7 Responses to “The Self-Referential Test”

1. 1 1 Mike H
   December 22, 2009 at 2:57 am

   Try the original:
   http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/srat.html

2. 2 2 Steve Landsburg
   December 22, 2009 at 9:39 am

   Mike H: Oh! I wish I’d known about this before I posted. There goes the rest of my morning….

3. 3 3 Dave
   December 22, 2009 at 2:15 pm

   For you guys much smarter than I – on Steven’s original quiz I am stuck. Is the answer to 7 A or B?

4. 4 4 IB
   December 22, 2009 at 2:27 pm

   Dave, yours is a fair question: 7 is pretty ambiguous. The answer is B.

   Excellent puzzle! Enjoyed it tremendously! Thanks!

5. 5 5 Jonathan Kariv
   December 22, 2009 at 6:24 pm

   Did the one Steve posted. Liked it alot. For some reason I can’t open the original one. Clicking on the questions prompts a “what program do you want to open this with”

6. 6 6 Steve Landsburg
   December 22, 2009 at 7:25 pm

   Jonathan: It’s a plain text file. You can open it with whatever you use to read plain text.

7. 7 7 Jeffrey
   January 5, 2010 at 8:41 pm

   Is there some explanation for 20? I guess you could say all four have a relationship with weather, but it’s hard to describe, just like the relationship between standardized tests and intelligence.

   But I’m not satisfied with that. It’s not just a mystical relationship. Higher test scores are very clearly correlated with intelligence. Similarly, a low barometric reading is correlated with storms and wind. Of course, the change in the barometer is what matters, but a low reading still means it’s more likely than usual that the barometer fell recently, so the expected wind is higher than average.

   Maybe it’s correlated with low temperatures or latitude – I don’t know about this one. But there is no reason to expect a correlation with longitude – any small correlation that exists would be a coincidence of geography and choice of prime meridian.