
My IQ - tokenadult
http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=84
======
jessedhillon
Great insight.

Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the
big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value.
If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can
substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives
of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I
am not the first person to observe that having a powerful mind is at many
times a burden.

You can see that other people may be more stupid than you, forwarding simpler
arguments and relying on less rigorous thinking than yours, but if they don't
want to be convinced of that, then you are powerless to make them see it. They
go off blissfully, and you burn with anguish. Again, if you cannot manifest
your intelligence in a way that forwards your agenda, who cares?

To phrase it in a more confrontational way: if nobody is forced to contend
with your mind, nobody knows it exists. Or to summarize it in a quote:

 _"[Intelligence] is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are,
you aren't."_ \-- Margaret Thatcher

This clicked for me during my final year of college, when a friend of mine was
taking an LSAT preparation course. During a break, he was chatting with the
instructor about realistic outcomes, and said earnestly that he hoped to get a
score of 168 (which IIRC is a very high score.) The instructor, a man of maybe
30, who had been out of school for several years, scoffed and replied, "Good
luck, I only got 165 and I'm a genius."

And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked
at Target.

Edit: expanded a little on the first couple of paragraphs.

~~~
graeme
That's interesting. I'm an LSAT instructor. My first reaction to reading the
instructor's comment was, 'Ha, only 165, he's no genius'.

But, MENSA accepts 163 as a cutoff LSAT score for entry. So if MENSA ==
genius, then he _is_ a genius.

Among people who take the LSAT though, he's _only_ 92nd percentile. He doesn't
have much business teaching the test. Anyone who's at an Ivy League law school
has a better score than him.

I completely agree that intelligence, on it's own, is near useless. It needs
to be combined with the other elements that make someone effective. THEN, and
only then, do you have the ingredients for something powerful.

Our society lionizes intelligence to the point that many people with little
but intelligence smugly rest on their laurels, and accomplish less than their
potential due to defects in social skills, initiative, etc.

~~~
anothermachine
Anyone at an Ivy League law school might have more lucrative opportunities
than teaching LSAT classes.

~~~
graeme
You'd be surprised ;)

On an _hourly_ basis, you can earn more teaching the LSAT than as an Ivy
League law grad. Mind you, I don't work 80 hour weeks, so I don't make as much
on an absolute basis, but the work is more interesting, and I've branched out
into LSAT books and an online LSAT course.

But mainly, I wanted to point out that the instructor is unreasonably
arrogant. By comparison with his reference group, he's far from exceptional.

By implication, the Mensa cut-off is also far from 'genius'. Top 2% is 1 in
50.

~~~
Pinatubo
To be fair, that's 1 in 50 from a group that was relatively accomplished in an
academic setting before the test. But I agree that it doesn't qualify as
"genius."

~~~
graeme
I may not have been clear, my posts mix LSAT percentiles and IQ percentiles.

The Mensa cut-off is top 2% of the general public. 98th percentile on an IQ
test.

For the LSAT, they accept 163 as meeting that cut-off. Relative to other LSAT
takers however, a 163 is 92nd percentile. So the top 8% of LSAT takers are
qualified to enter mensa, or roughly 1 in 12.

~~~
knite
I took the LSAT in 2009. I scored 166, which was in the 93rd percentile. Mensa
lists their cut-off as the 95th percentile, so your 163/92 figure is
inaccurate, at least for recent years.

------
FaceKicker
> But the biggest problem was that the idea of crossing the odd object out
> seems very strange to me in general. What is the odd object out in this
> list?

> Cow, hen, pig, sheep.

> The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. But that
> is not the only possible correct answer. For example, pig is the only one
> whose meat is not kosher. And, look, sheep has five letters while the rest
> have three.

These types of questions irritate the theoretician in me as well, but to play
devil's advocate a bit, are they really illegitimate questions? I would guess
that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that
measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans, who
regularly speak in ways that require the listener to resolve ambiguities that
are at LEAST as severe as the farm animal question. If you think hard enough
about it, sure, you can come up with a justification for any of the four
answers (trivially, a cow is a cow and the other three choices are non-cows),
but I would say that if you truly can't come up with the answer to that
question that they "want" (barring any possible cultural reasons for not being
able to do so), your intuition for pattern recognition could probably use some
work.

This is not to defend IQ tests in general; I'm only arguing that ambiguous
questions may measure something meaningful about your ability to learn or
process information.

~~~
lifeformed
My first thought to that question was: "All but the hen have 4 legs, the hen
only has 2". I'd have gotten the right answer, but only serendipitously.

~~~
NDizzle
That was my first thought as well. They're also the only ones without hooves.
What does that make us?

------
jalanco
I was raised in an abusive middle class household. My parents were not well
educated. When I took the ACT test in 1975, neither my parents nor I even knew
what the hell it was. I made a 23. I went to a unremarkable Tier 4 college
because my friend was going there. I paid for it working as an "auger boy" on
a gravel drilling rig for a concrete company for five years. I failed college
algebra twice. I was put on academic suspension, and somehow talked my way
back in. I made a C in algebra, a C in trig, and then took calculus from a
handicapped polio survivor named Mr. Treese (not a PhD) who could barely walk
or speak clearly. He had zero patience for bullshit but for some reason he
liked me. After taking three classes from Mr Treese he suggested that I should
enter the Math dept's annual calculus contest (I was a geology major). I
actually won the contest (and a $60 check!). Afterward, I never made a grade
lower than an A, and eventually moved on to earn an MS in CS. Today I think he
was probably the single most influential person in my life.

Today we have two daughters who are both completing science PhD's funded with
fellowships. I paid for their undergraduate education at Tier 1 schools but
they have done the rest on their own without loans. You can bet your life that
they knew what an SAT test was when they took it. All their lives we've told
them that they were definitely very smart but that it just doesn't matter,
that IQ is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you do, not how
smart you are.

(I remembered this story because Mr Treese didn't care much for the idea that
a "number series" problem has a "best" solution.)

~~~
textminer
This is a wonderful story. I think it highlights how important it is to have
parents support you (mine would buy me books and take me to the library and
entertain long, rambling thoughts in the car) and to have teachers and
professors support you.

~~~
jalanco
Thanks for your kind comment. I've thought of Mr. Treese often during my life.
Here's an anecdote about him that's always cracked me up: One time he called
on a student who wasn't, as usual, paying attention, asked him a math
question, and the student gave a rude reply, "Your guess is as good as mine."

Mr. Treese fixed his eyes on him, gave him that crooked grin of his and said,
"No that's incorrect. My guess would be much better than yours."

------
DanielBMarkham
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Years ago in our 20s my wife and I took an IQ test. I think she got in the
150s and I scored in the upper 140s.

But I felt I had done much better. When we looked at the scores, for several
answers I had results that were clearly consistent with an internal model I
could build of the problem, but it just wasn't the model the tester wanted.

So in a geometric progression, I noticed that each figure had an odd number of
visible vortices. In a word analogy, I noticed that all of the words except
one had an Old English root. And so on. Many times there were multiple
patterns of resolution. How could one be better than another?

I could certainly understand her choices, I just thought they were no worse or
better than mine. The fact that IQ tests are created by people with high IQs
led me to believe that what is really being measured here is some sort of
academic cultural cohesion; how much we begin to solve problems in similar
ways?

Not necessarily a bad idea, but not what I think of when somebody says
"intelligence test"

~~~
carey
A properly _standardised_ test should at least have been administered to
enough people that you were in the minority of the kind of people it was
standardised against. Actually, a properly standardised test should have
discarded questions like that if their answers weren’t reliable.

In any case, it is quite unlikely that the test you took could reliably
distinguish between scores above 145.

~~~
cbsmith
Couldn't you argue part of the test is whether the test taker can determine
the test maker's thinking? ;-)

------
jkimmel
IQ tests have long been criticized by a variety of groups. At the end of the
day, it merely measures your ability to perform well on tests that are similar
to an IQ test. Traditionally, this set was populated with academic tests, so
the IQ could be used to predict your performance in schools (it was actually
designed to predict the performance of French schoolchildren.)

However, as the school based subjects have broadened out from traditional
liberal arts conceptualizations to include more serious discussion of
alternative conceptualizations (CompSci being one example), the IQ test may be
decreasing in efficacy of prediction even with regards to academic tests. I
have no evidence for this, just an opinion. The issue you ran into seems to be
a result of these differing conceptualization paradigms.

At the end of the day, it's an assessment of performance in a very limited
subfield of life. I try not to take it too seriously.

~~~
wmil
That's not really true. IQ doesn't predict well on the high end, but it's
useful for predicting the outcomes of middle intellect people. And it works
better for groups than for individuals.

For instance, IQ scores are bad at predicting wealth but are the best
predictor of adult poverty we have.

And the US military uses them extensively. They generally don't allow anyone
in with an IQ score below 90.

~~~
mynameishere
Yes, every time the subject comes up, this whole crowd of relatively
intelligent people go into a moral dance about how stupid IQ tests are.

They were never meant to predict genius. The point is to organize people
efficiently when you're slotting them for guard duty or heavy equipment
operation or officer candidate school. Someone who points out BS about non-
Kosher pigs and obscure integer sequences is being clever for the sake of it.
IE, "Look how smart I am."

And, as you say, the military considers about 100 million Americans
dangerously too stupid for the army. They didn't do this out of arrogance.

~~~
vacri
This is a most underrated point - IQ is more important in a demographic sense
than in mensa-style braggatry.

------
jhuckestein
My dad made me take one when I was a kid and I did really well, but even then
I thought it was stupid. The first issue is addressed in this blog post. The
questions just aren't good enough. This is nobody's fault really, because it
is very difficult to come up with a set of hard questions that measure your
intellect and don't require lots of domain specific knowledge. It's either
within a certain domain. If everyone taking the test was a Mathematician for
example, the questions could be more clearly defined.

The second issue is that intelligence is multi-dimensional yet people try to
measure it on a one dimensional scale. What's worse, the dimensions of
intellect are somewhat elusive as well, so you can't just say something like
IQ is the sum of values on each axis. Personally, I think that people that are
high achievers in any field (business, arts, athletics, leadership, politics,
science) are intelligent in some way. But when you look at all those people,
there's no common denominator, no discernable pattern for intelligence.

~~~
Gormo
Does it make more sense to say that intelligence is 'multi-dimensional' or to
say that it's 'adimensional'? After all, IQ is a metric, not a direct
measurement, as intelligence isn't itself directly observable. If we're
defining 'intelligence' as being a quality of the human mind that's conducive
to success at achieving one's goals, then it becomes something of a tautology
to simply ascribe that quality to people who have observably achieved their
goals.

If the IQ metric is intended to correlate success on certain types of tests
with success in other contexts, then it may be reliable in certain regards -
e.g. people with higher IQs do tend to hive higher incomes, as 3pt14159
pointed out below - but the actual nature of that common causality is still
something that may not itself be understood sufficiently to describe it in
terms of dimensionality.

~~~
dave1010uk
I've always thought of intelligence as the ability to learn, which you could
say is the maximum speed you can gain knowledge and understanding. A person
may be able to learn in some areas very well, but not so well in others. Also,
someone who has devoted much time to gaining knowledge and understanding may
be much less intelligent as someone who could learn quickly but never puts
their mind to it.

An analogy for this view of intelligence and knowledge is like a car's
acceleration and speed. Some cars may be able to go very fast but they may
take a while to accelerate.

As others have mentioned in this thread, what obviously matters more is how
you apply intelligence, knowledge and understanding.

------
DanBC
I'm keen to know what the research is about cleverness and overthinking and
multiple choice questions.

One of the most intelligent people I know IRL has trouble with the UK driving
licence theory questions because she very rapidly provides 6 correct answers,
and then has to try to detangle her correct answers from the choices.

I suspect that she'd do better if she tried when she was drunk (not the
practical!!) because that would filter out the overthinking.

Of course, maybe this is all post rationalisation and some people just are
lousy at some stuff.

~~~
Shenglong
It might not be that she's overthinking--it could just be that the test-
writers don't have as much education/intelligence. I use ad-hominems
sparingly, so let me offer a specific example for the beginner's license test
in Halifax, NS, Canada:

In cold conditions, which of the following freeze before the others?

1\. Bridges

2\. Overpasses

3\. Shaded Areas

4\. All of the above

I wasn't entirely sure what a "shaded area" was, but I figured eventually that
it must be some area under shade from the sun. Next, "all of the above" didn't
make sense, because how can "all of the above" freeze before all of the above?
I figured that water has a higher specific heat capacity than ground, and thus
in cold conditions, the heat from the water would keep bridges warmer for
slightly longer. I answered Overpasses.

Apparently the answer was "all of the above". The funny thing is, when I ask
this question to people, I find a pretty consistent correlation between
responses: for my non-university educated friends, they typically answer D. On
the other hand, my university educated friends (whose majors vary
significantly) tend to answer A, B, C, or "D doesn't make sense".

~~~
mietek
You would do well to assume the question isn't meant to be self-contradictory,
and find a meaningful intepretation under this assumption. In this case,
"before the others" could be extended to mean "before any other areas".

~~~
biscarch
Actually the question should be rephrased to "Which of these can form
precarious driving conditions in cold weather?" because that's what they
actually want to know.

The problem as I see it is that the test-makers are trying to be overly clever
and not ask the question they want the answer to. If I have to "extend" the
language to say something it doesn't, the test maker has failed because the
test question is the only source of truth.

This is the issue I see most often with these sorts of questions.

~~~
stan_rogers
That rephrasing doesn't really work either. All roads can be precarious in
cold weather; the point of the question is to determine whether or not you
realise that some areas can become dangerous more quickly than others even
though the rest of the road system has seemed "safe enough so far".

(And the "hidden question" is "did you know that shaded areas can freeze as
quickly as a bridge or an overpass?" Most people who grow up around real
seasons develop an intuitive understanding that thin, isolated objects cool
off very quickly, but urban types are exposed to an artificial sense of ground
temperature. The point is not so much to _know_ D is correct before taking the
test, but to realise that since both A and B are correct, then C must also be
correct. It could have been better-phrased, yes, but a lot of questions on
written driving tests are of that sort—they can teach as much as they test.)

~~~
biscarch
* slight nitpick. I changed the basis of the question to encompass the need to reassess driving style in the presence of a change in weather conditions, as opposed to choosing specific instances of danger. That is not a rephrasing as I originally contended. My apologies.

If all roads can be precarious, the answer is all of the above, thus solving
the dilema of the test taker understanding the need to be more perceptive in
colder weather. We cannot control for all variables that would make a road
slick or dangerous, and therefore cannot test them all individually, but must
group them together into a situation (ex: road conditions changed). If we
accept that driving in and of itself is an active activity, then we should not
have to distinguish between specific changes in road conditions for any change
in road conditions should be enough for the driver to reevaluate their
driving.

This question on the test should then be changed completely to reflect the
fact that a change in road conditions necessitates a reevaluation of driving
style.

I would further contend that "hidden questions", such as the one described,
test one's ability to take multiple choice tests. If I know A and B, I have no
need for C and there is no need for me to even look at it. In fact, if there
were 40 options, "All of the Above" still has to be the correct answer, even
if I have no clue what the other 37 options are.

Teaching is not the intent of a test. Unless, of course, we are assuming that
the test taker did not learn anything before taking the test; In which case
the intent is not testing them at all but ensuring that they have some basic
skills to get by.

However I agree with your intent, the creation of questions for a test is not
a trivial pursuit.

------
olalonde
In theory, I believe there could be an objective way to determine the
"simplest" answer if it is defined as having the lowest Kolmogorov complexity
among valid answers (if I read the Wikipedia article correctly) [0]. In the
context of an IQ test though, it is not a very practical solution.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity>

~~~
mistercow
It's actually an impossible solution, since Kolmogorov complexity is
uncomputable. However, there are some related complexity measures which are
computable, so that they are merely impractical rather than impossible to
apply:
[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_complexity#O...](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_complexity#Other_complexities_and_related_concepts)

Of course, you can bet that the writers of the test did not use anything
related to algorithmic complexity when deciding the correct answers to these
questions. We can't show the exact complexity of the different hypotheses, but
we can sometimes compare hypotheses. Imagine programs that generate answers
according to the different hypotheses. Between the program that answers
according to taxonomy, and the program that answers according to word length,
which one requires a look-up table of animals and their classes?

~~~
anothermachine
1\. Someone named "mistercow" is obviously biased on this question.

2\. Another item to factor in, beyond lookup table size, is that questions are
written in English, and the medium (spelled words) should not be snuck in as
part of the content, except where sometimes it is done intentionally :) Also,
in classification problems like these, one should also consider not just how
efficiently a solution chooses an answer from the set, but also how cleanly it
isolates the cluster of items in question from the unnamed items. That is,
since [cow,hen,pig,sheep] are all animals, more so than a random word is,
animality should be part of the rule used to choose among them.

3\. As blauwbilgorgel notes, Google's very successful solution to model
picking is to slurp of everything published publicly online (and with Books,
also many things published offline) and sample over the combined output of
humanity. This is still biased towards written text, published text, and
loquaciousness, but it's pretty good.

~~~
mistercow
>Another item to factor in, beyond lookup table size, is that questions are
written in English, and the medium (spelled words) should not be snuck in as
part of the content, except where sometimes it is done intentionally :)

That just strengthens my point. The word-length hypothesis doesn't require any
information about English. If we change our assumptions to say that the
program is being fed the raw visual stimuli (as a human is), then the word-
length hypothesis gets even stronger, since it merely involves comparing the
widths of the stimuli.

But most of the information about the medium can be ignored when _comparing_
hypotheses because it is constant across them.

------
pfedor
Many people like to argue for political reasons that IQ tests are meaningless
or fundamentally flawed. One of the typical arguments, repeated in the
article, is that the questions on a test require some cultural background and
a smart person can fail them if they were raised in a different culture.

Following a similar line of reasoning, we could say that the vision test your
optometrist administers requires the cultural context, after all if you were
raised in a culture that uses cyrillic then you might not recognize some
characters, and you would fail the test even if your vision was 20/20!
Therefore, all vision tests are flawed, and the very concept of vision acuity
is meaningless.

~~~
pjscott
At this point in the conversation, I believe I'm supposed to accuse you of
being oculonormative and suggest that you are blinded by your Visual
Privilege. Would this be helpful? [y/N]

------
freditup
Another big downside to intelligence tests is they can make you think you are
just that intelligent. (More commonly known as pride / arrogance. We all
suffer from this, but I digress.) I've had conversations online with people
who have scored extremely high on IQ tests. Now interestingly, this person
assumed because of their high IQ scores that they were great at deducing
patterns and reading people. They ended up coming to simply outrageous
conclusions about myself that they were certain were correct no matter what I
said.

So, I personally think IQ tests are worthless. I don't see any benefits that
come from knowing what your IQ is. The only thing they give is arrogance, and
as Albert Einstein (may have) said, "The only thing more Dangerous than
Ignorance is Arrogance."

------
chiph
> > Cow, hen, pig, sheep. > The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it
> is the only bird.

I thought "It's the only one that goes around on two legs." And then: "It's
the only one that reproduces via eggs." Maybe not the right answer for the
"right" reason, but works...

But then, as I have gotten older, my IQ is probably half what it was when I
was tested as a teen (not a candidate for Mensa, sorry) Probably because I'm
more certain now that I don't know all the answers. :)

~~~
DanBC
Let's try to list all the "correct" answers.

1) Hen - only one with wings / only bird / only non mammal / only egg-
reproducer / only creature using 2 legs

2) Sheep - only one with more than 3 letters in name / renewable wool provider
(eggs and milk are renewing?) Only plural without an S (sheep vs cows, hens,
pigs)

3) Pig - only animal without renewing product (no milk, no eggs, no wool);
only male name (cow hen and sheep are female);

4) Cow - only sacred animal

~~~
rmc
_Cow - only sacred animal_

Debatable, Pigs aren't kosher or halal, so you could claim they are sacred.
I'm sure there are people who worship sheep or hens.

~~~
svnfv
That's because they're considered dirty, not sacred.

------
Alex3917
I used to be in the Promethius Society, which is people with an IQ of 148+. I
don't actually have an IQ of 148+ as far as I know, they just weren't smart
enough to properly password protect thei Ning group. I have to say though
after reading through the threads, most of them seemed vastly less intelligent
than the smarter HN posters here.

------
elorant
The problem with Mensa tests, or any other generalized test that tries to
identify patterns in humans, is that some people are taking themselves far too
serious. IMHO Mensa is meant to give you an indication of not how smart you
are but how perceptive you are in a particular kind of problem solving. And
that’s about it.

Now if you score above 115 and then you expect the whole world to treat you
like something special you miss the whole freaking point. I’ve seen people who
because they score something like 130 or 140 are intentionally acting like
whims or try to say something very profound and they end up speaking BS. They
are very hard to work with and constantly expect to be treated differently.

Bottom line if you happen to be supersmart try to do something useful and
meaningful for the rest of the society, otherwise nobody gives a flying fuck
how smart you think you are.

------
ColinWright

        > But it bugs me that I might not have been
        > creative enough to fail their test.
    

I know Tanya, and she most certainly is creative enough to fail their tests.
It's clear she was trying to conform, and did a job that was good enough for
its purpose.

But she is certainly creative enough to fail, and way more intelligent (for
pretty much any meaning of the term) than the test will have indicated.

~~~
mturmon
It's for sure that those tests are not good for measuring the top end. The
post calls in to question that any test could do so, but its clear that in any
event, that test is not it.

------
giardini
I felt truly intelligent only after ending my membership in Mensa.

------
gbrindisi
What are the benefits of being a member of Mensa?

~~~
anothermachine
I suspect it was far more valuable in pre-Internet non-population-dense
America, where it was one of the few effective ways to connect with other
smart people. It is extremely obsolete now. But "they" (whoever "they" is in
practice) publish some nifty puzzle books.

~~~
pjscott
At the time I'm writing this, yours may be the only answer in this thread that
doesn't try to signal moral superiority to Mensa members by piously insulting
them. (There are a couple of other comments that I would consider borderline
-- not overtly insulting, but carefully suffused with cynicism.)

------
Zarkonnen
That was pretty much my experience with the Mensa test too. The straight
mathematics section was quite easy. All the pattern-matching ones were
maddening because you could construct good chains of reasoning for all the
options.

------
jonnathanson
Great article. I experienced a similar frustration with the Stanford-Binet,
and even more so in high school with the good ol' SAT (which Mensa also
considers an admissable 'IQ' test).

It seems to me that a true "intelligence" test would also throw some
generative problems at you: i.e., test you for as many correct answers to a
pattern or sequence problem as you could come up with. I wouldn't advocate for
generative problems to the absolute exclusion of deductive problems -- but the
reverse is currently the case on most IQ tests, and it shouldn't be.

As for the broader point: there's been a scientific debate, for about as long
as IQ tests have existed, over exactly what IQ tests are measuring, and
exactly what IQ means. Most standard IQ tests are now regarded as measuring
"g" ("general factor," sometimes called "general intelligence"). It may indeed
be the most highly significant factor in intelligence, but even if it is
(which, again, is debatable), it is just one factor of many. There are other
factors, some of which are statistically significant. So simply isolating for
the strongest factor is dumbing down the entire equation.

At any rate, "g" ends up being highly correlated with our concept of
intelligence, but it is by no means a perfect or complete metric. And it does
tend to favor a very specific type of intelligence, given that it is a narrow
band on a broader spectrum. And vice versa: it excludes many whose minds we
would probably consider genius caliber.

------
peterjs
I don't think that "creative" people would fail the test. Creativity has
nothing to do with finding smartass solutions to puzzles. It has little to do
with even solving puzzles.

Creativity is seeing, connecting and coming up with things other people don't.
The main prerequisite is usually grunt work. We only see the results, not the
messy process behind James Dyson's vacuum cleaner with thousands of
prototypes, or Bob Noyce's integrated circuit. What made him so creative was
his knowledge and understanding of the world of semiconductors and the ability
to question things.

I strongly believe that any inventor with a similar story would score high on
an IQ tests and would not manifest his creativity by making up unlikely
theories. Admittedly, its a sign of intelligence to understand the question
and the context in which it is being asked. The world is full of opportunities
to show ones creativity. Picking one of 4 answers in a test is not one of
those.

------
onetimeuser50
I am a HN regular but I don't want to sound boastful so using a one time
account.

I have a high but not super-high IQ, about 138. I went to a highly IQ-
selective school, and as a result have met people who are smarter. Here is the
interesting part: while they can do certain kinds of things better than me
(puzzles, certain kinds of math, certain kinds of intricate code, analogies
etc). Yet, I have gotten far more interesting things in life done than they
have.

Even more interesting, I have discovered that I have thought harder and deeper
about many problems than some of the exceptional IQ people I have met. As a
result, I can simplify problems that they "only" (!) know how to solve. And
this simplifying skill has proved to be extremely valuable in the real world.
That skill doesn't seem to be directly implied by super-high IQ alone.

------
JohnLBevan
David Mitchell (British Comedian)'s view of Mensa:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMKqyaXtHI>

~~~
vacri
Great points, but "why join a club whose only entrance requirement is that you
pass the test to join" is redundant. Every club with any requirement is
exactly the same. Want to join a boat club and need the endorsement of one
member? That's a test you have to pass to join, a social one. Want to join an
old-fashioned gentleman's club? Then your test is 'be endorsed, well dressed,
and have a penis'. It's still a test to get in. Want to join a motorcycle
club? You're going to need a motorcycle and know how to ride it. Want to join
Hufflepuff? There's a test for that, too.

~~~
mgkimsal
Agreed it's redundant, but there's something else about it too. IQ is
biological. You may just as well have a club for left-handed people, or people
with green eyes. You'll have about as much in common with them.

Not entirely true, but the few Mensa meetings I went to were all 'social' ones
(met at a restaurant), and I had nothing demonstrable in common with the
people there other than having the same biological brain ability. We probably
_did_ have some things in common, but no one went out of their way to welcome
me, and I didn't bother to try to make myself welcome either, so I quit going.

What I think we may have had in common is some of the same social experiences
of being outsiders looking in to 'normal' societal groups. Certainly
everyone's experiences are different, but often highly intelligent people will
be ostracized (through their own fault or the fault of others or both), and
being able to relate based on those shared experiences can be useful in some
capacity. The group I went to didn't seem to be in to that.

~~~
illuminate
"IQ is biological"

And you believe this because?

~~~
mgkimsal
sweeping statement, I understand. at core is my position as a materialist - I
think everything is physical / material / biological. 'Intelligence' is simply
an expression of that, and IQ as a measure of that is measuring something
that's biological, like left-handedness or height.

My evidence... I've not seen any evidence to the contrary. We do see evidence
that physically messing with brains causing changes in brain function. Brain
damage can cause impairment to memory - short term memory is one of the
elements of IQ that gets measured in tests that I've taken.

If you have evidence to the contrary that what we measure as IQ is somehow
_not_ rooted in biology, please share it.

~~~
illuminate
I'm not here to prove the negative. Your opinion that nurture does not exist
hand-in-hand is false.

"everything is physical / material / biological."

I don't believe in ghosts/souls/the immaterial, but this is irrelevant to
social conditioning having an objective effect on IQ tests. Yes, the brain
that stores information is "physical", but the information is not stored in
birth.

------
trptcolin
Google cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vIrXiKk...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vIrXiKkuiI4J:blog.tanyakhovanova.com/%3Fp%3D84+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
billforsternz
One way intelligence manifests itself is through the ability to score well in
an IQ test. Another way is through the ability to make an impact on the world.
But I think another really strong characteristic of intelligent people is
their tendency to lead a rich inner life. I get the strong impression most
people go about their business without ever really thinking about how
incredible it is that the universe not only exists but contains (at extremely
low density) sentient beings capable of reasoning about it. Being one of those
sentient beings is a remarkable stroke of luck. Intelligent people recognise
that and celebrate accordingly.

------
freework
IQ tests are just like anything else in life: If you practice enough, you will
get good. If you are motivated enough to spend 10 hours a day practicing
taking IQ tests, you will eventually get a high score. If you are motivated
enough to practice the guitar 10 hours a day, you'll eventually become a
guitar virtuoso. If you are motivated enough to spend 10 hours a day writing
code, you'll eventually become a Rob Pike or Rich Hickey. If all you want in
life is to be seen as smart by other people, then in my opinion, you need to
re-examine some things in your life. I'd rather spend my time getting better
at things that actually matter.

~~~
pjscott
Since most people who take IQ tests are doing it just once, without
preparation, I'm not sure I see the relevance of this claim.

~~~
gurkendoktor
I have taken three and I have never applied for Mensa. Once in school when our
biology class was curious about the topic; once online because somebody
challenged me to it; once because it was in the TV magazine and I was bored,
and I wanted to know if one really gets better at it. (I think I did)

~~~
mgkimsal
I suspect you wouldn't have gotten demonstrably/statistically _much_ better
with repeated takings. Maybe if it was the same test multiple times, but even
then I'm not sure.

A few years ago I had 3 IQ tests administered to me over several weeks. There
wasn't any major difference between any of the scoring/ranking, despite the
fact that I was taking multiple. I never got much 'better'.

~~~
gurkendoktor
I think it depends on many factors: Will I be told which answers were wrong
and what would have been the right ones? I had similar problems with ambiguous
questions as the OP and this might help me to understand what the test writers
understand as "canonical" or "simplest" answer. Also, I am rather excited when
I take a new type of test, so I guess my biggest jump would have been from the
1st to the 2nd test.

------
Shenglong
_|Cow, hen, pig, sheep_

 _The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird._

I believe the standard answer is a "hen" because it's the only one that is
gender-specific. In fact, it is distinctly the odd-one out because it doesn't
even refer to a specific genus (or even family) of animal.

I'm all for creativity (I have the same complaint often) but there needs to be
some sort of standardization in communication and society. A genius who can't
communicate any of his/her ideas might as well be no genius at all.

~~~
DanBC
~~Sheep / ram?~~

Cow / bull?

~~Sow / uh, pig ? (I don't know about pig)~~

Hen / cock?

(Pseudo strikethrough! See child comment from pbiggar.)

~~~
protomyth
Boar is a male pig. Male sheep names depend on if it got snipped (ram is for
"intact" males).

// answers correspond to growing up in ND

------
lubujackson
I've actually written an IQ test that a lot of people have taken. When
researching how to put together an IQ test it became clear to me that from the
beginning IQ testing was not, and never will be, a valid way to rate
intelligence.

The simplest explanation is that "IQ score" is not fundamentally different
than "SAT score" or "GMAT score" and is in a lot of ways worse because there
are so many different interpretations and scoring methods for IQ. You can
score 150 on one test but it might be scored completely differently than a
test someone else takes. In other words, there is no agreed upon and
copyrighted standard for IQ.

All of this type of testing really just sucks. All we really know is that IQ
testing (or SATs, etc.) measures... something. And since people need to be
quantified in some way, we use these scores for people-sorting. We TOTALLY
overuse these scores without understanding them, and people feel great or feel
horrible about their scores because of their usage (which is unavoidable) and
for what it seems to say about them (which is very little).

It is hard to not feel good or bad about your score, even knowing all of this.
We WANT to be rated, we want to score well and score better than others.
That's human nature - just don't forget that your score will never impact what
you can and can't achieve in life.

------
tokenadult
AFTER EDIT: Thanks to all who have replied for the interesting comments. I
discovered this link while digesting replies I received on three different
email lists to a request to name experts on mathematically precocious young
people. (That was for work.) Tanya Khovanova, the author of the blog post
submitted here, was one name suggested to me as an expert on precocious
mathematics learners. When I saw her personal website,

<http://www.tanyakhovanova.com/>

I remembered that I had seen her blog post "Should You Date a Mathematician?"

<http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=319>

posted to Hacker News (and other sites I read) before. I'll read more of her
more purely mathematical blog posts over the next few days. I see one I can
use right away in the local classes I teach to elementary-age learners.

On the substance of the post, I'm seeing several comments that equate "genius"
to "person with a high IQ score." That was indeed the old-fashioned way that
Lewis Terman (1877 to 1956) labeled a person with a high IQ score as he
developed the Stanford-Binet IQ test. But as Terman gained more experience,
especially with the subjects in his own longitudinal study of Americans
identified in childhood by high IQ scores, he didn't equate high IQ to genius,
and he became more aware of the shortcomings of IQ tests. Terman and his co-
author Maude Merrill wrote in 1937,

"There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the
reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that
the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a
particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not
coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability,
mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking,
a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on
the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales."

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the
Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 25. That is why the later authors Kenneth Hopkins
and Julian Stanley (founder of the Study of Exceptional Talent) suggested that
is better to regard IQ tests as tests of "scholastic aptitude" rather than of
intelligence. They wrote

"Most authorities feel that current intelligence tests are more aptly
described as 'scholastic aptitude' tests because they are so highly related to
academic performance, although current use suggests that the term intelligence
test is going to be with us for some time. This reservation is based not on
the opinion that intelligence tests do not reflect intelligence but on the
belief that there are other kinds of intelligence that are not reflected in
current tests; the term intelligence is too inclusive."

Hopkins, Kenneth D. & Stanley, Julian C. (1981). Educational and Psychological
Measurement and Evaluation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 364.

So on the one hand there is the acknowledged issue among experts on IQ testing
that IQ scores don't tell the whole story of a test subject's mental ability.
A less well known issue is the degree to which error in estimation increases
in IQ scores as IQ scores are found to be above the norming sample mean.
Terman and Merrill wrote,

"The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high
reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The
probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with
young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from
younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the
P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of
Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation
arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they
were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 is typical of the
arrays at every age level.

"From Figure 3 [not shown here on HN, alas] it becomes clear that the probable
error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which
increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature
that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with
low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q.
technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds."

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the
Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 44

Readers of this thread who would like to follow the current scientific
literature on genius (as it is now defined by mainstream psychologists) may
enjoy reading the works of Dean Keith Simonton,

<http://www.amazon.com/Dean-Keith-Simonton/e/B001ITRL1I/>

the world's leading researcher on genius and its development. Readers curious
about what IQ tests miss may enjoy reading the book What Intelligence Tests
Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

[http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-
Psycholog...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-
Psychology/dp/0300164629/)

by Keith R. Stanovich and some of Stanovich's other recent books.

Readers who would like to read a whole lot about current research on human
intelligence and related issues can find a lot of curated reading suggestions
at a Wikipedia user bibliography

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations)

occasionally used for the slow, pains-taking process of updating the many
Wikipedia articles on related subjects (most of which are plagued by edit-
warring and badly in need of more editing).

~~~
cobrophy
All an IQ tests, is your ability to do well on an IQ test.

It's not a particularly great measure of intelligence. The fact that you can
often improve your IQ by 20 points (or more) just by practicing the types of
questions that turn up should be evidence of this. Did you just become
massively more intelligent relative to the population in the 2 days you spent
practicing the questions?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Be fair; this is a correct comment, in line with the OP. Terman admited that
IQ tests are only good at testing what is covered in the IQ test. A circular
definition of IQ if there ever was one.

------
nnq
True creativity as well as true intelligence should INCLUDE THE ABILITY TO
INTUITIVELY OR RATIONALLY "UNDERSTAND" WHAT IS THE SIMPLEST SOLUTION - meaning
the simplest possible pattern that can be considered to consist of 3 or 6 or 9
shapes, one of which you have to choose in a standard figures based IQ test...
"simple" might actually mean "being able to unambiguously explain it in the
smallest number of words" for someone with a background in literature and
philosophy and something similar for someone used more to the mathematical
language... but in 90% of the cases there is an unambiguous "simplest" pattern
that can be seen in the figures IQ test (not 100% because it's a statistical
measure anyway, but still).

After all, don't we usually think of "smart" people as the ones that can take
complicated things and make them simple or explain them in simpler terms
(think Feynman, Einstein...).

...now about "cow, hen, pig, sheep" ...this is obviously a biased example by
choosing 3 words of 3 letters and one of 5 and can be replaced with something
that does not overlap the number of letters pattern on top of the number of
legs or animal group one...

------
Sandman
I'm no fan of Mensa, but there's one thing that I don't understand in this
article - if the test was for non-English speakers and it contained pictures
of animals, why was one of the possible answers that popped into the author's
head "sheep - because it has five letters". That's language-specific, and
should not be regarded as a valid answer in a language-neutral test. But the
point is, it seems to me that the author is trying to find holes in the test.
Of course that "hen" is not the only possible answer. As the author suggested,
meat of pigs, for example, is not kosher. We can find things that
differentiate any one of those animals from the rest. In any set, you can find
some property of any object that will differentiate it from the rest. But
that's not the point, is it? The point is to find the most obvious answer. The
same goes for sequences of numbers. Yes, you can continue a sequence of
numbers with any number that you like, and your answer will be perfectly
valid. But the point is to find the most obvious one.

------
joelhaus
The English language is terribly ambiguous... even for native speakers.
Unfortunately, test creators frequently do not appreciate this fact (a crowd
sourced question review service for teachers and exam creators might be an
interesting solution). One of my favorite examples is the number of alternate
scenarios that this sentence could be describing:

    
    
      the boy saw a mouse running in his pajamas
    

_Counter-point_ : Throughout school, I often pondered whether the ambiguity in
test questions was actually intentional. In the real world, you are often
given problems to solve that are poorly defined, so perhaps this is good
preparation? However, when working on real world problems, you can clearly
state any assumptions you've made to arrive at your solution and this is not
easily applied to answering questions on a bubble sheet test with very limited
context.

------
baddox
Maybe you got a lot of those questions right, despite having reservations
about them, and perhaps that's the whole point of the test. Despite there
being confusing or ambiguous questions, maybe the test is designed to
determine your ability to figure out what the test-makers designated as the
correct response.

------
gioele
Ask HN: what is the acceptance/rejection rates for Mensa tests?

~~~
fleitz
On average they reject 98%. Mensa's cut off is the top 2% of IQs

~~~
gioele
If I understand it correctly, they claim that you must be in what is thought
to be the top 2%, in other words your IQ must be over 130-something.

But this does not mean that they reject 98% of the people that take the tests.
People interested in taking that test must already be, I suppose, in the top
10% of the IQ distribution (125+?), or so they think. If this is true they
they do reject 98% of the applicants but only 80%. Yet I suspect they reject
even less.

Any source or third-party evaluation of their acceptance rate?

~~~
kkuduk
AFAIK, tests are prepared by some third party organizations (psychology
departments?), scaled on representative sample of the population and are just
bought by Mensa(and changed every couple of years). You should be aware that
in different countries test with different SD (15, 16 and 25) are used. I
heard from one guy who was responsible for testing in my country that about
25% of people taking the test get accepted

------
mrlyc
I joined Mensa and left after three meetings. It seemed to me that they
mistook being able to think quickly for being able to think clearly, much the
same as a teenager who thinks he knows how to drive fast just because he has a
car with a powerful engine.

------
gruseom
It would be amusing to have a bunch of people take the same IQ test, then
tally all the plausible yet contradictory answers they produced to the same
questions. Done well, that could be an effective demolition of the whole
charade (though not in the sense that it would get anyone to change their mind
about it).

The trouble with such tests is that they like you to be intelligent, but not
too intelligent. So what they measure is efficiency of conformance. Is that
what we should be optimizing for? I don't think so.

It seems absurd that something so obviously unintelligent would be the key to
measuring intelligence.

Edit: oh, I see I'm just repeating what the OP has already brilliantly said.
What a great and devastating little article.

------
simulate
David Mitchell has some insightful things to say about Mensa and those that
choose to join the organization: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMKqyaXtHI>

------
scotty79
Entry test for MENSA I had about 5 years ago didn't have any words or shapes
of any real-world objects. There was only one kind of questions. You had to
pick image that would fit in the right bottom corner of (usually) 3x3 image
grid. It was all about picking apart those objects and noticing how their
elements change as you move from row to row and from column to column. Me
being programmer given me some advantage I think because I perceived some
transitions as bitwise operations and frame by frame animations.

------
satyajitsdt
Having given my share of IQ tests, personally I always felt that they lacked
in many sense. Once while researching about it I came across theory of
multiple intelligence by Howard Gardner
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences)).
Though not completely clear the basic idea behind it seems more logical to me.

------
jlazer
Joining Mensa was the dumbest thing I ever did.

~~~
pjscott
Did you actually join Mensa and find this to have been a terrible decision, or
are you just looking to score points with a witty jab at an out-group?

(Or some third thing?)

------
Tooluka
I've seen this task once in one IQ test: "Continue the row of numbers - 2, 4,
8, 16, 19, ..."

The answer was - 21... "You know, first we multiply by 2 and then we start to
add 3" :) . Perfect "creative thinking" test.

The IQ tests, even if they are valid are still inherently broken, just forget
about them and carry on.

------
Kilimanjaro
A true genius doesn't want fame, fortune, awards, he doesn't want to stretch
hands, hell, he doesn't even want to sign autographs. All he want is peace,
out of the spotlight, in absolute and maddening silence, to keep doing what he
does best.

To think.

------
cdooh
Never quiet thought of it like this. There some things that would seem obvious
to me but reading this realise perhaps not so much. Anyway IQ tests have long
fallen out of fashion as they only measure a certain type of intelligence

~~~
slurgfest
Fashionable or not, intelligence tests are still much more indicative of (e.g.
academic) potential than many other things people use to make hiring
decisions.

------
zapt02
I thought she was going to score poorly. "Barely" made it into MENSA, sheesh.

------
kenster07
IQ is worthless in a vacuum -- much like a computer. Though they have
magnitudes greater computational power than the smartest human, without
humans, they have no purpose.

------
ramgorur
I am quite dumb, but GRE made me dumber and this is a fact.

------
nsxwolf
tl;dr

Not bragging at all: I'm so _creative_ and the IQ test is so culturally
_unfair_ that I just barely made it into _freakin' Mensa_.

~~~
anothermachine
I think you'll find that Tanya Khovanova is in easily the top 0.1% of any
general intelligence test you'd choose.

~~~
robbiep
so she's only 1 in 1000?

~~~
mattdeboard
Yes, that is what 0.1% means. Here is a good explanation of decimal fraction
notation: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal#Decimal_fractions>

~~~
robbiep
Apologies, apparently Internet irony once again flew by undetected, my post
was to highlight that to be in the top 0.1% is hardly that rare or unusual As
Tim minchin says, even if you're 1 in a million, there's still 7,000 of you

------
danieldrehmer
The particular tests she complained about were not aimed at measuring
creativity, I believe.

But the animals question was really poorly designed

------
aaronbasssett
"I don't know what my IQ is. People who gloat about their IQ's are losers" –
Stephen Hawking

------
crikli
Intelligence is like an idea: without execution, nothing.

------
nacker
IQ tests share this property of undervaluing creativity and overvaluing
conformity with academic work in general.

Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig, from his Wikipedia
page:

'While doing laboratory work in biochemistry, Pirsig became greatly troubled
by the existence of more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given
phenomenon, and, indeed, that the number of hypotheses appeared unlimited. He
could not find any way to reduce the number of hypotheses--he became perplexed
by the role and source of hypothesis generation within scientific practice.
This led him to an awareness of a (to him) previously unarticulated limitation
of science, which was something of a revelation to him. The question
distracted him to the extent that he lost interest in his studies and failed
to maintain good grades; he was finally expelled from the university.'

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pirsig>

I score pretty well on IQ tests, but only by suppressing a constant incipient
rage at many of the questions, and a constant effort to ask myself "what would
be the most boring and conformist interpretation of this?" That is usually the
"right" answer.

~~~
rmc
Science has several rules of thumb, Occams Razor says that the simpliest is
usually the more likely, and the assumption that the universe operates
according to universal, consistant mathematical rules means that you should
favour theories that match every other part of observable reality, the rule of
thumb that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is like occam's
razor and means, again, choose the simpliest explaination that matches your
evidence.

Hence, you can sort theories, and then try to devise tests to falsify each one
to differenciate between them.

~~~
RivieraKid
I think that Occam's razor says, that if we have several theories that
describe reality with the same accuracy, we should chose the most succint
(least redundant).

~~~
d0mine
Being simple could more useful than being succinct e.g.:

    
    
      aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
    

is simpler than

    
    
      d9$lLsi
    

because the first is just 45a

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity>

~~~
RivieraKid
The first one is more succint in a sense, because normally it wouldn't be
represented in this literal, long form.

------
aaron695
I think the simple fact the writer knew the answer, (Hen) but then went on to
explain why it might be other things showed a lack of intelligence if
anything.

Anyone who's intelligent would know Kosher is a cultural test so is not valid.

If you don't know how to answer the question correctly it's a lack of
intelligence, not you're smarter than the test. Knowledge of the state of mind
of others is what is normally defines intelligence in animals. Knowing what
answer they want is part of the test. Some people just don't get it...

This is the same as psych tests that ask if you want to commit suicide. If you
don't know why this question is there then the test is working. You're not
smarter than the test because you think it's a stupid question, you just don't
understand the test.

------
vacri
Note that a proper IQ test must be administered by a trained professional and
takes a couple of hours. This is simply because there are so many pitfalls
that there is no other way - anything else that calls itself an IQ test is a
pale imitation and can't be anything but flawed, for all the usual criticisms.
What the author describes may be what Mensa need for admittance, but it's not
a proper IQ test.

------
dschiptsov
For the hen question two answers must be accepted, and second one, based on
the number of letters, must be rated higher.) At least if you want to catch a
person with Asperger's.

