To map the raw score out of 60 to a population (normalize) you would need to control for biases like free time. For example, with the cooperation of institutions, it could officially replace an hour of school or work. You can look up such normalization tables for this test.
There's no time limit on the test either, so people could take arbitrarily long.
But it seems from what's written at the start that what they're looking for is correlations between the different types of questions, rather than scores across people
No, not in any way. Ability to be present for a test does not have any bearing whatsoever on cognitive ability, nor does any test on the planet account for whether or not the taker is present.
I think the suggestion is that people who have less free time might be in more of a rush to complete the test, and that surely affects test results without indicating cognitive ability.
I’m going to guess this is an economically comfortable person with lots of free time imagining that people less well off have none. To an approximation, that trend is surely true - poor people have less free time - but almost everyone can find time to do things they want to do. Would it skew results? Hard to say.
Its an modern open-source and collaborative resource of IQ style questions for research studies. IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential (spoiling its utility as a metric since the questions can be trained... setting aside its dubious usefulness as a hiring tool anyway).
It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.
>IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential
Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?
It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.
The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.
The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
> The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.
IQ is meant for population statistics. For that purpose it's a great scientific tool.
> socioeconomic status
No. A real IQ test tries to cancel out educational level from the score by comparing people in buckets of age, education and a few other importance factors.
A systematic deviation of education quality in the same "level" is not possible to cancel out, making IQ indirectly measure socioeconomic status. Hence why the us governments banned IQ on the basis or racism for government hiring.
You cannot measure two prople with 1/4th of a IQ test (logic puzzle is only one part of a full test) and make any useful statistical conclusions. A domain specific interview question or aptitude test a much clearer value to hiring prococess.
If IQ was one of the best predictors of job training success, it would be used everywhere. Instead, very few companies use it. There's a persistent myth that IQ isn't more widely used because of legal concerns, but that can't be right, because IQ and general cognitive tests are used by several of the largest companies (with the deepest pockets for discrimination suits) in North America --- and, further, the Griggs v. Duke jurisprudence that roots the myth doesn't have any force outside the US, where... IQ testing is not generally used in employment.
I don't know what the "self-assuaging fantasy" is supposed to mean, but you can read Cosma Shalizi to see how any set of tests structured like IQ tests are necessarily give rise to a "g" fact, even if you randomly generate them. I feel like I don't have to assuage myself too much that math works.
>i feel like a website like this goes against that
what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?
The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.
Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...
These tests serve no purpose outside of academic studdies. Distributing them for people to self-score sully their scientific value, and perpetuate their use for unsound usecases.
IQ is limited because it only looks at one facet and it generalizes a lot. Tests that look both into ability and aptitude, and especially those who split them by domain are much more relevant and applicable to real world scenarios.
IQ does actually measure quite widely, but only one of many parts (the visual pattern matching part) is widely know outside of academic use. But even then it should not be used for hiring or intelligence scoring people against one-another.
If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.
57. I got a ton of shape rotation problems. Figured out a strategy for those:
Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.
"You achieved a total score of 50! This means that you are 70% higher than 13351 participants who have completed the test. The percentile score is calculated on-the-fly. This means that your percentile rank may change as more people complete the test."
Not sure this was worth 65 minutes of my time. Would have liked to see whether whatever this version of the ICAR60 is is pegged to a standardized (IQ) test score. I'm assuming the 13,000 people who have also taken this are not representative of the wider pop.
The self-selection bias is definitely something to consider. I’d guess people who feel relatively confident in their intelligence are more likely to take the test.
Bear in mind that while most questions are language-agnostic, some require the knowledge of the English alphabet and definitions of uncommon English words.
Readit News
Oh no, I'm retarded
>This means that you are 88.68% higher than 13391 participants who have completed the test.
Hmm
But this makes no sense doesn't it? It looks like the intention is
"You're score is higher than 88.68% of 13391 participants who have completed the test."
What it's literally saying is that 13391 participants got a score 88.68% lower than yours
Doesn't that skew things? That is a lot of time a lot of people don't have.
But it seems from what's written at the start that what they're looking for is correlations between the different types of questions, rather than scores across people
The irony of making such a big mistake while discussing cognitive ability...
It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.
Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?
It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.
The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.
The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.
> socioeconomic status
No. A real IQ test tries to cancel out educational level from the score by comparing people in buckets of age, education and a few other importance factors.
A systematic deviation of education quality in the same "level" is not possible to cancel out, making IQ indirectly measure socioeconomic status. Hence why the us governments banned IQ on the basis or racism for government hiring.
You cannot measure two prople with 1/4th of a IQ test (logic puzzle is only one part of a full test) and make any useful statistical conclusions. A domain specific interview question or aptitude test a much clearer value to hiring prococess.
I don't know what the "self-assuaging fantasy" is supposed to mean, but you can read Cosma Shalizi to see how any set of tests structured like IQ tests are necessarily give rise to a "g" fact, even if you randomly generate them. I feel like I don't have to assuage myself too much that math works.
what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?
The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.
Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...
If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.
Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.
Not sure this was worth 65 minutes of my time. Would have liked to see whether whatever this version of the ICAR60 is is pegged to a standardized (IQ) test score. I'm assuming the 13,000 people who have also taken this are not representative of the wider pop.
No idea what that means but I no longer want to see another cube for at least a few weeks :P