Oh, I didn't mean that I was annoyed (that's why I caught myself and edited in a smiley). I was just underscoring this as our little tradition.

Saw it too late...   /:   but it is nice to come around full circle to the matter  :)

I think it's non-linear though.

Probably. I'd be really surprised if it were linear.

Fascinating. Do you have the paper?

Any textbook chapter on psychometrics will contain a lot of the background material and will describe how g is calculated. Are you familiar with singular value decomposition? If so, the easiest way to think about this is that you do an SVD on a large set of intelligence test results and g is the principle eigenvector. I... don't really know how to convey an intuitive sense of what that means other than 'the combination of factors responsible for the most variance.'

The seminal paper, which first applied principle component analysis to finding something like g, was Spearman's 1904, book-length General Intelligence, published by The American Journal of Psychology. (Not really worth reading at this point but if you want to and don't have library access let me know.)

... why would I then participate in a dick-measuring contest with people I know would lose?

I agree that it's silly to participate and I'm not saying you should. Which is perfectly compatible with the statement that you are above average intelligence.

But can you really grasp that tangible thing through superficial interaction?

Not with any granularity. But if you were with a group of three people who had IQs of 125, 100, and 75, you'd figure out which person had which score pretty quickly.

Small differences don't convey much information about a person. Large differences do, and more or less correspond to lay notions of intelligence, anyways.

But not the people they're cooped up with out of social necessity, aka 99% of your social circle, I'd imagine.

You could be right. I'm not actually sure. A confounding factor is that the differences between most peers are small given the distribution of intelligence and the fact that high- and low-intelligence people tend to cluster in certain professions--supposing we equate something like g or IQ to be intelligence, that is. So, on average, anyone who perceives a big difference is probably wrong. But, at the same time, people who are actually more intelligent tend to be able to perceive that about themselves.

Re social circles: somewhat to my shame I don't have any obligations to be around people so my day-to-day social circle is 100% voluntary and has been built around people I know from grad school and people they know. (In undergrad I did a lot of volunteering and plan on returning to that habit when I'm done with classes at the end of this semester.)

I think it's important to always be aware of how fortunate you are in comparison to others. For your own sake as well as for the sake of not being a heartless dick.

Agreed.

My turn to be pedantic and split hairs: Those comments on incomes would be indicative of character flaws. Those flaws might themselves cause behaviour which, in turn, negatively affects less fortunate people. But the conversation does not have this affect per se. (Though, with Kant, we may expect such behaviour to worsen or entrench the flaws; so... a bit ambiguous, I guess.)

If they also say they don't want to date anyone who doesn't think the same of themselves, I get a bad taste in my mouth.

Ah, gotcha. That's probably a good way to use the question. (I feel like I now need to check my settings for that question... )