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My IQ

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Re: My IQ

#121

Post by meepmorp »

rayiner wrote: post #79
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.

> it assumes a level of familiarity with formal logic and English grammer/vocabulary.

Grammar, not grammer.

Re: My IQ

#122

Post by ahoyhere »

DanBC wrote: post #35
chiph wrote: post #22

> > Cow, hen, pig, sheep. > The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. I thought "It's the only one that goes around on two legs." And then: "It's the only one that reproduces via eggs." Maybe not the right answer for the "right" reason, but works... But then, as I have gotten older, my IQ is probably half what it was when I was tested as a teen (not a candidate for Mensa, sorry) Probably beca…

Let's try to list all the "correct" answers. 1) Hen - only one with wings / only bird / only non mammal / only egg-reproducer / only creature using 2 legs 2) Sheep - only one with more than 3 letters in name / renewable wool provider (eggs and milk are renewing?) Only plural without an S (sheep vs cows, hens, pigs) 3) Pig - only animal without renewing product (no milk, no eggs, no wool); only male name (cow hen and…

The cow, pig, and sheep all have hooves (are ungulates). The hen is the only one without hooves.

Surprised nobody mentioned that so far. That was my first go-to.

Re: My IQ

#123

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: My IQ

#124

Post by gioele »

fleitz wrote: post #81
gioele wrote: post #38

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

If I understand it correctly, they claim that you must be in what is thought to be the top 2%, in other words your IQ must be over 130-something.

But this does not mean that they reject 98% of the people that take the tests. People interested in taking that test must already be, I suppose, in the top 10% of the IQ distribution (125+?), or so they think. If this is true they they do reject 98% of the applicants but only 80%. Yet I suspect they reject even less.

Any source or third-party evaluation of their acceptance rate?

Re: My IQ

#125

Post by lywald »

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…

being intelligent has no intrinsic value

Loving what we are has to be worth something, or why bother with progress?

Re: My IQ

#126

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Years ago in our 20s my wife and I took an IQ test. I think she got in the 150s and I scored in the upper 140s.

But I felt I had done much better. When we looked at the scores, for several answers I had results that were clearly consistent with an internal model I could build of the problem, but it just wasn't the model the tester wanted.

So in a geometric progression, I noticed that each figure had an odd number of visible vortices. In a word analogy, I noticed that all of the words except one had an Old English root. And so on. Many times there were multiple patterns of resolution. How could one be better than another?

I could certainly understand her choices, I just thought they were no worse or better than mine. The fact that IQ tests are created by people with high IQs led me to believe that what is really being measured here is some sort of academic cultural cohesion; how much we begin to solve problems in similar ways?

Not necessarily a bad idea, but not what I think of when somebody says "intelligence test"

Re: My IQ

#127

Post by telemachos »

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…

> Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher.

I take your point, but Einstein and Wittgentsein are not good examples. You list jobs they held, but those jobs don't reasonably express the success either man had in his lifetime. Einstein was also a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies from 1933 to 1955 (when he died)[1]. Wittgenstein was also awarded a PhD at Cambridge - without having done coursework or exams - on the basis of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and was an idolized professor for many years there[2].

Neither man was by any stretch of the imagination an unrecognized genius - they were both absolutely recognized as huge intellects with superior achievements in their respective fields when they were alive.

[1] http://www.ias.edu/people/einstein/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#1929.E2.80....

Re: My IQ

#128

Post by sarah2079 »

nacker wrote: post #82
sarah2079 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

Interesting, that sounds worth checking out.

Re: My IQ

#129

Post by [deleted] »

meepmorp wrote: post #121
rayiner wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it assumes a level of familiarity with formal logic and English grammer/vocabulary. Grammar, not grammer.

[deleted]
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