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My IQ

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

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Re: My IQ

#181

Post by Dylan16807 »

telemachos wrote: post #170
gnosis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 por…

Come on, being unclear is not the same as moving the goalposts. Unless you think gnosis is lying about what they meant.

Re: My IQ

#182

Post by meepmorp »

mkr-hn wrote: post #132
meepmorp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is one of those things that can make an otherwise intelligent person look like an idiot. And I'm not talking about the typo.

That's desperately clever. Really.

Re: My IQ

#183

Post by illuminate »

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

An understanding of numbers and statistics is obviously not required for membership.

Re: My IQ

#184

Post by dwd »

jmpeax wrote: post #151
wwweston wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ?,…

I think in this case simplicity does reveal the answer. I would put 30 because the sequence becomes a repeating sequences of 31, 30. Answering 28 requires making the assumption that the sequence of numbers represent days of the month, which has a higher information entropy making the sequence less simple.

29 would be more valid in a leap year - so calendar days is far from simple and unambiguous.

Re: My IQ

#185

Post by temac »

jmpeax wrote: post #151
wwweston wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ?,…

I think in this case simplicity does reveal the answer. I would put 30 because the sequence becomes a repeating sequences of 31, 30. Answering 28 requires making the assumption that the sequence of numbers represent days of the month, which has a higher information entropy making the sequence less simple.

Could you develop on how to mesure the information entropy in an absolute way?

Re: My IQ

#186

Post by sesqu »

tokenadult wrote: post #96
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…

Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig I went to high school with a classmate who used to have the Pirsig family over for dinner fairly regularly. Robert Pirsig's father Maynard Pirsig was a law professor at the University of Minnesota, where the classmate's father (and, years later, I) studied for a law degree. I think, having read only Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance among Robert Pirsig'…

I'm not familiar with the Pirsigs, but I certainly do not consider the attitude in question to be lawyerlike. While lawyers do occasionally face philosophical conundrums, they also tend to have the desired answer known to them. This is considerably easier than to, say, set a prior for the domain of a model parameter, where your preferences are in a vague war between convenience and justice. The internal debate arises when working from first principles and finding too few.

Re: My IQ

#187

Post by robbiep »

anothermachine wrote: post #95
nsxwolf wrote: post #55

tl;dr Not bragging at all: I'm so creative and the IQ test is so culturally unfair that I just barely made it into freakin' Mensa .

I think you'll find that Tanya Khovanova is in easily the top 0.1% of any general intelligence test you'd choose.

so she's only 1 in 1000?

Re: My IQ

#188

Post by Sandman »

I'm no fan of Mensa, but there's one thing that I don't understand in this article - if the test was for non-English speakers and it contained pictures of animals, why was one of the possible answers that popped into the author's head "sheep - because it has five letters". That's language-specific, and should not be regarded as a valid answer in a language-neutral test. But the point is, it seems to me that the author is trying to find holes in the test. Of course that "hen" is not the only possible answer. As the author suggested, meat of pigs, for example, is not kosher. We can find things that differentiate any one of those animals from the rest. In any set, you can find some property of any object that will differentiate it from the rest. But that's not the point, is it? The point is to find the most obvious answer. The same goes for sequences of numbers. Yes, you can continue a sequence of numbers with any number that you like, and your answer will be perfectly valid. But the point is to find the most obvious one.

Re: My IQ

#190

Post by slurgfest »

siglesias wrote: post #175
telemachos wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 por…

You guys are both right. The point really is that prior to hitting a career grand slam (a Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") one can find oneself in a menial job where one is looked upon as an unfulfilled genius. There's nothing to say that this Target employee isn't writing the next great American novel in his spare time. In summary, the "menial" job in and of itself should…

I thought the point was that one can find oneself in a menial job where one is not looked upon as anything other than a bozo. Before the grand slam, nobody is going to recognize you as any kind of genius. Probably agreeing with you, but wasn't sure about the wording.
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