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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Risk Intelligence

I meant to post a link to this last week after PZ Myers mentioned it, but then I wanted to try taking the test first which meant my post got delayed and then forgotten about for a few days. If you haven't already had a look at the Risk Intelligence test, though, I think it is worth going to (as far as internet intelligence tests go). The basic idea of the test is that you don't simply answer every statement with a True/False response, but rather with a percentage - 50% meaning you have no idea and think the statement as equally likely to be true or false, 100% meaning you are certain it is true, and 0% meaning you are certain it is false. There are 10% increments in between for all of those pesky facts that you are pretty sure you've heard somewhere else, but you wouldn't bet anything much of value on.

I scored a 78 - apparently that is a rather good score, but not as good as PZ Myer's 83. It would seem that I lack confidence in my responses (judging by the response curve given at the end). Of course, I don't know how much stock to place in any internet quiz, but I still thought it was an interesting project. Plus, whoever put it on seems to be gathering data, so you might be helping out someone's research by taking the test.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I scored a 45. What does that mean exactly? I hit the 50/50 button the most...though I was pretty shocked at how much stuff I did get wrong.

Unknown said...

I got 72. That was fun!
Robert - http://projectionpoint.com/calibration_curve.php
shows you how to interpret your output. From what I gather if you put 50% for all of them you'd actually score quite high, assuming half the questions were true and half were false, I didn't really check

Mozglubov said...

The link Cornucrapia left gives a pretty good overview of what the results mean. In general terms, if your plot starts above the diagonal, crosses at 50, and then goes below you are generally over-confident. If your plot does the opposite (starts below, then crosses above) you are generally under-confident. If you cross more than once then you are wonky and I'm not sure there is a general meaning...