Measuring someone's IQ, in addition to being somewhat unreliable, is also way too simplistic. Two people with the same measured IQ can be completely different in their cognition, knowledge, experience, ability to reason, skills, and overall behavior. One might not be able to solve complicated logical puzzles but still be very competent and skillful at his job and life in general, while the other, even having the same measured IQ, might be a complete incompetent moron who knows nothing about anything and does everything wrong.
Most flat-earthers probably have a slightly lower measured IQ than the average (in other words, probably in the range of about 80-100 or the like, where 100 is the average), but that doesn't tell the entire story. They are very different in a separate axis to most other people in that same range.
I don't know if these independent "intelligence axes" have been much studied, researched and discussed in psychology (they probably have), but they sometimes show themselves in how stupidly some relatively average-intelligence people act. Like the 1995 bank robbery incident that inspired the famous "Dunning-Kruger effect" paper. In that event two people, who were at least intelligent enough to be able to live and function independently, and even understand things like security cameras, bank robberies and the repercussions of getting caught, got into their heads that because lemon juice can be used for the "invisible ink" trick, it would make their faces invisible to security cameras.
There's clearly a bad cognitive failure going on here that's tangential to IQ, not directly related to it (as most people with the same IQ would understand perfectly well the fault in that logic.) This is something that most IQ tests don't test for (probably because it's so vague and so difficult to test.)
It appears to me that the vast majority of flat-earthers have this same type of "Dunning-Kruger cognitive failure" going on. Most of them are intelligent enough to function completely well in life, they have jobs, most of them have families, they clearly don't have a problem in living independently and taking care of themselves, and understanding the practicalities of life. In other words, when it comes to practical everyday life, they are relatively normal people. Perhaps not the smartest of the bunch, but also not so intellectually defective as being outright unable to function and live independently.
But there's clearly this "IQ-adjacent failure" going on with them.
I actually partially discussed this exact phenomenon a bit in a previous blog post: The psychology of flat-earthism and mathematics, where I noted how most of them seem to think of mathematics as this esoteric cryptic made-up telltale gobbledygook where people just come up with completely random made-up mathematical incantations and spells which have no real meaning to them, and others just recite and use them because of completely blind faith and without any understanding, exactly as if just repeating the cryptic words of a prophet who made it all up. They seem to completely fail to understand the very foundational nature of mathematics, the very concept of mathematical rigor, of mathematical proofs, of how mathematics works at a foundational level. They completely fail to understand the very concept, and think that mathematics is just this wishy-washy made-up woowoo that some people just completely fabricate out of thin air and others take too seriously, completely on faith, with zero understanding.
There's a sort of psychological projection going on here, which ties to this "IQ-tangential Dunning-Kruger effect": Because they don't understand the core concept behind mathematics, because they don't understand the mathematical formulas and how they work, they think that nobody else does either. They think that everybody else is the same as them in that regard. (This is quite different from most other people, including those with similar IQ levels, who at least know that even if they themselves don't understand the formulas, there are other people who genuinely do.)
While in that blog post I wrote about mathematics in particular, the same phenomenon is true for pretty much everything else that they don't understand, of course. In other words, pretty much all of physics, and the vast majority of science in general.
Flat-earthers appear to cognitively live in a strange world, a world that is like it was during the Stone and Bronze Ages, where some basic technology was known and understood, but everything else was pure guesswork, and everybody was just completely guessing about the nature of reality and the surrounding world. People were just inventing all kinds of crazy ideas about stuff, like what causes rain or wind, what's high above beyond the clouds, what's deep under the seas, what exactly is fire and what causes is, what the nature of physical matter is, and so on and so forth. People had absolutely no idea, and everybody was just making stuff up, and other people were either believing their hypotheses or creating their own. Sure, people could engage in agriculture and construct some buildings, but everything beyond that was just a great unknown and subject to complete made-up guesswork.
Most flat-earthers seem to cognitively live in this kind of world. They think that any science that's beyond their comprehension is nothing but this kind of guesswork which people are just believing based on blind faith. Even some of the most basic, easily testable scientific postulates, like for example Newton's Laws, they think are nothing but guesses, hand-waving, wild conjectures, that people are taking way too seriously and believing on blind faith alone. They think that if they don't understand what's going on, then nobody else does either, and everybody is just making stuff up, just like they did during the Bronze Age.
It's literally like they are physically living in the year 2026, but cognitively they are living in 3000 BC. They might be living in the modern world and using modern technology, but their cognition of the world beyond their immediate surroundings is as it was five thousand years ago. And, on top of that, they seem completely incapable of understanding the problem with that kind of thinking, how irrational it is. They just take modern technology and practical knowledge for granted, without being capable of understanding what kind of science was needed to develop it. They still seem to think that science, for the most part, is mere baseless made-up guesswork, and don't seem to be able to make the connection between modern technology and that very science.
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