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ryandvm
Based on my experience with Mensa members, being obsessed with your own intelligence is seemingly the primary criterion for joining Mensa. A long, boring test was probably exactly the selection filter they're looking for.
whatshisface
Mensa doesn't need a special filter for that, by virtue of being an IQ organization and not a chemistry/literature/mathematics organization (where it's about using your IQ for something) they will end up with the people who haven't joined an organization that's more specific to their interests: a great implicit filter for people who don't have interests other than solving puzzles.
mdp2021
We are not restricted to one membership (of course).
Editing for the skimmer who will not read the implicit: it's about an interest in meta-skills, transversal, exportable.
blagie
I've never been part of Mensa, but it seems like good concept for when it was created.
The basic problem a lot of bright people had -- in the days before telecommunications -- was that the only people you had access to lived on your own street. If you were a nerd, most were boring.
A lot of work went into finding interesting people, be that through ham radio, organizations like Mensa, universities (at the time, about 5% of people went to university), gifted programs, or other places nerds could congregate.
I don't see much point to Mensa in 2022, but I think the cynicism is unwarranted. What do you do when you have a social club which is suddenly obsoleted by cars, phones, air planes, and the internet?
coldtea
>I've never been part of Mensa, but it seems like good concept for when it was created
"Let's create an wannabe intellectual elite club based on a controversial and not really representative test, milking suckers with paid tests, and giving them a false sense of achievement and superiority"
(and I score in the high range, it's not about sour grapes)
giraffe_lady
sure but:
> If you were a nerd, most were boring.
Is either of those strongly linked to IQ? Anecdotally and in my experience not really.
You can get pretty far on this by implicitly grouping a certain set of interests into "nerdy" or whatever but that is highly culturally mediated. A generation ago video games and sci-fi would have been a core of that set, but those are just the culture now.
The most nerd energy I've ever run across outside of my own interests is in people who follow auto racing and sports. Fiber arts and baking too. Not typically considered or even recognized as valid nerdery but very similar kind and degree of interest.
I'd argue that people who want to be in a group of other high IQ people probably do feel superior to people who can't be in that group. Now, and in the past too. Whether that's a useful grouping or a warranted superiority I don't want to get into. But it's really not more complicated than that, sorry.
mdp2021
> I don't see much point to Mensa in 2022
To connect people who might have something to exchange. Not differently from HN, really.
karmakaze
Googled it for you:
> To qualify for Mensa, you must have scored in the top 2 percent of the general population on any one of more than 200 accepted, standardized intelligence tests — including our Mensa Admission tests — at any point in your life. An estimated six million Americans are eligible for membership.
I've met some members. Their personalities are not what I would associate with the most intelligent people I've otherwise met. People who memorize digits of Pi come to mind.
GuB-42
> in the top 2 percent of the general population on any one of more than 200 accepted
> An estimated six million Americans are eligible for membership.
That's not how it works. 6 million Americans is about 2%. It means that in order to have such a filter, you only have one chance on a single test. Not, "1 of more than 200 at any point in your life"
Out of 200 tests, even among those of the highest standards, you are bound to find one where you are particularly good at, and then you can try again several times, because you are unlikely to be at the exact same position every time. Furthermore, the "general population" includes people who are not in their best shape and yet, "any point in your life" tests your peak performance. And there is training of course.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than 10% in reality. By that I mean "pick a random person and give him a huge incentive (ex. millions of dollars) to pass". If we restrict to people who really want to join without further incentive, it may be way higher.
outworlder
> People who memorize digits of Pi come to mind.
Hey, I feel attacked. What's wrong with memorizing digits of Pi?
giantg2
They used to allow you to join based on SAT scores. I know someone from that era. They don't seem very intelligent. I'm guessing they just studied a lot. Maybe it's the same for those people.
stavros
I joined Mensa today because I overheard some good reviews, but that's my biggest fear. I want a group that I can go for coffee and have interesting conversations with, not a group of people who are all about how smart they are.
I don't want to be biased before even going, though.
syedkarim
The thing to remember is that one in fifty people qualifies to be in Mensa, which is not particularly selective or exclusive. This is 2% of the general population, not 2% of, for example, readers of Hacker News. Or 2% of software developers or 2% of people who read more than one book per year.
My experience with Mensa is from 20 years ago with the group in Chicago. I was in my twenties and my guess is that the average age of members was late-fifties. In theory, they were interested in recruiting younger people, in practice they were not interested in changing the activities in a way that would attract younger members, like focusing efforts to solve real-world problems. I felt they were more interested in showcasing depth in various atypical hobbies, or to simply talk about how smart they were. I was never in awe of anyone’s intellect. Pretty much just normal people. I don’t think I came across anyone that was exceptionally accomplished at anything.
InitialLastName
You self-filtered into a group that's only about how smart people are, though.
In my experience, interesting conversations involve people with interests (and navel-gazing is antithetical to that).
torstenvl
This largely comes down to local group culture. In my experience, in the U.S. at least, more rural groups seem better. I speculate that this is due to: (1) lack of alternatives for intellectual engagement and (2) demographics, specifically that older generations are more likely to join clubs and organizations of all kinds. Both of these would balance the trend of millennial professionals to only join such an organization out of arrogance.
pessimizer
I joined in Chicago for a year, and it turns out that it's really a board gaming club.
shepardrtc
> not a group of people who are all about how smart they are.
You're going to be disappointed.
Seriously though, you can find incredibly intelligent people in the strangest of places. And you find less than you might think in the most obvious of places. Once you learn what to look for, I think it becomes easier to find people to have interesting conversations with. Personally, I find that curiosity about the world around you is a very good indicator of someone I would enjoy speaking with.
giantg2
Maybe a 2600 meeting?
dkarl
> being obsessed with your own intelligence is seemingly the primary criterion for joining Mensa
The parent says that scoring like an average person means they "really suck" or are "just dumb," so I think they have the right mentality for Mensa, even if their performance fell short.
bena
Exactly. I don't know exactly what it is about intelligence, but people get really defensive about it. No one wants to be average or even slightly above average. People will go through a lot of mental hoops to stake a claim of incredible intelligence.
We don't do this with any other measure though. The difference being that most other measures can be measured. They run up against reality rather quickly. Am I tall? No. No shame in saying that. No shame in saying I'm around the average. Am I fast? Slow? Strong? Weak? Thin? Fat? How big are my feet? My hands? etc.
All can be measured and seen. All have physical manifestations I cannot argue against.
Intelligence. Well. That's a little more abstract. Abstract to a degree that we don't always recognize that Jeopardy is not really a "smart" game. It's a trivia game. You have to know things. That's not intelligence, that's knowledge.
pizza234
YMMV :)
I joined mensa in two countries; I was involved in one, while in the other, I went only to one meeting.
The first had mostly regular table/social game events, and cultural events (e.g. chess competitions, museums, literature etc.).
I couldn't tell I was at a Mensa club, if not for the orientation of the cultural events, but especially... for the quantity of engineers :)
I remember there was at least one teenager at the social events, and I wouldn't even exclude that they just allowed them in because he was a friend of somebody - the atmosphere was relaxed and playful.
I'd totally join again a club like the first: 1. it was fun 2. the cultural activities were actually interesting 3. I'd network with SWEs. Which is, in some way, the attractive of Mensa - it definitely attracts nerds :)
Regarding me as a member of Mensa. I wouldn't qualify me obsessed with it; intelligence is a tool for me. And definitely I didn't enroll in college at 13 like some other HN readers :)
mdp2021
> the primary criterion
You are describing a type in the context of a club of people interested in the opposites of the type. It could suggest you that the deviation may remain the interesting part.
> the primary criterion for joining
Improper formulation. Not that important, but.
CGamesPlay
> I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve. I guess I really suck at pattern matching, or I am just dumb.
Well, no, that'd be average, not dumb.
ASalazarMX
And expected, most of us have to fall in the middle of the bell, only the very outliers will be at the extremes. It's normal to think one's very gifted, even boasting about it, but maturing is realizing that most of us are average.
At least we can get solace in knowing that intelligence and work is what makes great things, either alone is weak.
jrgoff
On top of that, it's average amongst the group of people who self select into taking such a test.
travisjungroth
There's no way they're not accounting for selection bias. This isn't on online poll where you score among x% of people who took the test. They give the test to a (hopefully) representative sample and score you against that.
bitshiftfaced
I don't think tests like this one are calibrated by those who happen to take it online. I believe they calibrate these tests by looking at a known test taker's results and comparing them to other test results. The other tests would be the high quality ones used in psychology that have a much larger, less biased selection of test takers.
silisili
LMAO this mirrors my experience exactly. About 10 mins left...I was questioning what I'm doing with my life. Hey, there's a finish button already, let me click that and end this thing. Does that count the rest as wrong? It wasn't clear.
drchopchop
Mensa is catnip for narcissists who are great at pattern recognition.
ASalazarMX
Worse, IQ tests are catnip for people who take IQ tests. If you practice IQ tests, your IQ will increase not because you've become smarter, but because you have more experience with IQ tests.
Ekaros
I have always wondered how do they say IQ tests can't be gamed or learned, but I never believed that. There really must be certain number of standard pattern matching ways that can be applied. Just cram these like leetcode and you should get better.
nvahalik
Yeah. I did pretty well and I'm definitely not Mensa smart... but a lot of the middle questions were pretty easy to pick up on... or/nor/differences/unions...
pizza234
You're entitled about your opinion about catnip, but pattern recognition is an important component of problem solving.
mdp2021
> catnip for
And an opportunity for people looking for people with whom to have some productive exchange.
People who already tried some selection filter before (the IQ), will have no issue applying another afterwards (and discard e.g. the pure narcissists).
emteycz
Just like the entire IQ thing
jeroenhd
> I scored almost right in the middle of the bell curve.
Congratulations! You're in possession of the statistically perfectly normal pattern matching skills!
A score of 100 means that you're as good in pattern matching as a normal human being, assuming the test is served and adjusted to a varied enough population.
This being Mensa, an organisation that's known of attracting people who think they are smart, your normal pattern matching skill might still be statistically better than the rest of the populace. Or it might mean that you're normal according to Norwegian standards, which doesn't necessarily say anything about your country. Or it could mean that you're above intelligent but not raised in a western, white society, because IQ measurement is culturally sensitive as well.
The homepage doesn't give any details about the population the IQ test was measured against, so it's hard to say what the end result means. Higher number = better pattern matching skills, that's the best explanation I can think of.
tommyage
I had to go through these things with a psychologist when i was in school and beeing suspended. My focus is very fragile, but these kinds of test actually satisfy so much that I am not paying any attention to the clock ticking. These tasks stimulate the mind, imo. Anyways, I am only scoring the average, nowadays. Now i know, that there are things I can excel at, but at others I dont.
These kind of tests were complemented with a few other days, where I had to answer questions, recall stories, talk about things fascinating me, myself and my opinions, picture interpretations, sequences of digits, multiple choices and other things I cant recall. At the start of the following week, these test were rated for multiple sections of knowledge. Then, the average IQ was estimated.
What I want to say is: This is only part of the actual estimation. It is the first test, who actually reminded me of these tests.
I did not suceed in school. I did start consume drugs on purpose, getting rejected from my school and only did the necessarities. After a few years working, I did start wondering about knowledge and started to pursue studies.
If there is a topic that facinates you, such test would complement one. In the end we are all median overall.
:)
andrelaszlo
Sounds like a lot of smart people with ADHD I know:
- Fragile focus (well put)
- Drug use
- Rejected from school
- Humble as hell despite being obviously brilliant (just read through a bunch of your comments)
Not saying you have it, but if you're still looking for answers perhaps it's something to look into. It's quite treatable too, if you struggle with anything.
throwaway6532
These were my thoughts after reading this too.
jancsika
If an IQ-based club sets its threshold too high, then it might end up accepting Mozart but excluding Beethoven. I'd personally find that fascinating, but the other 100% of the population would probably find it incoherent at best.
If an IQ-based club sets its threshold low enough to include a Beethoven, then it's no longer really an IQ-based club. (E.g., our threshold is "Edgar" because we want the smartest people and also we really like Edgar's output.)
Edit: I changed "Edgar" above to "Edgar's output." Let me explain:
Mozart had the "bigger brain," but Beethoven obsessed over a narrower set of techniques and devoted his life to exploring every facet of them (much to the detriment of everything else in his life). Probably for that reason, his output is considered to be at a comparable level by most historians. This is true even by modernist analysis standards which attempt to exclude considerations like influence.
You can probably find similar cases straddling any IQ threshold, where you want to include output from X and Y even though Y's IQ didn't meet your threshold.
wodenokoto
The problem with measuring IQ is that you don’t want to measure education or culture.
Math, history even reading comprehension are all affected by that.
IQ testing has sort of settled on pattern matching as a measure of IQ that isn’t correlated with your education or culture you grew up in.
Personally I still don’t believe you can’t train for an IQ test.
Enginerrrd
Oh you absolutely can train for an IQ test. It's not just pattern matching but also measures one's ability to abstract, and working memory and stuff.
The question is to what degree would IQ-test-specific training help you? I'd guess that it would, and it would be measurable and statistically significant, but not that impressive.
sitkack
Most of the questions were a progression in a sequence and/or set membership under some operation.
Anyone who plays Sudoku, Chess or enjoys abstract algebra would have had an advantage.
spywaregorilla
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.
jerf
I've seen Mensa put out "tests" that aren't actually that difficult for marketing purposes. (I can't speak to their actual tests.) I recall a Mensa book in my elementary school library proclaiming that if you could solve even one puzzle in the book, you were smart enough to join Mensa! I believe it was officially from Mensa, but it's been a while and I may not remember correctly.
I passed. I could solve many of them.
Oh, jerf, bragging about how you could join Mensa is like the canonical example of boorishness.
Yes, well, just about everyone I handed the book to "passed" as well, so... let's just say this isn't the strutbrag it may initially sound like. I did not attend school at Lake Wobegon where all the children were above average. It was an average school of average children. Either by an amazing coincidence we were all smart enough to join Mensa even so, or Mensa was sandbagging just a wee bit. You do the math, as the saying goes.
pessimizer
They could be nerfing their tests in order to gain membership, I don't know how I could know, I didn't have access to the test after taking it. The proctor told me an interesting thing, though, that something like half (IIRC) of the people who take the test pass. She attributed it to people who knew they would fail largely being intimidated (or sour-grapesing themselves) out of even trying.
That Mensa's test is (intentionally or unintentionally) shit is also a plausible explanation.
version_five
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
dirnctiwnsidj
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
> 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.
klabb3
> they work shockingly well
For what? (Correlations are interesting scientifically of course, but for everyone else?)
> No one cares about the ability to score well on IQ tests.
Except for Mensa and their applicants.
I don't mind IQ research. I do mind exclusive clubs for the sake of exclusivity, and especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria. It smells bad.
mywittyname
> 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
If only a person's grasp on language were correlated with intelligence.
bena
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.
Sharlin
> And often how quickly you're able to do it, although this test seems to disregard that portion.
It has a time limit, so it does measure how quick you are.
brnaftr361
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.
akudha
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
isitmadeofglass
> 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.
yifanl
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>
speeder
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.
kbenson
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.
db_admin
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.
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opdahl
> For the results to be as valid as possible, make sure that the room you sit in is properly ventilated and free from distractions and that you can work uninterrupted for 25 minutes.
Sounds to me that you have issues understanding directions so I think your result might be very much valid!
andybak
I know you aren't 100% serious but "issues understanding directions" is probably not strongly correlated with intelligence. It could very much be down to anxiety, diet, ADHD or other conditions.
Unless we define "intelligence" broadly enough that transient or other factors are included. That might be valid but it's very different to what most people think IQ tests should measure.
spywaregorilla
I sat in a properly ventilated room free of distractions.
I could have worked uninterrupted for 25 minutes.
Prompt followed.
dmurray
Also,
> This test consists of 35 problems
madsohm
I got bored after maybe question 20 and got an IQ of 100 back.
kbelder
35 questions / 20 finished * 100 partial score = 165 true IQ.
I remember Isaac Asimov claimed he never completed an IQ test, but he did one that was supposed to take 60 minutes, and stopped after 30, scoring 125. He assumed this meant he must have a 250 IQ. (In jest, of course.)
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gotaquestion
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
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.
dheerendra73
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
mhandley
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
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
aeonik
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
Is Harry Potter real?
Because if he isn't, you're trying to use fiction as evidence of something in the real world.
aeonik
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.
bena
But it's not real. It never really happened. It can't illustrate any sort of limitation because the limitation doesn't really exist in the fiction.
Fiction can ask questions about reality, but it can never answer them.
And dollars to donuts, Neal Stephenson couldn't actually do the things he claims Lawrence was capable of doing. And it's likely what Lawrence accomplished given the time frame is a bit impossible. But it doesn't have to be possible. Lightsabers are the length of swords because they are. The Enterprise achieves faster than light travel by creating a bubble of warped space because it does. Lawrence is able to formulate an entirely new theorem about fluid dynamics because he did.
And let's be clear, in a real situation, Lawrence's approach is still kind of bad. Now the question itself is running some assumptions that it shouldn't, but the inferences aren't terrible. Over the length of the run, the average flow is fine to work with. The speed of the boat is speed in still water. Also, the speed of the boat is also going to be an average because multiple things also affect the speed of the boat, including the density of the water. But Stephenson didn't think about that, so it didn't matter in the fiction. Even though, it would in reality for someone doing these calculations.
But the question, when asked in reality, needs a relatively accurate answer in a relatively quick time frame. And the numbers provided can give you that. Part of intelligence is also recognizing when it's time to gather wool and when it's time to get shit done.
The bit about the glockenspiel is supposed to be a dig about the Navy failing to recognize his brilliance. But yeah. He needs to get things done. And he doesn't. So the Navy was correct to put him somewhere where it doesn't matter how long it takes for him to make a decision.
reggieband
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
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
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.
helpfulclippy
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.
ZYinMD
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
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
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.
anthony_romeo
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
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
they are all highly positively correlated. that's why mensa accepts matrix tests
nbulka
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?
dusted
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
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.
iLoveOncall
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.
t_mann
"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.
zzbzq
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.
password54321
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.
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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.