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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I can’t do shape rotator exercises (raven’s progressive matrices, 90% of ‘aptitude’ / non-verbal IQ tests). I have what is probably the strongest ‘verbal tilt’ I’ve ever heard of. I really do score 99th percentile on verbal and somewhere around 60th percentile on spatial. I did much better than that in actual math, but I think some have speculated that math can go both ways, such that there are both verbal and non-verbal reasoning ways of doing it.
The sad thing is that I genuinely enjoy doing them (matrices / ‘pick the bottom right shape’), but anything above intermediate difficulty (I bought a German puzzle book that categorizes them nicely) and I can stare at it for an hour and not figure it out.
Any other wordcels here? Do you think it’s affected your ‘real’ life?
I can do the problems in RPMs, it's not easy, but in general, I do what I did for the example you linked to, which is decompose the pattern into primitives, verbally reason through how each one evolves, and then get the answer.
I believe in the example linked, it's5 .
Another trick I learned to help with my poor visuo-spatial imagination relates to the questions where you're shown multiple angles of a single die, then asked to say what a hidden side shows. If I have pen and paper, that's easy enough, but if not, I make a fist, and then imagine each aspect corresponds to a symbol, and then I can see the answer easily enough.
I would say that I'm a 99.999(9 or 99) wordcel, and about 75th percentile in terms of shape-rotating. I was good at maths till 10th grade, but in the 11th, I began to struggle both because my ADHD made my eyes glaze over during calculus and trig, and in the case of the latter, I missed several introductory classes. I remember seeing my personal tutor in maths raising an eyebrow and asking if that's how they taught me to solve trigonometric identities in class, breaking everything down into the smallest factors and then trying to make them cancel out, whereas the way the later questions were designed required you to memorize the equalities if you wanted to have any hope of solving them in a useful time span. I did better at stats and algebra.
I didn't really have much in the way of internet access at the time, I'm confident that with the quality of mathematical education found on YouTube and elsewhere, combined with the ADHD meds I was started on in med school, is have done much better. I'd certainly have killed to have access to GPT-4, I rely on it heavily for didactic purposes.
I'd certainly have gotten into a better med school!
At any rate, medicine is close to an ideal career in my particular case, the closest a typical doctor comes to using applied maths is figuring out drug dosages, and you're unlikely to need stats or calc at all unless you're doing research. 50% of it is rote-memorization, and ~50% is having the fluid intelligence to figure out the implications of the facts you memorized. Medicine is counter-intuitive enough with all the edge cases that you can't just work backwards and figure everything out from first principles.
I've only given a standardized IQ test once, for a job application, and I never saw the figures, but the recruiter told my girlfriend (who also happened to have applied!) that I scored very highly. I also scored >99% in the standardized aptitude tests (disguises IQ tests) many Indian students receive towards the end of schooling. I did a full RPM once through an app, and got a score of 130 IQ, but it wasn't proctored so the reader is welcome to weight that as they please. I know that I'm very strong verbally since I beat out about 2 million other people in an exam that measures aptitude in English in a standardized manner, being literally first, with a nice cheque that went towards a gaming pc and time on the podium with some very famous people. I remember being a little embarrassed that the cute girl who came second was far more academically illustrious than me, but a win's a win, she can cry on the pile of money she's likely sleeping on 🙏.
Back to medicine, as long as I have pharmaceutically enhanced diligence, I've yet to run into anything I simply can't understand, and I think I do a decent enough job at it. I managed to teach myself most of it, given that I was very depressed for most of my time in school, and we had about a year where classes were irregular due to political turmoil causing financial issues. But I passed whatever the GMC threw at me with flying colors, so I have a great deal more confidence and less conviction that I'm an impostor in a white lab coat these days haha.
Medicine is not massively g-loaded, is it? It's mostly memorisation, hence the popular med school anki subreddit. I can't think of anything day-to-day that actually requires reasoning about. I think it's why doctors suck at thinking from first principles and shut down when you ask them about something outside their "training set".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC165701/
This is the best I could find with my Google-fu.
Medicine is usually brutally competitive and meritocratic to get into, or it certainly is in India, so there's a lot of filtering for g going on before people enter the training program.
I would be immensely surprised if IQ didn't correlate well with performance in the profession, as it does with job performance on pretty much anything anyone ever cared to check.
I don't deny that there's a great deal of memorization involved (I did say the same myself), but you have to keep in mind that med school != clinical medicine. As for "massively g-loaded", what's your definition for "massive"?
It certainly rewards tenacity and conscientiousness, especially when you clear the minimum IQ bar, and doctors are significantly above average, on average.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2002-hauser.pdf
(Quoting the person quoting Gwern's post)
How much of that is due to pre-selection, and how much it matters after you're in? Shrug.
I think that the average researcher is way more determined than the average doctor - it's not uncommon for researchers to have been preparing for careers in research since they were in junior high school. I've known researchers who, as undergrads, answered emails and worked on projects from ER hospital beds. Well, one - but the rest of the lab didn't think it was that big a deal that her boss asked her to do work from the hospital bed and mildly reprimanded her for thinking it was a bit much.
Put it this way: plenty of researchers could do the equivalent of passing the anatomy final on day one of medical school. Very few doctors could have done the same.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link