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Comment by jyap | Hacker News Reader

Having taken the test and scoring an average 73 or so and then looking at the Twitter high rankings this is definitely rigged against simple terms. Yet the criteria “No specialised vocabulary (e.g., no technical terms)” should rule out a lot of words.

Words like moon and elephant will get you an average score but using those words are following the criteria closely.

Is it really an accurate test when you can look at other results and then score 90+ 5 minutes later?

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I scored 90.88 points on my first and only try with the following words: frenzy ghoul protocol concept autocracy hymn nephew screwdriver bail molecule. (Of which only the first seven words are scored when all are valid.) “Autocracy” is arguably the least commonly used word of those. After seeing the resulting scoring matrix, I realized that some of the words were too close to each other like frenzy with ghoul and protocol with concept. There was certainly some kind of priming effect going on when I selected those.

My point is, while the test can certainly be gamed, I don’t think that you need to pick highly unusual words to score high (90+).

I scored 85.86 first try with a surprisingly similar mix: lion, asteroid, easel, nostalgia, monarch, dilemma, paradigm, molecule, angst, corn.

Likewise I didn't appreciate the possibility that lion may have primed me for a monarch, dilemma for angst etc.

The order of our 7 may have changed the score.

We seem to each have a Tool (Screwdriver/Easel), Political Construct (Autocracy/Monarch), Abstraction (Concept/Protocol/Paradigm), "Animal" (Ghoul/Lion), Emotion (Frenzy/Nostalgia/Angst), and Scientific Object (Molecule/Asteroid/Molecule).

> Is it really an accurate test when you can look at other results and then score 90+ 5 minutes later?

It lets you repeat the test but only the first one is used in the study.

There's nothing seeing with using words like moon and elephant, it's a relative measure between words, not absolute.

Considering I got >95 on my first try and I have been frequently told that I find obscure associations, I think it is.

Yes, definitely this. I do not see how this test claims to measure creativity. It is essentially a vocabulary test.

The argument behind this test is that the words we generate are highly correlated, and therefore a person who is capable of generating a diverse set of words also exhibits diverging train of thought.

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