Ask HN: what is the acceptance/rejection rates for Mensa tests?
On average they reject 98%. Mensa's cut off is the top 2% of IQs
My IQ
81–90 of 294 posts
Re: My IQ
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In a lot of modern biology however you will have tens or hundreds of thousands of equally simple competing hypotheses. Biologist have had to adapt to this by using multiple hypothesis testing methods, but Prisig was working well before this became standard, so perhaps this was the barrier he was running up against.
Pirsig actually came up with an entire metaphysical system in response to this. It's in his book "Lila". Basically it deals with what "good" (as in a good theory, or answer) is, and the different kinds of goodness or Quality, as he calls it, there are.
It's quite detailed, but his first distinction is between 'static' and 'dynamic' good. A test-writer values static good more highly than dynamic, and while this is justifiable in the circumstances, in the big picture, dynamic good is the real deal.
Re: My IQ
#83What are the benefits of being a member of Mensa?
You get the card and can officially list it on your resume.
Re: My IQ
#84IQ tests have long been criticized by a variety of groups. At the end of the day, it merely measures your ability to perform well on tests that are similar to an IQ test. Traditionally, this set was populated with academic tests, so the IQ could be used to predict your performance in schools (it was actually designed to predict the performance of French schoolchildren.) However, as the school based subjects have broa…
That's not really true. IQ doesn't predict well on the high end, but it's useful for predicting the outcomes of middle intellect people. And it works better for groups than for individuals. For instance, IQ scores are bad at predicting wealth but are the best predictor of adult poverty we have. And the US military uses them extensively. They generally don't allow anyone in with an IQ score below 90.
Yes, every time the subject comes up, this whole crowd of relatively intelligent people go into a moral dance about how stupid IQ tests are.
They were never meant to predict genius. The point is to organize people efficiently when you're slotting them for guard duty or heavy equipment operation or officer candidate school. Someone who points out BS about non-Kosher pigs and obscure integer sequences is being clever for the sake of it. IE, "Look how smart I am."
And, as you say, the military considers about 100 million Americans dangerously too stupid for the army. They didn't do this out of arrogance.
Re: My IQ
#85AFTER EDIT: Thanks to all who have replied for the interesting comments. I discovered this link while digesting replies I received on three different email lists to a request to name experts on mathematically precocious young people. (That was for work.) Tanya Khovanova, the author of the blog post submitted here, was one name suggested to me as an expert on precocious mathematics learners. When I saw her personal website,
http://www.tanyakhovanova.com/
I remembered that I had seen her blog post "Should You Date a Mathematician?"
http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=319
posted to Hacker News (and other sites I read) before. I'll read more of her more purely mathematical blog posts over the next few days. I see one I can use right away in the local classes I teach to elementary-age learners.
On the substance of the post, I'm seeing several comments that equate "genius" to "person with a high IQ score." That was indeed the old-fashioned way that Lewis Terman (1877 to 1956) labeled a person with a high IQ score as he developed the Stanford-Binet IQ test. But as Terman gained more experience, especially with the subjects in his own longitudinal study of Americans identified in childhood by high IQ scores, he didn't equate high IQ to genius, and he became more aware of the shortcomings of IQ tests. Terman and his co-author Maude Merrill wrote in 1937,
"There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales."
Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 25. That is why the later authors Kenneth Hopkins and Julian Stanley (founder of the Study of Exceptional Talent) suggested that is better to regard IQ tests as tests of "scholastic aptitude" rather than of intelligence. They wrote
"Most authorities feel that current intelligence tests are more aptly described as 'scholastic aptitude' tests because they are so highly related to academic performance, although current use suggests that the term intelligence test is going to be with us for some time. This reservation is based not on the opinion that intelligence tests do not reflect intelligence but on the belief that there are other kinds of intelligence that are not reflected in current tests; the term intelligence is too inclusive."
Hopkins, Kenneth D. & Stanley, Julian C. (1981). Educational and Psychological Measurement and Evaluation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 364.
So on the one hand there is the acknowledged issue among experts on IQ testing that IQ scores don't tell the whole story of a test subject's mental ability. A less well known issue is the degree to which error in estimation increases in IQ scores as IQ scores are found to be above the norming sample mean. Terman and Merrill wrote,
"The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 is typical of the arrays at every age level.
"From Figure 3 [not shown here on HN, alas] it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds."
Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 44
Readers of this thread who would like to follow the current scientific literature on genius (as it is now defined by mainstream psychologists) may enjoy reading the works of Dean Keith Simonton,
http://www.amazon.com/Dean-Keith-Simonton/e/B001ITRL1I/
the world's leading researcher on genius and its development. Readers curious about what IQ tests miss may enjoy reading the book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought
http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...
by Keith R. Stanovich and some of Stanovich's other recent books.
Readers who would like to read a whole lot about current research on human intelligence and related issues can find a lot of curated reading suggestions at a Wikipedia user bibliography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
occasionally used for the slow, pains-taking process of updating the many Wikipedia articles on related subjects (most of which are plagued by edit-warring and badly in need of more editing).
Re: My IQ
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You'd be surprised ;)
On an hourly basis, you can earn more teaching the LSAT than as an Ivy League law grad. Mind you, I don't work 80 hour weeks, so I don't make as much on an absolute basis, but the work is more interesting, and I've branched out into LSAT books and an online LSAT course.
But mainly, I wanted to point out that the instructor is unreasonably arrogant. By comparison with his reference group, he's far from exceptional.
By implication, the Mensa cut-off is also far from 'genius'. Top 2% is 1 in 50.
Re: My IQ
#87IQ tests have long been criticized by a variety of groups. At the end of the day, it merely measures your ability to perform well on tests that are similar to an IQ test. Traditionally, this set was populated with academic tests, so the IQ could be used to predict your performance in schools (it was actually designed to predict the performance of French schoolchildren.) However, as the school based subjects have broa…
That's not really true. IQ doesn't predict well on the high end, but it's useful for predicting the outcomes of middle intellect people. And it works better for groups than for individuals. For instance, IQ scores are bad at predicting wealth but are the best predictor of adult poverty we have. And the US military uses them extensively. They generally don't allow anyone in with an IQ score below 90.
This is constantly overlooked in debates over IQ, SAT, etc.
In most cases where these tests are used, it is far more mportant to separate the above median from below median, or +2 STDDEV from median, etc, and not to pick winners in the Krelboyne Super Bowl.
Even assuming there is a total ordering of intelligence, how would a single 300-question test rank 300 million people? Why fill half the test with questions that 99% of takers will get wrong, just to differentiate among the top 1% of scorers?
Re: My IQ
#88AFTER EDIT: Thanks to all who have replied for the interesting comments. I discovered this link while digesting replies I received on three different email lists to a request to name experts on mathematically precocious young people. (That was for work.) Tanya Khovanova, the author of the blog post submitted here, was one name suggested to me as an expert on precocious mathematics learners. When I saw her personal we…
""Most authorities feel that current intelligence tests are more aptly described as 'scholastic aptitude' tests"
Hence the S, A, and T in "SAT".
Re: My IQ
#89Great 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.
Yes, they're surprisingly good at it. I've taken and taught other standardized tests, and often find them frustrating or boring.
I once found an LSAT question I considered ambiguous. I sent in a complaint to the LSAC. They replied with a three page letter that convinced me I was incorrect.
Re: My IQ
#90In 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
It's actually an impossible solution, since Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable. However, there are some related complexity measures which are computable, so that they are merely impractical rather than impossible to apply: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_complexity#O... Of course, you can bet that the writers of the test did not use anything related to algorithmic complexity when deciding the corre…
1. Someone named "mistercow" is obviously biased on this question.
2. Another item to factor in, beyond lookup table size, is that questions are written in English, and the medium (spelled words) should not be snuck in as part of the content, except where sometimes it is done intentionally :) Also, in classification problems like these, one should also consider not just how efficiently a solution chooses an answer from the set, but also how cleanly it isolates the cluster of items in question from the unnamed items. That is, since [cow,hen,pig,sheep] are all animals, more so than a random word is, animality should be part of the rule used to choose among them.
3. As blauwbilgorgel notes, Google's very successful solution to model picking is to slurp of everything published publicly online (and with Books, also many things published offline) and sample over the combined output of humanity. This is still biased towards written text, published text, and loquaciousness, but it's pretty good.