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How to increase your IQ level ?

I had a primary school teacher who complained that "kids today" would just whip out their slide rule and get an answer without really understanding the question or the answer....

Plus ça change, eh?

It all went wrong with those new fangled clay slates that let you erase your mistakes. As I alway say "It aint carved in stone until it's carved in stone".
 
@wise47 , why increase my IQ level? What are the practical benefits?
Whilst IQ is something you are born with and trying to change it no more worth the effort than a man adding a cubit to his height you can begin to approach issues more intelligently. My advice is, for every issue or problem, ask, ask, ask. Keep asking questions in your own mind seeing everything every each way you can. Don't just take someone else's word for it, even if they are 'an authority' (although that can be taken into account). There is nothing more galling than someone who hasn't bothered. Try to see every side of a topic to discover what is really going on. Don't be that person who responds with 'bollocks' in the belief nastiness trumps any of this.
 
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Whilst IQ is something you are born with and trying to change it no more worth the effort than a man adding a cubit to his height you can begin to approach issues more intelligently. My advice is, for every issue or problem, ask, ask, ask. Keep asking questions in your own mind seeing everything every each way you can. Don't just take someone else's word for it, even if they are 'an authority' (although that can be taken into account). There is nothing more galling than someone who hasn't bothered. Try to see every side of a topic to discover what is really going on. Don't be that person who responds with 'bollocks' in the belief nastiness trumps any of this.
On the other hand, 'Bollocks' may be a perfectly justifiable response when someone persists in peddling nonsense in defiance of evidence to the contrary (e.g. in this very thread). it's also not 'nastiness', but a succinct description of what's being peddled.
 
Hmm...

I can remember being taught how to use a slide rule, and had my own, including a nifty pocket version for quite a while.

I can also remember memorising the first few pages of logarithm tables, but happily, cannot remember a single detail now.

Do you remember using log table books at school?
I remember that they existed.
 
I remember that they existed.
I learnt to use one, though I can't remember if we were actually taught at school, or my dad taught me (he was a Physics teacher) or I found it in a book. I was never particularly proficient, though I remember I always had a slide rule in my briefcase, and there's certainly more than one in the house now somewhere. Calculators came in while I was at secondary school; my dad had one of the first Sinclair Scientific calculators, which used RPN. We weren't allowed to use them in exams, though; can't remember if that applied to slide rules (I suspect it did, since many had all sorts of formulae printed on them).
 
Your IQ can be raised, even very high, using a relatively simple method. It allows you to raise your intelligence level to 180, 200, 400, 600, or even 1600 points.

Bollocks, for various reasons, which have already been enumerated in this thread.

You almost certainly can increase the score you can get on an IQ test by practicing the questions, but that's a different thing entirely. There's a limit to the improvement, and will depend on the type of question (I suspect the ones used today are less susceptible to practice than the ones used for the Eleven Plus fifty-five years ago when I took it). What it won't do is affect your actual IQ (whatever that is).
 
On the other hand, 'Bollocks' may be a perfectly justifiable response when someone persists in peddling nonsense in defiance of evidence to the contrary (e.g. in this very thread). it's also not 'nastiness', but a succinct description of what's being peddled.
Further, expertise is the status of having already asked, asked, and asked, and thereby having acquired enough knowledge of a subject to have earned the right to respond to obvious nonsense with "bollocks." And on this topic at least, I took the pains to ask the proponent how he purports to do what he claims, in defiance of all available evidence, and he was kind enough to respond that it's by means akin to magic. Thence, "bollocks." There is no part of skepticism that requires us to coddle codswallop when it presents itself so egregiously.
 
The 29 test was to estimate the precision of a calculator. Enter 29, take the sine (set to degrees not radians), the cosine of the result, the tangent of the result, then back through inverse tangent, inverse cosine, inverse sine. How close to 29 is your result? Truncation errors give a result close but not equal to 29. My first calculator, a Sinclair Cambridge, had such a low precision that it returned an error at the fifth step, because the tangent - inverse tangent steps produced a number greater than 1. For reference, my current smartphone gives 29.0009396872.
When calculated by my favorite implementation of my favorite programming language, using IEEE double precision throughout, I get 29.00000000000001.

I assume the same answer would be obtained using just about any modern implementation of any modern programming language.
 
The 29 test was to estimate the precision of a calculator. Enter 29, take the sine (set to degrees not radians), the cosine of the result, the tangent of the result, then back through inverse tangent, inverse cosine, inverse sine. How close to 29 is your result? Truncation errors give a result close but not equal to 29. My first calculator, a Sinclair Cambridge, had such a low precision that it returned an error at the fifth step, because the tangent - inverse tangent steps produced a number greater than 1. For reference, my current smartphone gives 29.0009396872.

Dave
I guess that was for them fancy calculators. My original one just had the four basic functions and maybe a square root.
 
I had an old RPN calculator once. It had a bunch of the scientific functions on it that I surely didn't understand at the time. It had the red segment display type and worked perfectly.

My older brother went into college using that thing and graduated into a career of industrial robotics.

By the time I was supposed to be learning advanced math sliderules were all but desk relics owned by old men.
Didn't even see them in resale shops.
 
Further, expertise is the status of having already asked, asked, and asked, and thereby having acquired enough knowledge of a subject to have earned the right to respond to obvious nonsense with "bollocks." And on this topic at least, I took the pains to ask the proponent how he purports to do what he claims, in defiance of all available evidence, and he was kind enough to respond that it's by means akin to magic. Thence, "bollocks." There is no part of skepticism that requires us to coddle codswallop when it presents itself so egregiously.
Maybe Philosophy and ideas would have been a better place than science. IQ testing is used in education and employment, so why not for personal stuff such as expanding consciousness and raising levels of awareness. How to measure it, who knows?
 
Maybe Philosophy and ideas would have been a better place than science. IQ testing is used in education and employment, so why not for personal stuff such as expanding consciousness and raising levels of awareness. How to measure it, who knows?
Asked and answered. If the proponent wishes a claimed score of 400 to be directly comparable to a score of, say, 115 on the conventional scale, he must use a method of measurement and scoring equivalent to the convention—else bollocks.
 
I assume the same answer would be obtained using just about any modern implementation of any modern programming language.
For C++, yes I get the same answer as you did, as expected, since it's the same IEEE double precision arithmetic. Using Python's numpy.longdouble type (IEEE quadruple precision, 128 bits) I can improve it to 29.000000000000000003.
 
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I would increase my IQ by 1600 points, but on top of the 1,000,000,000 IQ I already have it's not worth the effort.
 
OP would be snickering at all these little brains and their bufoonish commentary, but he graciously recluses himself from commenting, just checking regularly on the thread to see how the lesser minds are getting along.
 
I've been meaning to ask the OP that since he believes IQ can apparently go up indefinitely, can it go down indefinitely too? What's going on at that lower end of the Bell Curve distribution?
 
For C++, yes I get the same answer as you did, as expected, since it's the same IEEE double precision arithmetic. Using Python's numpy.longdouble type (IEEE quadruple precision, 128 bits) I can improve it to 29.000000000000000003.
If numpy.longdouble is really 128 bits, then Python is doing some really sloppy calculating. Consider:

Code:
29.00000000000001        ; IEEE double precision (53 bits of significand)
29.000000000000000003    ; numpy.longdouble      (128 bits of significand?)

If numpy.longdouble is really 128 bits (on your system, because I believe the precision of that datatype is system-dependent), then why is it delivering only 4 decimal places (roughly 13 bits) more accuracy while using 75 more bits of significand?

With IEEE double precision, the 29.00000000000001 result is off by only 1 bit, in the least significant of the 53 bits. You're telling us the Python numpy.longdouble result (29.000000000000000003) got something like 60+ of its least significant bits wrong.

That doesn't particularly surprise me, but it does amuse me.

Editing to add this: It wouldn't surprise if your system's implementation of numpy.longdouble is using only 64 bits of significand, not 128. Or that one or more of the trigonometric calculations is limited to (or no more accurate than) 64 bits.
 
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