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On IQ Accuracy:
As Yvain says, "people have been pretty quick to ridicule this survey's intelligence numbers as completely useless and impossible and so on" because if they're true, it means that the average LessWronger is gifted. Yvain added a few questions to the 2012 survey, including the ACT and SAT questions and the Myers-Briggs personality type question that I requested (I'll explain why this is interesting), and that give us a few other things to check against, which has made the figures more believable. The ridicule may be an example of the "virtuous doubt" that Luke warns about in Overconfident Pessimism, so it makes sense to "consider the opposite":
The distribution of Myers-Briggs personality types on LessWrong replicates the Mensa pattern. This is remarkable since the patterns of personality types here are, in many significant ways, the exact opposite of what you'd find in the regular population. For instance, the introverted rationalists and idealists are each about 1% of the population. Here, they are the majority and it's the artisans and guardians who are relegated to 1% or less of our population.
Mensa's personality test results were published in the December 1993 Mensa Bulletin. Their numbers.
So, if you believe that most of the people who took the survey lied about their IQ, you also need to believe all of the following:
That most of these people also realized they needed to do IQ correlation research and fudge their SAT and ACT scores in order for their IQ lie to be believable.
Some explanation as to why the average of lurker's IQ scores would come out so close to the average of poster's IQ scores. The lurkers don't have karma to show off, and there's no known incentive good enough to get so many lurkers to lie about their IQ score. Vaniver's figures.
Some explanation for why the personality type pattern at LessWrong is radically different from the norm and yet very similar to the personality type pattern Mensa published and also matched my predictions. Even if they had knowledge of the Mensa personality test results and decided to fudge their personality type responses, too, they somehow managed to fudge them in such a way that their personality types accidentally matched my predictions.
That they decided not to cheat when answering the Bayes birthday question even though they were dishonest enough to lie on the IQ question, motivated to look intelligent, and it takes a lot less effort to fudge the Bayes question than the intelligence and personality questions. (This was suggested by ArisKatsaris).
That both posters and lurkers had some motive strong enough to justify spending 20+ minutes doing the IQ correlation research and fudging personality test questions while probably bored of ticking options after filling out most of a very long survey.
It's easier just to put the real number in the IQ box than do all that work to make it believable, and it's not like the liars are likely to get anything out of boasting anonymously, so the cost-benefit ratio is just not working in favor of the liar explanation.
If you think about it in terms of Occam's razor, what is the better explanation? That most people lied about their IQ, and fudged their SAT, ACT and personality type data to match, or that they're telling the truth?
Summary of criticism:
Possible Motive to Lie: The desire to be associated with a "gifted" group:
In re to this post, it was argued by NonComposMentis that a potential motive to lie is that if the outside world perceives LessWrong as gifted, then anyone having an account on LessWrong will look high-status. In rebuttal:
I figure that lurkers would not be motivated to fudge their results because they don't have a bunch of karma on their account to show off and anybody can claim to read LessWrong, so fudging your IQ just to claim that the site you read is full of gifted people isn't likely to be motivating. I suggested that we compare the average IQs of lurkers and others. Vaniver did the math and they are very, very close..
I argued, among other things, that it would be falling for a Pascal's mugging to believe that investing the extra time (probably at least $5 worth of time for most of us) into fudging the various different survey questions is likely to contribute to a secret conspiracy to inflate LessWrong's average IQ.
Did the majority avoid filling out intelligence related questions, letting the gifted skew the results?
Short answer: 74% of people answered at least one intelligence related question and since most people filled out only one or two, the fact that the self-report, ACT and SAT score averages are so similar is remarkable.
I realized, while reading Vaniver's post that if only 1/3 of the survey participants filled out the IQ score, this may have been due to something which could have skewed the results toward the gifted range, for instance, if more gifted people had been given IQ tests for schooling placement (and the others didn't post their IQ score because they did not know it) or if the amount of pride one has in their IQ score has a significant influence on whether one reported it.
So I went through the data and realized that most of the people who filled out the IQ test question did not fill out all the others. That means that 804 people (74% not 33%) answered at least one intelligence related question. As we have seen, the IQ correlations for the IQ, SAT and ACT questions were very close to each other (unsurprisingly, it looks like something's up with the internet test... removing those, it's 63% of survey participants that answered an intelligence related question). It's remarkable in and of itself that each category of test scores generated an average IQ so similar to the others considering that different people filled them out. I mean if 1/3 of the population filled out all of the questions, and the other 2/3 filled out none, we could say "maybe the 1/3 did IQ correlation research and fudged these" but if most of the population fills out one or two, and the averages for each category come out close to the averages for the other categories, why is that? How would that happen if they were fudging?
It does look to me like people gave whatever test scores they had and that not all the people had test scores to give but it does not look to me like a greater proportion of the gifted people provided an intelligence related survey answer. Instead it looks like most people provided an intelligence related survey answer and the average LessWronger is gifted.
Exploration of personality test fudging:
Erratio and I explored how likely it is that people could successfully fudge their personality tests and why they might do that.
There are a lot of questions on the personality test that have an obvious intelligence component, so it's possible that people chose the answer they thought was most intelligent.
There are also intelligence related questions where it's not clear which answer is most intelligent. I listed those.
The intelligence questions would mostly influence the sensing/intuition dichotomy and the thinking/feeling dichotomy. This does not explain why the extraversion/introversion and perceiving/judging results were similar to Mensa's.
Was Mensa's test conducted on the internet? The internet has a systematic bias in personalities. For example, reddit subscriptions to each personality type reddit favor Introversion and Intuition 4,828 INTJ 4,457 INTP 1,817 INFP 1,531 INFJ
IAWYC, but "the internet" is way too broad for what you actually mean -- ISTM that a supermajority of teenagers and young adults in developed countries uses it daily, though plenty of them mostly use it for Facebook, YouTube and similar and probably have never heard of Reddit. (Even I never use Reddit unless I'm following a link to a particular thread from somewhere else -- but the first letter of my MBTI is E so this kind of confirms your point.)
Yeah, different websites have different personality skews, which complicates things. Fortunately there's evidence against Mensa having used an online sample: Epiphany said the results were published in December 1993. It's fairly easy to give a survey to an Internet forum nowadays, but where would Mensa have found an online sample back in '93? IRC? Usenet? (There is a rec.org.mensa where people posted about personality and the Myers-Briggs back in 1993, but the only relevant post that year was someone asking about Mensans' personalities to no avail.)
Yeah...by "internet" what I meant was sites that most people do not know about - sites that you would only stumble upon in the course of extensive net usage. I once described it to a friend as "deep" vs "shallow" internet, with depth corresponding to the extent to which a typical visitor to the website uses the internet. Even within a website (say reddit) a smaller sub-reddit would be "deeper" than a main one.
I'm myself am actually a counterexample to my own "extroverts don't use the internet as much" notion...but I'm only a moderate extrovert. (ENTP or ENFP depending on the test...ENTP description fits better. I listed ENTP in the survey.)
By that definition, there are many nearly disconnected "deep internets".
Yes...i'm confused. Is this supposed to be a flaw in the definition? The idea here is to use relative obscurity to describe the degree to which a site is visited only by Internet users who do heavy exploring. There are only a few "shallow" regions... Facebook, Wikipedia, twitter...the shallowest being google. These are all high traffic and even people who never use computers have heard some of these words. There are many deep regions, on the other hand, and most are disconnected.
It is if you then proceed to claim to have statistics over users of the "deep internet".
I don't have any more data than that, sorry.
To suggest that people on the internet may have certain personality types is a good suggestion, but it raises two questions:
Might your example of Reddit be similar to LW because LW gets lots of users from Reddit? (Or put another way, if the average LessWronger is gifted, maybe "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" and Reddit has lots of gifted people, too.)
Might gifted people gather in large numbers on the internet because it's easier to find people with similar interests? (Just because people on the internet tend to have those personality types, it doesn't mean they're not gifted.)
As for "the internet" having a systematic bias in personalities, I would like to see the evidence of this that's not based on a biased sample. It's likely that the places you go to find people like you will, well, have people like you, so even if you (or somebody else on one of those sites) observed a pattern in personality types across sites they hang out on, the sample is likely to be biased.
That's a good point - I hadn't considered sample bias. Extending that point, though, Lesswrong and Mensa are a biased sample in more than the simple fact that the people are gifted. It is only a subset of gifted people that choose to participate in Mensa It should be mentioned, I'm using "internet" as shorthand for the "deep" internet ... not facebook. I'm talking websites that most people do not use, that you'd have to spend a lot of time on the internet to find. As such, the "internet" hypothesis would predict a greater bias towards smaller sub-reddits.
Anyway, I was mostly posing an alternate hypothesis. When I first noticed the trend on the personality forums, this is what I thought was happening -
Slacking off / internet addiction selects for Perceiving and low Conscientiousness.
Non-social-networking internet use selects for Introversion.
Any forum discussing an idea without immediate practical benefits selects for iNtuition.
And then, factor in lesswrong/giftedness...
If it's a math/science/logic topic, it selects for Thinking and iNtuition.
High scores on Raven's matrices select for Thinking, iNtuition. High scores on Working memory components select for Judging. The ACT/SAT additionally select for Conscientiousness
Strong mathematical affinity shifts those on the border of *NTP and *NTJ into *NTJ (people prefer dealing with intellectually ordered systems, even if they have messy rooms and chaotic lifestyles)
A scientific/engineering ideology creates a shift towards the concrete (empirical evidence, practical gains in technology, etc) shifts those on the border of *NTJ and *STJ into ISTJ.
In summary, I think LW and Mensa surveys are attracting a special subset of idea driven and logical people (iNtuitives and Thinkers) and likely to use the internet often/spot the survey. (Introverts)
That's much nicer and much more detailed. Questions this raises:
Might the "deep" internet you refer to be selecting for gifted people? (I think this is likely!)
Do we have figures on personality types and IQs for internet forums in general, not from a biased sample set? These figures would test your theory.
I agree with (1), but would claim that it also selectively attracts introverts (and I'm unsure whether or not it will bias J-P to the P side)
(2) For each of these, I tried not to look at the data after finding the poll. I made predictions first. Just for fun / to correct for hindsight bias, anyone reading might want to do the same. To play, don't click on the link or read my prediction until you make yours. Also, here is some data which claims to represent the general population - http://mbtitruths.blogspot.com/2011/02/real-statistics.html for comparison. I've already seen similar data on another site, so I won't state my predictions on this one.
A website posts stats for people who have taken the test. Unlike the above simple random sample, this selects for internet users.
http://www.personalitypage.com/html/demographics.html
Prediction: I'd consider this "shallow internet", so very weak biases to (I). The general population is (S), I'd expect a weak bias to (N) but not enough to overcome the general population's S centering.
Result: apparently I suck at predictions. In hindsight all the top three would be predicted score high "Fi" on a Jungian cognitive function test, and Fi in theory would be more interested in taking personality tests. But that's hindsight, and I'm not sure if connection between MBTI and Jung hasn't been verified empirically.
Here is a "deep internet" forum that I wouldn't ever visit... Christian singles chat forum! This should not suffer from the sample bias you mentioned earlier (He stated that websites I visit are likely to have users with similar personalities to me [ENTP])
http://christianchat.com/christian-singles-forum/34516-meyers-briggs-type-indicator-mbti-poll.html
Prediction: I tried my best not to look at the data despite the high visual salience as soon as you open that link. Here is my prediction: I'd predict strong biases towards Introversion (because internet), slight biases towards iNtuition (because religion is idea-based), moderate bias to Feeling (I think religious people are illogical) and ... let's say a slight tilt towards Judging. Call it a hunch, life experience says that Si (judging + sensing) is particularly predisposed to religion.
Result: OK, looks like my trends were right but my magnitude was way off. My "hunch" was correct but I didn't listen to it closely enough and vastly underestimated the Judging bias, while my personal prejudice overestimated the Feeling bias. My predictions about intution and introversion were essentially correct though.
http://personalitycafe.com/myers-briggs-forum/28171-mbti-demographics.html
Click the ppt, it has data by education.
Prediction: NT's pursue higher education, SF's do not. Other two dichotomies don't matter as much, but J helps slightly.
Result: seems about right. Eyeballing, J seems not to matter much until college, at which point it prevents dropping out.
For IQ - http://asm.sagepub.com/content/3/3/225.short
Prediction- Strong N, slight T bias. I don't think T actually means "intelligent" as I define it, but I do think it would help on some portions of the IQ test.
Result: N bias only. interesting.
Finally, Scientific aptitude: http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pr0.1970.26.3.711
Prediction - strong N, moderate T. I'm not sure about J-P. I think people who choose science tracks and go into academia will be P (creative types), whereas kids who get good grades but ultimately do not choose science will be J. I'm not sure which group they are looking at (I didn't permit myself to read it yet, so I'm a bit vague on what exactly they did). I don't think E - I will matter at all.
Result -
NT take high level science a lot more, Introverts take them slightly more. J-P is irrelevant. Intuition really helps in school at all levels. Feeling relates to high GPA in the easy courses but not the hard course (that's pretty unexpected) Introversion relates to high GPA in hard course but not in easy courses. Percievers start out with a pretty big edge both in IQ and GPA in the lower level courses, Judging takes a slight lead in both those metrics in the advanced course. Not sure if this is noise.
Side finding - they also did IQ measurements. Again, only N related to IQ (in fact, F won out over T)...but it did not relate as much in the advanced courses. I think the advanced course chopped off the lower end of the IQ bell curve, leaving only smart Sensors. By the way, Extroverts have an IQ edge, despite getting lower grades and not taking advanced courses as often.
Thoughts? I think in general my ideas about introversion not mattering for intelligence, but mattering a lot for internet use, bear out. Apparently Thinking doesn't really matter either...which I sort of felt was true, but I didn't actually expect the IQ test scores to agree with me on that. It might have to do with self reported vs actual use of logic.
Of course, we are looking at the center of the bell curve, whereas on LW we are (presumably) looking at the far right edge.
EDIT: here is another IQ one with bigger sample size. http://www.psytech.com/Research/Intelligence-2009-08-11.pdf
They say that they found IQ correlates with I, N, T, and P. However, they claim that were surprised about the "I" correlation, because a large number of other studies have found that E is positively correlated. They go on to talk about how different testing conditions might favor E vs I. Some interesting further reading in there...it seems that N only correlates on the verbal reasoning section,
I'd say "LW has about as many gifted people as Reddit (proportionally)" should be a sort of null hypothesis: if this is true, then people on LessWrong are not actually surprisingly smart.
I wouldn't say that's a reasonable null. Reddit has like 8 million users; 2% of the 310m American population is just 6.2m, so it would be difficult for Reddit to be 100% gifted while LW could easily be. The size disparity is so large that such a null seems more than a little weird.
I don't think I understand your objection. If LW were 100% gifted (while Reddit, presumably, is not?) wouldn't that be evidence that there's some sort of IQ selection at work? (or, conceivably, that just being on LW makes people smarter, although I think that's not supposed to be a thing).
I'm saying that we could, just from knowing how big Reddit is, reject out of hand all sorts of proportions of gifted because it would be nigh impossible; a set of nulls (the proportions 0-100%), many of which (all >75%) we can reject before collecting any data is a pretty strange choice to make!
Well, really what I want to ask is: is LW any different, IQ-wise, from a random selection of Redditors of the same size? Possibly stating it in terms of a proportion of "gifted" people is misleading, but that's not as interesting anyway.
I don't see the difference. A random selection of Redditors is going to depend on what Reddit overall looks like...
Well, I don't see the difference either, but I'm still not entirely sure what about this hypothesis seems unreasonable to you, so I was hoping this reformulation would help.
The reasoning behind it is as follows: I figure a generic discussion board on the Internet has roughly the same IQ distribution as Reddit. If LW has a high average IQ, but so does Reddit, then presumably these are both due to the selection effect of "someone who posts on an online discussion board". So to see if LW is genuinely smarter, we should be comparing it to Reddit, not to the Normal(100,15) distribution.
Maybe it just means Reddit-folk are surprisingly smart? I mean, IQ 130 corresponds to 98th percentile. The usual standard for surprise is 95th percentile.