University student have an IQ of around 113. If we, as you suggest, use LessWrong as a proxy for the EA community the average EA IQ might be as high as 139. There’s still a difference there, just not as large as if the 6% figure was drawn from the population at large.
Effect of IQ on sexual behaviour is lower than that study suggests
That graph is unfortunately misleading, it’s from before the authors of the source paper (Halpern et. al, 2000) controlled for age, physical maturity and mother’s education. After taking these things into account the relative odds (compared to IQ 100) of a high IQ male teen being a non-virgin is 0.62 rather than 0.32 – quite a lot higher!
It’s worth being aware that Halpern et. al were studying adolescents between 7th and 12th grade. IQ scores don’t stabilise until later in life so there are a lot of questions left to be asked on how well this translates to the adult population. Perhaps the discrepancy here is due to high IQ teens being those who have developed their executive function faster than others?
Then there’s the question of how being more likely to be a virgin as a teen affects the odds of perpetrating sexual violence as an adult. For example: it might be that odds of perpetrating sexual violence are correlated with sexual frustration in teen years, in which case having a higher IQ might indirectly increase the odds of becoming a rapist!
(Also:
High IQ male teens are about 3x more likely to be virgins than average, and high IQ female teens are about 5x more likely.
I think you might have misread the graph? The graph you linked to is relative of odds of having had intercourse: so a male teen with average IQ is 3x more likely to have had sex, 5x for a female teen. As that graph is of relative odds so without a base rate there’s no way to to establish from those figures how much more likely a high IQ teen is to be a virgin than an average IQ one.)
You make an interesting point here that I thought was worth digging into a little bit.
Difference in IQ between the self-reported rapists and the the community is lower than you might think
The 6% self-reported rapist figure used in the above is from a paper that surveys university students.
University student have an IQ of around 113. If we, as you suggest, use LessWrong as a proxy for the EA community the average EA IQ might be as high as 139. There’s still a difference there, just not as large as if the 6% figure was drawn from the population at large.
Effect of IQ on sexual behaviour is lower than that study suggests
That graph is unfortunately misleading, it’s from before the authors of the source paper (Halpern et. al, 2000) controlled for age, physical maturity and mother’s education. After taking these things into account the relative odds (compared to IQ 100) of a high IQ male teen being a non-virgin is 0.62 rather than 0.32 – quite a lot higher!
(The paper itself is behind a paywall so for reference I’ve uploaded the controlled graph for male teens to Imagebucket.)
It’s worth being aware that Halpern et. al were studying adolescents between 7th and 12th grade. IQ scores don’t stabilise until later in life so there are a lot of questions left to be asked on how well this translates to the adult population. Perhaps the discrepancy here is due to high IQ teens being those who have developed their executive function faster than others?
Then there’s the question of how being more likely to be a virgin as a teen affects the odds of perpetrating sexual violence as an adult. For example: it might be that odds of perpetrating sexual violence are correlated with sexual frustration in teen years, in which case having a higher IQ might indirectly increase the odds of becoming a rapist!
(Also:
I think you might have misread the graph? The graph you linked to is relative of odds of having had intercourse: so a male teen with average IQ is 3x more likely to have had sex, 5x for a female teen. As that graph is of relative odds so without a base rate there’s no way to to establish from those figures how much more likely a high IQ teen is to be a virgin than an average IQ one.)