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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 6851681" data-attributes="member: 16814">I'm starting to have a serious issue with your shifting statements.  Unless you're arguing that being a genius does not mean you have an above average intelligence, this statement does not at all square with your previous statements in argument to me.  To whit, you previously made this set of arguments:I cannot rationalize your statement above with those arguments without postulating that you now believe that a genius does not have an above average IQ.  Otherwise, you're vacillating in your arguments and arguing contradictory things to the same points.This is a nonsense argument.  You cannot possible think that I intended the meaning of average to mean the average of the number 5.  Arguing that you can substitute the meaning I provided in my argument with a different meaning you arbitrarily chose and then show that my argument fails using your meaning is a clear strawman fallacy.  Further, we're discussing 5 INT not in a situation of only one example, but in the definitions provided by the game system in question.  That game system has consistently, across all editions, placed the average INT at between 10 and 12.  With that definition, and the definition that lower scores are less than higher scores, it's trivial to arrive at the conclusion that a 5 INT is below the average of 10-12 INT.  Your argument is absolute chicanery if you try to deny that the game itself declares 5 INT to be below average, and you border on outright dishonesty with trying to insinuate that the average of a single 5 INT person means that 5 INT cannot be below average.Stop embarrassing yourself.This is a trivial point I'm well aware of.  3d6 is modeled as a normal distribution.  Reality is different and doesn't have a normal distribution.  I haven't introduced this concept because it's utterly irrelevant to the points I'm making to you (the definition of normal ability range isn't predicated on any real set of 3d6 rolls being a perfect normal distribution) and it was a unnecessary complication to my discussion of mapping IQ scores to 3d6.  In short, you're trivially correct, but it's not very relevant.Really.  You engage in fallacies left, right, and center and then declare that as fallacy of the highest order?  Sad.Also, wrong.  While you're correct that a value that is above average in one context may be below average in another context, that's not what quite what's going on here.  INT is an indirect measure of intelligence for the purposes of the game.  For that purpose, it has an average, which is defined as between 10 and 12.  Scores higher than 12 are above average, scores lower than 10 are below average.  This is definitional.  Further, I asserted that Sherlock is a genius, and has at least an above average intelligence.  This is a qualitative, not a quantitative statement.  The nature of Sherlock is that his intelligence is above average, regardless of the measurement of intelligence used.  So, since a 5 INT is both a measure of intelligence, and below average, Sherlock cannot have a 5 INT because he's defined as having an above average intelligence.Now, you could, perhaps, reach your argument if you asserted that intelligence, as measured by INT, is intentionally scaled so that 'average' means 'smarter than a genius' and a 5 INT is a solid score for a genius.  This would be difficult, as the rules for 5e establish that 10 or 11 is the average human ability.  That added qualifier of 'human' places INT on scale.  A 10 or 11 represents the average human intelligence.  A genius is someone with above average intelligence as related to the average human intelligence.  Therefore, a genius cannot have an intelligence score below human average (10 or 11 in 5e) without violating the meanings of these terms.  Therefore, a genius cannot have an intelligence score of 5.  Since you (for now) admit Sherlock is a genius, he can't have a score of 5 on the INT scale because the average, while possibly different from other measures of intelligence, is defined in the same general terms as the usage of intelligence that genius uses.  So, no fallacy.I'm curious myself, although I'll go ahead and proffer the answer of the 'not actually a fallacy' class of fallacies.</blockquote>

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