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It has been awile sinse iv'e thought about this, but a recent email has had me thinking...
Are gay guys smarter than other people?
I am aware that there is no physical or any theoretical studies that will ever hope to prove that one person is smarter than any other due to sexuality, but it seems, strangely, that most gay and lesbian friends, and people i know, seem smarter than hetrosexual people...a queer and disturbing thought
now...just out of interest, i went to http://www.iqtest.com yesterday and did the quick IQ test, and got a score of 129, other sites i went to gave me scores between 127 and 132.
I asked a few of my straight msn contacts to take the test, and they averaged between 85 and 109, while i also asked my gay msn contacts and they average all above 107
I asked five from each group and they were all over 17 and under 21
This is a strange unoficial thing, and it might be coincidental, or it may have reasons to do with gay lifestiles, or how much harder we work to stay in the closet. Who knows?
So what I'm asking you here to do (after a looooooong speach) is to get ur own IQ from any free site, you normally awnser between fourty and 200 questions and they email you a responce. It would also be interesting to know ur average IQ. I will try to do the same with a few straight people at other GBLT or PFLAG sites, and see what the comparison is.
A truth told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
-William Blake
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Some suggestions:
i. while there are a lot of stupid gay people, they are less likely to use the internet as an outlet for their feelings
ii. stupid people are less likely to admit to being gay in the first place (no idea if this is true, though it sounds plausible)
iii. stupid people are less likely to have things in common with you, so the people you know are likely to be more intelligent than average (though this does not explain the reason for the gay-straight discrepancy. I assume, however, that you met your straight friends through a different mechanism from your gay friends)
Honestly, though, those online IQ tests are not worth the time of day. They are not taken in controlled conditions (so you can be distracted easily), you have no idea whether they test the right things or are calibrated correctly, they often can't test beyond a certain score, and they sometimes artificially boost the scores to flatter the person taking them. It's in their best interests to try and please you, as they invariably try to tell you a "report" that completely and utterly fails to give you any useful data whatsoever.
The only point of IQ is to give a vague idea of what you *might* be good at, and what you *might* have problems with. You can't use it to judge suitability for a particular role, and anyone (especially a businessman or schoolteacher) who thinks that IQ is an ideal way to weed out potential candidates deserves to be shot. In my case the individual scores are so varied as to be basically useless. (My verbal IQ is more than 50 points higher than my non-verbal IQ, if I remember correctly.)
For what it is worth, Dee, you strike me as a person with a much higher IQ than 129, anyway.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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There was a lot of "stuff" against professor Hans Eysenck back in the 1970s with major student union protests against him whenever he appeared on campuses, too. He is largely credited with "inventing" the modern(!) IQ test.
IQ measures people's capability in those particualr tests, but is not a measure of intelligence.
Equally intelligence is not a meausre of being genuinely clever. An example coudl be the Mensa tests which any sane perosn would see often have two perfectly reasonable alternative answers, but the "intelligent" people in mensa declare one to be correct and the other not, but do not give loguic.
IQ also varies over time with age and experience. A child can have a low IQ but be very intelligent and an adult a high IQ and be so thick that it hurts.
Australian native peoples have huge "geographic intelligence" and can find their way with ease acrosss what we see as tr5ackless wastes. They are hugely well endowed with intelligence, but not with "IQ". Put simply they do not need it!
Are gay people of higher IQ than others?
If so the corollary is that the greater majority of high IQ people are gay. And that is almost certainly not so. If it were then every high IQ perosn you met would be the potential object of seduction
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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couple of points
my IQ is around 126
apparently, and i have no way to prove this, but there are more gay people in UK uni's then in the general population as a whole. at keele there's 1/8 people as gay, compared to 1/20 as an average on the whole population...
these are only figures i've been quoted, i've no idea where they come from, they could just be popular myth...
assuming those figures are true, a friend of mine who does pyschology came up with a theory as to why there might be more gay people in uni...
and it was kinda related to gay people being smarter...
what he thought was that at GCSE/A-Level age, gay boys in particular don;t tend to fit in with the stereotypical image. from experience and observation we agreed that most of the gay people we know weren't the sort to hang round with the big groups of guys, to go out playing football, drinking in clubs etc...
gay boys tend to be (to varying degrees) more feminine than most boys. this doesn't mean camp by any means, but for instance, lack of interest in football, or sports in general... shopping... i note that a lot of gay boys tend to hang around with groups of girls instead of lads...
also, many gay boys often feel kinda of left out of "lad culture" and not quite fitting in and so staying apart from it, maybe with a small close group of friends
what all this boils down to is that come revision time, the boys are out playing football or doing lad stuff down the pub, whilst the girls and gay boys are revising, hence get better grades, hence a higher proportion going to uni...
obviously, non of this is tested its pure theoretical speculation, but based on the experiences of both me and my friend, and several other gay people we know, perfectly accurate as well... probably not generalisable i admit.
of course, the same logic wouldn't apply to lesbians i guess... because lesbian women would be more in touch with masculine stuff....
strange co-incidence that the large majority of keeles womens rugby team are gay/bi...
Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, set fieri sentio et excrucior
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> If so the corollary is that the greater majority of high IQ people are gay.
No, as there are a lot more straight people than gay people. Intelligence distribution is a bell-shaped curve, so if gay people were more intelligent than straight people it would just mean that it would be shifted a few points upwards. At the top end of the intelligence scale you would find slightly more gay people than you might otherwise have expected, and at the bottom slightly fewer. And most people would still be somewhere in the middle. But (unless gay people are orders of magnitude more intelligent, which they are not) by no means "most" intelligent people would be gay.
I don't know if anyone has done a systematic study into this. Certainly in the days of Ancient Greece and the Renaissance there were a lot of great artists and philosophers who were also homosexual. Not so many these days, but I don't think gay people are under-represented (compared to the percentage of the population who are gay) in academic and intellectual pursuits. And of course there are still potentially many more who cannot make their orientation known for political reasons.
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Deeej's signature:
> How many feathers are there in a clump?<
There are 3,742. I counted them myself. I don't think that I had an IQ: They just forgot me when they were being dished out - or maybe I was busy counting feathers. ::-)
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. (Richard Dawkins, 2006)
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As I have sayd, its pure speculation all this, and simply to evoke responce and critisizm to enrich the mind.
But, as The Black Price has noted, Many gay people dont fit in, and tend to work in smaller groups and solitude, and often go against the flow in some things. (I wont elaborate here)
Now that I come to think of it, the fact that IQ has anything to do with it is unlikely, yet perhaps it is so that gay boys are less extroverted on the average, and so work alone, and harder to overcome a few discriminations? And therefor try to "beat" everyone else in work so that they can feel equal, despite discrimination?
I have no clue, as i sayd of what is true and what is not, but I'm glad of the responce this has gotten in under 5 hours 
A truth told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
-William Blake
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I've asked the same thing on a few other sites, and i got indignation and unhappiness, as well as a good responce here and there...but mostly they said exactly the same possible reasons most of you have givven.
Oh well, i love reading coments, but im not going to argue this one further, so ill just read what comes next (if anything)
A truth told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
-William Blake
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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Sorry I was otherwise engaged and haven't had a chance to browse for 48 hours, or I'd have joined in the affray earlier.
The topic is obviously capable of academic analysis, but it's highly unlikely that any str8 researcher is going to give a damn, let alone attempt to secure funding - and, of course, if the research were gay-led it would be discredited on grounds of inherent bias. So we'll never know.
I do think that the conclusion is theoretically possible, and Black Prince's suggestion that lifestyle factors - particularly lack of enthusiasm for the sporting social life - seems likely to be a significant consideration.
From my own experience, it's certainly true that almost all the other gay pupils I remember from grammar school days were in the upper streams.
I never quite tuned in to the gay scene at Uni (I was perfectly happy with what I had at home!) but in that period I did suffer what was first diagnosed as a 'nervous breakdown' (it turned out to be physical rather than mental in origin) and I was packed off to the local mental hospital for an intelligence test. I guess there may have been a suspicion that I was overstretched, but in the event I turned in an exceptionally high score, and was re-checked twice on different tests in case I was cheating in some way (I've never understood how you could cheat in an IQ test, or I would no doubt have tried to do so!). Since then, I've taken several tests - Mensa tests included - and consistently score very highly. BUT - and it's a very big but! - this was never reflected in correspondingly rosy academic gradings, and you will all know what an idiot I am when it comes to computers! This all seems to bear out Timmy's reservation that brilliance in IQ tests demonstrates nothing more than an exceptional aptitude for that type of problem. I suppose I do have a good analytic brain - after all, that's the way I earn my living - but it's always had to compete with an enthusiasm for alcohol which does tend to inhibit its effectiveness at times!
JFR, however, clearly WAS absent when IQ's were distributed; if that were not the case he would know that there are 467 feathers in a clump - an obvious conclusion, of which Deeeej was advised in a posting as long ago as 27 November. Indeed, I simply cannot understand why the lad is still posing the question!
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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marc
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Needs to get a life! |
Registered: March 2003
Messages: 4729
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Several years ago I was a scoutmaster while living in New England. One of my scouts tested off the charts. He had a photographic memory (served as troop scribe)... and was letter perfect on any and all transcriptions (raken to the test with audio tape to confirm)... by the time he entered middle school (age 12-15 or so) he was able to do english homework with one hand and maths with the other simultaneously. It was truly mind boggling to watch.
Needless to say he had carte blanche to any uni of choice.
The last time I talked with his father he was working for the federal government doing programming of a top secret nature for the defence department.
Fortunatly for him that his parents insisted on a normal education and allowed his intelectual blossoming to flourish in secondary schooling.
Life is great for me... Most of the time... But then I meet people online... Very few are real friends... Many say they are but know nothing of what it means... Some say they are, but are so shallow...
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marc
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Needs to get a life! |
Registered: March 2003
Messages: 4729
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The clump.....
A measure of volume (to measure 126mm cube) consist solely of feathers.
The quantity is in direct proportion to the size.
Cossie..... you just had a different bird from JFR.....
Life is great for me... Most of the time... But then I meet people online... Very few are real friends... Many say they are but know nothing of what it means... Some say they are, but are so shallow...
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As to the Defenition Deeej uses as one of Winchester college's Notions, a clump of feathers would be
7
77
777
7777
77777
777777
7777777
77777777
777777777
7777777777... and so forth, untill told to stop
This can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notion_(slang)
A truth told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
-William Blake
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As to the official defenition of a clump, as accepted by the International Asociation for Bird Feather Trading (IABFT) one "clump" of feathers is the average amount of feathers that is located on the body and wings (not the tail) of one mature male Golden Pheasant skin.
There is infact no oficial defenition as to the amount of feathers this is (as all birds vary) but it is about 13cubic centimeters of uncompressed feathers, before they are washed or dyed for sale.
Thank you all. End of dispute.
A truth told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
-William Blake
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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Up here in North East England we knaa aal aboot clumps; efter aal, we've been clumpin' aroond in tackety byeuts since Adam were a lad. So tyek it from me - there's 467 feathers in a clump, and there's nowt mair te be syaid - unless tha'd like a fist in thy gob?
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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cchd
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Getting started |
Registered: May 2004
Messages: 16
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Grief, 1 in 8 people at Keele are gay! I was there for 11 years and didn't meet any 
Of course, in the same 11 years I didn't get any degrees either - of course, I was just a little too young but perhaps on my next UK trip I should spend more time at Keele .....
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Are gay people smarter on average? 
Are smarter people gayer than average? 
