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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.
99.99999th percentile would be one of the top 1000 people on the planet in terms of verbal IQ. Pretty impressive!
Maybe 5 9s could be pushing it (well past the margin of error or inter-test variability, the same score that got me 1st one year was an 8th in another), but I'll stand by 4 of them.
I think the test breaks down at that level. I'll grant you that you're say one in a thousand, maybe ten thousand. Maybe even one in a hundred thousand. But if you were one of the top thousand people on the planet...I'd think that your writing would be better than it now is. Not that it isn't very good...but is it 'top 1,000 people writing in English who are alive today'? Not all that sure.
Also: do you have classmates that could memorize entire encyclopedias or medical texts, word for word? I've seen people do some fairly impressive feats of memorization - such as 'memorizing a 100-slide PowerPoint deck after reading it once and tell people that a thing came from slide 67'. No, he wasn't autistic, as far as I know.
It was a test of one's general command over English, not literary talent, which is far more subjective and difficult to evaluate. I certainly don't claim I'm in the top 1000 of living writers myself.
Not where I could see them, at the very least.
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