It characterized this guy perfectly. He’s even bragging about its accuracy!
Nobody tell him. Not that I think he’d understand your explanation anyway.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It characterized this guy perfectly. He’s even bragging about its accuracy!
Nobody tell him. Not that I think he’d understand your explanation anyway.
Believing that IQ tests show anything meaningful is a good test too. If you believe they are you are stupid, period.
Ignorance and stupidity is a deadly combination. Sadly, it perfectly characterizes the Republican Party.
I’m still waiting for a decent definition of intelligence.
There are many stupids in this tweet, not the least in the “Results” graph and its description. However, I wasn’t aware that the CIA reports crime statistics. I think that’s the FBI.
Dunning-Kruger is twirling mustache so hard right now! Ha!
Polite way of saying bottom 9.12%.
🙄
This guy is the next GOP presidential candidate.
@3, Erland Meyer (nice nym, bro!):
My favourite definition of intelligence is the capicity of reliably predict the future, especially of social interactions.
BTW, I wouldn’t want to be in that room of a thousand, supposedly random people, Dog,NO!
I promise to type an extra space character in my next contribution.
Thanks for the laugh… But, where is this from?
Over the last ten years or so, it’s become functionally impossible to tell the difference between a Republican and a Poe.
This one could realistically go either way….
Oh, and just out of curiosity, the FBI releases race crime data every year, doesn’t it, and this year is no exception, right?
OMG that is hilarious!!!! Dunning-Kruger personified!!!! So stupid, you’re incapable of understanding how stupid you are!!!!
@woozy
Yep, it’s the FBI, and yep, they’ve released crime stats for the first quarter of 2022.
Wow, a racist bigot who seems very poorly educated in rather basic math, plus some bizarre ideas about the CIA. Must be Tuesday.
I read somewhere that all I.Q. tests are written by graduate students from Connecticut, which is why they all have questions that begin “if Teddy leaves Sag Harbor on the brunchtime jitney…”
I think it’s so funny the guy’s bragging about these results. It says very clearly that his IQ is 80, and I figure most people would recognize that it’s generally considered bad. Yes I don’t believe much in these tests, but he obviously does….
Oh great. Are you saying I’m stupid?
It’s a peculiar definition in that spiders, monkeys, and especially ants would score higher than we would.
Erlend Meyer:
I suspect that the definition of intelligence is just as Jell-o like as the definition of consciousness.
The intelligence score from an IQ test fairly accurately measures how close, educationally and culturally, one is to the people who created the test. So if the test was developed by, say, college educated white men, then college educated white men are the standard.
sniff sniff
Smells like advertisement
OMFG! He thinks he’s “smart” because he’s smarter than 91 out of 1000 people? That’s not how any of this works! 91 out of 1000 is 9.1%. Not 90 point whatever percent. Last I checked the IQ tests were calibrated to make 100 average. Less than 100 is less than 50%. That’s how statistics and math works. :D :D :D
Found the test if anyone wants to try it.
https://brainable.com/quiz?
I’m going to do some more day drinking and tackle it when I’m severely intoxicated.
Dunning-Kruger is twirling mustache so hard right now!
Dunning-Kruger Effect failed to replicate, the artifacts in the data were a flaw in the statistics. So your comment is doubly ironic.
(Go do your own research! It’s really interesting. Also, note that there are lots of sketchy handwavies in the idea of the D-K Effect, such as “competence.” If the idea of self-selected samples self-rating at competence doesn’t set your skeptical antennae tingling, you may have embraced “popular science.”
Ray @23:
It took me a second too, but the “90.88%” is right. They’re not reporting the percentile — as I think would be more usual — but rather the area of the curve to the right of your score: “Your IQ is in the top X%”. Basically, it’s the number of people who scored higher than you. Lower numbers are better.
I see you found the original test – it’d be interesting to see if they change the wording for higher scores…
definition of intelligence is the capicity of reliably predict the future, especially of social interactions.
Oh, really? Reliably but not quickly? But I’m sure all the intelligent people saw that coming.
Meanwhile, IQ tests often lean on language-specific puzzles such as word shuffles. Depends on the test and there are so many so bad; but of course that doesn’t work. If intelligence had something to do with predicting future social interactions, we’d expect humans from different cultures to perform the same on it. It’s also a reasonable argument that “abstraction” matching and sequences may also be culturally influenced. I’m sure the custodians of IQ tests all rushed out to show there was no apparent bias in their tests.
As usual the whole “black people, IQ tests” may not be measuring anything about black people except that the US educational system has failed them. And, popular Psychology, too. :( Popular Psychology has always been quick to adopt the sketchiest theories in service of American racism, e.g: Eugenics. IQ testing and Eugenics – the tool and the promoter of the tool. Bah.
I followed the link to the actual test, but I wouldn’t pay them $1.99 for the results or give them an email to spam, so I don’t know the results.
It’s 12 questions that supposedly cover spatial reasoning, math, verbal and patterning. It had a twenty minute time limit, but I’m sure most of the commentariat here would finish it in a few minutes.
Inspired by a friend’s mentioning HAL 9000 during the recent
brouhaha over Google employee Blake Lemoine and the company’s
experimental “Language Models for Dialogue Applications” (LaMDA),
I’ve been re-reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Odyssey tetralogy for the
first time in many years (the second of which is a sequel to
the first movie, not a strict continuation of the first
novel — there are some significant differences).
Anyway, one passage that struck me in the first book was:
(Chapter 17, “Cruise Mode”)
++++++++
[Dave] Bowman had never found it possible to focus his interest
exclusively on any subject; despite the dark warnings of his
instructors, he had insisted on taking his Master’s degree in
General Astronautics — a course with a vague and woolly
syllabus, designed for those whose IQs were in the low 130s
and who would never reach the top of their profession.
++++
This mention of an IQ cutoff reminded me of another similar
sentiment expressed by Clarke from around the same time as the
first novel was published:
“The Mind of the Machine”, from the December 1968 issue of Playboy
(reprinted in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, 1999):
++++++++
The astronomer Fred Hoyle once remarked to me that is was pointless
for the world to hold more people than one could get to know in
a single lifetime. Even if one were president of United Earth, that
would set the figure somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred
thousand; with a very generous allowance for duplication, wastage,
special talents, and so forth, there really seems no requirement
for what has been called the global village of the future to hold
more than a million people scattered over the face of the planet.
And if such a figure appears unrealistic — since we are already
past the 3 billion mark and heading for at least twice as many by
the end of the century — it should be pointed out that once the
universally agreed upon goal of population control is attained,
any desired target can be reached in a remarkably short time.
If we really tried (with a little help from the biology labs),
we could reach a trillion within a century — four generations.
It might be more difficult to go in the other direction for
fundamental psychological reasons, but it could be done. If the
ultraintelligent machines of the future decide that more than
a million human beings constitute an epidemic, they might order
euthanasia for anyone with an IQ of less than 150, but I hope
that such drastic measure will not be necessary.
++++
It would appear that Mr. Clarke took IQ scores pretty seriously
as figures of human merit! I suppose he would have dismissed
Richard P. Feynman’s alleged 125 IQ as having been a faulty
measurement, as is indeed suggested in Feynman’s Wikipedia entry:
++++++++
An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125 — high
but “merely respectable”, according to biographer James Gleick.
His sister Joan, who scored one point higher, later jokingly claimed to
an interviewer that she was smarter. . .
Physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test:
“I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability.
Feynman received the highest score in the United States by a large margin on
the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam… He also had
the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton…
Feynman’s cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided… I recall looking
at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate… [it] contained
a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much
about such things.
++++
It’s hard to imagine Clarke having made that remark about euthanasia
for anyone with an IQ of less than 150 without being pretty confident that
he himself would clear the bar. (I must admit it would make a terrific
shocker of an additional plot element for a remake of
Colossus: The Forbin Project!)
In the movie 2001, before things start going haywire on the Discovery,
a BBC interviewer remarks “In talking to the computer,
one gets the sense that he is capable of emotional responses.
For example, when I asked him about his abilities, I sensed a certain
pride in his answer about his accuracy and perfection. . .”
One gets the sense that Clarke might have shared HAL’s pride in
his own “accuracy and perfection” — the author has been described as
“self-absorbed” (e.g., by Michael Moorcock in
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/22/arthurcclarke ;
that same article contains the observation “Ego [was] Arthur’s nickname
since youth”).
Alas, poor HAL seems to have lost, at least temporarily, the bulk
of any basis for pride when he’s rebooted in the second novel:
Chapter 23, “Rendezvous”
++++++++
After a week’s slow and careful reintegration, all of Hal’s routine,
supervisory functions were operating reliably. He was like a man
who could walk, carry out simple orders, do unskilled jobs, and
engage in low-level conversation. In human terms, he had an
Intelligence Quotient of perhaps 50; only the faintest outlines
of his original personality had yet emerged. . .
++++
;->
This is the score you get if you just say “God did it” for every question.
James, why do you wank on about long-dead Clarke?
What you’re achieving is to suggest to me that you think Clarke had such significance that your opinions about him would interest others by his mere mention.
—
These days it’s referred to as g.
(Not the G-spot, the g factor, alas)
Well, I was wanking on about Clarke because apparently he was
somewhat prone to wanking on about IQ, which was the general
topic of the original post.
Wanking on about IQ is not an entirely uncommon phenomenon, it
seems to me, in certain quarters of sci-fi fandom, and the
STEM community, to this very day (and not just among
“long-dead” — is 2008 that long ago? — authors).
Always happy to connect the dots for you!
In a sci-fi novel, and especially one of Clarke’s, that
letter would be more likely to have something to do with
physics than with psychometrics.
I have no such illusions. I just commented because I had a
premonition that it would annoy you.
;->
So he paid $2.00 to get on multiple spammers mailing lists, take a worthless “IQ” test, and be told in a way he doesn’t understand that he has below average intelligence?
Well bless his heart.
Who is this guy?
James:
Thank you. So, general free association.
Nonetheless. Things move on.
Fair enough. You made that comment based on that premonition, and employed free association to do so.
(Nice to know that from your perspective I seemed annoyed; from mine, it’s quite different. I’ve learnt more about you, too. Helpful, that)
So what, my IQ is in the top 99%
Hold on, I’m drunk but I should be stoned too to make this fair.
Well, at least I learned that an IQ below 130 is low enough that I’m doomed to end up locking myself out of the pod bay.
Well that was disappointing. The whole quiz takes about five minutes (they give you 20) and I only got one wrong. Apparently I’m a fucking genius. Even when I’m drunk and stoned, I’m smarter than this guy. Also warning they want $1.99 to do the test. Well the test is free, but they want $1.99 to give you the results. Keep your results on a sheet of scratch paper because scams like this are achingly obvious.
Also how dumb do you have to be to not get at least 90% on a shitty test like this? Dude ranked in the lower 10th percentile. Is his diaper poopy? Did someone drop him out of a 23rd story window when he was a baby? You can literally score higher by clicking “A” no matter what. Being dumb is one thing, but so dumb you choose the wrong answer more than the right answer by random chance, that takes effort. That is willful ignorance. It’s like dealing with flerfs.
Ray, you paint a vivid picture. I’m smiling.
(and kudos)
When Bart Simpson would score higher than you, you are in trouble.
My IQ is definitely in the top 100% of people.
And I ain’t paying no $1.99 to find that out.
Louis
Sorry, I got that wrong, I checked, my IQ is in the top 110% of people. I always give 110%.
Louis
@ 3. Erlend Meyer : me too.
I guess FWIW that intelligence is a combination of memory (education – affected heavily by access to books, online resourecs etc .. & lived experiences – reading and retaining information) plus problem solving abilities eg. logic, maths and creative / oh what’s the word “outside the box” type thinking.. Not any single one thing.
I read a lot so I think I’m reasonable in that aspect but not so great when it comes to my problem solving ability so, yeah.
I have read enough – specifically Stephen Jay Gould to know that IQ tests are culturallybiased bulldust and most of all a very limited use score of how well you do on certain IQ test more than anything about actual intelligence whatever that is..
PAS. Then we have the really big (?) gaps between “intelligence” and “wisdom” and emotional intelligence vs academic / intellectual intelligence..
This has MTG written all over it.
Ren´@3: “My favourite definition of intelligence is the capicity of reliably predict the future,”
That capacity seems (to me) to be entirely independent of those apparent manifestations of “intelligence” (as used colloquially) that appear in (most) activity in “pure mathematics”. Unless to “predict the future” is meant, in some very strong sense, to mean something like “create the future.” That is, would you include under the heading “reliable predictions of the future” such thoughts as “I’m going to prove the Poincar— Conjecture [or Fermat’s Last Theorem] in the following way: first I’m going to do this, then that, then the other thing …”?
Maybe MTG will offer him one of those unpaid internships. He’s definitely got the goods. An eighty IQ? In the top 90%? Full of conspiracy theories? Wowzers! He’s certainly ahead of those other 91 people.