I interpreted the point AlexMennen raised as “people like dealing with small integers, and so may be giving poor answers because they don’t have the right context.” My response was that there is a larger scale measure of intelligence that Americans have meaningful context with. That context is both where their scores / their friends’ scores are and what life outcomes are impacted by those scores. For example, the 25th percentile SAT reading scores for Stanford / UC Berkeley / UCLA / Sac State are 670/600/570/410, and so one could interpret a 30 point drop on each SAT test as about the difference between being a C student at Berkeley and a C student at UCLA. 11 IQ points is about the difference between being a C student at Stanford and a C student at UCLA (but IQ-SAT score conversions are wonky now that they clipped the right side off of the SAT distribution).
I interpreted the point AlexMennen raised as “people like dealing with small integers, and so may be giving poor answers because they don’t have the right context.” My response was that there is a larger scale measure of intelligence that Americans have meaningful context with. That context is both where their scores / their friends’ scores are and what life outcomes are impacted by those scores. For example, the 25th percentile SAT reading scores for Stanford / UC Berkeley / UCLA / Sac State are 670/600/570/410, and so one could interpret a 30 point drop on each SAT test as about the difference between being a C student at Berkeley and a C student at UCLA. 11 IQ points is about the difference between being a C student at Stanford and a C student at UCLA (but IQ-SAT score conversions are wonky now that they clipped the right side off of the SAT distribution).