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Benquo comments on Get genotyped for free ( If your IQ is high enough) - Less Wrong
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Easy for you? Do you think your experience was typical?
Easy enough that it can't really distinguish 2 SDs from 3 SDs at the top end.
Though it's possible that it's already an SD above the population mean to begin with since it's only college grads. I don't think these researchers are looking for a very precise cutoff.
Of course I am aware that I did unusually well, and I don't think that everyone can get a perfect score on the quant section, but last I checked, like one in 20 test takers does. To me, that suggests they could usefully make it a lot harder. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty of getting a 700 verbal, though. (I didn't think it was particularly more difficult than the SAT critical reading section, and I expect people to have a lot more practice reading dense academic prose at the end of undergrad than they did at the end of high school, but I can believe I'm not great at distinguishing degrees of difficulty in that range.)
Typical for who? For the general population? For the people on LW? For the people I personally hang out with, or who are attending the same school as me?
I suspect that for the kinds of people who generally hang out on LW.. yeah, it's not challenging. I often feel stupid compared to the people here, and I breezed through it without any special preparation. But judging by the amount of GRE prep material out there and the number of people moaning on grad school forums about whether they'll be admitted with their low scores, I guess there are lots of people who find it difficult.
I was briefly excited as I met both GRE and SAT cutoffs. But now I'm feeling guilty and debating whether or not to apply; I'm certainly not in the 99.9th percentile. I absolutely love this community but I don't really post because I sincerely feel inadequate.
I'm easily in the 5th percentile, but I feel like an imposter with my standardized test scores: the tests are SO damn easy and don't measure anything of substance. GRE verbal tests your ability to recall obscure words, and the math tests your ability to maintain focus through 2 hours of trivial middle-school math. I didn't study at all.
That's what being intelligent is supposed to feel like!
Guilt is overrated. They say you qualify. Therefore you do. It's their study. In fact, if you do qualify but don't think you should then you are biasing their data against genes for low self esteem.
If you meet their samples then you should go for it. If they've already decided that those are the metrics they want to use then that's what matters for their data gathering purposes.
Also, if you have GRE and SAT scores in that range, while it is possible that they aren't really a reflection of intelligence in the 99.9th percentile (ignoring for now what intelligence means in any useful sense) one is almost certainly well above the 95th percentile.
Please sign up. Do you really believe that your perception of your abilities is more accurate than that of objective tests? And if you believe that you aren't that intelligent, then why do you trust your reasoning and not that of the researchers who designed the study? Do you think they've made some great error in selecting these criteria? Do you think you are smarter than them? ;) Either way, you definitely should sign up.
Oh, and you don't have to be in the 99,9th percentile. The 99,865th percentile totally suffices! ;)