Friday 17 August 2012

Risk Intelligence - Don't Know Why

Earlier today I took a fascinating online test designed to measure risk-intelligence:

www.projectionpoint.com

It measures how well you judge your ability to estimate probabilities correctly (and only takes 5 minutes).

Guruhogg scored 76.74 - see if you can beat that!

My result


Recommended listening:
Don't Know Why by Norah Jones

7 comments:

  1. Thomas M. Keeling17 August 2012 at 13:54

    I went through the test just pressing 50% almost everytime and got 86.49. To get the highest score it is best just to play it safe all of the time.

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  2. Well done Tom - you've played the test! However, you wont know now how risk intelligent you really are... (they have a pay-to-use test that accounts for gaming strategies like the one you did... try that one!)

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    1. I did actually take it properly before I did what I said above. I got 71.something. Better than average but I'm obviously not as risk intelligent as GuruHogg

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  3. Ah, one day Tom, one day you will ascend to my supreme levels of risk intelligence... ;)

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  4. That'll always be the dream *sigh*

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  5. Thanks for your interest in the RQ test. I note in my book that some people realise fairly quickly that there is an easy way to game this test. As Thomas says, if you always select the 50% category unless you are pretty certain that a statement is true or false – and if the test contains equal numbers of true and false statements – you will score very highly, perhaps very near 100. The high scores generated by this strategy do not reflect high risk intelligence, however, because it sticks to the safety of the valley floor and the hilltops, and never ventures onto the perilous slopes where risk intelligence is required. This is a problem with a test that purports to measure risk intelligence! To remedy this, I created a second indicator which I call ―the K factor" - for Keats and Keynes. It works like this; each time that a person uses the categories 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 60%, 70%, 80% or 90%, they get one point. When they use 0%, 50% or 100% they get zero. The maximum K factor is therefore 50 for a fifty-question test. The K factor gives an indication of how reliable your RQ score is as an indicator of your level of risk intelligence. The problem is how to combine the information about the K factor with the RQ score in a way that is both simple and meaningful. I‘m still working on this.

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    1. Thanks for the comment - very interesting stuff.

      I guess the real issue is that you cannot tell whether people are being honest when they give the answers. The "K factor" is way of punishing people for not being honest - by presuming that people do not think in binary (totally sure/completely unsure) - a fairly safe assumption. Another way you could measure whether people are gaming the test is by loking at the number of different categories that people use over the 50 questions. For example, if someone uses 0%, 10%, 50%, 30% and 90% they would use 5 out of the 11 categories. This score of 5/11 could be used to decrease/increase the RQ score. I think the main advantage of this approach is that it takes a wider look at the results. Using many different categories should be a sign of high risk intelligence...

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