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 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.