I can pinpoint someone's IQ +/- 5 after reading a few paragraphs of their writing

HM guy wrote:

Interesting game!

(text)

I didn't really want it to be a game. I was hoping other people with the same ability would do it. Your posts are definitely well above average IQ. A little too long-winded and heavy "redditor" vibe. I'll get back to you on that

This thread is a classic illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. So Hardloper has some ability to assess intelligence with the only metric being a few sentences of the alleged author's composition. However, Hardloper overestimates his ability and therefore his accuracy is more than guesswork but not nearly calibrated to the precision he implicitly proclaims with grandiosity as he launches the thread.

Hardloper wrote:

Can anyone else do this? Discuss

No, and you can't either.

The last camel collapsed at noon.

It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little.

They climbed the leeward side of a small hill, man and camel planting big clumsy feet in the inconstant sand, and at the top they stopped. They looked ahead, seeing nothing but another hillock to climb, and after that a thousand more, and it was as if the camel despaired at the thought. Its forelegs folded, then its rear went down, and it couched on top of the hill like a monument, searing across the empty desert with the indifference of the dying.

The man hauled on its nose rope. Its head came forward and its neck stretched out, but it would not get up. The man went behind and kicked its hindquarters as hard as he could, three or four times. Finally he took out a razor-sharp curved Bedouin knife with a narrow point and stabbed the camel’s rump. Blood flowed from the wound but the camel did not even look round.

The man understood what was happening. The very tissues of the animal’s body, starved of nourishment, had simply stopped working like a machine that has run out of fuel. He had seen camels collapse like this on the outskirts of an oasis, surrounded by life-giving foliage which they ignored, lacking the energy to eat.

There were two more tricks he might have tried. One was to pour water into its nostrils until it began to drown; the other to light a fire under its hindquarters. He could not spare the water for one nor the firewood for the other, and besides neither method had a great chance of success.

It was time to stop, anyway. The sun was high and fierce. The long Saharan summer was beginning, and the midday temperature would reach 110 degrees in the shade.

Without unloading the camel, the man opened one of his bags and took out his tent. He looked round again, automatically: there was no shade or shelter in sight – one place was as bad as another. He pitched his tent beside the dying camel, there on top of the hillock.

He sat cross-legged in the open end of the tent to make his tea. He scraped level a small square of sand, arranged a few precious dry twigs in a pyramid, and lit the fire. When the kettle boiled he made tea in the nomad fashion, pouring it from the pot into the cup, adding sugar, then returning it to the pot to infuse again, several times over. The resulting brew, very strong and rather treacly, was the most revivifying drink in the world.

He gnawed at some dates and watched the camel die whilst he waited for the sun to pass overhead. His tranquillity was practised. He had come a long way in this desert, more than a thousand miles. Two months earlier he had left El Agela, on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, and travelled due south for five hundred miles, via Gialo and Kufra, into the empty heart of the Sahara. There he had turned east and crossed the border into Egypt unobserved by man or beast. He had traversed the rocky wasteland of the Western Desert and turned north near Kharga; and now he was not far from his destination. He knew the desert, but he was afraid of it – all intelligent men were, even the nomads who lived all their lives here. But he never allowed that fear to take hold of him, to panic him, to use up his nervous energy. There were always catastrophes: mistakes in navigation that made you miss a well by a couple of miles; water-bottles that leaked or burst; apparently healthy camels that got sick a couple of days out. The only response was to say Inshallah: It is the will of God.

Eventually the sun began to dip towards the west. He looked at the camel’s load, wondering how much of it he could carry. There were three small European suitcases, two heavy and one light, all important. There was a little bag of clothes, a sextant, the maps and the water bottle. It was already too much: he would have to abandon the tent, the tea set, the cooking pot, the almanac and the saddle..........

Okay, I lifted it.

Propitious wrote:

This thread is a classic illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. So Hardloper has some ability to assess intelligence with the only metric being a few sentences of the alleged author's composition. However, Hardloper overestimates his ability and therefore his accuracy is more than guesswork but not nearly calibrated to the precision he implicitly proclaims with grandiosity as he launches the thread.

You're hovering on 80 atm

Can you add a few more big words to bring it up to 85

Bullshit baffles brains.

math equation time wrote: While most would poke fun at anyone under 85, there about 16% of the population of your city is beneath that, and somehow they are for the most part functioning just fine.

You think?

What does 'functioning fine ' mean? Tying shoelaces?

Not 'poking fun' at them, but for the most, people are followers, don't use critical thought etc.

Even higher IQ people don't use something called 'common sense', and an acknowledgement that they don't know everything

Person who actually knows and gives IQ test wrote:

Anybody on this board claiming that to have a IQ of 150 IQ is full of s***.

I clicked on the thread because my IQ is high and I assumed it would be entertaining reading in here.

If you actually administer IQ tests then you should have no trouble looking up the percentile and frequency of IQ >= 150. There seem to be a lot of people on these boards, so there should be some hits over 150. How many of them have had a legit test is something I won't speculate on, but clearly there

Ha! I do read Reddit from time to time. Would love to hear what you have to say!

randomcoach wrote:

Person who actually knows and gives IQ test wrote:

Anybody on this board claiming that to have a IQ of 150 IQ is full of s***.

I clicked on the thread because my IQ is high and I assumed it would be entertaining reading in here.

If you actually administer IQ tests then you should have no trouble looking up the percentile and frequency of IQ >= 150. There seem to be a lot of people on these boards, so there should be some hits over 150. How many of them have had a legit test is something I won't speculate on, but clearly there

100

Hardloper wrote:

stunt101 wrote:

that's a nice skill. do me.

Sample size too small - need several paragraphs

Based on this writing I would say your IQ is fairly low.

Sign, not sich...

I probably lost at least 20 points for that swype text error.

just sayin wrote:

Propitious wrote:

This thread is a classic illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. So Hardloper has some ability to assess intelligence with the only metric being a few sentences of the alleged author's composition. However, Hardloper overestimates his ability and therefore his accuracy is more than guesswork but not nearly calibrated to the precision he implicitly proclaims with grandiosity as he launches the thread.

You're hovering on 80 atm

Can you add a few more big words to bring it up to 85

Dude your lack of wit in attempting to critique the Propitious guy who is obviously smarter than you places you at maybe 98.

Is my solution to the infamous crocodile question even quantifiable on that scale?

NON-CALCULUS SOLUTION BY DIRTY TRICK (SUBSTITUTION)

T(x)= 5(36+x^2)^1/2 + 4(20-x)

let u = x/6

then T(u) = 5(36+36u^2)^1/2 + 4(20-6u)

= 30(1+u^2)^1/2 + 4(20 - 6u)

now let u = sinhv, then sqrt(1+u^2) = coshv (DIRTY TRICK)

Now we have

T(v) = 30coshv + 4(20 -6sinhv)

= 80 + 30coshv - 24sinhv

= 80 + 30(e^v + e^-v)/2 - 24(e^v-e^-v)/2

= 80 + 3e^v + 27e^-v

this is at a maximum when the second two terms are equal*, that is,

3e^v = 27e^-v

v + ln3 = ln27 - v

v = (3ln3 - ln3)/2 = ln3

then u = sinh(ln3) = 4/3

and x = 6u = 24/3 = 8

* this is a "conjecture" but it's true... look at a graph of ae^x + be^-x with various values for a and b. It's late so I'll leave the proof of that to someone else for now. Otherwise it was easy using this DIRTY TRICK

....

let a, b, and c be real constants and consider the expression

ac^x + bc^-x

this is equivalent to

c^log(a)c x c^x + c^log(b)c x c^-x

= c^(x+log(a)c) + c^(-x + log(b)c)

looking at the first term, c^(x + a constant) has the same graph as c^x shifted to the left by that constant, for example it equals 1 at -log(a)c instead of zero. Likewise the second term is a horizontally shifted c^-x and is symmetric to c^x about a vertical line.

The graph of their sum forms a bowl shape. c^-x has negative slope increasing toward 0 on (-inf,inf), but is itself decreasing on that same interval, which means that if c^-y < c^-x then the absolute value of the slope at x is greater. And if c^y < c^x then that expression has greater slope at x than at y. This is to say, anywhere "higher up" on the graph of c^-x is changing height faster than anywhere "lower down" on either graph, and vice versa.

This means that if ac^x =/= bc^-x, then in either the positive or negative direction, one of those terms is decreasing faster than the other is increasing. So there exists y sufficiently close to x such that

ac^y + bc^-y < ac^x + bc^-x

Therefore the minimum cannot occur anywhere ac^x =/= bc^-x. Since the graph has one minimum this must be where ac^x = bc^-x.

Now my solution is 100% calculus-free.

Does IQ mean something besides an inflation of your ego? Intelligence doesn't correlate to success in life, work, etc. It is about the variables. I won't come back and read this, but please explain your interpretation so others will understand. I'm sure as s!$t your correlation is the "right" one.

*Let me explain to you the size of my ego. I'm just a dumb hillbilly that grew up playing in cornfields that built a fairly successful healthcare company (created the second richest CEO in Healthcare) by writing all of the P&Ps and developing the software/platform.

Can we get someone more original on here? I only come once or twice a month now.

Skadoosh

+1

WuxiFingerHold wrote:

+1

80

Bad Wigins wrote:

Is my solution to the infamous crocodile question even quantifiable on that scale?

NON-CALCULUS SOLUTION BY DIRTY TRICK (SUBSTITUTION)

let u = x/6

now let u = sinhv, then sqrt(1+u^2) = coshv (DIRTY TRICK)

Now my solution is 100% calculus-free.

True, and it's kinda cool, but a double substitution using through hyperbolic trig functions doesn't seem any easier than just doing the calculus, and the conjecture required to solve your solution is immediately available using calculus by finding where T'(v) = 0. (And you said maximum - don't you mean minimum?)

On the topic of problems, I thought this was a fun problem. Difficult enough that it's not trivial, but not so difficult it should take a huge amount of time or stump good math problem solvers, and doesn't require anything beyond highschool math.

There is a bag with marbles of two different colours. The probability of randomly drawing two marbles of the same colour (without replacement) is 1/2. Determine how many marbles of each colour could be in the bag. Prove you have all solutions.