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bramflakes comments on What should normal people do? - Less Wrong
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Comments (93)
I bet the average LessWrong person has a great sense of humour and feels things more than other people, too.
Seriously, every informal IQ survey amongst a group/forum I have seen reports very high IQ. My (vague) memories of the LessWrong one included people who seemed to be off the scale (I don't mean very bright. I mean that such IQs either have never been given out in official testing rather than online tests, or possibly that they just can't be got on those tests and people were lying).
There's always a massive bias in self-reporting: those will only be emphasised on an intellectual website that starts the survey post by saying that LessWrongers are, on average, in the top 0.11% for SATs, and gives pre-packaged excuses for not reporting inconvenient results - "Many people would prefer not to have people knowing their scores. That's great, but please please please do post it anonymously. Especially if it's a low one, but not if it's low because you rushed the test", (my emphasis).
If there's a reason to be interested in average IQ beyond mutual ego-massage, I guess the best way would be to have an IQ test where you logged on as 'Less Wrong member X' and then it reported all the results, not just the ones that people chose to share. And where it revealed how many people pulled out halfway through (to avoid people bailing if they weren't doing well).
Would still suffer from selection effects. People that thought they might not do so well would be disinclined to do it, and people who knew they were hot shit would be extra inclined to do it. The phrase "anonymous survey" doesn't really penetrate into our status-aware hindbrains.
Yep! But it's the best way I can imagine that someone could plausibly create on the forum.
Better: randomly select a group of users (within some minimal activity criteria) and offer the test directly to that group. Publicly state the names of those selected (make it a short list, so that people actually read it, maybe 10-20) and then after a certain amount of time give another public list of those who did or didn't take it, along with the results (although don't associate results with names). That will get you better participation, and the fact that you have taken a group of known size makes it much easier to give outer bounds on the size of the selection effect caused by people not participating.
You can also improve participation by giving those users an easily accessible icon on Less Wrong itself which takes them directly to the test, and maybe a popup reminder once a day or so when they log on to the site if they've been selected but haven't done it yet. Requires moderate coding.
I would find such a feature to be extraordinarily obnoxious, to the point that I'd be inclined to refused such a test purely out of anger (and my scores are not at all embarrassing). I can't think of any other examples of a website threatening to publicly shame you for non-compliance.