I have found the current Steem user base to have a significantly higher average IQ than internet users as a whole. That is one of the biggest attractions of this place. I have found that when I'm engaging a Steemian in a debate that person is very likely to be capable of holding their end of a debate and keeping in mind what the issues and their intricacies and complexities are without veering off into nonsense or emotional outbursts. I have debated issues with people here and we may not always have come to an agreement but I've nearly always had a sense of communicating with an intelligent person. Compared to what's out there on the rest of the internet that's breath of fresh air. Another trait notably different from the general population among Steemians is openness (Big Five reference here) but that's nor here or there, although an interesting topic of its own.
By Dmcq - , CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
The above is a normal distribution. The raw scores of an IQ test are normalized so that each test score corresponds to a score (average 100, standard deviation 15) that could also be expressed as a number that tells how many standard deviations the score deviates from average. (Standard deviation means how much the scores differ from each other on average.) On the horizontal axis are the IQ scores and on the vertical axis are the number of people who get each score relative to the whole test population.
What do you think the average IQ of current Steemians is? Please state your answer in the comments.
My guesstimate is that the average Steemian is between 110 and 115 at the moment. It was at its all-time peak (including the future) right when Steem was launched because all the people involved were geeks. It's been dropping slowly since then but not monotonously. Bull runs have a way of bringing more simple folks on board, which is a great thing because that's a direct consequence of going mainstream. Only the next bull market will provide an answer to the question whether or not it was a wise thing to stick around through the bear market of 2018 but that year had the effect of weeding out the non-hackers who do not pack the gear to stomach the (temporary?) loss of massive fiat value.