Ask A Genius 749: Status of Admissions to Mega Society Now
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How should people be skeptical about high range tests like the Mega or the Titan in ways that an individual with a long history of performing well in these tests would know better than individuals who have not taken them or being part of the societies, discussing them over years as they’ve been developed?
Rick Rosner: Before we started taping, you asked the question in a slightly different way like what can you tell me about the mega test that somebody else might not know. And I was going to go a little bit into the history of the mega test where it hit at a very fortunate point in history for getting a lot of people interested in it because just as the mega test hit, the Guinness Book of World Records which was a big deal back before the internet. The internet kind of killed it along with any other like encyclopedia or book form of reference. People really cared about the shit that was in the Guinness book of World Records especially kids who like amazing stuff.
And for four years I believe, roughly from 1983 to about 1987, the Guinness Book listed the highest IQ people in the world with Marilyn Savant being number one and I think it listed a couple other people as being close. Based on her score on the Stanford Benet childhood test she took at around age 10 and scored like a mental age of 23 which gave her a miscalculated it turns out IQ of like 230 or so and then she did well on them. Before the mega test was widely disseminated via Omni magazine, she got the highest score among the people who took it before then. So there was a lot of receptiveness to the idea of finding super high IQ people which led more than 4000 people to take the test. At the time the answers would have been hard to research because it was pre-internet. Now at least half the answers on the test are much easier to research because they’re verbal analogies, so easy to research via Google that they’re now worthless in terms of measuring high IQ. Maybe three out of 24 of those verbal problems might still be tough to research but most of them; no.
Plus people have been discussing on the internet all the prop which we’ve already talked about that the answers are out there. So what do you still want to know about skepticism of the mega, say?
Jacobsen: What are some fine details to keep in mind, those for the individuals with motivation and astuteness mind?
Rosner: What’s keep in mind is to do a good job on the Mega took me more than a hundred hours and I would think maybe somebody who thinks faster or researches faster than me would still take, pre-internet, it would take anybody at least 60 hours. Now with the internet you can knock off the verbal problems in a couple hours but the math problems are still pretty time consuming. You can maybe cut down the time it might take if you’re a coder and you can just develop some algorithms. But anyway why would you want to do any of this for a test that is so thoroughly compromised since the answers have been circulating for more than 30 years? You don’t want to take the Mega test except for fun. You don’t want to take it to prove you have a high IQ. No high IQ organization that I know of, maybe there’s still or some, would accept your score on the Mega because it’s super compromised.
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It’s pretty much ditto for the Titan which has the same problem with its verbal problems. You want to find tests that were developed during the internet era if you really want to try to get a score that will be accepted now. Do we know for sure that the Mega Society doesn’t accept the Titan anymore.
Jacobsen: It only accepts the Power and the Ultra.
Rosner: Okay and the power in The Ultra don’t have any of the verbal problems, I don’t think. So you shouldn’t take the Titan, you shouldn’t take the Mega, you should take Hoeflin’s other two tests; The Power or The Ultra.
Jacobsen: How did you perform on The Power in the older tests?
Rosner: I think I got perfect scores or maybe I missed one or something but I mean most of the problems on those tests I think are taken from his other tests. So having taken The Mega and The Titan, I think that took care of two-thirds of it. It’s been like 10 years since I’ve looked at these tests but I know that those tests, I think they had a lot of problems that were taken directly from the earlier tests or at the very least they had problems that were very closely related at least in terms of the methodology that you’d use to solve them to those earlier tests. So, at most I missed one problem on Hoeflin’s later tests.
Jacobsen: So you crushed basically all of Hoeflin’s major tests.
Rosner: Yeah except that there’s a huge practice effect that once how to go after his problems if you have the patience to work through some of the tougher ones, you can get to the solutions. There are some problems that are somewhat different like “What happens if you take a Torus and take three Möbius strip shaped slice out of it? What’s left? How many pieces?” That’s kind of different. That’s a problem I think that was on the either The Mega or The Titan and is quite a bit different. There are other slicing problems but none like that. But you can still kind of apply some stringent thinking and drawing and get to the answer because it’s still a slicing problem. So, my crushing one of the earlier Hoeflin tests is more impressive than having crushed subsequent Hoeflin and tests because of the extreme practice effect.
Jacobsen: How do Hoeflin’s tests compare to other people’s tests in the high range?
Rosner: Well the problems are super stringent.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by stringent?
Rosner: There’s no wobble in the answers. The answer is the answer even for the three interpenetrating cubes problem, I think it still remains that nobody has proven the answer is the answer with a 100% mathematical precision. But even with that one everybody knows what the answer is. Everybody would shit their pants if it turned out that that wasn’t the answer. There’s just tightness to the answers where, like you go back to Watson. Watson would ring in on Jeopardy if the Watson algorithm calculated there was an 80% chance that the answer was that Watson’s answer was the answer or something like that. And on a Hoeflin problem, there’s presented with the Hoeflin proper answer and any alternate answers that people might argue for that’d be close to a 100% certainty that the Hoeflin answer is the right answer, that nobody should be able to argue with any degree of effectiveness that any alternate answer would be the answer.
But I’ve seen other tests that have problems that are sufficiently loose that I might buy somebody’s argument that their answer is as good or nearly as good as the official answer. That doesn’t arise with Hoeflin problems. It doesn’t mean those tests are bad but those tests offer less super duper certainty on some of the problems.
Jacobsen: What are some other vulnerabilities of the tests or the test makers? For instance, some individuals who have some of the highest claimants to high test score claims knew the test developers personally. They’re part of the organizations or they were friends with them; this is also questionable.
Rosner: Yeah, I mean there’s one instance that I won’t name names but is somewhat well known among high IQ people and maybe come better well known depending on future developments but that’s a fairly rare occurrence. However, I haven’t much attempted super high IQ tests lately but the last time I did, I’m like “Ugh…this is such a pain in the ass. If I could just somehow get at the answers.” I mean not through my own thinking but somehow do some kind of skullduggery not that I would but it’s an attractive thought.
So I’m working on a novel about someone who is known for having one of the world’s highest IQs and this person also has vast financial resources. And so this person who doesn’t want to spend forever on tests but wants the reputation that goes with getting super high scores, social engineers some answers. He hires operatives to more or less seduce at least one author of high IQ tests and once in their home breaks in or puts stuff that gives them out like keystroke or trackers on their computer or whatever they use; skullduggery to get at the answers which would be ridiculous because the stakes are so low except that it’s not that ridiculous because of this one slightly famous kind of half of a story. It’s not a major risk because like this fictional character has the wherewithal to spend at least 50 Grand and probably more like a 100,000 on operatives to get at the answers but that’s not at all a realistic situation.
[Recording End]
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