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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)




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