People seem to treat it in a fatalistic way, like they’ve been told what their score will be at the end of the game, as opposed to one of their base stats (like finding out how tall you are). I tested myself on the big 5 lately and finding out I have a fairly extreme baseline on things like neuroticism and intellect been surprisingly valuable for understanding myself.
I understand there are also subcategories of IQ, and I am interested to know if there’s an IQ test I can take which gives me info on a variety of the more robust components of IQ (whatever they are, I don’t actually know). I could imagine this giving me advice of the type “In general try strongly to use verbal reasoning over spacial reasoning, and if you’re in a situation where spacial reasoning is necessary, make a conscious plan to put in more deliberate practice than seems necessary for the median similarly smart person around you who is learning the same skill.” If I expected to get 3+ big recommendations like that I think I’d be quite excited to pay for a test.
I think that having IQ tie more closer to your decisions might help people understand it than if it’s just an abstract immutable number that says you’re worse than these other people, and having it be multifactorial could be a way to help there?
But unless I can actually tie it to some decisions, I do expect finding out my IQ to make me depressed on net. Perhaps I can just use it to figure out whether or not it’s on the table for me to do math at MIRI, though my sense is that philosophical sophistication is much more the bottleneck there.
People seem to treat it in a fatalistic way, like they’ve been told what their score will be at the end of the game, as opposed to one of their base stats (like finding out how tall you are). I tested myself on the big 5 lately and finding out I have a fairly extreme baseline on things like neuroticism and intellect been surprisingly valuable for understanding myself.
I understand there are also subcategories of IQ, and I am interested to know if there’s an IQ test I can take which gives me info on a variety of the more robust components of IQ (whatever they are, I don’t actually know). I could imagine this giving me advice of the type “In general try strongly to use verbal reasoning over spacial reasoning, and if you’re in a situation where spacial reasoning is necessary, make a conscious plan to put in more deliberate practice than seems necessary for the median similarly smart person around you who is learning the same skill.” If I expected to get 3+ big recommendations like that I think I’d be quite excited to pay for a test.
I think that having IQ tie more closer to your decisions might help people understand it than if it’s just an abstract immutable number that says you’re worse than these other people, and having it be multifactorial could be a way to help there?
But unless I can actually tie it to some decisions, I do expect finding out my IQ to make me depressed on net. Perhaps I can just use it to figure out whether or not it’s on the table for me to do math at MIRI, though my sense is that philosophical sophistication is much more the bottleneck there.