The latest survey shows that the average LessWronger who entered his SAT or ACT is roughly in the top 0.11%. This is insanely high. For comparison, top 2% can be Mensa members. I do not know the correlation between SAT/ACT and IQ, but I know it's fairly high. Anyway, I'm very curious to see the average score on a real, culture-fair IQ test. Those are the only two tests that are free, online, correct and culture fair, from what I know.

http://www.cerebrals.org/wp/tests/jcti/

http://www.etienne.se/cfnse/

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.

JCTI might take a while, so I recommend keeping your answers on Notepad in case you want to leave it and continue later.

Edit: I have included polls, thanks to the commenters.

Post your score here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fqq/average_iq_on_lw/7yad/

Pick one (or several) of the following. I used specific examples, therefore anything similar still counts.

1. You have a friendly new acquaintance who is pretty much an average person. He is a theist and doesn't believe Evolution, you have already had a polite debate about that. Convince him to believe in the truth*.

2. One of your friends is very deeply religious - he has devoted his life to already invested a lot of it in religion. Unexpectedly, he is also highly rational (as a personality) and very intelligent, he studies a technical degree (enjoys it), he has read books about critical thinking (he even knows a little about biases) and he says that he will stop believing in religion if you disprove it. Debating with him so far didn't help (also he isn't too good - he isn't aware of expected value and such ideas). For his own good, convince him to change his mind in the direction of the truth. He is wasting a huge potential and that's not only bad for him, but also for humanity. Also, he will feel more comfortable in his new, more sensible beliefs.

3. Your brother dislikes you because of his impression of you that was created several years ago and wasn't updated to reflect the changes in your personality. You easily make impressions to other people that are vastly different from his impression of you. Change his impression, so that he sees you truthfully.

[I have removed 4., because it wasn't about changing the mind of someone who isn't a rationalist, but about coming up with a good psychological mechanism - it deserves an entirely new thread; I suspect that 3 might be too different from 1 and 2, but it's too late to make a so big change to the thread]

I know at least one person for each category. And I haven't been able to change nobody's mind. Have you succeeded in a similar situation? Regardless of whether you have, what strategies do you think would be winning in the 4 situations? If some of them sounds good, I might even try them out and share the results. I'm especially curious about how to approach in #3, because if there is a way, it would come from low-level psychology, which is something I adore.

So, the aim of this thread is for the participants to try and change someone's mind and then tell the story.

(also, I'm willing to accept ideas of other templates for classical situations similar to those, in fact I think I had one or two more ideas, but I can't seem to recall them)

*Needless to say, if at any point, anyone proves to you that his direction is in fact the truth, it would be better to change yourself in that direction instead, but that's outside of the scope of the thread.

I'm considering reading the book by the title How to read a book. A friend of mine (his critical thinking is quite good, but certainly not as good as it could be, so I can't trust his opinion too much) said he has read it and that it helped him a lot. He said it had advice on reading comprehension, critical thinking ("don't automatically accept what you read") and that when people read something, they tend to forget it quite easily (and that the book addresses this issue). But he also quoted a part of the book, which said that only reading hard things will improve your reading - it might be true, but it doesn't sound intuitive to me (according to my rationalist intuition, obviously :D). Also, the book is written in 1940 and revised in 1972. Additionally, the author is religious (I think he's even highly religious). And if I remember correctly, it's not based on research - there is a quite high chance that I don't remember correctly. I checked its Amazon page, nothing said anything about research (browsed through all the low ratings to see if they complain about that, nobody did).

Should I bother reading it? If it delivers what it promises, it will obviously be so cost-effective that most rationalists should abandon reading whatever they're reading and switch to this book. But is there a version that is entirely based on research, with references or sound theory behind most claims?

(copied and edited from my post in the Facebook LW group)

I suspect that it would be obvious to most rationalists that the way people judge other people is flawed. Typically for a heuristic approach, it's correct to a degree, but with many faults. And it's wasting a big amount of information and a potential for a more planned approach where you can ask questions that assess certain qualities and exchange information about people's personalities by giving their "parameters".

I needn't think of it in this way, it was natural for me to take this approach as soon as I learnt my first measurable parameter and its implications (it was IQ). Then I explored more of them and researched them some more.

So far, I know about IQ, rationality (Keith Stanovich's), Big Five personality traits, executive functions, intuition for social situations  and a few more things. However, I can't seem to find any literature that helps describe them (how do I detect them in people and what are their implications?) and their implications (how *exactly* is someone with a higher IQ different from someone with a lower IQ?). Also, I can't find literature on other traits.

Any literature on any of that would be greatly appreciated. I wonder if there is a book that deals with the whole issue. Also, I need literature about IQ and Big Five, but anything else would still be useful.

Is that sort of thing popular on LessWrong?

I'll first explain how I see expected outcome, because I'm not sure my definition is the same as the widely accepted definition.

If I have 50% chance to win 10$, I take it as there are two alternative universes, the only difference being that in one of them, I win 10$ and in the other one, I win nothing. Then I treat the 50% chance as 100% chance to be in both of them, divided by two. If winning 10$ means I'll save myself from 1 hour of work, when divided by two it would be 30 minutes of work. In virtually all cases, when it's about winning small sums of money, you can simply multiply the percentage by the money (in this case, we'll get 5$). Exceptions would be the cases analogous to the one where I'm dying of an illness, I can't afford treatment, but I have all the money I need except for the last 10$ and there isn't any other way to obtain them. So if there's 30% chance to save 10 people's lives, that's the same as saving 3 lives.

If you have no idea what you're talking about, then at least you can see a proof of my problem: I find it hard to explain this idea to people, and impossible for some.

I'm not even sure if the idea is correct. I once posted it on a math forum, asking for evidence, but I didn't find any. So, can someone confirm whether is true, also giving any evidence?

And my main question is, how can I explain this in a way that people can understand it as easily as possible.

(it is possible that it's not clear what I meant - I'll check this thread later for that, and if it turns out to be the case, I'll edit it and add more examples and try to clarify and simplify)

Since there aren't any subforums and I couldn't find a thread with information of what is relevant for Discussion, and I saw the threads here are relatively free, I've decided to ask my questions in a thread.

- Can I post questions about this section? (sorry if no)

- Can I post about psychology in general?

- Can I post about anything that might be of the interest of a rationalist? Like for example, a thread asking about how to reduce the risks for most cancers. Note that this is a huge range of possible questions.

Edit: thanks, I think I figured it out. I'm still not sure if I want to respond to all the comments, whether I should comment myself or edit the original post.