Rahul: The 115-125 range is great for people who are socially adept. ADHD folks are fucked in this range- people around you seem like goddamn idiots, while the extremely smart folk make you feel incredibly dumb. Nevertheless, you are still in the “brainy” club (pretty much anyone with a nonverbal or verbal IQ of 115 or higher is in the brainy club, Full scale doesn’t matter as much as specifics).
Oh yes. 115-125 IQ people definitely strike me as intelligent.
With a 115 IQ, you can absolutely get a BA with no problems at all, and you also should be able to pull off a Master’s, though you might have to work a bit. 115-120 and you could pull off a nursing degree pretty easily.
With a 120 IQ, you can definitely go to medical school easily, with a 120-125 IQ, you can go to law school no problem, and at 125 IQ, you should be able to pull off a PhD with the normal effort it takes to get one.
So in this range you have pretty much the whole world opened up to you. I believe that IQ follows income to IQ 125 and then starts to drop off as people start getting weirder as IQ progressively rises. A lot of 115-125 IQ are extroverted, and even the introverts are often pretty healthy. They’re not at the point where your IQ starts making you weird and out there. They often have great people skills and winning personalities, which is easily as important as IQ when getting the degrees and working in the fields above.
People at that range are pretty much on my level too. They understand most things I say and can follow along with just about any arguments I make, are capable of good abstract thinking, and often have an interesting sense of humor. A lot of them make a lot of clever little comments and can have a great clever sense of humor.
Some 115 IQ people I have to explain things to a lot, but it’s ok. I sort of end up being like the university lecturer and they are one of my students. Once I explain something they usually pick it right up. I don’t like it when I explain something and people still don’t get it though. That just goes nowhere. Also they are capable of decent intellectual conversation about fairly high level things, the sort of things I like to talk about.
I can sometimes see a difference between a lot of 115 IQ people and some 120 IQ people. The 120 IQ people slide effortlessly through abstract thinking, make excellent connections between things, and often have a knack for figuring out the essential principle beneath something and can sum it up in a nice paragraph or even a sentence. Tulio on this site is a great example of a 120 IQ person.
125 IQ people are even more impressive, and a lot of them are rather dazzling. Shi is a great example of a 125 IQ person, and he has a fancy brain indeed. Around 125 IQ, you start getting into your true intellectuals who often have interest in high level and classical literature and sometimes even subjects like philosophy.
The ratio of the score is very important. One of my brightest commenters has an IQ of 115, but he is not good at math at all. His verbal IQ may be ~135, and boy does it show. His comments approach near-genius level. When he’s commenting on my site, he’s not using his rather average math skills. Instead we are looking at a 135 IQ person in a sense but all we see in the comments is the verbal IQ. This is why the sub breakdown of the scores is so important.
The problem with ~100 IQ folks is not that they can’t understand what I am talking about but more that they can’t see why the stuff I am talking about is interesting in any way. They’re sort of baffled by my interests. For instance, I met a woman from another state the other day and the conversation ended up going into geography of where she was in her state, where the surrounding states were in connection to where she lived, the shapes of the other states, places where three states came together.
Apparently she got totally bored with this conversation real fast and further she couldn’t figure out why I would what she considered to be stupid nonsense so interesting. She was like, “Who cares about this stuff!?” So I dropped the subject. But I run into this all the time.
I usually drop out once I figure out they have no interest in whatever I am going on about, but often there’s nothing to talk about with these people but what I call boring stuff. And they have no interest at all in what I am talking about, which their attitude is, “Why the Hell would anybody be interested in that?!” I even get that from really smart people, especially women, even some with gifted or even genius IQ’s. Their attitude is, “Why the Hell would you find this stuff interesting at all? I don’t get it.”
It’s like the stuff I am interested in and what to talk about, most people have no interest in at all, and they can’t understand why anyone would find something like that interesting at all.
