My IQ

http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=84

by tokenadult • 14 years ago

392 275 14 years ago

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

paisawalla2• 14 years ago

Great insight.

Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I am not the first person to observe that having a powerful mind is at many times a burden.

You can see that other people may be more stupid than you, forwarding simpler arguments and relying on less rigorous thinking than yours, but if they don't want to be convinced of that, then you are powerless to make them see it. They go off blissfully, and you burn with anguish. Again, if you cannot manifest your intelligence in a way that forwards your agenda, who cares?

To phrase it in a more confrontational way: if nobody is forced to contend with your mind, nobody knows it exists. Or to summarize it in a quote:

"[Intelligence] is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are, you aren't." -- Margaret Thatcher

This clicked for me during my final year of college, when a friend of mine was taking an LSAT preparation course. During a break, he was chatting with the instructor about realistic outcomes, and said earnestly that he hoped to get a score of 168 (which IIRC is a very high score.) The instructor, a man of maybe 30, who had been out of school for several years, scoffed and replied, "Good luck, I only got 165 and I'm a genius."

And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked at Target.

Edit: expanded a little on the first couple of paragraphs.

salgernon• 14 years ago

I met a genius that worked in the shipping department of the first software company I worked for. (Back when people shipped software.)

But working in the shipping department was only what he did in order to persue his passion, which was bird watching and photography. That is where he expressed his genius, although he couldn't make a living from it, it made him happy.

Reminds me of http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Bentley who first photographed snowflakes. His genius never gained him fortune.

46Bit2• 14 years ago

There's a great deal of the population who spend their lives working in shops and so forth doing relatively menial work. Why they're doing it is not about intelligence at all, it's all about drive.

A driven person who's terrified of Maths and Sciences is unlikely to become a leading Physicist, but they might well power through enough basic sums to successfully establish businesses.

An intelligent person who's not driven might never achieve anything like fame, at least in their lifetime, but they still probably enjoy their free time and passions.

spec_laconic• 14 years ago

My best friend in HS happened to be a genius on paper. Got straight A's freshman and sophomore year, ended up doing less well junior and senior year, and, when he got to college, failed out. He now parks cars in a garage. I don't really care for IQ levels, I think they're mostly meaningless.

jeffdavis2• 14 years ago

I'll add that being able to work well with others is usually what determines whether you can manifest your intelligence in a useful way.

Working well with others takes many forms: being able to inspire and lead are obvious ones; but also the ability to take constructive criticism from others and learn from their perspectives -- which can be hard to do when you perceive the other person to be less intelligent (and perceiving others to be less intelligent is a problem by itself).

nodemaker• 14 years ago

Absolutely. Lots of really intelligent people seem to fall into the trap of being too individualist and selfish. (Ayn Rand!)

While some of them eventually shine really bright, most fail to achieve anything significant.

graeme4• 14 years ago

That's interesting. I'm an LSAT instructor. My first reaction to reading the instructor's comment was, 'Ha, only 165, he's no genius'.

But, MENSA accepts 163 as a cutoff LSAT score for entry. So if MENSA == genius, then he is a genius.

Among people who take the LSAT though, he's only 92nd percentile. He doesn't have much business teaching the test. Anyone who's at an Ivy League law school has a better score than him.

I completely agree that intelligence, on it's own, is near useless. It needs to be combined with the other elements that make someone effective. THEN, and only then, do you have the ingredients for something powerful.

Our society lionizes intelligence to the point that many people with little but intelligence smugly rest on their laurels, and accomplish less than their potential due to defects in social skills, initiative, etc.

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

Anyone at an Ivy League law school might have more lucrative opportunities than teaching LSAT classes.

drumdance2• 14 years ago

I don't think of MENSA == genius. More like the top 5% in smarts. True geniuses IMO are much rarer.

gnosis7• 14 years ago

"And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked at Target."

Kafka was a clerk at an insurance company. Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher.

Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his life, and that was to his brother.

There are hordes of other people widely regarded as "geniuses", who lived and died in dire poverty. Many others were cheated out of the fame and fortune they deserved by others who got the credit. And many more are probably still unrecognized.

The cold hard fact of the matter is that the world generally does not reward intelligence, "genius", or even hard work. True, some have the temperament and luck to scale the greasy pole of "success", but many others don't -- or choose to focus their energies elsewhere.

hellrich• 14 years ago

Kafka and Einstein had white collar jobs when those were rare and Wittgenstein gave away his (inherited) fortune.

telemachos3• 14 years ago

> Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher.

I take your point, but Einstein and Wittgentsein are not good examples. You list jobs they held, but those jobs don't reasonably express the success either man had in his lifetime. Einstein was also a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies from 1933 to 1955 (when he died)[1]. Wittgenstein was also awarded a PhD at Cambridge - without having done coursework or exams - on the basis of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and was an idolized professor for many years there[2].

Neither man was by any stretch of the imagination an unrecognized genius - they were both absolutely recognized as huge intellects with superior achievements in their respective fields when they were alive.

[1] http://www.ias.edu/people/einstein/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#1929.E2.80....

kahawe2• 14 years ago

I think a far more revealing point about Kafka is his self-view and the fact that in his will he wanted all of his works burned. I don't think Kafka was ever a very happy man in his life, so you really got to wonder how much good did the "being a genius" do for HIM regardless of how much he contributed to the world and humanity and our culture.

rayiner3• 14 years ago

I think the LSAT is a pretty good... well whatever it is.

It has the salient quality of being almost completely unambiguous. Out of 1000+ of LSAT questions I saw when studying for the test, I found maybe half a dozen that didn't have one unambiguously correct answer and four unambiguously incorrect answers.

Of course, it assumes a level of familiarity with formal logic and English grammar/vocabulary.

graeme4• 14 years ago

Yes, they're surprisingly good at it. I've taken and taught other standardized tests, and often find them frustrating or boring.

I once found an LSAT question I considered ambiguous. I sent in a complaint to the LSAC. They replied with a three page letter that convinced me I was incorrect.

meepmorp2• 14 years ago

> it assumes a level of familiarity with formal logic and English grammer/vocabulary.

Grammar, not grammer.

hackinthebochs6• 14 years ago

I find interesting the backlash against those who may have any interest in knowing their IQ, or god-forbid even feel good about it. What your anecdotes tell me is not that IQ itself is meaningless, but that success has a large factor of luck involved.

It's a failing of our society that genuinely high IQ people are not out there working to improve the lot of mankind. This growing trend of derision for those who acknowledge their own raw intelligence is only making it worse.

nickzoic2• 14 years ago

Success contains a large factor of luck for sure, but I'd say also a large factor of something not measured by IQ tests.

Charisma? "Emotional Intelligence"? Mental flexibility? Gumption? Who knows.

gurkendoktor7• 14 years ago

> It's a failing of our society that genuinely high IQ people are not out there working to improve the lot of mankind.

Or maybe it's a failing of those high IQ people? The genius who proudly saves the codebase at Zynga every single day is completely useless compared to any single nurse working her shift right now. Even the doctor at the top of the hospital does not necessarily have a stellar IQ. What other way is there to put it? Should we feel bad for smart people because society tricks them into financial services rather than less-paid cancer research? (No one would look down on someone who does the latter.)

btilly6• 14 years ago

If you think that "high IQ" and "genuinely intelligent" are the same thing, you are sadly mistaken.

Granted, IQ is correlated with intelligence. But there are lots of undeniably intelligent people who do not have remarkable IQs (eg Richard Feynman would not qualify for MENSA). Conversely your average MENSA chapter is full of people with undeniably high IQs and little sign of remarkable intelligence.

(Disclaimer. Based on my GRE scores, my IQ is about 1/10,000. Based on my experiences in the real world, I believe myself to be intelligent, but nowhere near what that hypothetical IQ score claims. I've always considered MENSA membership to be a filter for people whose only biggest accomplishment is a good score on an IQ test...)

lywald• 14 years ago

being intelligent has no intrinsic value

Loving what we are has to be worth something, or why bother with progress?

drumdance2• 14 years ago

So if you suffered a brain injury, would you love yourself less?

Osmium• 14 years ago

> being intelligent has no intrinsic value

We value lots of things in life that have no intrinsic value. Art, for example. There's nothing wrong with valuing intelligence too. It's what separates us from the apes after all.

That said, I don't disagree with your overall point. I've known many intelligent people woefully unprepared to deal with everyday life, and it always seemed sad to me. Two of them ended up as alcoholics, one with gambling debts. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if it means you can't deal with life.

777466• 14 years ago

> if nobody is forced to contend with your mind, nobody knows it exists.

I'm sure this has already been explored somewhere, but I've always wondered what it says about us as humans that we consider our lives in isolation to be meaningless, but put a bunch of meaningless people together into a society, and impacting them becomes very meaningful. What's going on here, synergy?

Evbn5• 14 years ago

Genetic predisposition to pack living and altruism in service of sexual reproduction of genes.

trotsky• 14 years ago

It seems like a lot of people over think intelligence and success. Properly balanced or even an excess of serotonin and norepinephrine are what primarily ensures survival and procreation, which generally translates into happiness and sufficient wealth. Trying to measure and identify abstract cognitive ability like IQ tests do is almost somewhat of an autism spectrum-esque devotion. While some smart men and women may contribute greatly to society it's unusual for it to be a personal victory or indeed be as significant as dozens of better predictors of personal trajectory. Over-thinking things may even position excess cognitive function as a net negative drag on success.

samspot• 14 years ago

> being intelligent has no intrinsic value

Thinking about this the other day, I was noticing that many people of great intelligence act as though it is a free pass to not putting forward much effort. Similarly they may neglect to pay attention to others who they regard as less intelligent than them (often their teachers or professors).

kamaal2• 14 years ago

If your success depends on impacting peoples life through your work, then intelligence isn't even relevant to the discussion of success.

kahawe2• 14 years ago

To further your excellent point:

IQ, "intellectual superiority" and improving-life-for-the-better or "happiness" are generally three separate things; or at least much more separate than we like to see them as clearly correlating if not causations.

And the people you meet at Mensa spread surprisingly many/all levels of society...

xiaoma• 14 years ago

A lack of high earnings by no means implies a lack of genius or a lack of success.

Mozart drank himself to death by age 30 and was hounded by creditors. Socrates, Nicola Tesla, Oscar Wilde and many other great minds died penniless.

ed_blackburn• 14 years ago

/"one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter."/

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

gbrindisi• 14 years ago

What are the benefits of being a member of Mensa?

lutze• 14 years ago

It means there's a chance you're no longer the most boring person you know.

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

I thought the reverse.

pbiggar2• 14 years ago

Probably networking (providing social proof to people who are "like you" that they are sufficiently "like you" that they should help you in some way).

UnoriginalGuy• 14 years ago

They get a magazine and the chance to go to meetings to talk to other "smart" people. I know someone who was but quickly let it lapse.

I think it is mostly about bragging rights.

geori• 14 years ago

You get the card and can officially list it on your resume.

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

I suspect it was far more valuable in pre-Internet non-population-dense America, where it was one of the few effective ways to connect with other smart people. It is extremely obsolete now. But "they" (whoever "they" is in practice) publish some nifty puzzle books.

pjscott6• 14 years ago

At the time I'm writing this, yours may be the only answer in this thread that doesn't try to signal moral superiority to Mensa members by piously insulting them. (There are a couple of other comments that I would consider borderline -- not overtly insulting, but carefully suffused with cynicism.)

RivieraKid3• 14 years ago

That it makes you easily recognisible as a prick.

wybo• 14 years ago

It is a nice way to meet other people that are (somewhat) smart (in a new city, or beyond ones social circle). What is especially good about it is the relative diversity of backgrounds that members are from (and different ages).

However the atmosphere at Mensa varies much from area to area (sometimes a bit pretentious, but in other areas very low key, pleasant and surprisingly open). And one should not take it too seriously.

jkimmel• 14 years ago

IQ tests have long been criticized by a variety of groups. At the end of the day, it merely measures your ability to perform well on tests that are similar to an IQ test. Traditionally, this set was populated with academic tests, so the IQ could be used to predict your performance in schools (it was actually designed to predict the performance of French schoolchildren.)

However, as the school based subjects have broadened out from traditional liberal arts conceptualizations to include more serious discussion of alternative conceptualizations (CompSci being one example), the IQ test may be decreasing in efficacy of prediction even with regards to academic tests. I have no evidence for this, just an opinion. The issue you ran into seems to be a result of these differing conceptualization paradigms.

At the end of the day, it's an assessment of performance in a very limited subfield of life. I try not to take it too seriously.

wmil• 14 years ago

That's not really true. IQ doesn't predict well on the high end, but it's useful for predicting the outcomes of middle intellect people. And it works better for groups than for individuals.

For instance, IQ scores are bad at predicting wealth but are the best predictor of adult poverty we have.

And the US military uses them extensively. They generally don't allow anyone in with an IQ score below 90.

mynameishere• 14 years ago

Yes, every time the subject comes up, this whole crowd of relatively intelligent people go into a moral dance about how stupid IQ tests are.

They were never meant to predict genius. The point is to organize people efficiently when you're slotting them for guard duty or heavy equipment operation or officer candidate school. Someone who points out BS about non-Kosher pigs and obscure integer sequences is being clever for the sake of it. IE, "Look how smart I am."

And, as you say, the military considers about 100 million Americans dangerously too stupid for the army. They didn't do this out of arrogance.

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

This is constantly overlooked in debates over IQ, SAT, etc.

In most cases where these tests are used, it is far more mportant to separate the above median from below median, or +2 STDDEV from median, etc, and not to pick winners in the Krelboyne Super Bowl.

Even assuming there is a total ordering of intelligence, how would a single 300-question test rank 300 million people? Why fill half the test with questions that 99% of takers will get wrong, just to differentiate among the top 1% of scorers?

nacker9• 14 years ago

Funny, the police in Police State USA prefer low IQ's ' on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training'

Or perhaps that being smart doesn't make you an enthusiastic state thug?

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...

olalonde• 14 years ago

In theory, I believe there could be an objective way to determine the "simplest" answer if it is defined as having the lowest Kolmogorov complexity among valid answers (if I read the Wikipedia article correctly) [0]. In the context of an IQ test though, it is not a very practical solution.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

monjaro• 14 years ago

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

esrauch• 14 years ago

I'm not a mathematician, but I don't think that means what you think it does. It doesn't preclude being able to compute the K-complexity for some subset of strings, or for some fixed maximum complexity. Since the scenario here is checking which of a few relatively low-complexity options has the lowest complexity (eg generally could be expressed in English in <30 words), it seems it could be used in this context.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

It's actually an impossible solution, since Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable. However, there are some related complexity measures which are computable, so that they are merely impractical rather than impossible to apply: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_complexity#O...

Of course, you can bet that the writers of the test did not use anything related to algorithmic complexity when deciding the correct answers to these questions. We can't show the exact complexity of the different hypotheses, but we can sometimes compare hypotheses. Imagine programs that generate answers according to the different hypotheses. Between the program that answers according to taxonomy, and the program that answers according to word length, which one requires a look-up table of animals and their classes?

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

1. Someone named "mistercow" is obviously biased on this question.

2. Another item to factor in, beyond lookup table size, is that questions are written in English, and the medium (spelled words) should not be snuck in as part of the content, except where sometimes it is done intentionally :) Also, in classification problems like these, one should also consider not just how efficiently a solution chooses an answer from the set, but also how cleanly it isolates the cluster of items in question from the unnamed items. That is, since [cow,hen,pig,sheep] are all animals, more so than a random word is, animality should be part of the rule used to choose among them.

3. As blauwbilgorgel notes, Google's very successful solution to model picking is to slurp of everything published publicly online (and with Books, also many things published offline) and sample over the combined output of humanity. This is still biased towards written text, published text, and loquaciousness, but it's pretty good.

blauwbilgorgel2• 14 years ago

>Of course, you can bet that the writers of the test did not use anything related to algorithmic complexity when deciding the correct answers to these questions.

Allow yourself to entertain the thought that they did. Imagine programs in our brain. Things that are easy to decode/(de)compress and require little energy/instruction are of low algorithmic complexity to them.

Start writing down farm animals in your mind. How long before you get to "hen"? You may have written down "chicken", but that would be too easy for a Mensa question, so you'd have to substitute that one :P

Wrong or obscure "answers" to a test question take more energy to produce, they are more complex, more random, less orderly. For me, "Cow" is the shortest program that gets executed first when I think of farm animals. It was likely one of the first programs for the test writer too.

blauwbilgorgel2• 14 years ago

Using the Google index as a compressor, as per Normalized Google Distance [1]

  "cow" "pig" "sheep" 10.800.000 results
  "cow" "pig" "hen" 5.040.000 results
  "cow" "hen" "sheep" 4.810.000 results
  "hen" "pig" "sheep" 4.480.000 results

Using Hackernews search API as a compressor, computing indexation distance between terms:

  Cow + Pig 0.4843358722880948
  Hen + Sheep 0.5328799348807779

Principles from Kolmogorov Complexity (Compression Distance) can give many approximate answers, even in the context of an IQ test.

Multiple choice is particularly easy, if you are allowed to note the result counts on queries like "Answer A + Keywords from Question" and "Answer B + Keywords from Question"

Speaking of cultural differences mentioned in the post -- You could even search locally on these terms and notice a difference in the semantic distances. If cows were to go extinct, in a 100 years, the search index would probably reflect on them being the least fit candidate for a set of three farm animals.

[1] http://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/papers/amdug.pdf

trptcolin• 14 years ago

Google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vIrXiKk...

ColinWright2• 14 years ago

    > But it bugs me that I might not have been
    > creative enough to fail their test.

I know Tanya, and she most certainly is creative enough to fail their tests. It's clear she was trying to conform, and did a job that was good enough for its purpose.

But she is certainly creative enough to fail, and way more intelligent (for pretty much any meaning of the term) than the test will have indicated.

mturmon• 14 years ago

It's for sure that those tests are not good for measuring the top end. The post calls in to question that any test could do so, but its clear that in any event, that test is not it.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

I'm keen to know what the research is about cleverness and overthinking and multiple choice questions.

One of the most intelligent people I know IRL has trouble with the UK driving licence theory questions because she very rapidly provides 6 correct answers, and then has to try to detangle her correct answers from the choices.

I suspect that she'd do better if she tried when she was drunk (not the practical!!) because that would filter out the overthinking.

Of course, maybe this is all post rationalisation and some people just are lousy at some stuff.

codewright• 14 years ago

I'm in this weird position of being excellent at the meta-reasoning required to ace a test and just smart enough to back it up, but not being very creative or powerful intellectually.

I was able to ace the National Latin Exam, my drivers' tests, and my handgun license test all without studying. Just from picking what seemed the most rational/logical in the context of a test.

I'd rather be an over-thinker. I'm terrible at a lot of things that demand pure intellectual horsepower. I'm primarily useful for just producing code, not really at higher-order thinking.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

Yes!

This person I mentioned - when she doesn't understand something she'll ask a question. And then she'll ask another question. And then she'll ask another question. And she'll keep going until she gets it. And because she's asking questions, and really thinking about it, she gets a deep understanding.

Me? I ask a question. Someone gives me an answer. I think to myself "ok, so I kind of get it" and then I drop it. So I have a broad but very shallow knowledge.

I have learnt to ask more questions, and to ask better questions. (Also, importantly, to use available online stuff to try to answer the questions I ask before I find IRL people.)

Shenglong2• 14 years ago

It might not be that she's overthinking--it could just be that the test-writers don't have as much education/intelligence. I use ad-hominems sparingly, so let me offer a specific example for the beginner's license test in Halifax, NS, Canada:

In cold conditions, which of the following freeze before the others?

1. Bridges

2. Overpasses

3. Shaded Areas

4. All of the above

I wasn't entirely sure what a "shaded area" was, but I figured eventually that it must be some area under shade from the sun. Next, "all of the above" didn't make sense, because how can "all of the above" freeze before all of the above? I figured that water has a higher specific heat capacity than ground, and thus in cold conditions, the heat from the water would keep bridges warmer for slightly longer. I answered Overpasses.

Apparently the answer was "all of the above". The funny thing is, when I ask this question to people, I find a pretty consistent correlation between responses: for my non-university educated friends, they typically answer D. On the other hand, my university educated friends (whose majors vary significantly) tend to answer A, B, C, or "D doesn't make sense".

mietek• 14 years ago

You would do well to assume the question isn't meant to be self-contradictory, and find a meaningful intepretation under this assumption. In this case, "before the others" could be extended to mean "before any other areas".

frooxie• 14 years ago

A bridge doesn't have to be anywhere near water. I would have answered "Shaded Areas" - why wouldn't a bridge or an overpass that's lit by the sun keep warm longer than an area that's in the shade?

koide• 14 years ago

I really have a hard time understanding this lack of "meta-intelligence" (or should we say "street smarts", that'd explain the success of at least some of your non university educated friends)

While it's evident that D is nonsensical, it's just as obvious that it is indeed the intended answer.

I expect if you are smart enough to detect it is nonsensical, you are also smart enough to deduce what you are expected to answer. I fail to understand why people nitpick themselves to death by a million cuts.

Maybe I'm not smart enough!

Shenglong2• 14 years ago

|Cow, hen, pig, sheep

The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird.

I believe the standard answer is a "hen" because it's the only one that is gender-specific. In fact, it is distinctly the odd-one out because it doesn't even refer to a specific genus (or even family) of animal.

I'm all for creativity (I have the same complaint often) but there needs to be some sort of standardization in communication and society. A genius who can't communicate any of his/her ideas might as well be no genius at all.

DanWaterworth• 14 years ago

> I believe the standard answer is a "hen" because it's the only one that is gender-specific.

What about cow?

markokocic• 14 years ago

Isn't that the point of the article? Everyone could pick one of those and reationalize why it should be the "standard" answer, but it doesn't mean it's the only right one. Good test would require candidate to pick an answer and then explain why, but that would make scoring such test too subjective.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

~~Sheep / ram?~~

Cow / bull?

~~Sow / uh, pig ? (I don't know about pig)~~

Hen / cock?

(Pseudo strikethrough! See child comment from pbiggar.)

pbiggar2• 14 years ago

I believe its Ewe / ram Sow / boar

protomyth2• 14 years ago

Boar is a male pig. Male sheep names depend on if it got snipped (ram is for "intact" males).

// answers correspond to growing up in ND

shasta• 14 years ago

'pig' can be written in a way such that it has a symmetry about a vertical line, so I'd go with it.

ColinWright2• 14 years ago

Scott Kim can make any of them symmetrical in multiple ways - that's not a distinguishing feature.

jeffdavis2• 14 years ago

Strangely, the first reaction I had was that a pig is the only thing that you need to kill to get something from. You can get milk, eggs, and wool from the other animals without killing them.

Not sure why I went in that direction, but I could imagine a lot of farmers and ranchers might think along similar lines.

debacle• 14 years ago

Maybe you play too much Minecraft.

randomdata2• 14 years ago

I'd be inclined to answer sheep. It is the only term that can be used in a plural context.

As DanWaterworth noted, cow is gender specific and does not even refer to a specific genus either (see: Whales).

aidos• 14 years ago

Cow is specifically female, so it's not that. There are definitely a few different ways of cutting it, I went for sheep. It's a silly "test" of anything if it has a "correct" answer.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

For me the obvious answer is that it has 2 legs :) But if I cannot convince you I am right, my awesome intelligence is all in vain.

rmc3• 14 years ago

I believe the standard answer is a "hen" because it's the only one that is gender-specific.

Silly city-dweller! Cows are females.

abaillargeon• 14 years ago

I've seen a few comments on HN and the blog about this question -- I think it's important to note that the article mentions this question was a set of pictures:

>>One test had many rows of small pictures, and I had to choose the odd one out in each row.

So the arguments about the number of letters, the order of the letter, etc wouldn't make sense here.

ucee054• 14 years ago

it is distinctly the odd-one out because it doesn't even refer to a specific genus

Cow can refer to female elephants as well

benmmurphy• 14 years ago

I would have thought hen because the other three are mammals.

randomdata2• 14 years ago

It cannot be that. Alligators and crocodiles also use the term cow and are not mammals.

Zarkonnen• 14 years ago

That was pretty much my experience with the Mensa test too. The straight mathematics section was quite easy. All the pattern-matching ones were maddening because you could construct good chains of reasoning for all the options.

chiph• 14 years ago

> > Cow, hen, pig, sheep. > The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird.

I thought "It's the only one that goes around on two legs." And then: "It's the only one that reproduces via eggs." Maybe not the right answer for the "right" reason, but works...

But then, as I have gotten older, my IQ is probably half what it was when I was tested as a teen (not a candidate for Mensa, sorry) Probably because I'm more certain now that I don't know all the answers. :)

DanBC4• 14 years ago

Let's try to list all the "correct" answers.

1) Hen - only one with wings / only bird / only non mammal / only egg-reproducer / only creature using 2 legs

2) Sheep - only one with more than 3 letters in name / renewable wool provider (eggs and milk are renewing?) Only plural without an S (sheep vs cows, hens, pigs)

3) Pig - only animal without renewing product (no milk, no eggs, no wool); only male name (cow hen and sheep are female);

4) Cow - only sacred animal

locci• 14 years ago

I have always thought the point of this kind of questions is that as a candidate you are supposed to provide the right answer which you are expected to provide despite all the ambiguities. This, I guess, should measure some kind of broader intelligence which overthinkers might lack.

rmc3• 14 years ago

Cow - only sacred animal

Debatable, Pigs aren't kosher or halal, so you could claim they are sacred. I'm sure there are people who worship sheep or hens.

ahoyhere• 14 years ago

The cow, pig, and sheep all have hooves (are ungulates). The hen is the only one without hooves.

Surprised nobody mentioned that so far. That was my first go-to.

nacker9• 14 years ago

IQ tests share this property of undervaluing creativity and overvaluing conformity with academic work in general.

Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig, from his Wikipedia page:

'While doing laboratory work in biochemistry, Pirsig became greatly troubled by the existence of more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and, indeed, that the number of hypotheses appeared unlimited. He could not find any way to reduce the number of hypotheses--he became perplexed by the role and source of hypothesis generation within scientific practice. This led him to an awareness of a (to him) previously unarticulated limitation of science, which was something of a revelation to him. The question distracted him to the extent that he lost interest in his studies and failed to maintain good grades; he was finally expelled from the university.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pirsig

I score pretty well on IQ tests, but only by suppressing a constant incipient rage at many of the questions, and a constant effort to ask myself "what would be the most boring and conformist interpretation of this?" That is usually the "right" answer.

rmc3• 14 years ago

Science has several rules of thumb, Occams Razor says that the simpliest is usually the more likely, and the assumption that the universe operates according to universal, consistant mathematical rules means that you should favour theories that match every other part of observable reality, the rule of thumb that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is like occam's razor and means, again, choose the simpliest explaination that matches your evidence.

Hence, you can sort theories, and then try to devise tests to falsify each one to differenciate between them.

charonn0• 14 years ago

And if more than one theory is more-or-less equally probable, simple, and in accord with observed reality then you test all of them to see which you can eliminate. Repeat.

nacker9• 14 years ago

Yes. The context that has to be taken into account includes the social context, ie. 'I am sitting in a room taking a test, I cannot request clarification of the question, the person who wrote this test may be far less intelligent than me, etc'.

By making an effort to choose the possible answer that I perceive as the most boring and conformist, rather than one I might find brilliant, funny, novel, and suggestive of further even more interesting ideas, I am pursuing a strategy of "favouring theories that match every other part of observable reality", as you put it.

gatekeepr• 14 years ago

The problem with Occam's Razor is that it requires you to identify the simplest explanation. In fields like for example molecular biology deciding what is 'the simplest' often is difficult and debatable.

sarah20792• 14 years ago

In a lot of modern biology however you will have tens or hundreds of thousands of equally simple competing hypotheses. Biologist have had to adapt to this by using multiple hypothesis testing methods, but Prisig was working well before this became standard, so perhaps this was the barrier he was running up against.

RivieraKid3• 14 years ago

I think that Occam's razor says, that if we have several theories that describe reality with the same accuracy, we should chose the most succint (least redundant).

wwweston• 14 years ago

The author didn't name Occam's Razor, but she did touch on the idea that simplicity can be an unhelpful or ambiguous criteria to apply:

"Usually when you are asked to continue a pattern the assumption is that you are supposed to choose the simplest way. But sometimes it is difficult to decide what the testers think the simplest way is. Can you replace the question mark with a number in the following sequence: 31, ?, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, … You might say that the answer is 30 as the numbers alternate; or, you might say that the answer is 28 as these are the days of the month."

This isn't to say that Occam's Razor isn't helpful -- it often is, if for no other reason than the fact that model/theory with fewer "moving parts" is simply easier to work with than another with more (and a similar level of explanatory power). Just that simplicity sometimes can't help or that it can be a value judgment.

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

I am genuinely curious--is this essentially the contrast between frequentist and Bayesian ways of thinking?

nacker9• 14 years ago

Not sure what you mean by 'frequentist', but one thing is for sure: the more hypotheses that occur to you, the longer it takes to go through them testing each one not only for consistency, plausibility etc, but also for how likely it is that you think the test-writer would prefer the rationale for that answer. If only a few hypotheses occur to you, and they tend to be in the same ballpark as those that would occur to the average test-writer, you have an advantage.

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

Bayesian uses a broader prior -- a distribution over possible prior distributions of facts, instead of assuming a single possible prior (Gaussian). In that sense you could sort of squint and say that that's the contrast.

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

A similar thing occurred to me not too long ago, when I was learning about type theory: if you have the type of some function, then the set of possible implementations of that function is (usually) countably infinite, so the type doesn’t really tell you anything. But of course you probably care only about one of the simplest, so the type really does tell you an awful lot.

Anyway, I’m with you on the business of IQ tests. The problem is that as answers become increasingly open-ended, they are both more representative of a person’s actual intelligence, and more difficult to score objectively.

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig

I went to high school with a classmate who used to have the Pirsig family over for dinner fairly regularly. Robert Pirsig's father Maynard Pirsig was a law professor at the University of Minnesota, where the classmate's father (and, years later, I) studied for a law degree. I think, having read only Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance among Robert Pirsig's writings, and after limited personal acquaintance with Maynard Pirsig, that Robert Pirsig takes a lawyer's "that's debatable" attitude as he approaches scientific and philosophical questions, which bogs down his quest for certainty.

AFTER EDIT: I've seen an interesting pattern of drive-by voting on this comment, but I'd like to know more about what other people who are acquainted with the writings of Maynard Pirsig (father) and Robert Pirsig (son) think about the influence of the one writer on the other.

sesqu• 14 years ago

I'm not familiar with the Pirsigs, but I certainly do not consider the attitude in question to be lawyerlike. While lawyers do occasionally face philosophical conundrums, they also tend to have the desired answer known to them. This is considerably easier than to, say, set a prior for the domain of a model parameter, where your preferences are in a vague war between convenience and justice. The internal debate arises when working from first principles and finding too few.

nacker9• 14 years ago

Interesting. I first read ZAMM first when I was 15, and really enjoyed it, but I would strongly encourage everyone who has not read "Lila" to please read it, as Pirsig basically retracts most of what he said in ZAMM. In his own words, "Lila" is his "smart child", and the book he wants to be remembered by. It is a much better book than ZAMM.

If anyone is interested, I just discovered William James Sidis's "The Animate And The Inanimate" here:

http://www.sidis.net/ANIMContents.htm

cdooh• 14 years ago

Never quiet thought of it like this. There some things that would seem obvious to me but reading this realise perhaps not so much. Anyway IQ tests have long fallen out of fashion as they only measure a certain type of intelligence

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

Fashionable or not, intelligence tests are still much more indicative of (e.g. academic) potential than many other things people use to make hiring decisions.

giardini• 14 years ago

I felt truly intelligent only after ending my membership in Mensa.

gioele2• 14 years ago

Ask HN: what is the acceptance/rejection rates for Mensa tests?

fleitz• 14 years ago

On average they reject 98%. Mensa's cut off is the top 2% of IQs

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

Top 2% on any one test-taking session of *any one of several tests (SAT, LSAT, Mensa test, etc), which is more than 2% of the population.

gabemart• 14 years ago

>On average they reject 98%. Mensa's cut off is the top 2% of IQs

These two statements are not congruent unless the distribution of IQs in people applying to Mensa is equal to the ditribution of IQs in the general population. I doubt that to be the case.

gioele2• 14 years ago

If I understand it correctly, they claim that you must be in what is thought to be the top 2%, in other words your IQ must be over 130-something.

But this does not mean that they reject 98% of the people that take the tests. People interested in taking that test must already be, I suppose, in the top 10% of the IQ distribution (125+?), or so they think. If this is true they they do reject 98% of the applicants but only 80%. Yet I suspect they reject even less.

Any source or third-party evaluation of their acceptance rate?

illuminate3• 14 years ago

An understanding of numbers and statistics is obviously not required for membership.

freditup• 14 years ago

Another big downside to intelligence tests is they can make you think you are just that intelligent. (More commonly known as pride / arrogance. We all suffer from this, but I digress.) I've had conversations online with people who have scored extremely high on IQ tests. Now interestingly, this person assumed because of their high IQ scores that they were great at deducing patterns and reading people. They ended up coming to simply outrageous conclusions about myself that they were certain were correct no matter what I said.

So, I personally think IQ tests are worthless. I don't see any benefits that come from knowing what your IQ is. The only thing they give is arrogance, and as Albert Einstein (may have) said, "The only thing more Dangerous than Ignorance is Arrogance."

dschiptsov• 14 years ago

For the hen question two answers must be accepted, and second one, based on the number of letters, must be rated higher.) At least if you want to catch a person with Asperger's.

jhuckestein• 14 years ago

My dad made me take one when I was a kid and I did really well, but even then I thought it was stupid. The first issue is addressed in this blog post. The questions just aren't good enough. This is nobody's fault really, because it is very difficult to come up with a set of hard questions that measure your intellect and don't require lots of domain specific knowledge. It's either within a certain domain. If everyone taking the test was a Mathematician for example, the questions could be more clearly defined.

The second issue is that intelligence is multi-dimensional yet people try to measure it on a one dimensional scale. What's worse, the dimensions of intellect are somewhat elusive as well, so you can't just say something like IQ is the sum of values on each axis. Personally, I think that people that are high achievers in any field (business, arts, athletics, leadership, politics, science) are intelligent in some way. But when you look at all those people, there's no common denominator, no discernable pattern for intelligence.

3pt14159• 14 years ago

Studies show high correlation between iq and a host of personal outcomes (divorce, income, etc).

Many iq tests actually measure multiple types of intelligences then combine them.

wzdd• 14 years ago

I picked your first example and googled it. The first result is a study demonstrating a positive correlation between divorce likelihood and IQ for people born in the 1940s in the Netherlands, a negative correlation between divorce likelihood and IQ for people born in the 1950s in the Netherlands, and a positive correlation again for people born in the USA in the 60s. The authors conclude that social factors (the difficulty of divorce and the negative social consequences) are important for this correlation.

It doesn't change that there's a correlation, but anybody using divorce rates as an argument for the effectiveness of IQ tests would have to be quite subtle.

(Link: http://www.eui.eu/Personal/Dronkers/English/echtscheidingint...)

Gormo• 14 years ago

Does it make more sense to say that intelligence is 'multi-dimensional' or to say that it's 'adimensional'? After all, IQ is a metric, not a direct measurement, as intelligence isn't itself directly observable. If we're defining 'intelligence' as being a quality of the human mind that's conducive to success at achieving one's goals, then it becomes something of a tautology to simply ascribe that quality to people who have observably achieved their goals.

If the IQ metric is intended to correlate success on certain types of tests with success in other contexts, then it may be reliable in certain regards - e.g. people with higher IQs do tend to hive higher incomes, as 3pt14159 pointed out below - but the actual nature of that common causality is still something that may not itself be understood sufficiently to describe it in terms of dimensionality.

dave1010uk• 14 years ago

I've always thought of intelligence as the ability to learn, which you could say is the maximum speed you can gain knowledge and understanding. A person may be able to learn in some areas very well, but not so well in others. Also, someone who has devoted much time to gaining knowledge and understanding may be much less intelligent as someone who could learn quickly but never puts their mind to it.

An analogy for this view of intelligence and knowledge is like a car's acceleration and speed. Some cars may be able to go very fast but they may take a while to accelerate.

As others have mentioned in this thread, what obviously matters more is how you apply intelligence, knowledge and understanding.

nsxwolf• 14 years ago

tl;dr

Not bragging at all: I'm so creative and the IQ test is so culturally unfair that I just barely made it into freakin' Mensa.

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

I think you'll find that Tanya Khovanova is in easily the top 0.1% of any general intelligence test you'd choose.

robbiep2• 14 years ago

so she's only 1 in 1000?

elorant• 14 years ago

The problem with Mensa tests, or any other generalized test that tries to identify patterns in humans, is that some people are taking themselves far too serious. IMHO Mensa is meant to give you an indication of not how smart you are but how perceptive you are in a particular kind of problem solving. And that’s about it.

Now if you score above 115 and then you expect the whole world to treat you like something special you miss the whole freaking point. I’ve seen people who because they score something like 130 or 140 are intentionally acting like whims or try to say something very profound and they end up speaking BS. They are very hard to work with and constantly expect to be treated differently.

Bottom line if you happen to be supersmart try to do something useful and meaningful for the rest of the society, otherwise nobody gives a flying fuck how smart you think you are.

gruseom• 14 years ago

It would be amusing to have a bunch of people take the same IQ test, then tally all the plausible yet contradictory answers they produced to the same questions. Done well, that could be an effective demolition of the whole charade (though not in the sense that it would get anyone to change their mind about it).

The trouble with such tests is that they like you to be intelligent, but not too intelligent. So what they measure is efficiency of conformance. Is that what we should be optimizing for? I don't think so.

It seems absurd that something so obviously unintelligent would be the key to measuring intelligence.

Edit: oh, I see I'm just repeating what the OP has already brilliantly said. What a great and devastating little article.

satyajitsdt• 14 years ago

Having given my share of IQ tests, personally I always felt that they lacked in many sense. Once while researching about it I came across theory of multiple intelligence by Howard Gardner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...). Though not completely clear the basic idea behind it seems more logical to me.

freework• 14 years ago

IQ tests are just like anything else in life: If you practice enough, you will get good. If you are motivated enough to spend 10 hours a day practicing taking IQ tests, you will eventually get a high score. If you are motivated enough to practice the guitar 10 hours a day, you'll eventually become a guitar virtuoso. If you are motivated enough to spend 10 hours a day writing code, you'll eventually become a Rob Pike or Rich Hickey. If all you want in life is to be seen as smart by other people, then in my opinion, you need to re-examine some things in your life. I'd rather spend my time getting better at things that actually matter.

pjscott6• 14 years ago

Since most people who take IQ tests are doing it just once, without preparation, I'm not sure I see the relevance of this claim.

gurkendoktor7• 14 years ago

I have taken three and I have never applied for Mensa. Once in school when our biology class was curious about the topic; once online because somebody challenged me to it; once because it was in the TV magazine and I was bored, and I wanted to know if one really gets better at it. (I think I did)

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

Ironically, this is similar to the original logic of the IQ test. If you are able to pick up and figure out the given questions quickly, you should be able to pick up and figure out many other things quickly, which is a pretty normal definition of intelligence.

There is no shortage of people who will do poorly at IQ tests because of cognitive difficulties and (sure) lack of motivation to practice. Does loading on factors like these make IQ tests less predictive of academic or career outcomes? No, both of those things also require a combination of cognitive ability and motivation.

mgkimsal4• 14 years ago

Maybe, to some degree, that's true. But... I never spent any time learning how to take IQ tests, and have been tested at multiple stages - specifically IQ tests, and also the ACT/SAT.

First tests I remember, I was 9. Then ACT at... 15? Maybe it was 16. Then more IQ tests (3 different ones, IIRC) about 4 years ago. All showed me to be in the same X percentile, with a very small degree of variance between tests and over 30+ years of taking them.

And to repeat, I never spent any time learning how to 'take' a test. It was actually disappointing to get the test results and compare them to ~30 years earlier, and not see any change. I thought I'd have been 'smarter' as an adult, but I do realize it's not really testing that so much as... raw capacity perhaps? That hasn't demonstrably changed, despite all the life that's happened to me. No major health issues tho; I can certainly imagine that had I had a brain injury, my IQ test scores would be lower.

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

AFTER EDIT: Thanks to all who have replied for the interesting comments. I discovered this link while digesting replies I received on three different email lists to a request to name experts on mathematically precocious young people. (That was for work.) Tanya Khovanova, the author of the blog post submitted here, was one name suggested to me as an expert on precocious mathematics learners. When I saw her personal website,

http://www.tanyakhovanova.com/

I remembered that I had seen her blog post "Should You Date a Mathematician?"

http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=319

posted to Hacker News (and other sites I read) before. I'll read more of her more purely mathematical blog posts over the next few days. I see one I can use right away in the local classes I teach to elementary-age learners.

On the substance of the post, I'm seeing several comments that equate "genius" to "person with a high IQ score." That was indeed the old-fashioned way that Lewis Terman (1877 to 1956) labeled a person with a high IQ score as he developed the Stanford-Binet IQ test. But as Terman gained more experience, especially with the subjects in his own longitudinal study of Americans identified in childhood by high IQ scores, he didn't equate high IQ to genius, and he became more aware of the shortcomings of IQ tests. Terman and his co-author Maude Merrill wrote in 1937,

"There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales."

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 25. That is why the later authors Kenneth Hopkins and Julian Stanley (founder of the Study of Exceptional Talent) suggested that is better to regard IQ tests as tests of "scholastic aptitude" rather than of intelligence. They wrote

"Most authorities feel that current intelligence tests are more aptly described as 'scholastic aptitude' tests because they are so highly related to academic performance, although current use suggests that the term intelligence test is going to be with us for some time. This reservation is based not on the opinion that intelligence tests do not reflect intelligence but on the belief that there are other kinds of intelligence that are not reflected in current tests; the term intelligence is too inclusive."

Hopkins, Kenneth D. & Stanley, Julian C. (1981). Educational and Psychological Measurement and Evaluation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 364.

So on the one hand there is the acknowledged issue among experts on IQ testing that IQ scores don't tell the whole story of a test subject's mental ability. A less well known issue is the degree to which error in estimation increases in IQ scores as IQ scores are found to be above the norming sample mean. Terman and Merrill wrote,

"The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 is typical of the arrays at every age level.

"From Figure 3 [not shown here on HN, alas] it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds."

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 44

Readers of this thread who would like to follow the current scientific literature on genius (as it is now defined by mainstream psychologists) may enjoy reading the works of Dean Keith Simonton,

http://www.amazon.com/Dean-Keith-Simonton/e/B001ITRL1I/

the world's leading researcher on genius and its development. Readers curious about what IQ tests miss may enjoy reading the book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

by Keith R. Stanovich and some of Stanovich's other recent books.

Readers who would like to read a whole lot about current research on human intelligence and related issues can find a lot of curated reading suggestions at a Wikipedia user bibliography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

occasionally used for the slow, pains-taking process of updating the many Wikipedia articles on related subjects (most of which are plagued by edit-warring and badly in need of more editing).

anothermachine9• 14 years ago

""Most authorities feel that current intelligence tests are more aptly described as 'scholastic aptitude' tests"

Hence the S, A, and T in "SAT".

scott_s3• 14 years ago

I also find it odd when people equate a high IQ with being a genius. In how I view the concept, one has to be a genius at something. I don't think there is a general "genius" category. In other words, I don't view it as a description of potential, but of unparalleled achieved mastery and accomplishment in something.

cobrophy• 14 years ago

All an IQ tests, is your ability to do well on an IQ test.

It's not a particularly great measure of intelligence. The fact that you can often improve your IQ by 20 points (or more) just by practicing the types of questions that turn up should be evidence of this. Did you just become massively more intelligent relative to the population in the 2 days you spent practicing the questions?

JoeAltmaier3• 14 years ago

Be fair; this is a correct comment, in line with the OP. Terman admited that IQ tests are only good at testing what is covered in the IQ test. A circular definition of IQ if there ever was one.

baddox• 14 years ago

Maybe you got a lot of those questions right, despite having reservations about them, and perhaps that's the whole point of the test. Despite there being confusing or ambiguous questions, maybe the test is designed to determine your ability to figure out what the test-makers designated as the correct response.

onetimeuser50• 14 years ago

I am a HN regular but I don't want to sound boastful so using a one time account.

I have a high but not super-high IQ, about 138. I went to a highly IQ-selective school, and as a result have met people who are smarter. Here is the interesting part: while they can do certain kinds of things better than me (puzzles, certain kinds of math, certain kinds of intricate code, analogies etc). Yet, I have gotten far more interesting things in life done than they have.

Even more interesting, I have discovered that I have thought harder and deeper about many problems than some of the exceptional IQ people I have met. As a result, I can simplify problems that they "only" (!) know how to solve. And this simplifying skill has proved to be extremely valuable in the real world. That skill doesn't seem to be directly implied by super-high IQ alone.

pfedor• 14 years ago

Many people like to argue for political reasons that IQ tests are meaningless or fundamentally flawed. One of the typical arguments, repeated in the article, is that the questions on a test require some cultural background and a smart person can fail them if they were raised in a different culture.

Following a similar line of reasoning, we could say that the vision test your optometrist administers requires the cultural context, after all if you were raised in a culture that uses cyrillic then you might not recognize some characters, and you would fail the test even if your vision was 20/20! Therefore, all vision tests are flawed, and the very concept of vision acuity is meaningless.

pjscott6• 14 years ago

At this point in the conversation, I believe I'm supposed to accuse you of being oculonormative and suggest that you are blinded by your Visual Privilege. Would this be helpful? [y/N]

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Years ago in our 20s my wife and I took an IQ test. I think she got in the 150s and I scored in the upper 140s.

But I felt I had done much better. When we looked at the scores, for several answers I had results that were clearly consistent with an internal model I could build of the problem, but it just wasn't the model the tester wanted.

So in a geometric progression, I noticed that each figure had an odd number of visible vortices. In a word analogy, I noticed that all of the words except one had an Old English root. And so on. Many times there were multiple patterns of resolution. How could one be better than another?

I could certainly understand her choices, I just thought they were no worse or better than mine. The fact that IQ tests are created by people with high IQs led me to believe that what is really being measured here is some sort of academic cultural cohesion; how much we begin to solve problems in similar ways?

Not necessarily a bad idea, but not what I think of when somebody says "intelligence test"

carey• 14 years ago

A properly _standardised_ test should at least have been administered to enough people that you were in the minority of the kind of people it was standardised against. Actually, a properly standardised test should have discarded questions like that if their answers weren’t reliable.

In any case, it is quite unlikely that the test you took could reliably distinguish between scores above 145.

cbsmith• 14 years ago

Couldn't you argue part of the test is whether the test taker can determine the test maker's thinking? ;-)

matthewowen2• 14 years ago

Did any of the other word questions have answers based upon the linguistic properties of the words (rather than on the meanings of the words)? If not, then you evidently did fail at that portion of pattern recognition.

JoeAltmaier3• 14 years ago

Be fair - for math patterns you're expected to choose the simplest fit. For language, the highest-order fit (e.g. meaning, not letter count). Why? Its cultural - thats how IQ tests are done.

jlazer• 14 years ago

Joining Mensa was the dumbest thing I ever did.

pjscott6• 14 years ago

Did you actually join Mensa and find this to have been a terrible decision, or are you just looking to score points with a witty jab at an out-group?

(Or some third thing?)

JohnLBevan• 14 years ago

David Mitchell (British Comedian)'s view of Mensa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMKqyaXtHI

vacri3• 14 years ago

Great points, but "why join a club whose only entrance requirement is that you pass the test to join" is redundant. Every club with any requirement is exactly the same. Want to join a boat club and need the endorsement of one member? That's a test you have to pass to join, a social one. Want to join an old-fashioned gentleman's club? Then your test is 'be endorsed, well dressed, and have a penis'. It's still a test to get in. Want to join a motorcycle club? You're going to need a motorcycle and know how to ride it. Want to join Hufflepuff? There's a test for that, too.

mgkimsal4• 14 years ago

Agreed it's redundant, but there's something else about it too. IQ is biological. You may just as well have a club for left-handed people, or people with green eyes. You'll have about as much in common with them.

Not entirely true, but the few Mensa meetings I went to were all 'social' ones (met at a restaurant), and I had nothing demonstrable in common with the people there other than having the same biological brain ability. We probably did have some things in common, but no one went out of their way to welcome me, and I didn't bother to try to make myself welcome either, so I quit going.

What I think we may have had in common is some of the same social experiences of being outsiders looking in to 'normal' societal groups. Certainly everyone's experiences are different, but often highly intelligent people will be ostracized (through their own fault or the fault of others or both), and being able to relate based on those shared experiences can be useful in some capacity. The group I went to didn't seem to be in to that.

FaceKicker2• 14 years ago

> But the biggest problem was that the idea of crossing the odd object out seems very strange to me in general. What is the odd object out in this list?

> Cow, hen, pig, sheep.

> The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. But that is not the only possible correct answer. For example, pig is the only one whose meat is not kosher. And, look, sheep has five letters while the rest have three.

These types of questions irritate the theoretician in me as well, but to play devil's advocate a bit, are they really illegitimate questions? I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans, who regularly speak in ways that require the listener to resolve ambiguities that are at LEAST as severe as the farm animal question. If you think hard enough about it, sure, you can come up with a justification for any of the four answers (trivially, a cow is a cow and the other three choices are non-cows), but I would say that if you truly can't come up with the answer to that question that they "want" (barring any possible cultural reasons for not being able to do so), your intuition for pattern recognition could probably use some work.

This is not to defend IQ tests in general; I'm only arguing that ambiguous questions may measure something meaningful about your ability to learn or process information.

gurkendoktor7• 14 years ago

> I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans

So it measures how good you are at not thinking outside of the box? ;)

FaceKicker2• 14 years ago

Exactly.

But I would say that "thinking inside of the box" is actually an incredibly important skill in practical situations. Probably 99+% of any functioning adult's thinking is "inside-the-box" (I realize that this is sort of a nebulous/meaningless statement, sorry). Things that we don't even think about, like looking both ways before crossing the street or watching our step as we get off the bus are all examples of inside-the-box thinking. But maybe a more interesting example of inside-the-box thinking (in the context of something you might want to actually test) is communicating effectively with other humans of a similar cultural background to your own.

So to get back to the portion of the article I quoted and maybe refine my point a bit, maybe it really isn't fair to say that any answer to questions like the farm animal one is more "natural" than another, but rather only seems more natural due to the biases of our own mental models that our evolution has optimized for survival rather than to achieve any measure of fundamental truth or purity. That's perfectly okay to me, as long as the test makes no claim to measure intelligence in any "fundamental" sense, but rather in a particular sense of intelligence that arises only as a human being living on earth. It's entirely a matter of opinion whether such a sense of intelligence is of any interest or relevance, though. Personally I think it is.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

I would put it as measuring one's ability to determine the most salient category from the perspective of the person asking the question. In the case of the farm animal question, the context of the question implies the criteria that should be used to determine which is different.

emmett2• 14 years ago

The ability to answer those kinds of ambiguous questions is extremely culturally linked. The whole idea about IQ tests is that they're supposed to be universal and culturally independent. The Cow/hen/pig/sheep question is clearly not culturally independent - what's important about those animals is a cultural question.

DeepDuh2• 14 years ago

I don't think this question is a good example of being culturally linked. Rather it asks for knowledge about the world you live in. What characteristic of an animal do you think is most important?

- that it's koscher? (very cultural) - the number of characters in its name? - whether it is born out of an egg or womb (e.g. mammal or not)?

If you seriously can't figure this out I have to doubt your intelligence - however I wouldn't say that about all test examples.

lifeformed• 14 years ago

My first thought to that question was: "All but the hen have 4 legs, the hen only has 2". I'd have gotten the right answer, but only serendipitously.

NDizzle• 14 years ago

That was my first thought as well. They're also the only ones without hooves. What does that make us?

Evbn5• 14 years ago

If you count the average number of legs on a bird, you will find that your result was not so serendipitous.

grecy• 14 years ago

> I would say that if you truly can't come up with the answer to that question that they "want" (barring any possible cultural reasons for not being able to do so), your intuition for pattern recognition could probably use some work.

So it measures how good you are at blending in with other people, while being the entrance exam for a society of people claiming to be vastly different than other people. Hmm.

jalanco2• 14 years ago

I was raised in an abusive middle class household. My parents were not well educated. When I took the ACT test in 1975, neither my parents nor I even knew what the hell it was. I made a 23. I went to a unremarkable Tier 4 college because my friend was going there. I paid for it working as an "auger boy" on a gravel drilling rig for a concrete company for five years. I failed college algebra twice. I was put on academic suspension, and somehow talked my way back in. I made a C in algebra, a C in trig, and then took calculus from a handicapped polio survivor named Mr. Treese (not a PhD) who could barely walk or speak clearly. He had zero patience for bullshit but for some reason he liked me. After taking three classes from Mr Treese he suggested that I should enter the Math dept's annual calculus contest (I was a geology major). I actually won the contest (and a $60 check!). Afterward, I never made a grade lower than an A, and eventually moved on to earn an MS in CS. Today I think he was probably the single most influential person in my life.

Today we have two daughters who are both completing science PhD's funded with fellowships. I paid for their undergraduate education at Tier 1 schools but they have done the rest on their own without loans. You can bet your life that they knew what an SAT test was when they took it. All their lives we've told them that they were definitely very smart but that it just doesn't matter, that IQ is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you do, not how smart you are.

(I remembered this story because Mr Treese didn't care much for the idea that a "number series" problem has a "best" solution.)

textminer• 14 years ago

This is a wonderful story. I think it highlights how important it is to have parents support you (mine would buy me books and take me to the library and entertain long, rambling thoughts in the car) and to have teachers and professors support you.

jalanco2• 14 years ago

Thanks for your kind comment. I've thought of Mr. Treese often during my life. Here's an anecdote about him that's always cracked me up: One time he called on a student who wasn't, as usual, paying attention, asked him a math question, and the student gave a rude reply, "Your guess is as good as mine."

Mr. Treese fixed his eyes on him, gave him that crooked grin of his and said, "No that's incorrect. My guess would be much better than yours."

simulate• 14 years ago

David Mitchell has some insightful things to say about Mensa and those that choose to join the organization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMKqyaXtHI

vacri3• 14 years ago

Note that a proper IQ test must be administered by a trained professional and takes a couple of hours. This is simply because there are so many pitfalls that there is no other way - anything else that calls itself an IQ test is a pale imitation and can't be anything but flawed, for all the usual criticisms. What the author describes may be what Mensa need for admittance, but it's not a proper IQ test.

zapt02• 14 years ago

I thought she was going to score poorly. "Barely" made it into MENSA, sheesh.

mrlyc• 14 years ago

I joined Mensa and left after three meetings. It seemed to me that they mistook being able to think quickly for being able to think clearly, much the same as a teenager who thinks he knows how to drive fast just because he has a car with a powerful engine.

kenster07• 14 years ago

IQ is worthless in a vacuum -- much like a computer. Though they have magnitudes greater computational power than the smartest human, without humans, they have no purpose.

Sandman• 14 years ago

I'm no fan of Mensa, but there's one thing that I don't understand in this article - if the test was for non-English speakers and it contained pictures of animals, why was one of the possible answers that popped into the author's head "sheep - because it has five letters". That's language-specific, and should not be regarded as a valid answer in a language-neutral test. But the point is, it seems to me that the author is trying to find holes in the test. Of course that "hen" is not the only possible answer. As the author suggested, meat of pigs, for example, is not kosher. We can find things that differentiate any one of those animals from the rest. In any set, you can find some property of any object that will differentiate it from the rest. But that's not the point, is it? The point is to find the most obvious answer. The same goes for sequences of numbers. Yes, you can continue a sequence of numbers with any number that you like, and your answer will be perfectly valid. But the point is to find the most obvious one.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

I used to be in the Promethius Society, which is people with an IQ of 148+. I don't actually have an IQ of 148+ as far as I know, they just weren't smart enough to properly password protect thei Ning group. I have to say though after reading through the threads, most of them seemed vastly less intelligent than the smarter HN posters here.

danieldrehmer• 14 years ago

The particular tests she complained about were not aimed at measuring creativity, I believe.

But the animals question was really poorly designed

aaron695• 14 years ago

I think the simple fact the writer knew the answer, (Hen) but then went on to explain why it might be other things showed a lack of intelligence if anything.

Anyone who's intelligent would know Kosher is a cultural test so is not valid.

If you don't know how to answer the question correctly it's a lack of intelligence, not you're smarter than the test. Knowledge of the state of mind of others is what is normally defines intelligence in animals. Knowing what answer they want is part of the test. Some people just don't get it...

This is the same as psych tests that ask if you want to commit suicide. If you don't know why this question is there then the test is working. You're not smarter than the test because you think it's a stupid question, you just don't understand the test.

crikli• 14 years ago

Intelligence is like an idea: without execution, nothing.

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

A true genius doesn't want fame, fortune, awards, he doesn't want to stretch hands, hell, he doesn't even want to sign autographs. All he want is peace, out of the spotlight, in absolute and maddening silence, to keep doing what he does best.

To think.

lubujackson• 14 years ago

I've actually written an IQ test that a lot of people have taken. When researching how to put together an IQ test it became clear to me that from the beginning IQ testing was not, and never will be, a valid way to rate intelligence.

The simplest explanation is that "IQ score" is not fundamentally different than "SAT score" or "GMAT score" and is in a lot of ways worse because there are so many different interpretations and scoring methods for IQ. You can score 150 on one test but it might be scored completely differently than a test someone else takes. In other words, there is no agreed upon and copyrighted standard for IQ.

All of this type of testing really just sucks. All we really know is that IQ testing (or SATs, etc.) measures... something. And since people need to be quantified in some way, we use these scores for people-sorting. We TOTALLY overuse these scores without understanding them, and people feel great or feel horrible about their scores because of their usage (which is unavoidable) and for what it seems to say about them (which is very little).

It is hard to not feel good or bad about your score, even knowing all of this. We WANT to be rated, we want to score well and score better than others. That's human nature - just don't forget that your score will never impact what you can and can't achieve in life.

billforsternz• 14 years ago

One way intelligence manifests itself is through the ability to score well in an IQ test. Another way is through the ability to make an impact on the world. But I think another really strong characteristic of intelligent people is their tendency to lead a rich inner life. I get the strong impression most people go about their business without ever really thinking about how incredible it is that the universe not only exists but contains (at extremely low density) sentient beings capable of reasoning about it. Being one of those sentient beings is a remarkable stroke of luck. Intelligent people recognise that and celebrate accordingly.

peterjs• 14 years ago

I don't think that "creative" people would fail the test. Creativity has nothing to do with finding smartass solutions to puzzles. It has little to do with even solving puzzles.

Creativity is seeing, connecting and coming up with things other people don't. The main prerequisite is usually grunt work. We only see the results, not the messy process behind James Dyson's vacuum cleaner with thousands of prototypes, or Bob Noyce's integrated circuit. What made him so creative was his knowledge and understanding of the world of semiconductors and the ability to question things.

I strongly believe that any inventor with a similar story would score high on an IQ tests and would not manifest his creativity by making up unlikely theories. Admittedly, its a sign of intelligence to understand the question and the context in which it is being asked. The world is full of opportunities to show ones creativity. Picking one of 4 answers in a test is not one of those.

ramgorur• 14 years ago

I am quite dumb, but GRE made me dumber and this is a fact.

joelhaus• 14 years ago

The English language is terribly ambiguous... even for native speakers. Unfortunately, test creators frequently do not appreciate this fact (a crowd sourced question review service for teachers and exam creators might be an interesting solution). One of my favorite examples is the number of alternate scenarios that this sentence could be describing:

  the boy saw a mouse running in his pajamas

Counter-point: Throughout school, I often pondered whether the ambiguity in test questions was actually intentional. In the real world, you are often given problems to solve that are poorly defined, so perhaps this is good preparation? However, when working on real world problems, you can clearly state any assumptions you've made to arrive at your solution and this is not easily applied to answering questions on a bubble sheet test with very limited context.

nnq• 14 years ago

True creativity as well as true intelligence should INCLUDE THE ABILITY TO INTUITIVELY OR RATIONALLY "UNDERSTAND" WHAT IS THE SIMPLEST SOLUTION - meaning the simplest possible pattern that can be considered to consist of 3 or 6 or 9 shapes, one of which you have to choose in a standard figures based IQ test... "simple" might actually mean "being able to unambiguously explain it in the smallest number of words" for someone with a background in literature and philosophy and something similar for someone used more to the mathematical language... but in 90% of the cases there is an unambiguous "simplest" pattern that can be seen in the figures IQ test (not 100% because it's a statistical measure anyway, but still).

After all, don't we usually think of "smart" people as the ones that can take complicated things and make them simple or explain them in simpler terms (think Feynman, Einstein...).

...now about "cow, hen, pig, sheep" ...this is obviously a biased example by choosing 3 words of 3 letters and one of 5 and can be replaced with something that does not overlap the number of letters pattern on top of the number of legs or animal group one...

Tooluka• 14 years ago

I've seen this task once in one IQ test: "Continue the row of numbers - 2, 4, 8, 16, 19, ..."

The answer was - 21... "You know, first we multiply by 2 and then we start to add 3" :) . Perfect "creative thinking" test.

The IQ tests, even if they are valid are still inherently broken, just forget about them and carry on.

jonnathanson• 14 years ago

Great article. I experienced a similar frustration with the Stanford-Binet, and even more so in high school with the good ol' SAT (which Mensa also considers an admissable 'IQ' test).

It seems to me that a true "intelligence" test would also throw some generative problems at you: i.e., test you for as many correct answers to a pattern or sequence problem as you could come up with. I wouldn't advocate for generative problems to the absolute exclusion of deductive problems -- but the reverse is currently the case on most IQ tests, and it shouldn't be.

As for the broader point: there's been a scientific debate, for about as long as IQ tests have existed, over exactly what IQ tests are measuring, and exactly what IQ means. Most standard IQ tests are now regarded as measuring "g" ("general factor," sometimes called "general intelligence"). It may indeed be the most highly significant factor in intelligence, but even if it is (which, again, is debatable), it is just one factor of many. There are other factors, some of which are statistically significant. So simply isolating for the strongest factor is dumbing down the entire equation.

At any rate, "g" ends up being highly correlated with our concept of intelligence, but it is by no means a perfect or complete metric. And it does tend to favor a very specific type of intelligence, given that it is a narrow band on a broader spectrum. And vice versa: it excludes many whose minds we would probably consider genius caliber.

aaronbasssett• 14 years ago

"I don't know what my IQ is. People who gloat about their IQ's are losers" – Stephen Hawking

scotty79• 14 years ago

Entry test for MENSA I had about 5 years ago didn't have any words or shapes of any real-world objects. There was only one kind of questions. You had to pick image that would fit in the right bottom corner of (usually) 3x3 image grid. It was all about picking apart those objects and noticing how their elements change as you move from row to row and from column to column. Me being programmer given me some advantage I think because I perceived some transitions as bitwise operations and frame by frame animations.

My IQ

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