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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32802 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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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?

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.

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.

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;

number: another number

also another number: X

Find X

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?

Thinking you plot stuff with numpy.

Also, numpy is a vector/matrix library, you cant plot with it. You can plot numpy objects, not with numpy.

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.

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.

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++.

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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