May I recommend the following piece of music to enjoy while reading: open in new window.
I recently found out that I have an exceptional IQ.
My…
I…
Q…
is…
zero*. I was not happy. I took the exam and stuffed it in the mouth of the examiner, which I thought should get me at least one point for a slam dunk. Alas, Alan Quantick, 57, of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, was an old bore and called security.
Consider the following question (this was an example, before the test had begun!):
For the following series of numbers, select the number that should replace the question mark.
1,2,3,4,?
Is it 1, 7, 3, 4, or 5?
True answer = how can we possibly know?, or whatever I say it is. Supposedly, the right answer is 5. Why? If the question was ‘what do you think most humans would put in place of the question mark?’, ‘What number produces the sequence of minimum entropy?’ (even then I think the answer might be 1 or 0), ‘do you speak English?’, or even ‘Play ball cunt!’, then yeah I’d put 5, but I honestly don’t see how 5 is a meaningful answer to the question. In short the question asks you to perform induction, which any a-hole knows is not valid. No matter how far Al Gore goes up a scissor lift it remains not valid.
It isn’t intelligence to play ball, or to find similarities between objects, intelligence is the ability to hold contradictory beliefs. Thus I saw the best answer to every question to be ‘How should I know? Now shimmy off you old bastard!’.
Didn’t wanna do well anyway mate,
* I realise that in actuality getting zero points on a test doesn’t give you an IQ of zero. The number of standard deviations from the norm given a hypothetically perfect test i.e. in comparison to an infinite number of humans on a test that no-one scores zero on, would still depend on the minimum number scored by any human. Therefore lets assume a sample of 8 billion (global population) from a normal distribution, with mean = 100**, and standard deviation = 15. Then the IQ that is likely to be attained by the lowest scoring human is 5 ish:
I’m ignoring higher order terms. i.e. the lowest IQ that we would expect exactly 1 person to have in a sample of 8 billion humans is 5ish. However having a score of zero on any good test (that scores no-one else at zero) would yield a negative IQ. I could have said -infinity but I thought that didn’t have the same oomph as zero. So sue me.
** Why is the mean 100? Why not 0? And why not make the sd equal to 1?***
*** More the the point, why bother?