General Discussion

I'm not a clinician but I am a neurobiologist doctoral candidate and public middle school teacher. And I've taken stats, in which IQ is an invariable word problem.

I think I subscribe to a more postmodern interpretation of IQ. It measures how well one does on a particular test and then there are models that extrapolate or correct away from that.

Definitionally 50% of the population are "low[er] IQ" but for the purposes of politics/power that is more complicated.

When I taught middle school, I only saw IQ in the context of disability, and even then rarely. Although I did work in an immigrant community that was significantly bilingual.

Upshot -- Trump's IQ is orthogonal to his other horrible qualities. His relative IQ compared to other 'archetypical' heads of state may be strategically beneficial to Democrats. He just isn't great at implementing plans because he can't project his consciousness beyond himself.

You are entitled to your thoughts, of course, and I am just talking with you. I appreciate being able to think through a problem.


Edit: By IQ test equivalents I mean the fancy special names for the tests that give you what is an IQ, but they don't call it that. Kids I worked with sometimes got 3 different scores with confidence intervals. The one kid that I was referring to scored, like, 50. And he presented as a completely normal, perhaps somewhat slow kid. He had plans, was in regular classes, had complex friends, had dramatic interpersonal relationships, had girls have crushes on him, etc...