Video games also have potential legal advantages over IQ tests for companies. You could argue that "we only hire people good at video games to get people who fit our corporate culture of liking video games" but that argument doesn't work as well for IQ tests.

yet again an original post title that self-sneers

  • maol@awful.systems
    ·
    1 year ago

    If you're going to hiring discrimination*, don't talk about your discrimination strategy in public.

    *(I assume the lesswrongeurs are assuming that IQ tests are going to be made illegal because black IQ test scores (on average) are lower than white IQ test scores (on average) and rather than interrogate this weird data the lesswrongeurs seem to have accepted as gospel that this test gap is immutable and possibly just the natural side effect of having melanin rather than a product of 100s of variables that had nothing to do with biology)

  • bitofhope@awful.systems
    ·
    1 year ago

    The entire article reads like a stealth sneer.

    Is it "consistency of results on a single IQ test type"? Not really. Wikipedia says: […]

    That's a best-case scenario for tests designed with that criteria as a priority, and the range is still significant.

    Is it "consistency of results across different IQ test types"? Not really; that's obviously worse than the above, and many "non-IQ" tests have comparable consistency.

    Yea to be fair to IQ tests horoscopes are also really inconsistent.

    Is it "practice being mostly irrelevant"? Not really. A few practice runs can often be worth +8 points

    Is it "working for an unusually wide range of intelligence"? Not really. IQ tests are notorious for working poorly above ~135

    Wow, sounds like IQ tests kinda suck. Maybe we shouldn't place so much importance on them.

    and I'd say they only really work well for -20 to +0 relative to the designers, with a somewhat wider range for teams.

    *removed externally hosted image*

    My ACT score was in the top 0.1%, but I don't feel particularly proud of that, because it wasn't evaluating any of my actual strengths. I left college after a semester (while that was a failure from the perspective of society, school was holding me back intellectually) but I still took the GRE for...reasons...and got a top 1% score without studying, but that's not something I consider particularly meaningful either. Here's a theory of Alzheimer's I developed - what test score does that correspond to? As for IQ tests, I had a couple proper ones as a kid, and my scores were probably as high as was very meaningful, but probably less impressive than reading Feynman in 3rd grade.

    Spoiler tagging this doesn't make it not an irrelevant humblebrag.

    It might not be as objective, but people could compete on aesthetics too.

    Oh shit, this guy invented art competitions!

    When people smarter than the test designers take an IQ test, they often have to guess what the designers were thinking, but with video games, evaluation can be completely objective.

    Guessing what a test designer thinks is a cognitive task so surely high G people can do it better. I don't see the problem.

    The bandwidth and scope possible with video games is much higher than with IQ tests. You can test people with bigger problems, like remembering the units in Wargame Red Dragon, and multidisciplinary challenges, like optimizing both cost and visuals of fireworks in Kerbal Space Program; そういえば、ゲームのウィキの英語を理解することはまたテストのもう一つの側面でしょう.

    Random-ass Japanese for no reason. Weeb detected. Ironic how the non-English sentence muses about testing proficiency in reading English.

    I propose that from here on out people will be ranked by a test that involves dad jokes and making spiteful remarks about TESCREAL fandom.

        • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems
          ·
          1 year ago

          When I was at school there was a kid who earnestly believed that he would, as an adult, build a nanobot machine to do modern day alchemy by rearranging the component particles of atoms, but he is, as far as I know, doing good and normal things out in the world today

          I find myself thinking about this story frequently in a sneering context

          • self@awful.systemsM
            ·
            1 year ago

            I was that kid growing up, mostly for fantasies around AI and the singularity

            some of it was due to a natural pull towards reading a lot of sci-fi, but looking back a lot of it was indoctrination from the same folks who’d much later be responsible for the cultier strains of Silicon Valley thought. the idea was that the only way to become a great programmer who would change the world was to adopt certain clusters of ideas and hobbies, but the actual goal from the folks doing the indoctrinating was to turn as many young minds as possible into weirdo ancap libertarians with no personality outside of being exploitable labor

            • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems
              ·
              1 year ago

              It’s kind of amazing that when I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s you heard a lot of silly season rubbish about nanobots, grey goo, unlimited life extension, humanity living in pods, and all this, only to discover as an adult and AFTER having already begun to devote some amount of your free time to dunking on Eliezer Yudkowsky that actually it had all along all been coming out of this very specific media-oriented cult or proto-cult amongst the same people who were flogging Netscape and palm pilots

              • self@awful.systemsM
                ·
                1 year ago

                fucking right? that’s what goes through my head when I sneer — tracing a line from jankily paying for unnecessary crap on eBay using an unregulated bank to those same mediocre assholes who could barely do an online bobcat bank having their own mythologies

          • kuna@awful.systems
            ·
            1 year ago

            I had that idea the second I learned that diamonds and coal are made of the same atoms, ngl.

    • zogwarg@awful.systems
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      and I’d say they only really work well for -20 to +0 relative to the designers, with a somewhat wider range for teams.

      I read this as:「These feeble minds cannot possibly measure my intelligence ! It's over 9000 !」
      This «I am very smart» lad must've received a disappointing score, which I suspect explain a great deal of his rant, humblebrag and all.

      That or it is indeed satire (although too much effort as gone into the author's blog, that if is satire it's more sad than funny).

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
    ·
    1 year ago

    You can test people with bigger problems, like remembering the units in Wargame Red Dragon

    The fact that this "bigger problem" is rote memorization aside, it looks like there are a whopping 1700 units in that game. With names like M113A3 Super Dragon, CH46-C Phrog, or LVTP-7A1. Imagine some horrible dystopian future where you get to lock yourself up in your room for a couple months with an Anki deck trying to memorize as many Wargame: Red Dragon units as possible.

    Your brain would probably be fried by the time you edge out the competition for your completely-non-Red-Dragon-related job.