Answered on Quora.
Most of the discussions below except the last paragraph refer to people I have met on the Internet. As I note below, in real life almost no one talks about this subject, and it is considered a social violation to even bring it up in the first place, ever. I mean even once.
There is a problem with the phrasing of the question. People who hate discussions of IQ refer to anyone who talks about the subject at all as being “obsessed” with it. To them, the only way not to be obsessed with IQ is to never discuss it at all. These people dislike discussions about IQ, generally because they think their own is too.
They also exaggerate the number of people “obsessed” with IQ in real life. According to them, there are all these countless people in real life who go around talking about IQ all the time. In real life, you almost never meet anyone who will speak one sentence about this taboo subject.
The only person I knew who would talk about it at all in real life was a White Nationalist or White Supremacist. He was a very racist person and he liked to discuss how Blacks and Hispanics have lower average IQ’s than Whites. Obviously this conversation simply flowed from his virulent racism.
I would say above 125. In my experience, below 125 IQ, people simply do not want to discuss IQ. In general, they think there’s is too low. This does not make much sense because people with IQ’s in this range are in the top 7% of the population. They are smarter than 93% of the country. And they think their IQ is low!
Below 100, most people don’t even know their scores. Really, people don’t even appreciate intelligence much below 120 IQ. I have even met people with 121 IQ’s who derided IQ tests, said they only tested book knowledge, said they were not important, and said they did not really test intelligence. This is odd because a 121 IQ is in the top 9% of the range.
They don’t think it’s important. Peoples of 90–110 are often not very impressed by smart people. For the most part, they don’t even think intelligence is important in life, and they resent conversations about it, probably because there’s is too low. You hardly ever meet someone with an IQ below 100 who even knows their score.
The people I met with IQ’s of 94–97 were resentful of the subject, thought the test was wrong and wanted to take it again, and definitely did not want to talk about IQ. However, those are average IQ’s. What’s wrong with having average intelligence? I mean most people in society have average IQ’s. What’s wrong with being average? Americans have an obsession with being above average. Everyone has to be above average to be worthy of anything. We can’t all be above average!
Nations with 94–97 average IQ’s tend to do quite well.
And the man I knew with the 94 IQ was quite intelligent. Further, I could converse well with him, even though his IQ was almost 4 Standard deviations above his. However, he had read many books and exercised his brain a lot. If you do that, you can raise your crystallized IQ by quite a bit. The man with the 97 IQ was very intelligent. He also was self-educated as he didn’t go to college. In fact, it would be hard to say I was smarter than he was even though my IQ 3.6 SD’s above his! He had a learning disability and this may have effected his score on the test. Like the man above, he had been stuffing his brain with knowledge for decades, and your crystallized IQ can rise quite a bit if you do that.
It’s interesting that the higher someone’s IQ is, the more impressed they are by an intelligent or very highly intelligent person.
Looking at the IQ bloggers or the bloggers who write quite a bit about IQ, their IQ scores are between 130–145. So it looks like to have a strong interest in the subject, you need over 130 IQ. Below that, you are just not going to get very interested in IQ. Most IQ bloggers are not very nice people, but a few of them are quite warm. It’s rather common that people on the Net obsessed with IQ are petty, mean, nasty, arrogant, and generally unpleasant.
I don’t know anyone in real life who talks about IQ at all. The only people who talk about the subject at all are on the Net. In real life, it’s not something anyone wants to talk about, as it is a faux pas and violation of social rules to discuss this subject at all with much of anyone in our society.
Sometimes there are discussions in the family about with parents and their children, but in the ones I have known, the parents were 130–150 IQ, and the kids were 140–150 IQ.
I have been in relationships where IQ was often discussed with my girlfriend, but we both had IQ’s of ~140–150. Most women I date do not with to discuss the subject, are resentful of it, and think it’s not important.
As I said earlier, only the smartest people are even interested in this subject at all.
