22 ms·

IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway

• catern 4y ago
  138 I feel like my programming knowledge helped, which maybe means it's a bad IQ test - being a programmer shouldn't mean your IQ tests higher. But then again, maybe the causality is the other way around?
  • soheil 4y ago
    That's over 3 sigma can you back up the claim to your score?
    • weberer 4y ago
      I got the same. There's really no proof you can give beyond a screenshot. https://imgur.com/QxSFWsD https://imgur.com/QxSFWsD
  • Imnimo 4y ago
    Agree, I felt like I knew what to do for some of them because of programming experience. I remember taking similar tests as a child, and always assumed that the pattern must be of the form "each object in the first square moves to some new location in the second square according to a rule, and then continues moving according to that rule to a new location in the third square". But here it seemed obvious to me that some questions were "combine the first square and the second square according to a logical operator like AND or XOR". I don't think I would have been so quick to see that sort of rule without being exposed to them frequently in programming.
  • newaccount74 4y ago
    I also feel that my programming knowledge and discrete maths courses in university helped me recognise patterns in this test quicker. But I only got 121, so just being a programmer apparently isn't enough :)
• giantg2 4y ago
  If you hit finish early, does it mark the untried ones against you?
• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Got bored by question 9. Hit finish. > Your IQ lies outside the area that the test is able to measure. You're god damn right. But aside... No, that's definitely not the correct conclusion from an incomplete testing dataset.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • version_five 4y ago
    Yeah I did 10 and then came to the comments to see if anyone knew how long it is. It gets boring pretty quickly. I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people. If it's just to join Mensa then whatever, but I'd hate to think life-affecting decisions are made based on whether you guessed or inferred which combination of cross, box, and dot come next
    • mywittyname 4y ago
      > I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people. The speed at which a person can recognize patterns correlates strongly with their ability to learn in general. The reason they use shapes is because it's a more universal measurement. Using words introduces issues with a person's ability to speak that language.
      • everdrive 4y ago
        If only a person's grasp on language were correlated with intelligence.
        • mywittyname 4y ago
          It is, but only for languages that a person has learned. How well would you do on any test written in Japanese? Assuming you never learned Japanese. Probably poorly. But if you knew a little bit of Japanese, you might do fine on a math test. And that's the idea with shape-based tests: trying to minimize the influence that language comprehension has on the results because you want the results to be neutral.
• ZYinMD 4y ago
  Pattern puzzles are good. I remember trying a test on the official Mensa website 10 years ago, and gave up midway because there were lots of word puzzles, which were biased in favor of native English speakers.
  • password54321 4y ago
    You are right and they have a spatial reasoning test called "Culture Fair" which they gave when I applied for a test. You only need to be top 2% on one of the two tests for an offer.
  • sweezyjeezy 4y ago
    They get easier with practice though, so I don't think they're that great either. Also are we saying that linguistic ability has no bearing on intelligence? IQ tests seem to mainly test ability at IQ tests, I'm sure there's some correlations with aptitude in other fields, but I'm not sure how well a literature nobel prize winner would do on this.
• fouronnes3 4y ago
  Would be more interesting if 100 was average HN reader.
  • throw1234651234 4y ago
    Last time I had a bunch of devs take it, we came back with 115-130 range, which seems reasonable.
  • edrxty 4y ago
    Best I can tell the average HN reader is in the low 80s but believes themselves to be high 150s. Could probably get a few papers out of this crowd :)
    • reducesuffering 4y ago
      If you honestly think the average HN reader is low 80's (bottom 15%) I've got some bad news about what the results of your IQ test will be.
      • iamacyborg 4y ago
        Clearly he’s in the high 150’s!
        • reducesuffering 4y ago
          double Dunning-Kruger
        • forgetfulness 4y ago
          So many online communities are collections of people of slightly above average intelligence, trying desperately to prove themselves far above other people of slightly above average intelligence.
  • ddsfafgrrhreh 4y ago
    Wouldn't be surprised. Many people here seem to become insecure when it comes to puzzles. A lot of "I got bored" comments here and people hating on leetcode style problems when both are honestly quite fun and believe would be to any mind that has the horsepower for these.
• teaearlgrey_hot 4y ago
  May I be the first to say that I’m not sure what “IQ” actually measures? Naturally I have the same understanding as most: IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains. “This brain has so and so much more thinking ability than others”. Yet I find a curious phenomenon when spending time /with/ the brains of others through their work, writings, or speech: often my level of engagement or intellectual fulfillment that I gain has little to no correlation with their IQ. What IQ seems to fail in capturing is the human ability to be creative and unique; whereas I believe now one can design a sufficiently advanced AI/ML instance which could learn the patterns in this Mensa test, our ability to assess value and meaning from a perspective of “well they recognize certain types of patterns” seems carelessly limited. But that’s just my perspective. :)
  • throw1234651234 4y ago
    This particular test is an imitation of Raven's Progressive Matrices, which measures working memory (WM). WM is the amount of information "chunks" an individual can work with in their short term memory. For an average person it's "7+-2" or 5-9 "chunks". The patterns you see on the test introduce progressively more and more changes, until you are getting beyond 9 changes a piece at 120+ IQ. Let me know if you have any questions.
    • subroutine 4y ago
      Interestingly, young chimps outperform humans in working memory tasks... https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12993-chimps-outperform-humans-at-memory-task/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12993-chimps-outperfo...
    • teaearlgrey_hot 4y ago
      But has it been shown that working memory correlates to anything in specific?
  • anm89 4y ago
    > IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains. I don't think this is a very valuable way to think about IQ. It is what it is, nothing more nothing less. It's the location you fall on in a normal distribution of intelligence as measured by specific tests.
• clint 4y ago
  I got bored after a couple and just quit, so I guess I'm the actual genius lol
  • clintonc 4y ago
    I came to the comments first. \o/
  • kbelder 4y ago
    I once stumbled across an online IQ test that had randomly generated questions, and never ended. The longer you kept taking it, the lower the IQ it gave you.
• throwaway4good 4y ago
  Also a test of patience.
• onesafari 4y ago
  If you've ever played The Witness, it's a lot like this. Which raises the question; is beating The Witness an IQ test?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  Benchmarking cognitive functions should be much more interesting than it currently is, with data tracking progress and regression. I feel like the tests are too focused on low level raw hardware bandwith of simple tasks, and not enough on semantic reading comprehension and problem solving. E.g robustness against cognitive biases should be benchmarked, thinking outside of the boxes/ solutions by transpositions/free associations should too. Such a toolset would also help measure the effect of nootropics differently, vs e.g. the magnesium threonate ~9 IQ points increase
• dtx1 4y ago
  Maybe I'm in the low IQ bracket but I suspect i would score higher if i knew what kind of changes/patterns are allowed. You can probably learn and train for this kind of test pretty effectively by just building a mental checklist for possible patterns to check against.
  • password54321 4y ago
    In an actual test the time is extremely short and you have to work on intuition.
• readingnews 4y ago
  I went ahead and did it all... by the time I was half way through, perseverance came into question. Wow that is boring. At about the 3/4 mark, I guess, some of the patterns were really hard to figure out, and the clock is ticking. My mind goes to "wait, I kind of suck at pictorial pattern matching with so many different objects", and "is that the only judge of my IQ? What is mensa? Oh wait, clock ticking, not bored out of my mind"... I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve. I guess I really suck at pattern matching, or I am just dumb. They want you in the very top for mensa.
  • techstrategist 4y ago
    Don’t take this too seriously, but this sounds like my prior experience with undiagnosed adhd.
    • melissalobos 4y ago
      > undiagnosed adhd I don't know if not wanting to perform boring activities in your free time is a great indicator of adhd. How far would a neurotypical person get into a long terms and conditions disclaimer before wanting to quit if there didn't seem to be a good/any reward?
      • DrewADesign 4y ago
        ADHD brains crave novelty and mental stimulation. Random challenging quizzes are like crack to me, personally. Half of them I get bored with immediately and drop.
        • philosopher1234 4y ago
          All brains crave novelty and mental stimulation.
          • rxhernandez 4y ago
            I've met plenty of people who've never left their metro area in the 3 decades they've been alive. On the other hand, when my girlfriend asks me what I would like to do, she has to qualify it with: "inside of this state." I have driven across multiple states on a whim a few times over the past couple years. The degree to which people crave novelty varies greatly.
• dheerendra73 4y ago
  In India, there is a selection test happens for schools called JNV[1]. These are schools designed for talented underprivileged kids who grew in mostly rural areas. The selection test actually uses this format of pattern recognition to judge abilities of 10-11 years old kids. I thought that’s pretty neat given how universal pattern recognition is and it helps remove bias from selection process towards kids who can’t afford extra classes to pass the exam. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawahar_Navodaya_Vidyalaya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawahar_Navodaya_Vidyalaya
  • mhandley 4y ago
    A decade or so back my son applied for one of the few remaining state selective schools in London. About 2000 applied for 100 places. Admission was by similar tests, including verbal and non-verbal reasoning. Despite the claims you can't game these tests, many people use tutors. We didn't, but I bought him all the non-verbal reasoning papers I could find online. He practised a lot, and over six months progressively raised his mark from around 70% (not high enough to get in) to 100% on the final practice paper he did a couple of days before the entrance exam. I'm sure you need some native aptitude, but it's not at all clear to me these really help remove selection bias. My son told me that when a new teacher gives them a word-search or visual puzzle, they kids will have finished before the teacher has finishing handing them out. On the other hand, he also tells me common sense isn't so common there, so things do tend to balance out in strange ways.
    • rahimnathwani 4y ago
      Yup. New York has a gifted and talented test that's supposed to require no preparation, but kids are competing with other kids who have spent time/effort/money to prepare: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=new+york+gifted https://www.amazon.com/s?k=new+york+gifted
• 101008 4y ago
  I took the test to be part of Mensa when I was 17. It was a one hour or two hours test? I think. I remember I got very bored by the end and I stopped paying attention to the questions and I started to answer without doing all the analysis it was required. I passed it and I was part of the the society. I found it quite weird because the rest of the people didn't look like "smart" or "intelligent" or whatever you could think of Mensa people. At the end I just decided that they (we) were good at identifying patterns. I stopped paying after one or two years.
  • bena 4y ago
    I think Mensa is on the lower end of high IQ societies. IIRC. I think they accept people who test in the 135 range, which is uncommon, but not horribly so. Like in the 2% range. So, 1 in 50 people. There's another group called the Triple-9 society which only takes people who test in the 99.9% percentile (hence the clever name). Mensa and other high IQ societies consist of people who have enough time to dedicate to being in a high IQ society. That should tell you enough about the motivation and mindset of the people in it. Like everyone there was probably technically intelligent, but they've convinced themselves that that alone was enough to lead them to the land of milk and honey. Like they say, hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Being intelligent isn't enough, you have to acquire knowledge and you have to apply that knowledge.
    • smugkot 4y ago
      >Mensa and other high IQ societies consist of people who have enough time to dedicate to being in a high IQ society. They also consist of people who (stupidly) attribute a lot more value to IQ than it deserves. I got a 135 on this test, I am not smarter than Richard Feynman. I bet that IMO/IPhO medalists are a LOT smarter than Triple-9 people. (Yes, I know that Feynman underwent an actual physical examination, and his score was probably lowered by his poor English skills, but my point still stands: smart people typically don't have extremely high IQs.)
      • samatman 4y ago
        > his poor English skills C'mon, Brooklyn is an accent not a disability!
• WithinReason 4y ago
  There is a certain set of tricks you need to use, if you already know what those are you can score much higher. You can practice for IQ tests too.
  • isitmadeofglass 4y ago
    > You can practice for IQ tests too. Not everyone is capable of doing this. Ironically people with low IQ would have quite a difficulty practicing for an IQ test. At the same time, the effects of practice are me rather small compared to where people place on the curve before and after training.
  • spicyusername 4y ago
    I had the same thought. As soon as you recognize that there are only a handful of categories of patterns, recognizing the solution is just a matter of matching your question against a known pattern (e.g. this row rotates, you combine the two shapes to produce a third, this shape moves and this one doesn't, etc) Taking a few of these over and over would quickly attune you to what to look for. I suppose in a perfect world, you'd be able to generate a test with tricks the participant hadn't seen before to test how quickly a person could cultivate a list of patterns to check each question against.
• dwallin 4y ago
  I wonder about the effect of a strict time limit. It seems to benefit time management skills over raw intelligence. Perhaps it would be more accurate to allow the test taker to finish the entire test while tracking time spent, and then use time spent to adjust the score.
  • zzbzq 4y ago
    Unfortunately The time limit seems the only way to limit this type of test. There's only a certain number of types of problems they have. If you can solve one in a class, you can solve any in that class. There wouldn't be enough ways to discriminate results without time.
• dhanna 4y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/20774089_What_One_Intelligence_Test_Measures_A_Theoretical_Account_of_the_Processing_in_the_Raven_Progressive_Matrices_Test https://www.researchgate.net/publication/20774089_What_One_I... Here’s an analysis of matrices
• motohagiography 4y ago
  Interesting, but the reason I personally avoid IQ tests is they are like horoscopes or having your fortune told, where it creates the conditions for subtle attribution errors that can really compound over time. When I was a kid, the answer I got from my parents was along the lines of, "they didn't get a number, but you're on the high end, and so you have to be extra careful about being lazy because IQ doesn't mean much." In terms of outcomes, what is there to say, that I'm really good at arguing on the internet? I can appreciate a lot of things while not being able to do them. Sure, I can start as an adult what most people do as kids (music, arts, languages, tech) and become a passable amateur pretty quickly, but the adult mind is irritating to teach because it has to reconcile everything new with its idea of self, and unhooking that adult ego is a heavier and heavier lift. Intelligence is entertaining, but domain specific practice and competence prevail almost every time. I suspect the best use of a high IQ is probably to teach because that scales it. By itself, it mostly produces interesting guests.
• mpfundstein 4y ago
  118 :-) i guess i can live with that around question 24 it got quite hard eventually.i had to skip 4 or 5 :-(
  • soheil 4y ago
    I wondered if skipping was worse than answering randomly.
    • mpfundstein 4y ago
      yeah, its actually stupid. they even say it! but i just can't gamble. I somehow feel bad doing it...
  • pelorat 4y ago
    I got 117, but I didn't skip any. Time ran out at 24-25, can't remember. I'm skeptical at what pattern recognition has to do with intelligence to be honest. I'm 45 and been programming since my teenage years, maybe that has been helpful as most if not all patterns in these tests are basically combinations of bitwise operations. Back in university I did the Swedish version of this (~20 years ago) and scored 140+. I don't think I did any worse now. I've heard the scale is constantly calibrated, so I guess people in general are smarter nowadays :-) I suck at math BTW.
• datan3rd 4y ago
  My IQ is a perfect 100!
  • instagraham 4y ago
    Ayy 50th percentile gang
  • blnkhc 4y ago
• kbenson 4y ago
  I tried it, and now I'm wondering what some of those patterns in the low-mid-30's were (I don't recall the specific numbers, but probably around 32 or 33), because I was completely lost when I got to those. I'm more interested in what those patterns were than their assessment of what it means with regard to my IQ.
  • ZYinMD 4y ago
    I didn't take the test but it might involve sudoku. I remember taking a test of similar fashion some time ago, and the final (hardest) question completely threw me off. I got curious and asked others, and was told it's sudoku related.
  • Topgamer7 4y ago
    There was one where is started getting to XOR. Going left to right if the line in the first box matched the line in the second block, it was not found in the third block. Seems like it stopped being about pattern matching versus logical constraint identification and application.
    • kbenson 4y ago
      Yeah, I got the AND and XOR ones. It was immediately after those, I think the first one might have been filled small circles and boxes on the left and right of a center vertical line. They were all at the bottom, making me think it might have to do with some symbolic counting, but I didn't come up with anything. the next 2-3 with the center vertical line I didn't get either, so conceptually there's maybe something about the vertical line I wasn't grasping.
      • jonhohle 4y ago
        I found the the filled and unfilled flags on diagonal lines, the filled and unfilled boxes separated by a vertical line, and the dots and box separated by a vertical line difficult. I was running out of time, but thought it may have something to do with shifting and/or mirroring the position of the figures, and/or a base 3 representation but couldn't come up with a generalizable pattern. I didn't see anything which suggested that its better to attempt and fail or skip and complete as many as possible, which would definitely affect time management strategy.
• stkdump 4y ago
  I stopped after 5 minutes (don't have so much time) and got 102. I guess thats what I am: average, not because of lacking potential, but due to lacking perseverance...
• jl6 4y ago
  Wow, I’m dumber than I thought.
• enjoylife 4y ago
  Its pattern matching to the extreme with varying amounts of; sequential changes of pictograms and constraints across the rows or columns. What a joke. A better version of this for our HN audience would be to measure the Lines of Code for our programs to reproduce such a test.
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  I didn’t see where you could see the answers. Was there a spot? I made it to 29 (feel like I knew all of the ones before that, but who knows?). But #29 threw me. It is the one with the like down the center, and columns of either solid or stroked boxes on either side. No clue what the pattern was there.
  • cafemachiavelli 4y ago
    Rot13d for spoilers: Vg'f fvtarq nqqvgvba. Lbh gnxr gur yrsg funcrf nf artngvir naq gur evtug funcrf nf cbfvgvir naq nqq gur svefg gjb vzntrf gb neevir ng gur guveq.
    • tshaddox 4y ago
      Yeah, that's probably what they were going for. These kinds of puzzles are pretty bogus though. You could choose any number of ways to interpret each cell as some logical expression, and then choose from any number of functions that make the truth table valid with any result you want in the blank cell. At that point, you just have to guess which of those functions the test writers thought was the most "natural" or "elegant" or "clever," but there's really no objective sense in which one is more correct than the other (unless you literally define the purpose of the test as measuring the ability of the test taker to predict the intent of the test writer). To use a simpler example with integer sequences, if the question asked for the next integer in this sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ? Most of us probably immediately think "ooh, the test writer is very clever because they know about the Fibonacci sequence, and I'm clever too, so the correct answer is obviously 13. But wait! What if the intended sequence is the number of strict odd-length integer partitions of 2n, and thus the correct answer is 11 [0]? What if the intended sequence is the number of balanced ordered trees with n nodes, and the correct answer is 14 [1]? Heck, what if the intended sequence is Fibonacci(n) mod 10, and the correct answer is 3? There is an infinite set of functions from the integers to the integers which give you the 7 provided results for n=0 through n=6, and you can get any result you want for n=7 by just choosing among those functions. There is absolutely no mathematical or logical way to prefer any one of those functions to any other. [0] https://oeis.org/A344650 https://oeis.org/A344650 [1] https://oeis.org/A007059 https://oeis.org/A007059
• haunter 4y ago
  Finished it, 102 though I got bored after 10 minutes
• forgetfulness 4y ago
  Not sure I'll do it, but I'm contented with not being a genius and still trying to hold informed opinions and trying to think critically. I've done well enough given my circumstances. It's probably not all attributable to hard work, and there's probably a bit of "nature" there (as well as often being endearing to people), but I know I'm not extremely intelligent, just somewhat (as not to be needlessly contrarian with people who insist I'm smart, gotta give at some point). It's alright, Mensa can be for the people with the big brains.
• sureglymop 4y ago
  IQ is interesting to me especially when people glorify the "high IQ". It's weird because it says exactly nothing about a persons empathy or ethical responsibility. So what I have learned from that is.. never underestimate your adversaries logical thinking ability, regardless of how seemingly devoid of empathy they are.
• oxff 4y ago
  (Illegal to use as an employment test, so we have to go into tens of thousands of debt by going to universities)
  • danamit 4y ago
    I took it as employment test before.
  • philipkglass 4y ago
    This appears to be a reference to Griggs v. Duke Power Company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. That's only the law in the United States. To what extent do employers in other countries accept an IQ test in lieu of a university degree?
    • MichaelZuo 4y ago
      It's somewhat common in Canada, with major companies like banks, etc. Last time I checked around 2015.
• stormdennis 4y ago
  Mensa, mensa mensam, mensae, mensae, mensa Mensae, mensae, mensas, Mensarum, mensis, mensis. That's mensa declined for you.
• tomerbd 4y ago
  I didn't get bored around question 20 actually got curious but this took a long time him finish 97
• thrwy_918 4y ago
  What I find impressive is that despite online IQ tests being notoriously unreliable, my score on the ~8 or so I've completed as an adult over the years (including this one) has been remarkable stable, to within + or - a couple of points - even though I generally don't take them very seriously. Which makes me question if they actually are all that unreliable, given that my score is not all that close to the center of the curve.
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    I think it's a nice gimmick, and the online test results are probably close to your actual measured IQ. These tests tend to only measure certain aspects of your intelligence (in this case: exclusively pattern matching, but no memory testing at all) so the results are often skewed. Any non-extreme IQ is a useless measurement anyway. If you consistently score around 85 or 145 on these tests then you may want to look into some actual tests or your working environment, but as a personal statistic your IQ says very little of you. I find it frankly disgusting that there are people and companies out there that rely on these numbers for real, important decisions, especially since the numbers and procedures are usually based on old information. IQ scores have increased over time up to a point in the 90s and what scored 100 points in 1940 is now below average (there was a difference of a whole 14 IQ points between 1942 and 2008! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)
• mempko 4y ago
  Can we stop promoting IQ tests? They are pseudo-scientific garbage.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    or maybe just ignore the link
• soheil 4y ago
  It gets boring pretty quickly. I wonder if part of people considered having a high IQ is the ability to persevere through adversity and having grit which really isn't the same as raw intelligence.
  • DeWilde 4y ago
    Makes sense, applying 100 IQ for 10 minutes give a higher intelligence force than applying 150 IQ for 1 minute. Totally scientific.
• gotaquestion 4y ago
  Back in 1995 I had a moment of massive intellectual insecurity and joined MENSA. There were about 30 of us who took the test. Keep in mind this was before email privacy & hygiene and the mailing list went out to all instead of BCC so we found out that everyone passed. Literally everyone. I'm suspicious of the MENSA selection criteria. You can even join without taking the test by having an SAT score above a certain value. Dubious. But then, why would anyone join a High IQ society? I did because I needed proof I was smart, and wanted to be around other smarties (my social circle was nill), but the people were just kinda average and boring.
  • burkaman 4y ago
    > You can even join without taking the test by having an SAT score above a certain value. Dubious. I'm sure it's true of many IQ tests, but the SAT is notoriously heavily correlated with wealth. Even if you generously assume that the test itself is not biased (which you shouldn't, it was and still is), that means your score is a function of practice and training, not "raw intelligence" if such a thing exists.
    • mediaman 4y ago
      There is no evidence that the SAT is a function of practice and training, and a lot of evidence that training has only a small impact on SAT scores. See, for example: https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe... https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Benjamin_Domingue/publication/228337033_Using_Linear_Regression_and_Propensity_Score_Matching_to_Estimate_the_Effect_of_Coaching_on_the_SAT/links/5486ec840cf268d28f06a133.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Benjamin_Domingue/publi... These controlled studies show an impact of something like 10-35 points from coaching and other prep.
      • burkaman 4y ago
        I didn't really mean SAT-specific coaching or practice tests, I meant more general practice and training as a result of your education. Like if you grew up in a rich neighborhood, on average you probably had better training on SAT-related skills over your 10 years of school, a better environment to practice those skills, etc.
• arisAlexis 4y ago
  Fun trivia, Feynman failed the Mensa IQ test. Nobody knows if he was joking or not :)
• djbelieny 4y ago
  So I am either very intelligent or ridiculously stupid. All I got was this message: "Your IQ lies outside the area that the test is able to measure. We are hoping to extend this area as soon as we have gathered more data."
• sirmike_ 4y ago
  What does this mean? I didn't even get a score. "Your IQ lies outside the area that the test is able to measure. We are hoping to extend this area as soon as we have gathered more data."
  • Sharlin 4y ago
    Did you answer all the questions?
    • sirmike_ 4y ago
      Yes. I answered all within the time frame. I still had 14 minutes and change on the clock.
      • djbelieny 4y ago
        Same here and got the same message ;/
      • chki 4y ago
        That either means you guessed a lot and got too many wrong – or you were extremely good. If you only took 10 minutes that means you only had 17 seconds per problem; I'm not too bad at pattern recognition (I think) but for some of those questions 17 seconds (or even 30 because it's an average) would be way too short for me.
        • Sharlin 4y ago
          Yep, definitely. I believe the test is calibrated such that if you get all of the questions right in less than 25 minutes, and without guessing, you're off the charts of this test. That is, you're supposed to use all the time you got, and still score quite high even if you have to guess the last couple of questions. (I got 133, guessing the last three and may have got a couple others wrong.)
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    The test claims to measure IQs between 85 and 145. That means the test probably scored you below 85 or above 145. I don't know what that means for your actual IQ but I have a feeling you might just score very well on an official IQ test if you're into that kind of thing.
• nbulka 4y ago
  How can one prove that the selected answer is indeed the correct one? Isn't it possible that there are more concise explanations than the recognized "correct" answer that the author of the test didn't see (and indeed, couldn't have seen, since patterns are a huge powerset ...) If the reply is that, well, it's the simplest elegant explanation .. isn't that an appeal to popular notion and not pattern recognition as a whole? Is there any literature on the psychology of IQ tests?
• marstall 4y ago
  I scored 185 on an IQ test administered in the 5th grade ... 108 on this one!
  • ledauphin 4y ago
    I've never scored that high, but have previously scored in the high 99th percentile on several occasions, and I, too, scored ~110 on this one. It maybe didn't help that I flipped a bit after reading the instructions and decided that there were only 25 questions instead of 35. :)
• yifanl 4y ago
  I finished it and scored 138, which ostensibly is a high score assuming the bell curve at the end is correct... and I'm just left wondering what was it I was being tested on. Pattern recognition, I guess? It's a bit interesting since all the data work I've worked with involves labelling and categorization which is the same general idea, and I wonder if that' just coincidence. I've always thought that data science has been about labeling data because that's one of the most immediate business desires, or is that what the cognitive sciences actually consider to be a good abstraction of intelligence, if such a thing even exists.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    I'd argue that pattern recognition is basically the brain's most important job. Acquiring new patterns is another (but you'll notice how easy it is when the new patterns mostly fit existing patterns). That's not to say that the tests actually mean anything. They probably don't.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      > I'd argue that pattern recognition is basically the brain's most important job. True, but I'd argue that there's little to no reason to think that this is innate, and that it can be trained. Doing these pattern recognition puzzles over and over again would make you very good at them.
      • outworlder 4y ago
        I think there's very little of what we call 'intelligence' that's innate. Not sure if there's any consensus, but most papers I've read seem to indicate that the difference is either tiny or non-existent, for similarly healthy brains.
    • lordnacho 4y ago
      Not recognizing patterns that aren't there is another related and important job, which is in conflict with what you mention. I'm not sure this is really being tested. If you look at patterns like 1,2,4,8, etc (to choose something that I can write in text) there's actually a lot of next numbers that could fit a pattern, but to get the points you have to pick a certain one.
• kmm 4y ago
  The weird thing is that I'm quite good at puzzles like these, but I'm garbage at things like chess (well, I have a 1050 blitz rating on lichess, which isn't terrible, but it's not good either). You'd think it would carry over, but apparently it doesn't. Which makes me wonder what kind of smarts the test actually quantifies.
  • ddsfafgrrhreh 4y ago
    I think IQ in tasks like chess determine your potential or at least how fast you learn. Obviously you aren't going to figure out something like a bishop pair checkmate on the spot even with 160.
• 725686 4y ago
  Interestingly, mensa is spanish is slang for stupid female.
• historia_novae 4y ago
  What I find fascinating about discussions about IQ (tests) is how they trigger a whole class of people. It's like there are smart people who are confident about their intelligence, less than bright who are conscious about their shortcomings on the matter, and in-between a whole bunch of midwits who can't accept that smarter people than them exist and thus declare IQ (tests) measure nothing.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    I took the test and joined Mensa for a year before letting it lapse. I think that IQ tests measure nothing but test-taking ability. I've always been good at tests. I'm not exceptionally bright.
    • password54321 4y ago
      There seems to be a pattern with people's IQ and their profession. The average IQ for physicists and philosophers or even just someone with a PhD is like 135. The guy who cleans the toilet is very likely not going to be in that range. Clearly something to do with intelligence is being measured.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        The reason I took the test is because when I was listening to the Howard Stern radio show, their crew was taking IQ tests, and I realized I hadn't ever taken one and had no idea where you would. I've cleaned a ton of toilets professionally in my life, even well into adulthood. Do I sound smart? Because I've been deemed in the top 2% of IQs. Also, because I got a score in the 140s that means I can say that IQ is silly and that even its inventor didn't like the uses to which it was put, and you have to accept that. High-IQ privilege.
        • password54321 4y ago
          I also got into Mensa not that it has anything to do with the correlation of jobs and IQ.
• kuboble 4y ago
  half of a questions was basically "maybe another xor? yes, that's a xor"
• ddsfafgrrhreh 4y ago
  Scored 140 for a Mensa test I took at a test centre and thought I would get something decent. Even in normal conversations I can form a graph of all the points being made intuitively or form a whole random orchestra in my head.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Wow you are so smart senpai, can you teach me your ways?
• gsliepen 4y ago
  I did one of these when I was a kid and had just weeks prior to that done some similar excercises I found in a puzzle book. Once you know the tricks you can finish it really fast, and since they indeed use some formula that's basically the percentage of correct answers divided by the time you took times some constant, I got a very high score that I thought was bogus. Nowadays I would compare its ability to actually measure IQ or skill with those "find the fake coin by only weighing piles of money three times" interview questions, or interviews where they ask you to implement some algorithm for a problem you will only ever encounter on HackerRank or similar sites.
• anthony_romeo 4y ago
  Just a note on IQ tests: a test conducted by a psychologist includes several different areas beyond what this test covers. Longer term memory, for example, is a component not assessed here. These components are scored both separately and combined as a 'full-scale IQ', and will highlight both strengths and deficiencies in these particular areas. Some people who scored average or low on this test can still have a high IQ in other functional areas, and some who scored highly may just be particularly well-attuned to solving symbolic arithmetic puzzles but be deficient in other areas.
  • gotaquestion 4y ago
    I took one as a kid. I had to draw pictures. There's a lot to an IQ test besides guess what's next.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    they are all highly positively correlated. that's why mensa accepts matrix tests
• helpfulclippy 4y ago
  Spoilers. I've always liked these tests because they're like little sudokus that tell me flattering things about myself, because they ask about what I'm good at and not what I'm not. One time I saw one that had 3d visualization stuff, which made me feel really dumb, and it scored me accordingly. I was frustrated with the time limit on this one -- it seemed like the really interesting patterns may have been at the end, and I just didn't have time for them at all because I'm a slowpoke motherfucker who likes to triple-check stuff before I move on. I was at 60 seconds remaining by the time I got to question 30. The stuff before that was OK, but got a little tedious when I realized that a lot of them were either just rotations, or variations on or/and/xor logic applied to segments of shapes. I didn't feel like I had to reach for new tools to solve those. Personally I'd have loved more time and the chance to see correct answers, and maybe some explanation of whatever patterns that I missed. Of course, that undermines what Mensa is after here, and I guess that's why I'd be a bad fit. I'd love a local group where we exchange fun puzzles like this over beers and weed, but Mensa seems a little more concerned with creating some sort of status around ranking than the pursuit of puzzlecraft or whatever. To me, it was a welcome surprise in adulthood that we're not actually lined up by SATs/GPA/whatever and those percentile scores have fuck all to do with what we're capable of. But hey, to each their own.
• gotaquestion 4y ago
  I think this skews toward programmers. 30+ questions and everything was a composition of shift, rotate, and, or, nand, nor, xor. If you're a programmer it's just a matter of figuring out what operations are used. If you're not a programmer, you probably have no language to describe the relationships, and therefore can't just zip along looking for common assembly-language instructions. EDIT: Now that I think about it, I bet I could make an increasingly challenging logic puzzle generator just by increasing the number of composite operations and operands. I bet if I googled I could find a dozen such projects that already exist. My work here is done. :)
  • db_admin 4y ago
    Alternatively, you may say that programming is skewed towards people that find it easy to operate in a world of logic. We all know that programming can be like a puzzle and you sometimes have to keep a lot of conditions and dependencies in your head to solve the current problem. Others may lack the formal language, but I don't see an inherent disadvantage in that. You can play music without knowing the notes.
• LambdaTrain 4y ago
  I would take it if demon offers me a a deal that transfers my pattern matching IQ to the proficiency of using language as a tool (in Wittgenstein's sense)
• oliwarner 4y ago
  -10 points for clicking the link, -10 points for not stopping sooner. These have limited fun (they get boring fast) and even more limited application for assessment, but I do wonder that if you feel you need to ask, you're probably in a losing spot.
• csours 4y ago
  Meta: Look at several questions. Identify the type of rule at play. Identify the actual rule at play. Apply the rule. Check for falsification. Don't be too mentally tired. Go back to previous questions and check for rules you learned later. Get too mentally tired (aka bored) and randomly click until you finish.
  • csours 4y ago
    Confounding factors: Rule availability - do participants already know about NAND, XOR, etc. Mental resource availability - how rested and hydrated and nourished are the participants.
    • lordnacho 4y ago
      Exactly right. Also knowing what rules aren't used is a huge advantage. I bet if you had the solutions to a sample set your IQ would appear significantly higher.
      • csours 4y ago
        So, I noticed boolean rules (NAND, XOR, etc), rotation, exhaustion, translation. Any others I missed?
        • lordnacho 4y ago
          I wondered whether the grid always meant the same thing. Are things always a two dimensional pattern or does it get used as a one dimensional series sometimes?
• tradertef 4y ago
  Got 125. I thought I could do better if I could not be monitoring my e-mails.. looking at the comments; it is pretty good :)
  • xaxaxb 4y ago
    128. Same. Felt like I could've done better if not at night, while reading HN.
• imwillofficial 4y ago
  I scored 115. ::cries in midwit::
• Ansil849 4y ago
  Got through the first 10 exercises (out of apparently a total of 35) before becoming bored. I'd rather do the data refining job at Lumen.
• andrelaszlo 4y ago
  I got exactly the same score as on the WAIS 4 test I took a few years ago. (Enough to qualify for a membership, I guess...) If you thought this test was a breeze, I think the chances are your IQ is pretty high. You can think whatever you want about that of course. One the other hand: if you got bored and distracted, lost your confidence, or just got a low score - don't read too much into it. These tests have a good correlation with other IQ tests but are not perfect. If you are neurodivergent, for example, some sub-tests of the WAIS can be much harder than others. You can still be really smart, but some situations may be limiting your use of that intelligence. It can also be that some aspect of your intelligence (I just think of it as having an "effective" mind) is weaker than you'd expect given your overall strength, so you could be compensating for it using the resources you do have. Here are my least favorite stereotypes around intelligence: - "High IQ means low EQ." If dealing with other people is hard for you, you might for example be helped by an autism assessment. You might be running the "neurotypical emulator", which is really costly on your hardware. It's also a shitty thing to say to people. - "Gifted kids get bored in school and might start getting into trouble." Well, smart kids usually have an easy time in school. If they're bored, they probably find strategies to cope. If they get into trouble more than the average kid, they might have other problems. Don't just let them deal with it themselves. Smart kids deserve help too, even though they seem to be more independent than others. - "High IQ means you're into X". Rubik's cubes aren't automatically fascinating just because you test high on an IQ test. Signalling intelligence might have a correlation with intelligence but there are also a lot of people (perhaps the smartest ones?) that have little interest in that. It seems like we're pretty poor judges of intelligence in general, but putting a lot of importance on it anyway.
• antegamisou 4y ago
  Is HN something between Reddit and Buzzfeed now? Apologies if this sounds smartass-y but the quality of top posts in the frontpage has dropped significantly the past two years.
  • password54321 4y ago
    Got a bad result?
    • antegamisou 4y ago
      I have done similar tests in the past including this one and I scored over 125 in all of them. But it doesn't really matter because you can't gauge g by a matrix reasoning test alone (I estimate my 'real' IQ to be -1 SD from what I scored) . And that's what makes posts like this one low quality - pop. (Believing an online test gives an accurate estimate of your intellect.)
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • ComradePhil 4y ago
        125 is Neil deGrasse Tyson level and won't even get you into Mensa. If you think that is smart, well good for you. Also, Mensa Norway has very similar test when you go to take it in person... and results are close to what you get online.
        • antegamisou 4y ago
          Ignoring the uneducated claims about someone's IQ based on their public appearance, where in the parent comment did I say the word smart? Also you downplaying the range of ~ +1.5SD is a textbook example of spending too much time on YT watching Jordan Peterson's lectures on IQ. People with actual* +1.5 - 2 SD IQ, are STEM PhD's, not your average Internet rando. *subjects of standardized intelligence testing (WAIS, SB) not prone to practice effects like all the RPMs online. Yes, I just said that practicing enough Ravens will get you to Mensa provided a three digit 'baseline'.
• pphysch 4y ago
  131 aint bad for pre-lunch, skipped the last 3 though
• iLoveOncall 4y ago
  This feels like those "Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training" Nintendo games where it's not about being smart or training your brain, but just training your skills for this particular kind of tests. Just reading a bit about how those tests are constructed (can the patterns be diagonal for example) would give you already an advantage over the same test where you don't have this. If you can train for it, it's not an IQ test, period.
  • password54321 4y ago
    At the very least a Mensa test at a test centre is much different than any test I have found online. But last time I checked you can only increase your score marginally through practice. An 80 IQ person probably couldn't practice to 150.
  • zzbzq 4y ago
    The justification in the literature is that since all types of intelligence are correlated, just testing a relatively neutral one like progressive matrices is a good choice, since it would generalize out to other types of intelligence. The flaw in this is that types of intelligence are correlated on average, they still vary within an individual, so IQ tests may say something about populations of people, but they are a poor assessment of an individual.
  • t_mann 4y ago
    "If you can train for it, it's not an IQ test, period." That's pretty much the opposite of how IQ tests work. You can train for any test, and prepping can definitely increase your score also on real IQ tests. If you want to know your honest score, do just light preparation, if any. If you want an as high score as you can get, then treat it like you'd treat a SAT/GRE/GMAT/... But don't expect any of the benefits that studies might associate with high IQ scores to flow from this exercise. If you train IQ tests, you'll get better at doing IQ tests, that's it. I wouldn't encourage this behaviour. An IQ test is meant to test you on questions that you haven't seen before, anything else is just statistical noise. Influencers who brag about how they "raised their IQ" with this or that technique (or supplements), are similarly mistaken about what those tests can and can't do.
• rich_sasha 4y ago
• rg111 4y ago
  I took this test some months ago in the way they suggested and they said that I have a very high chance being admitted to Mensa or some such. I don't ever want to. What's the point of a community that is solely focused on some figure-based puzzle solving? I don't find any. And I have met several highly successful, resourceful, and influential (very effective in academic/business) who never had their IQ tested. And I have met multiple Mensa members who aren’t much. One was outright useless. Being a Mensa member usually means your parents want to feel special by admitting their children to such an institute. It serves as an extension of their social status. To me- it is practically a sign of privilege and having helicopter parents. I never took an IQ test. The one once prescribed by a doctor was cancelled midway by my dad because they hinted I had a very high IQ and my dad didn’t want me to live with hubris of a high-IQ kid. I am grateful to him now. A low or high IQ score wouldn’t matter to me now because I am beyond three-digits-signalling or defined-by-three-digits nonsense. But it would have mattered to a ten years old. I had an unhealthy level of arrogance already by topping each class and getting a lot of awards in co-curriculums.
  • hackinthebochs 4y ago
    >What's the point of a community that is solely focused on some figure-based puzzle solving? I don't find any. Filtering for people with shared interests, or at least a capacity to see the world in similar ways is useful to just about everyone (skill at "puzzle solving" is correlated with other traits). Not everyone has the ability to use school as such a filter. And trying to find like-minded people in the real world, or on the modern internet is futile for someone whose interests/perspectives isn't well-represented by the interests of the mass. There's also the irony of people disparaging the idea of a group based around IQ commenting on hacker news, which has long since evolved passed the narrow focus on tech entrepreneurship. What makes this place better than /r/programming?
    • rg111 4y ago
      > Not everyone has the ability to use school as such a filter I haven’t thought about this. Thank for giving me this perspective. > trying to find like-minded people in the real world I personally find people who base their identity on some number pretty boring. High IQ enables you to be better at other things, and that is where I would look for like minded people. > modern internet This is such a broad term. To the point of being meaningless in most discussions. Tiktok popular feed is modern internet. A niche programming language's Discord with 400 members is also modern internet. Saying something categorically about "modern internet" is like judging the highway system or rail network. > irony of people disparaging the idea of a group based around IQ If some community finds IQ -based signalling and IQ-based identity, it should be HN. Such a test does not measure a person’s true potential or intelligence. It's kinda stupid to base someone's ability or potential around some test. I love to be with and spend time with intelligent people, but whenever I see someone dropping their IQ or writing it on their social bios, I find it outright distasteful. It means you have little achievement beyond the IQ test score. That would be a pathetic life. Truly successful people- never seen them flaunt IQ- ever.
• xaxaxb 4y ago
  Score: 128 (Your IQ was measured to 128 which is equivalent to the 97 percentile, with a standard deviation of 15.) A little brag? idk, depends on what others' are. But long time no see, Mensa. I remember I used to do their books and would end up at somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. This is the first time I've scored this high. Programming does wonders :P. Also means that score is not absolute for life and can change over time depending on how much brain you exercise. Thanks for posting.
  • aeonik 4y ago
    I got a 95, though I generally think I'm good at synthesizing concepts and applying them. I do tend to be a little slow and distracted. But, I'd be surprised if I am actually slightly below average. That being said, if the result is accurate, I think this would be good news for the world. People around me say I'm smart because I like math and programming, little do they know they are, statistically speaking, likely to be smarter than me. If only they knew, maybe they would feel more empowered to learn harder concepts! You don't need a high IQ to geek out to functional programming.
    • kuboble 4y ago
      If you can solve the same problems as the best problem solving person in the world but 10x slower it still makes you one of the best problem solvers and that test won't tell that.
      • aeonik 4y ago
        Sounds like I need to start charging hourly X-D
• baroninthetrees 4y ago
  Not too smart to handle content blockers. Got through 30 questions and ran out of time and hit finish only to see a JS error. LOL
• antisthenes 4y ago
  Don't best-practice IQ tests also measure the verbal component, e.g. vocabulary and reading comprehension? I also recall some tests requiring rotation of 3d figures, not just 2d fill the 9th slot type problems. I see a lot of poor quality "IQ" tests on the internet that are 100% pattern recognition and it's always the same schtick - rotate, exclude, "combine" the figures. Actually got one of these tests as a prerequisite for an interview. While I'm not one of those "iq doesn't matter" types who reject the ability to measure intelligence, I will absolutely cast doubt on these narrow pattern recognition tests.
• reggieband 4y ago
  I used to do well at these pattern matching tests with consistent scores in the range 125 - 135. This one I hit 118 but I ran out of time around question 32. I got stun locked on a couple of the earlier easier questions. I wonder if this is due to mental decline as I get a bit older (I'm in my early 40s now). I took it again with the benefit of knowing most of the earlier question patterns and got 133 on the second attempt. Pretty sure it wouldn't be too hard to bump that higher if I cared. In that sense, these tests are heavily biased towards people who take these tests. Once you know the tricks these tests are built on you do a second-order pattern match (which trick is the question using) which helps you find the answer. I would guess you could grind these tests leet-code style to get arbitrarily high scores. People here report getting bored by these tests and I don't feel that at all. I actually get totally stress-focused and the time flies by almost too fast. Seeing the pattern is a dopamine hit that my brain craves.
  • password54321 4y ago
    I mean you did the same test twice and gave yourself extra time. Of course you are going to perform better. This doesn't mean you will perform better for a totally new test.
    • reggieband 4y ago
      I argue that patterns learned on individual tests would apply to new tests. There are a set of patterns which have already been called out here. Translation, rotations, exclusions, logical and/xor on line segments and dots, etc. IME, most IQ tests sample from this set of patterns. Once you are familiar with that set you aren't really doing a first-order matching - instead you are going through your list of expected patterns and seeing if they apply to the particular question. This means you can breeze through the early questions drawn from that set using your memory and then save your cognitive time for the later harder patterns.
• hezralig 4y ago
  I scored 128, however, that was due to skipping about 3 of the puzzles due to the time limit. While I think if I had not stopped to reply to a slack message I might have scored higher, this is a poor indicator of overall intelligence given it relies on basic pattern recognition to apply simple xor/and/nand/or operations and object rotation. I suck at math and don't have the stomach to memorize basic equations. While I am not a potato, I do not think (or would hope) my intelligence falls that highly ahead of the curve.
  • akvadrako 4y ago
    I think the average stem graduate student scores 130, so it isn't unreasonable.
• EugeneOZ 4y ago
  Such tests can cause depression, they should not be published online. Some kid might decide to stop trying harder in college just because was distracted and failed this test. Solving tests like this will create some skill in solving them (you’ll recognize many logical patterns much faster), so the results will not be correct.
  • DarylZero 4y ago
    Someone in college has taken a lot of tests...
• mdp2021 4y ago
  Leisure (or, light entertainment) information: those interested in the context of quizzes that try your "solving the unmet" abilities may be interested in the new Auerbach, Nabarro, English, Webster show, presented by Lee Mack: The 1% Club I mention this since some here tried the test in the submission, and noticed that the meta-patterns are trite (bitshift etc). A proper test should be about uncommon patterns... In the episodes I have seen, that show does not use one key applicable to more questions.
• Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Does this test actually allow you to join the group or is it a marketing tool, possibly with scored nudged up a bit, to get you to pay to take a test to see if you can join? I've never heard of a valid IQ test in an uncontrolled unproctored environment.
• thunkshift1 4y ago
• nickx720 4y ago
  Ah, I had to do something today for an initial screening round for software development role. I didn't make the cut. Haha.
• aeonik 4y ago
  This is my favorite quote relating to IQ tests: They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back? Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the “average” speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would? Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal. Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else. -Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon (1999)
  • bena 4y ago
    Is Harry Potter real? Because if he isn't, you're trying to use fiction as evidence of something in the real world.
    • aeonik 4y ago
      Despite being fiction, the quote I shared is a plausible thought experiment that illustrates one kind of limitation of tests in general. It appeals to most people because they can empathize with over thinking test material. It's clearly representative of a real phenomenon. As I get older, I notice tests tend to become more irritating, because most systems depend on so many variables that every answer to a question needs an "it depends" to qualify any reasonable answer. This realization has been very important to my career as an engineer, because it helps me interact with customers in more productive ways during requirements gathering, design, or troubleshooting. Instead of trying to answer every customer question directly, I find it much more effective to dive into assumptions and explore the customer's perspective (most of the time). Using Lawrence's approach to a problem solving actually works very well, but will fail you on a test.
• dusted 4y ago
  Yeah, unsurprisingly, I'm too dumb to join mensa, but I can't help but feel bemused about the seemingly strong need that some people have here to dismiss the organization and test for whatever reason they find. There are lots of worse interests than ones cognitive ability, and I can't help but think it might be somewhat related to some bitter feeling one might get from being average. I've taken some similar IQ test before, and my score is about the same each time, and I wonder about the effect of previous experience on the result.. Also, I'm scared to think, knowing myself how dim I am, that the vast majority of people are supposedly even dimmer.
  • antihero 4y ago
    Don’t hang too much on IQ, it’s mostly pattern recognition and understanding vocabulary. What you do with the brain you have is far more important.
• ah3nan 4y ago
  I got 100, my solving pattern was comparing each row or column with each other to get the answer, the last 4 i choose the most different quickly because time is running out.
• gcanyon 4y ago
  If anyone has thoughts on question 35 I’m curious to hear them. I’ve come up with a very simple method/solution, and a slightly more complicated solution, and bot produce results that are not among the proposed answers.
• naveen99 4y ago
  102. I have never done well on these visual puzzles. May as well be drumming or dancing for me, other things I am terrible at. doesn’t seem to correlate with other things though that I am good at.
• tomerbd 4y ago
  97 here I guess I'm the dumbest HN reader
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• blindmute 4y ago
  I got 138 which is apparently 99.5 percentile. I ran out of time on #32. This is about right based on an IRL test I took before where I scored 99.7 percentile. Psychologically, it's hard to remain humble when you always score 99+ on every measure of intelligence. Even for unrelated topics like political opinions or personal ethos, I find myself thinking that almost everyone I disagree with is overwhelmingly likely be less intelligent than me, and therefore probably wrong. When you're <= average intelligence and most people disagree with your opinions, it makes sense to think that you might be making some mistake in evaluation. When you're 3 sigma above average and most people disagree with you, it's a lot more likely that they're the ones not fully thinking things through. Of course, anyone can still be wrong about things, but is that likely? Many say that IQ doesn't measure intelligence, but based on the evidence I disagree with that too, so it's pretty unfalsifiable. Either I'm an idiot using a meaningless test to judge himself superior, or I'm actually superior; until someone comes up with a more 'accepted' measure of intelligence (they won't), well, it is what it is.