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Cognitive Daily

Are you smart or stupid? Take the test! Not scientific, but amusing nonetheless.
Another “interesting” application of IQ (Warning: photos of swastikas). Data is rather old here, but I’d be surprised if these correlations don’t still hold up.
Fish may be more logical than the subjects of the previous link.
Cognitive Dissonance had a birthday. And I forgot to send a card. I’m exactly 10 years and three days younger than cognitive dissonance.
New book chronicles the rise of statistical measurement of Americans. Does Casual Fridays get a chapter?
Even if you’re not an alcoholic, drinking too much is still bad for you.
Completely unrelated to the above link: Do young children understand irony?

Comments

#1 nicerobot
January 29, 2007

I’m only 23% smarter than average LOL 23% smarter than the average person that took that test. Who are they? How old? What is their background? …?
#2 Dave Munger
January 29, 2007

Heh.. Yeah, plus the whole percentage calculation is completely arbitrary. As far as I can tell, all they’re doing is giving back your score as a percentage of the mean (minus 100 percent), which, of course, is meaningless.
#3 brtkrbzhnv
January 30, 2007

I got 28.9% (24), but I’m Swedish, and that test was quite US-centric. (That’s kind of a lame excuse; I do admit I should have known who that US president was.)

“The average intelligence quotient (IQ) of all members of the human race is 100 on the Stanford-Binet scale, as illustrated in the bell curves in the figure below. The average IQ of racists is up to 4 IQ points less than this” is most likely incorrect, for they’ve probably used an IQ scale normalized on the population of some high-IQ nation, not the world as a whole. As the racists in these studies are most likely from high-IQ nations, they should have an IQ well above the world average even if they get a score of 96 when compared to their compatriots. Also: since some of those studies were done back when racism was fairly mainstream, I’d say that the results shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about present-day conditions.
#4 Dave Munger
January 30, 2007

I’d say that the results shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about present-day conditions.

I tend to agree with you — but then again, since racism is less prevalent today than in the 1940s in Western nations, I’d submit that the effect may be even more pronounced.