ChristianKl comments on The Truth About Mathematical Ability - LessWrong

61 Post author: JonahSinick 12 February 2015 01:29AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 12 February 2015 12:39:08PM 3 points [-]

I went to Lowell High School in San Francisco, an academic magnet school with ~650 students per year, who averaged ~630 on the math SAT.

International audience: I don't know what the average math SAT results happen to be to judge how impressive 630 is.

Comment author: JonahSinick 12 February 2015 07:02:02PM 3 points [-]

International audience: I don't know what the average math SAT results happen to be to judge how impressive 630 is.

Thanks, I added relevant information within the article. This was just an oversight – I wasn't making a conscious choice not to cater to an international audience.

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 February 2015 11:16:16PM 3 points [-]

Thanks, I added relevant information within the article.

Good. I expected that you would appreciate ways like that to improve your article.

This was just an oversight – I wasn't making a conscious choice not to cater to an international audience.

I didn't want to imply that it was a conscious decision. Stuffing a lot of meaning into few words is hard ;)

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 12 February 2015 12:44:40PM *  3 points [-]

Out of 800. About 80-85ish percentile?

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 February 2015 12:50:26PM 1 point [-]

Out of 800

That still doesn't tell me what the average person gets.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 12 February 2015 01:06:50PM *  3 points [-]

How many characters is the google complexity of your question (defined as "lowest length of query, in characters, that gives you an answer on the first page")? An upper bound is 8 characters.

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 February 2015 01:28:09PM *  6 points [-]

I can Google the answer, but I don't think I'm the only person who doesn't know what the average happens to be. I think it's worthwhile that an article like this provides a reference for such a score.

Reading on (http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/SATPercentileRanks.pdf) that Jonah's score of 720 puts him into the 96 percentile of the overall population makes a sentence like

"Our tests are really badly calibrated – we haven't been able to get them to the point where somebody with 99.9 percentile level subject matter knowledge reliably scores at the 97th percentile or higher."

more interesting. There no good reason not to provide that information in the article.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 12 February 2015 01:32:08PM *  3 points [-]

I agree with your larger point.

The fact that any dimension reduction strategy from [super large and complicated space that is your brain] to [positive integer within a range] is badly calibrated should be news to precisely no one.

Comment author: Vaniver 12 February 2015 02:59:59PM 2 points [-]

The fact that any dimension reduction strategy from [super large and complicated space that is your brain] to [positive integer within a range] is badly calibrated should be news to precisely no one.

I don't think I agree with "badly calibrated," there. It's not like everyone saw g coming, or it doesn't see any opposition; it's surprising and interesting how much of the variance in human intelligence can be captured by a single dimension. Is it 100%? Of course not, and I say that because we calculate g loadings and correlations and have a good idea of just how much information g does or does not give us.

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