Live data from Hacker News

My IQ

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

291–294 of 294 posts

Re: My IQ

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IQ is biological" And you believe this because?

sweeping statement, I understand. at core is my position as a materialist - I think everything is physical / material / biological. 'Intelligence' is simply an expression of that, and IQ as a measure of that is measuring something that's biological, like left-handedness or height. My evidence... I've not seen any evidence to the contrary. We do see evidence that physically messing with brains causing changes in brain…

I'm not here to prove the negative. Your opinion that nurture does not exist hand-in-hand is false.

"everything is physical / material / biological."

I don't believe in ghosts/souls/the immaterial, but this is irrelevant to social conditioning having an objective effect on IQ tests. Yes, the brain that stores information is "physical", but the information is not stored in birth.

Re: My IQ

#292

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…

/"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 saddens me the number of intellectually bright people I work with who don't grok basics like sound engineering principles. Your code is off little value if it's unmaintainable, or impossible to prove it works, regardless of how clever the implementation may be.

Re: My IQ

#293
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that's 1 in 50 from a group that was relatively accomplished in an academic setting before the test. But I agree that it doesn't qualify as "genius."

I may not have been clear, my posts mix LSAT percentiles and IQ percentiles. The Mensa cut-off is top 2% of the general public. 98th percentile on an IQ test. For the LSAT, they accept 163 as meeting that cut-off. Relative to other LSAT takers however, a 163 is 92nd percentile. So the top 8% of LSAT takers are qualified to enter mensa, or roughly 1 in 12.

I took the LSAT in 2009. I scored 166, which was in the 93rd percentile. Mensa lists their cut-off as the 95th percentile, so your 163/92 figure is inaccurate, at least for recent years.

Re: My IQ

#294
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Given the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity, this concept is not usable as an absolute mesure.
Post reply on HN