Feeding My Ignorance

I am often intrigued by the type of post that appear on Social Media that 'shout' "only the smartest can get this right" or "only people with high intelligence can do this". My gut feel is that these were simply 'click-bait' - trying to draw you in with the promise of proving that you are 'better' than many.

...

This is, actually, probably true to quite a large extent - however a little experiment that I just carried out gave me a rather unexpected result.

There was one such puzzle posted today (there were many - I experimented with one...) where people were asked to solve what was effectively a set of simultaneous equations (which sounds scary but can be quite simple!) - given three equations, what is the result of the fourth. The puzzle involved using some basic knowledge of arithmetic and a little bit of logic - nothing that would be classified as "super-intelligent".

I sampled some of the answers - and around 70% of them were wrong answers. Bearing in mind that people were posting their answers (and in some cases their workings out) on the thread it surprised me to find such a high failure rate.

Clearly isolated tests such as these do not in any way measure intelligence in a meaningful way - that includes those which purport to measure IQ from a dozen or so questions - but at the same time they are clearly a measure of 'something'.

Do most people post an answer and "assume" it is right? Or do they scan the other answers to see how many agree with them? Or do they scan the explanations to find out where they might have gone wrong? How do they know which is the right answer when that (at least in this case) is not what the majority are answering? (although I didn't check to see whether it was the most popular answer)

Could say - more questions than answers - but then again - here we had several answers to the same question....

BTW - the answer to the question posed in the subject is "almost certainly"!!!!