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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1973 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.)

Funny, there's lots of people on that Twitter thread saying things like "how am I supposed to know x book is 1000+ pages" or "but I don't read poetry". I don't read poetry either but I could recognise at least 3 of them as poets. The reason I know War & Peace is 1000+ pages despite never reading it is because I've seen it on a bookshelf and been forever put off picking it up and reading it because until I saw it I didn't know people could write books that wide. I've never used make-up but I know the Maybelline jingle. I don't read a lot of history but I remember that Mexico has pyramids from reading stuff like Tintin or watching the Simpsons episode where Homer gets launched into the mushroom dimension by Chief Wiggum's chilli. I hate restaurants but I reckon I could pick 4/5 classic French dishes if that was a question. Meanwhile I've got more than a dozen art history books and I read classics for fun but aesthetics/literary was my lowest score.

It makes me wonder if some people, particularly younger people and Twitter users, are in an information environment where not only do they not often see how physically big certain books can be, or have to skim past the poetry section to find the graphic novels, or sit through a television advert that isn't algorithmically tuned to their specific micro-demographic, but also the dependence on apps means for example instead of seeing http error codes in a browser when they visit a badly configured website all they know is the endless and mutely spinning circle icon they see when any one part of the entire chain isn't working perfectly. Why would you know about SATA cables if everything is cloud storage for phone apps?

I'm sure if there was a Gen Z section with questions like "which of these are Instagram features" or "which of these people are famous streamers" I'd be down in the 5th percentile.

294, had no idea there were always 5, I know I left 4 on a few thinking there was a maybe and may have picked 6 on a few, too.

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