by Lucius Trae

Created on: May 11, 2010

I love seeing people react to studies like this. It shows how unscientific the majority of the population is in their approach to new information. Obviously, IQ studies have plenty of flaws, but there is nothing to indicate bias in favor of non-sexually active people in IQ testing.

Contrastingly, there are cases to be made for biases against minorities in some cases. Of course, that's only the majority opinion in the field. There are some who believe the testing is completely unbiased (not me, personally).

Science continually shows us that humans are bad at probability. If I say "most people who are intelligent don't do drugs," people will get upset. I don't know if that's true, but we can assume it is for these purposes.

Someone will immediately say "I know X, Y, and Z who do drugs and are extremely intelligent. Of course you do! The odds are most people will know someone who violates the rule, which is why it says "most" will not do drugs.

The study is saying "most" people with higher IQs are less likely to be sexually active. So the fact that you lost your virginity at a young age doesn't mean your less intelligent than your virgin peers. People get offended and assume the study is calling them less intelligent. It's not, but a future study might do so. If we perfected intelligence monitoring with brain scans or something of that nature, people would surpass most of us.

I know a lot of people are more intelligent than I am. It's just outright arrogant to criticize science on the basis that it produces results that make you feel bad. You shouldn't be judging your self-worth relative to other people anyway. It doesn't set the bar high.

Now why is this study legitimate? Well, the first part is the data collection had a fairly acceptable methodology. A larger sample size with more variation would be useful, but scientists have budgets like anyone else. The obvious answer is that students with higher IQs are studying.

However, people who have higher or lower IQs have difficulty relating to their peers more frequently than those closer to the average. Again, it doesn't mean all intelligent people are socially awkward.

If you look through history, you'll see an interesting pattern. Geniuses often married one another, and the most intelligent people in history seemed to know one another far more than random chance would predict.

Intelligent people generally don't get much out of talking to the average person on the street. It doesn't mean they don't value that person

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