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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?
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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