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Tuesday, July 12, 2016

I'm smarter than Vox Day!

A recent Vox Day post is one of his interminable screeds concerning his social interactions with "gamma males", toward the end of which he writes: "Once more, Camestros provides us with sufficient evidence to safely conclude that if IQ is a reasonable measure of innate intelligence, his is considerably lower than mine. It's funny that despite being such a questionable metric, a similar percentile just seems to keep showing up no matter how it's measured.

[Bell-curve graphic result from the linked on-line quiz (*), according to which his English vocabulary is 30150, which is said to be in the top 0.01%]

Of course, my actual vocabulary is probably more than twice that, but then, we're not counting Italian, German, French, or Japanese vocabularies.
"

[Edit: Can you see me rolling my eyes? Having a massive Italian vocabulary has next to nothing to do with one's English vocabulary]

Normally, I avoid on-line quizzes, especially ones purporting to measure or reflect IQ. But I took this one (*). The quiz result claims that my English vocabulary is 30325 (also in the top 0.01%, obviously).

So, according to Vox Day himself, I likely have a higher IQ than he does.


(*) It's 50 multiple-choice synonym/antonym matches. [EDIT: If you dare, take the quiz and post the result in the commbox]

Here is a comment posted to the quiz, which seems to me to be the best explanation for a high score -- "... Also, I'm seeing in comments that people are trying to correlate their score with their educational levels (or brag that they got a high score with relatively low education). I would posit that one's score has less to do with formal education and more to do with how much one reads."

Myself, I understand -- and use in writing -- a much greater vocabulary than I use in speaking.

6 comments:

Gyan said...

30325. One word totally defeated me--avulse.
Otherwise a simple test.
But, I see no link between this and IQ.

Ilíon said...

Same here; I'd never encountered that word. Likewise, I see no link between it and IQ. Remember, it was VD who presented it as a proxy for IQ.

Ilíon said...

On 'avulse', I think I chose 'suture' as being more likely to be the antonym; I don't recall the other choices. So, perhaps I missed another one. As 'avulse' was the only challenging one, perhaps I mis-clicked on one.

Nate Winchester said...

And then later...

They also tend to be vehemently irreligious, which again tends to go back to pride.

So, if you have a broken mind, if you feel anxious and insecure, if you feel like an imposter, I have two pieces of advice.

1. Humble yourself before God.
2. Give Man the opportunity to humble you.

I'm not self-confident because I'm smart, or because I'm athletic, or because pretty girls like me, I'm self-confident because I have allowed myself to be tested, repeatedly, and I have passed the tests. The test is not winning. The test is getting up after you are knocked down, being a good sport when you are beaten, meeting rejection with grace, meeting failure with good humor, and accepting your assigned place in the social hierarchy without demur or complaint.

You can't change the past or the present. All you can change is how you approach the vicissitudes of the future.

Winning feels great. I like to win as anyone else. I've won everything from grade school competitions to NCAA Division One conference championships. But even better than winning, in terms of developing self-respect, is having the rival who has beaten you despite your best efforts treat you with respect, as an equal, and above all, as a worthy opponent.

And I'm not proud of my intelligence because I know what it is worth in comparison to the glory of the Creator and the magnificence of His Creation, which is precisely nothing. It means nothing more than the color of a spot on a dog's coat or the pattern on a snake's skin.


For something worth nothing (which he's right) he sure insists on talking about it a lot.

Cypris said...

22950, top 5.08% (I'm a native Romanian speaker)

Ilíon said...

Hello, Mare Nostrum. Welcome to my little blog.

You speak English well! ;)