site banner

Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

But...are you sure you're in the top 1%?

Top 1% is good, but it's something you see all the time.

If you imagine a typical 100 people in whatever school you went to, take a random 100, and on average, one of them is in the top 1%. That's over 3 million people in the US!

I expect a website that filters for willingness to write longform text might easily get to the point where top 1% IQ is far more commonly represented than among the general population. I'd also expect people with the username "@lagrangian" to have higher IQ.

That said, I'm slightly less willing to trust the 145 IQ, though it's still very possible. Looking it up, 0.1% of people are at 145 or higher. But I don't know how lagrangian evaluated his own, as I wouldn't trust random internet IQ tests, especially on the tails.

It's also worth keeping in mind that each unit of IQ might not be the same (whatever that means), as it's just forced into a bell curve.