Have you ever seen that popular meme about the IQ bell curve? You know, the one that supposedly shows how intelligence is distributed across the population? Well, it turns out that meme is based on a flawed assumption. I’m not going to give you a TED talk, but I’ll break it down for you.
The Gaussian PDF in the meme template looked a bit off to me, so I decided to investigate. I extracted the curve shape and did a least-squares curve fit of a Gaussian to it. And guess what? The results showed that the curve is, in fact, wrong.
I used GIMP to extract an image of just the curve boundary, and then Python with PIL, numpy, and matplotlib to analyze the data. The results were surprising, to say the least.
This raises some interesting questions about how we perceive and understand intelligence. Are we relying too heavily on flawed assumptions and memes? Should we be more critical of the information we consume online? Let me know what you think in the comments below.