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I just took another batch of IQ tests for some poor suffering undergrads and felt that they were hilariously swingy.
I've always scored around 130; but one or two questions can drop your right out of/into that bracket , and the pattern recognition questions are easy to get wrong through test format. Eg, in this test there was a sequence of numbers displayed such that the question number looked like it was part of the sequence. I only noticed because it made the sequence all fucky.
This ontop of the other (crapyer) test where you basically play word association half the time, the whole enterprise of IQ testing fills me with doubt. I have no doubt I am "intelligent" enough to be somewhere near where I test on the bell curve, but 97th percentile feels way too high to me. I feel like a better test would be to present my with a piece of broken machinery I've never seen before and timing me while I try to fix it, only that's kinda hard to feed into numpy for pretty graphs.
Are the IQ tests used for actual funded trials different than what is used by starving students, are all of them shakey as hell buzzfeed affairs, or am I just biased against them for some reason?
97th percentile means out of a room of 33 random people, you're the smartest. Does that feel right to you? In my school year of 200, there was one kid who was clearly the brightest. I could believe he was a 1 in 1000 intelligence = ~145 IQ. I think I was roughly second, so smartest 1 in 100 or 135 IQ. Yet this was a good school full of middle class kids, so the selection isn't fair. The hard part about building this intuition is getting an idea of what a room full of truly random people feels like.
(Also fixing broken machinery as an IQ test would bias against women, who have poorer spacial reasoning as a group. I think women outperform men on verbal reasoning, so you have to add some of that in.)
you would expect to be the smartest...
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As your school example gets at, 33 random people are hard to come by.
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I recently took the CFAT, which has very similar questions to your typical IQ test, as part of applying to the Canadian military. It's a very serious test and a very important part of how the Canadian military decides who to hire. They didn't tell me my exact result, but they did say I did very well, and I expect it was the equivalent of ~130 IQ, which is what I've gotten on other IQ tests I've done.
I think my score is inflated because I enjoy doing what the test tests for; I have an excellent vocabulary because I read a lot, and I'm very fast at algebra because I enjoy doing it and have practiced a lot of arithmetic and algebra. But I think it's quite likely I'm in the top 5-1% of Canadians at vocabulary and algebra.
That sort of broken machinery test would probably make me look at lot more average. But I expect you and me both would still be noticeably above average. This forum puts a lot of emphasis on IQ, and I think IQ probably should be given some more importance by wider society, but I think this forum often goes too far. Work ethic has a very large impact on success too, IQ's far from everything, a fast brain doesn't guarantee glory.
A fast brain does give you quite a bit that most people don't consider though, it correlates with nearly everything we do care about even if it's not a perfectly smooth correlation with everything. Reaction speed, general health, earnings much more. People who denigrate IQ often think there is some kind of RPG style cosmic balancing act, but this is not the case, it's fully possible and in fact frequently true that some people are just strictly worse at nearly everything than other people.
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Online IQ tests are all kinda junk. They max out at 130-140 and getting one or two wrong puts you at 120 or so, it's not like there is much gradation between being 'genius ' or only above average.
IQ tests have a hard time, even 'real' ones administered by professionals, of discriminating IQ above 135 or so for adults. For children, it's possible to administer adult tests to try to estimate a higher than ceiling score, but this to does not imply a certain rarity of IQ. A 170 score as a child does not imply a 1/million rarity as an adult or even a child.
IQ tests work and are predictive, but not that well as differentiating between, say, 135 vs 150 IQ.
For a much bigger challenge and also predictive of IQ without a low ceiling, learn a hard skill, solve a hard problem.
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yeah, compare LSAT, GRE, SAT, etc. scores. it's not hard to get an idea where you rank
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Were they IQ tests, or were they just researching cognition and making sloppy estimates? An actual IQ test is standardized and normed, and administered by professionals (not, generally, undergrads).
In my experience, it is often incredibly difficult for smart people to truly grasp how stupid most people are. This is an extremely pesky fact because it's almost impossible to discuss without sounding hopelessly pretentious, but the fact remains--a good portion of American college students, who statistically represent the "best and brightest" ~40% of their generation, cannot follow or construct a formal argument without extensive coaching.
And I mean this in the most basic, technical sense of identifying premises and relating them to conclusions. For example, I once made a presentation about LSAT success to a room of undergraduates aiming for law school. I grabbed some sample questions from the LSAC website, that I figured would be easy enough to serve as a clear example of "what to expect" without scaring the audience too badly. In an audience of about 20 upperclassmen, there was one student (a physics major) who was able to answer the questions. Everyone else was totally mystified. For reference, here is a recent LSAC sample question:
Now, the LSAT is not an IQ test, but the point is that I work with university students all the time, and I am actively aware of things like how many struggle to pass the logic classes, algebra classes, etc. But even then I constantly find myself overestimating their ability to just engage in basic reasoning tasks. And no, I'm not an ivy league professor, I'm not teaching our nation's elite, but estimating from SAT ranges most of my students are generally within the 110-130 IQ range. With a bit of coaching and regular study, they can be trained to do things like pass an algebra class, though most will forget what they've learned within a decade or two, especially if they don't put it to use in their professions.
In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott Alexander writes a bit about the strength of "filter bubbles" that separate the "red tribe" from the "blue tribe." In my experience, there are also filter bubbles that separate people by IQ. I have red-tribe friends running a wide range of apparent intelligence levels. I also have many blue-tribe friends, but all of them are either lawyers or college professors or similar. Low-IQ blue tribers might as well not exist, as far as my social experiences go. I'm sure they do exist--I am reminded of their existence any time I accidentally read reddit without logging in!
If you're testing in the 97th percentile I can't imagine why you'd feel biased against IQ tests, which seem to be telling you something most people want to hear: that you're really special! This may be muted because you don't feel special (possibly as a result of IQ filter bubbles), or because the way in which you are special doesn't amount to much if it isn't paired with some mixture of conscientiousness and luck. But finally it is probably important to remember that, as a statistical measure, IQ is of much greater use when discussing populations than when discussing individuals. Yes, knowing an individual's professionally-established IQ probably gives you some information about them, but IQ ranges in professions are nevertheless quite broad.
I must say, I was totally mystified by the sample LSAT question as well. After being told that the answer is B it seems obvious in hindsight, but when you're tired or stressed it's hard to connect the dots without switching into System 2.
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I am guessing they would be online IQ tests. A professional IQ test must be proctored. You cannot just do a batch of them.
People keep circulating this picture around as evidence of low IQ thresholds or overlaps. It is junk. It's based on old 30-40-year-old data and does not apply to America's much more competitive economic and labor landscape, in which there are higher cognitive thresholds and more pre-employment filtering, especially for tech jobs. Being a programmer in 1980 is not at all like today.
"It is junk" seems like an overstatement of your complaint, though. If you have something based on more recent data, I'd love to see it (and share it!). I share your intuition that more recent data would very likely show less overlap and higher thresholds (at least for STEM professions, and maybe others as well). But I don't know that for certain, and I'm skeptical that the difference would be so great as to invalidate my point.
This is the problem with social science studies in general, as they are based on old data and used to make normative statements about society as it is today. Gathering sufficient data, analyzing it, peer review, etc. takes time. Nowadays companies have much more ways of filtering out and the pre-employment stage, like background checks, automated resume filtering, drug tests, personality tests, phone interviews, etc. these did not exist 30+ years ago, or at least not as often.
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Why wouldn't he be?
I'm not sure there even exists any group biased in favor of IQ, except for communities self-selected on this exact condition – psychometricians, biodeterminism evangelists, and Mensa losers who do not have any other achievement in life; ironically, this makes IQ an invalid metric in their case, and largely redundant in every other. Most intelligent people have external validations of their superiority – diplomas, professional outcomes, power. An IQ number adds nothing legible to that social proof.
Indeed, they have very good reasons to be biased against IQ. Fittingly, one of the smartest people in my network, who easily maxed out any test, was also the most dismissive of the idea. A pure math student. The notion that your intelligence is measurable at all is insulting on its face to people who have built careers in highly competitive cognitive fields. Do those mere psychologists assert to comprehend dimensions of my mind? Moreover, using some two-bit puzzles? And putting a single number on it?! One who has spent months to decades mastering challenging problems, crossing inferential distances, is naturally incredulous. And is not hard to just memorize patterns in a typical IQ test – why assume others have not, if that is something ostensibly prestigious?
Such people also inhabit filter bubbles, where understanding the idiocy of the average does not bring any benefit – you can go your whole life humblebragging that any poor schmuck could be in your place, you just were lucky and worked hard. It even sounds encouraging, egalitarian. IQ realism is, of course, anything but.
And finally, if one takes implications of IQ reality seriously, then there is a question: are those credentialized people truly the best of the bunch? No matter how much improvement training brings, it stands to reason that a higher-IQ type would be able to wrangle ideas that lesser people are cognitively closed to; see farther; dodge easy mistakes. So, perhaps, there is some fault in the criteria of success in their institutions? So perhaps their status, too, is not quite merited?
People who don't score highly are biased against IQ for obvious reasons.
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TBQH, red tribers don’t segregated themselves by IQ to nearly the same extent as blue tribers.
This sounds intuitively true to me, but I've never explicitly noticed this before. Do you know of a study/source measuring this, or is just obvious anecdotal trends? And why do think it is this way? Is it just that the Blue Tribe places intelligence on a pedestal and so care about it more when selecting friends and relationships, while Red Tribers are more down to earth? Is it because of Blue Tribers congregating in universities and cities and that somehow drives this segregation, while Red Tribers are more likely to stay in their hometown and mingle with everyone else who lives there?
It’s anecdotal trends, but I think it’s driven by education level segregation in the blue tribe more than anything about IQ per se.
In large part red tribe hobbies are things that appeal to people from across the IQ/class/education spectrum(hunting, football, political conspiracy theories, motorcycles, barbecue, guns- these all seem to have fairly equal appeal to smart and dumb, rich and poor, illiterate and learned alike, whereas blue tribe hobbies usually don’t.) Additionally the economic niches red tribers fill tend to put them in touch with both white and blue collar workers while blue tribers are pretty siloed into white collar or service work. Finally red tribers are just more likely to not go to college even when they’re smart, so bubbles based on education are both less likely to form(conservative churches and bars are both probably less segregated by education status than liberal examples of either) and less segregating by IQ when they do form.
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Online, it seems reversed, with red/grey people putting more value on IQ. Cernovich, for example , tweets a lot about IQ. Or Charles Murray.
Hold up, are you suggesting that Cernovich and Murray are "red tribe" in your book?
For the umpteenth time the blue/red distinction is cultural not political, and yes there is a difference.
If like a spectrum, closer to red than not. But I see what you mean.
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When I was a kid, my school peers were all fellow AP-track kids with similar 1400-1600 SAT scores. Nowadays the majority of those kids all went to similar selective colleges, my peers from my selective colleges were mostly other kids who were AP-track kids at their own high schools. At work, my peers were at their own selective colleges with other AP-track kids from other high schools. And so on and so forth. I met my wife in college, her college friends and work peers all track similarly. A lot of our Blue Tribe hobbies "appropriate to our class" like Yoga and Rock Climbing and Art Galleries just expose us to other people who attended other selective colleges etc etc ditto ditto.
On the other hand, my friends from the Boy Scouts, from Church, and from local team sports ranged. Some were average (1200 SAT) kids from similar suburban houses. Some of my lifelong best friends from scouts lived in trailer parks. Some of my friends from church are good people, but basically not that bright, cardboard factory workers. Even today, guys at my gun club range (lol) in profession, from engineers to cops to trash collectors.
That's the basic argument: Blue Tribe life is all about professional attainment and as such focuses itself in work-home-status hobbies that stratify class (and thus largely IQ) lines. Red Tribe life centers itself around cultural institutions that cut across classes.
This is the basic argument of [Coming Apart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book); I would note that both my argument and his only apply to White Americans and not evenly to other races for complicated reasons.
Okay, I have to link to this. Yes, he's shouty, but it's part of the performance image he's built up.
"This is food for sheep and people who do yoga" 😁
Thanks, I hate it.
More seriously though, what is this meant to convey? That asparagus is high class? This might be wildly pedantic but IME that's very much not the case - I live in a rural area with a lot of ditches not near cropland or irrigation systems. As a result there's a rather vibrant scene every summer for about two weeks where wild asparagus is freely available to anyone who feels like pulling over to the side of the road and walking down into the tall grass to snap off a pound or two (or twenty) of the stuff. It has a very similar vibe to people who go mushroom hunting after a good rain, something that could be considered "outdoorsy" or "being in tune with nature". In practice I've found that it's more people who are already farming/gardening/hunting/fishing, drive their F-150 three blocks to the town gas station for their Marb lights, started working when they were sixteen and held down a job somewhere doing something ever since.
No, I think it was just funny. Who on earth thinks of putting asparagus into a sweet cake? Some kind of savoury quiche or tart, sure - but a cake? It was an 80s recipe, but I have to agree with Hollis that it does have the vibe of "whole organic vegan all-natural gathered under the light of the full moon" types.
I've gone mushroom picking in the fields with my dad as a youngster years back, but we never thought of "okay, now coat them in chocolate and stick them on top of an apple tart" 😁
Hey, fair enough. To me that recipe just looks like a tweaked carrot cake with ferns instead of root vegetables, sounds kind of gross but I might give it a shot.
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I think, in modern times, the latter part about conscientiousness and luck, particularly the conscientiousness, has a lot to do with it. If it is true that IQ is largely innate and predictive of one's success in intellectual fields (as well as non-intellectual ones, for that matter), then if you have high IQ, then your success in intellectual fields can largely be attributed to luck of birth, akin to living a wealthy luxurious life because your parents happened to be billionaires. This, I think, is highly damaging to the ego of many people who like to imagine themselves as having worked for their success, and notably worked harder than all those other people who they had to outcompete in order to succeed. I personally believe that this is one of the main drivers of the widespread rejection of IQ and heredity thereof among the educated academic group.
Of course, there's also the issue that conscientiousness itself may also be just as "innate" as IQ (for however "innate" any such characteristic can be said to be), which is a whole other can of worms.
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Well I must be smarter than I thought, because B seems to me to be the only proper answer. Then again, I'm a lot older than the people in that class, so I've learned by experience to read the question, don't jump to conclusions, and be sure you know what you are answering (rather than what you think you are answering).
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A common argument against IQ tests and standardized tests is the coachability aspect. It's easy to control for this by allowing for multiple re-takes, and even then, you will still find that scores exhibit a normal distribution and are predictive of IQ. It's just that the mean is slightly higher. The SAT can be taken many times, with the highest score counting, and still exhibits normal distribution.
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Since you're talking about university students I have to ask: does this mean they've learned how to decompose an Abelian group, or that they've learned the quadratic formula?
I still remember long ago being asked for geometry help by a neighbor, a smart man who owned his own white-collar business, because his business math only required (grade school) algebra and arithmetic, and by the time he was remodeling his sailboat he'd forgotten how to use the Pythagorean Theorem on a real problem. I'd feel more smug, except later there was an entire math class I forgot 90% of, during several years interlude between "I'll take this for fun" and "wait, this could actually be used for something?".
This depends to a significant extent on the school--and I don't mean "more prestigious schools will require more." Sometimes it is quite the opposite! There are a variety of contributing factors, here.
For example, faculty at a community college are sometimes less demanding than those at a major university, given the demographics of their student body (which also vary dramatically between community colleges, tending to track the demographics of their respective communities). But community college faculty also typically emphasize teaching over research, and small class sizes over large lecture halls, and actual professors over grad students. As a consequence, a community college in a middle-class suburb is often a much better place to learn algebra than a major research university. This is something middle-class students often consider when weighing the benefits of doing two years of study at a more-affordable community college before transferring to a state university to finish a bachelor's degree.
Or for a different example, the "introductory" math and science classes at a STEM-focused university will often be substantially more rigorous than "equivalent" courses at large state universities. Accreditation processes are supposed to smooth this out somewhat, but in practice the "Algebra 101" class offered by Big State U has to be passable by large numbers of non-STEM students. This can sometimes lead to disputes over general education requirements as STEM programs in large universities like to really load up specialized credit hours; they don't want their students wasting credit hours (as they see it) passing an "Algebra 101" class with content students "should" have already learned in high school (e.g., the quadratic formula). Indeed, it's not unheard of for STEM majors to be expected to pass derivative and integral calculus courses in their freshman year, or else to just plan on spending at least five years completing their studies, including a semester or two of, functionally, remedial mathematics.
Or for yet another example, faced with the foregoing, some universities just outright offer "non-STEM-major" classes. I'm personally aware of this happening in the sciences rather than math--like, "BIO 101 for non-major general education credit, or BIO 110 for STEM majors"--but I have heard of similar things happening with math.
Yeah, I completed a semester of calculus in my university studies, but I didn't understand the use of calculus until many years later, by which point I had long since forgotten how to conduct operations any more complicated than getting the first derivative of x^2. The last time my mathematical abilities really counted for anything more complicated than household finances was probably when I took the GRE.
My state school alma mater still has calculus I and II as freshman-level (100-series) classes, though they now have a pair of lower classes ("Precalculus" and "College Algebra and Trigonometry" which appear to cover the same ground) which are freshman-level also. Regular algebra is remedial (000-series).
The school has separate calculus curricula not only for non-STEM majors but for life science majors. Not sure if this reflects on the calculus ability of life science majors or is just meant to make sure the women in STEM are kept safe from the bulk of the geeks.
The non-STEM calculus is usually horribly watered down, and in a weaker school may never deal with anything more complicated than polynomials. Life science calc, where it exists, cuts out trig in favor of early work with exponentials and logs, and is much more computational, but at least it doesn’t purge limits from the curriculum.
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"Geology 101: Rocks For Jocks" was the joke at my school.
The bifurcation I saw in math was "math for future engineers" vs "math for future mathematicians", where the latter versions of classes would cover more material at a more theoretical level, but the former were nothing to be ashamed of. "Math for non-STEM students" was just "math for future engineers but you're allowed to stop taking it sooner". Even the lower-level calculus that many STEM kids had tested past would still be taught quite rigorously. ... which was a very good idea; some kids hadn't had as many opportunities in high school, some changed majors (although changing out of STEM was more common than into STEM...), etc.
There was one "CS for future engineers" sort of class, taught by the engineering department, that should have been much tougher ... but in between "half the kids have never written Hello World" and "they all need to spend time on Fortran for when they're thrown into legacy codes", maybe they did the best they could in one semester.
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I've seen a trend at some big Universities that seems designed to choke off the community college option and solve the non-STEM-major math course problem. STEM majors that are designed as pure, four year programs with tight prerequisite chains of degree requirements starting in the first year such that missing or failing one course sets back progress a year (especially if classes in the sequence are only offered one semester out of the year), that cannot be fulfilled by community college courses so at best the only benefit there are general education requirements but the blow may be softened somewhat with university offered humanities-for-STEM-majors courses that are credit and workload light to accommodate STEM workloads but fulfill the larger University's requirements. It can lead to a rather segregated student population, more so than normal (especially if you have dorms similarly segregated, there is usually at least one quieter STEM focused dorm that may or may not be combined with the substance free themed offering).
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I did this in the late 90s. Took a physics and a geology class both explicitly for non-stem majors. My main take away was that the professors loved teaching those classes and were open about how much more they liked us as students than their stem students. They also happened to be good professors generally. Rest in peace Dr. Aaronson.
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I think you're probably typical minding here. On the street it doesn't look like there's too much of a difference between smart and dumb people, and equally when people are doing jobs they've been trained to do their programming kicks in and discrepancies in apparent competences get smoothed over. The real difference turns up when you put people in unfamiliar situations in which dumb people will generally freeze up and "throw an exception" while smart people think on their feet and find solutions to the problem they are presented with.
This would actually be a pretty good IQ test, as long as nobody taking the test has seen that particular bit of machinery before. Even if it takes you a lot of time, chances are you'll still be faster than 97% of the population at it since a large portion of them won't even be able to fix it at all.
I call it the 99% vs. 99.9% problem. Prima facie, a smart person can do everything a genius can do , except that extra fraction of a percent, which in some circumstances makes all the difference between success vs. failure but may be otherwise be indistinguishable.
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What do you mean by took a bunch, did you administer them? How can you give out tests but be confused about what the test is.
Just get a real test done? I tried many proxies and the variance is large, around 10 IQ points.
Also, numpy is a vector/matrix library, you cant plot with it. You can plot numpy objects, not with numpy.
What happens when low IQ people make IQ tests.
I remember I had to do a job interview where the question was along the format of;
I solved the ratio and X turned out to be a nice natural number. WRONG! the pattern was the digit sum. To the motherfucker who made the test, do you even know what " : " in math implies?
If you can do this or you know what this means, I guess that answers if you are above 97% percentile
I don't think such an easy heuristic exists. Numpy is hardly arcane, anyone who ever used python for anything scientific ever had to use numpy, no other way around it.
As for being able to do, I'd disagree there as well. I have a good enough baseline guesstimate of my IQ from my GRE quant scores, it's below 97th percentile, and I use numpy for a living.
Having done any python programming at all probably puts someone in the top 3% of the Americans…for programming. That’s like 10 million people. The BLS says there are <200k “computer programmers.” I doubt there are 50x that many people with python skills.
It’s absolutely crazy how many people spend their entire lives without touching a REPL.
Python is the scripting language that every non-software-engineering STEM grad probably worked with once in college unless they're one of those R/Octave types (or worse MATLAB). Everyone from Astrophysicists to Zoologists will likely be touching a bit of python for anything from data analysis to running the tools themselves. Many of them are not computer programmers though occasionally they do get hired into software positions based on resumes where their lack of training in things like source control, software architecture design or using descriptive variable and function names (or even functions) cause problems. Maybe not 5 million strong but likely more than a million. It's the PHP for scientists and engineers.
Even 5 million would still only be 1.5% of the population! Programming is just weirdly niche.
My sister got competent in R for her genetics course. My brother does chemistry, and I don’t know how he hasn’t touched any of those options. My other sister has avoided them too, but she’s in a finance field that has its own tools.
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Just being a bit of a pedant. Here is my opinion of programming language use in scientific fields.
R: Used mostly by Statisticians, and good humanities researchers. I wish R took up widespread adoption in all HASS academia because they will be finally questioned on open-sourcing their research code once they finally stop using those godforsaken GUI-based statistical tools. R code is dogshit for productionizing though but the lesser of two evils compared to lets say.. SPSS. 8/10
MATLAB/Octave: Matlab has a stranglehold on engineering, Especially DSP and control engineering. For legacy reasons and more. Octave is just poor man's Matlab. Terrible syntax and productionizing support.. 4/10
Python: 10/10, Not much needs to be said here. My version of heaven would be if it was adopted well enough to make the previous two redundant, I'd wager that would actually have a meaningful boost to research output and potentially GDP. Looks like things are tending in that direction ever so slowly.
Julia: Great for computationally intensive matrix manipulation work, used mostly by CS students trying out every language under the sun and a minuscule number of physicists. 8/10
Absolutely not. My only tip is that you uninstall it.
If its a personal project there is no reason you should be using SPSS.
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I’m one of those dirty MATLAB sluts, but I’ve got more python experience than most in my field. The problem is that by the time my coworkers get opinions on the stuff that MATLAB does poorly, they’re likely to jump straight to c++ or such. Python occupies an awkward middle ground where it’s marginally less convenient (for corporate use; thanks, moral hazard!), but still won’t get you deployed on embedded hardware.
Of course, a grown man who calls himself an slut also uses MATLAB.
Python should replace matlab not C++.
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At my bank python is being widely used because the regulators haven't figured out how to make you do 60 step safety deployment plans with it yet and you can actually hack out useful stuff quickly.
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And what percentage of the population would that be?
Most people not only wouldn't know numpy from pandas, but wouldn't know numpy from a giant panda. I don't know if most numpy users in the 97th percentile of IQ, but I bet they are mostly well over the 90th percentile, because it's at the intersection of mathematics and programming, both generally requiring high IQ.
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Just 97th percentile things...
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In the interest of calibrating my understanding of this, anecdotal experience by anecdotal experience, may I ask what score you received on the SAT?
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