Sebastian
Article
Sebastian is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Contact: Sebastian”; “Using Sebastian’s updated tables”; “Sebastian proposes the alternative possibility”. It most often appears alongside Less Wrong, LessWrong, ACX.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: April 10, 2023
- Last seen: April 01, 2026
Appears In
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
- Survey Results: PMS Symptoms
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
Related Pages
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- Less Wrong (4 shared issues)
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- LessWrong (4 shared issues)
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- ACX (3 shared issues)
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- ACX (3 shared issues)
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- ACX MEETUP (3 shared issues)
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- Alex (3 shared issues)
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- Asia-Pacific (3 shared issues)
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- Astral Codex Ten (3 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten Com (3 shared issues)
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- Atlanta (3 shared issues)
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- Austin (3 shared issues)
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- Australia (3 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA Contact: Sebastian Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday May 20th 12:30pm Location: Compton Hill Reservoir Park. We will be at a picnic setup between the Tower and "The Statue of Naked Truth". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJQ76+Q9 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/j4aLpMKKb7eLqjdRw/st-louis-acx-meetups-everywhere-2023 Notes: Some snacks will be provided.
The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right. And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else. Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on. Problem #1: The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong Thanks to Sebastian Jensen for pointing this out! He writes: A search of ‘SAT to IQ’ on google results in being presented with the website ‘iqcomparisonsite.com’. This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85 [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article]. The general factor of academic achievement and IQ correlate at about 0.81-0.88 [psychometric test], [GCSE grades]. This discrepancy occurs because they measure different abilities - an IQ test will test many different abilities, while the SAT/ACT only tests verbal/mathematical ability. In addition, these percentiles are very outdated as the average SAT score has changed over time due to changes in the content of the test. Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient. Using Sebastian’s updated tables, we find that the average Less Wrong IQ as predicted by SATs goes down from 140 → 132, and the ClearerThinking IQ goes down from 134 → 124. So people probably exaggerated their IQs somewhat, and unrelatedly we were using an SAT → IQ conversion that exaggerated IQs, and so the numbers falsely appeared to match. Okay! It’s a start! Interlude: The ClearerThinking IQ Test The ClearerThinking survey included a battery of cognitive tests of exactly the sort that could usually be used to determine IQ. Unfortunately none of them were normed, so we know how all the 3700 subjects did relative to each other, but not where the 100 point is. Spencer was able to norm them to the general population based on education level. That is, he asked his sample about their educational attainment (college degree, PhD, etc) and found they were a little more educated than the US average. Since the US average IQ is 100, his sample should have an average a little higher than this. He was able to calculate how much higher. Then he mapped a bell curve to everyone in his sample’s performance on his tests. Since he had 3700 people, he was able to do this relatively smoothly. He found an average IQ of 110, which originally surprised me, because I thought his sample was supposed to be random crowdworkers, who should be close to the US average of 100. But in fact, his survey was a combination of 1900 crowdworkers and 1800 people who saw it on social media - eg friends and friends-of-friends of Spencer. Separating this out by group, we find that the crowdworkers have an average normed-IQ of 100, and the social media referrals have an average normed-IQ of 120, making the overall average of 110. This seems pretty trustworthy, since it correctly estimates the crowdworkers (completely average) as 100. Spencer studied math at Columbia, his friends and friends-of-friends are pretty smart, and I think the 120 estimate for them is also okay. But there’s still a problem here. Using an accurate SAT score → IQ calculator, we determined that the ClearerThinking average should be 124. But using real cognitive tests, it looks like it’s 110. What went wrong? Problem #2: Only The Smartest People Report Their SATs Using Spencer’s cognitive test results, we can compare people who did vs. didn’t take the SAT. We find: People who didn’t take the SAT (remember, this includes current high schoolers) have tested-IQ 110.
Sebastian proposes the alternative possibility that it’s something about hormones.
Inline links: something about hormones
Contact: Sebastian Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 3, 7:00 PM Location: Olympia Kebob House - reservation for 'Sebastian'. I will have an ACX sign and we will be in the back room. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJMFR+JR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/g/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3/p/RwTKebjmomX6sYsSD/
Contact: Sebastian Contact Info: sebastianworms[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, May 10th, 2:00 PM Location: Parc Cinquantenaire / Guinguette Maurice if weather sucks Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F26R9RP+5F
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F26R9RP+5F