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My IQ

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

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Re: My IQ

#111

Post by wwweston »

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…

The author didn't name Occam's Razor, but she did touch on the idea that simplicity can be an unhelpful or ambiguous criteria to apply:

"Usually when you are asked to continue a pattern the assumption is that you are supposed to choose the simplest way. But sometimes it is difficult to decide what the testers think the simplest way is. Can you replace the question mark with a number in the following sequence: 31, ?, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, … You might say that the answer is 30 as the numbers alternate; or, you might say that the answer is 28 as these are the days of the month."

This isn't to say that Occam's Razor isn't helpful -- it often is, if for no other reason than the fact that model/theory with fewer "moving parts" is simply easier to work with than another with more (and a similar level of explanatory power). Just that simplicity sometimes can't help or that it can be a value judgment.

Re: My IQ

#112

Post by Gormo »

jhuckestein wrote: post #51

My dad made me take one when I was a kid and I did really well, but even then I thought it was stupid. The first issue is addressed in this blog post. The questions just aren't good enough. This is nobody's fault really, because it is very difficult to come up with a set of hard questions that measure your intellect and don't require lots of domain specific knowledge. It's either within a certain domain. If everyone…

Does it make more sense to say that intelligence is 'multi-dimensional' or to say that it's 'adimensional'? After all, IQ is a metric, not a direct measurement, as intelligence isn't itself directly observable. If we're defining 'intelligence' as being a quality of the human mind that's conducive to success at achieving one's goals, then it becomes something of a tautology to simply ascribe that quality to people who have observably achieved their goals.

If the IQ metric is intended to correlate success on certain types of tests with success in other contexts, then it may be reliable in certain regards - e.g. people with higher IQs do tend to hive higher incomes, as 3pt14159 pointed out below - but the actual nature of that common causality is still something that may not itself be understood sufficiently to describe it in terms of dimensionality.

Re: My IQ

#114

Post by pfedor »

Many people like to argue for political reasons that IQ tests are meaningless or fundamentally flawed. One of the typical arguments, repeated in the article, is that the questions on a test require some cultural background and a smart person can fail them if they were raised in a different culture.

Following a similar line of reasoning, we could say that the vision test your optometrist administers requires the cultural context, after all if you were raised in a culture that uses cyrillic then you might not recognize some characters, and you would fail the test even if your vision was 20/20! Therefore, all vision tests are flawed, and the very concept of vision acuity is meaningless.

Re: My IQ

#116

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

mistercow wrote: post #32
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

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…

>Of course, you can bet that the writers of the test did not use anything related to algorithmic complexity when deciding the correct answers to these questions.

Allow yourself to entertain the thought that they did. Imagine programs in our brain. Things that are easy to decode/(de)compress and require little energy/instruction are of low algorithmic complexity to them.

Start writing down farm animals in your mind. How long before you get to "hen"? You may have written down "chicken", but that would be too easy for a Mensa question, so you'd have to substitute that one :P

Wrong or obscure "answers" to a test question take more energy to produce, they are more complex, more random, less orderly. For me, "Cow" is the shortest program that gets executed first when I think of farm animals. It was likely one of the first programs for the test writer too.

Re: My IQ

#117

Post by d0mine »

RivieraKid wrote: post #71
rmc wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

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).

Being simple could more useful than being succinct e.g.:

  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
is simpler than

  d9$lLsi
because the first is just 45a

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

Re: My IQ

#118

Post by benmmurphy »

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…

I would have thought hen because the other three are mammals.

Re: My IQ

#119

Post by pjscott »

anothermachine wrote: post #80
tikhonj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically, you're allowed to use whatever prior you like. A beautiful thing about Bayesian inference is that it tells you how to update your prior, without making any assumptions about what it may be.

Re: My IQ

#120

Post by hackinthebochs »

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 find interesting the backlash against those who may have any interest in knowing their IQ, or god-forbid even feel good about it. What your anecdotes tell me is not that IQ itself is meaningless, but that success has a large factor of luck involved.

It's a failing of our society that genuinely high IQ people are not out there working to improve the lot of mankind. This growing trend of derision for those who acknowledge their own raw intelligence is only making it worse.

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