Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
My IQ
221–230 of 294 posts
Re: My IQ
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 acknow…
If you think that "high IQ" and "genuinely intelligent" are the same thing, you are sadly mistaken. Granted, IQ is correlated with intelligence. But there are lots of undeniably intelligent people who do not have remarkable IQs (eg Richard Feynman would not qualify for MENSA). Conversely your average MENSA chapter is full of people with undeniably high IQs and little sign of remarkable intelligence. (Disclaimer. Base…
The problem with these arguments is that we waffle on the definition of intelligence. Feynman was admittedly no genius. There's no reason to claim he was obviously highly intelligent (and therefore IQ is meaningless). He had many gifts, a .1% intellect wasn't one of them. This doesn't take away from his accomplishments nor the impact he's had on society. There's no reason to redefine intelligence just to make sure it includes guys like him at the high end of the spectrum. His work stands on its own.
Re: My IQ
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to debate the merits of inferring accomplishment from a person's job, that's fine. To call that my main argument, and countering it with your sample size of three, is trolling.
Here is the point: if all you know about someone is that they run a cash register, that doesn't tell you that they are unable to do anything else. This argument does not rely on sample sizes.
No, here's the point: if you run a cash register, don't scoff at someone who aims higher than what you've achieved, and don't throw your genius status in their face when you do it.
If you want to argue that a person's job is not indicative of ther level of achievement in life, then you absolutely do have to argue inductively. But I personally do not care about that argument. It is a stupid premise, and gnosis is picking an argument when one is not being forwarded. And he is doing it in a completely fallacious manner (overgeneralization, tu quoque), against what I clearly stated was an anecdote and life lesson.
Who does that? A person's own experiences, related as such, are anecdotes, not arguments.
Re: My IQ
#224> But the biggest problem was that the idea of crossing the odd object out seems very strange to me in general. What is the odd object out in this list? > Cow, hen, pig, sheep. > The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. But that is not the only possible correct answer. For example, pig is the only one whose meat is not kosher. And, look, sheep has five letters while the rest have three. Thes…
> I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans So it measures how good you are at not thinking outside of the box? ;)
Exactly.
But I would say that "thinking inside of the box" is actually an incredibly important skill in practical situations. Probably 99+% of any functioning adult's thinking is "inside-the-box" (I realize that this is sort of a nebulous/meaningless statement, sorry). Things that we don't even think about, like looking both ways before crossing the street or watching our step as we get off the bus are all examples of inside-the-box thinking. But maybe a more interesting example of inside-the-box thinking (in the context of something you might want to actually test) is communicating effectively with other humans of a similar cultural background to your own.
So to get back to the portion of the article I quoted and maybe refine my point a bit, maybe it really isn't fair to say that any answer to questions like the farm animal one is more "natural" than another, but rather only seems more natural due to the biases of our own mental models that our evolution has optimized for survival rather than to achieve any measure of fundamental truth or purity. That's perfectly okay to me, as long as the test makes no claim to measure intelligence in any "fundamental" sense, but rather in a particular sense of intelligence that arises only as a human being living on earth. It's entirely a matter of opinion whether such a sense of intelligence is of any interest or relevance, though. Personally I think it is.
Re: My IQ
#225|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.
It cannot be that. Alligators and crocodiles also use the term cow and are not mammals.
Re: My IQ
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think that "high IQ" and "genuinely intelligent" are the same thing, you are sadly mistaken. Granted, IQ is correlated with intelligence. But there are lots of undeniably intelligent people who do not have remarkable IQs (eg Richard Feynman would not qualify for MENSA). Conversely your average MENSA chapter is full of people with undeniably high IQs and little sign of remarkable intelligence. (Disclaimer. Base…
The problem with these arguments is that we waffle on the definition of intelligence. Feynman was admittedly no genius. There's no reason to claim he was obviously highly intelligent (and therefore IQ is meaningless). He had many gifts, a .1% intellect wasn't one of them. This doesn't take away from his accomplishments nor the impact he's had on society. There's no reason to redefine intelligence just to make sure it…
Defining intelligence is complicated, and probably a wrongheaded way to look at things. See http://masi.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html for more on that.
But with that said, any definition that says that Feynman wasn't a genius is obviously wrong. In every environment that he was in, he was given the genius label because he obviously was one compared to (usually quite intelligent) peers. If a test says that he is not a genius, then the test isn't capturing what common usage says that genius means.
Conversely the flip side of the point stands as well. The fact that someone is labeled a genius by a test does NOT mean that they have whatever intellectual abilities would be required to better society. There is a correlation - they are more likely to have those abilities. But not a guarantee. And the fact that we see high IQ people failing to use their brains life is not always evidence that those people's gifts are being used. The true gifts may simply not be what was recorded on the test.
Re: My IQ
#227Earlier 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.
Frequentist approaches do not use any prior at all. Indeed some of the issues that frequentists wind up getting genuinely concerned about, such as repeated significance testing errors, are clear logical fallacies if you're doing any sort of Bayesian analysis.
As an example, most of http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html will look dead wrong to any informed Bayesian.
Re: My IQ
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Agreed it's redundant, but there's something else about it too. IQ is biological. You may just as well have a club for left-handed people, or people with green eyes. You'll have about as much in common with them. Not entirely true, but the few Mensa meetings I went to were all 'social' ones (met at a restaurant), and I had nothing demonstrable in common with the people there other than having the same biological brai…
"IQ is biological"
And you believe this because?
Re: My IQ
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans So it measures how good you are at not thinking outside of the box? ;)
Exactly. But I would say that "thinking inside of the box" is actually an incredibly important skill in practical situations. Probably 99+% of any functioning adult's thinking is "inside-the-box" (I realize that this is sort of a nebulous/meaningless statement, sorry). Things that we don't even think about, like looking both ways before crossing the street or watching our step as we get off the bus are all examples o…
I prefer to describe it to people as thinking the box, knowing the contents, and being willing keep it neat and tidy inside.
Re: My IQ
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans So it measures how good you are at not thinking outside of the box? ;)
Exactly. But I would say that "thinking inside of the box" is actually an incredibly important skill in practical situations. Probably 99+% of any functioning adult's thinking is "inside-the-box" (I realize that this is sort of a nebulous/meaningless statement, sorry). Things that we don't even think about, like looking both ways before crossing the street or watching our step as we get off the bus are all examples o…
Perhaps the best way to put it is that this kind of question measures an ability to discern the edges of the box.