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Friday Fun Thread for April 18, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anybody down to take an online IQ test? It's not timed but according to the site takes up to 20 minutes to complete.

Feel free to share your scores. I'll go first.

Full Scale: 138

Memory: 136

Verbal: 137

Spatial: 141

I'm not surprised my memory was the lowest of the three, I feel like I've always had a bad memory (and I hate that card game called Memory where you flip over the cards to make pairs.) I always wonder if the synonym thing is really the best way to measure verbal intelligence: I just don't care to memorize obscure words which I feel drags my score down but it just seems like a waste of time to remember words that I never encounter and can simply look up the other 99 percent of the time that I'm not taking an online IQ test. Besides that, if I can imagine that a word means something else, that isn't really valued in this test either, but it would be useful if I was writing poetry or a song or something. (Like if the word is "big" and a syononym option is "ebullient," I know that ebullient doesn't mean big but spiritually, to me, it has the essence of bigness...) But I guess the intelligence to override my imagination is what the test measures. I'd rather be imaginative than book smart though, really. The spatial portion was probably the closest to measuring "imagination" in that you need to imagine the shapes rotated in your mind. I feel like I used to be much faster at this, I found myself rechecking my answers quite a few times (of course the test was untimed so I could do that without penalty.)

Full scale: 111

Memory: 101

Verbal: 140

Spatial: 107

Not even a little surprised that I'm a wordcel rather than a shape rotator. In future, if you see one of my posts and think it's badly argued, feel free to discount my reasoning accordingly based on the results posted above.

I think it's interesting that someone could have such uneven results... Do you think you could like, practice and train at the memory and spatial tasks and get better at them over time if you tried? Are you just apathetic to those sorts of tasks compared with verbal skills? Did you excel at, say, english and history classes in school and do worse in other subjects?

Are you just apathetic to those sorts of tasks compared with verbal skills?

Of course not - I wish these tasks came naturally to me the way they do to so many others.

Did you excel at, say, english and history classes in school and do worse in other subjects?

When I did my Leaving Cert (Irish university entrance exam), I got a B in both English and maths. But I do think that, in general, I didn't have to work half as hard at English as I did at maths.