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My IQ

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

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Re: My IQ

#71

Post by RivieraKid »

rmc wrote: post #47
nacker wrote: post #29

IQ tests share this property of undervaluing creativity and overvaluing conformity with academic work in general. Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig, from his Wikipedia page: 'While doing laboratory work in biochemistry, Pirsig became greatly troubled by the existence of more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and, indeed, that the number of hypotheses appeared unlimited…

Science has several rules of thumb, Occams Razor says that the simpliest is usually the more likely, and the assumption that the universe operates according to universal, consistant mathematical rules means that you should favour theories that match every other part of observable reality, the rule of thumb that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is like occam's razor and means, again, choose the simp…

I think that Occam's razor says, that if we have several theories that describe reality with the same accuracy, we should chose the most succint (least redundant).

Re: My IQ

#72

Post by nacker »

tikhonj wrote: post #58
nacker wrote: post #29

IQ tests share this property of undervaluing creativity and overvaluing conformity with academic work in general. Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig, from his Wikipedia page: 'While doing laboratory work in biochemistry, Pirsig became greatly troubled by the existence of more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and, indeed, that the number of hypotheses appeared unlimited…

I am genuinely curious--is this essentially the contrast between frequentist and Bayesian ways of thinking?

Not sure what you mean by 'frequentist', but one thing is for sure: the more hypotheses that occur to you, the longer it takes to go through them testing each one not only for consistency, plausibility etc, but also for how likely it is that you think the test-writer would prefer the rationale for that answer. If only a few hypotheses occur to you, and they tend to be in the same ballpark as those that would occur to the average test-writer, you have an advantage.

Re: My IQ

#73

Post by ucee054 »

Shenglong wrote: post #15

|Cow, hen, pig, sheep The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. I believe the standard answer is a "hen" because it's the only one that is gender-specific. In fact, it is distinctly the odd-one out because it doesn't even refer to a specific genus (or even family) of animal. I'm all for creativity (I have the same complaint often) but there needs to be some sort of standardization in communic…

it is distinctly the odd-one out because it doesn't even refer to a specific genus

Cow can refer to female elephants as well

Re: My IQ

#74

Post by tikhonj »

nacker wrote: post #72
tikhonj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am genuinely curious--is this essentially the contrast between frequentist and Bayesian ways of thinking?

Not sure what you mean by 'frequentist', but one thing is for sure: the more hypotheses that occur to you, the longer it takes to go through them testing each one not only for consistency, plausibility etc, but also for how likely it is that you think the test-writer would prefer the rationale for that answer. If only a few hypotheses occur to you, and they tend to be in the same ballpark as those that would occur to…

My understanding is that the approach of coming up with a hypothesis and testing it is called "frequentist inference", in opposition to "Bayesian inference". However, I'm not terribly well versed in the subject and was hoping somebody could give a clear explanation of the difference between the two.

Re: My IQ

#75

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

olalonde wrote: post #6

In theory, I believe there could be an objective way to determine the "simplest" answer if it is defined as having the lowest Kolmogorov complexity among valid answers (if I read the Wikipedia article correctly) [0]. In the context of an IQ test though, it is not a very practical solution. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

Using the Google index as a compressor, as per Normalized Google Distance [1]

  "cow" "pig" "sheep" 10.800.000 results
  "cow" "pig" "hen" 5.040.000 results
  "cow" "hen" "sheep" 4.810.000 results
  "hen" "pig" "sheep" 4.480.000 results
Using Hackernews search API as a compressor, computing indexation distance between terms:

  Cow + Pig 0.4843358722880948
  Hen + Sheep 0.5328799348807779
Principles from Kolmogorov Complexity (Compression Distance) can give many approximate answers, even in the context of an IQ test.

Multiple choice is particularly easy, if you are allowed to note the result counts on queries like "Answer A + Keywords from Question" and "Answer B + Keywords from Question"

Speaking of cultural differences mentioned in the post -- You could even search locally on these terms and notice a difference in the semantic distances. If cows were to go extinct, in a 100 years, the search index would probably reflect on them being the least fit candidate for a set of three farm animals.

[1] http://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/papers/amdug.pdf

Re: My IQ

#76

Post by hellrich »

gnosis wrote: post #69
paisawalla wrote: post #2

Great insight. Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I am not the first person…

"And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked at Target." Kafka was a clerk at an insurance company. Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher. Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his life, and that was to his brother. There are hordes of other people widely regarded as "geniuses", who lived and die…

Kafka and Einstein had white collar jobs when those were rare and Wittgenstein gave away his (inherited) fortune.

Re: My IQ

#77

Post by anothermachine »

graeme wrote: post #25
paisawalla wrote: post #2

Great insight. Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I am not the first person…

That's interesting. I'm an LSAT instructor. My first reaction to reading the instructor's comment was, 'Ha, only 165, he's no genius'. But, MENSA accepts 163 as a cutoff LSAT score for entry. So if MENSA == genius, then he is a genius. Among people who take the LSAT though, he's only 92nd percentile. He doesn't have much business teaching the test. Anyone who's at an Ivy League law school has a better score than him.…

Anyone at an Ivy League law school might have more lucrative opportunities than teaching LSAT classes.

Re: My IQ

#78

Post by freework »

IQ tests are just like anything else in life: If you practice enough, you will get good. If you are motivated enough to spend 10 hours a day practicing taking IQ tests, you will eventually get a high score. If you are motivated enough to practice the guitar 10 hours a day, you'll eventually become a guitar virtuoso. If you are motivated enough to spend 10 hours a day writing code, you'll eventually become a Rob Pike or Rich Hickey. If all you want in life is to be seen as smart by other people, then in my opinion, you need to re-examine some things in your life. I'd rather spend my time getting better at things that actually matter.

Re: My IQ

#79

Post by rayiner »

paisawalla wrote: post #2

Great insight. Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I am not the first person…

I think the LSAT is a pretty good... well whatever it is.

It has the salient quality of being almost completely unambiguous. Out of 1000+ of LSAT questions I saw when studying for the test, I found maybe half a dozen that didn't have one unambiguously correct answer and four unambiguously incorrect answers.

Of course, it assumes a level of familiarity with formal logic and English grammar/vocabulary.

Re: My IQ

#80

Post by anothermachine »

tikhonj wrote: post #58
nacker wrote: post #29

IQ tests share this property of undervaluing creativity and overvaluing conformity with academic work in general. Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig, from his Wikipedia page: 'While doing laboratory work in biochemistry, Pirsig became greatly troubled by the existence of more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and, indeed, that the number of hypotheses appeared unlimited…

I am genuinely curious--is this essentially the contrast between frequentist and Bayesian ways of thinking?

Bayesian uses a broader prior -- a distribution over possible prior distributions of facts, instead of assuming a single possible prior (Gaussian). In that sense you could sort of squint and say that that's the contrast.
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