IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway
test.mensa.no
test.mensa.no
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.
> 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.)
30+ questions and everything was a composition of shift, rotate, and, or, nand, nor, xor.
If you're a programmer it's just a matter of figuring out what operations are used. If you're not a programmer, you probably have no language to describe the relationships, and therefore can't just zip along looking for common assembly-language instructions.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I bet I could make an increasingly challenging logic puzzle generator just by increasing the number of composite operations and operands. I bet if I googled I could find a dozen such projects that already exist. My work here is done. :)
Others may lack the formal language, but I don't see an inherent disadvantage in that. You can play music without knowing the notes.
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.
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the “average” speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
-Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon (1999)
Because if he isn't, you're trying to use fiction as evidence of something in the real world.
It appeals to most people because they can empathize with over thinking test material. It's clearly representative of a real phenomenon.
As I get older, I notice tests tend to become more irritating, because most systems depend on so many variables that every answer to a question needs an "it depends" to qualify any reasonable answer.
This realization has been very important to my career as an engineer, because it helps me interact with customers in more productive ways during requirements gathering, design, or troubleshooting. Instead of trying to answer every customer question directly, I find it much more effective to dive into assumptions and explore the customer's perspective (most of the time).
Using Lawrence's approach to a problem solving actually works very well, but will fail you on a test.
Fiction can ask questions about reality, but it can never answer them.
And dollars to donuts, Neal Stephenson couldn't actually do the things he claims Lawrence was capable of doing. And it's likely what Lawrence accomplished given the time frame is a bit impossible. But it doesn't have to be possible. Lightsabers are the length of swords because they are. The Enterprise achieves faster than light travel by creating a bubble of warped space because it does. Lawrence is able to formulate an entirely new theorem about fluid dynamics because he did.
And let's be clear, in a real situation, Lawrence's approach is still kind of bad. Now the question itself is running some assumptions that it shouldn't, but the inferences aren't terrible. Over the length of the run, the average flow is fine to work with. The speed of the boat is speed in still water. Also, the speed of the boat is also going to be an average because multiple things also affect the speed of the boat, including the density of the water. But Stephenson didn't think about that, so it didn't matter in the fiction. Even though, it would in reality for someone doing these calculations.
But the question, when asked in reality, needs a relatively accurate answer in a relatively quick time frame. And the numbers provided can give you that. Part of intelligence is also recognizing when it's time to gather wool and when it's time to get shit done.
The bit about the glockenspiel is supposed to be a dig about the Navy failing to recognize his brilliance. But yeah. He needs to get things done. And he doesn't. So the Navy was correct to put him somewhere where it doesn't matter how long it takes for him to make a decision.
I took it again with the benefit of knowing most of the earlier question patterns and got 133 on the second attempt. Pretty sure it wouldn't be too hard to bump that higher if I cared. In that sense, these tests are heavily biased towards people who take these tests. Once you know the tricks these tests are built on you do a second-order pattern match (which trick is the question using) which helps you find the answer. I would guess you could grind these tests leet-code style to get arbitrarily high scores.
People here report getting bored by these tests and I don't feel that at all. I actually get totally stress-focused and the time flies by almost too fast. Seeing the pattern is a dopamine hit that my brain craves.
I've always liked these tests because they're like little sudokus that tell me flattering things about myself, because they ask about what I'm good at and not what I'm not. One time I saw one that had 3d visualization stuff, which made me feel really dumb, and it scored me accordingly. I was frustrated with the time limit on this one -- it seemed like the really interesting patterns may have been at the end, and I just didn't have time for them at all because I'm a slowpoke motherfucker who likes to triple-check stuff before I move on. I was at 60 seconds remaining by the time I got to question 30.
The stuff before that was OK, but got a little tedious when I realized that a lot of them were either just rotations, or variations on or/and/xor logic applied to segments of shapes. I didn't feel like I had to reach for new tools to solve those.
Personally I'd have loved more time and the chance to see correct answers, and maybe some explanation of whatever patterns that I missed. Of course, that undermines what Mensa is after here, and I guess that's why I'd be a bad fit.
I'd love a local group where we exchange fun puzzles like this over beers and weed, but Mensa seems a little more concerned with creating some sort of status around ranking than the pursuit of puzzlecraft or whatever. To me, it was a welcome surprise in adulthood that we're not actually lined up by SATs/GPA/whatever and those percentile scores have fuck all to do with what we're capable of. But hey, to each their own.
If the reply is that, well, it's the simplest elegant explanation .. isn't that an appeal to popular notion and not pattern recognition as a whole?
Is there any literature on the psychology of IQ tests?
I've taken some similar IQ test before, and my score is about the same each time, and I wonder about the effect of previous experience on the result..
Also, I'm scared to think, knowing myself how dim I am, that the vast majority of people are supposedly even dimmer.
Just reading a bit about how those tests are constructed (can the patterns be diagonal for example) would give you already an advantage over the same test where you don't have this.
If you can train for it, it's not an IQ test, period.
The flaw in this is that types of intelligence are correlated on average, they still vary within an individual, so IQ tests may say something about populations of people, but they are a poor assessment of an individual.
That's pretty much the opposite of how IQ tests work. You can train for any test, and prepping can definitely increase your score also on real IQ tests.
If you want to know your honest score, do just light preparation, if any. If you want an as high score as you can get, then treat it like you'd treat a SAT/GRE/GMAT/... But don't expect any of the benefits that studies might associate with high IQ scores to flow from this exercise. If you train IQ tests, you'll get better at doing IQ tests, that's it. I wouldn't encourage this behaviour. An IQ test is meant to test you on questions that you haven't seen before, anything else is just statistical noise.
Influencers who brag about how they "raised their IQ" with this or that technique (or supplements), are similarly mistaken about what those tests can and can't do.
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'm suspicious of the MENSA selection criteria. You can even join without taking the test by having an SAT score above a certain value. Dubious.
But then, why would anyone join a High IQ society? I did because I needed proof I was smart, and wanted to be around other smarties (my social circle was nill), but the people were just kinda average and boring.
I'm sure it's true of many IQ tests, but the SAT is notoriously heavily correlated with wealth. Even if you generously assume that the test itself is not biased (which you shouldn't, it was and still is), that means your score is a function of practice and training, not "raw intelligence" if such a thing exists.
See, for example: https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Benjamin_Domingue/publi...
These controlled studies show an impact of something like 10-35 points from coaching and other prep.
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.
Also, because I got a score in the 140s that means I can say that IQ is silly and that even its inventor didn't like the uses to which it was put, and you have to accept that. High-IQ privilege.
It's a bit interesting since all the data work I've worked with involves labelling and categorization which is the same general idea, and I wonder if that' just coincidence. I've always thought that data science has been about labeling data because that's one of the most immediate business desires, or is that what the cognitive sciences actually consider to be a good abstraction of intelligence, if such a thing even exists.
That's not to say that the tests actually mean anything. They probably don't.
True, but I'd argue that there's little to no reason to think that this is innate, and that it can be trained. Doing these pattern recognition puzzles over and over again would make you very good at them.
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.
Also, Mensa Norway has very similar test when you go to take it in person... and results are close to what you get online.
Also you downplaying the range of ~ +1.5SD is a textbook example of spending too much time on YT watching Jordan Peterson's lectures on IQ. People with actual* +1.5 - 2 SD IQ, are STEM PhD's, not your average Internet rando.
*subjects of standardized intelligence testing (WAIS, SB) not prone to practice effects like all the RPMs online. Yes, I just said that practicing enough Ravens will get you to Mensa provided a three digit 'baseline'.
Your average internet rando does indeed have a lower IQ, but given that someone does have a +2SD IQ, that person is still more likely to be an internet rando than to be an impressive STEM PhD, for much the same reason as your average 6'4" person is more likely to be a car salesman than an NBA player despite almost all NBA players being really tall.
[1] http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/iq.htm [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/185353/number-of-doctora...
Here's the one from 5 years ago, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-05-03
Or 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2012-05-03
For me it seems to be selective memory. Sometimes it seems like it's all the same, it's just the names of companies and technologies that change. Am I just getting old?
It happened to reddit with the digg exodus, and it's slowly happening here as the powers that be attempt to convert reddit into something to do with money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
That's only the law in the United States. To what extent do employers in other countries accept an IQ test in lieu of a university degree?
If you thought this test was a breeze, I think the chances are your IQ is pretty high. You can think whatever you want about that of course.
One the other hand: if you got bored and distracted, lost your confidence, or just got a low score - don't read too much into it. These tests have a good correlation with other IQ tests but are not perfect.
If you are neurodivergent, for example, some sub-tests of the WAIS can be much harder than others. You can still be really smart, but some situations may be limiting your use of that intelligence. It can also be that some aspect of your intelligence (I just think of it as having an "effective" mind) is weaker than you'd expect given your overall strength, so you could be compensating for it using the resources you do have.
Here are my least favorite stereotypes around intelligence:
- "High IQ means low EQ." If dealing with other people is hard for you, you might for example be helped by an autism assessment. You might be running the "neurotypical emulator", which is really costly on your hardware. It's also a shitty thing to say to people.
- "Gifted kids get bored in school and might start getting into trouble." Well, smart kids usually have an easy time in school. If they're bored, they probably find strategies to cope. If they get into trouble more than the average kid, they might have other problems. Don't just let them deal with it themselves. Smart kids deserve help too, even though they seem to be more independent than others.
- "High IQ means you're into X". Rubik's cubes aren't automatically fascinating just because you test high on an IQ test. Signalling intelligence might have a correlation with intelligence but there are also a lot of people (perhaps the smartest ones?) that have little interest in that. It seems like we're pretty poor judges of intelligence in general, but putting a lot of importance on it anyway.
Totally scientific.
I don't ever want to.
What's the point of a community that is solely focused on some figure-based puzzle solving? I don't find any.
And I have met several highly successful, resourceful, and influential (very effective in academic/business) who never had their IQ tested.
And I have met multiple Mensa members who aren’t much. One was outright useless.
Being a Mensa member usually means your parents want to feel special by admitting their children to such an institute. It serves as an extension of their social status.
To me- it is practically a sign of privilege and having helicopter parents.
I never took an IQ test. The one once prescribed by a doctor was cancelled midway by my dad because they hinted I had a very high IQ and my dad didn’t want me to live with hubris of a high-IQ kid. I am grateful to him now.
A low or high IQ score wouldn’t matter to me now because I am beyond three-digits-signalling or defined-by-three-digits nonsense. But it would have mattered to a ten years old. I had an unhealthy level of arrogance already by topping each class and getting a lot of awards in co-curriculums.
Filtering for people with shared interests, or at least a capacity to see the world in similar ways is useful to just about everyone (skill at "puzzle solving" is correlated with other traits). Not everyone has the ability to use school as such a filter. And trying to find like-minded people in the real world, or on the modern internet is futile for someone whose interests/perspectives isn't well-represented by the interests of the mass.
There's also the irony of people disparaging the idea of a group based around IQ commenting on hacker news, which has long since evolved passed the narrow focus on tech entrepreneurship. What makes this place better than /r/programming?
I haven’t thought about this. Thank for giving me this perspective.
> trying to find like-minded people in the real world
I personally find people who base their identity on some number pretty boring. High IQ enables you to be better at other things, and that is where I would look for like minded people.
> modern internet
This is such a broad term. To the point of being meaningless in most discussions.
Tiktok popular feed is modern internet. A niche programming language's Discord with 400 members is also modern internet. Saying something categorically about "modern internet" is like judging the highway system or rail network.
> irony of people disparaging the idea of a group based around IQ
If some community finds IQ -based signalling and IQ-based identity, it should be HN.
Such a test does not measure a person’s true potential or intelligence. It's kinda stupid to base someone's ability or potential around some test.
I love to be with and spend time with intelligent people, but whenever I see someone dropping their IQ or writing it on their social bios, I find it outright distasteful.
It means you have little achievement beyond the IQ test score. That would be a pathetic life.
Truly successful people- never seen them flaunt IQ- ever.
Sure, you can just find people who are good at X directly, but this isn't always easy and its not like connecting with such groups is trivial once found. Being good at X may require a massive upfront investment that not everyone is in a position to expend. Besides, the value of such groups isn't just being connected around some narrow technical/high skill topic, but rather being able to connect with people who have unique and interesting views on a wide range of issues. Just being, say, a contributor to some open source project isn't going to get you that.
> Saying something categorically about "modern internet" is like judging the highway system or rail network.
The "modern internet" is in contrast to the internet prior to social media where finding intelligent people to discuss various topics was as easy as finding a newsgroup or a forum on the subject. The self-selection effect of the pre-modern internet on the quality of average discourse is hard to overstate.
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.
:)
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...
I see a lot of poor quality "IQ" tests on the internet that are 100% pattern recognition and it's always the same schtick - rotate, exclude, "combine" the figures. Actually got one of these tests as a prerequisite for an interview.
While I'm not one of those "iq doesn't matter" types who reject the ability to measure intelligence, I will absolutely cast doubt on these narrow pattern recognition tests.
It's alright, Mensa can be for the people with the big brains.
I feel like my programming knowledge helped, which maybe means it's a bad IQ test - being a programmer shouldn't mean your IQ tests higher. But then again, maybe the causality is the other way around?
While I think if I had not stopped to reply to a slack message I might have scored higher, this is a poor indicator of overall intelligence given it relies on basic pattern recognition to apply simple xor/and/nand/or operations and object rotation.
I suck at math and don't have the stomach to memorize basic equations. While I am not a potato, I do not think (or would hope) my intelligence falls that highly ahead of the curve.
A little brag? idk, depends on what others' are. But long time no see, Mensa. I remember I used to do their books and would end up at somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. This is the first time I've scored this high. Programming does wonders :P. Also means that score is not absolute for life and can change over time depending on how much brain you exercise. Thanks for posting.
I do tend to be a little slow and distracted. But, I'd be surprised if I am actually slightly below average.
That being said, if the result is accurate, I think this would be good news for the world. People around me say I'm smart because I like math and programming, little do they know they are, statistically speaking, likely to be smarter than me.
If only they knew, maybe they would feel more empowered to learn harder concepts! You don't need a high IQ to geek out to functional programming.
presented by Lee Mack:
The 1% Club
I mention this since some here tried the test in the submission, and noticed that the meta-patterns are trite (bitshift etc). A proper test should be about uncommon patterns... In the episodes I have seen, that show does not use one key applicable to more questions.
Any non-extreme IQ is a useless measurement anyway. If you consistently score around 85 or 145 on these tests then you may want to look into some actual tests or your working environment, but as a personal statistic your IQ says very little of you.
I find it frankly disgusting that there are people and companies out there that rely on these numbers for real, important decisions, especially since the numbers and procedures are usually based on old information. IQ scores have increased over time up to a point in the 90s and what scored 100 points in 1940 is now below average (there was a difference of a whole 14 IQ points between 1942 and 2008! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)
Solving tests like this will create some skill in solving them (you’ll recognize many logical patterns much faster), so the results will not be correct.
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.
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.
These have limited fun (they get boring fast) and even more limited application for assessment, but I do wonder that if you feel you need to ask, you're probably in a losing spot.
Look at several questions.
Identify the type of rule at play. Identify the actual rule at play.
Apply the rule. Check for falsification.
Don't be too mentally tired.
Go back to previous questions and check for rules you learned later.
Get too mentally tired (aka bored) and randomly click until you finish.
"Your IQ lies outside the area that the test is able to measure. We are hoping to extend this area as soon as we have gathered more data."
I don't know what that means for your actual IQ but I have a feeling you might just score very well on an official IQ test if you're into that kind of thing.
Nowadays I would compare its ability to actually measure IQ or skill with those "find the fake coin by only weighing piles of money three times" interview questions, or interviews where they ask you to implement some algorithm for a problem you will only ever encounter on HackerRank or similar sites.
Mensae, mensae, mensas, Mensarum, mensis, mensis.
That's mensa declined for you.
around question 24 it got quite hard eventually.i had to skip 4 or 5 :-(
I suck at math BTW.
97
It maybe didn't help that I flipped a bit after reading the instructions and decided that there were only 25 questions instead of 35. :)
I'd rather do the data refining job at Lumen.
Psychologically, it's hard to remain humble when you always score 99+ on every measure of intelligence. Even for unrelated topics like political opinions or personal ethos, I find myself thinking that almost everyone I disagree with is overwhelmingly likely be less intelligent than me, and therefore probably wrong. When you're <= average intelligence and most people disagree with your opinions, it makes sense to think that you might be making some mistake in evaluation. When you're 3 sigma above average and most people disagree with you, it's a lot more likely that they're the ones not fully thinking things through.
Of course, anyone can still be wrong about things, but is that likely? Many say that IQ doesn't measure intelligence, but based on the evidence I disagree with that too, so it's pretty unfalsifiable. Either I'm an idiot using a meaningless test to judge himself superior, or I'm actually superior; until someone comes up with a more 'accepted' measure of intelligence (they won't), well, it is what it is.