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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2820 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 22, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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!

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