Comments on: Take Our Survey

By: John Maxwell

John Maxwell — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:02:06 +0000

Gee, this survey sounds really interesting. Can someone send me a link to the survey and possibly the results?

By: TGGP

TGGP — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:25:44 +0000

I don't believe IQ tests measure anything meaningful What you believe is dead wrong, if you consider predictive power in hordes of life outcomes to be "meaningful". You might want to read g: A precis

By: Kaj Sotala

Kaj Sotala — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:52:36 +0000

I picked “choose not to answer” when asked how much “ethical / spiritual considerations” (or something along those lines) influenced my answer. Reason being, I wasn’t sure of what was meant by that – in my view nearly all of the other reasons given would fall under the “ethical considerations” bit.

By: _Felix

_Felix — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:37:04 +0000

I don’t believe IQ tests measure anything meaningful, I don’t associate ethics with spirituality, I think obeying the law is important for selfish reasons but not the measure of a good citizen, and I never went to school or sat an exam but people tend to assume I have a degree. Therefore I had to rely on “prefer not to answer the question” a hell of a lot.

By: aaron

aaron — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 02:57:45 +0000

This also reminds me of something, occasionally you’ll see that the average IQ is about 104 and the military is slightly higher at 105. But the military doesn’t admit the lower end, so it won’t be as skewed. It probably has a lower mode (but probably still has two curves, there’s a small subpopulation of very intelligent people.).

By: aaron

aaron — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:57:13 +0000

Just thought of something.

The average american IQ is ~105. What’s the distribution?

I occasionally say to friends that “the average IQ is only 105, but probably none of you know anyone with that dumb, or even deal with one on a normal day.”

What’s the mode? I bet the frequency of injury, illness, and syndromes and the seeming upper bound/low instances of savants to cause the curve to be skewed negative (or have multiple distributions).

By: Doug S.

Doug S. — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:43:38 +0000

I didn’t get a $1 trillion question, just a $1 billion question. I hesitated there and in the end picked “prefer not to answer.” A billionaire is an extremely powerful person and assigning that much wealth to a random person may have negative consequences. (On the other hand, randomly making someone into a superhuman genius actually seems less likely to screw up the world; presumably they’d be smart enough to figure out that the world isn’t a zero-sum game and helping yourself means helping others and vice versa.)

By the way, it would be awesome if someone found $1 trillion worth of platinum, although I’d be worried if they got to keep all the profits from selling it. Platinum is rare and is incredibly useful as a chemical catalyst; if there were more platinum, there really would be more wealth in the world. Gold is not that useful, as far as I can tell – it’s a great conductor of electricity (much like copper) but there don’t seem to be that many uses for large quantities of gold that can’t be accomplished with more readily available substitutes.

The situation is different if the “buried treasure” was something of no intrinsic value. I wouldn’t want a random person to discover a large amount of buried cash; that would simply transfer resources from other people to the lucky finder through the mechanism of inflation. Finding rare collectibles – baseball cards, comic books, etc. would be neutral; they don’t increase the capacity of the world to produce goods and services, but they don’t reduce the wealth of people who don’t buy them.

That economics textbook I had for my one mandatory economics course in college was the most effective indoctrination I’ve ever read. It’s certainly more persuasive and compelling than the various religious tracts I’ve come across. As a result, I’ve started to think more like an economist. For example, I now believe in comparative advantage and free trade. If I have to move to India to get a technical job, so be it.

By: Michael Handy

Michael Handy — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:17:56 +0000

The 1 day and $1 trillion questions gave me some pause. but in the end i only lowered the 1 day and 1 trillion to somewhat likely. I figured that all things being equal, 1 day may well be highly beneficial in someones actions.

While the possibility of $1 trillion destabilising the world economy was sobering,in the end I figured things would stabalise eventually, and it would be fun to see what happened and compare to economists models. The data gained from such an occurance may be worth the risk

By: agent00yak

agent00yak — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:55:59 +0000

I said yes to the trillion dollar question only because I thought I could trade on the economic consequences of the treasure. I would short precious metals, go long auction houses and position my portfolio to benefit from a higher than expected liquidity environment. Otherwise I probably would have decided against pushing the button.

By: James Annan

James Annan — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:46:21 +0000

Sorry, I just got too bored trying to plough through the (seemingly) interminable tables of how much attention I was supposed to have paid to multiple factors on some previous question, when I hadn’t analysed my thought processes in such detail in the first place (or attempted to remember them)…