Illusory Superiority on P&B

[strichener]

17 hours ago, Shandon Par said:

Worryingly I'm usually in the 130s. Genuinely fear for the other 98% of the population.

How many times do you take the test.  You are definitely OFTW.  

[welshbairn]

6 minutes ago, strichener said:

Is it an argument?  I'd rather see it as a promise.

Charming. 

[strichener]

5 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

Charming. 

[Melanius Mullarkey]

6 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

. 

Wid.

[tamthebam]

11 hours ago, welshbairn said:

Why the hell isn't Wichita a state, that's what I want to know. Fine name, good people probably.

Don't take that line, man

[Silvio Tattiescone]

On 16/07/2021 at 20:55, Funky Nosejob said:

 

I can recite the alphabet backwards. It’s a useless skill and doesn’t make me smart.

I can burp the alphabet. Let me assure you, my grandchildren think it's an awesome skill.

[Funky Nosejob]

1 minute ago, Newbornbairn said:

I can burp the alphabet. Let me assure you, my grandchildren think it's an awesome skill.

When burping the alphabet, do you burp “J” to rhyme with “say” or “sigh”?

I’ve noticed that when reciting it both forwards and backwards, I rhyme it with “sigh” as is befitting of a proper Scottish education.

[Silvio Tattiescone]

5 minutes ago, Funky Nosejob said:

When burping the alphabet, do you burp “J” to rhyme with “say” or “sigh”?

I’ve noticed that when reciting it both forwards and backwards, I rhyme it with “sigh” as is befitting of a proper Scottish education.

I can do both - I'm bilingual. 

[Thistle_do_nicely]

YEEEEE HAW HOWDY PARTNER WE'RE IN TEXAS!

Aw boi we're in New Yoik now!

Delaware. Woah. We're in... Delaware.

[Fullerene]

21 hours ago, coprolite said:

I reckon i'd get over 45 states but maybe 3 capitals. Depends how many wrong guesses you get because i'm never quite sure which compass points go with which states. 

I get your point though, wisdom of the crowd. It might only take someone knowing if North Carolina is a thing for us to have it all sewn up. 

Hopefully you can guess the capitol of Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana,  Iowa, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah.

 

[Shandon Par]

5 hours ago, strichener said:

How many times do you take the test.  You are definitely OFTW.  

Done a few of them, thinking it must be a fluke but they’ve always come in quite high. Not sure what is score this week as my head is a bit fuzzy.

[Funky Nosejob]

I.Q. tests are a very good way of testing your ability to pass I.Q. tests, but nothing else.

After graduating, I sat so many tests set by prospective employers that I got really good at them. The more I sat, the more “patterns” I learned to look for and the more logical reasoning questions I learned the solutions to. One of the last ones I sat, for an insurance company, placed me in the top 5% of graduates for verbal reasoning and the top 2% of graduates for mathematical skills. Results that would not be suggested or merited by my barely deserved “Desmond”.

I’ve never been convinced by tests that ask questions like, “Mary is 5 years older than Jane who in 2 years time will be twice as old as Sally, blah, blah, blah... How old is Mary?”. Surely, rather than trying to do some complex mathematical calculation, the simplest solution is to ask Mary how old she is.

[SANTAN]

5 minutes ago, Funky Nosejob said:

I.Q. tests are a very good way of testing your ability to pass I.Q. tests, but nothing else.

After graduating, I sat so many tests set by prospective employers that I got really good at them. The more I sat, the more “patterns” I learned to look for and the more logical reasoning questions I learned the solutions to. One of the last ones I sat, for an insurance company, placed me in the top 5% of graduates for verbal reasoning and the top 2% of graduates for mathematical skills. Results that would not be suggested or merited by my barely deserved “Desmond”.

I’ve never been convinced by tests that ask questions like, “Mary is 5 years older than Jane who in 2 years time will be twice as old as Sally, blah, blah, blah... How old is Mary?”. Surely, rather than trying to do some complex mathematical calculation, the simplest solution is to ask Mary how old she is.

The video I posted earlier has a good example of this. 

There is a guy in the lineup that is in the army and they all presume he's going to be dumb when in actual fact the type of problem solving you need for such tests leads to him smashing it, he does better than more than half the ones who thought they were intelligent because of their "specialist subjects" that are effectively "memory". 

[Hedgecutter]

4 hours ago, Funky Nosejob said:

When burping the alphabet, do you burp “J” to rhyme with “say” or “sigh”?

I’ve noticed that when reciting it both forwards and backwards, I rhyme it with “sigh” as is befitting of a proper Scottish education.

I might get somebody so recite the alphabet normally at an interview.  They'll probably leave thinking it was easy and that they aced it, not realising they're failed because they said "Jai".  A good way to weed out the weirdos.

[Fullerene]

18 hours ago, Todd_is_God said:

Looking through the list there, I reckon there are a few that there would be a pretty good chance no-one would say.

It's obviously a challenge for you to do so when you have a lot of knowledge on this particular subject, but I'd be stunned if at least one of the following was not a pointless answer:

Olympia, WA

Pierre, SD

Frankfort, KY

Trenton, NJ

Montpelier, VT

I have been to Frankfort.  The trams are something else.

 

[Todd_is_God]

3 minutes ago, Fullerene said:

I have been to Frankfort.  The trams are something else.

 

I mean that's just a train

[GordonS]

On 17/07/2021 at 15:02, Hedgecutter said:

Referring back to the OP, you can have rather intelligent people finding themselves at any stage of that Dunning-Kruger curve, particularly the high-confidence/low-ability part.  One might argue that's where they end up most on GN when they assume that they must be knowledgeable about at most things (given a little data or a Wikipedia page) because they have expertise in something completely unrelated.

I've noticed that's not uncommon among scientists when they stray outside their area of expertise. Robert Winston is a veritable eejit on a whole range of issues. Richard Dawkins has form for this too, and a surprising amount of climate idiocy comes from people with unrelated science qualifications.

I think it's partly because they don't spend time learning things from scratch, so they don't appreciate how more complex almost everything is than it first appears. They also struggle to see the wood for the trees.

[hearthammer]

On my gravestone, it will read    "Reasonably intelligent, Incredibly Stupid".   Sums up la vie and my place on the original graph for this thread.

[Ross.]

On 17/07/2021 at 20:40, djchapsticks said:

I work in finance and it genuinely terrifies me how many people working in the field don't understand basics of finance despite being employed in it. Particularly percentages.

I had to correct someone the other day who said that there was a 35% risk of non-payment by customer A and a 15% risk by customer B and that this meant there was a total of a 50% non-payment risk and my head near enough fucking exploded. Particularly as the person in question is a pay band above me.

And another who thought that because VAT is charged at 20% you could just deduct 20% of the net value to remove the VAT and couldn't understand why removing 20% of the net value doesn't just cancel out adding 20% to gross.

Before Covid, I also had someone in our customer care team (who are responsible for crediting customer accounts when they are invoiced incorrectly) come up to me in the office and ask if a credit note getting raised to the customer meant that it was a negative value as it was us deducting. She then proceeded to credit a quantity of -1 item at a negative value and when I explained to her that it would just result in another positive invoice going to the customer as she'd actually created a double negative, I actually saw the hamster behind her eyes die.

We have people in our contact centre who deal on a daily basis with hedge fund managers. We often get asked questions like “This company are raising funds via a rights issue at a cost of £1 per share. This client has 1m rights to buy shares on a 1:1 basis. How much will it cost them to exercise all their rights?”.

20 hours ago, Funky Nosejob said:

I.Q. tests are a very good way of testing your ability to pass I.Q. tests, but nothing else.

After graduating, I sat so many tests set by prospective employers that I got really good at them. The more I sat, the more “patterns” I learned to look for and the more logical reasoning questions I learned the solutions to. One of the last ones I sat, for an insurance company, placed me in the top 5% of graduates for verbal reasoning and the top 2% of graduates for mathematical skills. Results that would not be suggested or merited by my barely deserved “Desmond”.

I’ve never been convinced by tests that ask questions like, “Mary is 5 years older than Jane who in 2 years time will be twice as old as Sally, blah, blah, blah... How old is Mary?”. Surely, rather than trying to do some complex mathematical calculation, the simplest solution is to ask Mary how old she is.

My work are very big on these types of tests when hiring folk. It means you end up hiring people who ask the kind of question I mention above, because they have done lots of those types of assessments and remembered the answers to enough of them. Reputedly we are one of the most difficult companies in our sector to be hired by. I don’t understand how. They wanted volunteers recently to try an updated version of the logic/mental arithmetic test that is used as part of the initial assessment. I volunteered, rattled through the 50 questions in about 10 minutes and scored 96% without really paying attention to it. Almost every question used was just a reworded Facebook post without the “retweet if you know the answer!!!” tag at the end.

[Sergeant Wilson]

There are quite a lot of people that don't understand public and private sector, even if the work in it.

 "What's the company policy on cases of....xyz?

It's not a policy, it's the fucking law, you nugget"

 "Yeah my last company was HMRC.

Was it?...for fucksake!"