The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Notes -
Congrats on a high score! Despite popular misconception, vocabulary is the best task to test general intelligence, being most highly correlated to other intelligence tasks:
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/which-test-has-the-highest-g-loading
Now, some criticisms of this particular test, which I took and received a humiliating 95th percentile, which feels too low for me, although to be fair I didn't take any time to think when I didn't immediately know the correct answer.
The test seems to be the same for everyone. It would work better if the difficulty increased/decreased depending on which questions are answered correctly, ala the GRE.
It feels too short. The luck of guessing correctly factors too highly.
I had some quibbles with the accuracy of some of the questions. I've written trivia (even an IQ test!) in the past. Some of these questions don't pass muster in my opinion, but I can't be certain because they didn't show the correct answers.
I think the scatter is probably too high. What this means is that there shouldn't be any questions "out of left field". The chances of answering any one question correctly should correlate highly with the chance of answering any other correctly. Their shouldn't be any terms that are extremely obscure (unless necessary) or require special knowledge. Avulse seems to fit the bill here. My spellchecker is currently flagging it, lol.
No test of this duration and rigor can possibly assign a score in the top 1%, let alone top 0.1%.
But don't listen to me, apparently I'm a moron. I'm also aware that this site is a pop culture site and does not claim any sort of scientific rigor.
There's no way you're 95th percentile unless you really weren't paying attention to the test! I'd suggest giving it again and more seriously this time haha.
I think there's a great deal of range restriction on the very extreme right, such that it's compressing the values that very talented people would score to distinguish themselves from each other. The highest it's possible to score is around 30.1k words and still the 0.01th percentile.
Funnily enough, I'm aware of avulse from avulsions, a type of wound we studied in trauma care in medicine. I'd still have been able to guess it was the right one from elimination, but I also would have heard it in other contexts.
Besides, it's just a fancy way of saying tear injuries as opposed to cuts and stabs.
I'm flattered that this indicates a high IQ, but I'm pretty sure my skill is highly lopsided, I'm an arch wordcel but only somewhat above average as a shape rotator, I don't think I'd make a good engineer or mathematician.
English has anywhere from a million to several million words depending on who you ask, and it only takes the knowledge of 10k of them to be considered fluent. I scored 30k here, but I suspect in a more exhaustive test I'd be at least a 100k if not more, as would many of the very high scorers all lumped in at 0.01th percentile.
Let's see. Here are 50 words chosen at random from a 178,000 Scrabble word set.
Actual, Assemblagists, Banteringly, Basks, Consubstantial, Cosmeticized, Cosmic, Curator, Disconcertingly, Fawns, Foreshowed, Fornical, Fugleman, Gadroon, Hoyles, Ices, Kingfishes, Lachrymose, Lemongrasses, Macrocytic, Merrymakings, Microbrewings, Mirthfully, Multilateral, Noncompetitors, Nyalas, Outstrip, Parliamentary, Pavise, Recheats, Reconfers, Relictions, Scrubs, Seg, Serfage, Shakinesses, Sweeneys, Telepathic, Teratomas, Terebene, Terrify, Topmast, Trachoma, Twaddle, Underclays, Unseated, View, Whoremongers, Wrinkly, Yen
30k does seem like a underestimate due to the ability to know words via construction. For example if I know kind, I also know kindly, unkindly, kindliness, etc...
The problem I guess is what happens to words that I've never used but that I can figure out with near 100% confidence: "microbrewings, banteringly, reconfers, etc..." I would say these DON'T count because you couldn't say that they are a real word or just made up.
And then there are words such as Candible and Fervifying that aren't in the Scrabble dictionary, but the meanings of which can be derived if you know the base words and suffixes.
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Yeah I think the word-count extrapolations are questionable here -- I am apparently in the top .15 %tile, at 29817 words; while it's entirely possible that you know 270 more words than I do (probably much more than that, because doctor!) I'm not sure how one would be able to tell from this test.
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Yeah I wouldn't really trust the tests on that page too much, I took their IQ test and got 158 on it, which a ridiculous overestimation based on the previous tests I took, where I got like 135-140.
I got 160 on that website as well and the cherry on top was the "Albert Einstein" banner that popped up below, actual fucking meme. My real IQ is probably around 130 as well, from educational/testing proxies.
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You're assuming that there's any way to distinguish between 135 and 158 on a short test. There's not. Longer tests aren't great at this either.
More Kirkegaard:
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/some-people-have-iqs-of-160
"Some people have IQs of 160 / But technical limitations make it difficult to say who exactly"
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