Comment on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:23:00 GMT

My eyes were hurting after the first test, and this continued (less intensely, I think) into the second, even though reading on the monitor isn't generally a problem for me. There may also be sensory issues involved in scores-- I was running into trouble anyway, but having to distinguish between very dark gray squares and black squares in one of the later puzzles didn't help. If I had more of a different sort of intelligence, I would have thought of fiddling with my monitor settings.

I'm inclined to think that practice/information could help a lot with the puzzles-- having a repertoire of possible patterns is going to make solutions easier than trying to find patterns cold.

Possibly as a result of not being entirely pleased at that 107 score, I'm doubting the whole premise of IQ testing-- that it's important to find out what can't be improved about people's minds.

Part of this is the arrogance problem-- how complete is your knowledge of the possibility of improvement, anyway?-- and the other part is wondering whether all those resources could be better put into learning how to improve what can be improved.

The other thing is that I've had some recent evidence that the ways the parts of the mind are interconnected aren't completely obvious. I've been doing some psychological work on fading out self-hatred, and the results have been being less frightened about what I post (I decided before taking the IQ tests to post my scores, but there was still a bit of a pang), easier and faster typing-- not tested, but I do seem somewhat apt to write at greater length (this seems to be the result of feeling less need to over-monitor so that typing can be a low-level habit), less akrasia (still pretty bad, but the desire to do things is happening more often), and the ability to walk downstairs more easily (I have some old knee injuries which can be ameliorated by better coordination-- but I haven't been working on coordination).

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