Although impressive, it is worth to notice that Cicero only played blitz games (in which each turn lasts 5 minutes, and players are not usually very invested). 

An AI beating 90% of players in blitz chess is less of an achievement than an AI beating 90% of players in 40 min chess; and I expect the same to be true for Diplomacy. Also, backstabbing and elaborate schemes are considerably rarer in blitz.

 I would be very curious to see Cicero compete in a Diplomacy game with longer turns.

Corretto, non faremo noche loca fino all'alba :D

Thank you! I had never thought that Aristarchus might have intentionally seeked a lower bound for the relative size of Sun and Moon. This does indeed make a lot of sense.

The shape is perceptibly different from a Gaussian (at least in the distributions that I found googling "empirical distribution of IQ" and similar keywords). This is not surprising, because almost nothing in Nature is an ideal Gaussian.

Thank you, I will look at the paper.

Now, suppose everyone began gaming the "athletic ability" test so that the table of maximum speeds B in light of scores didn't correlate anymore, what would happen? Well, psychologists would analyze the new trend. They'd look at current full time professional short range runners, the scores they obtained in their "athletic ability" test when they took it a few years before, and develop a new table with updated maximum speeds B for "athletic score" abilities, so that both numbers began correlating again.

Here you are supposing that everyone does the same amount of preparation; otherwise, recalibrating the score would not be enough. I think that this is the main point: does everyone prepare the same amount for IQ tests?

(A) and (B) make different predictions. If (B) is true, people with high IQ will not be particularly good at a new task when they try it for the first time - but then they would improve by application. If (A) is true, people with high IQ will be immediately good at new cognitive tasks (or, at least, much better than people with low IQ).

Thank you for your answer!

If you practice for IQ tests, you're going to become better at detecting the specific kinds of patterns used in IQ tests, but then your IQ score will correlate less with your general pattern-recognition ability, and in turn with those other traits, so at some point your score will stop reflecting your general intelligence. [...]

Are you sure of this? Maybe the sort of people who are motivated to get an high score in a IQ test are the same sort of people who are motivated to get good grades in the college, who work harder to advance their career, and so on.

To clarify, we have two possible explainations for the correlation:

      A) People with a high IQ score got their high IQ score because they have a better innate capacity to detect patterns, so they are also innately more capable to become engineers or lawyers. People with a low IQ score have a low innate intelligence, so they are not able to understand that being a criminal is a bad idea.

     B) People with a high IQ score got their high IQ score because they were motivated to get an high IQ score. They are also more likely to become engineers or lawyers, because they are motivated to work hard to achieve their goals. People with a low IQ score just wanted to finish this boring test as soon as possible, so they gave random answers and returned to bar drinking.

I think that a mixture of (A) and (B) may be true. Most of your answers suggest that (A) is the most relevant explanation. However, if you for example replace "IQ score" with "school grades", I would say intuitively that (B) is the main answer. Is the IQ test fundamentally different from a school test?

I agree that different peoples have different learning curve. 

I wonder if perhaps a more appropriate test of "general intelligence" (+ motivation/grit) would be assessing how much you are able to improve in a task, given 1 month to practice.

Probably it is hard to make this work, because you could cheat in the first test doing it terribly on purpose.

Thank you for your answer, however, the question is not if it is worthy, or useful to practice for IQ test; the question is if it can be done (and, secondarily, how many people do it). 

Usually, the ranking of abilities for a task are well correlated with the amount of practice. There is the rare child prodigy who beats the chess grandmaster, but usually all the people who can beat a chess grandmaster have practiced a lot of chess.

Is IQ special in this respect? Is the majority of people who is extremely good at IQ tests just "naturally" extremely good at IQ tests?

The mean IQ is different among different cultures in the United States. Could these differences be explained (at least partially) by different mean levels of preparation? For example, I imagine that if you grow up in a highly competitive culture, and your family presses you hard to achieve good grades, you will more likely also study more for an IQ test.