Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My IQ

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 294 posts

Re: My IQ

#161

Post by vacri »

JohnLBevan wrote: post #140

David Mitchell (British Comedian)'s view of Mensa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMKqyaXtHI

Great points, but "why join a club whose only entrance requirement is that you pass the test to join" is redundant. Every club with any requirement is exactly the same. Want to join a boat club and need the endorsement of one member? That's a test you have to pass to join, a social one. Want to join an old-fashioned gentleman's club? Then your test is 'be endorsed, well dressed, and have a penis'. It's still a test to get in. Want to join a motorcycle club? You're going to need a motorcycle and know how to ride it. Want to join Hufflepuff? There's a test for that, too.

Re: My IQ

#162

Post by telemachos »

gnosis wrote: post #155
telemachos wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]. Wittge…

My point was the OP appeared to be judging by the jobs an individual held at one point in time. Judged by the same criteria, Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Kafka would have fared no better. The fact that Einstein and Wittgenstein held more prestigious positions at other points in their lives would not have spared them from an attitude like the OP demonstrated at the time they held the more menial jobs, and judging only…

Your original post sounded very different from what you're saying now, but I apologize if I misunderstood you. Your last two paragraphs talk about whole lives and what the world recognizes without in any way distinguishing between the examples you gave initially. Kafka, Einstein and Wittgenstein are all listed in the same paragraph; again, there's no distinction between them there.

I'm not trying to nitpick, just to say that I doubt I was the only person who took the post differently than it sounds now like you meant it.

Re: My IQ

#163

Post by textminer »

jalanco wrote: post #142

I was raised in an abusive middle class household. My parents were not well educated. When I took the ACT test in 1975, neither my parents nor I even knew what the hell it was. I made a 23. I went to a unremarkable Tier 4 college because my friend was going there. I paid for it working as an "auger boy" on a gravel drilling rig for a concrete company for five years. I failed college algebra twice. I was put on academ…

This is a wonderful story. I think it highlights how important it is to have parents support you (mine would buy me books and take me to the library and entertain long, rambling thoughts in the car) and to have teachers and professors support you.

Re: My IQ

#164

Post by stan_rogers »

biscarch wrote: post #144
mietek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would do well to assume the question isn't meant to be self-contradictory, and find a meaningful intepretation under this assumption. In this case, "before the others" could be extended to mean "before any other areas".

Actually the question should be rephrased to "Which of these can form precarious driving conditions in cold weather?" because that's what they actually want to know. The problem as I see it is that the test-makers are trying to be overly clever and not ask the question they want the answer to. If I have to "extend" the language to say something it doesn't, the test maker has failed because the test question is the on…

That rephrasing doesn't really work either. All roads can be precarious in cold weather; the point of the question is to determine whether or not you realise that some areas can become dangerous more quickly than others even though the rest of the road system has seemed "safe enough so far".

(And the "hidden question" is "did you know that shaded areas can freeze as quickly as a bridge or an overpass?" Most people who grow up around real seasons develop an intuitive understanding that thin, isolated objects cool off very quickly, but urban types are exposed to an artificial sense of ground temperature. The point is not so much to know D is correct before taking the test, but to realise that since both A and B are correct, then C must also be correct. It could have been better-phrased, yes, but a lot of questions on written driving tests are of that sort—they can teach as much as they test.)

Re: My IQ

#166

Post by mrlyc »

I joined Mensa and left after three meetings. It seemed to me that they mistook being able to think quickly for being able to think clearly, much the same as a teenager who thinks he knows how to drive fast just because he has a car with a powerful engine.

Re: My IQ

#167

Post by gnosis »

telemachos wrote: post #162
gnosis wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was the OP appeared to be judging by the jobs an individual held at one point in time. Judged by the same criteria, Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Kafka would have fared no better. The fact that Einstein and Wittgenstein held more prestigious positions at other points in their lives would not have spared them from an attitude like the OP demonstrated at the time they held the more menial jobs, and judging only…

Your original post sounded very different from what you're saying now, but I apologize if I misunderstood you. Your last two paragraphs talk about whole lives and what the world recognizes without in any way distinguishing between the examples you gave initially. Kafka, Einstein and Wittgenstein are all listed in the same paragraph; again, there's no distinction between them there. I'm not trying to nitpick, just to…

They were listed in the same paragraph because they were examples of people who are widely considered to be "geniuses", but who either held menial jobs at one point in their life, or who weren't "successful" (in the common sense of the term) at one point in their life (in Van Gogh's and Kafka's case it was at all during their life, in Einstein's and Wittgenstein's case, during significant portions of their lives, though Einstein was certainly vastly more successful than any of the others during his lifetime).

The OP was talking about one point in the Target employee's life, the point at which he was a Target employee and an LSAT teacher, and he seemed to be judging solely based on job titles. That's a very myopic, and I would contend, unfair vantage point from which to judge a person's life, contribution to humanity, or achievements... as the examples I mentioned (and many others that I didn't mention specifically) demonstrate.

Re: My IQ

#168

Post by Osmium »

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

We value lots of things in life that have no intrinsic value. Art, for example. There's nothing wrong with valuing intelligence too. It's what separates us from the apes after all.

That said, I don't disagree with your overall point. I've known many intelligent people woefully unprepared to deal with everyday life, and it always seemed sad to me. Two of them ended up as alcoholics, one with gambling debts. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if it means you can't deal with life.

Re: My IQ

#169

Post by carey »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #126

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 e…

A properly _standardised_ test should at least have been administered to enough people that you were in the minority of the kind of people it was standardised against. Actually, a properly standardised test should have discarded questions like that if their answers weren’t reliable.

In any case, it is quite unlikely that the test you took could reliably distinguish between scores above 145.

Re: My IQ

#170

Post by telemachos »

gnosis wrote: post #167
telemachos wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your original post sounded very different from what you're saying now, but I apologize if I misunderstood you. Your last two paragraphs talk about whole lives and what the world recognizes without in any way distinguishing between the examples you gave initially. Kafka, Einstein and Wittgenstein are all listed in the same paragraph; again, there's no distinction between them there. I'm not trying to nitpick, just to…

They were listed in the same paragraph because they were examples of people who are widely considered to be "geniuses", but who either held menial jobs at one point in their life, or who weren't "successful" (in the common sense of the term) at one point in their life (in Van Gogh's and Kafka's case it was at all during their life, in Einstein's and Wittgenstein's case, during significant portions of their lives, tho…

Please look again at your original post. This whole business about "at one point in their life" simply isn't there. You didn't say those words. Just the opposite: in one of the later paragraphs, you talk about people "who lived and died in dire poverty". You seem to be moving the goalposts of the argument. Either that or your first post was very unclear.

> in Einstein's and Wittgenstein's case, during significant portions of their lives, though Einstein was certainly vastly more successful than any of the others during his lifetime

No, see, you're doing it again. Wittgenstein was regarded from early in his life as a genius. He was considered a very eccentric genius (that's putting it mildly), but in his own lifetime he was successful and well regarded. If anything, he held lower status jobs because he chose to run away from the world of fame and regard that he already had.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#Teaching_po...

Post reply on HN