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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1736 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026

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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Emil Kirkegaard has a new test, a "Multifactor General Knowledge Test". Link here: https://taketest.xyz/mfgkt

It's short and takes maybe 5 minutes. The percentile rankings are fun. Surely The Motte can drag the distribution rightward.

My results. (Foiled again by my working class upbringing.)

71 percentile among anglophones. Naturally, carried by technical and computer knowledge, heavily tanked by aesthetic and literary domains.

The question about number of pages in the books seemed completely arbitrary, because books can be printed in different font and paper sizes?????

A couple of people have brought this up, but there is no reasonable way to make the 1000+ page books listed fit in under 1000 pages, nor to blow up the smaller books to fit that size. Imagine a 999-page Infinite Jest - printers just don't make books in that size (it would be too small to be a coffee table book, but too large to be a normal format or fit on a small bookshelf. The normal book is around 1100 pages in a large format with a small font, and even smaller for the long footnotes). It's meant to be a test of general knowledge, not trick questions.

You’re mostly right, but Cryptonomicon is right on the border, at 918 to 1,168 pages, depending on the edition.

Huh, I read it as an ebook and it flashed by. Books feel a lot shorter on Kindle, I guess.

I agree, that wasn't a fair one.

I've been banging this drum for a long time.

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