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I guess we're in pretty deep, but the original framing was this: a user said any intelligence differences were minor and also hard to tell, another user posts a study claiming basically that we could actually tell, and the OG user said yes that's still a minor difference, I can't tell 100 vs 115. Third user chimes in and says ok, 85 to 100 is the actual difference which implies in context that this 15 point gap is not minor and/or is obvious in casual conversation. At that point I respond about how 115 to 100 != 100 to 85 and that IQ is a stupid measure, which spawned a few subthreads.
Perhaps I conflated a few users or responded to the wrong argument, in retrospect (at that juncture), which maybe contributed to some unwieldy downthread organization. I apologize if my digression the last two replies wasn't strictly relevant, but it does bear mentioning with respect to my overall point. The whole conversation, I was trying to point out, is a stupid one. IQ has poisoned the debate. People want IQ to represent intelligence but it doesn't do so in a very rigorous way, and asymmetry is one of those ways. There are numerous methodological problems as well as fundamental interpretability problems. In a strict sense, sure, we were originally only comparing 100 to 85 and trying to consider it in context. That's kind of fine. The original wikipedia article (about the adoption study) does mention grappling with some but not all of these problems, and only methodologically. And actually, if you look carefully at the article, the parents were selected precisely because of having an IQ of 115 or higher. Maybe it's not a perfect point, but I want to point out that these misconceptions clearly pop up in many places including study design! And this study design did, in fact, have a number of significant issues, despite on its face being a perfect poster child experiment, for example as discussed here.
Inasmuch as we're more narrowly talking about casual conversation, sure, maybe the "test" of "can casual conversation detect someone 85 IQ or below" is perfectly valid and usable as a test (i.e. detecting if someone is sitting somewhere within the binned bottom 16ish percent of IQ scores, on that particular test), though maybe I've misconstructed the test: Is it instead "can you detect the difference between a 100 and 85 IQ" or "can you detect an 80-90 IQ from a 110-120 IQ person in casual conversation" or "can you identify someone's IQ within 15 points in casual conversation, provided they are not over 100" or and many, many other variations... Some might sound similar but from a math perspective might have drastically different actual implications, and even more problems crop up the second we try to equate specific IQ test scores as intelligence directly.
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