This line of argument is known as the No True Scotsman fallacy and it’s not the one being made by the article or the post. Actually, the whole point is that waiving your IQ around in any debate is a ridiculous notion in the first place and any argument should stand or fall by the weight of its empirical evidence, not throwing out IQ scores.

The only time the issue of intellect vs. critical thinking would apply is when someone makes a very clear and obvious double standard, i.e. “prove to me that you can safely inject a child with 10,000 doses of vaccines as written in a pediatric journal by taking a baby and injecting him or her with 10,000 doses of a vaccine, but when it comes to chelation and detox, all I need are a few testimonials on a random website to know it works much better than this poison-filled Western medicine.”

An elderly couple I know quite well can, for example, thoroughly Fisk an op-ed piece from our local rightwing think tank, the Fraser Institute: they can spot the fallacies, uncover the hidden assumptions, identify the cherry-picking of data, rage over the application of a specific case to fake up a (false) general principle, and all the other slimy tricks the paid liars use.

But they are also deeply into New Age and CAM woo, and for years now have pretty much swallowed it whole. They’re going to get the seasonal flu vaccine, as they have for years, but will refuse the swine flu vaccine. Wait, what? They’re going to refuse the swine flu vaccine because… because… well, I never did get a coherent answer, except that Guillain–Barre Syndrome figured in it somewhere, as did the “it hasn’t been tested!” battle cry.

Oh, and they were — almost — taken in by one of these “get rich in real estate using other people’s money” scams, “only four spaces left in the next seminar at our low discount price of ONLY two thousand dollars”. Obvious high-pressure sales tactics for a dubious product (if you can get so rich doing this why are you teaching a course in it and not out there doing it), yet they didn’t spot it.

I still don’t understand what kind of mental short circuits are necessary for an individual to be able to think critically in one area and not others, but they indisputably exist. It’s as if different classes of input are siloed into different cognitive structures, i.e. the way to think about rightwing propaganda is This, while the way to think about crop circles is That, and there is no connection between the two, no recognition that there are similarities in the patterns of each of those and that the same mechanisms for the dissection of truth claims can be applied to both.

You know, I think that someone who needs to invoke how well they passed an IQ test probably doesn’t have a very good argument to begin with.

And yes, you should laugh at them until your sides hurt.

If you knew it, you would by definition not be a total washout in critical thinking…

The intellectually prodigious cannot be counterfeited. Rather than foster brilliance we allocate for its suppression as equal opportunity, affirmative action, compassion, social engineering, reverse discrimination… DIVERSITY. There is no level playing field that will not reveal genetic, developmental, and behavioral trash; reproductive warriors, religious hind gut fermenters, Enviro-whiner Luddites; the stupid, the pathetic, and the Officially Sad. You may call a turd a sausage and eat it with relish, but it it still a turd.