I don’t think anyone on Less Wrong has lied about their IQ.
Over 1000 people took the test. Statistically speaking, it should have included about 50 sociopaths. Not all sociopaths would necessarily lie on that question but considering that you’re going to have to explain why you think that none of the sociopaths lied (or pathological liars or borderlines or other types that are likely to have been included in the test results) you have chosen a position, or at least wording, which is going to be darned near impossible for you to defend.
To lie about your IQ would mean you’d have to know to some degree what your real IQ is, and then exaggerate from there.
No because to say “I know my IQ” when one doesn’t is also a lie, and that’s what it would be saying if they put ANY IQ in the box without knowing it.
iqtesk.dk is normed by Mensa Denmark, so it’s far more reliable than self-reports.
Mensa is a club not a professional IQ testing center. They’re not even legally allowed to give out scores anymore. Their test scores are not considered to be accurate. For one thing, they (and iqtest.dk) do not evaluate for learning disorders. One in six gifted people has a learning disorder. Learning disorders lower one’s score and so the test should be adjusted to reflect this.
The iqtest.dk scores ARE self-reported. That is to say, the user types the IQ score into the survey box themselves. In that way, they’re equally flawed to the other intelligence questions, not “more reliable than self-reports”.
I stopped here because the rest of the comment follows the same pattern. About every other sentence in your comment is irrational. LessWrong is going to eat you alive, honey. Get out while you’re ahead.
Over 1000 people took the test. Statistically speaking, it should have included about 50 sociopaths.
Not if LessWrong values truthseeking activities more than the general population, or considers lying/truth-fabrication a greater sin than the general population does, or if LessWrong just generally attracts less sociopaths than the general population. If over 1000 fitness enthusiasts take a test about weight, the statistics re: obesity are not going to reflect the general population’s. Considering the CRT scores of LessWrong and the nature of this website to admire introspection and truthseeking activities, I doubt that LW would be reflective of the general population in this way.
Lies are more than untrue statements; at least, in the context of self-reports, they are conscious manipulations of what one knows to be true. Someone might think they know their IQ because they’ve taken less reliable IQ tests, or because they had a high childhood IQ, or because they extrapolated their IQ from SAT scores, or for a host of other reasons. In this case they haven’t actually lied, they’ve just stated something inaccurate.
Someone could put an IQ when they have no idea what their IQ is, yes, in the sense that they have never taken a test of any sort and have no idea what their IQ would be if they took one, even an inaccurate one. I don’t think many people here would do that, though, because of the truthseeking reasons mentioned earlier.
Mensa is a club not a professional IQ testing center. They’re not even legally allowed to give out scores anymore. Their test scores are not considered to be accurate.
Mensa doesn’t need to be a professional IQ testing center for their normings to be accurate, however. I am also not sure how not accounting for learning disorders would seriously alter IQTest.dk’s validity over self-reports.
However, it’s inaccurate to say that because someone puts their number in the box from IQTest.dk that they’re “equally flawed” to the other intelligence questions. Someone who self-reports an IQ number, any number, may not know if that number was obtained using accurate methodology. It may be an old score from childhood, and childhood IQ scores vary wildly compared to adult IQ scores. It may be an extrapolation from SAT scores, as I mentioned above. There are a number of ways in which self-reported IQ differs from reported IQtest.dk IQ.
LessWrong is going to eat you alive, honey. Get out while you’re ahead.
This reads as unnecessarily tribalistic to me. I take it you think I am an undiscriminating skeptic? In any case, cool it.
I’d expect Less Wrongers to be more likely to be sociopaths than average. We’re generally mentally unusual.
Yeah, I am perfectly aware that the IQ score I got when I was three wasn’t valid then and certainly isn’t now. The survey didn’t ask “What’s a reasonable estimate of your IQ?”.
Not if LessWrong values truthseeking activities more than the general population, or considers lying/truth-fabrication a greater sin than the general population does, or if LessWrong attracts less sociopaths than the general population. If over 1000 fitness enthusiasts take a test about weight, the statistics re: obesity are not going to reflect the general population’s. Considering the CRT scores of LessWrong and the nature of this website to admire introspection and truthseeking activities, I doubt that LW would be reflective of the general population in this way.
That is why I used the wording “statistically speaking”—it is understood to mean that I am working from statistics that were generated on the overall population as opposed to the specific population in question. You are completely ignoring my point which is that you have chosen a position which is going to be more or less impossible to defend. That position was:
I don’t think anyone on Less Wrong has lied about their IQ.
It’s considered very rude to completely ignore someone’s argument and nit pick at their wording. That is what you just did.
Lies are more than untrue statements; at least, in the context of self-reports,
Now it’s like you’re trying to make up a new definition of the word lying so you can continue to think your ridiculous assessment that:
To lie about your IQ would mean you’d have to know to some degree what your real IQ is
By the common definition of the word “lie” producing a number when you do not know the number definitely does qualify as a lie. You’re not fooling me by trying to make a new definition of the word “lie” in this context. This behavior just looks ridiculous to me.
Mensa doesn’t need to be a professional IQ testing center for their normings to be accurate, however.
But they do need to provide a professional IQ testing service if they want their norms to mean something. The iqtest.dk might turn out to be a better indicator of visual-spatial ability than IQ, or it might discriminate against autistics, which LW might have an unusually large number of (seeing as how there are a lot of CS people here).
However, it’s inaccurate to say that because someone puts their number in the box from IQTest.dk that they’re “equally flawed” to the other intelligence questions.
Here you go twisting my wording. I specifically said:
In that way, they’re equally flawed to the other intelligence questions...
The only reason I’m responding to you is because I am hoping you will see that you need to do more work on your rationality. Please consider getting some rationality training or something.
The general population would contain 50 sociopaths to 1000; I don’t think LessWrong contains 50 sociopaths to 1000. Rationality is a truth-seeking activity at its core, and I suspect a community of rationalists would do their best to avoid lying consciously.
I am not sure what “the common definition of the word ‘lie’” is, especially since there are a lot of differing interpretations of what it means to lie. I know that wrong answers are distinct from lies, however. I think that a lot of LessWrong people might have put an IQ that does not reflect an accurate result. But I doubt that many LessWrong people have put a deliberately inaccurate result for IQ. Barring “the common definition” (I don’t know what that is), I’m defining “stating something when you know what you are stating is false” as a lie, since someone can put a number when they don’t know for sure what the true number is but don’t know that the number they are stating is false either.
I don’t know what you mean by “mean something” with respect to Mensa Denmark’s normings. They will probably be less accurate than a professional IQ testing service, but I don’t know why they would be inaccurate or “meaningless” by virtue of their organization not being a professional IQ testing service.
The only way I can think of in which the self-reported numbers would be more accurate than the IQTest.dk numbers is if the LW respondents knew that their IQ numbers were from a professional testing service and they had gone to this service recently. But since the test didn’t specify how they obtained this self-report, I can’t say, nor do I think it’s likely.
IQTest.dk uses Raven’s Progressive Matrices which is a standard way to measure IQ across cultures. This is because IQ splits between verbal/spatial are not as common. It wouldn’t discriminate against autistics, because it actually discriminates in favor of autistics; people with disorders on the autism spectrum are likely to score higher, not lower.
I’m not sure how the bolding of “in that way” bolsters your argument. Paraphrased, it would be “in the way that the user types the IQ score into the survey box themselves, the IQTest.dk questions are equally flawed to the other intelligence questions.” But this neglects to consider that the source of the number is different; they are self-reports in the sense that the number is up to someone to recall, but if someone types in their IQTest.dk number you know it came from IQTest.dk. If someone types in their IQ without specifying the source, you have no idea where they got that number from—they could be estimating, it could be a childhood test score, and so on.
Please consider getting some rationality training or something.
Remarks like these are unnecessary, especially since I’ve just joined the site.
Over 1000 people took the test. Statistically speaking, it should have included about 50 sociopaths.
Do you have statistics about how many sociopaths take extra-long online tests or how many sociopaths frequent rationalist forums? Or are you just talking about the percentage of sociopaths in the general population?
As a sidenote one would think that people willing to lie about their IQ would be positively correlated with people that look up Bayes’ birthdate before filling in their ‘estimation’. Anyone making a statistical analysis regarding this?
LessWrong is going to eat you alive, honey.
Downvoted for this statement and overall unnecessary rude tone.
I agree with that article and that’s exactly why I downvoted you. You were contemptuously calling someone ‘honey’ and behaving like an all-around dick that smirks at newcomers and warns them that the rest of us will chew them up. That’s not what I want to see belong here and I won’t be a pacifist about it when you’re behaving like a weed.
I agree with that article and that’s exactly why I downvoted you.
I read the article again very carefully, trying to figure out whether Eliezer was advocating weeding people for behaving the way that I did. The article is about keeping “fools” out of the “garden of intelligent discussion”. It says nothing about the tone of posts and what tones should be weeded.
contemptuously calling someone ‘honey’
Actually, that was intended to make the tone friendlier. I acknowledge that this is not the way that you perceived it. My feeling is not contempt. I just don’t think he is likely to contribute constructively.
behaving like an all-around dick that smirks at newcomers and warns them that the rest of us will chew them up
I like newcomers. The sole problem here was that about half of what this specific newcomer said was irrational.
I won’t be a pacifist about it when you’re behaving like a weed.
That is exactly how I felt when I saw alfredmacdonald posting a bunch of irrational thoughts in this place for rationality. Are we both doing something wrong, then? The tone of your last comment doesn’t look any different to me than the tone of my comments. Is it that you feel that using a tone like this is never justified and we’ve both made a mistake or is it that you believe it’s okay to speak like this to people you feel are rude, but not to people you think are being irrational?
Is it that you feel that using a tone like this is never justified and we’ve both made a mistake or is it that you believe it’s okay to speak like this to people you feel are rude
I speak to you like this because the simple explanation of “I downvoted you for excessive rudeness” doesn’t seem to satisfy you, to the point that you keep asking me for further clarification (and re-asked me when I ignored your first question). So I have to change my tone, because though the repetition of the same clarification “I downvoted you for excessive rudeness” should be adequate, you don’t get it.
Let me mention that I won’t continue discussing this, and if you continue pestering me you’ll be incentivize me to not offer any clarification at all for future downvotes towards your person, to just downvote you without explanation.
I see that you’re not interested in discussing the original issue that started this. I know that everyone has limited energy, so I accept this. It feels important to mention that none of my comments were written with an intent to pester you. I am not disagreeing with you about how you experienced them—different people experience things differently. I only mean to tell you that I did not intend to cause you this experience.
My intent was to understand your point of view better to see if our disagreement over whether a cold tone is justified for the purpose of garden-keeping would be resolved or if I would learn anything.
I hope you can see that despite our disagreement about how to protect the quality of the discussion area, we both care about whether the quality of the discussion area is good, and are willing to take action to protect it. I am not trying to troll; this wasn’t for “lulz”. I am doing it because I care. We have that one thing in common.
For this reason, I would prefer to use a friendly or neutral tone with you in the future. You may or may not be interested in putting this difference aside in order to have smoother interactions in the future, but I am willing to, so I invite you to do the same.
Do you have statistics about how many sociopaths take extra-long online tests …
The verbiage “statistically speaking” was supposed to imply an acknowledgement that I know that the statistics were based on the overall population, not the specific context.
As a sidenote one would think that people willing to lie about their IQ would be positively correlated with people that look up Bayes’ birthdate before filling in their ‘estimation’. Anyone making a statistical analysis regarding this?
Ooh. This is a very, very good point. And if the survey participants really wanted to look gifted, they’d have probably decided that fudging the Bayes question was a necessity. I added your thought to my IQ accuracy comment. Upvote.
Downvoted for this statement and overall unnecessary rude tone.
Thank you for explaining your downvote.
Is it that you disagree with Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism or that you do this in a different way? If you have some different method, what is it?
Note: It’s probably inevitable that someone will ask me why I seem to agree with the spirit of this article, if I don’t believe in “elitism”. My answer is, succinctly, that humans seek like-minded people to hang out with, that this is part of fulfilling one’s social needs, and that it’s silly to allow our attempt to get basic needs met to be politicized and called “elitism” just because we gather around intellectualism when it is no different from the desire of a single mom to spend some time out with adults because children can’t have the same conversations or the desire of hunting-minded people to engage in activities without vegetarians harping on them (or vice versa).
Over 1000 people took the test. Statistically speaking, it should have included about 50 sociopaths. Not all sociopaths would necessarily lie on that question but considering that you’re going to have to explain why you think that none of the sociopaths lied (or pathological liars or borderlines or other types that are likely to have been included in the test results) you have chosen a position, or at least wording, which is going to be darned near impossible for you to defend.
No because to say “I know my IQ” when one doesn’t is also a lie, and that’s what it would be saying if they put ANY IQ in the box without knowing it.
Mensa is a club not a professional IQ testing center. They’re not even legally allowed to give out scores anymore. Their test scores are not considered to be accurate. For one thing, they (and iqtest.dk) do not evaluate for learning disorders. One in six gifted people has a learning disorder. Learning disorders lower one’s score and so the test should be adjusted to reflect this.
The iqtest.dk scores ARE self-reported. That is to say, the user types the IQ score into the survey box themselves. In that way, they’re equally flawed to the other intelligence questions, not “more reliable than self-reports”.
I stopped here because the rest of the comment follows the same pattern. About every other sentence in your comment is irrational. LessWrong is going to eat you alive, honey. Get out while you’re ahead.
Not if LessWrong values truthseeking activities more than the general population, or considers lying/truth-fabrication a greater sin than the general population does, or if LessWrong just generally attracts less sociopaths than the general population. If over 1000 fitness enthusiasts take a test about weight, the statistics re: obesity are not going to reflect the general population’s. Considering the CRT scores of LessWrong and the nature of this website to admire introspection and truthseeking activities, I doubt that LW would be reflective of the general population in this way.
Lies are more than untrue statements; at least, in the context of self-reports, they are conscious manipulations of what one knows to be true. Someone might think they know their IQ because they’ve taken less reliable IQ tests, or because they had a high childhood IQ, or because they extrapolated their IQ from SAT scores, or for a host of other reasons. In this case they haven’t actually lied, they’ve just stated something inaccurate.
Someone could put an IQ when they have no idea what their IQ is, yes, in the sense that they have never taken a test of any sort and have no idea what their IQ would be if they took one, even an inaccurate one. I don’t think many people here would do that, though, because of the truthseeking reasons mentioned earlier.
Mensa doesn’t need to be a professional IQ testing center for their normings to be accurate, however. I am also not sure how not accounting for learning disorders would seriously alter IQTest.dk’s validity over self-reports.
However, it’s inaccurate to say that because someone puts their number in the box from IQTest.dk that they’re “equally flawed” to the other intelligence questions. Someone who self-reports an IQ number, any number, may not know if that number was obtained using accurate methodology. It may be an old score from childhood, and childhood IQ scores vary wildly compared to adult IQ scores. It may be an extrapolation from SAT scores, as I mentioned above. There are a number of ways in which self-reported IQ differs from reported IQtest.dk IQ.
This reads as unnecessarily tribalistic to me. I take it you think I am an undiscriminating skeptic? In any case, cool it.
I’d expect Less Wrongers to be more likely to be sociopaths than average. We’re generally mentally unusual.
Yeah, I am perfectly aware that the IQ score I got when I was three wasn’t valid then and certainly isn’t now. The survey didn’t ask “What’s a reasonable estimate of your IQ?”.
That is why I used the wording “statistically speaking”—it is understood to mean that I am working from statistics that were generated on the overall population as opposed to the specific population in question. You are completely ignoring my point which is that you have chosen a position which is going to be more or less impossible to defend. That position was:
It’s considered very rude to completely ignore someone’s argument and nit pick at their wording. That is what you just did.
Now it’s like you’re trying to make up a new definition of the word lying so you can continue to think your ridiculous assessment that:
By the common definition of the word “lie” producing a number when you do not know the number definitely does qualify as a lie. You’re not fooling me by trying to make a new definition of the word “lie” in this context. This behavior just looks ridiculous to me.
But they do need to provide a professional IQ testing service if they want their norms to mean something. The iqtest.dk might turn out to be a better indicator of visual-spatial ability than IQ, or it might discriminate against autistics, which LW might have an unusually large number of (seeing as how there are a lot of CS people here).
Here you go twisting my wording. I specifically said:
The only reason I’m responding to you is because I am hoping you will see that you need to do more work on your rationality. Please consider getting some rationality training or something.
The general population would contain 50 sociopaths to 1000; I don’t think LessWrong contains 50 sociopaths to 1000. Rationality is a truth-seeking activity at its core, and I suspect a community of rationalists would do their best to avoid lying consciously.
I am not sure what “the common definition of the word ‘lie’” is, especially since there are a lot of differing interpretations of what it means to lie. I know that wrong answers are distinct from lies, however. I think that a lot of LessWrong people might have put an IQ that does not reflect an accurate result. But I doubt that many LessWrong people have put a deliberately inaccurate result for IQ. Barring “the common definition” (I don’t know what that is), I’m defining “stating something when you know what you are stating is false” as a lie, since someone can put a number when they don’t know for sure what the true number is but don’t know that the number they are stating is false either.
I don’t know what you mean by “mean something” with respect to Mensa Denmark’s normings. They will probably be less accurate than a professional IQ testing service, but I don’t know why they would be inaccurate or “meaningless” by virtue of their organization not being a professional IQ testing service.
The only way I can think of in which the self-reported numbers would be more accurate than the IQTest.dk numbers is if the LW respondents knew that their IQ numbers were from a professional testing service and they had gone to this service recently. But since the test didn’t specify how they obtained this self-report, I can’t say, nor do I think it’s likely.
IQTest.dk uses Raven’s Progressive Matrices which is a standard way to measure IQ across cultures. This is because IQ splits between verbal/spatial are not as common. It wouldn’t discriminate against autistics, because it actually discriminates in favor of autistics; people with disorders on the autism spectrum are likely to score higher, not lower.
I’m not sure how the bolding of “in that way” bolsters your argument. Paraphrased, it would be “in the way that the user types the IQ score into the survey box themselves, the IQTest.dk questions are equally flawed to the other intelligence questions.” But this neglects to consider that the source of the number is different; they are self-reports in the sense that the number is up to someone to recall, but if someone types in their IQTest.dk number you know it came from IQTest.dk. If someone types in their IQ without specifying the source, you have no idea where they got that number from—they could be estimating, it could be a childhood test score, and so on.
Remarks like these are unnecessary, especially since I’ve just joined the site.
In principle, one could make up a number or insert a number other than what they got. But I don’t think a nontrivial fraction of respondents did that.
Do you have statistics about how many sociopaths take extra-long online tests or how many sociopaths frequent rationalist forums? Or are you just talking about the percentage of sociopaths in the general population?
As a sidenote one would think that people willing to lie about their IQ would be positively correlated with people that look up Bayes’ birthdate before filling in their ‘estimation’. Anyone making a statistical analysis regarding this?
Downvoted for this statement and overall unnecessary rude tone.
Perhaps you became busy or something and did not have a chance to respond to my comment, but I am still curious about this:
I agree with that article and that’s exactly why I downvoted you. You were contemptuously calling someone ‘honey’ and behaving like an all-around dick that smirks at newcomers and warns them that the rest of us will chew them up. That’s not what I want to see belong here and I won’t be a pacifist about it when you’re behaving like a weed.
I read the article again very carefully, trying to figure out whether Eliezer was advocating weeding people for behaving the way that I did. The article is about keeping “fools” out of the “garden of intelligent discussion”. It says nothing about the tone of posts and what tones should be weeded.
Actually, that was intended to make the tone friendlier. I acknowledge that this is not the way that you perceived it. My feeling is not contempt. I just don’t think he is likely to contribute constructively.
I like newcomers. The sole problem here was that about half of what this specific newcomer said was irrational.
That is exactly how I felt when I saw alfredmacdonald posting a bunch of irrational thoughts in this place for rationality. Are we both doing something wrong, then? The tone of your last comment doesn’t look any different to me than the tone of my comments. Is it that you feel that using a tone like this is never justified and we’ve both made a mistake or is it that you believe it’s okay to speak like this to people you feel are rude, but not to people you think are being irrational?
I speak to you like this because the simple explanation of “I downvoted you for excessive rudeness” doesn’t seem to satisfy you, to the point that you keep asking me for further clarification (and re-asked me when I ignored your first question). So I have to change my tone, because though the repetition of the same clarification “I downvoted you for excessive rudeness” should be adequate, you don’t get it.
Let me mention that I won’t continue discussing this, and if you continue pestering me you’ll be incentivize me to not offer any clarification at all for future downvotes towards your person, to just downvote you without explanation.
I see that you’re not interested in discussing the original issue that started this. I know that everyone has limited energy, so I accept this. It feels important to mention that none of my comments were written with an intent to pester you. I am not disagreeing with you about how you experienced them—different people experience things differently. I only mean to tell you that I did not intend to cause you this experience.
My intent was to understand your point of view better to see if our disagreement over whether a cold tone is justified for the purpose of garden-keeping would be resolved or if I would learn anything.
I hope you can see that despite our disagreement about how to protect the quality of the discussion area, we both care about whether the quality of the discussion area is good, and are willing to take action to protect it. I am not trying to troll; this wasn’t for “lulz”. I am doing it because I care. We have that one thing in common.
For this reason, I would prefer to use a friendly or neutral tone with you in the future. You may or may not be interested in putting this difference aside in order to have smoother interactions in the future, but I am willing to, so I invite you to do the same.
What do you say?
The verbiage “statistically speaking” was supposed to imply an acknowledgement that I know that the statistics were based on the overall population, not the specific context.
Ooh. This is a very, very good point. And if the survey participants really wanted to look gifted, they’d have probably decided that fudging the Bayes question was a necessity. I added your thought to my IQ accuracy comment. Upvote.
Thank you for explaining your downvote.
Is it that you disagree with Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism or that you do this in a different way? If you have some different method, what is it?
Note: It’s probably inevitable that someone will ask me why I seem to agree with the spirit of this article, if I don’t believe in “elitism”. My answer is, succinctly, that humans seek like-minded people to hang out with, that this is part of fulfilling one’s social needs, and that it’s silly to allow our attempt to get basic needs met to be politicized and called “elitism” just because we gather around intellectualism when it is no different from the desire of a single mom to spend some time out with adults because children can’t have the same conversations or the desire of hunting-minded people to engage in activities without vegetarians harping on them (or vice versa).