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When given the task "What is the next number in this sequence: 3, 5, 7" my first thought would be 9, since we are counting odd numbers. But that's kind of dumb, nobody would ask something this simple. So maybe the answer is 11, since we might be counting prime numbers. That's probably good enough for an IQ test, but if this was an interview question at Google the better answer might be 13 (counting Mersenne exponents, integers so that 2^n - 1 is prime, a well known method to find large primes). On the other hand 23 is the next prime whose digits are also prime. 9 is also the next Columbian Number, but 13 is the next fortunate number.

Now a good question would give me only one of these as possible answer, but in practise having multiple viable answers happens and I have to judge how complicated the question was supposed to be, what the test's expectations are etc. If you ask a Japanese you might get a different answer than if you ask a French simply because of how different their academic cultures are.



What does a carefully chosen straw man IQ question (may never have appeared in an IQ test in history, afaik) have to do with the fact that no sub saharan african society had developed the wheel before colonialism?




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