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Wellness Wednesday for May 31, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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There's no way you're 95th percentile unless you really weren't paying attention to the test! I'd suggest giving it again and more seriously this time haha.

I think there's a great deal of range restriction on the very extreme right, such that it's compressing the values that very talented people would score to distinguish themselves from each other. The highest it's possible to score is around 30.1k words and still the 0.01th percentile.

Funnily enough, I'm aware of avulse from avulsions, a type of wound we studied in trauma care in medicine. I'd still have been able to guess it was the right one from elimination, but I also would have heard it in other contexts.

Besides, it's just a fancy way of saying tear injuries as opposed to cuts and stabs.

I'm flattered that this indicates a high IQ, but I'm pretty sure my skill is highly lopsided, I'm an arch wordcel but only somewhat above average as a shape rotator, I don't think I'd make a good engineer or mathematician.

English has anywhere from a million to several million words depending on who you ask, and it only takes the knowledge of 10k of them to be considered fluent. I scored 30k here, but I suspect in a more exhaustive test I'd be at least a 100k if not more, as would many of the very high scorers all lumped in at 0.01th percentile.

Let's see. Here are 50 words chosen at random from a 178,000 Scrabble word set.

Actual, Assemblagists, Banteringly, Basks, Consubstantial, Cosmeticized, Cosmic, Curator, Disconcertingly, Fawns, Foreshowed, Fornical, Fugleman, Gadroon, Hoyles, Ices, Kingfishes, Lachrymose, Lemongrasses, Macrocytic, Merrymakings, Microbrewings, Mirthfully, Multilateral, Noncompetitors, Nyalas, Outstrip, Parliamentary, Pavise, Recheats, Reconfers, Relictions, Scrubs, Seg, Serfage, Shakinesses, Sweeneys, Telepathic, Teratomas, Terebene, Terrify, Topmast, Trachoma, Twaddle, Underclays, Unseated, View, Whoremongers, Wrinkly, Yen

30k does seem like a underestimate due to the ability to know words via construction. For example if I know kind, I also know kindly, unkindly, kindliness, etc...

The problem I guess is what happens to words that I've never used but that I can figure out with near 100% confidence: "microbrewings, banteringly, reconfers, etc..." I would say these DON'T count because you couldn't say that they are a real word or just made up.

And then there are words such as Candible and Fervifying that aren't in the Scrabble dictionary, but the meanings of which can be derived if you know the base words and suffixes.

Yeah I think the word-count extrapolations are questionable here -- I am apparently in the top .15 %tile, at 29817 words; while it's entirely possible that you know 270 more words than I do (probably much more than that, because doctor!) I'm not sure how one would be able to tell from this test.