and people voted for him. oh god. the joke’s on us.
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Re Langan, I think he’s one of those intelligent idiots.
He has a facility with mathematics, and pattern matching, and memory (which garners him high IQ scores), but falters when he applies it to the real world. He has all sorts of odd, unprovable (or disproven!) hunches that he takes as inspired Truth.
I bet his pure knowledge IQ is more around 90-100. I mean, he “knows” less than many 9th graders. On any objective test, he’d do quite poorly. But his Sales & Marketing IQ, his “Dale Carnegie” IQ, his Insecurity & Narcissism IQ – whatever that thing is that he does to motivate himself to sell himself to others – it’s off the charts.
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I did a lot of IQ tests when I was unemployed a few years back and I am sure it increased my IQ score, just as doing any test repeatedly will improve your outcomes. I don’t believe it made me smarter.
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I didn’t say that was Hawking’s motive, did I? Nice straw man there.
It’s easy for him to say; everybody already knows he’s smart.
Pff, that old saw. Yeah, there’s some truth to that, but it’s the closest thing to an objective measure we’ve come up with so far, no? If there’s such a need for something less culturally biased, where is it? Nobody’s stopping it happening. I’m happy to lose a few points if someone manages to make it fairer.
What about when it’s relevant, huh? What then, for crying out loud. Intellect is a bit more bloody relevant than dick size or what have you, since it’s what distinguishes us from the rest of the animals.
Nobody doubts the guy covered in meat is strong. He doesn’t get 97-pound weaklings challenging him to armwrestles and then claiming to have won.
I think it’d be nice if the only measure we have to mitigate fucken Dunning-Kruger wasn’t cut off at the knees by folks concerned about politeness and inclusiveness, since (as I’m sure you’ll agree) we seem to have a bit of a problem lately with signal to noise and the consequent surplus of fuckwits in control of proceedings.
This is my line in the sand. I will not be dictated to by morons.
Is it smart to prepare for a test? I wonder if creators of IQ tests incorporate a curve for that.
I wonder if creators of IQ tests incorporate a curve for that
They could control for the number of places the test has been used and for how long and I suppose they would initially mark me down when the test was new to me but familiar to people who had taken it before.
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They are not, but you have to understand what they measure. They are very much like CPU benchmarks, except that they measure a degree of literacy, numeracy and abstract reasoning.
One reason that IQ test scores before adjustment have been steadily rising in the West seems to be that children are getting better at abstract reasoning, perhaps because of greater exposure to interactive testing.
IQ scores are useful in some areas. But the tests usually take no more than an hour. They are therefore utterly useless for measuring the ability to carry out longer and more complex tasks. They may show that under ideal conditions you can recognise a pattern quickly, but they say almost nothing about how well you will recognise patterns in data after studying it for many hours - the kind of aptitude you need for a PhD, or for designing a complex program.
Going back to the computer analogy, mobile phones these days have CPUs as fast as desktop computers. But they can’t handle demanding tasks. Why? Because they are limited by heat build up and battery life. The same CPU in a phone and a laptop will give very different results. The same “human CPU” in different bodies with different development of the rest of the brain will give very different results.
Hawking’s point is that people who boast about their IQ presumably usually do so because they have no other achievements worth mentioning. Trump does it because he is quite extraordinarily thin skinned and is monstrously over-entitled. In another environment without being lifted by his rich father, he’d be compensating for his lousy job by boasting about his gun collection.
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BTW, I reckon taking multiple tests did make you smarter, but only in very specific ways, and temporarily at that, for the most part. But why not? If you wanted to see how much weight you could lift, what’s the point unless you give it a red-hot go? There’s no hard limit on how bad a day you might be having, but your best is your best.
And despite naysayers condemning IQ as entirely worthless, most of the questions in these tests genuinely test real-world abilities; I’d guess about two thirds of it is relevant to my job as a bike mechanic.
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If Scientology works, why don’t we see any Operating Thetans flying around fixing the Universe with their amazing mind powers?
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Relevant to this thread is that Toksvig is interested in other people and helps them expand, while Fry is interested in Fry and leaves them to get on with it. It’s an example of how what I suspect are very similar IQs manifest themselves in very different ways.
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Nothing but the last bit sounds very out there, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that one of the smartest folks on the planet world be working on a link between science and theology. Furthermore, it’s certainly worth thinking twice before dismissing ideas from someone who may be a lot smarter than you.
I reckon you’ve gotta admire the balls on that assertion, too. I’ll have to check that out.
There aren’t enough likes in the day for this comment. Well said. And well said again.
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Maybe they already did.
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And it’s really anyone’s guess how smart someone outside of their field of expertise is… isn’t Hawking one of these AI alarmists?
I really hope he doesn’t go the way of the aged physicist…
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That looks interesting! Although I’m afraid most of it will go over my head 
I’ve always scored above average on IQ tests but never paid much attention in school, because of this my maths education is lacking. How does this compare to Flatland? Is it a lot more complex?
You don’t? I do. Much like people with a high IQ, bodybuilders (or people who can bench a high amount) don’t necessarily have the skills or the supporting muscles to do anything useful with that bulk.
There are many fun video’s to be found of bodybuilders losing to much less buff competitive armwrestlers. The amount you bench, the height of your IQ, it all means nothing if you can’t apply it.
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That was surely his point.
I’m 95% sure he was quoting The Simpsons, but I’ve grown old enough to see things quoting/parodying the Simpsons be mistaken for the originators of the things themselves.
It’s even stranger when people say something is from “The Simpsons” when The Simpsons was parodying something else. Ex. “That elevator full of blood thing is from The Simpsons.”
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IKR? All that time and money and Tom Cruise still can’t fly by himself. As long as there is one Suppressive Person within a hundred miles, it’s like kryptonite.
They’re pretty good at ghostly firefighting:
http://www.xenu-directory.net/practices/ot-wins.html
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Hell’s Teeth, they are fucking mad!
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