am i stupid test — i took one in the cereal aisle

the cart wheel locked in aisle four. i googled the question right there, between the cereal and the granola, while a stranger waited politely behind me. the test had twelve questions. it diagnosed me with average. average is the worst possible result. it tells you nothing. i would like a longer test or no test.

so here we are. thursday, 2:18pm, back at the desk, processing what happened on saturday between the bran options and the granola wall. the cart wheel had locked. the stranger had waited. the am i stupid test had spoken. the verdict was average, which is the kind of word people use when they don’t want to commit. doctors do this. landlords do this. now twelve-question quizzes do it too.

writing this from a chair the building leases and the company assigns and i, technically, just sit in. monitor angled. one slack ping i’m pretending didn’t happen.

i did not seek out the am i stupid test. it found me. the search bar offered the question before i had finished typing it. you stand still in a supermarket and the algorithm assumes you have an existential crisis. occasionally, it is correct.

the cereal aisle, the locked wheel, the stranger

let me set the scene, because the scene is the whole post. saturday. aisle four. one of those carts that decided one wheel will no longer cooperate. behind me, a stranger. mid-forties. patient. holding a basket. she did not say anything. that’s the part that sticks. she just stood there with the posture that signals i have all afternoon and i am not going to be the one to mention it. patience like that is more dangerous than honking.

so i pulled out my phone and typed the question. the internet immediately produced fourteen of them. one with a quiz icon. one with a brain icon. one with a brain icon that was on fire, which i interpreted as marketing. i picked the one with four point two stars.

TWELVE QUESTIONS. NO TIMER. NO STAKES. NO FOREST FLOOR.

the twelve questions, ranked by how much they insulted me

i closed the tab in a fit of dignity, so i won’t reproduce the test in full. but the questions were of this kind: do you sometimes forget where you put your keys. do you sometimes walk into a room and forget why. have you ever put the wrong thing in the microwave. do you sometimes feel, in a quiet room, that you might be a very small kind of stupid.

question seven made me freeze. that’s why i was in aisle four — i was buying cereal because the kitchen incident had taken the microwave with it, the microwave is where breakfast lived, and so cereal had been promoted from sometimes-food to required-food. i answered yes. the microwave i killed last month is the seventh i have killed. that’s not a sometimes. that’s a hobby.

question twelve broke me. it was a confession dressed as a question. anyone designing a test that ends with a feelings prompt has lost the plot.

average is the worst possible result

i need to defend this. average is fine. average is normal. all true. none of it the point. an am i stupid test that produces average has performed zero diagnostic work. it handed me back the question i walked in with and called that an answer.

i would have respected a test that called me a moron. i would have respected a test that called me a genius. average is the diagnostic equivalent of the doctor saying “well, you’re alive”. yes. i was hoping for more.

i looked into it after. the source was a comment on a forum, which is technically a citation only if you are very loose about citation. the comment said most online iq quizzes are written in an afternoon, calibrated against nothing, and tuned to leave the average user feeling slightly above average so they share the result. which means, mathematically, getting average is the version the algorithm could not optimize. i underperformed the dopamine layer.

i have written elsewhere about why stupid is its own category and not a weakness of intelligence, and the cereal aisle quiz, in its small accidental way, proves the point. the test wants to grade me on intelligence. stupid is a category. you don’t quiz a category.

stefan and the wine man’s law of tests

two months ago there was a wine tasting and a man named stefan. stefan would say “this one has notes of leather, tobacco, forest floor”. the room would nod. the rule i derived, sitting there with my forest-floor glass: any test where the answer is also the product is not a test. the am i stupid test is in that category. it diagnoses you, then offers you, in a banner at the bottom, a course, a workbook, an app, a pdf. the result was always going to require the next thing. that is the business model.

i don’t own a yoga mat i use. i own three. the third one lives under the couch, possibly evolving. i bought all three after a wellness quiz diagnosed me with tension, a symptom common to anyone who has ever had a job. tension. forest floor. average. same word.

slack just buzzed twice. i’m not looking. somebody renamed the channel again. third time this quarter. the renames do nothing. the channel keeps being itself.

what a real am i stupid test would look like

i’m drafting this here, because the test as it currently exists is a disgrace to the form. a real am i stupid test would have:

• at minimum, sixty questions. twelve is a vibe check. sixty is a diagnosis.
• at least one question about the microwave. the microwave is the universal litmus.
• at least one question about whether you have, in a public place, googled a question about yourself while a stranger waited.
• at least one question about whether you have ever physically slid a piece of mail you don’t want to open under another piece of mail you also don’t want to open.
• a result that is specific. tell me the percentile. tell me the category. tell me what i’m in for.
• no banner at the bottom. no course. no pdf. just a result. let the result do the work.

i would also include a question about whether the taker has, in the last week, said “this is stupid” out loud — because the phrase is a placeholder for irritation, and irritation is observation, not stupid. most folk-wisdom about the word sounds right but does not survive contact with a thursday and a locked cart wheel.

verdict — i would like a longer test or no test

the cart wheel started working the moment i moved away from the granola. once i moved on, the cart moved on. whether stupid is permanent is a separate inquiry, and the desk is not mine for that long.

↑