This is why I love xkcd
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I worded it like this:
For different values of n, how many people would I have to kill (starting from the smartest and working down) to raise my IQ by n points, and what effect would that have on the world in general?
Any idea who the smartest person is so I know where to start?
Filed under: Don't worry, you'll all be safe for a while yet.
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I'm pretty sure I'm skewing the average by representing the bottom half of the bell curve somewhere.
The bell bottom curve, charting the rise and fall of a ridiculous style of trousers?
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This post is deleted!
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This post is deleted!
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Munroe-alizing the previous 2 posts because I'm bored.
@Keith said:Q: For different values of n, how many people would I have to kill (starting from the smartest and working down) to raise my IQ by n points, and what effect would that have on the world in general? --Keith
Given a semi-acceptable range and assuming uniform distribution of IQ, it's not too bad to figure out using everyday spreadsheet functions. You can create a bell curve in almost any half decent spreadsheet for a range of values, and then apply the population to the breakdown per score to get the counts of people with each IQ.
: off-topic picture with funny alt-text :
The top IQ is around 200, which works perfectly for using an IQ range of 1 - 200 in the bell curve. Every +/-15 points of IQ = 1 standard deviation from the median, so 95% of the population falls between 70 and 130. We will assume the world population is 7.046 billion1.
: picture of crowded earth, more funny alt-texts :
According to that math, about 187,396,000 have an IQ of 100 and that is the median (and mode, and average due to the uniform distribution). Just 5 people are estimated to have an IQ over 190 in this model (and 5 people with an IQ under 10!)
: picture of smart stick people poking stupid stick people with sticks and a funny alt-text :
Where things get screwy is that when we kill only the smart people, the distribution isn't normal anymore, so the bell curve no longer works out. But if you stick with population count per IQ score after all the murdering is done and find the point with the same population above/below that score, that will give us a new median, and the new 100.
: stick figures playing with 100s and a funny alt-text :
Now at the top end, the number of people per IQ is so low, you're going to have to do a lot of murdering to move the sticks. After killing over 750,000 people you've still managed to only make 99.9 the new 100 and killed everyone with an IQ over 155. So basically no change at all. And you've now done in more people than all but a handful of the worst outbreaks in human history.
: not so funny outbreak stick-figure pic, still funny alt-text :
If one of those outbreaks targeted geniuses that qualify for Mensa (IQ of 131+), then it would kill 148,000,000 people. And only just barely make a score of 99 the new 100. It would also have doubled the death total of the 1918 spanish flu pandemic. And now in the running with the Bubonic plague estimated to have killed between 100 and 200 million from 1346 - 1350.
: plague stick pic, mournful alt-text :
If this disease were to somehow affect everyone with even simply above average intelligence (IQ > 100), the new median IQ would only drop to 90. That would also mean 3,429,000,000 dead, and probably the collapse of the modern world.
: pic of world war G, hilarious alt-text :
People with an IQ under 70 are considered as severely intellectually disabled. In order for a person with an IQ of 70 to become perfectly average, you would need to wipe out everyone with an IQ of 75 or more. That's 6,732,000,000+ people! The world would be left with a mere 300,000,000 survivors. Or about the number of people in the US. Which is probably where most of those survivors lived2.
: pic of fat stick figure US people, rimshot alt-text, 'MERICA :
- per google
- I live there too
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Awesome! Now we just need the pictures and to understand how the world devolves as the smart people disappear. Which of the services that we rely on will stop working first?
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I now know why he only does 1 of these a week. Spend so much time re-doing the figures to make sure you didn't slip up somewhere. Especially when there's not really anything to check your results against!
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Fantastic. +1
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I now know why he only does 1 of these a week. Spend so much time re-doing the figures to make sure you didn't slip up somewhere. Especially when there's not really anything to check your results against!
Like the way you slipped up doing the figures? He does three a week.
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Nope, only one "what if".
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Like the way you slipped up doing the figures? He does three a week.
In one week he does three cartoons and one What If. It's the _What If_s that are being referred to here, and they're fun.
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Like the way you slipped up doing the figures? He does three a week.
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Nope, only one "what if".
That right there was the first reference to "what if" in this thread.
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That right there was the first reference to "what if" in this thread.
We need an XKCD What If about how many smart people I'd have to kill to raise my IQ by n points and the effect that it would have on the world for different values of n. I'm already over three quarters of the way to the perfect 100.
Emphasis added :)
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Even if that was the first What-If reference here, which it wasn't, I would have though it pretty easy to figure out which part of XKCD I was paying tribute to here.
I took about 3 hours total from start to finish, including the small amount of research on IQ and diseases and the time to type it in here. And I did err in my methodology the first time through trying to recalculate the midpoint IQs, I used average function instead of getting the median. Then I thought about it for a second and realized that didn't match except for in the original uniform distribution, so I redid the counts to find the medians correctly after all murdering took place.
Either way, my point wasn't that I think Munroe makes a lot of mistakes to worry over, it was that even when you do have the math right, you worry over it because you've just posted it for the world to see and scrutinize.
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Either way, my point wasn't that I think Munroe makes a lot of mistakes to worry over, it was that even when you do have the math right, you worry over it because you've just posted it for the world to see and scrutinize.
And there are generally some mistakes that slip through and inevitably get spotted in the first few comments on the forums. It must be especially difficult because alot of the readers are very technically minded.
