Video games also have potential legal advantages over IQ tests for companies. You could argue that “we only hire people good at video games to get people who fit our corporate culture of liking video games” but that argument doesn’t work as well for IQ tests.

yet again an original post title that self-sneers

  • @bitofhope
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    1111 months ago

    The entire article reads like a stealth sneer.

    Is it “consistency of results on a single IQ test type”? Not really. Wikipedia says: […]

    That’s a best-case scenario for tests designed with that criteria as a priority, and the range is still significant.

    Is it “consistency of results across different IQ test types”? Not really; that’s obviously worse than the above, and many “non-IQ” tests have comparable consistency.

    Yea to be fair to IQ tests horoscopes are also really inconsistent.

    Is it “practice being mostly irrelevant”? Not really. A few practice runs can often be worth +8 points

    Is it “working for an unusually wide range of intelligence”? Not really. IQ tests are notorious for working poorly above ~135

    Wow, sounds like IQ tests kinda suck. Maybe we shouldn’t place so much importance on them.

    and I’d say they only really work well for -20 to +0 relative to the designers, with a somewhat wider range for teams.

    Source? I Made it Up

    My ACT score was in the top 0.1%, but I don’t feel particularly proud of that, because it wasn’t evaluating any of my actual strengths. I left college after a semester (while that was a failure from the perspective of society, school was holding me back intellectually) but I still took the GRE for…reasons…and got a top 1% score without studying, but that’s not something I consider particularly meaningful either. Here’s a theory of Alzheimer’s I developed - what test score does that correspond to? As for IQ tests, I had a couple proper ones as a kid, and my scores were probably as high as was very meaningful, but probably less impressive than reading Feynman in 3rd grade.

    Spoiler tagging this doesn’t make it not an irrelevant humblebrag.

    It might not be as objective, but people could compete on aesthetics too.

    Oh shit, this guy invented art competitions!

    When people smarter than the test designers take an IQ test, they often have to guess what the designers were thinking, but with video games, evaluation can be completely objective.

    Guessing what a test designer thinks is a cognitive task so surely high G people can do it better. I don’t see the problem.

    The bandwidth and scope possible with video games is much higher than with IQ tests. You can test people with bigger problems, like remembering the units in Wargame Red Dragon, and multidisciplinary challenges, like optimizing both cost and visuals of fireworks in Kerbal Space Program; そういえば、ゲームのウィキの英語を理解することはまたテストのもう一つの側面でしょう.

    Random-ass Japanese for no reason. Weeb detected. Ironic how the non-English sentence muses about testing proficiency in reading English.

    I propose that from here on out people will be ranked by a test that involves dad jokes and making spiteful remarks about TESCREAL fandom.

      • @bitofhope
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        610 months ago

        what test score does that correspond to?

        I dunno, let’s ask someone who peer reviewed it.

        • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
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          710 months ago

          When I was at school there was a kid who earnestly believed that he would, as an adult, build a nanobot machine to do modern day alchemy by rearranging the component particles of atoms, but he is, as far as I know, doing good and normal things out in the world today

          I find myself thinking about this story frequently in a sneering context

          • @selfMA
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            510 months ago

            I was that kid growing up, mostly for fantasies around AI and the singularity

            some of it was due to a natural pull towards reading a lot of sci-fi, but looking back a lot of it was indoctrination from the same folks who’d much later be responsible for the cultier strains of Silicon Valley thought. the idea was that the only way to become a great programmer who would change the world was to adopt certain clusters of ideas and hobbies, but the actual goal from the folks doing the indoctrinating was to turn as many young minds as possible into weirdo ancap libertarians with no personality outside of being exploitable labor

            • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
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              810 months ago

              It’s kind of amazing that when I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s you heard a lot of silly season rubbish about nanobots, grey goo, unlimited life extension, humanity living in pods, and all this, only to discover as an adult and AFTER having already begun to devote some amount of your free time to dunking on Eliezer Yudkowsky that actually it had all along all been coming out of this very specific media-oriented cult or proto-cult amongst the same people who were flogging Netscape and palm pilots

              • @selfMA
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                310 months ago

                fucking right? that’s what goes through my head when I sneer — tracing a line from jankily paying for unnecessary crap on eBay using an unregulated bank to those same mediocre assholes who could barely do an online bobcat bank having their own mythologies

          • @kuna
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            8 months ago

            deleted by creator

            • @gerikson
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              410 months ago

              I put charcoal into a potato mashing thing and squeezed, was disappointed when I got no diamonds.

    • @zogwarg
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      10 months ago

      and I’d say they only really work well for -20 to +0 relative to the designers, with a somewhat wider range for teams.

      I read this as:「These feeble minds cannot possibly measure my intelligence ! It’s over 9000 !」
      This «I am very smart» lad must’ve received a disappointing score, which I suspect explain a great deal of his rant, humblebrag and all.

      That or it is indeed satire (although too much effort as gone into the author’s blog, that if is satire it’s more sad than funny).

    • nyoooom
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      410 months ago

      Lol, in many video games figuring out what the developers had in mind gives huge advantages, that person probably isn’t very good at videogames lmai

  • Sailor Sega Saturn
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    1110 months ago

    You can test people with bigger problems, like remembering the units in Wargame Red Dragon

    The fact that this “bigger problem” is rote memorization aside, it looks like there are a whopping 1700 units in that game. With names like M113A3 Super Dragon, CH46-C Phrog, or LVTP-7A1. Imagine some horrible dystopian future where you get to lock yourself up in your room for a couple months with an Anki deck trying to memorize as many Wargame: Red Dragon units as possible.

    Your brain would probably be fried by the time you edge out the competition for your completely-non-Red-Dragon-related job.

  • unfaithful-functor
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    911 months ago

    not gonna lie i clicked to see if they mentioned any games im good at. ended up both disappointed they didn’t and disappointed at wtf im even reading.

    i propose we measure people based on how much they are able to enjoy sims 4.

  • @maol
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    910 months ago

    If you’re going to hiring discrimination*, don’t talk about your discrimination strategy in public.

    *(I assume the lesswrongeurs are assuming that IQ tests are going to be made illegal because black IQ test scores (on average) are lower than white IQ test scores (on average) and rather than interrogate this weird data the lesswrongeurs seem to have accepted as gospel that this test gap is immutable and possibly just the natural side effect of having melanin rather than a product of 100s of variables that had nothing to do with biology)

  • @selfMA
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    911 months ago

    I agree with the post title, but only because video games have value and IQ tests absolutely do not

    IQ tests are notorious for working poorly above ~135, and I’d say they only really work well for -20 to +0 relative to the designers, with a somewhat wider range for teams.

    wait so how do the IQ test designers get their IQs tested? if the scouter explodes when it measures your IQ, do you get to design the tests?

    Have you played something like Slay the spire? Or Mechabellum that is popular right now? Deck builders don’t require coordination at all but demands understanding of tradeoffs and managing risks. If anything those skills are neglected parts of intelligence.

    nice! by the Slay the Spire metric, I’ve got like a 180 IQ. time to dunk on these nerds

    (I’m also gonna download Mechabellum cause it looks like entirely my shit. not the first time I’ve ignored all of the “salient” points in a rat post and went straight for the game recommendations)

    • @froztbyte
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      710 months ago

      wait so how do the IQ test designers get their IQs tested?

      and moses came down from the mountain, bearing with him the holy slates of psychometry with which to measure which animals shall be allowed to board

      – (the actual reason there’s no more unicorna)

    • @mind@lemmy.world
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      -610 months ago

      video games have value and IQ tests absolutely do not

      IQ tests have proven to be a good predictor of job performance, health, and likelihood of being convicted for a crime.

      The main study for this was the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which took IQ tests and followed the same participants throughout their life. IQ was shown to be a better predictor than family income, and other factors.

      Being able to predict job performance has value for companies who want long-term reliable employees. It has value for schools and students so that those struggling can get additional help before bigger problems pop up.

      • David GerardOPMA
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        10 months ago

        and likelihood of being convicted for a crime.

        do you think there are any confounding factors there

        EDIT: actually, forget it, you’ve been deleting and reposting to try to promote this stuff, bye now

        • @selfMA
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          1110 months ago

          aw fuck, my baby’s first post defending iq got d-d-d-downvotes! the only high iq move here is to delete and repost it and then post a pop science youtube video that supports my point. that’ll show em who the real @mind in the room is

        • @mind@lemmy.world
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          -410 months ago

          The conclusions made about IQ were done after controlling for factors like race and family income, which you would know if you even did a cursory study of the research behind these tests, because you weren’t the first person to ask that. Controlling for confounding variables was always a big part of IQ research.

          I’m sure we both know that race and family income will have a big effect on life outcomes, regardless off who you are as a person. To account for that, you can control for both factors and see how IQ impacted life outcomes when those stay the same.

          According to the NLSY, a big study often referenced to establish how good IQ is as a predictor, shows that even with a race or income bracket, a higher IQ is linked to better life outcomes.

          • @froztbyte
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            810 months ago

            you know what, I’ll bite

            “just for kicks” I’ve run IQ tests at various times in my life, in various states of being (stressed, sick, tired, etc)

            the variance I got on the outputs have been up to 40 points wide across many cases.

            objective measure it is not.

            proxy indicator, very much so.

            the shit does not measure what you think it does.

            • 🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦
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              510 months ago

              @froztbyte @sneerclub Data point: at one time as a kid it occurred to a school counselor that maybe my grades were evidence that my supposed “potential” based on an earlier IQ test was wrong & that a new more modern version of the Stanford-Binet would reveal my imbecility. The 2nd test came out 60+ points higher than the 1st. That couldn’t be correct, so I ended up taking 2 more tests, both with scores in between but substantially different.
              Sure, IQ is real.

          • PJ Coffey
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            510 months ago

            @mind @dgerard

            IQ tests assume that there is a general intelligence that they’re measuring. That has never been found and if it _had_ then it would be compulsory learning at school.

            IQ tests are pretty good for measuring low attainment and problems, that’s what they were designed for.

      • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
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        410 months ago

        You know I misread this post due to the janky format of the new website and I just wanted you to understand as you go that I really thought you could have had something great with the version of this where you’re arguing that very defensive gamers are predicted to be more intelligent and do less crime than black people, but no: you just had to be the brainlet with the oldest fuckin’ “actually IQ test are real and magic” shtick on the internet

        • David GerardOPMA
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          10 months ago

          this is how we know nu-sneerclub* is a success

          * much as nu-metal

  • @mind@lemmy.world
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    -510 months ago

    Veritasium, a popular science channel on YouTube, released a video just a few days ago explaining what IQ is and how it works:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY

    IQ is not properly measured from a random website. If someone announced they have a 200 IQ because of some scam site, that doesn’t mean actual IQ tests are invalid. The problem is with that website, and the gullible test-taker.

    Every time I’ve heard someone say IQ tests are meaningless, 100% of the time they admit they’ve never heard of Spearman or the G factor, which would have been covered in a relevant Psychology course at university.

    It’s not everything in life, but IQ is real, measurable, and has value in predicting how well someone will do with various challenges in the future.

    • @blakestaceyMA
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      1110 months ago

      Every time I’ve heard someone say IQ tests are meaningless, 100% of the time they admit they’ve never heard of Spearman or the G factor, which would have been covered in a relevant Psychology course at university.

      Get ready for that percentage to go down.

    • David GerardOPMA
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      1110 months ago

      most of us here have heard of them, know the history of IQ in as much detail as you need to to counter race scientists, and understand perfectly well that it’s largely nonsense, but thanks anyway

      • @mind@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Neither the LessWrong post, nor my comment, even touched on race. Pretending like either did is a strawman. You can’t defend your position, so you call people racists when they never did anything of the sort.

        understand perfectly well that it’s largely nonsense

        There have been studies like the National Longitudinal Study of Youth that showed IQ could predict many different life outcomes.

        Do you think that test was fraudulent? Why are you dismissing research that is widely accepted, and published by professional psychologists who have meticulously documented their data?

        This entire debate reminds me of the climate change debate: One side that cites research, data, and knows the relevant concepts. Another side who doesn’t ever cite actual research, can’t elaborate on how they got to their conclusion, and dismisses the science without giving any reason.

        • @selfMA
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          1010 months ago

          You can’t defend your position, so you call people racists when they never did anything of the sort.

          drink! and so early in the day too

          • @froztbyte
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            710 months ago

            should we start bets on whether it’s zee in a mind suit (on a different instance)?

            • @selfMA
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              810 months ago

              shit, I’m just enjoying the worst parts of Reddit not realize their debatebro race scientist bullshit (likely copied from a textfile too, given the response speed) won’t work here til it’s entirely too late

              • @froztbyte
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                610 months ago

                it’s a bit amusing how literal-sealioning it is yeah

                wonder how long they can stay Novel

              • @future_synthetic
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                410 months ago

                You want to speak to the manager? It’s me, I am the manager.

            • David GerardOPMA
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              510 months ago

              our IQ minded friend has been escorted to the egress, so will doubtless continue responding but from servers we’re not reading from here

        • 🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦
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          510 months ago

          @mind @sneerclub Here’s the problem: that study DID NOT show that IQ could “predict” anything. It showed a CORRELATION but that’s a totally different thing. IQ is not determinative or causative of anything, because it is an entirely synthetic metric whose measurement is based on unproven and essentially unprovable theory.

          The concept of “Innate General Intelligence” which IQ purports to quantify is the phlogiston of psychology.

    • PJ Coffey
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      710 months ago

      @mind @dgerard

      This was debunked over 40 years ago.

      What is the reason for the pernicious resilience of the IQ myth?

      Spearman was never able to find a g. It’s always shown to be a statistical artefact.

      *smh* and then the fallacious comparison to climate change.

      IQ tests, in common with most “race science”, doesn’t produce good results.

      Climate change constantly does.

      You’re more like Room Temperature superconductors. (Which may even be becoming real! As opposed to IQ.)

      • David GerardOPMA
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        710 months ago

        What is the reason for the pernicious resilience of the IQ myth?

        starts with “r” (and ends “acists”)

          • @selfMA
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            510 months ago

            Timnit is amazing! this is going on my “watch today when work isn’t actively destroying my mind” list