Sadly it's not a joke.

Most people suck at math. Those who don't suck usually have many well-paying jobs available for them. There are lots of schools, so many math teachers are needed.

Put these numbers together, and you realize that there is no way to have math teachers who are actually good at math. The numbers just don't add up.

Sounds familiar. The only missing part are the "happy endings" such as:

When you finally complete Feature B, the analysts look at it again, and realize that it actually wasn't necessary, and you should revert it.

We definitely know how to create a Jira ticket for it, and the rest is developer's problem.

> I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback.

Parents of the children who can't pass the standardized tests also get a vote.

Everyone who actually studied psychometrics has to upvote this.

(Which is why it stays at the bottom of the HN comment thread.)

Even if we could positively confirm that the person is smarter than literally every human who has ever lived... that would be about IQ 200, still far from IQ 210. (The required number of humans grows exponentially.)

The tallest man in history was 8'11".

If a 14' man shows up, an absurd outlier even among outliers, is all we're able to conclusively say that he is taller than 8'11"?

Yeah, this is a mistake everyone makes, and it is difficult to explain to people who didn't study statistics.

The short version is that intelligence is an ordinal value, not a cardinal value. You can say that person A is more intelligent than person B, but not that person A is exactly 3.14515x more intelligent than person B.

Intelligence is simply measured in percentiles, that's all. You can't be more intelligent than 100% of the population. The 100% of the population is the population of Earth. You cannot get a higher IQ score than that.

Yes they do. Not that it ever stopped people from making claims about having higher IQ.

IQ 160 means that you are 1 in 30,000 of your age group. That means that to calibrate a test that can measure that high, the authors had to test more than 30,000 people in each age group (depending on what statistical certainty you need, but it could be 10x the number for reasonable values). Not sure how large the age groups typically are, but the total number of people necessary for calibration is counted in millions. You have to pay them all for participating in the calibration, and that's not going to be cheap.

And with values greater than IQ 160, the numbers grow exponentially. So I am rolling to disbelieve than anyone actually calibrated tests for such large numbers. (Especially once the numbers start to exceed the total population of Earth, which is around IQ 190.)

> 210 IQ will never be enough. $20M dollars will never be enough.

At least, $20M dollars exists, while 210 IQ is mathematically nonsense -- it means "one out of several trillions", which exceeds the human population. You would have to colonize the entire galaxy, and then be the smartest human in that galaxy. If even that is not enough, I am giving up.

Or the distribution could be leptokurtic like almost everything in the real world. Also galaxies are bigger than you think.

You took those trillions literally, it's not meant like that. It's a general observation on how abstract the measuring is.

My friend ended up in a hospital, when some jerk moved into the small space in front of him, and then had to jump on the brakes because the first car unexpectedly slowed down. My friend also jumped on the brakes but the distance was too small.

You sound like a nice person, but the typical reaction is different, so the people on the spectrum spend their entire lives training to protect themselves against that, i.e. masking. It would probably take some time to gain their trust.