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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Does the relationship between problem solving speed and g scale infinitely? Can you really just take a dozen easy matrices, give everyone 4 minutes and get the same ranking as if you take a bunch of hard problems and give the same people a couple hours to do them? I’m skeptical.

I guess it seems likely they’ve considered that solution.

Does the relationship between problem solving speed and g scale infinitely

Probably not infinitely, but it probably scales farther than the current tests are pushing it. I remember when i took the SAT I thought they gave you way too much time on the math section. I finished every question and double checked all my answers in less than half the time allotted so i just put my head down at that point.

Fair enough, it doesn't scale infinitely but it does a lot, and it definitely scales in the region where SAT/GMAT tops out.

See e.g. the Wonderlic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test which is just 50 easy questions that any IQ 100 person should be able to solve given unlimited time, the catch is that you just have 8 minutes for everything, and so the average score is 20/50, making it effectively a test of speed on "easy" questions. All the evidence I've seen is that high wonderlic scores are very highly correlated to high IQ scores as done with a certified test like WAIS, and this correlation doesn't disappear even close to the 50/50 upper limit.

Yes, that’s a good example. I’d be interested to see how efforts to raise the ceiling for the quant GMAT section would pan out.