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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   2526 thread views

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.)

Did it while a little distracted, went away to shower and do other things, did try to concentrate for the timed tasks, also I took this near midnight so might be a little sleepy

  • Full scale: 140
  • Memory: 138 (VM 76/85, EM 21/26)
  • Verbal: 135 (V 30/34, A 16/27)
  • Spatial: 141 (MR 17/17, CP 14/18)

I'm surprised my memory and spatial is that high, and that my verbal is that low — historically formal IQ tests have pinned me as having significantly higher verbal IQ. I will blame it on English being a second language of mine (even if I am fluent), but I'm not sure it explains the disparity between the synonym-matching and the unscrambling-words tasks. I was barely able to get any of the 5-letter words unscrambled. (For reference the previous LSAT thing that was floating around a while ago (?) was easy as shit in comparison, 5/5 no sweat — was the LSAT supposed to be a good proxy of verbal IQ?)

The shape-rotation is super easy, as all of the the shapes are a bent line on a plane with another bit sticking out — the only thing needed is to identify once you orient yourself towards the part sticking out (for example, I just assumed it was facing myself), what shape should the remaining squiggle be. This would have been more difficult for me under time pressure, but most of the shapes were fairly self-explanatory I felt.

Probably could've gotten a bit higher on the CP puzzles if I didn't rush and actually reasoned my way through some of these but then I suppose it's fairly pointless if you actually idk do it? Was I supposed to run purely on intuition on this?

Why so many excuses and humblebrags from someone who got a great score?

I actually think that it was probably a bit inaccurate and it might have overestimated my spatial/nonverbal IQ (as I thought the spatial elements could be gamed a bit too easily), but most of the soul-searching is due to being quite perplexed at my lower verbal score. Previous estimations/tests of my verbal IQ returned a score, like, >10 points above my nonverbal IQ.

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