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Notes -
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.)
My results:
Full scale: 136
Memory: 132 (VM 76/85, EM 15/26)
Verbal: 137 (V 25/34, A 22/27)
Spatial: 136 (MR 16/17, CP 13/18)
It is almost midnight for me, so I was fairly tired, but judging from other comments this is standard (in practice - who's actually going to block out some prime focus time in the midday to do an unmoderated online IQ test?)
My thoughts on the test sections:
Visual memory
I think this was a pretty good test in being robust to gaming - the only issue I can think of is the question of whether you can move your mouse into a convenient position whilst the image plays (I decided the fair thing to do is to not touch your mouse at all until the animation finishes)
Exposure memory
This felt like the most "IQ"ish test for me, in that there was no conscious thinking at all. I initially planned to just rapidly repeat the sequence to myself as it played, then I realised I can't articulate an image like this in words in a fraction of second. (Was there anyone who could actually generate short verbal encodings for the icons on the fly?)
My strategy was to just passively consume it and then just click whatever icons "spoke" to me without thinking (and then adding in any others I remembered properly with a few seconds conscious recall)
Vocab
I had heard before that Vocab is extremely g-loaded, and this EOK article gives r=0.8 (I haven't read the article though, I just skipped to the table)
I always found this really weird. When I first started believing in IQ (as a measure of something beyond "how well you do IQ tests") I had always assumed that any word stuff would be less g-loaded than "maths" stuff like shape rotation (because STEM people are smarter than humanities people) - I suppose since we hear/read so many words, even really weird ones like "diaphanous" come up at least once, and if you're more intelligent, you process your stimuli more efficiently, so fewer strange words and concepts fly over your head.
Anagram
I think this is the worst subtest. Some other tests are gameable in this specific interface, as there is no time limit, and they could just be fixed by adding a timer.
But I know from personal experience that anagram solving are extremely trainable - I have a friend (of similar intelligence to me, based on exam results and working together) who can unscramble 9 letter anagrams in seconds (even using bizarre words), as he enjoys playing "word games" like this, and knows various patterns, heuristics, etc. I believe he would easily max out this test.
Mental Rotations
As @Pigeon pointed out, the shape rotation was too easy (I got 16/17, and I believe it would have been 17/17 if I had used my \infty time correctly and checked my work properly), especially without a timer. I just did a "mental rotation" without much effort or strain (I suppose if you didn't partition the shape into "plane" + "protrusion" it might have been hard, but I suppose you need good spatial intelligence to notice something like this)
Center Points
After the test, I looked it up - it turns out this is a "thing" - it's called the Geometric Median, and there does not appear to be a simple "trick" that allows you to estimate it in your head.
I'm not sure to what extent they wanted us to just go on vibes for this one (The most advanced maths I used here was to count the number of squares in each group when they were clearly clustered) - I remember around Q10-ish I realised there were 24 questions and got impatient and started almost instant-answering a lot of questions.
Also - I realise the vague "mental picture" I had for this problem was completely off - I did not clock that the optimising set has to be convex (since the objective is convex), and had mental images of things like arcs or isolated points (and I think I even hallucinated correct answers of this form in my memory as I progressed through the rounds - maybe because the first question, of a 2x2 square doesn't look convex since the guide answer doesn't include the 2x2 itself)
This doesn't massively effect the actual problem, but curious if anyone else also had the same wrong picture in their minds? I don't know why, but it still feels sort of wrong to me that the objective is convex (even with really weird point placements, you can't get any local optima?) - but on the other hand... it's literally a sum of convex functions! This feels like quite a big oversight on my part, hopefully I was just tired...?
Amongst my close friends in undergrad, there used to be a guy who had a ~150 IQ (he was the only member of the group who had it measured "properly" by a professional - he had a psychologist friend and he agreed to be one of the test subjects for something), and he was noticeably duller than the rest of us in [hard STEM subject we all studied] - this was evidenced objectively in exam results (and he worked to try get good results) I'm not sure if he is just one of those unfortunate people on the vertex of the functionality/IQ ellipse, or if it really was just a "culture" issue (maybe he was just overloaded with extra-curriculars, he had test-anxiety, etc - normally I'd discount those explanations as cope - but then... 150 IQ!)
Anyways, I always secretly hoped/fantasised that maybe the 150IQ really did correspond to the expected level of functionality, and that I was actually more functional - so maybe I was actually some kind of genius with a +4 sigma IQ (and I've never done genius things like getting an IMO gold medal because something something environment something something Newton was an unremarkable undergraduate something something) - so it was a little disheartening to have my unlikely fantasy extinguished completely.
And I think this is part of why I've never actually taken the effort to find an online IQ test (despite thinking about IQ and intelligence, and even talking about it with friends, a lot) - but obviously that was bad and irrational. More information can only ever add utility, because you can always do whatever you want anyways. I can already face the reality of having a 136IQ because I've been living it for my whole life, that which can be killed by the truth should perish, the cat was already dead before I opened the box, etc
Maybe he was mentally ill/traumatized. That can wreck cognitive performance.
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