Yeah, I've done an online test a few times just for giggles. The result is usually something around 165 or so...then they try to sell me something. I always assume they give you a high number just to stroke your ego so you'll be more likely to buy the crap they're selling. I once found one or two sites with very different tests that seemed somehow more legitimate to me and that weren't selling anything. Those ones scored me in the 130-140 range, which, based on my experience in school and interactions with others, seems more reasonable to me. Probably still a bit high, but I'm more inclined to believe those numbers than the 160+ of the others.
At times I wonder whether the same can be said of some semi "legitimate" fields, such as economics. "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." Ezra Solomon, as quoted in Psychology Today (March 1984); also attributed to John Kenneth Galbraith in U.S. News & World Report (7 March 1988), p. 64.
^ I'm sure you meant that as a joke, but just to clarify, the field of economics bears very little resemblance to the "economic forecasting" that you see the pundits on TV do!
has economic forecasting the same rate of accuracy as the weather forecast? In that case it might count as a branch of occultism
I always thought the finance/economics pundits on television weren't much different than political pundits. In terms of more "serious" economics, at times I wonder why the random walk hypothesis is taken as a premise in various mathematical finance models. (Such as the Black-Scholes equation for financial derivatives). That is, besides mathematical convenience and solvability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk_hypothesis
Random walk is used because the stock market results from a massive amount of interactions, some of which are quantifiable and some of which are not. Not only that, there are interactions whose mechanisms are not publicly known--think high-frequency trading algorithms, whose internals are closely-guarded secrets. People are not robots and do not behave like robots. Many trading decisions are made on instinct and intuition rather than hard data. All you have to do is look at game theory to see how people frequently make suboptimal decisions even when the optimal decision is staring them right in the face. Kind of hard to make reliable predictive models in the face of that.