There are three questions I’ve tested on people for a while now. I started doing this informally — asking friends and colleagues — and I’ve since turned it into a short online challenge.
The questions are not measuring intelligence. They’re measuring a specific thing: whether your brain makes automatic assumptions so fast that you act on them before checking whether they’re valid.
This is a real cognitive pattern, and it has consequences well beyond quiz games.
The Three Questions
I won’t reproduce them here — the challenge is a better format, because you commit to an answer before seeing the explanation. But here’s the structure of each one:
The first question sounds like it has an obvious answer. The obvious answer is wrong. The right answer requires noticing that you made an assumption the question didn’t actually require.
The second question sounds like a logic puzzle. Most people solve it quickly — and incorrectly. The incorrect answer is actually a more complex answer than the correct one. Slower thinking produces a worse result.
The third question involves a time-sensitive scenario. Almost everyone misidentifies which element of the scenario is the key variable.
Together, they test three failure modes: premature closure (accepting the first answer that appears), confirmation of pattern (assuming the current situation matches a familiar one), and variable selection (focusing on the wrong factor).
Why These Patterns Matter Outside Quiz Games
I’ve been learning to invest for about a year. Almost every mistake I’ve observed in investment analysis — including my own — traces back to one of these three patterns.
Premature closure looks like: reading the headline earnings number, deciding the quarter was good, and stopping there without checking whether revenue growth or margin expansion actually drove the result.
Confirmation of pattern looks like: seeing a company that superficially resembles another successful business, and assuming it has similar economics without checking whether the resemblance is real.
Variable selection looks like: focusing intensely on the metric that’s most visible (short-term earnings) while underweighting the metric that’s more predictive (long-term capital allocation quality).
None of this is unique to investing. The same three patterns appear in project planning, hiring decisions, medical diagnosis, and engineering risk assessment. The questions are a useful mirror.
What the Challenge Measures
The challenge scores you on three dimensions: whether you got each answer right, how quickly you answered (an indicator of whether you slowed down at all), and what your explanation was for your answer.
The score isn’t the important part. The explanation for your wrong answer is. Most people’s explanations reveal exactly which assumption they made — which is more useful than just knowing you were wrong.
One Thing to Try
If you take the challenge and miss one or more questions, before you look at the explanation, try to identify which assumption you made that led to the wrong answer. Write it down. Then check whether your identification matches the explanation.
People who can identify their own error before seeing the explanation are better at catching the same pattern in future reasoning — including in contexts with real stakes.
Take the 3-Question IQ Challenge — no tricks, no time pressure, just three questions: [3-Question IQ Challenge →](https://ordinarymantrying.com/tools/example-iq-challenge.html)
Which type of reasoning error do you catch yourself making most often — moving too fast, pattern-matching incorrectly, or focusing on the wrong variable?
Free Tool
3 lateral thinking questions. Most smart people miss at least one. The explanation reveals which assumption you made.
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