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OK, so 100 is the average intelligence. Without really thinking about it, one kind of assumes that average is... well, you know - meh, average. Not smart, not stupid, just... average. But actually, has anyone done any studies to really get a handle on just what average intelligence amounts to? (Other than answering IQ tests...) 'cos I think it's probably pretty damned stupid.
I'm asking this in all seriousness - not trying to have a rant. What is average intelligence - just how smart (or dumb) is someone with an IQ of 100?
For example - how would such people fare in:
applications to an average university
a course to become an airline pilot
learning to program in C#
studying law
running for public office (ha ha just joking with that one!)
..this sort of thing...
[edit] just to be clear: I am not looking for a scientifically rigorous answer - the question doesn't have one, I know that. Just.. as the title says: how smart is average?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
modified 6-May-16 15:14pm.
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Someone once said I was below average. I though he was being mean, but it was just his default mode.
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That will go over some heads.
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Intelligence is impossible to measure.
So, just stop there.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Well, I realise that - it's also multi-dimensional/faceted... I'm not really after a definitive scientific answer....
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Wombaticus wrote: - it's also multi-dimensional/faceted
To the point of being unanswerable in my opinion.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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What's the purpose then Mr. Smarty Pants?
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Back in my college days I ended up taking a whole bunch of different IQ tests and got the same, normalized, score on all of them! I kept getting 139 which, while it pleased me to be above the 100 average, it also annoyed me in that they told me that a score of 140 or above is "genius" level and I couldn't quite make it! A friend cheered me up by having a T-shirt printed for me with "One point short of a Genius" on it. However, although she meant well, the word "Genius" was spelled "Genuis" which rather spoiled the effect! 
I recently did an on-line IQ test and scored 144 so my incredible age must have counted for something!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Meh, I've taken plenty of IQ tests, both official and online... They all put me in the 185-200 range...
Except when I was really bored and decided to join Mensa... I took their admission test (Didn't have any of the paperwork from the few of those IQ tests that were "official"), and missed qualifying by one point.
(In my defense, their "Which of these things is not like the other?" questions were really "Which of the several obvious answers to this is the one we decided is correct?", and I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years)
So to summarize, I'm pretty sure all intelligence testing is complete crap... And to summarize the summary of the summary, as DNA said, people are the problem.
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I was invited to join Mensa when I was working in London. I went to one of the monthly social get-togethers. I didn't know what to expect but it turned out to be a p*ssing competition as to who got the highest score for entry. Also, I found out that the Mensa "IQ" score is 20% higher than most others. In other words if an IQ test says a person has an IQ of 150, the same person should obtain a score of 180 using the Mensa test. Considering the social skills, or lack thereof, of the people at the meeting, I declined the invitation and the test.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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The same is true of online IQ tests, they score people artificially high in order to encourage people to brag and have their friends take it, because of course it's about making money with them clicks. Same with Mensa, they score people high because, well, they want more paying members don't they? And as you found, it's all about bragging rights (and by extension, insecurity).
If you want an accurate IQ test you have to go to a psychologist. And even then, if you want it to be truly accurate you need to take it as a child.
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Not on a professionally supervised Stanford-Binet or Weschler you didn't.
Just because a thing (on-line thing, yes?) says "IQ Test" don't mean didley-squat.
A couple points:
(a) Professionally valid IQ tests are increasingly unreliable above 150. But getting a score over 150 means that you are really, really smart.
(b) The IQ scores you boast of above are higher than Gary Kasparov, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. Anyone scoring that high will cause a local ripple and people would want to talk to you, and re-test you (the "unreliabilty" thing)
So, to summarize, I think I will discount your opinion of IQ testing, because it seems pretty obvious that you have never (other than Mensa) been "properly" tested.
Good to know that you are on the A-Ark 
(at least, they told you it was the A-Ark, right? But the guys who told you it was the A-Ark, they aren't on board are they?)
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Robert g Blair wrote: Not on a professionally supervised Stanford-Binet or Weschler you didn't.
I don't know them by name, but there was definitely one "professionally supervised" one ~30 years ago... And without going into detail (Real name, public forum, etc), there were significant effects. Life-changing, even.
Robert g Blair wrote: The IQ scores you boast of above are higher than Gary Kasparov, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.
Which is exactly why I think the entire concept is garbage. Either I have as much potential as them, and just haven't been motivated to reach it, or the measurement itself is flawed. I would assume the latter.
Robert g Blair wrote: Good to know that you are on the A-Ark
(at least, they told you it was the A-Ark, right? But the guys who told you it was the A-Ark, they aren't on board are they?)
Pfft, there IS no A-Ark... That's just what we told those fools on the B-Ark... Hold on, my telephone is ringing... Someone should really clean this thing... 
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Sure Ian.
Can I just get this straight:
You scored 185 or 200 on a professionally supervised IQ test.
But you failed a Mensa test (passing grade = 132).
Because "Quote: Which of these things is not like the other?" questions were really "Which of the several obvious answers to this is the one we decided is correct?", and I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years
To people who are familiar with IQ testing Ian, those excuses are quite funny. Both of them reveal an inability to understand the concepts.
False negatives, ie, scoring lower than you can, (deliberate, language problems, illness etc) are quite possible on those tests. It happens sometimes.
False positives, ie, scoring higher than you should, has only ever been achieved by cheating. And usually requires collusion with the test proctor.
EDIT:
Just thinking about my own experience, I have toned this post down a bit.
It is quite possible you tested low at Mensa because of illness, or after-effects of something (I don't want to say drugs or anything).
I had the experience, for several years, of being "dumb" - due to illness.
When I look back at the (not so good) code I wrote back then I can remember how "hard" everything seemed to be.
Still, I did manage to complete a couple projects in a reasonable manner. So maybe "average" people can cut code ...
modified 11-May-16 20:21pm.
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Robert g Blair wrote: To people who are familiar with IQ testing Ian, those excuses are quite funny. Both of them reveal an inability to understand the concepts.
An inability to understand the concepts... When they show five line drawings, ask the old "Which of these things is not like the other", and there are several things that exactly four of them have in common, it becomes a game of "Read the test designer's mind".
As for the long division... My own fault, I suppose... Too much time relying on computers and calculators, so I had to re-teach myself the basics.
Robert g Blair wrote: False negatives, ie, scoring lower than you can, (deliberate, language problems, illness etc) are quite possible on those tests. It happens sometimes.
I was getting over a cold at the time, but I wouldn't use that as an excuse... If I felt too sick to take the test, I would have postponed it.
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I did an IQ test once and it gave me a score of 136. I'm also a member of Mensa, if it helps you in anayway!!
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OMG, THIS really made me laugh. Thanks. And this was meant to be a reply to Forogar's post.
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"Think of how smart the average person is. Now realize that half of them are dumber than that."
-- St. George (Carlin)
(Yes, I know that's technically the median, not the average, but the average idiot doesn't know what a median is)
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And (subject to your caveat) half are also smarter....
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Technically, the "average" intelligence is not the midpoint. So half of people are not necessarily smarter or dumber than the average. To get that grouping, you use the median, or middle value, which is defined, statistically, as the value that separates the highest half from the lowest.
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It is true, statistically speaking, that the median, rather than the mean, is the value of a continuous property which divides a population into two groups of the same size, one above, and one below. It is also true, however, that, for properties which are (statistically) normally distributed within a population, the median will be equal to the mean. Intelligence (or, at least, I.Q.) is normally distributed within the human population, so it is valid to assume that the median is equal to the mean.
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There is very little in our world that cannot be done, to some degree or another, by people with an IQ of only 100, so they would be able to do all of your examples. Your score on an IQ test doesn't make you good at something, it merely means you score well on IQ tests. What you do with your intelligence is the thing that matters.
Put another way, scoring high on IQ tests isn't a very marketable skill
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Perhaps I shouldn't have brought up IQ tests, as we all know they're pretty arbitrary and useless... what I'm after getting a handle on is just how smart is the average human being? Or, as I titled the post: how smart is average?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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What are smarts good for, actually? Near as I can tell, they help you grasp situations faster, and to see more deeply into them. The problem is, that training and experience make a bigger difference. A really smart person may be able to perform better than most people on a larger variety of tasks, but they will be unlikely to perform better than an experience average person on a given task.
So maybe that's the answer you're looking for -- smarter people can perform adequately on a larger variety of tasks.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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It would be smart to think about what sort of answer you can expect to that question, and why you would or wouldn't accept the answer as factual. For instance, if I made some claim about the ability of people with 100 IQs to program in C#, how could I possibly prove it, and why would you choose to believe it ... other than being predisposed to doing so.
BTW, the people making claims about Mensa and its tests are lying. The person claiming to score 185-200 on "official" tests has never done any such thing if he failed to qualify on a Mensa test, which has a much lower standard (132). Mensa test scores are most certainly are not inflated by 20% ... Mensa administers standardized Stanford-Binet and Weschler tests, using trained proctors, but also accepts proper documentation of results on other tests.
The "Which of these things is not like the other?" questions do not have arbitrary answers ... that is a common excuse of people who fail, but there is an objectively right answer, with an explanation that most people accept when it is pointed out to them. And really, "I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years"? There's no division on these tests that even a halfwit can't do in their heads, and even if there were such problems, manual multiplication and division are trivial rote procedures that high IQ brains don't forget. People with 200 IQs can visualize in multiple dimensions; they don't struggle with arithmetic. If this person scored 200 on "official" tests, how did he manage that with such poor skills, and why did he do so much worse on a test that purportedly has scores inflated by 20%? These are the sorts of obvious questions that people with average IQs don't bother to ask.
And no one in Mensa ever talks about their test scores, in part because they're smart enough to realize that they are likely to end up on the wrong end of the comparison. The chatter about bragging rights and Mensa wanting your money is sour grapes and largely downright stupid ... if Mensa were inflating scores in order to get more members to make more money, they would do away with the entry requirements altogether. And again, Mensa uses standardized proctored tests, the same ones used by psychologists. No, sorry, this is just the common phenomenon of random not terribly bright people lying on the internet.
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