Gyroscopic Investing

I hadn't ever heard of this, but apparently back around 2000 a man took a test and was rejected from the police force for having too high an IQ.  He filed an appeal and lost...twice.  So many things make sense now....

Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Most Cops Just Above Normal The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barr ... Yc6D8o24pr

Still above average, though.
The last line in that article is baffling!

I love this story.  I remember reading about it a year or two ago.

Think of the challenges involved in doing a test preparation course for this exam.

Does below average IQ actually exist in reality as a bell curve?  I'm skeptical.

MachineGhost wrote: Does below average IQ actually exist in reality as a bell curve?  I'm skeptical.

Of course it does.  Anything that can be measured over time or across multiple samples has an average.

What I meant was I'm skeptical the bell curve is symmetrical to the left of the average IQ as to the right.  Do we really have as many people to the left as to the right?  It just doesn't seem to vibe with reality.  It cannot be a Gaussian distribution.  I think there is more likely to be a massive concentration around the middle that cliff dives off just slightly to the left of 100 IQ, but only gradually declines to the right of 100 IQ.

In other words, people below 100 IQ are mentally challenged and I don't see that we have a massive population of them (autistic? disabled?) symetrically equivalent in numbers to those with above average and genius IQ's.  Stupidity is not the same thing as low IQ.  I have an above average IQ, yet I'm stupid at times as anyone can tell from my posts.

I feel like I'm turning into a doodle.  Time for a break from the forum!

Who said that 100 was an average IQ?  The average IQ is whatever it is.  I guess we'll never know since you can't give everyone in the world an IQ test, and there are known socio-economic flaws in IQ tests. 

rocketdog wrote: Who said that 100 was an average IQ?  The average IQ is whatever it is.  I guess we'll never know since you can't give everyone in the world an IQ test, and there are known socio-economic flaws in IQ tests.

IQ tests are normalized so that within any tested population the average score is 100 with a standard deviation of 15 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient) - this pretty much means the average IQ is 100 by definition.  Note I'm not saying if you gave a particular test to everyone in the world and used its current scoring metric the average would be 100 - but that if you gave a test to everyone in the world the scoring metric would be adjusted to make sure the average is 100.