10 ms·

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

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.
  - brnaftr361 4y ago
    Intelligence is an error of reification.
dirnctiwnsidj 4y ago
Maybe the theory is strange to you, but the correlation is real. Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities, including things like ability to write poetry that initially seem impossible to measure. It is even correlated with height! No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests. They care about the things an IQ test can predict.
- andybak 4y ago
  > They care about the things an IQ test can predict. They are good at predicting the ability to do IQ tests! Seriously though - aren't they still fairly controversial? I have strong doubts on an intuitive level.
  - brian_cloutier 4y ago
    They are controversial within popular culture but the idea that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities" is not controversial within the relevant scientific community. Here's a nice short book which cites a lot of literature: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc... There's even a vox explainer on it, hard to believe they would publish this today: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence https://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence
    - andybak 4y ago
      OK. A few off the cuff objections: 1. It seems fairly widely reported that you can practice at IQ tests and get better. Are there any studies confirming or denying this? I presume you'd agree that if true it rather kills the validity of IQ tests dead. 2. I have ADHD and I'm acutely aware of how environmental factors affect my performance in many tasks. How do you square this with the idea that they measure an objective innate quality? 3. How do you account for the Flynn Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect - are people getting smarter? 4. What's your thoughts on the argument that it's impossible to create genuinely culture free tests? This was something I was taught at college and it made sense to me then. Has it been debunked? Conclusively? 5. Steven Jay Gould wrote an entire book critiquing IQ tests : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man - do any of the points he raises stand up to scrutiny?
akudha 4y ago
There is this interesting 4 part podcast called My Year in Mensa, by comedian Jamie Loftus. It is worth a listen. Gives a new perspective (spoiler alert - not good) on Mensa
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bena 4y ago
Intelligence is like the person said above, horsepower for brains. It's about how well you're able to reason things. And often how quickly you're able to do it, although this test seems to disregard that portion. Which is fine, they make it clear that it's more of a test to see if you should be tested rather than a test in and of itself. Pattern recognition is a large part of that. A person who is able to discern patterns more easily, is usually able to reason better. More able to do second and third order thinking. IQ "tests" that use words or numbers are also testing knowledge to some degree, which isn't something you typically want when you want to test raw intelligence. Being able to do calculus doesn't necessarily prove you're intelligent, it proves you know calculus. So that leaves abstract concepts. And that's another facet of intelligence, being able to think abstractly. There should also be some "die folding" questions in there. Where it shows you six connected boxes and you pick the cube that it makes. That one is also about spatial relations as you have to model the cube in your head in some fashion. All that being said: intelligence is nothing on its own. It's a force multiplier. Intelligence allows you to use the knowledge and skills you do have better. It also makes the acquisition of knowledge and skills easier. People with higher IQs have better life outcomes on average than those with lower IQs among every cohort. What that means, if you take all the poor people, those poor people with higher IQs are going to be doing better overall. Still poor, but able to make more of what they have. Tall people? People with higher IQs will be doing better overall than those with lower IQs. Doctors? Same. Welders? Same. Now, this doesn't mean that every person with a higher IQ is doing better. Success is very multi-faceted and dependent on a lot of things, some of which are outside of our control entirely. But it helps.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Only if you leave in people with cognitive impairments. IQ against income rapidly decorrelates as you exceed the 80-point threshold; income is probably the only real and hard measure - and frankly even using that measure conflates success. How many conventionally smart people are ascetic or minimalist? Historically, there's a pretty high count.
  - bena 4y ago
    Pegging success solely to income is disingenuous. It's not the only measure of success, let alone the only "real and hard measure". There are awards, patents, accomplishments, etc. There are positive correlations between IQ and positive outcomes in general. Basically, take a metric of success and group people into it and you'll find people with higher IQs in the groups with better outcomes. Even if you then slice those groups by other factors.
yifanl 4y ago
It's 35 questions and in the last 10 I didn't see any patterns and resorted to the highly intellectual strategy known as "guessing". As a skeptic of IQ, I'm pretty worried about the same thing, surely it couldn't just be people publishing a study about how lucky subjects are at finding round pegs and square holes>
- kbenson 4y ago
  At some point in the later 20's it's about ORing, ANDing and XORing the shapes, depending on the question. In the 30's it's about something I wasn't able to grasp.
- speeder 4y ago
  The first patterns were mostly rotations and whatnot. Last patterns were boolean logic, for example 3 or 4 tests were just XOR stuff, another was AND, another was summing, and so on... I ended with a score lower than my usual, because I wasn't really paying attention... and bored.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
> I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people. To be fair, most people don’t understand how paracetamol helps reduce pain. But it does and we are able to measure its effect, so we have scientific studies that prove it. It doesn’t matter if you understand how it works, it does. Same with IQ tests. It’s not about the pattern matching. It’s about the fact that a huge mountain of scientific literature have found these measures of pattern-matching abilities to be correlated with a wide range of other abilities and accomplishments. If a persons ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time was a better predictor, then that is what we would use instead. It doesn’t matter if we understand why that would be the case. But ofcause everyone who scores less than they feel that they should end up trying to discredit the entire concept rather than just accept that their poor ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time does not define them, or impose any new limitations in their life. I swear every discussion about IQ ends up feeling like a room full of short men debating if measuring tape is even reliable and debating if it’s even fair to say that tall men can reach thing on top shelves more easily since we live in a society with chairs, and there’s obviously something wrong because they have tons of arguments for why they are 6 feet tall, even though the measuring tape doesn’t agree. No one is saying that you can’t have an absolutely great life, or reach the tallest of shelves, being a short man. The fact that we can measure peoples height, and that certain things are different base on how tall you are doesn’t have to offend people.
db_admin 4y ago
It tells you this information right before you start the test: "This test consists of 35 problems that must be solved within a 25 minute time limit." But I agree that it is unfortunate to base the future of a person on a one-time test. That includes the finals in school or a day full of exams after a long semester.

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.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Intelligence is an error of reification.

dirnctiwnsidj 4y ago

Maybe the theory is strange to you, but the correlation is real. Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities, including things like ability to write poetry that initially seem impossible to measure. It is even correlated with height! No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests. They care about the things an IQ test can predict.

andybak 4y ago
> They care about the things an IQ test can predict. They are good at predicting the ability to do IQ tests! Seriously though - aren't they still fairly controversial? I have strong doubts on an intuitive level.
- brian_cloutier 4y ago
  They are controversial within popular culture but the idea that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities" is not controversial within the relevant scientific community. Here's a nice short book which cites a lot of literature: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc... There's even a vox explainer on it, hard to believe they would publish this today: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence https://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence
  - andybak 4y ago
    OK. A few off the cuff objections: 1. It seems fairly widely reported that you can practice at IQ tests and get better. Are there any studies confirming or denying this? I presume you'd agree that if true it rather kills the validity of IQ tests dead. 2. I have ADHD and I'm acutely aware of how environmental factors affect my performance in many tasks. How do you square this with the idea that they measure an objective innate quality? 3. How do you account for the Flynn Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect - are people getting smarter? 4. What's your thoughts on the argument that it's impossible to create genuinely culture free tests? This was something I was taught at college and it made sense to me then. Has it been debunked? Conclusively? 5. Steven Jay Gould wrote an entire book critiquing IQ tests : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man - do any of the points he raises stand up to scrutiny?

akudha 4y ago

There is this interesting 4 part podcast called My Year in Mensa, by comedian Jamie Loftus. It is worth a listen. Gives a new perspective (spoiler alert - not good) on Mensa

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bena 4y ago

Intelligence is like the person said above, horsepower for brains. It's about how well you're able to reason things. And often how quickly you're able to do it, although this test seems to disregard that portion. Which is fine, they make it clear that it's more of a test to see if you should be tested rather than a test in and of itself. Pattern recognition is a large part of that. A person who is able to discern patterns more easily, is usually able to reason better. More able to do second and third order thinking. IQ "tests" that use words or numbers are also testing knowledge to some degree, which isn't something you typically want when you want to test raw intelligence. Being able to do calculus doesn't necessarily prove you're intelligent, it proves you know calculus. So that leaves abstract concepts. And that's another facet of intelligence, being able to think abstractly. There should also be some "die folding" questions in there. Where it shows you six connected boxes and you pick the cube that it makes. That one is also about spatial relations as you have to model the cube in your head in some fashion. All that being said: intelligence is nothing on its own. It's a force multiplier. Intelligence allows you to use the knowledge and skills you do have better. It also makes the acquisition of knowledge and skills easier. People with higher IQs have better life outcomes on average than those with lower IQs among every cohort. What that means, if you take all the poor people, those poor people with higher IQs are going to be doing better overall. Still poor, but able to make more of what they have. Tall people? People with higher IQs will be doing better overall than those with lower IQs. Doctors? Same. Welders? Same. Now, this doesn't mean that every person with a higher IQ is doing better. Success is very multi-faceted and dependent on a lot of things, some of which are outside of our control entirely. But it helps.

brnaftr361 4y ago
Only if you leave in people with cognitive impairments. IQ against income rapidly decorrelates as you exceed the 80-point threshold; income is probably the only real and hard measure - and frankly even using that measure conflates success. How many conventionally smart people are ascetic or minimalist? Historically, there's a pretty high count.
- bena 4y ago
  Pegging success solely to income is disingenuous. It's not the only measure of success, let alone the only "real and hard measure". There are awards, patents, accomplishments, etc. There are positive correlations between IQ and positive outcomes in general. Basically, take a metric of success and group people into it and you'll find people with higher IQs in the groups with better outcomes. Even if you then slice those groups by other factors.

yifanl 4y ago

It's 35 questions and in the last 10 I didn't see any patterns and resorted to the highly intellectual strategy known as "guessing". As a skeptic of IQ, I'm pretty worried about the same thing, surely it couldn't just be people publishing a study about how lucky subjects are at finding round pegs and square holes>

kbenson 4y ago
At some point in the later 20's it's about ORing, ANDing and XORing the shapes, depending on the question. In the 30's it's about something I wasn't able to grasp.
speeder 4y ago
The first patterns were mostly rotations and whatnot. Last patterns were boolean logic, for example 3 or 4 tests were just XOR stuff, another was AND, another was summing, and so on... I ended with a score lower than my usual, because I wasn't really paying attention... and bored.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

> I've never understood how finding patterns in shapes like that seems to be the last word in intelligence for some people. To be fair, most people don’t understand how paracetamol helps reduce pain. But it does and we are able to measure its effect, so we have scientific studies that prove it. It doesn’t matter if you understand how it works, it does. Same with IQ tests. It’s not about the pattern matching. It’s about the fact that a huge mountain of scientific literature have found these measures of pattern-matching abilities to be correlated with a wide range of other abilities and accomplishments. If a persons ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time was a better predictor, then that is what we would use instead. It doesn’t matter if we understand why that would be the case. But ofcause everyone who scores less than they feel that they should end up trying to discredit the entire concept rather than just accept that their poor ability to stand on one leg for extended periods of time does not define them, or impose any new limitations in their life. I swear every discussion about IQ ends up feeling like a room full of short men debating if measuring tape is even reliable and debating if it’s even fair to say that tall men can reach thing on top shelves more easily since we live in a society with chairs, and there’s obviously something wrong because they have tons of arguments for why they are 6 feet tall, even though the measuring tape doesn’t agree. No one is saying that you can’t have an absolutely great life, or reach the tallest of shelves, being a short man. The fact that we can measure peoples height, and that certain things are different base on how tall you are doesn’t have to offend people.

db_admin 4y ago

It tells you this information right before you start the test: "This test consists of 35 problems that must be solved within a 25 minute time limit." But I agree that it is unfortunate to base the future of a person on a one-time test. That includes the finals in school or a day full of exams after a long semester.