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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2819 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 22, 2023

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I can’t do shape rotator exercises (raven’s progressive matrices, 90% of ‘aptitude’ / non-verbal IQ tests). I have what is probably the strongest ‘verbal tilt’ I’ve ever heard of. I really do score 99th percentile on verbal and somewhere around 60th percentile on spatial. I did much better than that in actual math, but I think some have speculated that math can go both ways, such that there are both verbal and non-verbal reasoning ways of doing it.

The sad thing is that I genuinely enjoy doing them (matrices / ‘pick the bottom right shape’), but anything above intermediate difficulty (I bought a German puzzle book that categorizes them nicely) and I can stare at it for an hour and not figure it out.

Any other wordcels here? Do you think it’s affected your ‘real’ life?

The lopsided verbal is a Jewish thing.

I misread thing as thug, assumed that this must be some sort of sentence anagram, and wasted about twenty minutes of my commute trying to work it out.

I need better glasses.

Blind ass

B Islands?

Do you have Aphantasia, an inability to visualize in your mind's eye? I do and am horribly at shape rotation.

hmm. I think I almost do too, but seem ok with shape rotation, though i’m way better at math. Interesting hypothesis

Here is a test: Did you know that it is normal for people to see images in their mind's eye when they read books?

I don’t think so, I can visualize shapes and scenes in my head I think, although perhaps less well than others can.

Based on my SAT scores, I'm probably more of a wordcel. But probably not as much of a drastic difference as you. I'm probably 95-99 percentile verbal. And 80-90th spatial.

In a different era I might have gone down the route of being a lawyer. Programming and spatial thinking was in too high of a demand though. So I ended up as a web developer.

Its been a weird career progression. I find that my intelligence set is not expected for a programming job, or it is expected, but I'm expected to quickly turn into a manager. I can keep up great in meetings, and communicate with a bunch of people on difficult topics. But then when I am left to do greenfield expansion into new areas (a place where the shape-rotators thrive) I'm left confused and lost.

But I found my way into a job that is more wordcel oriented and my shape-rotators skills are rarely called upon. It has been nice and relaxing.

wow. this is leaving me with a lot to think about. Maybe programming wasn’t the right career, and i should embrace the management? hmmm

What’s the book, please?

Can you share one that you struggled with? I'm wondering how I'd fare. I'm very much the opposite with weak verbal skills.

I can do the problems in RPMs, it's not easy, but in general, I do what I did for the example you linked to, which is decompose the pattern into primitives, verbally reason through how each one evolves, and then get the answer.

I believe in the example linked, it's 5.

Another trick I learned to help with my poor visuo-spatial imagination relates to the questions where you're shown multiple angles of a single die, then asked to say what a hidden side shows. If I have pen and paper, that's easy enough, but if not, I make a fist, and then imagine each aspect corresponds to a symbol, and then I can see the answer easily enough.

I would say that I'm a 99.999(9 or 99) wordcel, and about 75th percentile in terms of shape-rotating. I was good at maths till 10th grade, but in the 11th, I began to struggle both because my ADHD made my eyes glaze over during calculus and trig, and in the case of the latter, I missed several introductory classes. I remember seeing my personal tutor in maths raising an eyebrow and asking if that's how they taught me to solve trigonometric identities in class, breaking everything down into the smallest factors and then trying to make them cancel out, whereas the way the later questions were designed required you to memorize the equalities if you wanted to have any hope of solving them in a useful time span. I did better at stats and algebra.

I didn't really have much in the way of internet access at the time, I'm confident that with the quality of mathematical education found on YouTube and elsewhere, combined with the ADHD meds I was started on in med school, is have done much better. I'd certainly have killed to have access to GPT-4, I rely on it heavily for didactic purposes.

I'd certainly have gotten into a better med school!

At any rate, medicine is close to an ideal career in my particular case, the closest a typical doctor comes to using applied maths is figuring out drug dosages, and you're unlikely to need stats or calc at all unless you're doing research. 50% of it is rote-memorization, and ~50% is having the fluid intelligence to figure out the implications of the facts you memorized. Medicine is counter-intuitive enough with all the edge cases that you can't just work backwards and figure everything out from first principles.

I've only given a standardized IQ test once, for a job application, and I never saw the figures, but the recruiter told my girlfriend (who also happened to have applied!) that I scored very highly. I also scored >99% in the standardized aptitude tests (disguises IQ tests) many Indian students receive towards the end of schooling. I did a full RPM once through an app, and got a score of 130 IQ, but it wasn't proctored so the reader is welcome to weight that as they please. I know that I'm very strong verbally since I beat out about 2 million other people in an exam that measures aptitude in English in a standardized manner, being literally first, with a nice cheque that went towards a gaming pc and time on the podium with some very famous people. I remember being a little embarrassed that the cute girl who came second was far more academically illustrious than me, but a win's a win, she can cry on the pile of money she's likely sleeping on 🙏.

Back to medicine, as long as I have pharmaceutically enhanced diligence, I've yet to run into anything I simply can't understand, and I think I do a decent enough job at it. I managed to teach myself most of it, given that I was very depressed for most of my time in school, and we had about a year where classes were irregular due to political turmoil causing financial issues. But I passed whatever the GMC threw at me with flying colors, so I have a great deal more confidence and less conviction that I'm an impostor in a white lab coat these days haha.

I would say that I'm a 99.999(9 or 99) wordcel

99.99999th percentile would be one of the top 1000 people on the planet in terms of verbal IQ. Pretty impressive!

Maybe 5 9s could be pushing it (well past the margin of error or inter-test variability, the same score that got me 1st one year was an 8th in another), but I'll stand by 4 of them.

I think the test breaks down at that level. I'll grant you that you're say one in a thousand, maybe ten thousand. Maybe even one in a hundred thousand. But if you were one of the top thousand people on the planet...I'd think that your writing would be better than it now is. Not that it isn't very good...but is it 'top 1,000 people writing in English who are alive today'? Not all that sure.

Also: do you have classmates that could memorize entire encyclopedias or medical texts, word for word? I've seen people do some fairly impressive feats of memorization - such as 'memorizing a 100-slide PowerPoint deck after reading it once and tell people that a thing came from slide 67'. No, he wasn't autistic, as far as I know.

It was a test of one's general command over English, not literary talent, which is far more subjective and difficult to evaluate. I certainly don't claim I'm in the top 1000 of living writers myself.

do you have classmates that could memorize entire encyclopedias or medical texts, word for word?

Not where I could see them, at the very least.

Can you link to the English exam? I’m very curious. The stratification required to differentiate (unambiguously) between 1st and 2nd place among 2 million test takers must be pretty high.

I'd love to, but given that my name's in the papers from when I won, I'd be doxxing myself. I arguably already have!

I was good at maths till 10th grade, but in the 11th, I began to struggle both because my ADHD made my eyes glaze over during calculus and trig, and in the case of the latter, I missed several introductory classes.

Basically had the same experience, thankfully did go to the best school available(in Russia there is an alternative way to get into, bypassing the SAT analogue), but picked up personal tutor gig as a side hustle and had to learn all of it anyway.

Offtopic question but how saturated is the personal tutor market in India? Here it is not all, almost any 95th percentile and higher can earn decent money from it, while working remotely, people most often just don't consider this an option.

I'd say it's gotten about as saturated as the market can bear, and believe me the demand is massive. Everyone wants their kids to have a leg up, and the quality of education even in the better schools is questionable, in part because the school teachers correctly expect that their students will be going elsewhere for in-depth coaching.

Most personal tutors who make a name for themselves aim to move past one-on-one coaching to larger batches, it's just more lucrative that way. There are plenty of large coaching/Ed-tech companies, but we've crossed Peak Education, because the billion dollar Byjus disintegrated.

Back to medicine, as long as I have pharmaceutically enhanced diligence, I've yet to run into anything I simply can't understand, and I think I do a decent enough job at it.

Medicine is not massively g-loaded, is it? It's mostly memorisation, hence the popular med school anki subreddit. I can't think of anything day-to-day that actually requires reasoning about. I think it's why doctors suck at thinking from first principles and shut down when you ask them about something outside their "training set".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC165701/

47 (9%) doctors were no longer on the Medical Register. They had lower A level grades than those who were still on the register (P < 0.001). A levels also predicted performance in undergraduate training, performance in postregistration house officer posts, and time to achieve membership qualifications (Cox regression, P < 0.001; b=0.376, SE=0.098, exp(b)=1.457). Intelligence did not independently predict dropping off the register, career outcome, or other measures. A levels did not predict diploma or higher academic qualifications, research publications, or stress or burnout. Diplomas, higher academic degrees, and research publications did, however, significantly correlate with personality measures.

Results of achievement tests, in this case A level grades, which are particularly used for selection of students in the United Kingdom, have long term predictive validity for undergraduate and postgraduate careers. In contrast, a test of ability or aptitude (AH5) was of little predictive validity for subsequent medical careers.

This is the best I could find with my Google-fu.

Medicine is usually brutally competitive and meritocratic to get into, or it certainly is in India, so there's a lot of filtering for g going on before people enter the training program.

I would be immensely surprised if IQ didn't correlate well with performance in the profession, as it does with job performance on pretty much anything anyone ever cared to check.

I don't deny that there's a great deal of memorization involved (I did say the same myself), but you have to keep in mind that med school != clinical medicine. As for "massively g-loaded", what's your definition for "massive"?

It certainly rewards tenacity and conscientiousness, especially when you clear the minimum IQ bar, and doctors are significantly above average, on average.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2002-hauser.pdf

At the top of the list, in the low 130’s, are either physicians and surgeons or professors and researchers, depending on the study you look at. The range amongst physicians and surgeons is tightly clustered, whereas the range for professors and researchers is broader. Below that, in the high 120’s are lawyers, followed by accountants in the low 120’s. Pharmacists average around 120 and nurses in the high 110’s. You can find a link to the full list with more professions in the description.

(Quoting the person quoting Gwern's post)

How much of that is due to pre-selection, and how much it matters after you're in? Shrug.

I think that the average researcher is way more determined than the average doctor - it's not uncommon for researchers to have been preparing for careers in research since they were in junior high school. I've known researchers who, as undergrads, answered emails and worked on projects from ER hospital beds. Well, one - but the rest of the lab didn't think it was that big a deal that her boss asked her to do work from the hospital bed and mildly reprimanded her for thinking it was a bit much.

Put it this way: plenty of researchers could do the equivalent of passing the anatomy final on day one of medical school. Very few doctors could have done the same.

I would be immensely surprised if IQ didn't correlate well with performance in the profession, as it does with job performance on pretty much anything anyone ever cared to check.

I actually believe this isn't the case so much, at least for the median. The reason for this is partially what you already mentioned, extreme pre-filtering. This is then combined with very generous compensation, practically ironclad employment security, limited opportunities for career advancement and a high work load. This strongly incentivices defection on the part of doctors.

I have no doubt that almost all doctors I meet are intelligent, whether they're a good doctor or not depends on whether they're diligent and actually interested in their work, not their relative intelligence within the doctor cohort.

This isn't unique to doctors either, mind you. It happens in all professions with sufficient compensation, status and employment security. People get satisfied and check out.

People get corrupted and intelligence isn't a protection against that. You can't really tell beforehand whose going to be a hard worker either.

I can believe that doctors average 130 IQ (though it seems a little high), and I totally expect that IQ correlates with performance.

Maths is far more g loaded than medicine. People who study maths will talk about eventually hitting a wall and no longer being able to progress. At a certain level you no longer have the cognitive power to comprehend the ideas.

I've never heard anyone talk in such a way about medicine. In medicine it seems like there is not much to "understand". Is it possible to get stuck on a question in medicine and not understand the answer? My impression is no. Are there 10x or 100x doctors? Doctors who can do things the average doctor can't?

Maths is far more g loaded than medicine. People who study maths will talk about eventually hitting a wall and no longer being able to progress. At a certain level you no longer have the cognitive power to comprehend the ideas.

yes, math is probably the highest g-loading, along with physics. This is why months back I argued that Elon is not as smart as top mathematicians and theoretical physicists, which got a lot of rebuke, but I think is still true.

Are there 10x or 100x doctors? Doctors who can do things the average doctor can't?

Unlike programming, doctors don't scale, so the impact of superlative talent is bounded. But in my experience, the best doctors end up becoming super-specialists, especially in surgery, and act as the last port of call when use normies don't cut it. So it's not that they can do everything significantly better than the average doctor, but they cover the cases we can't.

Is it possible to get stuck on a question in medicine and not understand the answer?

Not particularly, unless you're in research or doing something particularly complicated in neurology or biochemistry.

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