Ask A Genius 773: A Test or a Book
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/02
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So your question is if I am done taking Ultra high-end IQ tests and certainly for the time being. Issue number one is I’m trying to complete a book. I’ve got many tens of thousands of words but towards this book that just need to be pushed into the shape of a book plus more tens of thousands of words to fill out the book and that means I cannot allow myself to waste time on the hundreds of hours it might take to do a good job on an IQ test. For a period of a couple years I’ve been even very reluctant to allow books into the house to allow for recreational reading. So the number of books I’ve read over the past few years has decreased by 90%. Four years ago I decided to only allow myself to read at the gym between sets and not to bring those books into the house where I would waste time reading them. And then Covid hit and I can’t read at the gym any longer because I want to get in and out so nobody coughs on me. And for a year the gyms were closed. So if I can’t give myself the latitude to read I can’t give myself the latitude to fuck around with IQ tests.
There was an Cooijmans test I started I don’t know probably eight or ten years ago and made decent progress on but still did not definitively solve enough items to get past the Giga level. There’s no point in me turning in a test unless I have a reasonable chance of outscoring any score I’ve gotten previously. Now I’ve taken attempts, like there was that one with the contest, had a time limit and I came in third with a score of 175 or 177. That was a pretty earnest attempt where I really had thought I had a shot at doing better than that but it was time limited and I really didn’t give it the extra 80 hours that might have led me to come up with better solutions to some of the problems.
The deal is with Cooijmans test and with Hoeflin tests, you’ve got to noodle around with sometimes dozens or more than 50 potential solutions until you happen upon one that seems to be a better lock than any of your other potential solutions. Each solution you come up with is a little bit random; you don’t know when it’s going to hit you. It’s not that you can force new potential solutions just by sitting and thinking hard. You have to put in the time and then hope that a solution comes to you. It’s as much chance as it is gumption and I can’t give myself the amount of time it takes to stumble on dozens of possible solutions to a problem until the stumbling leads to one that is, I’d say head and shoulders above the other potential solutions, but really part of the problem with the tougher problems is that the intended solution may not be head and shoulders above the other, it may just be eyebrows the above the other solutions. Subtlety is a problem; it’s making subtle distinctions.
So there’s that and then there’s that I’m 62 and A, I’ve got stuff to do and B, there’s a chance I’ve lost mental acuity but really I doubt that’s a huge issue given the way you have to go about solving the problems on these tests. At least it’s not that I come across the correct solution from I zero in on it from being brilliant, it’s that I stumble across it among three dozen other potential solutions just because I’m dogged. So that technique or attribute is less subject to the attenuation of age. I’ve got this book that I think is a really good book and I’ve got two other book ideas that I really have to buckle down and do the books and not do the fucking IQ test and that’s what it boils down to. It would suck to have a failure of willpower and drift back into finishing this test that I started in 2014 and put another 110 hours in across two months and still only score like 182. So that’s the deal, that’s the landscape.If I could find a test that was misnomed/ misnormed or I could immediately see that it was easier than the scores it gives and that test would be accepted by Cooijmans who’s really the arbiter of the Giga level right now, then maybe I could be suckered into taking a test. But the tests I’ve seen, not that I’ve looked at that many, but I’ve looked at some over the past eight years aren’t slutty with their scores. A slutty test could suck me back in like Al Pacino and Godfather 3 but I just haven’t seen that.
[Recording End]
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