I went ahead and did it all... by the time I was half way through, perseverance came into question. Wow that is boring.
At about the 3/4 mark, I guess, some of the patterns were really hard to figure out, and the clock is ticking. My mind goes to "wait, I kind of suck at pictorial pattern matching with so many different objects", and "is that the only judge of my IQ? What is mensa? Oh wait, clock ticking, not bored out of my mind"... I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve. I guess I really suck at pattern matching, or I am just dumb. They want you in the very top for mensa.
Based on my experience with Mensa members, being obsessed with your own intelligence is seemingly the primary criterion for joining Mensa. A long, boring test was probably exactly the selection filter they're looking for.
Mensa doesn't need a special filter for that, by virtue of being an IQ organization and not a chemistry/literature/mathematics organization (where it's about using your IQ for something) they will end up with the people who haven't joined an organization that's more specific to their interests: a great implicit filter for people who don't have interests other than solving puzzles.
I've never been part of Mensa, but it seems like good concept for when it was created.
The basic problem a lot of bright people had -- in the days before telecommunications -- was that the only people you had access to lived on your own street. If you were a nerd, most were boring.
A lot of work went into finding interesting people, be that through ham radio, organizations like Mensa, universities (at the time, about 5% of people went to university), gifted programs, or other places nerds could congregate.
I don't see much point to Mensa in 2022, but I think the cynicism is unwarranted. What do you do when you have a social club which is suddenly obsoleted by cars, phones, air planes, and the internet?
>I've never been part of Mensa, but it seems like good concept for when it was created
"Let's create an wannabe intellectual elite club based on a controversial and not really representative test, milking suckers with paid tests, and giving them a false sense of achievement and superiority"
(and I score in the high range, it's not about sour grapes)
I don't think it's about wanting to be an intellectual (evidently, IQ has very little to do with that), but rathe about finding someone who might also be able to think in the same way you do, and socialize and talk with them.
I've found that there are people with whom I can share many thoughts and concepts as they pop into my head, and they will "get" it, maybe not agree, but they have the capacity to entertain my idea, bad as it may be. I find that kind of socializing very pleasant, and I much prefer it to "talking about weather and current events in sports and popculture" which also have it's place, but which can be discussed with a much broader selection of people.
And that's just me, and I'm not one of the smart ones, but if I can feel like that, I can only imagine that someone in the top 1 percentile would feel something similar, if stronger, and thus would need to make an extra effort to find such company.
If you don't feel like this, it's just very likely that you already have this need met from someone around you, and you've just never noticed?
Is it better or worse than having a club for Ivy League schools? At least Mensa doesn't gate membership on political connections and class (yes by proxy, lets be charitable).
Tests in 1946 didn't have the same types of controversy as in 2022.
Prior to standardized testing, college admissions was literally based on belonging to a club. Rich parents would send you to a prep school, and admissions was based on admissions officers knowing the prep school (and grades, recommendations, etc. there-from). It was introduced to allow anyone from any socioeconomic background, and more demographic backgrounds, to be admitted based on ability rather than wealth. At the time, admissions rates to elite schools weren't nearly as cut-throat. A poor kid could study hard, take a test, and go to Harvard.
They didn't make the world equal, but they made it /more/ equal.
I really don't think the cynicism is warranted. Institutions go obsolete.
Did you not read the thread you’re commenting in? There’s a very good reply just a few comments up explaining how the origins of MENSA seem much more reasonable to our modern sensibilities in a lower tech world.
Are you dismissing that perspective, or did you just not see it? Ranting about an IQ Club that you’re not a part of seems to me even more embarrassing than what you’re accusing them of. Does that make sense?
Maybe that last line is a bit harsh, but I presume MENSA has never negatively impacted your life - certainly not tangibly. This is my experience, and I have no interest in joining. Assuming the worst, and denigrating those that haven’t done anything to deserve it is immature at best, yet it’s something that we seem to be getting more comfortable with. It frustrates me.
Is either of those strongly linked to IQ? Anecdotally and in my experience not really.
You can get pretty far on this by implicitly grouping a certain set of interests into "nerdy" or whatever but that is highly culturally mediated. A generation ago video games and sci-fi would have been a core of that set, but those are just the culture now.
The most nerd energy I've ever run across outside of my own interests is in people who follow auto racing and sports. Fiber arts and baking too. Not typically considered or even recognized as valid nerdery but very similar kind and degree of interest.
I'd argue that people who want to be in a group of other high IQ people probably do feel superior to people who can't be in that group. Now, and in the past too. Whether that's a useful grouping or a warranted superiority I don't want to get into. But it's really not more complicated than that, sorry.
I think you're underestimating just how disconnected the world of 1946 was.
In 2022, it's awfully easy to find people into whatever you're into, and you can talk to them around the world. In 1946, if you were a physics nerd and you ran into a chemistry nerd or biology nerd, you'd be excited to have a friend who shared your interest in /science/.
As a footnote: Performance on a test like Mensa's is strongly culturally-mediated. I suspect most people can score decently with a bit of practice and training. I think the major question was:
- Do you want to talk about football and sports?
- Dating and gossip?
- Intellectual stuff
A lot of this also had to do with how people spend their time. It's a lot easier to be an intellectual / nerd in 2022 than in 1946. I have the world's information at my fingertips.
> 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.
> in the top 2 percent of the general population on any one of more than 200 accepted
> An estimated six million Americans are eligible for membership.
That's not how it works. 6 million Americans is about 2%. It means that in order to have such a filter, you only have one chance on a single test. Not, "1 of more than 200 at any point in your life"
Out of 200 tests, even among those of the highest standards, you are bound to find one where you are particularly good at, and then you can try again several times, because you are unlikely to be at the exact same position every time. Furthermore, the "general population" includes people who are not in their best shape and yet, "any point in your life" tests your peak performance. And there is training of course.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than 10% in reality. By that I mean "pick a random person and give him a huge incentive (ex. millions of dollars) to pass". If we restrict to people who really want to join without further incentive, it may be way higher.
You should have been memorizing Tau, of course! Don't embarrass the human race to our galactic neighbours. Imagine what we'd think of receiving a signal that was an encoding of e/2?
They used to allow you to join based on SAT scores. I know someone from that era. They don't seem very intelligent. I'm guessing they just studied a lot. Maybe it's the same for those people.
I joined Mensa today because I overheard some good reviews, but that's my biggest fear. I want a group that I can go for coffee and have interesting conversations with, not a group of people who are all about how smart they are.
I don't want to be biased before even going, though.
The thing to remember is that one in fifty people qualifies to be in Mensa, which is not particularly selective or exclusive. This is 2% of the general population, not 2% of, for example, readers of Hacker News. Or 2% of software developers or 2% of people who read more than one book per year.
My experience with Mensa is from 20 years ago with the group in Chicago. I was in my twenties and my guess is that the average age of members was late-fifties. In theory, they were interested in recruiting younger people, in practice they were not interested in changing the activities in a way that would attract younger members, like focusing efforts to solve real-world problems. I felt they were more interested in showcasing depth in various atypical hobbies, or to simply talk about how smart they were. I was never in awe of anyone’s intellect. Pretty much just normal people. I don’t think I came across anyone that was exceptionally accomplished at anything.
This largely comes down to local group culture. In my experience, in the U.S. at least, more rural groups seem better. I speculate that this is due to: (1) lack of alternatives for intellectual engagement and (2) demographics, specifically that older generations are more likely to join clubs and organizations of all kinds. Both of these would balance the trend of millennial professionals to only join such an organization out of arrogance.
It wasn't bad. The people were a little bland and John Galty, but I love playing board games. The main problem was that they call it a Chicago chapter, but it was way out in the suburbs. I assumed that it was to be as far away from black people as possible (along with its membership, I think I was the only black person at the first meeting I went to out of probably 60 people IIRC), but I assume bad faith.
edit: would recommend if you live nearby and treat it as a board gaming club.
edit2: also, if I remember correctly you could bring two guests to meetings, so you're not stuck with only Mensa members.
> not a group of people who are all about how smart they are.
You're going to be disappointed.
Seriously though, you can find incredibly intelligent people in the strangest of places. And you find less than you might think in the most obvious of places. Once you learn what to look for, I think it becomes easier to find people to have interesting conversations with. Personally, I find that curiosity about the world around you is a very good indicator of someone I would enjoy speaking with.
It's funny. I am fascinated by cryptozoology, but generally don't believe cryptids exist. So you'd think skeptics' groups would be my jam? Turns out, nah. All the skeptics' groups I've tried aren't really all that interested in paranormal subjects, per se, just in their agreement that it doesn't exist. And the conversations often don't go much beyond that, so I quickly get bored.
Cryptozoology enthusiast groups are way more fun for me. I may not agree with most people there on whether Mothman exists, but we are 100% agreed that Mothman is awesome and we would like to spend more time talking about the story and what it means to people.
I used to be a regular at a Ruby meetup on similar grounds. I don't actually like the programming language itself very much, but I love Rubyists.
> being obsessed with your own intelligence is seemingly the primary criterion for joining Mensa
The parent says that scoring like an average person means they "really suck" or are "just dumb," so I think they have the right mentality for Mensa, even if their performance fell short.
Exactly. I don't know exactly what it is about intelligence, but people get really defensive about it. No one wants to be average or even slightly above average. People will go through a lot of mental hoops to stake a claim of incredible intelligence.
We don't do this with any other measure though. The difference being that most other measures can be measured. They run up against reality rather quickly. Am I tall? No. No shame in saying that. No shame in saying I'm around the average. Am I fast? Slow? Strong? Weak? Thin? Fat? How big are my feet? My hands? etc.
All can be measured and seen. All have physical manifestations I cannot argue against.
Intelligence. Well. That's a little more abstract. Abstract to a degree that we don't always recognize that Jeopardy is not really a "smart" game. It's a trivia game. You have to know things. That's not intelligence, that's knowledge.
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 :)
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.
And expected, most of us have to fall in the middle of the bell, only the very outliers will be at the extremes. It's normal to think one's very gifted, even boasting about it, but maturing is realizing that most of us are average.
At least we can get solace in knowing that intelligence and work is what makes great things, either alone is weak.
There's no way they're not accounting for selection bias. This isn't on online poll where you score among x% of people who took the test. They give the test to a (hopefully) representative sample and score you against that.
I don't think tests like this one are calibrated by those who happen to take it online. I believe they calibrate these tests by looking at a known test taker's results and comparing them to other test results. The other tests would be the high quality ones used in psychology that have a much larger, less biased selection of test takers.
LMAO this mirrors my experience exactly. About 10 mins left...I was questioning what I'm doing with my life. Hey, there's a finish button already, let me click that and end this thing. Does that count the rest as wrong? It wasn't clear.
Worse, IQ tests are catnip for people who take IQ tests. If you practice IQ tests, your IQ will increase not because you've become smarter, but because you have more experience with IQ tests.
I have always wondered how do they say IQ tests can't be gamed or learned, but I never believed that. There really must be certain number of standard pattern matching ways that can be applied. Just cram these like leetcode and you should get better.
This, specially the pattern matching. Sequences, dominoes, there's not many ways they can be arranged. The first time people see them they will be stumped, but after knowing how they're made, the tested can figure how the testers think and answer them easily.
Another example is language and vocabulary, which are heavily influenced by culture and education. If IQ is going to measure education too, it would be valid to include number sequences that are the even digits if Euler's number, or names of famous astronomers without the vowels.
Yeah. I did pretty well and I'm definitely not Mensa smart... but a lot of the middle questions were pretty easy to pick up on... or/nor/differences/unions...
And an opportunity for people looking for people with whom to have some productive exchange.
People who already tried some selection filter before (the IQ), will have no issue applying another afterwards (and discard e.g. the pure narcissists).
> I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve.
Congratulations! You're in possession of the statistically perfectly normal pattern matching skills!
A score of 100 means that you're as good in pattern matching as a normal human being, assuming the test is served and adjusted to a varied enough population.
This being Mensa, an organisation that's known of attracting people who think they are smart, your normal pattern matching skill might still be statistically better than the rest of the populace. Or it might mean that you're normal according to Norwegian standards, which doesn't necessarily say anything about your country. Or it could mean that you're above intelligent but not raised in a western, white society, because IQ measurement is culturally sensitive as well.
The homepage doesn't give any details about the population the IQ test was measured against, so it's hard to say what the end result means. Higher number = better pattern matching skills, that's the best explanation I can think of.
I had to go through these things with a psychologist when i was in school and beeing suspended.
My focus is very fragile, but these kinds of test actually satisfy so much that I am not paying any attention to the clock ticking.
These tasks stimulate the mind, imo.
Anyways, I am only scoring the average, nowadays.
Now i know, that there are things I can excel at, but at others I dont.
These kind of tests were complemented with a few other days, where I had to answer questions, recall stories, talk about things fascinating me, myself and my opinions, picture interpretations, sequences of digits, multiple choices and other things I cant recall.
At the start of the following week, these test were rated for multiple sections of knowledge. Then, the average IQ was estimated.
What I want to say is: This is only part of the actual estimation. It is the first test, who actually reminded me of these tests.
I did not suceed in school. I did start consume drugs on purpose, getting rejected from my school and only did the necessarities.
After a few years working, I did start wondering about knowledge and started to pursue studies.
If there is a topic that facinates you, such test would complement one.
In the end we are all median overall.
Sounds like a lot of smart people with ADHD I know:
- Fragile focus (well put)
- Drug use
- Rejected from school
- Humble as hell despite being obviously brilliant (just read through a bunch of your comments)
Not saying you have it, but if you're still looking for answers perhaps it's something to look into. It's quite treatable too, if you struggle with anything.
If an IQ-based club sets its threshold too high, then it might end up accepting Mozart but excluding Beethoven. I'd personally find that fascinating, but the other 100% of the population would probably find it incoherent at best.
If an IQ-based club sets its threshold low enough to include a Beethoven, then it's no longer really an IQ-based club. (E.g., our threshold is "Edgar" because we want the smartest people and also we really like Edgar's output.)
Edit: I changed "Edgar" above to "Edgar's output." Let me explain:
Mozart had the "bigger brain," but Beethoven obsessed over a narrower set of techniques and devoted his life to exploring every facet of them (much to the detriment of everything else in his life). Probably for that reason, his output is considered to be at a comparable level by most historians. This is true even by modernist analysis standards which attempt to exclude considerations like influence.
You can probably find similar cases straddling any IQ threshold, where you want to include output from X and Y even though Y's IQ didn't meet your threshold.
Oh you absolutely can train for an IQ test. It's not just pattern matching but also measures one's ability to abstract, and working memory and stuff.
The question is to what degree would IQ-test-specific training help you? I'd guess that it would, and it would be measurable and statistically significant, but not that impressive.
I did ok, but there were some puzzles that just didn't make sense to me. I suspect they were about rotating or reflecting. The xoring ones, though, those are my jam.
I don't think anyone who knows the xor trick behind the matrices questions can really say the test is measuring them. :-) Also I think it's funny that this comment thread will be giving 10 points of "practice effect" to everyone who reads it. We are ruining psychological research.
Is the trick just knowing what xor is? I haven't done anything like this before, but I did do EE as an undergrad so some xors just jump out at you, haha.
I think knowing xor is the trick because once you recognize it, the first half or so of the test becomes a bunch of questions that are exactly the same. It would be one thing if I thought they were equally easy (then I could imagine that I was just saturating them with my Giant Brain(tm)) but for them to be absolutely identical, I think, shows that the test isn't working anymore.
I randomly guessed for the last six questions because it was getting boring and still ended up with 121. https://i.imgur.com/hgXGoXn.png Some of the pattern addition / subtraction stuff was neat though.
I also don't put a lot of faith into IQ tests. I've met some incredibly smart people, on paper, who are incredibly dumb when it comes to common sense.
If you don't put a lot of faith in IQ tests, I think it should be for a different reason. Intelligence and common sense are two independent things and an IQ test only attempts to measure one of them.
121 sounds reasonable if you guessed the last six ones. What the test measures is essentially how many questions you get right before you start guessing, whether out of boredom or because you don't have enough time to figure the questions out (the test cannot really differentiate between those two). For reference, I scored 133 and had to guess the last three or four ones; this is consistent with the last time I did a test like this several years ago.
Are you sure you got bored, and didn't just run out of time like me? :P
I don't believe you got bored on the questions, they were hard enough that I did some screenshots to think on them afterwards, and I needed to spend 5 minutes with each of those before they cracked xD
I don't know if not wanting to perform boring activities in your free time is a great indicator of adhd. How far would a neurotypical person get into a long terms and conditions disclaimer before wanting to quit if there didn't seem to be a good/any reward?
ADHD brains crave novelty and mental stimulation. Random challenging quizzes are like crack to me, personally. Half of them I get bored with immediately and drop.
I've met plenty of people who've never left their metro area in the 3 decades they've been alive.
On the other hand, when my girlfriend asks me what I would like to do, she has to qualify it with: "inside of this state." I have driven across multiple states on a whim a few times over the past couple years.
The degree to which people crave novelty varies greatly.
Not too often you see someone being glib and pedantic at the same time. ADHD is at least related to a dopamine deficiency and those affected generally self-sooth by seeking stimulation.
Same here. The last 15 I just randomly clicked anything with 10 mins left on the clock because I got bored and wanted to see the end. Still scored 105 so maybe I was lucky...
No, it appears the test is quite calibrated based on these HN comments. You got a bit more than half of them before starting to guess, so you got a slightly higher than average result.
I've seen Mensa put out "tests" that aren't actually that difficult for marketing purposes. (I can't speak to their actual tests.) I recall a Mensa book in my elementary school library proclaiming that if you could solve even one puzzle in the book, you were smart enough to join Mensa! I believe it was officially from Mensa, but it's been a while and I may not remember correctly.
I passed. I could solve many of them.
Oh, jerf, bragging about how you could join Mensa is like the canonical example of boorishness.
Yes, well, just about everyone I handed the book to "passed" as well, so... let's just say this isn't the strutbrag it may initially sound like. I did not attend school at Lake Wobegon where all the children were above average. It was an average school of average children. Either by an amazing coincidence we were all smart enough to join Mensa even so, or Mensa was sandbagging just a wee bit. You do the math, as the saying goes.
They could be nerfing their tests in order to gain membership, I don't know how I could know, I didn't have access to the test after taking it. The proctor told me an interesting thing, though, that something like half (IIRC) of the people who take the test pass. She attributed it to people who knew they would fail largely being intimidated (or sour-grapesing themselves) out of even trying.
That Mensa's test is (intentionally or unintentionally) shit is also a plausible explanation.
Yeah I did 10 and then came to the comments to see if anyone knew how long it is. It gets boring pretty quickly.
I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people. If it's just to join Mensa then whatever, but I'd hate to think life-affecting decisions are made based on whether you guessed or inferred which combination of cross, box, and dot come next
Maybe the theory is strange to you, but the correlation is real. Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities, including things like ability to write poetry that initially seem impossible to measure. It is even correlated with height!
No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests. They care about the things an IQ test can predict.
They are controversial within popular culture but the idea that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities" is not controversial within the relevant scientific community.
1. It seems fairly widely reported that you can practice at IQ tests and get better. Are there any studies confirming or denying this? I presume you'd agree that if true it rather kills the validity of IQ tests dead.
2. I have ADHD and I'm acutely aware of how environmental factors affect my performance in many tasks. How do you square this with the idea that they measure an objective innate quality?
4. What's your thoughts on the argument that it's impossible to create genuinely culture free tests? This was something I was taught at college and it made sense to me then. Has it been debunked? Conclusively?
1. No, it only kills the validity of IQ tests for which the examinee has practiced, and only if the amount of practice is unknown and the amount of improvement is large and unpredictable. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
2. Environmental factors affect everything. You try to standardise them as much as possible for an operational definition of the thing you're measuring. You will never succeed completely. Nevertheless IQ tests time correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
3. Not sure anybody really understands what's going on with the Flynn effect. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
4. I'm sure it is in fact impossible on some level to create genuinely culture free tests. If we're going to be anal about this, this is a consequence of the various no-free-lunch theorems in statistical inference. For any culture/person/algorithm there are problems where they'll do better relative to others, and problems where they'll do worse. Nevertheless IQ tests correlate with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
5. I'm sure they do, but I haven't read the book and the summary in the Wikipedia article is too vague to tell.
None of these objections actually engage with the parent comment's assertion that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but (1) and (2) and (4) all seem to come from a place of believing that if a test is not 100% accurate then it is useless. Hopefully when I phrase it that way you can see why none of these objections "kill the validity of IQ tests dead".
(3) is very interesting and there is not yet any agreement as to what is causing it. Flynn seems to have thought our culture is slowly becoming better at training us to think abstractly. There's some evidence for this: one Australian study found that over 20 years the students in a set of schools became better at a vocabulary test but did not improve at all in processing speed. This is not what you would expect to see if the improvements were due to better nutrition or less environmental lead.
For (5), haven't read it. He's stunningly erudite and a careful author though, it's worth taking him seriously. Do you have some examples of points he raised?
The controversy stems from the egalitarian cultural assumption of modern western liberal democracies that humans are generally equal, "blank slates" and intelligence, skills, intellectual abilities etc can all be cultivated through institutions and technical processes to produce generally the same outcomes for most or all. A similar dynamic is observed with propaganda around saying everyone can "learn to code", as if we just need to figure out the educational algorithm and we can teach everyone to think the same way or be capable of achieving same intellectual skills.
IQ tests, or any standardized tests for that matter, blow up this assumption as do aggregated data showing differentials across groups or even nations, and that intelligence as even crudely measured by IQ tests which is just a proxy for something that isn't so precise, still correlates with general positive outcomes in life such as earning potential, health, career success, national achievement in science etc. It is also not politically correct that this dynamic is largely a biological phenomenon, that intelligence like many other physical characteristics is heritable.
This is why generalized IQ tests were banned from job interviews because not everyone scored the same, which is politically incorrect and unacceptable in our current political climate.
Basically for the liberal "left" which dominates western culture, "equality" is almost a religious belief, in opposition to any acknowledgement or even promotion of hierarchies, or recognition of inequality as an objective reality of human existence. Anything that undermines "equality" and points to natural hierarchy is "controversial" not allowed.[0]
[0] A random example, but there are many, of unacceptable differentiation when it comes to group cognitive outcomes. And elimination of standardized tests or advanced classes in the name of "equality" and against any instances of "inequality"
As far as I know they’re mostly controversial because it’s politically incorrect to claim that a wide variety of cognitive skills correlate well with a single variable measured with a simple test. But IQ as measured with a progressive matrices test does seem to have real predictive power, although no correlation is ever 1.0, of course.
I mention above, it's not the existence of the correlation that's a problem. Whether or not its "statistically significant", it's wrong to use correlations for deviation making on the individual level, because they are just stereotypes, they're not necessarily true. For population studies or something, sure, but same as you can't tell someone that just because someone with their personal attributes and history is statistically likely to be a criminal so they must be, you shouldn't be telling people they're dumb based on some abstract instrument just because its outcomes exhibit a correlation
They are controversial amongst laymen, as evidenced by the discussion here.
They are not controversial at all amongst psychologists. The notion that IQ tests have predictive power is about as settled as the notion that "people get sad sometimes".
For what? (Correlations are interesting scientifically of course, but for everyone else?)
> No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests.
Except for Mensa and their applicants.
I don't mind IQ research. I do mind exclusive clubs for the sake of exclusivity, and especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria. It smells bad.
The measurement can be influenced by practice. The g factor—the thing IQ tests are designed to measure—appears to be immune to practice, though I am not sure how this was determined.
Similar tests, like the SAT and GRE, are designed to work even with practice. They have other problems.
I don't mind research or clubs. If people want to have their own little puzzle club or whatever, that's entirely their right. And research into human intelligence is interesting wherever it goes.
What I'm skeptical of is applying stereotyping - and that's what this is, it's s predictive model that's based on averages, not the individual - to any kind of real decision that's any more weighty that letting you into a club. Like education decisions for example.
Ok, but individuals can all take these and other tests no? It is not only stereotyped assumptions around group averages applied to individuals.
It is also aversion or even policy regulation against even giving tests and acting on the results towards individuals, as this entails inevitable discrimination when the natural and unavoidable hierarchy of human abilities is observed.
> especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria.
IQ is very much so not genetically determined. See for instance the flynn effect which is happening far too fast to be the result of genetics. IQ is only ~50% heritable.
Yeah, hence "supposedly". The club's criteria is based on some form of largely immutable or hard to change personal trait. I can understand this in one way: as a support group. Highly intelligent people don't always have easy lives, especially when growing up. But if it was a support group, you'd have very little use for a test.
> I do mind exclusive clubs for the sake of exclusivity, and especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria. It smells bad.
? what is your stance on, e.g., competitive sports teams ?
It is, but only for languages that a person has learned.
How well would you do on any test written in Japanese? Assuming you never learned Japanese. Probably poorly. But if you knew a little bit of Japanese, you might do fine on a math test. And that's the idea with shape-based tests: trying to minimize the influence that language comprehension has on the results because you want the results to be neutral.
Intelligence is like the person said above, horsepower for brains. It's about how well you're able to reason things. And often how quickly you're able to do it, although this test seems to disregard that portion. Which is fine, they make it clear that it's more of a test to see if you should be tested rather than a test in and of itself.
Pattern recognition is a large part of that. A person who is able to discern patterns more easily, is usually able to reason better. More able to do second and third order thinking.
IQ "tests" that use words or numbers are also testing knowledge to some degree, which isn't something you typically want when you want to test raw intelligence. Being able to do calculus doesn't necessarily prove you're intelligent, it proves you know calculus.
So that leaves abstract concepts. And that's another facet of intelligence, being able to think abstractly. There should also be some "die folding" questions in there. Where it shows you six connected boxes and you pick the cube that it makes. That one is also about spatial relations as you have to model the cube in your head in some fashion.
All that being said: intelligence is nothing on its own. It's a force multiplier. Intelligence allows you to use the knowledge and skills you do have better. It also makes the acquisition of knowledge and skills easier. People with higher IQs have better life outcomes on average than those with lower IQs among every cohort. What that means, if you take all the poor people, those poor people with higher IQs are going to be doing better overall. Still poor, but able to make more of what they have. Tall people? People with higher IQs will be doing better overall than those with lower IQs. Doctors? Same. Welders? Same.
Now, this doesn't mean that every person with a higher IQ is doing better. Success is very multi-faceted and dependent on a lot of things, some of which are outside of our control entirely. But it helps.
Yes, there's a 25 minute time limit on the test as a whole. I just recalled the part where they said there was no bonus for finishing fast.
So it probably bakes in a range. Like if you complete this test in the allotted time, you will be in this range. But if you completed it in half the time, you'd probably be higher, but they haven't calculated the range you'd be in. They'd just say, "Yeah, you're in the top range".
It probably never makes sense not to use the whole 25 minutes. If you think you got all of them right in less than that time, it pays to use the remaining time to double-check your answers. The test seems to be calibrated such that if you get all the questions right, and use exactly 25 minutes, you score the maximum, 145.
I clicked finish (without having finished every question) with 2-3 minutes left, and they popped up a dialog suggesting I use the extra time to review my answers (not to keep trying on the question I gave up on).
Only if you leave in people with cognitive impairments. IQ against income rapidly decorrelates as you exceed the 80-point threshold; income is probably the only real and hard measure - and frankly even using that measure conflates success. How many conventionally smart people are ascetic or minimalist? Historically, there's a pretty high count.
Pegging success solely to income is disingenuous. It's not the only measure of success, let alone the only "real and hard measure".
There are awards, patents, accomplishments, etc.
There are positive correlations between IQ and positive outcomes in general. Basically, take a metric of success and group people into it and you'll find people with higher IQs in the groups with better outcomes.
Even if you then slice those groups by other factors.
I already covered that contingency. All the other criteria you've mentioned are qualitative. Which returns us to income levels, which again, IQ doesn't predict very well. And the claim that you'll find people with "higher IQ" (not clinically disabled), to be more successful is specious because you're including the portion of the tail that is dysfunctional.
First, in terms of salary, people with below 80 IQs aren't included because they generally don't have jobs.
Second, why would we even have to cut off the tail portion?
Next, you didn't cover that contingency. You keep saying it's all income levels, but it's not. IQ and positive outcomes are positively correlated. Pick a thing, pick a measure of success, you'll find that people with higher IQs will tend towards the successful group.
And this is also a "all doctors are tall, not all tall people are doctors" kind of statistic. Higher IQ people will wind up in the more successful groups more often, but being in the more successful group doesn't mean you have a high IQ.
There is this interesting 4 part podcast called My Year in Mensa, by comedian Jamie Loftus. It is worth a listen. Gives a new perspective (spoiler alert - not good) on Mensa
> I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people.
To be fair, most people don’t understand how paracetamol helps reduce pain. But it does and we are able to measure its effect, so we have scientific studies that prove it. It doesn’t matter if you understand how it works, it does.
Same with IQ tests. It’s not about the pattern matching. It’s about the fact that a huge mountain of scientific literature have found these measures of pattern-matching abilities to be correlated with a wide range of other abilities and accomplishments. If a persons ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time was a better predictor, then that is what we would use instead. It doesn’t matter if we understand why that would be the case. But ofcause everyone who scores less than they feel that they should end up trying to discredit the entire concept rather than just accept that their poor ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time does not define them, or impose any new limitations in their life.
I swear every discussion about IQ ends up feeling like a room full of short men debating if measuring tape is even reliable and debating if it’s even fair to say that tall men can reach thing on top shelves more easily since we live in a society with chairs, and there’s obviously something wrong because they have tons of arguments for why they are 6 feet tall, even though the measuring tape doesn’t agree.
No one is saying that you can’t have an absolutely great life, or reach the tallest of shelves, being a short man. The fact that we can measure peoples height, and that certain things are different base on how tall you are doesn’t have to offend people.
It's 35 questions and in the last 10 I didn't see any patterns and resorted to the highly intellectual strategy known as "guessing". As a skeptic of IQ, I'm pretty worried about the same thing, surely it couldn't just be people publishing a study about how lucky subjects are at finding round pegs and square holes>
At some point in the later 20's it's about ORing, ANDing and XORing the shapes, depending on the question. In the 30's it's about something I wasn't able to grasp.
It tells you this information right before you start the test: "This test consists of 35 problems that must be solved within a 25 minute time limit."
But I agree that it is unfortunate to base the future of a person on a one-time test. That includes the finals in school or a day full of exams after a long semester.
> For the results to be as valid as possible, make sure that the room you sit in is properly ventilated and free from distractions and that you can work uninterrupted for 25 minutes.
Sounds to me that you have issues understanding directions so I think your result might be very much valid!
I know you aren't 100% serious but "issues understanding directions" is probably not strongly correlated with intelligence. It could very much be down to anxiety, diet, ADHD or other conditions.
Unless we define "intelligence" broadly enough that transient or other factors are included. That might be valid but it's very different to what most people think IQ tests should measure.
I 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. :)
Alternatively, you may say that programming is skewed towards people that find it easy to operate in a world of logic. We all know that programming can be like a puzzle and you sometimes have to keep a lot of conditions and dependencies in your head to solve the current problem.
Others may lack the formal language, but I don't see an inherent disadvantage in that. You can play music without knowing the notes.
In India, there is a selection test happens for schools called JNV[1]. These are schools designed for talented underprivileged kids who grew in mostly rural areas.
The selection test actually uses this format of pattern recognition to judge abilities of 10-11 years old kids.
I thought that’s pretty neat given how universal pattern recognition is and it helps remove bias from selection process towards kids who can’t afford extra classes to pass the exam.
A decade or so back my son applied for one of the few remaining state selective schools in London. About 2000 applied for 100 places. Admission was by similar tests, including verbal and non-verbal reasoning. Despite the claims you can't game these tests, many people use tutors. We didn't, but I bought him all the non-verbal reasoning papers I could find online. He practised a lot, and over six months progressively raised his mark from around 70% (not high enough to get in) to 100% on the final practice paper he did a couple of days before the entrance exam. I'm sure you need some native aptitude, but it's not at all clear to me these really help remove selection bias.
My son told me that when a new teacher gives them a word-search or visual puzzle, they kids will have finished before the teacher has finishing handing them out. On the other hand, he also tells me common sense isn't so common there, so things do tend to balance out in strange ways.
Yup. New York has a gifted and talented test that's supposed to require no preparation, but kids are competing with other kids who have spent time/effort/money to prepare: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=new+york+gifted
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.
Despite being fiction, the quote I shared is a plausible thought experiment that illustrates one kind of limitation of tests in general.
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.
But it's not real. It never really happened. It can't illustrate any sort of limitation because the limitation doesn't really exist in the fiction.
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 used to do well at these pattern matching tests with consistent scores in the range 125 - 135. This one I hit 118 but I ran out of time around question 32. I got stun locked on a couple of the earlier easier questions. I wonder if this is due to mental decline as I get a bit older (I'm in my early 40s now).
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 mean you did the same test twice and gave yourself extra time. Of course you are going to perform better. This doesn't mean you will perform better for a totally new test.
I argue that patterns learned on individual tests would apply to new tests. There are a set of patterns which have already been called out here. Translation, rotations, exclusions, logical and/xor on line segments and dots, etc. IME, most IQ tests sample from this set of patterns. Once you are familiar with that set you aren't really doing a first-order matching - instead you are going through your list of expected patterns and seeing if they apply to the particular question. This means you can breeze through the early questions drawn from that set using your memory and then save your cognitive time for the later harder patterns.
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.
Pattern puzzles are good. I remember trying a test on the official Mensa website 10 years ago, and gave up midway because there were lots of word puzzles, which were biased in favor of native English speakers.
You are right and they have a spatial reasoning test called "Culture Fair" which they gave when I applied for a test. You only need to be top 2% on one of the two tests for an offer.
They get easier with practice though, so I don't think they're that great either. Also are we saying that linguistic ability has no bearing on intelligence? IQ tests seem to mainly test ability at IQ tests, I'm sure there's some correlations with aptitude in other fields, but I'm not sure how well a literature nobel prize winner would do on this.
Just a note on IQ tests: a test conducted by a psychologist includes several different areas beyond what this test covers. Longer term memory, for example, is a component not assessed here. These components are scored both separately and combined as a 'full-scale IQ', and will highlight both strengths and deficiencies in these particular areas. Some people who scored average or low on this test can still have a high IQ in other functional areas, and some who scored highly may just be particularly well-attuned to solving symbolic arithmetic puzzles but be deficient in other areas.
How can one prove that the selected answer is indeed the correct one? Isn't it possible that there are more concise explanations than the recognized "correct" answer that the author of the test didn't see (and indeed, couldn't have seen, since patterns are a huge powerset ...)
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?
Yeah, unsurprisingly, I'm too dumb to join mensa, but I can't help but feel bemused about the seemingly strong need that some people have here to dismiss the organization and test for whatever reason they find. There are lots of worse interests than ones cognitive ability, and I can't help but think it might be somewhat related to some bitter feeling one might get from being average.
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.
This feels like those "Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training" Nintendo games where it's not about being smart or training your brain, but just training your skills for this particular kind of tests.
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.
"If you can train for it, it's not an IQ test, period."
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.
The justification in the literature is that since all types of intelligence are correlated, just testing a relatively neutral one like progressive matrices is a good choice, since it would generalize out to other types of intelligence.
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.
At the very least a Mensa test at a test centre is much different than any test I have found online. But last time I checked you can only increase your score marginally through practice. An 80 IQ person probably couldn't practice to 150.
Interesting, but the reason I personally avoid IQ tests is they are like horoscopes or having your fortune told, where it creates the conditions for subtle attribution errors that can really compound over time. When I was a kid, the answer I got from my parents was along the lines of, "they didn't get a number, but you're on the high end, and so you have to be extra careful about being lazy because IQ doesn't mean much."
In terms of outcomes, what is there to say, that I'm really good at arguing on the internet? I can appreciate a lot of things while not being able to do them. Sure, I can start as an adult what most people do as kids (music, arts, languages, tech) and become a passable amateur pretty quickly, but the adult mind is irritating to teach because it has to reconcile everything new with its idea of self, and unhooking that adult ego is a heavier and heavier lift.
Intelligence is entertaining, but domain specific practice and competence prevail almost every time. I suspect the best use of a high IQ is probably to teach because that scales it. By itself, it mostly produces interesting guests.
Back in 1995 I had a moment of massive intellectual insecurity and joined MENSA. There were about 30 of us who took the test. Keep in mind this was before email privacy & hygiene and the mailing list went out to all instead of BCC so we found out that everyone passed. Literally everyone.
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.
> You can even join without taking the test by having an SAT score above a certain value. Dubious.
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.
I didn't really mean SAT-specific coaching or practice tests, I meant more general practice and training as a result of your education. Like if you grew up in a rich neighborhood, on average you probably had better training on SAT-related skills over your 10 years of school, a better environment to practice those skills, etc.
I had the same thought. As soon as you recognize that there are only a handful of categories of patterns, recognizing the solution is just a matter of matching your question against a known pattern (e.g. this row rotates, you combine the two shapes to produce a third, this shape moves and this one doesn't, etc)
Taking a few of these over and over would quickly attune you to what to look for.
I suppose in a perfect world, you'd be able to generate a test with tricks the participant hadn't seen before to test how quickly a person could cultivate a list of patterns to check each question against.
Not everyone is capable of doing this. Ironically people with low IQ would have quite a difficulty practicing for an IQ test. At the same time, the effects of practice are me rather small compared to where people place on the curve before and after training.
What I find fascinating about discussions about IQ (tests) is how they trigger a whole class of people. It's like there are smart people who are confident about their intelligence, less than bright who are conscious about their shortcomings on the matter, and in-between a whole bunch of midwits who can't accept that smarter people than them exist and thus declare IQ (tests) measure nothing.
I took the test and joined Mensa for a year before letting it lapse. I think that IQ tests measure nothing but test-taking ability. I've always been good at tests. I'm not exceptionally bright.
There seems to be a pattern with people's IQ and their profession. The average IQ for physicists and philosophers or even just someone with a PhD is like 135. The guy who cleans the toilet is very likely not going to be in that range. Clearly something to do with intelligence is being measured.
The reason I took the test is because when I was listening to the Howard Stern radio show, their crew was taking IQ tests, and I realized I hadn't ever taken one and had no idea where you would. I've cleaned a ton of toilets professionally in my life, even well into adulthood. Do I sound smart? Because I've been deemed in the top 2% of IQs.
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.
Dr. Jordan Peterson is correct that IQ tests are highly predictive of many important things in life, like educational attainment, wealth, income, etc. It's understandable how the concept of a single number encapsulating so much about a person's potential, is controversial.
I finished it and scored 138, which ostensibly is a high score assuming the bell curve at the end is correct... and I'm just left wondering what was it I was being tested on. Pattern recognition, I guess?
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.
I'd argue that pattern recognition is basically the brain's most important job. Acquiring new patterns is another (but you'll notice how easy it is when the new patterns mostly fit existing patterns).
That's not to say that the tests actually mean anything. They probably don't.
Not recognizing patterns that aren't there is another related and important job, which is in conflict with what you mention. I'm not sure this is really being tested. If you look at patterns like 1,2,4,8, etc (to choose something that I can write in text) there's actually a lot of next numbers that could fit a pattern, but to get the points you have to pick a certain one.
> I'd argue that pattern recognition is basically the brain's most important job.
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 think there's very little of what we call 'intelligence' that's innate. Not sure if there's any consensus, but most papers I've read seem to indicate that the difference is either tiny or non-existent, for similarly healthy brains.
I took the test to be part of Mensa when I was 17. It was a one hour or two hours test? I think. I remember I got very bored by the end and I stopped paying attention to the questions and I started to answer without doing all the analysis it was required.
I passed it and I was part of the the society. I found it quite weird because the rest of the people didn't look like "smart" or "intelligent" or whatever you could think of Mensa people.
At the end I just decided that they (we) were good at identifying patterns. I stopped paying after one or two years.
I think Mensa is on the lower end of high IQ societies. IIRC. I think they accept people who test in the 135 range, which is uncommon, but not horribly so. Like in the 2% range. So, 1 in 50 people. There's another group called the Triple-9 society which only takes people who test in the 99.9% percentile (hence the clever name).
Mensa and other high IQ societies consist of people who have enough time to dedicate to being in a high IQ society.
That should tell you enough about the motivation and mindset of the people in it.
Like everyone there was probably technically intelligent, but they've convinced themselves that that alone was enough to lead them to the land of milk and honey. Like they say, hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Being intelligent isn't enough, you have to acquire knowledge and you have to apply that knowledge.
>Mensa and other high IQ societies consist of people who have enough time to dedicate to being in a high IQ society.
They also consist of people who (stupidly) attribute a lot more value to IQ than it deserves. I got a 135 on this test, I am not smarter than Richard Feynman.
I bet that IMO/IPhO medalists are a LOT smarter than Triple-9 people.
(Yes, I know that Feynman underwent an actual physical examination, and his score was probably lowered by his poor English skills, but my point still stands: smart people typically don't have extremely high IQs.)
Most career data shows that once you reach 125-130 IQ or so, it stops really being a factor in career success, and other things matter more: grit, interpersonal skills, etc.
Being at the 99.9% level is impressive to be sure, but it doesn't seem to translate to much tangible benefit in our current society.
Close. The data said that at the 125-130 range, there's nothing that you cannot do, mentally.
Basically, they tested people from all walks of life and they found that the skill with the highest threshold was about 125-130.
People with higher IQs may be able to do or learn things better or faster, but it's possible for anyone to achieve that level if they put in the work. IQ just tells you basically how much work it will take.
Is HN something between Reddit and Buzzfeed now? Apologies if this sounds smartass-y but the quality of top posts in the frontpage has dropped significantly the past two years.
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 happens; as one social network turns to shit, the evacuees drag down the quality of the platform they escape to.
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.
I have done similar tests in the past including this one and I scored over 125 in all of them. But it doesn't really matter because you can't gauge g by a matrix reasoning test alone (I estimate my 'real' IQ to be -1 SD from what I scored) . And that's what makes posts like this one low quality - pop. (Believing an online test gives an accurate estimate of your intellect.)
Ignoring the uneducated claims about someone's IQ based on their public appearance, where in the parent comment did I say the word smart?
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'.
The median STEM PhD probably has[1] around a +2 SD IQ, but the median person with a +2 SD IQ does not have a STEM PhD or similarly impressive educational attainment (2% of people have a +2 SD IQ but only 1.2% of people have PhDs, and only 20% of people with PhDs have STEM PhDs[2]).
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.
Maybe I'm in the low IQ bracket but I suspect i would score higher if i knew what kind of changes/patterns are allowed. You can probably learn and train for this kind of test pretty effectively by just building a mental checklist for possible patterns to check against.
I got exactly the same score as on the WAIS 4 test I took a few years ago. (Enough to qualify for a membership, I guess...)
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.
It gets boring pretty quickly. I wonder if part of people considered having a high IQ is the ability to persevere through adversity and having grit which really isn't the same as raw intelligence.
I took this test some months ago in the way they suggested and they said that I have a very high chance being admitted to Mensa or some such.
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.
>What's the point of a community that is solely focused on some figure-based puzzle solving? I don't find any.
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?
> Not everyone has the ability to use school as such a filter
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.
Your derision seems to be narrowly focused on IQ as a filter for its own sake. But it's not that an IQ filter is valuable as an IQ filter, but that it correlates with other traits that might be valuable to someone. But filtering is hard. If you agree that a high IQ allows you be good at X, then first filtering for high IQ will get you closer to finding those highly skilled X's.
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 tried it, and now I'm wondering what some of those patterns in the low-mid-30's were (I don't recall the specific numbers, but probably around 32 or 33), because I was completely lost when I got to those. I'm more interested in what those patterns were than their assessment of what it means with regard to my IQ.
There was one where is started getting to XOR. Going left to right if the line in the first box matched the line in the second block, it was not found in the third block.
Seems like it stopped being about pattern matching versus logical constraint identification and application.
Yeah, I got the AND and XOR ones. It was immediately after those, I think the first one might have been filled small circles and boxes on the left and right of a center vertical line. They were all at the bottom, making me think it might have to do with some symbolic counting, but I didn't come up with anything. the next 2-3 with the center vertical line I didn't get either, so conceptually there's maybe something about the vertical line I wasn't grasping.
I found the the filled and unfilled flags on diagonal lines, the filled and unfilled boxes separated by a vertical line, and the dots and box separated by a vertical line difficult. I was running out of time, but thought it may have something to do with shifting and/or mirroring the position of the figures, and/or a base 3 representation but couldn't come up with a generalizable pattern.
I didn't see anything which suggested that its better to attempt and fail or skip and complete as many as possible, which would definitely affect time management strategy.
I didn't take the test but it might involve sudoku. I remember taking a test of similar fashion some time ago, and the final (hardest) question completely threw me off. I got curious and asked others, and was told it's sudoku related.
Are you talking about the ones with the line and the filled / non-filled squares, or with the striped / non-striped flags? I couldn't make sense of them either.
Yeah, those ones. Most of the questions seemed to separate into groups where a conceptual idea was explored, and it feels like I just didn't see/understand the concept those were attempting, so I'm interested in what I was missing.
May I be the first to say that I’m not sure what “IQ” actually measures? Naturally I have the same understanding as most: IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains. “This brain has so and so much more thinking ability than others”. Yet I find a curious phenomenon when spending time /with/ the brains of others through their work, writings, or speech: often my level of engagement or intellectual fulfillment that I gain has little to no correlation with their IQ. What IQ seems to fail in capturing is the human ability to be creative and unique; whereas I believe now one can design a sufficiently advanced AI/ML instance which could learn the patterns in this Mensa test, our ability to assess value and meaning from a perspective of “well they recognize certain types of patterns” seems carelessly limited. But that’s just my perspective.
Instead of asking what IQ measures I think it's probably more useful to simply ask what it predicts.
Often discussions regarding IQ seem to get bogged down in debates around the definition and value of intelligence, or the ability of an IQ test to accurately measure it. But whatever your opinion on what IQ tests are measuring, IQ has undoubtably been shown to have a high statistical predictability for many of the positive (and negative) life outcomes we're interested in as a society. For example, if you score higher on an IQ test you're statistically much less likely to go to prison and much more likely to have a higher income.
Personally I think IQ is something worth thinking about in the context of group behaviour and performance. For example, at the level of a nation it's worth measuring mean IQ and being concerned about any persistant annual declines in IQ, or simply to understand why some cohorts might have significantly higher or lower IQs. On the level of the individual I'd question how useful it is.
This particular test is an imitation of Raven's Progressive Matrices, which measures working memory (WM). WM is the amount of information "chunks" an individual can work with in their short term memory. For an average person it's "7+-2" or 5-9 "chunks".
The patterns you see on the test introduce progressively more and more changes, until you are getting beyond 9 changes a piece at 120+ IQ. Let me know if you have any questions.
> IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains.
I don't think this is a very valuable way to think about IQ. It is what it is, nothing more nothing less. It's the location you fall on in a normal distribution of intelligence as measured by specific tests.
I have heard that IQ measurements correlate very well with general success in society. Peterson says they correlate better than any other measurement in human Psychology. (Paraphrasing and I can't validate it)
Peterson also says that it doesn't matter which questions you use. People with hi scores on one test will typically have high scores on the other tests.
It seems to be a hard thing for intelligent creatures to hear:
There are some smarter that you and some less smart and you are most likely in the middle range somewhere.
I'm not disagreeing at all. I'm just saying that isn't what IQ is. It correlates with all sorts of stuff and understanding those correlations is useful. But IQ isn't its correlations. I definitely believe those correlations exist and are pretty strong.
It isn't "Mental Horsepower" though. If something called "Mental Horsepower" or "General Intelligence" exist which I don't personally buy, IQ probably correlates with them but it isn't them.
IQ is a location on the point of a normalized distribution of scores on a specific set of tests. Nothing more, nothing less.
Correlations don't guarantee things to be true. If IQ correlates strongly with "Mental Horsepower" it could still be very possible for a specific individual to have high IQ with low "Mental Horsepower" although it is statistically less likely.
> 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.
We can also test how far most people can jump and their ability to memorize numbers or do arithmetic or algebra quickly. We don’t have a “movement quotient” or a “calculation quotient” so what exactly does an “intelligence quotient” aim to quantify precisely? It’s not intelligence, I’ll argue.
We absolute have and use these things. This is why the US army makes you run a mile and counts your pull ups. These things are not measures of your "true physical fitness", they are just data points. But they have extremely high correlation on other fitness metrics so we just measure them and assign a score.
You could very reasonably label the outcome of that test a movement quotient.
> What IQ seems to fail in capturing is the human ability to be creative and unique
This is completely contrary to the evidence we have. Creativity is correlated with IQ and inversely correlated with age. A lot of famous artists in a variety of fields are recognized to be quite intelligent. Most creative arts programs in universities are highly competitive; perhaps the most competitive of any college in a university. And a surprising number of famous musicians have degrees in other difficult fields, for example the lead singer of the band The Offspring has a Ph.D in biology.
Additionally, it has been observed that papers written by younger mathematicians are much more likely to have novel approaches to solving problems. Suggesting that younger minds are more creative than older ones.
So many online communities are collections of people of slightly above average intelligence, trying desperately to prove themselves far above other people of slightly above average intelligence.
Wouldn't be surprised. Many people here seem to become insecure when it comes to puzzles. A lot of "I got bored" comments here and people hating on leetcode style problems when both are honestly quite fun and believe would be to any mind that has the horsepower for these.
Don't best-practice IQ tests also measure the verbal component, e.g. vocabulary and reading comprehension? I also recall some tests requiring rotation of 3d figures, not just 2d fill the 9th slot type problems.
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.
So I am either very intelligent or ridiculously stupid. All I got was this message: "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."
Not sure I'll do it, but I'm contented with not being a genius and still trying to hold informed opinions and trying to think critically. I've done well enough given my circumstances. It's probably not all attributable to hard work, and there's probably a bit of "nature" there (as well as often being endearing to people), but I know I'm not extremely intelligent, just somewhat (as not to be needlessly contrarian with people who insist I'm smart, gotta give at some point).
It's alright, Mensa can be for the people with the big brains.
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?
Agree, I felt like I knew what to do for some of them because of programming experience. I remember taking similar tests as a child, and always assumed that the pattern must be of the form "each object in the first square moves to some new location in the second square according to a rule, and then continues moving according to that rule to a new location in the third square". But here it seemed obvious to me that some questions were "combine the first square and the second square according to a logical operator like AND or XOR". I don't think I would have been so quick to see that sort of rule without being exposed to them frequently in programming.
I also feel that my programming knowledge and discrete maths courses in university helped me recognise patterns in this test quicker. But I only got 121, so just being a programmer apparently isn't enough :)
I scored 128, however, that was due to skipping about 3 of the puzzles due to the time limit.
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.
Score: 128 (Your IQ was measured to 128 which is equivalent to the 97 percentile, with a standard deviation of 15.)
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 got a 95, though I generally think I'm good at synthesizing concepts and applying them.
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.
If you can solve the same problems as the best problem solving person in the world but 10x slower it still makes you one of the best problem solvers and that test won't tell that.
Leisure (or, light entertainment) information: those interested in the context of quizzes that try your "solving the unmet" abilities may be interested in the new Auerbach, Nabarro, English, Webster show,
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.
I got 100, my solving pattern was comparing each row or column with each other to get the answer, the last 4 i choose the most different quickly because time is running out.
I stopped after 5 minutes (don't have so much time) and got 102. I guess thats what I am: average, not because of lacking potential, but due to lacking perseverance...
What I find impressive is that despite online IQ tests being notoriously unreliable, my score on the ~8 or so I've completed as an adult over the years (including this one) has been remarkable stable, to within + or - a couple of points - even though I generally don't take them very seriously. Which makes me question if they actually are all that unreliable, given that my score is not all that close to the center of the curve.
I think it's a nice gimmick, and the online test results are probably close to your actual measured IQ. These tests tend to only measure certain aspects of your intelligence (in this case: exclusively pattern matching, but no memory testing at all) so the results are often skewed.
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)
The weird thing is that I'm quite good at puzzles like these, but I'm garbage at things like chess (well, I have a 1050 blitz rating on lichess, which isn't terrible, but it's not good either). You'd think it would carry over, but apparently it doesn't. Which makes me wonder what kind of smarts the test actually quantifies.
I think IQ in tasks like chess determine your potential or at least how fast you learn. Obviously you aren't going to figure out something like a bishop pair checkmate on the spot even with 160.
IQ is interesting to me especially when people glorify the "high IQ".
It's weird because it says exactly nothing about a persons empathy or ethical responsibility.
So what I have learned from that is.. never underestimate your adversaries logical thinking ability, regardless of how seemingly devoid of empathy they are.
Such tests can cause depression, they should not be published online. Some kid might decide to stop trying harder in college just because was distracted and failed this test.
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 didn’t see where you could see the answers. Was there a spot?
I made it to 29 (feel like I knew all of the ones before that, but who knows?). But #29 threw me. It is the one with the like down the center, and columns of either solid or stroked boxes on either side. No clue what the pattern was there.
Yeah, that's probably what they were going for. These kinds of puzzles are pretty bogus though. You could choose any number of ways to interpret each cell as some logical expression, and then choose from any number of functions that make the truth table valid with any result you want in the blank cell. At that point, you just have to guess which of those functions the test writers thought was the most "natural" or "elegant" or "clever," but there's really no objective sense in which one is more correct than the other (unless you literally define the purpose of the test as measuring the ability of the test taker to predict the intent of the test writer).
To use a simpler example with integer sequences, if the question asked for the next integer in this sequence:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ?
Most of us probably immediately think "ooh, the test writer is very clever because they know about the Fibonacci sequence, and I'm clever too, so the correct answer is obviously 13. But wait! What if the intended sequence is the number of strict odd-length integer partitions of 2n, and thus the correct answer is 11 [0]? What if the intended sequence is the number of balanced ordered trees with n nodes, and the correct answer is 14 [1]? Heck, what if the intended sequence is Fibonacci(n) mod 10, and the correct answer is 3? There is an infinite set of functions from the integers to the integers which give you the 7 provided results for n=0 through n=6, and you can get any result you want for n=7 by just choosing among those functions. There is absolutely no mathematical or logical way to prefer any one of those functions to any other.
It is like Super Symmetry, you can concoct any number of basis functions to match the desired output, I feel like I have to be extra smart to figure out the one they want.
Yes, I had exactly that thought as I was going through it. I could see many times a pattern, but was it the pattern that they wanted? Pretty small samples to triangulate on.
My guess was that boxes of the same color on the same side of the line sum, but boxes of the same color on different sides of the line cancel each other out. That yielded an answer that was one of the 5 given possibilities.
I wonder about the effect of a strict time limit. It seems to benefit time management skills over raw intelligence. Perhaps it would be more accurate to allow the test taker to finish the entire test while tracking time spent, and then use time spent to adjust the score.
Unfortunately The time limit seems the only way to limit this type of test. There's only a certain number of types of problems they have. If you can solve one in a class, you can solve any in that class. There wouldn't be enough ways to discriminate results without time.
Does this test actually allow you to join the group or is it a marketing tool, possibly with scored nudged up a bit, to get you to pay to take a test to see if you can join? I've never heard of a valid IQ test in an uncontrolled unproctored environment.
-10 points for clicking the link, -10 points for not stopping sooner.
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.
If anyone has thoughts on question 35 I’m curious to hear them. I’ve come up with a very simple method/solution, and a slightly more complicated solution, and bot produce results that are not among the proposed answers.
Confounding factors: Rule availability - do participants already know about NAND, XOR, etc. Mental resource availability - how rested and hydrated and nourished are the participants.
Exactly right. Also knowing what rules aren't used is a huge advantage. I bet if you had the solutions to a sample set your IQ would appear significantly higher.
I wondered whether the grid always meant the same thing. Are things always a two dimensional pattern or does it get used as a one dimensional series sometimes?
102. I have never done well on these visual puzzles. May as well be drumming or dancing for me, other things I am terrible at. doesn’t seem to correlate with other things though that I am good at.
The test claims to measure IQs between 85 and 145. That means the test probably scored you below 85 or above 145.
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.
That either means you guessed a lot and got too many wrong – or you were extremely good. If you only took 10 minutes that means you only had 17 seconds per problem; I'm not too bad at pattern recognition (I think) but for some of those questions 17 seconds (or even 30 because it's an average) would be way too short for me.
Yep, definitely. I believe the test is calibrated such that if you get all of the questions right in less than 25 minutes, and without guessing, you're off the charts of this test. That is, you're supposed to use all the time you got, and still score quite high even if you have to guess the last couple of questions. (I got 133, guessing the last three and may have got a couple others wrong.)
I did one of these when I was a kid and had just weeks prior to that done some similar excercises I found in a puzzle book. Once you know the tricks you can finish it really fast, and since they indeed use some formula that's basically the percentage of correct answers divided by the time you took times some constant, I got a very high score that I thought was bogus.
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.
I would take it if demon offers me a a deal that transfers my pattern matching IQ to the proficiency of using language as a tool (in Wittgenstein's sense)
I got 117, but I didn't skip any. Time ran out at 24-25, can't remember. I'm skeptical at what pattern recognition has to do with intelligence to be honest. I'm 45 and been programming since my teenage years, maybe that has been helpful as most if not all patterns in these tests are basically combinations of bitwise operations. Back in university I did the Swedish version of this (~20 years ago) and scored 140+. I don't think I did any worse now. I've heard the scale is constantly calibrated, so I guess people in general are smarter nowadays :-)
Scored 140 for a Mensa test I took at a test centre and thought I would get something decent. Even in normal conversations I can form a graph of all the points being made intuitively or form a whole random orchestra in my head.
Benchmarking cognitive functions should be much more interesting than it currently is, with data tracking progress and regression. I feel like the tests are too focused on low level raw hardware bandwith of simple tasks, and not enough on semantic reading comprehension and problem solving. E.g robustness against cognitive biases should be benchmarked, thinking outside of the boxes/ solutions by transpositions/free associations should too.
Such a toolset would also help measure the effect of nootropics differently, vs e.g. the magnesium threonate ~9 IQ points increase
I got 138 which is apparently 99.5 percentile. I ran out of time on #32. This is about right based on an IRL test I took before where I scored 99.7 percentile.
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.
I once stumbled across an online IQ test that had randomly generated questions, and never ended. The longer you kept taking it, the lower the IQ it gave you.
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.