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

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

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Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 06 November 2012 01:18:36PM 4 points [-]

I'm completely baffled by questions 26, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 on the iq test. (http://iqtest.dk) I think I must be missing something. Can anyone explain what the answers are and why?

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 08 November 2012 09:53:03PM *  0 points [-]

I blogged about this, and between "g", the cheat page recommended by VincentYu, and me, we worked out solid answers to all the puzzling questions in the comments on the post.

http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/what-is-going-on-here.html

If anyone can't do any of the others, leave a comment there and I'll explain it.

For calibration/reassurance purposes, I got 130 on this test originally, and (worried by this) tried a couple of other free internet tests, on which all the questions seemed easy, which gave me 148 and 147 respectively (I'm assuming they're topping out around there. One of them can be pushed to 151 if you give all correct answers as fast as you can).

I have fairly good reasons to believe that I should (even in my current aged state) break any IQ test designed for the normal range, which belief is contradicted by iqtest.dk and confirmed by the two random ones.

I'm guessing the iqtest.dk is at least one standard deviation (15 points) out, and possibly twice that.

There's also the question of whether it's designed to be done 'cold', by someone who's never seen a Raven's matrix or a symmetry problem before, or whether before attempting it you should have practised those sorts of questions. And the thornier question of whether forcing scores to a normal distribution is a sensible thing to do.