Nornagest comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

65 Post author: Yvain 03 November 2012 11:00PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 08 November 2012 06:23:34AM *  2 points [-]

A lot of people in this thread have reported institutionally tested IQ scores much higher than those given by the extra-credit Internet test. (My own score on the former is two and a half standard deviations higher than on the latter, though I took the former many years ago.) I suspect that iqtest.dk's either normed very low (unusually for an Internet IQ test) or is suffering from other problems.

The first possibility that comes to mind is that some people are taking it several times (one person elsewhere in the thread reported scores in the 100 range, then 120, then 140 over three trials), and that its scoring system is taking that into account improperly.

Comment author: Cakoluchiam 08 November 2012 07:58:57AM 1 point [-]

As I mention elsewhere, ... gur grfg vf vaperqvoyl rnfl gb tnzr. Vg qbrfa'g punatr gur cbfvgvba bs cbgragvny nafjref orgjrra gnxvatf, fb trggvat n cresrpg fpber ba lbhe frpbaq gel vf cerggl rnfl.

Comment author: Nornagest 08 November 2012 08:31:53AM *  2 points [-]

That's what I thought. So if jeremysalwen is right and they're calculating scores as if their sample of results is representative, then their scoring algorithm is going to be utterly useless (perhaps outside a narrow regime around 100): the right-hand side of the curve is going to be populated entirely by people gaming the test in various ways (retakes are almost certainly common, and more sophisticated methods are likely to represent at least a couple percent of results), and I'd imagine a good chunk of the left-hand side would fall to guessers.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 November 2012 09:49:54AM 4 points [-]

Even without cheating, I don't think the people who voluntarily spend 40 minutes on an IQ test are representative of the whole population.