If you look at any intellectual skill or ability, the most raw and natural measuremnt is not normal. Going back to chess, if you look at ELO, you might be persuaded that chess ability is normally distributed. But thats wrong because ELO, like decibel, is a log transformation of the underlying measurement. We take logarithms when the the raw thing we are looking is so variable it spans orders of magnitude. So in reality the underlying distribution of chess ability is extremely skewed with a heavy right tail. It spans orders of magnitude.
What Ive been trying to do is make the argument why an exponential-like distribution is a more natural representation of intelligence and therefore what the "underlying distribution" looks like.
Clearly, a delta function against a shelf game is not a natural or useful representation of height so I think that counterpoint to your argument is obvious.
According to you, what is the underlying distribution of intelligence and why?
I think intelligence is normally distributed, like all other human characteristics. When transformed to win rates based on intelligence that becomes a different distribution. Your argument is centered on the 2nd distribution.
My question was why do you say it is normally distributed? where is your evidence?
> When transformed to win rates based on intelligence that becomes a different distribution.
You dont have to look at just competition, but other mental skills too. Most any application of intelligence is not normally dostributed. Why is this fact not a natural reflection of the underlying distribution?
I am struggling to see any support for your position. Help me out.
More concretely, someone with 140 IQ is not 40% more intelligent than someone with 100 IQ. It would be more correct to say that 140 IQ person is orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average person.
Perhaps a better analogy is the decibel scale. 100 dB vs 110 dB is only a difference of 10% on the scale, but in actually represents an order of magnitude change. A similar effect goes on with intelligence and how we measure it.