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Taurus_Londono comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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"So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests - ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source."
I am a member of this population, and I lied. Although I have taken variants of the aforementioned tests, I have never done so in an academic or professional context (ie; Raven's via iqtest.dk). I suspect that I am not the only one.
"People were really really bad at giving their answers in millions. I got numbers anywhere from 3 (really? three million people in Europe?) to 3 billion (3 million billion people = 3 quadrillion)."
Two-thirds have a college degree and roughly one third are European citizens. Does this bode well for the affirmation about self-reported IQ?
"...so it was probably some kind of data entry error..." "Computers (practical): 505, 30.9%"
If people lie about IQ, why not just check Wikipedia and cheat on the Europe question? I lied about IQ, but I did not cheat for the Europe question. I suspect that I am not alone.
IQ is arguably as direct a challenge to self-appraisal as you can put to anyone who would self-select for an LW survey. Because mean for HBD was 2.7, many of the respondents may feel that IQ does not fall into predictable heritability patterns by adulthood (say, 27.4 years old). Could it be intertwined with self-attribution bias and social identity within a community devoted to rational thinking? Perhaps they don't realize that rational decision-making =/= improved performance on Raven's Progressive Matrices.
If I was a member of a health club for 2.62 years, ipso facto, would I be inclined to self-report as physically fit/strong/healthy (especially if I thought I had control over said variable, and that it wasn't largely the result of inheritance and environmental factors in a seemingly distant childhood)?
Self-reported IQ data via an online survey: robust? C'mon, you're smarter than that...
Helpful for letting us know there are bad people out there that will seek to sabotage the value of a survey even without any concrete benefit to themselves other than the LOLZ of the matter. But I think we are already aware of the existence of bad people.
As for your "I suspect that I am not alone", I ADBOC (agree denotationaly but object connotationaly). Villains exist, but I suspect villains are rarer than they believe themselves to be, since in order to excuse their actions they need imagine the whole world populated with villains (while denying that it's an act of villainy they describe).
Well, I'm also a European (with a Master's Degree in Computer Science ) who didn't give my number in millions, and I could have my MENSA-acceptance letter scanned and posted if anyone disbelieves me on my provided IQ.
So bollocks on that. You are implying that people like me are liars just because we are careless readers or careless typists. Lying is a whole different thing than mere carelessness.
Have you read Correspondence Bias?
I said that I "lied" when answering the IQ question because while I used the best available sources that I had, namely tests taken casually in non-official contexts, such as the Mensa Denmark Raven's test available at iqtest.dk as I mentioned above (similar in some regard to your own European Mensa test?), doing so constitutes knowingly violating the survey instructions. However closely the accuracy of such scores may approximate to your own is not relevant to the fact that my response did not conform to the survey instructions; it is extremely unlikely that I am the only individual who chose to do this. That is worth knowing.
What in my post gives the impression that I was twirling my mustache and rubbing my hands together like a devious little scamp with nothing better to do than to provoke hyperbole from someone in an online discussion?
I am not currently in a position to take an officially administered test of the kind specifically mentioned in survey (and have no desire to join Mensa), yet I preferred to give an answer using the closest available sources of information for the reasons stated above (bias).
The purpose of my post was to provide factual evidence towards a more complete assessment of the assertion that the IQ results are robust. Providing factual evidence (however small) relevant to this issue is not a personal assault on your character or an inference about whether or not you, personally, are a liar (I didn't know that you existed until you posted now).
Feeling bad that the survey results may not be accurate is one thing (you should feel at least a little bad, if you care at all about Less Wrong or the individuals that had to comb through and work with the results), but confusing your personal indignation with the reality of the results (either the IQ results are valid or not) is a mistake....one against which I'd thought this place tried to inculcate its participants.
"We are careless readers or careless typists"...? Are you sure that I am the only one whose bias is rarer than I imagine it to be? At the very least, I didn't go so far as to use the pronoun "we" when I said only that I "suspect I am not alone."
Also, given the results detailed above, what "sabotaged" the survey more? My IQ response or your carelessness?
The survey was not meant to include non-official tests. If you respond to a question about official tests with the result of a non-official test, not only have you lied, you have lied in an important way. Certainly you could argue that the non-official test is as good as measuring IQ as the acceptable tests, but that argument's not up to you to make--the creator of the survey obviously didn't think so and it's his survey The design of the survey reflects his decision about what sources of error are acceptable, not yours. He gets to decide that, not you, regardless of whether you can argue for your position or not.
Did you select cooperate or defect on the prisoner dilemma question?
I selected to cooperate.
If I'd thought the financial incentive to defect was greater, I may have been tempted to do so... ...but isn't it interesting that even a modest material reward didn't have the same effect as the incentive to lie about IQ?