Yeah I did 10 and then came to the comments to see if anyone knew how long it is. It gets boring pretty quickly.
I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people. If it's just to join Mensa then whatever, but I'd hate to think life-affecting decisions are made based on whether you guessed or inferred which combination of cross, box, and dot come next
It is, but only for languages that a person has learned.
How well would you do on any test written in Japanese? Assuming you never learned Japanese. Probably poorly. But if you knew a little bit of Japanese, you might do fine on a math test. And that's the idea with shape-based tests: trying to minimize the influence that language comprehension has on the results because you want the results to be neutral.
Maybe the theory is strange to you, but the correlation is real. Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities, including things like ability to write poetry that initially seem impossible to measure. It is even correlated with height!
No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests. They care about the things an IQ test can predict.
They are controversial within popular culture but the idea that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities" is not controversial within the relevant scientific community.
1. It seems fairly widely reported that you can practice at IQ tests and get better. Are there any studies confirming or denying this? I presume you'd agree that if true it rather kills the validity of IQ tests dead.
2. I have ADHD and I'm acutely aware of how environmental factors affect my performance in many tasks. How do you square this with the idea that they measure an objective innate quality?
4. What's your thoughts on the argument that it's impossible to create genuinely culture free tests? This was something I was taught at college and it made sense to me then. Has it been debunked? Conclusively?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but (1) and (2) and (4) all seem to come from a place of believing that if a test is not 100% accurate then it is useless. Hopefully when I phrase it that way you can see why none of these objections "kill the validity of IQ tests dead".
(3) is very interesting and there is not yet any agreement as to what is causing it. Flynn seems to have thought our culture is slowly becoming better at training us to think abstractly. There's some evidence for this: one Australian study found that over 20 years the students in a set of schools became better at a vocabulary test but did not improve at all in processing speed. This is not what you would expect to see if the improvements were due to better nutrition or less environmental lead.
For (5), haven't read it. He's stunningly erudite and a careful author though, it's worth taking him seriously. Do you have some examples of points he raised?
1. No, it only kills the validity of IQ tests for which the examinee has practiced, and only if the amount of practice is unknown and the amount of improvement is large and unpredictable. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
2. Environmental factors affect everything. You try to standardise them as much as possible for an operational definition of the thing you're measuring. You will never succeed completely. Nevertheless IQ tests time correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
3. Not sure anybody really understands what's going on with the Flynn effect. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
4. I'm sure it is in fact impossible on some level to create genuinely culture free tests. If we're going to be anal about this, this is a consequence of the various no-free-lunch theorems in statistical inference. For any culture/person/algorithm there are problems where they'll do better relative to others, and problems where they'll do worse. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
5. I'm sure they do, but I haven't read the book and the summary in the Wikipedia article is too vague to tell.
None of these objections actually engage with the parent comment's assertion that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities".
As far as I know they’re mostly controversial because it’s politically incorrect to claim that a wide variety of cognitive skills correlate well with a single variable measured with a simple test. But IQ as measured with a progressive matrices test does seem to have real predictive power, although no correlation is ever 1.0, of course.
I mention above, it's not the existence of the correlation that's a problem. Whether or not its "statistically significant", it's wrong to use correlations for deviation making on the individual level, because they are just stereotypes, they're not necessarily true. For population studies or something, sure, but same as you can't tell someone that just because someone with their personal attributes and history is statistically likely to be a criminal so they must be, you shouldn't be telling people they're dumb based on some abstract instrument just because its outcomes exhibit a correlation
The controversy stems from the egalitarian cultural assumption of modern western liberal democracies that humans are generally equal, "blank slates" and intelligence, skills, intellectual abilities etc can all be cultivated through institutions and technical processes to produce generally the same outcomes for most or all. A similar dynamic is observed with propaganda around saying everyone can "learn to code", as if we just need to figure out the educational algorithm and we can teach everyone to think the same way or be capable of achieving same intellectual skills.
IQ tests, or any standardized tests for that matter, blow up this assumption as do aggregated data showing differentials across groups or even nations, and that intelligence as even crudely measured by IQ tests which is just a proxy for something that isn't so precise, still correlates with general positive outcomes in life such as earning potential, health, career success, national achievement in science etc. It is also not politically correct that this dynamic is largely a biological phenomenon, that intelligence like many other physical characteristics is heritable.
This is why generalized IQ tests were banned from job interviews because not everyone scored the same, which is politically incorrect and unacceptable in our current political climate.
Basically for the liberal "left" which dominates western culture, "equality" is almost a religious belief, in opposition to any acknowledgement or even promotion of hierarchies, or recognition of inequality as an objective reality of human existence. Anything that undermines "equality" and points to natural hierarchy is "controversial" not allowed.[0]
[0] A random example, but there are many, of unacceptable differentiation when it comes to group cognitive outcomes. And elimination of standardized tests or advanced classes in the name of "equality" and against any instances of "inequality"
They are controversial amongst laymen, as evidenced by the discussion here.
They are not controversial at all amongst psychologists. The notion that IQ tests have predictive power is about as settled as the notion that "people get sad sometimes".
For what? (Correlations are interesting scientifically of course, but for everyone else?)
> No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests.
Except for Mensa and their applicants.
I don't mind IQ research. I do mind exclusive clubs for the sake of exclusivity, and especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria. It smells bad.
I don't mind research or clubs. If people want to have their own little puzzle club or whatever, that's entirely their right. And research into human intelligence is interesting wherever it goes.
What I'm skeptical of is applying stereotyping - and that's what this is, it's s predictive model that's based on averages, not the individual - to any kind of real decision that's any more weighty that letting you into a club. Like education decisions for example.
Ok, but individuals can all take these and other tests no? It is not only stereotyped assumptions around group averages applied to individuals.
It is also aversion or even policy regulation against even giving tests and acting on the results towards individuals, as this entails inevitable discrimination when the natural and unavoidable hierarchy of human abilities is observed.
The measurement can be influenced by practice. The g factor—the thing IQ tests are designed to measure—appears to be immune to practice, though I am not sure how this was determined.
Similar tests, like the SAT and GRE, are designed to work even with practice. They have other problems.
> especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria.
IQ is very much so not genetically determined. See for instance the flynn effect which is happening far too fast to be the result of genetics. IQ is only ~50% heritable.
Yeah, hence "supposedly". The club's criteria is based on some form of largely immutable or hard to change personal trait. I can understand this in one way: as a support group. Highly intelligent people don't always have easy lives, especially when growing up. But if it was a support group, you'd have very little use for a test.
> I do mind exclusive clubs for the sake of exclusivity, and especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria. It smells bad.
? what is your stance on, e.g., competitive sports teams ?
There is this interesting 4 part podcast called My Year in Mensa, by comedian Jamie Loftus. It is worth a listen. Gives a new perspective (spoiler alert - not good) on Mensa
Intelligence is like the person said above, horsepower for brains. It's about how well you're able to reason things. And often how quickly you're able to do it, although this test seems to disregard that portion. Which is fine, they make it clear that it's more of a test to see if you should be tested rather than a test in and of itself.
Pattern recognition is a large part of that. A person who is able to discern patterns more easily, is usually able to reason better. More able to do second and third order thinking.
IQ "tests" that use words or numbers are also testing knowledge to some degree, which isn't something you typically want when you want to test raw intelligence. Being able to do calculus doesn't necessarily prove you're intelligent, it proves you know calculus.
So that leaves abstract concepts. And that's another facet of intelligence, being able to think abstractly. There should also be some "die folding" questions in there. Where it shows you six connected boxes and you pick the cube that it makes. That one is also about spatial relations as you have to model the cube in your head in some fashion.
All that being said: intelligence is nothing on its own. It's a force multiplier. Intelligence allows you to use the knowledge and skills you do have better. It also makes the acquisition of knowledge and skills easier. People with higher IQs have better life outcomes on average than those with lower IQs among every cohort. What that means, if you take all the poor people, those poor people with higher IQs are going to be doing better overall. Still poor, but able to make more of what they have. Tall people? People with higher IQs will be doing better overall than those with lower IQs. Doctors? Same. Welders? Same.
Now, this doesn't mean that every person with a higher IQ is doing better. Success is very multi-faceted and dependent on a lot of things, some of which are outside of our control entirely. But it helps.
Only if you leave in people with cognitive impairments. IQ against income rapidly decorrelates as you exceed the 80-point threshold; income is probably the only real and hard measure - and frankly even using that measure conflates success. How many conventionally smart people are ascetic or minimalist? Historically, there's a pretty high count.
Pegging success solely to income is disingenuous. It's not the only measure of success, let alone the only "real and hard measure".
There are awards, patents, accomplishments, etc.
There are positive correlations between IQ and positive outcomes in general. Basically, take a metric of success and group people into it and you'll find people with higher IQs in the groups with better outcomes.
Even if you then slice those groups by other factors.
I already covered that contingency. All the other criteria you've mentioned are qualitative. Which returns us to income levels, which again, IQ doesn't predict very well. And the claim that you'll find people with "higher IQ" (not clinically disabled), to be more successful is specious because you're including the portion of the tail that is dysfunctional.
First, in terms of salary, people with below 80 IQs aren't included because they generally don't have jobs.
Second, why would we even have to cut off the tail portion?
Next, you didn't cover that contingency. You keep saying it's all income levels, but it's not. IQ and positive outcomes are positively correlated. Pick a thing, pick a measure of success, you'll find that people with higher IQs will tend towards the successful group.
And this is also a "all doctors are tall, not all tall people are doctors" kind of statistic. Higher IQ people will wind up in the more successful groups more often, but being in the more successful group doesn't mean you have a high IQ.
Yes, there's a 25 minute time limit on the test as a whole. I just recalled the part where they said there was no bonus for finishing fast.
So it probably bakes in a range. Like if you complete this test in the allotted time, you will be in this range. But if you completed it in half the time, you'd probably be higher, but they haven't calculated the range you'd be in. They'd just say, "Yeah, you're in the top range".
It probably never makes sense not to use the whole 25 minutes. If you think you got all of them right in less than that time, it pays to use the remaining time to double-check your answers. The test seems to be calibrated such that if you get all the questions right, and use exactly 25 minutes, you score the maximum, 145.
I clicked finish (without having finished every question) with 2-3 minutes left, and they popped up a dialog suggesting I use the extra time to review my answers (not to keep trying on the question I gave up on).
It's 35 questions and in the last 10 I didn't see any patterns and resorted to the highly intellectual strategy known as "guessing". As a skeptic of IQ, I'm pretty worried about the same thing, surely it couldn't just be people publishing a study about how lucky subjects are at finding round pegs and square holes>
At some point in the later 20's it's about ORing, ANDing and XORing the shapes, depending on the question. In the 30's it's about something I wasn't able to grasp.
> I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people.
To be fair, most people don’t understand how paracetamol helps reduce pain. But it does and we are able to measure its effect, so we have scientific studies that prove it. It doesn’t matter if you understand how it works, it does.
Same with IQ tests. It’s not about the pattern matching. It’s about the fact that a huge mountain of scientific literature have found these measures of pattern-matching abilities to be correlated with a wide range of other abilities and accomplishments. If a persons ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time was a better predictor, then that is what we would use instead. It doesn’t matter if we understand why that would be the case. But ofcause everyone who scores less than they feel that they should end up trying to discredit the entire concept rather than just accept that their poor ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time does not define them, or impose any new limitations in their life.
I swear every discussion about IQ ends up feeling like a room full of short men debating if measuring tape is even reliable and debating if it’s even fair to say that tall men can reach thing on top shelves more easily since we live in a society with chairs, and there’s obviously something wrong because they have tons of arguments for why they are 6 feet tall, even though the measuring tape doesn’t agree.
No one is saying that you can’t have an absolutely great life, or reach the tallest of shelves, being a short man. The fact that we can measure peoples height, and that certain things are different base on how tall you are doesn’t have to offend people.
It tells you this information right before you start the test: "This test consists of 35 problems that must be solved within a 25 minute time limit."
But I agree that it is unfortunate to base the future of a person on a one-time test. That includes the finals in school or a day full of exams after a long semester.
> For the results to be as valid as possible, make sure that the room you sit in is properly ventilated and free from distractions and that you can work uninterrupted for 25 minutes.
Sounds to me that you have issues understanding directions so I think your result might be very much valid!
I know you aren't 100% serious but "issues understanding directions" is probably not strongly correlated with intelligence. It could very much be down to anxiety, diet, ADHD or other conditions.
Unless we define "intelligence" broadly enough that transient or other factors are included. That might be valid but it's very different to what most people think IQ tests should measure.
I've seen Mensa put out "tests" that aren't actually that difficult for marketing purposes. (I can't speak to their actual tests.) I recall a Mensa book in my elementary school library proclaiming that if you could solve even one puzzle in the book, you were smart enough to join Mensa! I believe it was officially from Mensa, but it's been a while and I may not remember correctly.
I passed. I could solve many of them.
Oh, jerf, bragging about how you could join Mensa is like the canonical example of boorishness.
Yes, well, just about everyone I handed the book to "passed" as well, so... let's just say this isn't the strutbrag it may initially sound like. I did not attend school at Lake Wobegon where all the children were above average. It was an average school of average children. Either by an amazing coincidence we were all smart enough to join Mensa even so, or Mensa was sandbagging just a wee bit. You do the math, as the saying goes.
They could be nerfing their tests in order to gain membership, I don't know how I could know, I didn't have access to the test after taking it. The proctor told me an interesting thing, though, that something like half (IIRC) of the people who take the test pass. She attributed it to people who knew they would fail largely being intimidated (or sour-grapesing themselves) out of even trying.
That Mensa's test is (intentionally or unintentionally) shit is also a plausible explanation.
I remember Isaac Asimov claimed he never completed an IQ test, but he did one that was supposed to take 60 minutes, and stopped after 30, scoring 125. He assumed this meant he must have a 250 IQ. (In jest, of course.)
Pattern puzzles are good. I remember trying a test on the official Mensa website 10 years ago, and gave up midway because there were lots of word puzzles, which were biased in favor of native English speakers.
You are right and they have a spatial reasoning test called "Culture Fair" which they gave when I applied for a test. You only need to be top 2% on one of the two tests for an offer.
They get easier with practice though, so I don't think they're that great either. Also are we saying that linguistic ability has no bearing on intelligence? IQ tests seem to mainly test ability at IQ tests, I'm sure there's some correlations with aptitude in other fields, but I'm not sure how well a literature nobel prize winner would do on this.
So many online communities are collections of people of slightly above average intelligence, trying desperately to prove themselves far above other people of slightly above average intelligence.
Wouldn't be surprised. Many people here seem to become insecure when it comes to puzzles. A lot of "I got bored" comments here and people hating on leetcode style problems when both are honestly quite fun and believe would be to any mind that has the horsepower for these.
May I be the first to say that I’m not sure what “IQ” actually measures? Naturally I have the same understanding as most: IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains. “This brain has so and so much more thinking ability than others”. Yet I find a curious phenomenon when spending time /with/ the brains of others through their work, writings, or speech: often my level of engagement or intellectual fulfillment that I gain has little to no correlation with their IQ. What IQ seems to fail in capturing is the human ability to be creative and unique; whereas I believe now one can design a sufficiently advanced AI/ML instance which could learn the patterns in this Mensa test, our ability to assess value and meaning from a perspective of “well they recognize certain types of patterns” seems carelessly limited. But that’s just my perspective.
This particular test is an imitation of Raven's Progressive Matrices, which measures working memory (WM). WM is the amount of information "chunks" an individual can work with in their short term memory. For an average person it's "7+-2" or 5-9 "chunks".
The patterns you see on the test introduce progressively more and more changes, until you are getting beyond 9 changes a piece at 120+ IQ. Let me know if you have any questions.
> IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains.
I don't think this is a very valuable way to think about IQ. It is what it is, nothing more nothing less. It's the location you fall on in a normal distribution of intelligence as measured by specific tests.
We can also test how far most people can jump and their ability to memorize numbers or do arithmetic or algebra quickly. We don’t have a “movement quotient” or a “calculation quotient” so what exactly does an “intelligence quotient” aim to quantify precisely? It’s not intelligence, I’ll argue.
We absolute have and use these things. This is why the US army makes you run a mile and counts your pull ups. These things are not measures of your "true physical fitness", they are just data points. But they have extremely high correlation on other fitness metrics so we just measure them and assign a score.
You could very reasonably label the outcome of that test a movement quotient.
I have heard that IQ measurements correlate very well with general success in society. Peterson says they correlate better than any other measurement in human Psychology. (Paraphrasing and I can't validate it)
Peterson also says that it doesn't matter which questions you use. People with hi scores on one test will typically have high scores on the other tests.
It seems to be a hard thing for intelligent creatures to hear:
There are some smarter that you and some less smart and you are most likely in the middle range somewhere.
> There are some smarter that you and some less smart and you are most likely in the middle range somewhere.
This always seemed to me like an important piece of social intelligence. I've noticed that people who are intelligent enough to be smarter than most around them, but who take that to mean nobody else is as smart as they are, end up getting played a lot by other folks who recognize this failure.
I'm not disagreeing at all. I'm just saying that isn't what IQ is. It correlates with all sorts of stuff and understanding those correlations is useful. But IQ isn't its correlations. I definitely believe those correlations exist and are pretty strong.
It isn't "Mental Horsepower" though. If something called "Mental Horsepower" or "General Intelligence" exist which I don't personally buy, IQ probably correlates with them but it isn't them.
IQ is a location on the point of a normalized distribution of scores on a specific set of tests. Nothing more, nothing less.
Correlations don't guarantee things to be true. If IQ correlates strongly with "Mental Horsepower" it could still be very possible for a specific individual to have high IQ with low "Mental Horsepower" although it is statistically less likely.
> What IQ seems to fail in capturing is the human ability to be creative and unique
This is completely contrary to the evidence we have. Creativity is correlated with IQ and inversely correlated with age. A lot of famous artists in a variety of fields are recognized to be quite intelligent. Most creative arts programs in universities are highly competitive; perhaps the most competitive of any college in a university. And a surprising number of famous musicians have degrees in other difficult fields, for example the lead singer of the band The Offspring has a Ph.D in biology.
Additionally, it has been observed that papers written by younger mathematicians are much more likely to have novel approaches to solving problems. Suggesting that younger minds are more creative than older ones.
Instead of asking what IQ measures I think it's probably more useful to simply ask what it predicts.
Often discussions regarding IQ seem to get bogged down in debates around the definition and value of intelligence, or the ability of an IQ test to accurately measure it. But whatever your opinion on what IQ tests are measuring, IQ has undoubtably been shown to have a high statistical predictability for many of the positive (and negative) life outcomes we're interested in as a society. For example, if you score higher on an IQ test you're statistically much less likely to go to prison and much more likely to have a higher income.
Personally I think IQ is something worth thinking about in the context of group behaviour and performance. For example, at the level of a nation it's worth measuring mean IQ and being concerned about any persistant annual declines in IQ, or simply to understand why some cohorts might have significantly higher or lower IQs. On the level of the individual I'd question how useful it is.
I once stumbled across an online IQ test that had randomly generated questions, and never ended. The longer you kept taking it, the lower the IQ it gave you.
I went ahead and did it all... by the time I was half way through, perseverance came into question. Wow that is boring.
At about the 3/4 mark, I guess, some of the patterns were really hard to figure out, and the clock is ticking. My mind goes to "wait, I kind of suck at pictorial pattern matching with so many different objects", and "is that the only judge of my IQ? What is mensa? Oh wait, clock ticking, not bored out of my mind"... I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve. I guess I really suck at pattern matching, or I am just dumb. They want you in the very top for mensa.
Based on my experience with Mensa members, being obsessed with your own intelligence is seemingly the primary criterion for joining Mensa. A long, boring test was probably exactly the selection filter they're looking for.
Mensa doesn't need a special filter for that, by virtue of being an IQ organization and not a chemistry/literature/mathematics organization (where it's about using your IQ for something) they will end up with the people who haven't joined an organization that's more specific to their interests: a great implicit filter for people who don't have interests other than solving puzzles.
I joined Mensa today because I overheard some good reviews, but that's my biggest fear. I want a group that I can go for coffee and have interesting conversations with, not a group of people who are all about how smart they are.
I don't want to be biased before even going, though.
> not a group of people who are all about how smart they are.
You're going to be disappointed.
Seriously though, you can find incredibly intelligent people in the strangest of places. And you find less than you might think in the most obvious of places. Once you learn what to look for, I think it becomes easier to find people to have interesting conversations with. Personally, I find that curiosity about the world around you is a very good indicator of someone I would enjoy speaking with.
It's funny. I am fascinated by cryptozoology, but generally don't believe cryptids exist. So you'd think skeptics' groups would be my jam? Turns out, nah. All the skeptics' groups I've tried aren't really all that interested in paranormal subjects, per se, just in their agreement that it doesn't exist. And the conversations often don't go much beyond that, so I quickly get bored.
Cryptozoology enthusiast groups are way more fun for me. I may not agree with most people there on whether Mothman exists, but we are 100% agreed that Mothman is awesome and we would like to spend more time talking about the story and what it means to people.
I used to be a regular at a Ruby meetup on similar grounds. I don't actually like the programming language itself very much, but I love Rubyists.
This largely comes down to local group culture. In my experience, in the U.S. at least, more rural groups seem better. I speculate that this is due to: (1) lack of alternatives for intellectual engagement and (2) demographics, specifically that older generations are more likely to join clubs and organizations of all kinds. Both of these would balance the trend of millennial professionals to only join such an organization out of arrogance.
The thing to remember is that one in fifty people qualifies to be in Mensa, which is not particularly selective or exclusive. This is 2% of the general population, not 2% of, for example, readers of Hacker News. Or 2% of software developers or 2% of people who read more than one book per year.
My experience with Mensa is from 20 years ago with the group in Chicago. I was in my twenties and my guess is that the average age of members was late-fifties. In theory, they were interested in recruiting younger people, in practice they were not interested in changing the activities in a way that would attract younger members, like focusing efforts to solve real-world problems. I felt they were more interested in showcasing depth in various atypical hobbies, or to simply talk about how smart they were. I was never in awe of anyone’s intellect. Pretty much just normal people. I don’t think I came across anyone that was exceptionally accomplished at anything.
It wasn't bad. The people were a little bland and John Galty, but I love playing board games. The main problem was that they call it a Chicago chapter, but it was way out in the suburbs. I assumed that it was to be as far away from black people as possible (along with its membership, I think I was the only black person at the first meeting I went to out of probably 60 people IIRC), but I assume bad faith.
edit: would recommend if you live nearby and treat it as a board gaming club.
edit2: also, if I remember correctly you could bring two guests to meetings, so you're not stuck with only Mensa members.
> To qualify for Mensa, you must have scored in the top 2 percent of the general population on any one of more than 200 accepted, standardized intelligence tests — including our Mensa Admission tests — at any point in your life. An estimated six million Americans are eligible for membership.
I've met some members. Their personalities are not what I would associate with the most intelligent people I've otherwise met. People who memorize digits of Pi come to mind.
You should have been memorizing Tau, of course! Don't embarrass the human race to our galactic neighbours. Imagine what we'd think of receiving a signal that was an encoding of e/2?
They used to allow you to join based on SAT scores. I know someone from that era. They don't seem very intelligent. I'm guessing they just studied a lot. Maybe it's the same for those people.
> in the top 2 percent of the general population on any one of more than 200 accepted
> An estimated six million Americans are eligible for membership.
That's not how it works. 6 million Americans is about 2%. It means that in order to have such a filter, you only have one chance on a single test. Not, "1 of more than 200 at any point in your life"
Out of 200 tests, even among those of the highest standards, you are bound to find one where you are particularly good at, and then you can try again several times, because you are unlikely to be at the exact same position every time. Furthermore, the "general population" includes people who are not in their best shape and yet, "any point in your life" tests your peak performance. And there is training of course.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than 10% in reality. By that I mean "pick a random person and give him a huge incentive (ex. millions of dollars) to pass". If we restrict to people who really want to join without further incentive, it may be way higher.
I've never been part of Mensa, but it seems like good concept for when it was created.
The basic problem a lot of bright people had -- in the days before telecommunications -- was that the only people you had access to lived on your own street. If you were a nerd, most were boring.
A lot of work went into finding interesting people, be that through ham radio, organizations like Mensa, universities (at the time, about 5% of people went to university), gifted programs, or other places nerds could congregate.
I don't see much point to Mensa in 2022, but I think the cynicism is unwarranted. What do you do when you have a social club which is suddenly obsoleted by cars, phones, air planes, and the internet?
>I've never been part of Mensa, but it seems like good concept for when it was created
"Let's create an wannabe intellectual elite club based on a controversial and not really representative test, milking suckers with paid tests, and giving them a false sense of achievement and superiority"
(and I score in the high range, it's not about sour grapes)
Is it better or worse than having a club for Ivy League schools? At least Mensa doesn't gate membership on political connections and class (yes by proxy, lets be charitable).
Tests in 1946 didn't have the same types of controversy as in 2022.
Prior to standardized testing, college admissions was literally based on belonging to a club. Rich parents would send you to a prep school, and admissions was based on admissions officers knowing the prep school (and grades, recommendations, etc. there-from). It was introduced to allow anyone from any socioeconomic background, and more demographic backgrounds, to be admitted based on ability rather than wealth. At the time, admissions rates to elite schools weren't nearly as cut-throat. A poor kid could study hard, take a test, and go to Harvard.
They didn't make the world equal, but they made it /more/ equal.
I really don't think the cynicism is warranted. Institutions go obsolete.
I don't think it's about wanting to be an intellectual (evidently, IQ has very little to do with that), but rathe about finding someone who might also be able to think in the same way you do, and socialize and talk with them.
I've found that there are people with whom I can share many thoughts and concepts as they pop into my head, and they will "get" it, maybe not agree, but they have the capacity to entertain my idea, bad as it may be. I find that kind of socializing very pleasant, and I much prefer it to "talking about weather and current events in sports and popculture" which also have it's place, but which can be discussed with a much broader selection of people.
And that's just me, and I'm not one of the smart ones, but if I can feel like that, I can only imagine that someone in the top 1 percentile would feel something similar, if stronger, and thus would need to make an extra effort to find such company.
If you don't feel like this, it's just very likely that you already have this need met from someone around you, and you've just never noticed?
Did you not read the thread you’re commenting in? There’s a very good reply just a few comments up explaining how the origins of MENSA seem much more reasonable to our modern sensibilities in a lower tech world.
Are you dismissing that perspective, or did you just not see it? Ranting about an IQ Club that you’re not a part of seems to me even more embarrassing than what you’re accusing them of. Does that make sense?
Maybe that last line is a bit harsh, but I presume MENSA has never negatively impacted your life - certainly not tangibly. This is my experience, and I have no interest in joining. Assuming the worst, and denigrating those that haven’t done anything to deserve it is immature at best, yet it’s something that we seem to be getting more comfortable with. It frustrates me.
Is either of those strongly linked to IQ? Anecdotally and in my experience not really.
You can get pretty far on this by implicitly grouping a certain set of interests into "nerdy" or whatever but that is highly culturally mediated. A generation ago video games and sci-fi would have been a core of that set, but those are just the culture now.
The most nerd energy I've ever run across outside of my own interests is in people who follow auto racing and sports. Fiber arts and baking too. Not typically considered or even recognized as valid nerdery but very similar kind and degree of interest.
I'd argue that people who want to be in a group of other high IQ people probably do feel superior to people who can't be in that group. Now, and in the past too. Whether that's a useful grouping or a warranted superiority I don't want to get into. But it's really not more complicated than that, sorry.
I think you're underestimating just how disconnected the world of 1946 was.
In 2022, it's awfully easy to find people into whatever you're into, and you can talk to them around the world. In 1946, if you were a physics nerd and you ran into a chemistry nerd or biology nerd, you'd be excited to have a friend who shared your interest in /science/.
As a footnote: Performance on a test like Mensa's is strongly culturally-mediated. I suspect most people can score decently with a bit of practice and training. I think the major question was:
- Do you want to talk about football and sports?
- Dating and gossip?
- Intellectual stuff
A lot of this also had to do with how people spend their time. It's a lot easier to be an intellectual / nerd in 2022 than in 1946. I have the world's information at my fingertips.
I joined mensa in two countries; I was involved in one, while in the other, I went only to one meeting.
The first had mostly regular table/social game events, and cultural events (e.g. chess competitions, museums, literature etc.).
I couldn't tell I was at a Mensa club, if not for the orientation of the cultural events, but especially... for the quantity of engineers :)
I remember there was at least one teenager at the social events, and I wouldn't even exclude that they just allowed them in because he was a friend of somebody - the atmosphere was relaxed and playful.
I'd totally join again a club like the first: 1. it was fun 2. the cultural activities were actually interesting 3. I'd network with SWEs. Which is, in some way, the attractive of Mensa - it definitely attracts nerds :)
Regarding me as a member of Mensa. I wouldn't qualify me obsessed with it; intelligence is a tool for me. And definitely I didn't enroll in college at 13 like some other HN readers :)
> being obsessed with your own intelligence is seemingly the primary criterion for joining Mensa
The parent says that scoring like an average person means they "really suck" or are "just dumb," so I think they have the right mentality for Mensa, even if their performance fell short.
Exactly. I don't know exactly what it is about intelligence, but people get really defensive about it. No one wants to be average or even slightly above average. People will go through a lot of mental hoops to stake a claim of incredible intelligence.
We don't do this with any other measure though. The difference being that most other measures can be measured. They run up against reality rather quickly. Am I tall? No. No shame in saying that. No shame in saying I'm around the average. Am I fast? Slow? Strong? Weak? Thin? Fat? How big are my feet? My hands? etc.
All can be measured and seen. All have physical manifestations I cannot argue against.
Intelligence. Well. That's a little more abstract. Abstract to a degree that we don't always recognize that Jeopardy is not really a "smart" game. It's a trivia game. You have to know things. That's not intelligence, that's knowledge.
You are describing a type in the context of a club of people interested in the opposites of the type. It could suggest you that the deviation may remain the interesting part.
I don't know if not wanting to perform boring activities in your free time is a great indicator of adhd. How far would a neurotypical person get into a long terms and conditions disclaimer before wanting to quit if there didn't seem to be a good/any reward?
ADHD brains crave novelty and mental stimulation. Random challenging quizzes are like crack to me, personally. Half of them I get bored with immediately and drop.
I've met plenty of people who've never left their metro area in the 3 decades they've been alive.
On the other hand, when my girlfriend asks me what I would like to do, she has to qualify it with: "inside of this state." I have driven across multiple states on a whim a few times over the past couple years.
The degree to which people crave novelty varies greatly.
Not too often you see someone being glib and pedantic at the same time. ADHD is at least related to a dopamine deficiency and those affected generally self-sooth by seeking stimulation.
Yeah. I did pretty well and I'm definitely not Mensa smart... but a lot of the middle questions were pretty easy to pick up on... or/nor/differences/unions...
And an opportunity for people looking for people with whom to have some productive exchange.
People who already tried some selection filter before (the IQ), will have no issue applying another afterwards (and discard e.g. the pure narcissists).
Worse, IQ tests are catnip for people who take IQ tests. If you practice IQ tests, your IQ will increase not because you've become smarter, but because you have more experience with IQ tests.
I have always wondered how do they say IQ tests can't be gamed or learned, but I never believed that. There really must be certain number of standard pattern matching ways that can be applied. Just cram these like leetcode and you should get better.
This, specially the pattern matching. Sequences, dominoes, there's not many ways they can be arranged. The first time people see them they will be stumped, but after knowing how they're made, the tested can figure how the testers think and answer them easily.
Another example is language and vocabulary, which are heavily influenced by culture and education. If IQ is going to measure education too, it would be valid to include number sequences that are the even digits if Euler's number, or names of famous astronomers without the vowels.
I did ok, but there were some puzzles that just didn't make sense to me. I suspect they were about rotating or reflecting. The xoring ones, though, those are my jam.
I don't think anyone who knows the xor trick behind the matrices questions can really say the test is measuring them. :-) Also I think it's funny that this comment thread will be giving 10 points of "practice effect" to everyone who reads it. We are ruining psychological research.
Is the trick just knowing what xor is? I haven't done anything like this before, but I did do EE as an undergrad so some xors just jump out at you, haha.
I think knowing xor is the trick because once you recognize it, the first half or so of the test becomes a bunch of questions that are exactly the same. It would be one thing if I thought they were equally easy (then I could imagine that I was just saturating them with my Giant Brain(tm)) but for them to be absolutely identical, I think, shows that the test isn't working anymore.
LMAO this mirrors my experience exactly. About 10 mins left...I was questioning what I'm doing with my life. Hey, there's a finish button already, let me click that and end this thing. Does that count the rest as wrong? It wasn't clear.
There's no way they're not accounting for selection bias. This isn't on online poll where you score among x% of people who took the test. They give the test to a (hopefully) representative sample and score you against that.
I don't think tests like this one are calibrated by those who happen to take it online. I believe they calibrate these tests by looking at a known test taker's results and comparing them to other test results. The other tests would be the high quality ones used in psychology that have a much larger, less biased selection of test takers.
And expected, most of us have to fall in the middle of the bell, only the very outliers will be at the extremes. It's normal to think one's very gifted, even boasting about it, but maturing is realizing that most of us are average.
At least we can get solace in knowing that intelligence and work is what makes great things, either alone is weak.
> I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve.
Congratulations! You're in possession of the statistically perfectly normal pattern matching skills!
A score of 100 means that you're as good in pattern matching as a normal human being, assuming the test is served and adjusted to a varied enough population.
This being Mensa, an organisation that's known of attracting people who think they are smart, your normal pattern matching skill might still be statistically better than the rest of the populace. Or it might mean that you're normal according to Norwegian standards, which doesn't necessarily say anything about your country. Or it could mean that you're above intelligent but not raised in a western, white society, because IQ measurement is culturally sensitive as well.
The homepage doesn't give any details about the population the IQ test was measured against, so it's hard to say what the end result means. Higher number = better pattern matching skills, that's the best explanation I can think of.
Oh you absolutely can train for an IQ test. It's not just pattern matching but also measures one's ability to abstract, and working memory and stuff.
The question is to what degree would IQ-test-specific training help you? I'd guess that it would, and it would be measurable and statistically significant, but not that impressive.
I randomly guessed for the last six questions because it was getting boring and still ended up with 121. https://i.imgur.com/hgXGoXn.png Some of the pattern addition / subtraction stuff was neat though.
I also don't put a lot of faith into IQ tests. I've met some incredibly smart people, on paper, who are incredibly dumb when it comes to common sense.
If you don't put a lot of faith in IQ tests, I think it should be for a different reason. Intelligence and common sense are two independent things and an IQ test only attempts to measure one of them.
121 sounds reasonable if you guessed the last six ones. What the test measures is essentially how many questions you get right before you start guessing, whether out of boredom or because you don't have enough time to figure the questions out (the test cannot really differentiate between those two). For reference, I scored 133 and had to guess the last three or four ones; this is consistent with the last time I did a test like this several years ago.
Are you sure you got bored, and didn't just run out of time like me? :P
I don't believe you got bored on the questions, they were hard enough that I did some screenshots to think on them afterwards, and I needed to spend 5 minutes with each of those before they cracked xD
I had to go through these things with a psychologist when i was in school and beeing suspended.
My focus is very fragile, but these kinds of test actually satisfy so much that I am not paying any attention to the clock ticking.
These tasks stimulate the mind, imo.
Anyways, I am only scoring the average, nowadays.
Now i know, that there are things I can excel at, but at others I dont.
These kind of tests were complemented with a few other days, where I had to answer questions, recall stories, talk about things fascinating me, myself and my opinions, picture interpretations, sequences of digits, multiple choices and other things I cant recall.
At the start of the following week, these test were rated for multiple sections of knowledge. Then, the average IQ was estimated.
What I want to say is: This is only part of the actual estimation. It is the first test, who actually reminded me of these tests.
I did not suceed in school. I did start consume drugs on purpose, getting rejected from my school and only did the necessarities.
After a few years working, I did start wondering about knowledge and started to pursue studies.
If there is a topic that facinates you, such test would complement one.
In the end we are all median overall.
Sounds like a lot of smart people with ADHD I know:
- Fragile focus (well put)
- Drug use
- Rejected from school
- Humble as hell despite being obviously brilliant (just read through a bunch of your comments)
Not saying you have it, but if you're still looking for answers perhaps it's something to look into. It's quite treatable too, if you struggle with anything.
Same here. The last 15 I just randomly clicked anything with 10 mins left on the clock because I got bored and wanted to see the end. Still scored 105 so maybe I was lucky...
No, it appears the test is quite calibrated based on these HN comments. You got a bit more than half of them before starting to guess, so you got a slightly higher than average result.
If an IQ-based club sets its threshold too high, then it might end up accepting Mozart but excluding Beethoven. I'd personally find that fascinating, but the other 100% of the population would probably find it incoherent at best.
If an IQ-based club sets its threshold low enough to include a Beethoven, then it's no longer really an IQ-based club. (E.g., our threshold is "Edgar" because we want the smartest people and also we really like Edgar's output.)
Edit: I changed "Edgar" above to "Edgar's output." Let me explain:
Mozart had the "bigger brain," but Beethoven obsessed over a narrower set of techniques and devoted his life to exploring every facet of them (much to the detriment of everything else in his life). Probably for that reason, his output is considered to be at a comparable level by most historians. This is true even by modernist analysis standards which attempt to exclude considerations like influence.
You can probably find similar cases straddling any IQ threshold, where you want to include output from X and Y even though Y's IQ didn't meet your threshold.
Benchmarking cognitive functions should be much more interesting than it currently is, with data tracking progress and regression. I feel like the tests are too focused on low level raw hardware bandwith of simple tasks, and not enough on semantic reading comprehension and problem solving. E.g robustness against cognitive biases should be benchmarked, thinking outside of the boxes/ solutions by transpositions/free associations should too.
Such a toolset would also help measure the effect of nootropics differently, vs e.g. the magnesium threonate ~9 IQ points increase
Maybe I'm in the low IQ bracket but I suspect i would score higher if i knew what kind of changes/patterns are allowed. You can probably learn and train for this kind of test pretty effectively by just building a mental checklist for possible patterns to check against.
In India, there is a selection test happens for schools called JNV[1]. These are schools designed for talented underprivileged kids who grew in mostly rural areas.
The selection test actually uses this format of pattern recognition to judge abilities of 10-11 years old kids.
I thought that’s pretty neat given how universal pattern recognition is and it helps remove bias from selection process towards kids who can’t afford extra classes to pass the exam.
A decade or so back my son applied for one of the few remaining state selective schools in London. About 2000 applied for 100 places. Admission was by similar tests, including verbal and non-verbal reasoning. Despite the claims you can't game these tests, many people use tutors. We didn't, but I bought him all the non-verbal reasoning papers I could find online. He practised a lot, and over six months progressively raised his mark from around 70% (not high enough to get in) to 100% on the final practice paper he did a couple of days before the entrance exam. I'm sure you need some native aptitude, but it's not at all clear to me these really help remove selection bias.
My son told me that when a new teacher gives them a word-search or visual puzzle, they kids will have finished before the teacher has finishing handing them out. On the other hand, he also tells me common sense isn't so common there, so things do tend to balance out in strange ways.
Yup. New York has a gifted and talented test that's supposed to require no preparation, but kids are competing with other kids who have spent time/effort/money to prepare: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=new+york+gifted
I took the test to be part of Mensa when I was 17. It was a one hour or two hours test? I think. I remember I got very bored by the end and I stopped paying attention to the questions and I started to answer without doing all the analysis it was required.
I passed it and I was part of the the society. I found it quite weird because the rest of the people didn't look like "smart" or "intelligent" or whatever you could think of Mensa people.
At the end I just decided that they (we) were good at identifying patterns. I stopped paying after one or two years.
I think Mensa is on the lower end of high IQ societies. IIRC. I think they accept people who test in the 135 range, which is uncommon, but not horribly so. Like in the 2% range. So, 1 in 50 people. There's another group called the Triple-9 society which only takes people who test in the 99.9% percentile (hence the clever name).
Mensa and other high IQ societies consist of people who have enough time to dedicate to being in a high IQ society.
That should tell you enough about the motivation and mindset of the people in it.
Like everyone there was probably technically intelligent, but they've convinced themselves that that alone was enough to lead them to the land of milk and honey. Like they say, hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Being intelligent isn't enough, you have to acquire knowledge and you have to apply that knowledge.
>Mensa and other high IQ societies consist of people who have enough time to dedicate to being in a high IQ society.
They also consist of people who (stupidly) attribute a lot more value to IQ than it deserves. I got a 135 on this test, I am not smarter than Richard Feynman.
I bet that IMO/IPhO medalists are a LOT smarter than Triple-9 people.
(Yes, I know that Feynman underwent an actual physical examination, and his score was probably lowered by his poor English skills, but my point still stands: smart people typically don't have extremely high IQs.)
Most career data shows that once you reach 125-130 IQ or so, it stops really being a factor in career success, and other things matter more: grit, interpersonal skills, etc.
Being at the 99.9% level is impressive to be sure, but it doesn't seem to translate to much tangible benefit in our current society.
Close. The data said that at the 125-130 range, there's nothing that you cannot do, mentally.
Basically, they tested people from all walks of life and they found that the skill with the highest threshold was about 125-130.
People with higher IQs may be able to do or learn things better or faster, but it's possible for anyone to achieve that level if they put in the work. IQ just tells you basically how much work it will take.
I had the same thought. As soon as you recognize that there are only a handful of categories of patterns, recognizing the solution is just a matter of matching your question against a known pattern (e.g. this row rotates, you combine the two shapes to produce a third, this shape moves and this one doesn't, etc)
Taking a few of these over and over would quickly attune you to what to look for.
I suppose in a perfect world, you'd be able to generate a test with tricks the participant hadn't seen before to test how quickly a person could cultivate a list of patterns to check each question against.
Not everyone is capable of doing this. Ironically people with low IQ would have quite a difficulty practicing for an IQ test. At the same time, the effects of practice are me rather small compared to where people place on the curve before and after training.
I wonder about the effect of a strict time limit. It seems to benefit time management skills over raw intelligence. Perhaps it would be more accurate to allow the test taker to finish the entire test while tracking time spent, and then use time spent to adjust the score.
Unfortunately The time limit seems the only way to limit this type of test. There's only a certain number of types of problems they have. If you can solve one in a class, you can solve any in that class. There wouldn't be enough ways to discriminate results without time.
Interesting, but the reason I personally avoid IQ tests is they are like horoscopes or having your fortune told, where it creates the conditions for subtle attribution errors that can really compound over time. When I was a kid, the answer I got from my parents was along the lines of, "they didn't get a number, but you're on the high end, and so you have to be extra careful about being lazy because IQ doesn't mean much."
In terms of outcomes, what is there to say, that I'm really good at arguing on the internet? I can appreciate a lot of things while not being able to do them. Sure, I can start as an adult what most people do as kids (music, arts, languages, tech) and become a passable amateur pretty quickly, but the adult mind is irritating to teach because it has to reconcile everything new with its idea of self, and unhooking that adult ego is a heavier and heavier lift.
Intelligence is entertaining, but domain specific practice and competence prevail almost every time. I suspect the best use of a high IQ is probably to teach because that scales it. By itself, it mostly produces interesting guests.
I got 117, but I didn't skip any. Time ran out at 24-25, can't remember. I'm skeptical at what pattern recognition has to do with intelligence to be honest. I'm 45 and been programming since my teenage years, maybe that has been helpful as most if not all patterns in these tests are basically combinations of bitwise operations. Back in university I did the Swedish version of this (~20 years ago) and scored 140+. I don't think I did any worse now. I've heard the scale is constantly calibrated, so I guess people in general are smarter nowadays :-)
I tried it, and now I'm wondering what some of those patterns in the low-mid-30's were (I don't recall the specific numbers, but probably around 32 or 33), because I was completely lost when I got to those. I'm more interested in what those patterns were than their assessment of what it means with regard to my IQ.
I didn't take the test but it might involve sudoku. I remember taking a test of similar fashion some time ago, and the final (hardest) question completely threw me off. I got curious and asked others, and was told it's sudoku related.
There was one where is started getting to XOR. Going left to right if the line in the first box matched the line in the second block, it was not found in the third block.
Seems like it stopped being about pattern matching versus logical constraint identification and application.
Yeah, I got the AND and XOR ones. It was immediately after those, I think the first one might have been filled small circles and boxes on the left and right of a center vertical line. They were all at the bottom, making me think it might have to do with some symbolic counting, but I didn't come up with anything. the next 2-3 with the center vertical line I didn't get either, so conceptually there's maybe something about the vertical line I wasn't grasping.
I found the the filled and unfilled flags on diagonal lines, the filled and unfilled boxes separated by a vertical line, and the dots and box separated by a vertical line difficult. I was running out of time, but thought it may have something to do with shifting and/or mirroring the position of the figures, and/or a base 3 representation but couldn't come up with a generalizable pattern.
I didn't see anything which suggested that its better to attempt and fail or skip and complete as many as possible, which would definitely affect time management strategy.
Are you talking about the ones with the line and the filled / non-filled squares, or with the striped / non-striped flags? I couldn't make sense of them either.
Yeah, those ones. Most of the questions seemed to separate into groups where a conceptual idea was explored, and it feels like I just didn't see/understand the concept those were attempting, so I'm interested in what I was missing.
I stopped after 5 minutes (don't have so much time) and got 102. I guess thats what I am: average, not because of lacking potential, but due to lacking perseverance...
I didn’t see where you could see the answers. Was there a spot?
I made it to 29 (feel like I knew all of the ones before that, but who knows?). But #29 threw me. It is the one with the like down the center, and columns of either solid or stroked boxes on either side. No clue what the pattern was there.
My guess was that boxes of the same color on the same side of the line sum, but boxes of the same color on different sides of the line cancel each other out. That yielded an answer that was one of the 5 given possibilities.
Yeah, that's probably what they were going for. These kinds of puzzles are pretty bogus though. You could choose any number of ways to interpret each cell as some logical expression, and then choose from any number of functions that make the truth table valid with any result you want in the blank cell. At that point, you just have to guess which of those functions the test writers thought was the most "natural" or "elegant" or "clever," but there's really no objective sense in which one is more correct than the other (unless you literally define the purpose of the test as measuring the ability of the test taker to predict the intent of the test writer).
To use a simpler example with integer sequences, if the question asked for the next integer in this sequence:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ?
Most of us probably immediately think "ooh, the test writer is very clever because they know about the Fibonacci sequence, and I'm clever too, so the correct answer is obviously 13. But wait! What if the intended sequence is the number of strict odd-length integer partitions of 2n, and thus the correct answer is 11 [0]? What if the intended sequence is the number of balanced ordered trees with n nodes, and the correct answer is 14 [1]? Heck, what if the intended sequence is Fibonacci(n) mod 10, and the correct answer is 3? There is an infinite set of functions from the integers to the integers which give you the 7 provided results for n=0 through n=6, and you can get any result you want for n=7 by just choosing among those functions. There is absolutely no mathematical or logical way to prefer any one of those functions to any other.
It is like Super Symmetry, you can concoct any number of basis functions to match the desired output, I feel like I have to be extra smart to figure out the one they want.
Yes, I had exactly that thought as I was going through it. I could see many times a pattern, but was it the pattern that they wanted? Pretty small samples to triangulate on.
Not sure I'll do it, but I'm contented with not being a genius and still trying to hold informed opinions and trying to think critically. I've done well enough given my circumstances. It's probably not all attributable to hard work, and there's probably a bit of "nature" there (as well as often being endearing to people), but I know I'm not extremely intelligent, just somewhat (as not to be needlessly contrarian with people who insist I'm smart, gotta give at some point).
It's alright, Mensa can be for the people with the big brains.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread> Your IQ lies outside the area that the test is able to measure.
You're god damn right. But aside... No, that's definitely not the correct conclusion from an incomplete testing dataset.
I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people. If it's just to join Mensa then whatever, but I'd hate to think life-affecting decisions are made based on whether you guessed or inferred which combination of cross, box, and dot come next
The speed at which a person can recognize patterns correlates strongly with their ability to learn in general.
The reason they use shapes is because it's a more universal measurement. Using words introduces issues with a person's ability to speak that language.
How well would you do on any test written in Japanese? Assuming you never learned Japanese. Probably poorly. But if you knew a little bit of Japanese, you might do fine on a math test. And that's the idea with shape-based tests: trying to minimize the influence that language comprehension has on the results because you want the results to be neutral.
No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests. They care about the things an IQ test can predict.
They are good at predicting the ability to do IQ tests!
Seriously though - aren't they still fairly controversial? I have strong doubts on an intuitive level.
Here's a nice short book which cites a lot of literature: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...
There's even a vox explainer on it, hard to believe they would publish this today: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence
1. It seems fairly widely reported that you can practice at IQ tests and get better. Are there any studies confirming or denying this? I presume you'd agree that if true it rather kills the validity of IQ tests dead.
2. I have ADHD and I'm acutely aware of how environmental factors affect my performance in many tasks. How do you square this with the idea that they measure an objective innate quality?
3. How do you account for the Flynn Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect - are people getting smarter?
4. What's your thoughts on the argument that it's impossible to create genuinely culture free tests? This was something I was taught at college and it made sense to me then. Has it been debunked? Conclusively?
5. Steven Jay Gould wrote an entire book critiquing IQ tests : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man - do any of the points he raises stand up to scrutiny?
(3) is very interesting and there is not yet any agreement as to what is causing it. Flynn seems to have thought our culture is slowly becoming better at training us to think abstractly. There's some evidence for this: one Australian study found that over 20 years the students in a set of schools became better at a vocabulary test but did not improve at all in processing speed. This is not what you would expect to see if the improvements were due to better nutrition or less environmental lead.
For (5), haven't read it. He's stunningly erudite and a careful author though, it's worth taking him seriously. Do you have some examples of points he raised?
2. Environmental factors affect everything. You try to standardise them as much as possible for an operational definition of the thing you're measuring. You will never succeed completely. Nevertheless IQ tests time correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
3. Not sure anybody really understands what's going on with the Flynn effect. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
4. I'm sure it is in fact impossible on some level to create genuinely culture free tests. If we're going to be anal about this, this is a consequence of the various no-free-lunch theorems in statistical inference. For any culture/person/algorithm there are problems where they'll do better relative to others, and problems where they'll do worse. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
5. I'm sure they do, but I haven't read the book and the summary in the Wikipedia article is too vague to tell.
None of these objections actually engage with the parent comment's assertion that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities".
IQ tests, or any standardized tests for that matter, blow up this assumption as do aggregated data showing differentials across groups or even nations, and that intelligence as even crudely measured by IQ tests which is just a proxy for something that isn't so precise, still correlates with general positive outcomes in life such as earning potential, health, career success, national achievement in science etc. It is also not politically correct that this dynamic is largely a biological phenomenon, that intelligence like many other physical characteristics is heritable.
This is why generalized IQ tests were banned from job interviews because not everyone scored the same, which is politically incorrect and unacceptable in our current political climate.
Basically for the liberal "left" which dominates western culture, "equality" is almost a religious belief, in opposition to any acknowledgement or even promotion of hierarchies, or recognition of inequality as an objective reality of human existence. Anything that undermines "equality" and points to natural hierarchy is "controversial" not allowed.[0]
[0] A random example, but there are many, of unacceptable differentiation when it comes to group cognitive outcomes. And elimination of standardized tests or advanced classes in the name of "equality" and against any instances of "inequality"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/04/californ...
They are not controversial at all amongst psychologists. The notion that IQ tests have predictive power is about as settled as the notion that "people get sad sometimes".
/s
For what? (Correlations are interesting scientifically of course, but for everyone else?)
> No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests.
Except for Mensa and their applicants.
I don't mind IQ research. I do mind exclusive clubs for the sake of exclusivity, and especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria. It smells bad.
What I'm skeptical of is applying stereotyping - and that's what this is, it's s predictive model that's based on averages, not the individual - to any kind of real decision that's any more weighty that letting you into a club. Like education decisions for example.
It is also aversion or even policy regulation against even giving tests and acting on the results towards individuals, as this entails inevitable discrimination when the natural and unavoidable hierarchy of human abilities is observed.
Similar tests, like the SAT and GRE, are designed to work even with practice. They have other problems.
IQ is very much so not genetically determined. See for instance the flynn effect which is happening far too fast to be the result of genetics. IQ is only ~50% heritable.
? what is your stance on, e.g., competitive sports teams ?
Pattern recognition is a large part of that. A person who is able to discern patterns more easily, is usually able to reason better. More able to do second and third order thinking.
IQ "tests" that use words or numbers are also testing knowledge to some degree, which isn't something you typically want when you want to test raw intelligence. Being able to do calculus doesn't necessarily prove you're intelligent, it proves you know calculus.
So that leaves abstract concepts. And that's another facet of intelligence, being able to think abstractly. There should also be some "die folding" questions in there. Where it shows you six connected boxes and you pick the cube that it makes. That one is also about spatial relations as you have to model the cube in your head in some fashion.
All that being said: intelligence is nothing on its own. It's a force multiplier. Intelligence allows you to use the knowledge and skills you do have better. It also makes the acquisition of knowledge and skills easier. People with higher IQs have better life outcomes on average than those with lower IQs among every cohort. What that means, if you take all the poor people, those poor people with higher IQs are going to be doing better overall. Still poor, but able to make more of what they have. Tall people? People with higher IQs will be doing better overall than those with lower IQs. Doctors? Same. Welders? Same.
Now, this doesn't mean that every person with a higher IQ is doing better. Success is very multi-faceted and dependent on a lot of things, some of which are outside of our control entirely. But it helps.
There are awards, patents, accomplishments, etc.
There are positive correlations between IQ and positive outcomes in general. Basically, take a metric of success and group people into it and you'll find people with higher IQs in the groups with better outcomes.
Even if you then slice those groups by other factors.
Second, why would we even have to cut off the tail portion?
Next, you didn't cover that contingency. You keep saying it's all income levels, but it's not. IQ and positive outcomes are positively correlated. Pick a thing, pick a measure of success, you'll find that people with higher IQs will tend towards the successful group.
And this is also a "all doctors are tall, not all tall people are doctors" kind of statistic. Higher IQ people will wind up in the more successful groups more often, but being in the more successful group doesn't mean you have a high IQ.
It has a time limit, so it does measure how quick you are.
So it probably bakes in a range. Like if you complete this test in the allotted time, you will be in this range. But if you completed it in half the time, you'd probably be higher, but they haven't calculated the range you'd be in. They'd just say, "Yeah, you're in the top range".
Last patterns were boolean logic, for example 3 or 4 tests were just XOR stuff, another was AND, another was summing, and so on...
I ended with a score lower than my usual, because I wasn't really paying attention... and bored.
To be fair, most people don’t understand how paracetamol helps reduce pain. But it does and we are able to measure its effect, so we have scientific studies that prove it. It doesn’t matter if you understand how it works, it does.
Same with IQ tests. It’s not about the pattern matching. It’s about the fact that a huge mountain of scientific literature have found these measures of pattern-matching abilities to be correlated with a wide range of other abilities and accomplishments. If a persons ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time was a better predictor, then that is what we would use instead. It doesn’t matter if we understand why that would be the case. But ofcause everyone who scores less than they feel that they should end up trying to discredit the entire concept rather than just accept that their poor ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time does not define them, or impose any new limitations in their life.
I swear every discussion about IQ ends up feeling like a room full of short men debating if measuring tape is even reliable and debating if it’s even fair to say that tall men can reach thing on top shelves more easily since we live in a society with chairs, and there’s obviously something wrong because they have tons of arguments for why they are 6 feet tall, even though the measuring tape doesn’t agree. No one is saying that you can’t have an absolutely great life, or reach the tallest of shelves, being a short man. The fact that we can measure peoples height, and that certain things are different base on how tall you are doesn’t have to offend people.
But I agree that it is unfortunate to base the future of a person on a one-time test. That includes the finals in school or a day full of exams after a long semester.
Sounds to me that you have issues understanding directions so I think your result might be very much valid!
> This test consists of 35 problems
Unless we define "intelligence" broadly enough that transient or other factors are included. That might be valid but it's very different to what most people think IQ tests should measure.
I could have worked uninterrupted for 25 minutes.
Prompt followed.
I passed. I could solve many of them.
Oh, jerf, bragging about how you could join Mensa is like the canonical example of boorishness.
Yes, well, just about everyone I handed the book to "passed" as well, so... let's just say this isn't the strutbrag it may initially sound like. I did not attend school at Lake Wobegon where all the children were above average. It was an average school of average children. Either by an amazing coincidence we were all smart enough to join Mensa even so, or Mensa was sandbagging just a wee bit. You do the math, as the saying goes.
That Mensa's test is (intentionally or unintentionally) shit is also a plausible explanation.
I remember Isaac Asimov claimed he never completed an IQ test, but he did one that was supposed to take 60 minutes, and stopped after 30, scoring 125. He assumed this meant he must have a 250 IQ. (In jest, of course.)
:)
The patterns you see on the test introduce progressively more and more changes, until you are getting beyond 9 changes a piece at 120+ IQ. Let me know if you have any questions.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12993-chimps-outperfo...
I don't think this is a very valuable way to think about IQ. It is what it is, nothing more nothing less. It's the location you fall on in a normal distribution of intelligence as measured by specific tests.
You could very reasonably label the outcome of that test a movement quotient.
It doesn't mean you aren't going to see big differences in results when you test it which is why they do it.
Peterson also says that it doesn't matter which questions you use. People with hi scores on one test will typically have high scores on the other tests.
It seems to be a hard thing for intelligent creatures to hear:
There are some smarter that you and some less smart and you are most likely in the middle range somewhere.
This always seemed to me like an important piece of social intelligence. I've noticed that people who are intelligent enough to be smarter than most around them, but who take that to mean nobody else is as smart as they are, end up getting played a lot by other folks who recognize this failure.
It isn't "Mental Horsepower" though. If something called "Mental Horsepower" or "General Intelligence" exist which I don't personally buy, IQ probably correlates with them but it isn't them.
IQ is a location on the point of a normalized distribution of scores on a specific set of tests. Nothing more, nothing less.
Correlations don't guarantee things to be true. If IQ correlates strongly with "Mental Horsepower" it could still be very possible for a specific individual to have high IQ with low "Mental Horsepower" although it is statistically less likely.
This is completely contrary to the evidence we have. Creativity is correlated with IQ and inversely correlated with age. A lot of famous artists in a variety of fields are recognized to be quite intelligent. Most creative arts programs in universities are highly competitive; perhaps the most competitive of any college in a university. And a surprising number of famous musicians have degrees in other difficult fields, for example the lead singer of the band The Offspring has a Ph.D in biology.
Additionally, it has been observed that papers written by younger mathematicians are much more likely to have novel approaches to solving problems. Suggesting that younger minds are more creative than older ones.
Often discussions regarding IQ seem to get bogged down in debates around the definition and value of intelligence, or the ability of an IQ test to accurately measure it. But whatever your opinion on what IQ tests are measuring, IQ has undoubtably been shown to have a high statistical predictability for many of the positive (and negative) life outcomes we're interested in as a society. For example, if you score higher on an IQ test you're statistically much less likely to go to prison and much more likely to have a higher income.
Personally I think IQ is something worth thinking about in the context of group behaviour and performance. For example, at the level of a nation it's worth measuring mean IQ and being concerned about any persistant annual declines in IQ, or simply to understand why some cohorts might have significantly higher or lower IQs. On the level of the individual I'd question how useful it is.
Then the nation should filter its immigrants by IQ and promote natality for the most smart stratum of its own people.
As research using twins followed by 30 years in adoptive family claims majority of IQ is genetic.[1]
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
At about the 3/4 mark, I guess, some of the patterns were really hard to figure out, and the clock is ticking. My mind goes to "wait, I kind of suck at pictorial pattern matching with so many different objects", and "is that the only judge of my IQ? What is mensa? Oh wait, clock ticking, not bored out of my mind"... I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve. I guess I really suck at pattern matching, or I am just dumb. They want you in the very top for mensa.
Editing for the skimmer who will not read the implicit: it's about an interest in meta-skills, transversal, exportable.
I don't want to be biased before even going, though.
You're going to be disappointed.
Seriously though, you can find incredibly intelligent people in the strangest of places. And you find less than you might think in the most obvious of places. Once you learn what to look for, I think it becomes easier to find people to have interesting conversations with. Personally, I find that curiosity about the world around you is a very good indicator of someone I would enjoy speaking with.
Cryptozoology enthusiast groups are way more fun for me. I may not agree with most people there on whether Mothman exists, but we are 100% agreed that Mothman is awesome and we would like to spend more time talking about the story and what it means to people.
I used to be a regular at a Ruby meetup on similar grounds. I don't actually like the programming language itself very much, but I love Rubyists.
In my experience, interesting conversations involve people with interests (and navel-gazing is antithetical to that).
My experience with Mensa is from 20 years ago with the group in Chicago. I was in my twenties and my guess is that the average age of members was late-fifties. In theory, they were interested in recruiting younger people, in practice they were not interested in changing the activities in a way that would attract younger members, like focusing efforts to solve real-world problems. I felt they were more interested in showcasing depth in various atypical hobbies, or to simply talk about how smart they were. I was never in awe of anyone’s intellect. Pretty much just normal people. I don’t think I came across anyone that was exceptionally accomplished at anything.
edit: would recommend if you live nearby and treat it as a board gaming club.
edit2: also, if I remember correctly you could bring two guests to meetings, so you're not stuck with only Mensa members.
I feel like that could be the Yelp review for every Mensa club.
> To qualify for Mensa, you must have scored in the top 2 percent of the general population on any one of more than 200 accepted, standardized intelligence tests — including our Mensa Admission tests — at any point in your life. An estimated six million Americans are eligible for membership.
I've met some members. Their personalities are not what I would associate with the most intelligent people I've otherwise met. People who memorize digits of Pi come to mind.
Hey, I feel attacked. What's wrong with memorizing digits of Pi?
In fact, if we use base-π representation then π=1 and memorisation is trivial. QED.
> An estimated six million Americans are eligible for membership.
That's not how it works. 6 million Americans is about 2%. It means that in order to have such a filter, you only have one chance on a single test. Not, "1 of more than 200 at any point in your life"
Out of 200 tests, even among those of the highest standards, you are bound to find one where you are particularly good at, and then you can try again several times, because you are unlikely to be at the exact same position every time. Furthermore, the "general population" includes people who are not in their best shape and yet, "any point in your life" tests your peak performance. And there is training of course.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than 10% in reality. By that I mean "pick a random person and give him a huge incentive (ex. millions of dollars) to pass". If we restrict to people who really want to join without further incentive, it may be way higher.
The basic problem a lot of bright people had -- in the days before telecommunications -- was that the only people you had access to lived on your own street. If you were a nerd, most were boring.
A lot of work went into finding interesting people, be that through ham radio, organizations like Mensa, universities (at the time, about 5% of people went to university), gifted programs, or other places nerds could congregate.
I don't see much point to Mensa in 2022, but I think the cynicism is unwarranted. What do you do when you have a social club which is suddenly obsoleted by cars, phones, air planes, and the internet?
"Let's create an wannabe intellectual elite club based on a controversial and not really representative test, milking suckers with paid tests, and giving them a false sense of achievement and superiority"
(and I score in the high range, it's not about sour grapes)
Prior to standardized testing, college admissions was literally based on belonging to a club. Rich parents would send you to a prep school, and admissions was based on admissions officers knowing the prep school (and grades, recommendations, etc. there-from). It was introduced to allow anyone from any socioeconomic background, and more demographic backgrounds, to be admitted based on ability rather than wealth. At the time, admissions rates to elite schools weren't nearly as cut-throat. A poor kid could study hard, take a test, and go to Harvard.
They didn't make the world equal, but they made it /more/ equal.
I really don't think the cynicism is warranted. Institutions go obsolete.
I've found that there are people with whom I can share many thoughts and concepts as they pop into my head, and they will "get" it, maybe not agree, but they have the capacity to entertain my idea, bad as it may be. I find that kind of socializing very pleasant, and I much prefer it to "talking about weather and current events in sports and popculture" which also have it's place, but which can be discussed with a much broader selection of people.
And that's just me, and I'm not one of the smart ones, but if I can feel like that, I can only imagine that someone in the top 1 percentile would feel something similar, if stronger, and thus would need to make an extra effort to find such company.
If you don't feel like this, it's just very likely that you already have this need met from someone around you, and you've just never noticed?
Maybe that last line is a bit harsh, but I presume MENSA has never negatively impacted your life - certainly not tangibly. This is my experience, and I have no interest in joining. Assuming the worst, and denigrating those that haven’t done anything to deserve it is immature at best, yet it’s something that we seem to be getting more comfortable with. It frustrates me.
> If you were a nerd, most were boring.
Is either of those strongly linked to IQ? Anecdotally and in my experience not really.
You can get pretty far on this by implicitly grouping a certain set of interests into "nerdy" or whatever but that is highly culturally mediated. A generation ago video games and sci-fi would have been a core of that set, but those are just the culture now.
The most nerd energy I've ever run across outside of my own interests is in people who follow auto racing and sports. Fiber arts and baking too. Not typically considered or even recognized as valid nerdery but very similar kind and degree of interest.
I'd argue that people who want to be in a group of other high IQ people probably do feel superior to people who can't be in that group. Now, and in the past too. Whether that's a useful grouping or a warranted superiority I don't want to get into. But it's really not more complicated than that, sorry.
In 2022, it's awfully easy to find people into whatever you're into, and you can talk to them around the world. In 1946, if you were a physics nerd and you ran into a chemistry nerd or biology nerd, you'd be excited to have a friend who shared your interest in /science/.
As a footnote: Performance on a test like Mensa's is strongly culturally-mediated. I suspect most people can score decently with a bit of practice and training. I think the major question was:
- Do you want to talk about football and sports?
- Dating and gossip?
- Intellectual stuff
A lot of this also had to do with how people spend their time. It's a lot easier to be an intellectual / nerd in 2022 than in 1946. I have the world's information at my fingertips.
To connect people who might have something to exchange. Not differently from HN, really.
I joined mensa in two countries; I was involved in one, while in the other, I went only to one meeting.
The first had mostly regular table/social game events, and cultural events (e.g. chess competitions, museums, literature etc.).
I couldn't tell I was at a Mensa club, if not for the orientation of the cultural events, but especially... for the quantity of engineers :)
I remember there was at least one teenager at the social events, and I wouldn't even exclude that they just allowed them in because he was a friend of somebody - the atmosphere was relaxed and playful.
I'd totally join again a club like the first: 1. it was fun 2. the cultural activities were actually interesting 3. I'd network with SWEs. Which is, in some way, the attractive of Mensa - it definitely attracts nerds :)
Regarding me as a member of Mensa. I wouldn't qualify me obsessed with it; intelligence is a tool for me. And definitely I didn't enroll in college at 13 like some other HN readers :)
The parent says that scoring like an average person means they "really suck" or are "just dumb," so I think they have the right mentality for Mensa, even if their performance fell short.
We don't do this with any other measure though. The difference being that most other measures can be measured. They run up against reality rather quickly. Am I tall? No. No shame in saying that. No shame in saying I'm around the average. Am I fast? Slow? Strong? Weak? Thin? Fat? How big are my feet? My hands? etc.
All can be measured and seen. All have physical manifestations I cannot argue against.
Intelligence. Well. That's a little more abstract. Abstract to a degree that we don't always recognize that Jeopardy is not really a "smart" game. It's a trivia game. You have to know things. That's not intelligence, that's knowledge.
You are describing a type in the context of a club of people interested in the opposites of the type. It could suggest you that the deviation may remain the interesting part.
> the primary criterion for joining
Improper formulation. Not that important, but.
I don't know if not wanting to perform boring activities in your free time is a great indicator of adhd. How far would a neurotypical person get into a long terms and conditions disclaimer before wanting to quit if there didn't seem to be a good/any reward?
On the other hand, when my girlfriend asks me what I would like to do, she has to qualify it with: "inside of this state." I have driven across multiple states on a whim a few times over the past couple years.
The degree to which people crave novelty varies greatly.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24997891/
Next time, check if your dismissive one-liner makes a valid point.
And an opportunity for people looking for people with whom to have some productive exchange.
People who already tried some selection filter before (the IQ), will have no issue applying another afterwards (and discard e.g. the pure narcissists).
Another example is language and vocabulary, which are heavily influenced by culture and education. If IQ is going to measure education too, it would be valid to include number sequences that are the even digits if Euler's number, or names of famous astronomers without the vowels.
Well, no, that'd be average, not dumb.
At least we can get solace in knowing that intelligence and work is what makes great things, either alone is weak.
Congratulations! You're in possession of the statistically perfectly normal pattern matching skills!
A score of 100 means that you're as good in pattern matching as a normal human being, assuming the test is served and adjusted to a varied enough population.
This being Mensa, an organisation that's known of attracting people who think they are smart, your normal pattern matching skill might still be statistically better than the rest of the populace. Or it might mean that you're normal according to Norwegian standards, which doesn't necessarily say anything about your country. Or it could mean that you're above intelligent but not raised in a western, white society, because IQ measurement is culturally sensitive as well.
The homepage doesn't give any details about the population the IQ test was measured against, so it's hard to say what the end result means. Higher number = better pattern matching skills, that's the best explanation I can think of.
Math, history even reading comprehension are all affected by that.
IQ testing has sort of settled on pattern matching as a measure of IQ that isn’t correlated with your education or culture you grew up in.
Personally I still don’t believe you can’t train for an IQ test.
The question is to what degree would IQ-test-specific training help you? I'd guess that it would, and it would be measurable and statistically significant, but not that impressive.
Anyone who plays Sudoku, Chess or enjoys abstract algebra would have had an advantage.
I also don't put a lot of faith into IQ tests. I've met some incredibly smart people, on paper, who are incredibly dumb when it comes to common sense.
- Let readers know you didn't really try for the last 6 questions
- Took a screenshot of your score to share?!
I don't believe you got bored on the questions, they were hard enough that I did some screenshots to think on them afterwards, and I needed to spend 5 minutes with each of those before they cracked xD
These kind of tests were complemented with a few other days, where I had to answer questions, recall stories, talk about things fascinating me, myself and my opinions, picture interpretations, sequences of digits, multiple choices and other things I cant recall. At the start of the following week, these test were rated for multiple sections of knowledge. Then, the average IQ was estimated.
What I want to say is: This is only part of the actual estimation. It is the first test, who actually reminded me of these tests.
I did not suceed in school. I did start consume drugs on purpose, getting rejected from my school and only did the necessarities. After a few years working, I did start wondering about knowledge and started to pursue studies.
If there is a topic that facinates you, such test would complement one. In the end we are all median overall.
:)
- Fragile focus (well put)
- Drug use
- Rejected from school
- Humble as hell despite being obviously brilliant (just read through a bunch of your comments)
Not saying you have it, but if you're still looking for answers perhaps it's something to look into. It's quite treatable too, if you struggle with anything.
If an IQ-based club sets its threshold low enough to include a Beethoven, then it's no longer really an IQ-based club. (E.g., our threshold is "Edgar" because we want the smartest people and also we really like Edgar's output.)
Edit: I changed "Edgar" above to "Edgar's output." Let me explain:
Mozart had the "bigger brain," but Beethoven obsessed over a narrower set of techniques and devoted his life to exploring every facet of them (much to the detriment of everything else in his life). Probably for that reason, his output is considered to be at a comparable level by most historians. This is true even by modernist analysis standards which attempt to exclude considerations like influence.
You can probably find similar cases straddling any IQ threshold, where you want to include output from X and Y even though Y's IQ didn't meet your threshold.
I thought that’s pretty neat given how universal pattern recognition is and it helps remove bias from selection process towards kids who can’t afford extra classes to pass the exam.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawahar_Navodaya_Vidyalaya
My son told me that when a new teacher gives them a word-search or visual puzzle, they kids will have finished before the teacher has finishing handing them out. On the other hand, he also tells me common sense isn't so common there, so things do tend to balance out in strange ways.
I passed it and I was part of the the society. I found it quite weird because the rest of the people didn't look like "smart" or "intelligent" or whatever you could think of Mensa people.
At the end I just decided that they (we) were good at identifying patterns. I stopped paying after one or two years.
Mensa and other high IQ societies consist of people who have enough time to dedicate to being in a high IQ society.
That should tell you enough about the motivation and mindset of the people in it.
Like everyone there was probably technically intelligent, but they've convinced themselves that that alone was enough to lead them to the land of milk and honey. Like they say, hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Being intelligent isn't enough, you have to acquire knowledge and you have to apply that knowledge.
They also consist of people who (stupidly) attribute a lot more value to IQ than it deserves. I got a 135 on this test, I am not smarter than Richard Feynman.
I bet that IMO/IPhO medalists are a LOT smarter than Triple-9 people.
(Yes, I know that Feynman underwent an actual physical examination, and his score was probably lowered by his poor English skills, but my point still stands: smart people typically don't have extremely high IQs.)
C'mon, Brooklyn is an accent not a disability!
Being at the 99.9% level is impressive to be sure, but it doesn't seem to translate to much tangible benefit in our current society.
Basically, they tested people from all walks of life and they found that the skill with the highest threshold was about 125-130.
People with higher IQs may be able to do or learn things better or faster, but it's possible for anyone to achieve that level if they put in the work. IQ just tells you basically how much work it will take.
Taking a few of these over and over would quickly attune you to what to look for.
I suppose in a perfect world, you'd be able to generate a test with tricks the participant hadn't seen before to test how quickly a person could cultivate a list of patterns to check each question against.
Not everyone is capable of doing this. Ironically people with low IQ would have quite a difficulty practicing for an IQ test. At the same time, the effects of practice are me rather small compared to where people place on the curve before and after training.
In terms of outcomes, what is there to say, that I'm really good at arguing on the internet? I can appreciate a lot of things while not being able to do them. Sure, I can start as an adult what most people do as kids (music, arts, languages, tech) and become a passable amateur pretty quickly, but the adult mind is irritating to teach because it has to reconcile everything new with its idea of self, and unhooking that adult ego is a heavier and heavier lift.
Intelligence is entertaining, but domain specific practice and competence prevail almost every time. I suspect the best use of a high IQ is probably to teach because that scales it. By itself, it mostly produces interesting guests.
around question 24 it got quite hard eventually.i had to skip 4 or 5 :-(
I suck at math BTW.
I didn't see anything which suggested that its better to attempt and fail or skip and complete as many as possible, which would definitely affect time management strategy.
A better version of this for our HN audience would be to measure the Lines of Code for our programs to reproduce such a test.
I made it to 29 (feel like I knew all of the ones before that, but who knows?). But #29 threw me. It is the one with the like down the center, and columns of either solid or stroked boxes on either side. No clue what the pattern was there.
Vg'f fvtarq nqqvgvba. Lbh gnxr gur yrsg funcrf nf artngvir naq gur evtug funcrf nf cbfvgvir naq nqq gur svefg gjb vzntrf gb neevir ng gur guveq.
To use a simpler example with integer sequences, if the question asked for the next integer in this sequence:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ?
Most of us probably immediately think "ooh, the test writer is very clever because they know about the Fibonacci sequence, and I'm clever too, so the correct answer is obviously 13. But wait! What if the intended sequence is the number of strict odd-length integer partitions of 2n, and thus the correct answer is 11 [0]? What if the intended sequence is the number of balanced ordered trees with n nodes, and the correct answer is 14 [1]? Heck, what if the intended sequence is Fibonacci(n) mod 10, and the correct answer is 3? There is an infinite set of functions from the integers to the integers which give you the 7 provided results for n=0 through n=6, and you can get any result you want for n=7 by just choosing among those functions. There is absolutely no mathematical or logical way to prefer any one of those functions to any other.
[0] https://oeis.org/A344650
[1] https://oeis.org/A007059
It's alright, Mensa can be for the people with the big brains.