what's in a number?
I've long figured I was a pretty smart guy, being told that by my teachers and peers and coworkers for as long as I can remember. There've been things here and there that got me wondering exactly how intelligent I am, but until now, I'd never taken an IQ test. Dunno why. Maybe I just never got around to it. Maybe it was part of my reaction against my geekiness. I dunno.
Now, if you're only continuing to read this because you want to know what I got, give it up. I boast too much about stupid stuff already, and I'm sure it's not the highest score in my social circle anyway (and I probably don't hold a torch to the Google folks). Besides, it wasn't an official IQ test. What happened is that Karla from the Firefly meetup group (or rather, the Silicon Gulch Browncoats) was doing some psychological research with Stanford and needed to practice administering an abbreviated IQ test. So I volunteered.
Before I left today, Erika asked me what I would do if I found out my score was merely average. Well, I said I hoped that it would spur me to work harder to compensate. But that's just a hope. In reality, I think there's a good chance I would've been crushed to lose the one thing about me I thought was truly special (which, perhaps, was the reason I'd never taken it until now). Of course, she didn't ask me what I would do if I did well, probably assuming I would merely become more insufferable than I already was (I'm not like that all the time, just sometimes).
But I guess she'll get to find out if her assumption was correct. So what now? Well, I'm hoping that I'll do the Spiderman thing and act like I have some sort of deep responsibility. So maybe it'll motivate me to do something with my life (although I think I'm already on that path). But mostly, I'm trying not to read too much into this. It's just a number. A number that I was curious about, but still just a number.
Indeed, I was also looking at our finances to see how we were doing after six months of the student budget thing, and I was surprised to see that our net worth actually went up, indeed, passing a significant milestone. But again, that's just a number as well. Perhaps even more arbitrary a number than the intelligence one, because one's value in our economy depends on a lot of weird things and fluctuates pretty wildly, never mind how much your net worth depends upon things like the real estate and stock market. But arbitrary as it is, it's an important number with definite real-world consequences.
I suppose that might be true of IQ as well, but intelligence is far too complicated an ability to truly measure with a number. To draw an analogy with baseball, batting ability is also a lot more than just your batting average, or number of home runs, or even your one-base percentage and your slugging averages. It has to at least take into account subtle things like situational hitting (laying down bunts successfully, hitting to right field when there's a runner on first, not striking out on a hit-and-run play, etc. etc.). Most widely-used baseball statistics suck for this reason (e.g. wins, batting average, RBIs, etc.). Heck, Formula One is even worse, awarding an individual championship based on a very crude points system based on a team result while making no attempt to filter out the team's effect on that result (at least ERA for baseball pitchers makes an attempt).
Indeed, I was rather surprised at the rather narrowness of the IQ test itself. A lot of it was language (defining terms, explaining similarities between two words), and the rest was the kind of visual reasoning stuff that engineers tend to be good at. I would have expected a test of a much wider range of abilities and skills. And of course, I do realize that there's some debate over whether the IQ test is just another way for the elite to stay in power (I'm sure Mitra would think that).
But of course, putting up a gazillion numbers next to a person's name doesn't clarify things. We want a single number because we want to be able to compare a person against somebody else and say that one is better than the other (which is why Bill James came up with the Win Shares stat). And I can't deny that I have a competitive streak, or else I probably wouldn't have taken the test at all. But it's just a number. And while we seem to need numbers to help make sense of information, numbers will never tell the whole story. And in the big picture, that number means nothing. What I actually accomplish with my life will be what matters, and I sincerely hope that I'm just getting started and will someday end up accomplishing something so world-changing that it could never be reduced to a number.
Now, if you're only continuing to read this because you want to know what I got, give it up. I boast too much about stupid stuff already, and I'm sure it's not the highest score in my social circle anyway (and I probably don't hold a torch to the Google folks). Besides, it wasn't an official IQ test. What happened is that Karla from the Firefly meetup group (or rather, the Silicon Gulch Browncoats) was doing some psychological research with Stanford and needed to practice administering an abbreviated IQ test. So I volunteered.
Before I left today, Erika asked me what I would do if I found out my score was merely average. Well, I said I hoped that it would spur me to work harder to compensate. But that's just a hope. In reality, I think there's a good chance I would've been crushed to lose the one thing about me I thought was truly special (which, perhaps, was the reason I'd never taken it until now). Of course, she didn't ask me what I would do if I did well, probably assuming I would merely become more insufferable than I already was (I'm not like that all the time, just sometimes).
But I guess she'll get to find out if her assumption was correct. So what now? Well, I'm hoping that I'll do the Spiderman thing and act like I have some sort of deep responsibility. So maybe it'll motivate me to do something with my life (although I think I'm already on that path). But mostly, I'm trying not to read too much into this. It's just a number. A number that I was curious about, but still just a number.
Indeed, I was also looking at our finances to see how we were doing after six months of the student budget thing, and I was surprised to see that our net worth actually went up, indeed, passing a significant milestone. But again, that's just a number as well. Perhaps even more arbitrary a number than the intelligence one, because one's value in our economy depends on a lot of weird things and fluctuates pretty wildly, never mind how much your net worth depends upon things like the real estate and stock market. But arbitrary as it is, it's an important number with definite real-world consequences.
I suppose that might be true of IQ as well, but intelligence is far too complicated an ability to truly measure with a number. To draw an analogy with baseball, batting ability is also a lot more than just your batting average, or number of home runs, or even your one-base percentage and your slugging averages. It has to at least take into account subtle things like situational hitting (laying down bunts successfully, hitting to right field when there's a runner on first, not striking out on a hit-and-run play, etc. etc.). Most widely-used baseball statistics suck for this reason (e.g. wins, batting average, RBIs, etc.). Heck, Formula One is even worse, awarding an individual championship based on a very crude points system based on a team result while making no attempt to filter out the team's effect on that result (at least ERA for baseball pitchers makes an attempt).
Indeed, I was rather surprised at the rather narrowness of the IQ test itself. A lot of it was language (defining terms, explaining similarities between two words), and the rest was the kind of visual reasoning stuff that engineers tend to be good at. I would have expected a test of a much wider range of abilities and skills. And of course, I do realize that there's some debate over whether the IQ test is just another way for the elite to stay in power (I'm sure Mitra would think that).
But of course, putting up a gazillion numbers next to a person's name doesn't clarify things. We want a single number because we want to be able to compare a person against somebody else and say that one is better than the other (which is why Bill James came up with the Win Shares stat). And I can't deny that I have a competitive streak, or else I probably wouldn't have taken the test at all. But it's just a number. And while we seem to need numbers to help make sense of information, numbers will never tell the whole story. And in the big picture, that number means nothing. What I actually accomplish with my life will be what matters, and I sincerely hope that I'm just getting started and will someday end up accomplishing something so world-changing that it could never be reduced to a number.