Processing gaps.

A fascinating thread.  Blank slatists and others would have a field day as would those hung up with EQ and other versions.  No sourcing so this, so it is probably a back of the envelope estimation.  My guess is that this is directionally correct even if perhaps occasionally incorrect at the level a specific claim.

Most people (95%+) with less than 90 IQ can't understand conditional hypotheticals.

— ７１８ＴＶ (@stainedhanes) February 23, 2022

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Unrolled:

Most people (95%+) with less than 90 IQ can't understand conditional hypotheticals.

>How would you have felt if you didn't eat lunch?

>What do you mean? I did

>Yes, but if you didn't, how would you feel?

>Why are you saying I didn't? I told you I did

>Imagine you hadn't, though. How would you have felt?

>I don't understand

50% of convicts respond like this.

Another interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion.

Example:

>Write a story with 2 named characters, each with one line of dialogue

>Most literate people can manage this, especially once you give them an example

>Write a story with 2 named characters, each with one line of dialogue

>In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least 2 named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue

If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically impossible

Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even 100 IQs start to get mixed up with the names of who's talking.

Time is daunting to understand for sub 80s. Exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past, can't plan for the future at all.

Sub 90s struggle with anachronism. For example, the 80-85s stumble on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff.

>Why do you think military generals in WW II didn't use computers to develop strategies?

>I guess they didn't want to get hacked by nazis?

Admittedly you could argue this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea.

Sequencing is difficult for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although a movie like Memento can strain them.

Recursion is definitely the killer, though.  Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of average intelligence.  It's the main reason why so many sub 90 IQs are sociopaths or psychopaths. They don't have the mental computing power to model other people's thoughts and feelings. Ask any prison psychologist.

>How do you think that man felt when you beat him?

>Dunno

>How do you think his mother felt when she heard that her son was dead?

>Dunno 

  

They don't have the brainpower to build even a crude model of someone else's mind, let alone populate it with events from the past.  

What is most curious to me 'mapping', which in abstract reasoning is expressing one thing in terms of another.  For example, imagine a picture of an arrow, colored in a gradient from yellow to green.  Following the direction of the arrow, Imagine a one-way street, with ascending house numbers, lowest at the entrance and highest at the exit.

If you mapped the arrow onto the street, what color would house #1 be?  This isn't tricky for most 100+s. It has some minor ambiguities, but anyone of normal intelligence can do the 'mapping', that is, the expression of one thing in term(s) of another.  However, for sub 90s, its very difficult. They struggle, and sub 80s just can't do it at all.

Anything under 90 will routinely make errors with even commonplace mapping (maps, time schedules, etc). Sub 85s start to get into the territory where they can't learn to read, as symbolic mapping of phonemes (or even morphemes) even with constant drilling, just too tricky.

Sufficiently high IQ autists can emulate theory of mind, but they have to be smart enough to appreciate the utility of it. Any autist or narcissist over 120 can do this regularly, but they don't have the 'hardware' for empathy.

Keep this in mind when interacting with others.

Other examples I encounter.  Well, actually more an extended list with recursion etc. added at the bottom.  

An incapacity to mentally conceptualize and manipulate 3-D objects.

An inability to understand or work with the implications of analogies.

An inability to recognize sarcasm and/or irony.

An inability to integrate a declarative assertion into a knowledge context.

An inability to understand probabilities. 

An inability to understand conditional probabilities.

An inability to reconcile abstract knowledge with experience.

An inability to handle conditional hypotheticals.

An inability to handle recursion.

An inability to handle logic sequencing.

An inability to handle temporal sequencing and dependencies.

The point is not to "other" people at different points on the normal IQ continuum but to recognize that comprehension necessarily varies along that continuum based on innate capabilities.  To communicate across the spectrum of capabilities necessitates a capacity to think in multiple and starkly different modes.  To do so requires an understanding of where those disjoint capabilities reside on the continuum.