Average IQ by Country 2026

5 hours ago

Hong Kong, South Korea, and China have the highest average IQ scores (107.73, 106.97, and 106.48 respectively).
Higher national IQ averages are associated with strong education systems, high school attainment, good early childhood nutrition, and familiarity with standardized testing.
Rwanda, Timor-Leste, and Somalia have the lowest average IQ scores (86.90, 86.70, and 83.84 respectively).
Lower IQ averages are linked to limited education opportunities, low school completion rates, undernutrition, and reduced test exposure, not fixed cognitive differences.
The global average IQ is standardized around 100, with wide variation among countries.
Differences in national IQ averages are largely explained by education quality, schooling access, early childhood development, and test familiarity.

Binary IQ8 days ago

Binary IQ refers to an LLM's ability to correctly answer simple yes/no questions when all relevant information is in the context window, and the author hypothesizes this is the main bottleneck for reliable agents.
Best current LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.5) show high in-distribution IQ (~125) but much lower out-of-distribution IQ (~75), making agents unreliable despite high average success rates.
Collective IQ suggests that groups of average-IQ individuals or models cannot exceed the decision-making capability of the smartest member, analogous to LLM agents being unable to surpass the intrinsic binary IQ of the underlying network.

Intelligence is a highly heritable trait, with heritability increasing from about 20% in infancy to as much as 80% in later adulthood.
Intelligence captures genetic effects common to diverse cognitive and learning abilities, with genetic correlations around 0.60 or higher.
Assortative mating for intelligence is high (spouse correlations ~0.40), which increases additive genetic variance in the population.

Defining intelligence as 'ability to achieve goals across domains' conflates it with power, as seen with Stalin and Trump.
Power in the real world derives from authority and trust, not purely strategic reasoning like in games.
Individual IQ correlates modestly with income, but national IQ strongly correlates with national outcomes due to spillover effects.

A survey of email subscribers asked about three levels of maths proficiency: formal study, comfortable use, and ability to teach.
Over 70% of respondents have formally studied up to differential equations, but only a third remain comfortable with that level.
The drop from 'studied' to 'can teach' averages 1.6 levels, with heavy tails: some retain full knowledge, others forget a lot.

Wisdom is defined as knowing what to do in most situations, reflecting a high average outcome across various scenarios.
Intelligence is characterized by exceptionally high performance in specific situations, akin to peaks on a graph.
The relationship between wisdom and intelligence is that they represent the average and maximum of the same performance curve.

Binary IQ8 days ago

Binary IQ refers to an LLM's ability to correctly answer simple yes/no questions when all relevant information is in the context window, and the author hypothesizes this is the main bottleneck for reliable agents.
Best current LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.5) show high in-distribution IQ (~125) but much lower out-of-distribution IQ (~75), making agents unreliable despite high average success rates.
Collective IQ suggests that groups of average-IQ individuals or models cannot exceed the decision-making capability of the smartest member, analogous to LLM agents being unable to surpass the intrinsic binary IQ of the underlying network.

Intelligence is a highly heritable trait, with heritability increasing from about 20% in infancy to as much as 80% in later adulthood.
Intelligence captures genetic effects common to diverse cognitive and learning abilities, with genetic correlations around 0.60 or higher.
Assortative mating for intelligence is high (spouse correlations ~0.40), which increases additive genetic variance in the population.

Defining intelligence as 'ability to achieve goals across domains' conflates it with power, as seen with Stalin and Trump.
Power in the real world derives from authority and trust, not purely strategic reasoning like in games.
Individual IQ correlates modestly with income, but national IQ strongly correlates with national outcomes due to spillover effects.

A survey of email subscribers asked about three levels of maths proficiency: formal study, comfortable use, and ability to teach.
Over 70% of respondents have formally studied up to differential equations, but only a third remain comfortable with that level.
The drop from 'studied' to 'can teach' averages 1.6 levels, with heavy tails: some retain full knowledge, others forget a lot.

Wisdom is defined as knowing what to do in most situations, reflecting a high average outcome across various scenarios.
Intelligence is characterized by exceptionally high performance in specific situations, akin to peaks on a graph.
The relationship between wisdom and intelligence is that they represent the average and maximum of the same performance curve.

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