most people lack.
Yeah that’s him…
I’ve been working on my motivation it’s hard but I give myself goals. I would love to have a higher IQ somehow.
I watched a few of Marks videos and I’m not convinced he is as stupid as he believes himself to be, just read the comments on his videos.
Through my life I’ve been told by people I’m smart, which gave me an ego, and lead me to being an asshole to people I deemed less intelligent.
Later in life I began to resent the association, and I almost reflexively deny any assertions that I am anything other than slightly above average.
As aforementioned, getting stuck on how intelligent you are is the wrong metric to evaluate your personal worth. I wish that instead of being told I’m smart, that people praised me for my effort.
For example, if there was a word I’ve wrote which you don’t know the meaning of, look it up - that’s a very simple way to improve your vocabulary, which helps to improve how you navigate your own mind.
I feel that encouraging growth is far more important than telling someone they have some kind of innate talent, and it’s something I live by.
If I can offer one resource for you to study to “have a higher IQ”, it’s learning about logical fallacies.
To put it simply, people are stupid because they fail to recognize flaws in their own thinking. With the link I’ve given you, click on each fallacy and try to think of a time when you’ve committed that fallacy.
It can be a bit wordy, so don’t worry if you don’t entirely understand the definition. Try to infer the meaning by reading the examples in bold at the bottom of each fallacy.
Even very intelligent people are not immune from logical contradictions, so don’t be disheartened if you begin to recognize you’ve got some bad habits.
And whatever you do, if you notice someone else committing these fallacies, keep it to yourself. Too many people learn basic epistemology (study of knowledge itself) and think they’re capable of debating others by dismantling the other persons arguments by citing their fallacies. This is… (say it with me)… really dumb!
Do you think that there is like an opposite to the Dunning/Kruger effect were really smart people think of them selves as dumber than they really are
Absolutely, though I wouldn’t say it’s an opposite Dunning/Kruger, just that smart people are further along the x-axis.
Having the knowledge to understand how much you don’t know is both a blessing and a curse.
The curse: It is hard to project a true sense of authority, because to yourself, you do not believe you’re competent enough.
The blessing: humility. You understand that everyone fits on the graph somewhere.
I’ve tended to score suspiciously high on most aptitude/iq type tests my entire life (70s kid, among the earliest ADD diagnoses, etc) and tbh i think I am quite a lot dumber than those tests imply.
Show of hands all y’all “talented and gifted” kids that never did nuthin …
*edit: to be clear, I don’t think ‘raw intelligence’ or anything similar necessarily confers a lot of life benefits. It can, but doesn’t always or maybe even most of the time.
There is the impostor syndrome.
This resource is also very helpful.
It explores biases which virtually everyone holds, and might be easier to understand than the other link.
No more questions but this was fascinating and you seem like a super cool person with a lot of depth. Thanks for being vulnerable here
Thank you and you do too
Do you notice your low IQ in daily life? Like, when grocery shopping or when just being at home, being with a partner, or doing chores?
Yeah, I use my card more because I suck at maths and I need to use my voice to text feature on my phone to write things down. My memory isn’t that good and I get overwhelmed by information easily
Do you want to be friends? 🪻
Well that came out of no where. Sure but why did you ask?
Great! What’s your favorite food?
Pepperoni pizza with cheese crust
That’s a really good favorite food. Have you tried it with extra cheese?
Beware, maybe they’re being friendly, but I could also imagine people trying to take advantage of you here, knowing that you have a low IQ - a lot of scams revolve around overwhelming people with numbers. So if you receive messages like “hey, if you invest 500$ with me, I can turn them into 1000$” here, block them.
I guess you already know that, though 🥲 you seem very sympathetic. Do you feel like you have good social intelligence? That you can feel what people mean, also when they’re not saying things directly? Do you have an easy time making friends, and being social with people?
I took it more as: they were making a joke about the feeling of lower intelligence being relatable.
*Reads post “Heh, yeah im dumb too”
Kinda thing
I understand what your saying you got to be careful out there.
“That you can feel what people mean, also when they’re not saying things directly?”
With enough practice. I know what people mean when they say things like they wanna “hang out” or “roll with someone”
“Do you feel like you have good social intelligence?”
Yeah, I make friends easily and I’m good in social interactions.
Did you feel or believe that you might have a below average IQ before you took the assessment ?
I did my first IQ test when I was 14 and I did don’t expect the results
What do you do for work? What level of education have you completed? Were the results a surprise? And most importantly, has it affected your self-esteem at all, or do you know how little an IQ test actually means? (As an example, I’ve taken a few for fun and got about double your score each time, but I haven’t finished college and was a B- student at best).
“What do you do for work?”
I’m a burger flipper at Burger King.
“What level of education have you completed?”
I was a super senior at high school graduating at age 20 and I never went to university or college although I would like to.
“Were the results a surprise?”
Yes they were.
“And most importantly, has it affected your self-esteem at all”
I’m not capable of low self esteem. It’s more like I feel shame and anger for it.
“or do you know how little an IQ test actually means?”
I hate people saying this. It’s like if you were blind and everyone who could see told you that vision doesn’t mean anything. I have seen first hand how IQ affects you. I remember how different I was to the other kids in my school. The way they could just learn things I couldn’t. I’ve experienced how my IQ has singled me out from everyone else. Do you know what it’s like to come to terms with the fact that no matter how hard you try you’ll always be slower then everyone else? Do you know what it’s like to come to terms with the fact that you’ll never be a nurse, programmer or go to university/college no matter how hard you try? Do you know what it’s like to come to terms with the fact that you’ll never develop over the mental age of a teenager? No, you won’t so fuck off with this corny bullshit about trying your hardest. Real life is not some cheesy sports movie where you really put your mind to something and overcome all the odds. That doesn’t happen in the real world. Kid.
Even if the IQ tests you took were accurate (probably weren’t), they test a very specific type of problem solving intelligence. That type of intelligence may be required for abstract reasoning like physics and maths, but it’s not necessary for being a successful human.
There are many other types of intelligence that are not tested for in that test. Other types of intelligence that can have a much bigger impact on one’s success.
One example is physical or spatial intelligence. My brother for example is just good with his hands, taking things apart, putting them back together. He’s a mechanic now, but this trait was apparent before he could talk - he used a screwdriver to take apart a chair, and he would pull out drawers to use them as a ladder to get up on the kitchen counter.
Another type of intelligence is social or emotional intelligence. Some very high IQ individuals would test very very low if this one had a test. But this can have a bigger impact on your relationships, on your life, and even on your career than the IQ type of intelligence.
Artistic and creative intelligence, athletic intelligence. There are many other kinds. Some people are really good at gardening or farming.
You can read and write, which would make you a genius scholar a few hundred years ago. Don’t worry about a number on a test. Just like your grades in school they don’t matter. It absolutely does not indicate that you won’t mature or that you’re inferior to anybody.
It’s like if you were blind and everyone who could see told you that vision doesn’t mean anything.
It’s more like if you were blind, tested your running speed, performed poorly, attribute all your problems to being a bad runner, then everyone tells you that running speed doesn’t mean anything.
I acknowledge that there’s things that are more difficult for you and that negatively affects your quality of life, but it doesn’t sound like those problems are the same ones that IQ tests are measuring. If you care to work on improving your situation, it’s important to know what the actual problems are before you can even start trying to address them.
Thank you for your works. I do have other problems in my life I’ve never denied that.
I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m autistic and much older than you, so yeah, I do actually know what it’s like to have to come to terms with my own limitations. I know exactly what you mean about being angry and ashamed of those limitations. Every time I fail to extract myself from a situation and have a meltdown, screaming and hitting myself in the head - sometimes in public - and having to face that, what everyone saw, once I’m calm and quiet and lucid again. Every time I look gullible because I fall for some obvious bullshit (satire or parody news, for example). Knowing I could be more if I could just understand people, and get them to understand me.
That’s what I mean when I say IQ tests don’t really mean anything, they measure just a few aspects of intelligence and it doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about a whole person. My partner has been told by people she thought were friends that she’s dumb and she doesn’t bring anything to the table, and it destroyed her self esteem, but it was absolutely not true or fair and I’ve spent years undoing that damage. I was hoping you don’t suffer that too, that’s all.
I didn’t once say anything about trying your hardest, but if you really want to expand that last half of my last question into a whole point, then it should be this: you are perfectly capable of living a good life, being happy, and making others happy, regardless of a score on a test.
That’s what I mean when I say IQ tests don’t really mean anything, they measure just a few aspects of intelligence and it doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about a whole person
Are parts of someone’s intelligence not a meaningful part of them? And I don’t mean in the “other people should judge them for it” sense, just, in general it seems like a pretty notable piece of you.
Are parts of someone’s intelligence not a meaningful part of them?
As meaningful as any other fraction of a part of a person by itself, and no - it’s not as notable as most people would like make out.
- Are just a few aspects of someone’s intellect (working memory and speed/accuracy in information processing) the whole of who they are as a person?
- Are the only valuable parts of a person those aspects of intelligence a given IQ test is designed to measure?
- Is it impossible to live a good and fulfilling life, if you score poorly on such a test?
If you answer those questions “No”, then you get it. For myself and my own experience, I find plenty of joy and meaning in my life despite my deficiencies; whether I can remember a factoid instead of having to look it up, or whether I can calculate a percentage tip in my head vs using a calculator, hasn’t impacted that at all.
Right on - are there any jobs you’d rather be doing? I’ve been thinking of retraining to become an animal handler, lately 😆 I think you might be able to do that with a low IQ! Maybe that’s more satisfying than flipping burgers… Though I got a craving for a whopper now.
Who knows I may be serving you burgers on the week days. I would love to become a nurse or maybe a game developer.
Have you given any thought to entering politics?
No
You really should
Definitely. We need some smarter people in office.
How did you manage to win Georgia’s 14th Congressional district??
I see this is a big at some politician you don’t like. Pretty funny
Marjorie Taylor Greene, in case anybody was wondering.
Do you read any books/novels?
If you do, Which ones? How’s the reading experience for you?
I don’t read books that often. I find reading hard and there hard to follow.
Have you given audiobooks a try? You can also start with books with simple words, slowly understand it over the weeks with a dictionary by the side maybe.
Some books are fun! Try them if you can, at your own pace :)
It’s never really crossed my mind and yes I went to school I did read books with simple words in them but the problem is I never slowly understood them and a dictionary is the pinnacle of a book I can’t read.
Know some books can be fun like coffee table books.
You write extremely well though, so it must have stuck.
It took a lot of practice and the help of modern technology.
What is your perception of the world? Like does it seem complex?
Well, there’s a countless amount of people on the earth so of course its complex
I mean what’s your perception on how your world?
That’s a very broad question. Do you mean? Do you mean politically? Religiously? If you want to know my politics when I’m a left leaning centrist
I’m intentionally trying to keep it broad so that you can answer whatever part is the most relevant to you.
Ok you did a good job there
A gentle reminder that about half the population has their IQ below the average (“about” because average≠median, yes, nerds, I know)
Having it below 100 is nothing to worry about, just like having anything below average is.
average≠median
Intelligence is thought to have a normal distribution, in which case the mean, median, and mode are all equal.
Also “average” can technically refer to any measure of central tendency.
Okay, you successfully outnerded me :D
I found this thing earlier that says that the average IQ in America (where I’m from) is 98.
https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/average-iq-in-usa-1710768833-1
Thank you for this AMA it is very interesting to get your viewpoint.
I have many questions, feel free not to answer them if you don’t like them.
When have you discovered that you are different? What happened? Why did you take IQ tests?
Can you share story about something that is different between you and average people?
Is your memory worse or just the thinking process?
Do you have any idea why your IQ is so low? Is it just coincidence or something happened while you were young?
How can I recognize that someone has low IQ? How should I act when I meet someone with low IQ, should I use simpler sentences or simpler ideas?
Thank you.
“When have you discovered that you are different? What happened? Why did you take IQ tests?”
I was always slower then other kids my age. When I was 14 I was made to do an IQ test by the teachers in my school when I discovered my IQ at the time was 73.
“Can you share story about something that is different between you and average people?”
There’s plenty. When I was 18 somebody asked me how to spell something and I just couldn’t spell it and I broke down in tears. It was pretty embarrassing.
“Is your memory worse or just the thinking process?”
I think it’s both. My memory isn’t very good and my thinking process is very limited.
“Do you have any idea why your IQ is so low? Is it just coincidence or something happened while you were young?”
I think my mom drank while she was pregnant. Which explains why I’m different then my brothers and sisters. I don’t know if that’s true though maybe I just lost the genetic lottery.
“How can I recognize that someone has low IQ? How should I act when I meet someone with low IQ, should I use simpler sentences or simpler ideas?”
Not really, IQ isn’t immediately obvious like other disabilities and if you meet someone with low IQ just speak and treat them like there anyone else.
… treat them like they’re anyone else.
FTFY
Is this a meme? Context, man…
Your responses suggest a higher score in language, is your 73 the average of all the test areas? Such as math, etc.
Thank you for sharing your story, it must be a difficult life. Life is hard with 120, I barely make it, I can not even imagine your case especially together with NPD.
I have seen your other AMA about NPD, and I can understand “trauma”. I “only” had really bad decades long depression and anxiety and have found way out of it with good therapy (which is rare).
Good luck to you, I hope you will have some luck further on.
Thank you for your understanding. I don’t think all mental illness’s are caused by trauma. I don’t know where my NPD or HPD came from. I really wish I could be like everyone else. I feel like I’m being sabotaged from within.
How is your memory or recall? Do you feel like you to write stuff down a lot?
It takes me a long time to get used to patterns. If I don’t completely focus on one thing I forget about it. I get information mixed up easily and I forgot the little details about things. Sometimes I forget what I’m doing all together and I get overwhelmed easily.
Luckily I use my phone a lot to write things down which helps and if I don’t do that I just write things down on my body.
what kind of iq test did you take? was it recent and have you only taken the one?
“kind”? Isn’t it just one IQ test that everyone takes? It was 5 years ago when I was 19. I did another one when I was 14 and I scored 73 on that one.
There’s a bunch of different ways to test IQ, and most if not all tests are known to be pretty flawed. The concept of intelligence being something that can be compared on a single numeric scale is in itself pretty much bullshit - there are different types of intelligence, and the tests tend to focus on random things like pattern matching.
A bunch of “high IQ” people are barely functional on a day to day basis. Basically low scores on an IQ test indicates that you lack the skills to do that exact test - I wouldn’t read too much into it.
Edit: Read another comment where you elaborate and don’t want to come across as dismissing your experience at all, I can see that it’s frustrating when people keep insisting it doesn’t matter. But having completed my PhD and having met a lot of people that would do incredibly well in IQ tests, I can safely say many of them too face significant challenges in lives deriving from their lack of situational awareness and understanding of for example social situations.
If it isn’t intelligence and what is it then? It’s undeniable that some people are better mentally than others. Like obviously someone with down syndrome is going to have less knowledge then someone without down syndrome. Right?
Not necessarily.
IQ tries to measure intelligence on one dimension, which is usually pattern matching. In reality a bunch of different things go into what we consider intelligence. Social intelligence and emotional intelligence are two big ones, that are often completely unrelated to pattern matching. But even within what one would consider “book smart” there’s a bunch of variation - someone could be incredibly smart in some ways and unbelievably dumb in others.
I think the variation within the chess elite is a good example. They are all intelligent in a way that would rank them favourably in IQ tests. Some of them are also brilliant people, but others buy into propaganda or conspiracy theories, some of them may be sexist and backwards, and some of them it’s almost a wonder they know how to breathe.
Another example is practical vs theoretical skills. A lot of theoretically intelligent people would be completely helpless in practical tasks like building something or fxing a broken machine.
There’s something particularly weird about watching academics deal with practical problems. Their stupidity can be unbelievable.
I think a lot of people with downs syndrome can have pretty high emotional intelligence for example, where they can empathize and relate to the feelings of other people.
Not to discount your struggles or anything, but…just so you know…IQ tests are biased against neurodivergent people. I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Level 1) last summer, and one of the tests in the battery they administered to me was an IQ test (WAIS).
About a month after the tests, I went back to get my results. The doctor went into lots of details, but a couple thay stood out were that I had autism and that they clocked my IQ at about 124. The IQ score shocked me as I was a member of American Mensa after scoring well into the 99th percentile on both of their intelligence tests. The doctor clarified that I shouldn’t hold any stock in IQ tests as an autistic person because they aren’t well designed for neurodivergent people since our strengths aren’t usually as balanced as they are for neurotypical people.
I thought I’d mention this since you have ADHD!
I like to think that actually I’m a super genius who actually has a IQ of 240 or something.
what’s your source of news?
how do you know what to trust in life generally?
“what’s your source of news?”
The internet
“how do you know what to trust in life generally?”
Wait a little bit to see if it gets debunked.
Wait a little bit to see if it gets debunked.
Honestly a pretty smart strategy. Wiser than most.
thanks for the reply
What else was I going to do
it had been almost a day since you started the AMA so i thought i missed the boat
Just because the thread is a day old doesn’t mean I logged out of my account
