Robin Hanson once wrote a blog post about how reasonably intelligent people (for instance, the sort of people who read his blog) tend to overestimate how smart everyone else is.
For instance, about half of Americans are unable to correctly read a table and do a simple addition/subtraction calculation:
Only 52% could do item AB30901, which is to look at a table on page 118 of the 1980 World Almanac and answer: According to the chart, did U.S. exports of oil (petroleum) increase or decrease between 1976 and 1978?
Such is the banal reality of the American high-90s average IQ, which is still a dozen points above the world average.
Why am I bringing this up?
Because whenever I write about IQ and its relationship to economic success there will inevitably be the skeptical commenters bringing up the same old tired responses. IQ is just a number. It doesn’t measure anything. You are a pseudo-intellectual. You are an IQ reductionism. You are an autist.
Now I acknowledge that there are understandable reasons for this. You can say that Country X has an IQ of 100 and Country Y has an IQ of 85 – but what the hell does it mean in real life?
And consequently, why should the ability to scribble down something for some irrelevant test matter for economic success?
Moreover, this to an extent even applies to the people who read and appreciate IQ realist writers like Steve Sailer and James Thompson on this website. You might have a good general appreciation of the different average IQs of the world’s major regions (Global North: ~100; Latin America and Middle East: ~85; Sub-Saharan Africa: ~70). And many do appreciate that national wealth depends largely on a population’s intelligence, especially of its “smart fractions” (as opposed to neoliberal hand-wringing over insufficient deregulation or the Marxist jeremiads about the “Golden Billion” keeping the Third World down). However, putting the two together – at least in an intuitive, non-autistic way – is quite tricky.
Fortunately, the PISA website has sample math questions from the 2012 assessment, corresponding to each of the six different levels of difficulty, as well as statistics on the percentage of 15-16 year old students from each of the participating countries that is capable of correctly answering it:
Distribution of countries by competence level in Math (PISA 2012)
| Country | Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 | Level 6 |
| Albania | 68% | 39% | 16% | 4% | 1% | 0% |
| Argentina | 65% | 34% | 11% | 2% | 0% | 0% |
| Australia | 94% | 80% | 58% | 34% | 15% | 4% |
| Austria | 94% | 81% | 59% | 35% | 14% | 3% |
| Belgium | 93% | 81% | 63% | 40% | 19% | 6% |
| Brazil | 65% | 33% | 13% | 4% | 1% | 0% |
| Bulgaria | 80% | 56% | 32% | 14% | 4% | 1% |
| Canada | 96% | 86% | 65% | 39% | 16% | 4% |
| Chile | 78% | 49% | 23% | 8% | 2% | 0% |
| Colombia | 58% | 26% | 8% | 2% | 0% | 0% |
| Costa Rica | 76% | 40% | 13% | 3% | 1% | 0% |
| Croatia | 91% | 70% | 43% | 21% | 7% | 2% |
| Czechia | 93% | 79% | 57% | 33% | 13% | 3% |
| Denmark | 96% | 83% | 59% | 30% | 10% | 2% |
| Estonia | 98% | 90% | 68% | 38% | 15% | 4% |
| Finland | 97% | 88% | 67% | 38% | 15% | 4% |
| France | 91% | 78% | 56% | 32% | 13% | 3% |
| Germany | 95% | 82% | 63% | 40% | 18% | 5% |
| Greece | 86% | 64% | 37% | 15% | 4% | 1% |
| Hong Kong | 97% | 92% | 80% | 60% | 34% | 12% |
| Hungary | 90% | 72% | 47% | 24% | 9% | 2% |
| Iceland | 93% | 79% | 55% | 29% | 11% | 2% |
| Indonesia | 58% | 24% | 8% | 2% | 0% | 0% |
| Ireland | 95% | 83% | 59% | 31% | 11% | 2% |
| Israel | 84% | 67% | 45% | 24% | 9% | 2% |
| Italy | 92% | 75% | 51% | 27% | 10% | 2% |
| Japan | 97% | 89% | 72% | 48% | 24% | 8% |
| Jordan | 64% | 31% | 11% | 2% | 1% | 0% |
| Kazakhstan | 86% | 55% | 23% | 6% | 1% | 0% |
| Korea | 97% | 91% | 76% | 55% | 31% | 12% |
| Latvia | 95% | 80% | 53% | 26% | 8% | 2% |
| Liechtenstein | 97% | 86% | 71% | 48% | 25% | 7% |
| Lithuania | 91% | 74% | 48% | 23% | 8% | 1% |
| Luxembourg | 91% | 76% | 53% | 30% | 11% | 3% |
| Macao | 97% | 89% | 73% | 49% | 24% | 8% |
| Malaysia | 77% | 48% | 22% | 7% | 1% | 0% |
| Mexico | 78% | 45% | 18% | 4% | 1% | 0% |
| Montenegro | 73% | 43% | 19% | 6% | 1% | 0% |
| Netherlands | 96% | 85% | 67% | 43% | 19% | 4% |
| New Zealand | 93% | 77% | 56% | 33% | 15% | 5% |
| Norway | 93% | 78% | 53% | 28% | 9% | 2% |
| Peru | 53% | 25% | 9% | 3% | 1% | 0% |
| Poland | 97% | 86% | 64% | 38% | 17% | 5% |
| Portugal | 91% | 75% | 52% | 28% | 11% | 2% |
| Qatar | 53% | 30% | 15% | 7% | 2% | 0% |
| Romania | 86% | 59% | 31% | 12% | 3% | 1% |
| Russia | 93% | 76% | 50% | 24% | 8% | 2% |
| Serbia | 85% | 61% | 35% | 15% | 5% | 1% |
| Shanghai | 99% | 96% | 89% | 76% | 55% | 31% |
| Singapore | 98% | 92% | 80% | 62% | 40% | 19% |
| Slovakia | 90% | 73% | 49% | 27% | 11% | 3% |
| Slovenia | 95% | 80% | 56% | 32% | 14% | 3% |
| Spain | 92% | 76% | 52% | 26% | 8% | 1% |
| Sweden | 91% | 73% | 48% | 24% | 8% | 2% |
| Switzerland | 96% | 88% | 70% | 45% | 21% | 7% |
| Taiwan | 96% | 87% | 74% | 57% | 37% | 18% |
| Thailand | 81% | 50% | 23% | 8% | 3% | 1% |
| Tunisia | 64% | 32% | 11% | 3% | 1% | 0% |
| Turkey | 85% | 58% | 33% | 16% | 6% | 1% |
| UAE | 80% | 54% | 29% | 12% | 4% | 1% |
| UK | 92% | 78% | 55% | 30% | 12% | 3% |
| USA | 92% | 74% | 48% | 25% | 9% | 2% |
| Uruguay | 71% | 44% | 21% | 7% | 1% | 0% |
| Vietnam | 96% | 86% | 63% | 35% | 13% | 4% |
| OECD average | 92% | 77% | 55% | 31% | 13% | 3% |
I am going to go through them, essentially repeating Robin Hanson’s exercise for the United States for the world at large. Hopefully, this will give us a better perspective on what abstract things like “average national IQ” actually mean in practice. And why seemingly minor differences between them are important and explain the vast bulk of international differences in GDP per capita and general socio-economic success.
Look Around. There Are Stupid People Everywhere.
Level 1
Very simple graph-reading problem that almost everyone (92%) in the OECD got correct.
Even so, even at this very elementary level, only 65% of Brazilians and not much more than half of Indonesians and Peruvians can be expected to get it right.
Level 2
Not even so much a question of elementary arithmetic as of elementary common sense.
But the OECD average is now 77% – only three quarters of Europeans are getting this right, while only the East Asians are still scoring at around the 90% mark.
However, performance amongst outside the high-IQ northern world is already plummeting: Only around half of Malaysians and Mexicans are getting this right, a third of Brazilians, and only a quarter of Colombians, Indonesians, and Peruvians.
Level 3
One would think that this not much harder than the most basic literacy test, but apparently not. There is not a single country where more than 80% got it right.
OECD average: 55. Elementary table reading is a struggle for half of Americans and Russians, and two thirds of Turks and Romanians.
But the results for the developing world are already veering into catastrophic territory: Only 18% of Mexicans, 13% of Brazilians, and 8% of Indonesians are still coping.
Level 4
This is the first problem with at least some multi-step elements to it, though it only involves multiplying numbers in a straightforward sequence. I suspect this is the bare minimum cognitive level you need to be capable of productive work within the complex “O-Ring” economy.
OECD average: 31%. The major East Asian countries: ~50%, the Germanic lands: ~40%, the USA – 25%, Russia – 24%, Turkey – 16%.
Meanwhile, the figures for the developing world are diminishing into truly “(not so) smart fraction” territory: Only 4% of Mexicans and Brazilians, 3% of Tunisians and Peruvians, and 2% of Jordanians, Colombians, and Indonesians are still on board, hanging on.
Level 5
The arithmetic procedure here is still elementary, but it is both multi-step, and has to be completed in the correct order.
I would estimate that this is the minimum level you have to be do competent intellectual work, such as programming.
OECD average: 13%, which broadly correlates to the actual percentage of “symbolic analysts” – mind workers who process information and symbols for a living – within the developed world economies.
But the percentage of people at this cognitive level in the developing world is now pretty much petering out: They constitute just 1% in Albania, Brazil, and Mexico, and less than 1% in Colombia and Indonesia.
Making teams at this level of competence for ordinary entrepreneurs is becoming increasingly unrealistic and, consequently, imposing an absolute limit on economic complexity.
Level 6
This problem requires a multi-step approach, an understanding of rates, and the intelligence to complete it in the correct order.
Though not especially hard, even at this level. I suspect that many of you can do it in your heads within a minute.
But a majority of all the tested teens begged to differ.
OECD average: 3% (!!). Korea: 12%, Japan: 8%, Germany: 5%. The US, Italy, Sweden, and Russia were all at 2%; the Mediterranean was at 1%.
Some countries where a big fat 100% (rounded up) were unable to do this problem: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Qatar, Tunisia, Uruguay.
The number of people at this level, the highest measured by PISA, is dwindling away into insignificance in Latin America and the Middle East.
And yet this only translates to an IQ of 120-125. We’re nowhere even near genius level yet.
A Cognitive Model of the Economy
The classical definition of an economy is a system for the production and exchange of goods and services. However, I will argue that you can view it even more fundamentally as a system for generating and trading solutions to problems.
People with successful solutions acquire money, and in turn buy solutions for their own problems (which range from basic needs, such as food and shelter, to whims and fancies, such as a new Tesla). From this perspective, different systems of political economy are ultimately just different ways of organizing the problem-solving machine. For instance, under capitalism, everyone is largely free to buy and sell solutions, whereas under the central planning systems of the old socialist regimes, bureaucrats play the key role in deciding who works on which problem and who gets access to their solutions – and who doesn’t.
In this interpretation, loosening regulations should be generally good, since it effectively removes barriers to speedier exploration of any given problem space. But having people capable of such exploration in the first place is even more important.
Some of these problems, such as subsistence farming and trucking, are pretty simple and can be accomplished with reasonable efficiency even by relatively dull workers. This is because problems in this “Foolproof sector” (as Garett Jones calls it) require few steps and have only a minimal threshold difficulty, so production in this sector is governed by the standard Cobb-Douglas equation. More highly skilled workers are only modestly more productive, and are thus awarded with modestly higher salaries. Labor differs by productivity, but is substitutable – one experienced waiter is worth two novice ones.
Gregory Clark – A Farewell to Alms: A simple visual illustration of a multi-step production process. Even minor differences in competence – assuming they have an affect on p, the probability of failure, will have increasingly drastic effects on the success rate as the production chain gets longer.
Other problems are very complex and require teams of competent workers to perform multiple complicated steps to create a successful solution. The best are paired with the best for maximum productivity. Moreover, many O-Ring problems might have a threshold limit for IQ, below which no productive work can be done on them in principle (as per the Ushakov-Kulivets model). To be commercially viable, the risk of failure on any one link of a long production chain needs to be kept low. Examples of these “O-Ring” tasks may include: Aircraft manufacturing; corporate merger planning; computer chip design; machine building; open-heart surgeries.
Why is the O-Ring sector critical? Workers in this sector are richly awarded, corresponding to the massive amount of value generated in these enterprises. But these workers can also take jobs in the Foolproof sector – the chip designer in the O-Ring sector can always become a waiter in the Foolproof sector – thereby pushing up wages in the latter far beyond what they would otherwise be in a society with no substantial O-Ring sector to speak of. As Jones argues, this is because labor in the Foolproof sector is substitutable, and low-IQ people are broadly competitive with high-IQ workers.
According to Kremer/Jones, it is the relative strength of the O-Ring sector in the developed world which explains why a hairdresser earns five times as much in Belgium as in Brazil, even though productivity between the two cannot be much different. Or why a coffee at a cafe costs 10x less than in Turkey than in Norway, even though the Turkish coffee will if anything be better. This difference between 100 IQ Belgium and 85 IQ Brazil is much greater than the difference between two average persons with that IQ within either country.
Why is this O-Ring stronger in Belgium than in Brazil? Because in Brazil, only a tiny fraction of high school students can do anything much more complex than a simple, single-step arithmetic operation.
So why do foolproof sector workers in the US earn much more than foolproof sector workers in Korea? Or let’s say if you take into account medical, maybe they earn the same, but they should earn a lot more based on the difference in the percentage that answered level 6 correctly. Maybe there are diminishing returns in this theory beyond a certain point.
PISA tests are a meme; at least here.
“Here’s your test on a computer, kids”
“Does it impact our grades?”
“Nope”
“Are the test results public?”
“Nope”
“LOL, watch this – record time”
:Everyone does it as quickly as possible, those who try hard might be called out as nerds and uncool:
Seriously, I have a distinct feeling that Asian schools prepare their kids in advance. The same way most of schools here practically abandoned normal teaching programme and instituted year long preparations aimed at drilling students into solving the specific exams that constitute the Abitur/Matura.
Also, don’t pretend that actual IQ test solving can’t be trained.
There’s no such thing as “economic success”.
Or, rather, there is no single valid metric of “success” in this space.
Consider Equatorial Guinea, an “economically successful” country with a GDP (PPP per capita) comparable to the Czech Republic. Yet it is still a classic African shithole, with literal cannibals roaming the streets.
Consider again the Ukraine, which is a Somalia-tier failed state, with a failed economy to match it. Yet it is full of SWPL white people who drink craft beer, enjoy boutique board games and walk alone at night.
Looking at this makes me a little sceptical of how well the PISA tests measure competence (at least in absolute terms).
For instance, the claim that only such a small percentage of British schoolchildren can do advanced maths seems to be contradicted by the fact that over half can pass their Maths GCSEs, which require competence in similar levels of Maths.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/aug/24/proportion-of-students-getting-good-gcse-grades-falls-after-reforms
I for one never make this mistake! For example, I knew that blocking Telegram was going to stifle its user growth in Russia, because most people are too dumb and too lazy to figure out how to use VPN.
In my observation people who overstimate intelligence in others are themselves somewhat limited in their mental capacity – think of a typical college-educated Western liberal, who is reasonably “smart”, and thinks that African immigrants are smart people just like him.
It takes a special kind of intelligence to see limitations in others, and some people are even smart enough to aknowledge their own limitations.
That’s an interesting finding and a bit unexpected, because Brazil has a substantial white population, who enjoy access to superior schooling. This massive gap in performance cannot be explained solely by race.
Can we expect that whites in USA will grow dumber as the country becomes more disfunctional and more “diverse”? I questioned America’s ability to sustain its techological edge in the future, and now there is some empirical data that might support my thesis.
I think this is a bit different since the average Telegram user is more sophisticated than the average. Now yes, if say odnoklassniki was blocked, then usage would plummet. But I haven’t noticed any major decline in usage amongst the people who were using it, e.g. people at a state-owned company that I was doing contract work for when the ban went into effect. Also, as I’m sure you well known, the actual blocking has been highly ineffective. I don’t even have to use VPN to access it 99% of the time.
In Hive Mind, Garett Jones mentions the peer effect – studies showing people work harder when they are observed by hard workers. It’s highly plausible that the same goes for intellectual achievement. Not much point in working your brain off when surrounded by dumbos, since most success is relative, not absolute.
GCSEs involve years of teaching to the test. Format is predictable, changes little from year to year. Past exams are available for practice.
In contrast, PISA presents novel problems of the sort one is more likely to encounter in real life.
“Or why a coffee at a cafe costs 10X less than in Turkey than in Norway”.
10X less?
Or 1/10th as much?
I think Karlin is converging on my elitist “nationalism”. The proles require leadership and noblesse oblige.
It should not be forgotten that they have have very useful specific knowledge and skills and are often immune to “clever sillies” nonsense. I have double digit IQ employees who can work miracles with their hands.
Our task is to mobilize them as soldiers to crush and replace existing elites with ourselves.
Post of the year. I mean it.
Oh I’m gonna have fun playing this test and telling the results per country to people in China.
The fact that Argentines are so dumb (0% even getting level 5) when they are 80% white is what I find most astonishing. Maybe they are just extremely lazy.
Gigerenzers Work showed that tests, like the above, are strongly format dependent. Change the test format to one to which our cognitive abilities are evolutionary adapted and performance will improve a lot.
The main problem I have with these tests is, that they are mostly irrelevant, in the same sense as university education is mostly irrelevant to work place performance, since most skills are learned when they are needed and kept in strength as long as they are needed. University and schools degrees are at best a kind of signaling of discipline, obedience and the like.
What is more relevant than IQ imho (which has a dissapointing intra-individual validity btw; test the same individual at different times and you get different results, fluctuating up to 20%), is how fast an individual can behavioraly adapt to environmental requirements. Put differently, it is more important how fast an individual can learn or change its behavioral repertoire. Some individuals learn faster than others and are therefore more adaptible to and therefore successful in changing environements.
You can train rats, pigeons and dogs quite surprisingly complex tasks. With the proper symbolic format (like colored buttons) and training you could train a rat to perform simple symbolic algorithms (think of how a turing machine operates). Human behavior is even more adaptable, putting the tests above in the purview of IQ-70 populations – with proper training that is (IQ tests are also subject to training effects btw, i.e. you can train for high IQ test scores).
What is missing in the intelligence debate is a measure of this second order behavior, or the ability to learn new behaviors.
How can it be so bad when their average is 96?
The Argentinean probably saunters casually into the testing room thinking – why the f*** should I take this irrelevant nonsense seriously. That steak and wine dinner last night was amazing, I think ill save my mental effort for that history of Russian literature I’m reading.
The Chinese guy walks grim-faced and serious into the room thinking – I must give this totally irrelevant question my absolute maximum effort, for the honor of my family and to avenge the humiliations of the Opium War and show we’re equal to whites!
Much later, guys like Anatoly Karlin scratch their heads and simply can’t figure out why IQ tests significantly fail to measure up to real world outcomes between countries and groups, and individuals.
Oh well, they say to themselves, w’ell just ignore the pesky details.
And so the human comedy goes.
The simple answer is that Argentine demographics aren’t 80% white, or at least not what would fall as European under North American definitions. A century of gradual decline is a century of shifting population ratios due to differentiate fertility.
Also it needs to be said that the nations of Latin America are running de facto caste systems due to assortative mating. Caste systems have the side effect of maintained system stability at the cost of overall competitiveness because elite intragroup competition is much smaller and selection pressures much weaker because the proles are so dimwitted that they don’t pose any threat.
some people are even smart enough to a(c)knowledge their own limitations.
By this standard I must be very intelligent.
C’mon, everyone knows Argentinians are NOT white
The proles require leadership and noblesse oblige.
But they have to “like” you to follow you and that leaves out about 99.9% of would be elite leaders.
Well the White Mexican IQ is around 100 and White Mexicans are not that smart acting.
I thought I had read in the past that the Amerindian admixture in Argentines was about 20%, but apparently I was wrong; it is more like 30% with another 5% black (at best). That makes a lot more sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentines#DNA_Genetics_studies
Apparently in Chile it is even more, 40%, which surprises me very much since I have been there and (those that I met) did not look it.
Average IQ of AK blog commentors is unironically probably very high. I would guess that the average IQ of almost any interent forum is reasonably above average high.
The problem with Level 6 Math is that the correct answer as given is 28 whereas the actual one is 28.3(3). That the test-takers were not able to come up with a sensible question that tests concepts such as rates/normalization AND returns an integer answer speaks of low IQ of the test designers.
Not arguing the main point, of course! The ranking is still roughly meaningful. That is, a largish part of the difference between Switzerland and Albania (or Singapore and Jamaica) can be explained in terms of the tests results shown.
What accounts for the relatively poor performance of Bulgaria and Romania on PISA tests, but their exceptional performance in mathematical olympiads, where they outperformed the UK and France?
I wonder how much emigration there’s been of smarter Argentinians. Got to figure, the country is pretty unstable politically.
Still, it is hard to reconcile Chile which is lower white, higher Amerind.
I believe that the Amerind percentages are increasing in both places, at least theoretically, due to immigration.
How?
Are these results bundled from paper and computer?
I used to find it more difficult to take computer tests. I took a practice SAT on the computer, and then the real one without any further prep. On the real, I believe I scored like 200 pts. higher. Out of 1600, though of course it is scaled.
I think it was a couple of things. Kids are discouraged from doing math in their heads. You’ve got to “show your work.” It is much more comfortable on the eyes to look at paper, and the noise of a computer, I think takes away like 10 IQ points.
No, the answer is 28 km/h. She traveled 7 km in 15 minutes (quarter of an hour).
As with chess, the Communist bloc cared much more about these Olympiads.
I wonder what the sample questions are on that African test that they administer to avoid comparison with other countries’ PISA results.
Congratulations, you are a subhuman
Those International Science Olympiads (Math, Physics, Informatics, Chemistry) are a combination of talent/IQ and drill – devoted study and preparation under mentors and University student volunteers.
Or simple homeschooling/extra effort in private time.
Top High School students/teens are chosen and then specially prepared. There are typical, standard problem in those exams, and solving the previous years’ exams helps a lot. Exams are compiled by all competitor states contributing problem proposals.
Generally, it is teens/highschoolers competing at solving university level problems.
This was already measured and the results were recently IIRC posted on unz.com somewhere. In short, you are wrong.
On both issues, BTW. You can train IQ tests, but after training the value of the results fall (you can express taht idea in either saying g-loading will fall, or that the skills are not trasnferable to another task).
The most significant thing is that the results seems to be the same from immigrants children (Steve Sailer was posting once the results somewhere) i.e. Tunisians in Germany do not have results of the native Germans, but much worse.
This is true – British teachers get graded and promoted on their GCSE (high school exam taken at age 16) results. The schools are also marked on their GCSE results and graded in published school league tables. Therefore there is massive pressure to get kids through, all teaching of 14 to 16 year old kids is geared to getting them to pass the exams which determine if they they can go on to do A levels (university entrance exams for 18 year old)
School reputations also matter , I volunteered at a local school which had a banner displayed at the school entrance proudly announcing a 98% pass rate. Many kids however tend to forget everything that they had been taught in maths pretty quickly. There is also an anti maths prejudice amongst many girls and people from the white working class British community
Another thing that volunteering at the school enabled me to see is how varied the general population’s intelligence really is. Those of us who have worked in cognitive professions and went to Ivy League or Russell Group (or equivalent universities) are normally surrounded by reasonably smart people and as Anatoly said assume that everyone is just like us. They are not
I could not find this, but found something else entertaining in one of the papers.
also
Agree unironically. Like at least 110. That’s astronomically high by global standards.
It really is shocking to talk to a person with an IQ under 110. I don’t do it all that often, at least beyond small talk, but it’s always jarring when I get beyond pleasantries and realize that this person really, truly doesn’t understand the concept of “the state” or have a clue about geography or whatever thing I foolishly reference.
My problem is that I’m often among the dumbest in the room, day to day, so it’s easy to forget that I’m actually smarter than most randomly selected people, and care about more than visual entertainment. Over the years I’ve learned to just shut up and not steer the conversation into “intense” areas. It’s exhausting and a big reason why I gravitate toward the internet. I’m not really all that smart but it’s hard to find a worthwhile conversation with a peer (especially one who won’t crimestop) offline. Thank God for venues like this one!
LOOOOOL!!!!
Peace.
People from non-Oxbridge/LSE/Imperial Russell Group universities usually seem a little slow, tbh
Conclusion of the article about “O-ring theory” in development economics, is interesting – I have not heard this before.
But there is a problem in using PISA “maths” test.
If you download the sample papers, PISA “maths” test with no maths. It’s more a kind of idle puzzle collection.
–
I respect OECD’s economics knowledge, and general ideology.
One of the problems of OECD’s approach, is trying to test children at 16, which is when real education is only beginning.
To find comparative gaps in education systems was the purpose of OECD , with the aim of giving recommendations to countries in areas where they need to “catch up” academically.
For OECD, it was impossible to test any substantial knowledge of children, as different countries have different syllabuses for this age-group.
So OECD presumably hired some educational psychologists to create these puzzle questions which they believe to be transnationally valid.
As a result, a large part of what you are measuring is how children, in various countries, can decode confusing questions designed by the OECD to be transnational.
It’s functioning partly as a test of children’s (or their educational systems’) level of conformity to OECD’s transnational organizational culture.
In this sense, it’s quite useful for seeing which countries’ youth are “onboard” with their agenda.
–
Aside from this particular topic, I would advocate skepticism that testing youth at 16 in general, is going to demonstrate level of the adults in the society.
People are maturing at different speeds, and I would hypothesize plenty of cases of stupider kids maturing faster than kids with higher potential.
The correct age for testing should be 21 or 22, when people are academically mature.
That problem might have motivated Freemasonry and similar membership in the past, pre-Internet times.
Also, to understand the concept of state, society and causalities in it, one must also be well informed about history and political theory, not just intelligent.
Off topic; Anatoly, what is your opinion of Vitali A. Meliantsev and his works on economy of Russia?
Specifically, the numbers he presents and issues he raises in “Russia’s comparative economic development in the long run”?
ha, I too took the arithmetic mean (in my defense, it already felt dodgy)
Apparently, (bolding mine)
You travel from point A to B at an average speed of 20 km/h, and return at an average speed of 30km/h. What was your average speed for the round trip?
The o-ring story is just one layer to the full model, albeit possibly the most important layer. There’re other things that matter, such as the USA being founded and still mostly run on Anglo principles (seems good for max GDP per head), the US having never been invaded, having a 100 year head start on South Korea in terms of industrialization. Look at Japan, who has a simile IQ to Korea, lower skilled workers there are well compensated, Korea (and Russia and Poland et c.) will catch up as their GDP per capita asymptotes toward the IQ potential.
Very nice article.
The examples of specific questions highlight the problems in the Balkans, also.
((20^-1+30^-1)/2)^-1?
It’s quite funny to think about how the results of standardized tests are often given as geographic percentiles. In America: state vs. national. But geographic percentiles are close to meaningless, and their primary significance comes from demographics differences.
It would be better to straight up give demographic percentiles. More informative for the test-taker individually and also for understanding society at large. Of course, it will never happen because it would burst one of the main myths of education.
Don’t troll me Anatoly – you must admit one of the most ridiculous things about HBD is how it purports to notice and celebrate a rich diversity in all human traits….except for competitive desire.
That is supposed to be utterly invariant and constant across race, ethnic group, culture, history, environment, recent national humiliation, and time.
This assumption is necessary to make competitive endeavors meaningful – if one group simply isn’t competing as hard, kind of makes it less fun 🙂
When you play sports, it feels really shitty when the other team just doesn’t give it their best effort – really spoils the fun. We were all there, as kids.
So believe me I get it. But it won’t stop me poking fun at you silly kids 🙂
((20^-1+30^-1)/2)^-1?
Correct, but it’s much easier to see the answer (and calculate it in your head) if you choose a concrete distance (the result is obviously independent of the distance)– 60 km being particularly convenient.
24 km/h.
The “trickier” (8th primary school/1st high school class physics) question would be: You drove from point A to point B.
Half the time you drove 20 km/h, the other half 30 km/h. Your average speed was?
Steve Sailer broke down PISA results by race. It was also done by race and state (you have to hunt for the latter in google). White people from the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey are among the highest-scoring people in the world.
The sample problems of Level 1 to 6 are cluttered with noise of useless informations that is culturally and economic development dependent.
Why do we need to know that Helen has a speedometer? 20-30 years ago speedometers showing averages speed were not common. If you had a speedometer it was mechanical showing instantaneous speed only. To get the average speed you need time keeping. But anyway the fact that Helen has a speedometer is irrelevant to the problem.
All problems are quantitative requiring mathematical operation (except for Level 1) and some idea how things work.
If you reformulated the problems nad asked questions differently the score would be much higher.
Level 1: For which months the black bar is taller than grey bar? Some kids were not exposed to graphs and haven’t learn how to read them.
Level 2: What is larger/smaller/equal 4/10 or 2/5? The question is about the definition of the average speed. Give that definition first.
Level 3: Which number in the lowest row is the largest? WhoTF needs to now what is engine capacity. The term “engine capacity” is not common. How does it sound Swahili?
Level 4: How many kids in Uruguay saw a revolving door? Most people will have problem visualizing the problem and realizing that 6 people per rotation can pass the door. BTW, African Americans are familiar with revolving (one way only) doors as they are commonly used in prison.
And so on. Solving the problem like these is to be conditioned by a lot of practice where you are exposed to problems like these. In Mt. Fuji problem you must realize that you must calculate the total time which is the sum of two times: going up and going down. In Helen Level 6 you need to know what is the average speed and that it is not the same as the average of speeds.
It is all matter of preparation for the test which teaches how to convert stories that you do not have interest in (WGTF about Helen?) to mathematical abstractions. To do it you have to be acculturated to the high level of motivation to score high that you care about scoring the test more than pondering WTF it is all about and who needs it.
Now the bigger issue. Do PISA tests tell us something? PISA tests scores are classical chicken-egg problem. Why do countries on the make like Eastern Europe often have high PISA scores? Why do they care? Russia is doing exceptionally well in them. But Russia also has impressive military parades on the Victory Day. Russia is known for Potemkin villages. But are Potemkin villages bad? Now, pretense is good because it shows what are important values. Like in case of hypocrisy: “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” While building a Potemkin village a Russian muzhik gets some idea how a nice village suppose to look. When preparing tanks for the V-day parade the mechanics will put more effort to a make sure that the equipment does not breaks down and perhaps it will extend to normal operations. When cramming for PISA test kids actually learn something. And when they get high scores their confidence level goes up.
I didn’t spend a lot of time solving it, so I might be wrong, but I thought the answer was 24.
My thinking was, that I drove 1 hour there (20 km distance), and then back at 30 km/h (so I needed two thirds of an hour to get back, a.k.a. 40 minutes), so I drove an altogether 40 km distance in 100 minutes. This means 20 km in 50 minutes, and 1.2X20 km = 24 km in 60 minutes, so 24 km/h.
Regardless if the distance was longer, it would be the same, just easier to calculate with 1 hour.
Is it wrong?
whatkindofsorceryisthis.gif
Yes, the answer to first one is 24 km/h.
The one I wrote is variation of it that shows difference between average speed and average of speeds, so 25 km/h is the correct answer.
Typical gotcha problems.
This might be supported, by a currently strong correlation between academic ability, and person’s occupational and geographical mobility.
People with higher academic achievements, are having more mobility on average both between professions, and also geographically movement between different industrial centers.
But can you disentangle this from a fact that people with higher academic ability, have far greater opportunities and motivations for mobility? Visa requirements for many countries are quite openly based on skill levels.
On the other hand, workers in some industries are often appearing not so much unable, as simply psychologically motivated not to change and adapt, with an almost cultural resistance to it.
In discussions on this topic, it is usually referred to Margaret Thatcher, who has famously and unsuccessfully tried to break the laziness and immobility of British workers, that refused to adapt to the decline of their coal industry by changing profession.
There is a depressing sense of “premature aging” in such cultures, professions and social strata, where people become very rigid against learning new topics after a certain age – and this rigidity surely being less a product of inability, than lack of willpower.
If he uses a kitten for an avatar 99% of people will click “like.”
And just think, some people say such people should have a free hand to rule over their wives and children as they see fit.
Executive function likely has a genetic component and this affects economic performance as well. I don’t think this is about competition as much as it is about awareness; it may be that population A just “doesn’t care” as much about solving infrastructural problems as opposed to population B.
But population A’s lack of caring will mean that their infrastructural problems will mount and cause real consequence, e.g. fewer roads, lack of electrical coverage, blackouts, contamination of water, and so on.
Lack of caring for the consequence does not mean that the consequences will not materialize. Its not necessary to have a moral opinion on this to observe the effects of such.
Incidentally, since I believe that increased smartphone use harms executive function(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216304915) and there’s some research to support this, this probably means that we’ll see more harm across-the-board.
Kittens are popular. Hello Kitty will probably bump it up to 100%.
Peace.
If you download the full test (especially older ones) you’ll see most questions are more confusingly written than these samples, and at the same time not testing abilities (if they could be written in a clear way).
Difficulty of the exam for the children, is in decoding what the questions are trying to say.
We could see it as a useful test of whether children can filter out unnecessary information, and discern the intentions of the transnational question designer the OECD has hired. Perhaps this is a skill in itself.
Question format could be useful for preparing children for how their future exams, in areas like mechanics, can be formatted (with narrative and diagrams).
But at the same time, a more imaginatively talented child, might prefer to dream about this picture of Mount Fuji, instead of the boring counting game beneath it. I would not blame them.
This theory is not even wrong. Can IQ explain why this nonsensical theory was created and is promoted by some? Or is it that IQ is not a foolproof protection against stupidity particularly when driven by ideology.
I remember paying for my simple haircuts 50CHF in Switzerland while in the US they are still on the level of $10-15 at, say, at SuperCuts. Anybody knowns economic forces that are responsible for the difference between the US and Switzerland and IQ is not one of them.
I think humanity would be better off if Kremer, Jones and Karlin because hair dressers and left the economics to people which gay
It is really staggering to think that in so many countries <1% can get #6 right. You would think that some would at least try it and get it right accidentally. That is to say, in a way that they could not reproduce, or without understanding the problem intuitively but just by doing some simple math.
I wonder what the percentage of blank answers would be in each country.
It is indeed staggering, but I don’t think the implications are as dire as might appear at first blush. Yes, stupid people vote, but they usually vote with the guidance of some respected authority figure, like a pastor or union leader. Of course, these authority figures are corrupt now, but the point is that elites have a great deal of influence over voters even in a popular democracy with universal suffrage,
I’d like to see that data (and if it’s self-reported, well, I’d probably lie about taking these tests seriously, too). Epigon is right. The vast majority of kids taking tests that don’t affect their grades put zero effort into the test. I didn’t. I got abysmal scores on PISA-type tests.
/98th percentile GRE (a test I very much cared about)
$50 for a buzzcut in Switzerland? Was that at some five star hotel on Lake Geneva? I can’t believe it. I think the Swiss would cut their own hair, at that rate, putting the barbers out of work.
Never been to Switzerland, but I remember paying like 50 cents for an ice cream cone in Germany circa 2000. It was small, but you couldn’t get something like that in the US.
It’s not quite true – although it satisfies peoples’ “just world hypothesis” instincts.
To falsify the hypothesis, just see the contradiction in writing: the intellectual genius of a wealthy people like the Qataris, or the stupidity of a poor nationality like the Chinese.
In per capita terms, China is as poor and unsuccessful, as Thailand, Algeria and Brazil. And yet, their reported average academic test scores are higher than those of many wealthy countries.
In the future, such a correlation should become stronger, as a result of the digital revolution making intelligence relevant to a larger proportion of the future economy. But even today, there many other factors, often less related to inherent qualities of the people, than to arbitrary things like geography, involved in economic success.
Half the time you drove 20 km/h, the other half 30 km/h. Your average speed was?
That’s far easier than the other one, every one will get that right without thinking.
We are getting dumber as a country. It’s not just the huge influx of immigrants from lower IQ black and brown countries, the increasing inter-marriage rate between whites and blacks/browns, but also a failing education system. Our schools care more about indoctrination than actual education these days. Elementary math is often taught by teachers who flunked algebra in high school. By the time most kids get to middle school, they’ve fallen too far behind.
Regular haircuts in regular places about 50CHF and no tip necessary. They take more time (30-40min) though than in ShortCuts. In one case a was given a haircut by a hang-over women (Valerie iirc) in Geneva which she royally screws up partly because of communication problems. I do not think anybody would let he work in ShortCuts in the US in that state.
Ironically the commenters pointing up the large differences in motivation and test-taking attitudes between ethnic cohorts are really just reinforcing the usual stereotypes, e.g. high time-preference and high external locus-of-control and high cognitive-miserliness and low frustration-tolerance, apathy, lackadaisicalness, the inverse-ganbarism, with all the attendant empirical IQ-correlation implications. Within ethnic cohorts, this is exactly expected across the IQ distribution with good-but-not-perfect correlation. IOW the thinking goes, “the average test-taking motivation of some groups is much lower, but please, please, do not reflect on this any further, there is nothing to see here!” … except that one requires active crimestopping to prevent oneself noticing the expected group achievement gaps at the ethnic-and/or-national level, which just so happen to correlate to the measured and inferred average IQ. Yes, indeed, indolence is a major handicap, and yes, indeed, dems are the real raycisss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F2SJS6B1wQ
Of course average intelligence matters. The new knowledge economy will only separate the top countries from the bottom countries even further. The only countries in the world that can succeed in this knowledge economy are Western countries and Northeast Asian countries. All the black and brown countries will only fall further behind.
But Western countries are at a precarious position. We are engineering our own downfall through stupid policies like open borders and a welfare scheme that rewards high birthrate among the lowest IQ groups. Never mind our 15 year olds, what % of our lawmakers can get passed Level 1? I’ll bet 99% of the black congressmen/women can’t even get passed Level 1, yet Maxine Waters could very well chair the next Finance committee.
And thank God.
A country like Thailand for instance has excellent roads – easily as good as what’s found in America. And its airports, subway system, and elevated rail are miles ahead of what’s available in NYC.
But their IQ is certainly lower than America’s and they don’t have any high technology companies. A company that functions like Amazon reflects a society with a particular “priority profile”. Its ludicrous to suggest the creation of a company like Amazon is primarily – or even largely – a product of IQ. I think you specifically know what I’m talking about.
Each country has a unique “profile” of priorities, abilities, and “desire structures” that determine its real world “quiddity”.
I think a fruitful area of inquiry would be investigating the “desire structure” of different societies – I think that would be at least as revealing about outcomes as IQ and other tests of ability.
Of course this would be more like anthropology than hard science, but it would be very revealing about the structure of the world.
Unfortunately, tests of pure ability are conceptually impossible.
But I think tests are peculiarly susceptible to be misleading because they are so abstract and detached from real world concerns.
What they are good for are constructing elaborate imaginal “dominance hierarchies”.
I always liked Bern more than Geneva.
A good man always knows his limitations.
Surely you know of the overwhelming financing by China and engineering by China there.
Hard to say that Amazon wasn’t the result of a combination of high aptitude people. Technology is really, really hard to get right, and Amazon is a pretty impressive feat of delivery and execution. It can be pretty evil, but its intelligent evil.
I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. Its a lot of smart people there – many of them are quite insane and its very cultish and strange at times, but its not lacking for intelligent, self-motivated people who would be bored to death by the idea of idleness.
Yes, it is a skill. Anything can be a skill. In some cultures this skill is not valued. This skill measures acculturations to culture that is foreign and often considered hostile so the skill may not only be not valued but also will be resisted. The ones excelling in it will be seen as sell outs and traitors. The Uncle Toms. Culture is a bitch. It is a very complex system. That’s why the IQ story is so appealing to simple minds because it allows the simpletons to ignore what they don’t have an aptitude for.
Thai infrastructure was good in the 90s – the train system is I think German. I was using it as an example of priorities.
I am positive that Bangkok has right now people just as smart as the creators of Amazon. I’m also positive Poland has many such people.
What is lacking is the philosophical conviction that spending stupendous amounts of effort and energy to construct a vast highly organized system eating up the life energy of thousands of high aptitude people for the purpose of shortening delivery times by a few days is the best use of our limited time on this green earth.
And the reason that’s lacking in those countries, is that life is immensely more satisfying there, and people grow up far less mentally damaged.
Have you read Steve Jobs daughters biography of her father?
Any county that wants to boost creativity should study it in depth – learn how to create mentally damaged people like Jobs, its the secret to Western style creativity.
I vote for idleness 🙂
Geneva voted for accession to EU and Bern against it in 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_1992
https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Idle-Loafers-Manifesto/dp/0060779691?crid=3PA3YPJD95KIK&keywords=tom+hodgkinson&qid=1536089206&sprefix=Tom+hodg&sr=8-1&ref=mp_s_a_1_1
A deeply relevant book that everyone on this blog should be reading. The antidote for our times.
Presented as a lighthearted romp, its actually a deeply religious text that reacquaints us with ancient wisdom that has been lost in the West since 1600.
This is why they are working on life extension. Besides, aren’t you a kind of a Buddhist? They’ll just reincarnate as a sloth or an oak to idle their days away then.
I think that you fail to acknowledge that for a lot of tech people, the work is genuinely fun. Why does Karlin, for example, play video games? Video games are a form of work, they force you to obey rules and challenges, and yet some of the most popular ones repeatedly hurt their players. A lot of people like effort, even are addicted to it.
Intelligence without morality is the most dangerous thing on earth. It could do far more damage than those who are morally corrupt but lack intelligence. SV is now run by intelligent people who are morally bankrupt, the same people who ran Wall Street, K Street, Washington DC, Hollywood, the media, academia, and our legal system into the ground.
Good that you brought up Jobs. Daniel Chieh earlier stated that the issue you guys are discussing has no moral dimension but Jobs is clearly an example of deeply immoral person. Look at the story how he ripped Wozniak off when they were still very young. Wozniak learned about it many many years later when he read it in the book about Atari and Jobs.
Steve Wozniak: I Cried When Steve Jobs Kept Atari Bonus to Himself
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711
It was not about keeping the bonus but about the deception. It is not about money what people who are all about money do not get including the people who wrote that article.
Bonus question: How many points are there on Earth where you can walk 1 km south, then 1 km west, then 1 km north and be back at your original starting point?
Good point. Amazon is also highly immoral. Bezos has taken to dressing like a manospherian tough guy lately.
Interesting result in the International Physics Olympiad 2018.
The participants represent the smartest of smart fractions top 0.0001% of the respective countries.
China and India came joint first with 5 Golds(The maximum possible each)
In a world increasingly moving towards automation,the IQ of the top 0.5% is what is going to matter assuming the population at large are not a bunch of Cretins.
A population with genetic IQ of 92+ but with a top 0.5% with IQ 135+ (India) is likely over decades going to outperform countries with IQ of 95+ with a top 0.5% with IQ 120+ (Lat Am,SE Asia,Turkey etc).We can see this playing out even today India’s industrial base Space,Nuclear(Full Civilian fuel cycle+nuclear weapons +nuclear submarines),Auto components etc dwarf anything these countries have despite the fact they are on average 3-5 times richer,do not suffer from horrendous malnourishment rates and have much better social infrastructure and did not spend the majority of their independent years under the asinine License Raj economic system.
I don’t deny that for a lot of people striving is necessary to stave off nihilism. So much so that as a society we’ve advanced technologically where we need to work very little but have increased our workload pointlessly by a ton. We refuse to look at that yawning black chasm right beneath our feet and pour ourselves into “projects,”.
It all began with the Puritans. I’m just saying this is the result of a mental disease.
All sorts of effort can be good – gardening, walking in nature, philosophy, literature, art, good conversation.
Whereas Google and Facebook are “highly moral” and adventuring in new frontiers of virtue signaling every day while learning how to “opinion engineer” their audience. The simple evil of greed may in fact be the lesser harm.
Oh, don’t get me started on Google and Facebook. Definitely just as evil. You’re right on that one.
It’s all rotten. And pointless.
The “morally corrupt” ones are not who you should fear. Their aims are relatively minor all things considered. They can be bribed or distracted; their evil is one we understand, a beast that we all fight and tame(or not) within ourselves.
It is the true believers that you should truly be terrified of, because they have found spiritual truth in undoing this wicked world and no price is too great, no mountain too high, and no slaughter too terrible for them to belay delivering utopia upon us.
SV has many true believers.
A GCSE Maths ‘pass’ (was seen as grade C but with nuGCSEs that’s now grade 4) isn’t very difficult and you only need correct answers for roughly 20% of the questions.
Regarding prejudice, my (just) 15-year-old daughter is an anomalous, strong maths-geek and I’ve long been curious about this area. For girls I think it is less about them being anti-maths and more about them being pro-English.
Piles of research has long had girls being better at reading/writing/verbal stuff than maths on average and unless there is a compelling economic or social motive to do otherwise, then children tend to pick their best(=favourite) subjects when contemplating post-GCSE choices. See ‘the gender paradox” re. super-gender-neutral Sweden having one of the worst percentages for female representation in STEM etc.
I’m feeling like a fucking genius. Maybe an outlier in terms of IQ and income, but a fucking genius nonetheless.
Mowgli raised by video games has spoken.
Any thoughts on how the test makers expect the test takers to solve the problem? Done as you (and I) did it (4 + 3 km) / (9 + 6 minutes) * (60 minutes / 1 hour) = 28 km/h
it is a trivial in your head computation with the numbers being conveniently round.
Done the longer way computing the averages separately and combining them is a much more complex computation.
Which better qualifies as level 6: realizing the easy way works, or being able to do the harder way correctly?
Do you have a link to that analysis? I am curious how those results correspond to the IAB Brain Drain data. I use the latter as a measure of immigration selectivity and it would be useful if the PISA variation between source/host country pairs could serve as validation.
And the black guy blows off the test even more than the white people do. So that must mean that blacks have equal IQs than whites right?
Bravo, res. You are Level 6. You can be a hairdresser in Belgium.
So your whole point is that the test is invalid because white people blew off the test while the yellows studied for the test in advance?
I highly doubt this but let’s examine this further. If that is the case, why did whites out score the Latinos and Africans?
Maybe Asians pulled an all nighter, while whites studied forb2 hours, and Latinos didn’t study at all. So maybe Latinos are as smart as white people since the test scores don’t show that Latinos didn’t study for the test?
You would have to be low IQ to believe this stuff. The whole Asians study for IQ tests are just a meme to make white people feel better about themselves. Sorry to hurt your self esteem.
That is because the east coast is filled with Ashkenazi Jews which matches their 115 IQ.
Take a sampling of white people from South Dakota and tell me what you get.
The problem with the True Believers is that they believe in “doing” – thus they become like the Evil Ones in their pursuit of refashioning the world. We become what we fight – we must. There is a reason the alt-right is busy studying and implementing all the strategies if the Left.
If they just understood that everything is OK, they’d relax, and be merrier.
So, far I would say India’s history with nuclear subs is kind of embarrassing, with a hatch left open and flooding in port, of their prototype vessel.
I don’t think that ever would have happened on the USS Nautilus. Although, in the US a nuke sub was effectively destroyed in 2012, by arson from a worker who wanted to leave work early. Though it is incident, I think it represents a real decline, though the worker was white.
India is an interesting case to think about because of raw numbers. Add in mobility and you could, if the politics allow, have some very smart organizations, perhaps even cities. The question really is how much the politics will allow and what are the natural differential fertility trends in India. Probably not encouraging. Still, I think it will quite likely outperform Turkey in the longterm.
Sure, I don’t think Latinos are significantly less intelligent than whites.
I’ve never noticed it, and its impossible to measure since test scores measure effort as much as anything.
I’ve dealt extensively with Asians and I haven’t noticed they’re more intelligent than whites, although Asian culture is my favourite culture! More ambitious and driven, at the moment, sure.
I grew up among Jews and haven’t noticed they’re so much brighter. I remember the surprise of my Jewish friend when he started doing business in the big wide world of nyc and he told us breathlessly that it’s a myth Jews are so much smarter than whites, as if it was some kind of momentous discovery 🙂
Most of these differences are priorities, levels of ambition, needing to prove oneself, recent cultural humiliations – stuff like that, for the most part.
There’s probably some level of genetic difference but hard to say what. Definitely not the majority.
Who can say? If he blows off the test, we just don’t know.
India has an IQ of 82 not 92 lol. That is a huge difference as much of India is dumber than Africans. To many Dravidians who look like Aboriginals and have the IQ to match.
Your point is wrong anyway. In the future it is more important to have a high floor than a high ceiling precisely because of automation.
India will never overcome its low IQ fraction because it makes up the majority of the populous. So no matter how smart its 0.0001% are, those IQ points will likely go towards helping the West and not India.
If you are a moderate IQ country with few low IQ people like Indians, you don’t really need geniuses. You can just follow the economies and ideas of smarter people and nations and be good.
This is what Chile is like and it is a much better country to live in that India.
2015 PISA science scores in Canada and Jewish population
Alberta 541 (0.4% Jews)
BC 539 (0.8% Jews)
Quebec 537 (1.2% Jews)
Ontario 524 (1.8% Jews)
Nova Scotia 517 (0.3%)
New Brunswick 506 (0.1% Jews)
Manitoba 499 (1.2% Jews)
Saskatchewan 496 (0.2% Jews)
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Canada
I do not see correlation between PISA score and Jewish percentage of population.
9 minutes of the ride was 26.6km/h and 6 minutes at 30.
so how do you figure out the average?
This is a good point I hadn’t considered.
How can a country like India defend itself or even field a competent military when so many of it’s people have an IQ if 82?
Even if there are a lot of genius level generals designing war games in some bunker, where are the 90-100 IQ Indians to carry out the orders and what will this lead to?
Scary thoughts.
Everyone makes mistakes.
China’s first nuclear submarine Xia class also had several much more significant accidents which resulted in loss of lives.That in no way hampered China’s eventual emergence as a major naval power.
India is frankly not fit for democracy (I am not convinced one man one vote democracy is in the long term good even for developed western countries) we have however evolved to a point where an effective semi authoritarian spell can propel us to a solid second world country within 15 years and I have grounds for cautious optimism that a movement in that direction is under way beyond that there are too many imponderables to hazard a guess.
MA is 1.8% Jewish. The high scores in New England are mostly a Puritan thing, not a Jewish phenomenon.
So blacks are not born superior athletes then? Asians and Latinos could dominate the NBA like blacks do if they just prioritized it?
Even in New York, Jews are a very small proportion of the population, let alone the entire East Coast. 115 is ludicrous as an estimate for Ashkenazi IQ also.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IooiIKeiRs4/VNbUwq1ZvzI/AAAAAAAAC2E/fxZyPd2Q5-g/s1600/whiteiq.png
https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2015/02/state-iq-estimates-whites-only-2013.html
Anatoly, do you have the answer key for this PISA test? I want to compare the answers that I calculated for this with the actual answers for this to see just how well I did.
Also, posts such as this explain the danger of letting in a lot of low-IQ people into the First World. Basically, the First World is going to get screwed if the newcomers fail to converge to First World levels of average IQ. Also, given that decades of affirmative action have failed to make a significant dent in racial and ethnic achievement/IQ gaps in the U.S., one should probably be extremely skeptical that we’ll be able to make Third Worlders converge to First World levels of average IQ without things such as embryo selection for intelligence or gene editing of embryos.
AK: It’s linked to in the text – http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/
Sailer also showed that the U.S. performs extremely well overall when its scores are broken down by race. What hurts the U.S. is its racial demographics.
I stated genetic IQ not present IQ which is depressed due to various environmental factors.
Though given the genetic diversity of a sub continent I await a much more thorough analysis of Indian IQ than Lynn’s 82 figure that seems to be taken as the gospel truth.
Given the fact that descendants of Indian indentured laborers(who originate mostly from Low /Middle castes from the most backward areas of India) in places like Trinidad,Suriname,Mauritius and South Africa score in the low 90s I believe I am being very conservative vis a vis genetic potential IQ of India as a whole.
I believe AK had written something along these lines a few years back.
Students supposed to know what an average velocity is. This you learn at science or physics. But at math at about the same time you also learn about arithmetic, geometric and other types of mean. In many languages there is no distinction between mean and average. So it is possible that a student my calculate two velocities and then calculate their mean, say arithmetic.
A student confronted with this problem goes through the list of templates that he created while solving problems in the past and identify it as: (1) it is physics, (2) about velocities, (3) average velocity, (4) they never ask about mean/average of velocities, so it must be the average velocity…and so on.
Now if you had a student who is great at math and who knows what velocity is (you divide distance by speed) but who never heard how the average velocity is defined and has not been trained in solving problems like this one and thus has no list of templates to look up, he could be confused particularly because the problem does not offer a, b, c, d answers that he could check against several possibilities that he could have come up with by using different definitions of an average.
Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
North Koreans who are under much worse conditions than most of India have their genetic IQ preserved.
Chinese IQ tests from just a few decades ago when China was still very impoverished still showed much higher IQ than India.
Indians have a lower IQ built in because they have a high percentage of Aboriginal/Dravidian blood which you can see in their face.
I guess I am missing the point or putting too fine a point on it. Auto assembly involves a complex, lengthy supply chain. The entire enterprise is based on the labor component becoming foolproof.
Meanwhile, that the value of labor is limited by group intelligent is one of those things that is likely true but unprovable,
3rd worlders can certainly use cellphones, but they would never be able to invent them. By extension, using technology is possible. Is there any instance of a country unable to implement cell technology?
Quite possibly. Asians and Latinos have other outlets for prestige and income. Its very hard to judge why one community specializes in particular niche. There is probably a genetic component but its impossible to measure it.
Being around Jews, it’s evident to me they prioritize money – I have acquaintances who will argue with me for hours over trivial amounts of money, with immense passion and energy and argumentative fecundity, essentially exhausting me – yet it is equally evident to me Jews have no special talent for money. Just a passion for it, for cultural reasons.
If Chinese suddenly decided their honor depended entirely on basketball and poured all their striving into it, I wouldn’t be surprised if suddenly China produced the world best players.
Very hard to say, these things.
Whoever this authoritarian ruler going to be I hope he will put toilets high on his authoritarian agenda.
PROFILES IN COURAGE – TOILET PIONEER
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/o7dham/chappelle-s-show-profiles-in-courage—toilet-pioneer
I would need to see specifics to believe this.
Most likely white populations that test well will be Jewish or part Jewish. No way South Dakota or Tenessee tests as well.
Texas and Minnesota scored well because of their high amount of German blood which is intermixed with a lot of Jewish blood
On the East Coast there are soooooo many white people with Ashkenazi blood even if they don’t identify as Jews.
Besides, these IQ numbers still don’t match the IQ of Chinese or Ashkenazi Jews. So the poster above who said these white people had the highest test scores were obviously full of it.
Well questions testing to see if kids can count numbers and multiply. Almost all healthy (not-disabled) people can do this. Questions are too far easy for this age group (15-16 year olds).
The difficulty is in distractions, irrelevant pictures, and unclear words.
For example, “Level 4” question is asking them to multiply 3 numbers. Children can usually do this at age 10. It is a question at an 10 year old difficulty level.
What is the reason for including a picture of a door – why not just ask them to multiply the three numbers? (The only advantage of adding the door picture, is to confused people from countries where these doors do not exist – it’s a test of whether your country has this door type, not of multiplication).
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A good exam for this age, would write the questions as clearly as possible, without any culturally dependent distractions.
If they had actually a topic suitable for 15 year olds, like solving quadratic equation by factorization – they can write the questions normally, but test the children more by choosing larger and more awkward numbers.
The transnational comparison could still be possible, by keeping simple topics which will be covered in syllabuses of schools in different countries, while making more difficult questions within those same topics.
There’s no reason African children should be culturally resistant to e.g. quadratic equation. It’s a universal topic, which 15 year olds around the world are studying.
So you are a Jewish suprematist troll, aren’t you? And not a vey smart one.
You don’t understand credentialism, grade inflation and reduced pedagogic standards.
The number of kiddies who get As (nowadays, A or A) at GCSE has increased from 8% to 22% since 1988; A was introduced in 1994 when the number of kiddies getting As changed from about 1 in 12 to about 1 in 8.
So ‘A’ is the ‘new B’ (almost exactly, actually).
A GCSE ‘A’ has changed from ‘this kid is soundly inside the top decile for this subject‘ to ‘this kid is definitely outside the top 6% (otherwise they would have got an A*). They could be outside the top quintile. They’re safely inside the top quartile, though, innit.‘.
GCSE maths is like high school maths everywhere in the West nowadays: it has been shorn of all rigour.
The same is true for university “Honours”: in the UK, 25% of graduates get a First (in 1988 it was 4-10% depending on the institution). In Australia a First now means inside the 4th percentile (at Melbourne Uni Economics they had a tradition to only give a single First: that’s gone now). In my year, there were 4 Firsts – a record up to that point, but it was four genuinely outstanding students; a dead-heat for top student (me and my mate Ritch), then 2 others dead-heated 4% lower (two other mates). Some years prior to 1995 there were no Firsts awarded.
I know this is getting long: might take a whole minute more to finish…
Back to high school maths and declining standards.
As far back as the late 90s – before grade inflation really took off – even quasi-élite students were poorly prepared by high school mathematics.
At the time I was a PhD candidate (in Econometrics, on a ‘full ride’ merit scholarship).
To augment our scholarships we were given tutoring positions (3 1-hour tutes a week, plus exam and assignment marking, for a 0.35 full time, full-year salary – easiest money ever). So we were at the ‘coal face’ – teaching first year Econometrics, which was mandatory (I also tutored third year Applied Econometric Modelling, which was elective – and a cinch to teach because everyone who took it wanted to be there and the chaff had already been winnowed out).
This was at a university in the top few dozen in the world in the field, which required high school marks solidly in the 5-6% to get into the undergraduate course. The entry requirements also included 2 units of maths (i.e., what we used to refer to as ‘Pure’ and ‘Applied’) at Year 12 final exams.
It’s difficult to score in the top decile of high school graduates with 2 maths subjects, unless you get an A in at least one of those subjects.
With that as background: I had students in first year who didn’t know
• what a logarithm was (for fuck’s sake);
• how to differentiate (forget chain and product rules – I mean simple differentiation of a univariate function);
• how to manipulate powers (e.g., a²/a⁴= ?);
• basic matrix and vector algebra (the hardest topic would have been Cholesky decomposition of a 5×5 matrix – by hand, because it’s 1996).
These kids were not outliers, or ‘special entry’ kids – my colleagues reported similar problems with their first-year classes, too.
In the end my mates and I prepared a bunch of remedial mathematics notes that were distributed widely, and we pre-emptively handed them out during ‘O’ (Orientation) week in subsequent years.
Less than 5 years prior to this, my mates and I were undergraduates ourselves: Econometrics was mandatory in first year, but elective subsequently: ‘pure’ Economics majors dropped it the moment they could.
Every one of the second-year Econometrics students in our year had done first-year Mathematics (in the Science department) as an elective in first year… because it was free marks. Calculus, linear algebra, first-order differential equations – re-hashing year 11 and 12 maths.
I know right? I’m old, and I’m one of those “shit was better/harder/tougher when I was younger, waaaaah” types.
No, not really.
Standards were higher, and they changed – markedly, radically, downwards – in the middle years of the 1990s.
I watched it happen in real time: in my Honours year (1995), the person teaching Macroeconomic Theory was forced to “pump the brake” on a really good rigorous Modern Macro course (e.g., one based on Blanchard & Fisher).
It was a mandatory subject for Honours; a fail meant you were booted with a Pass degree.
Half the pure-Economics majors had spent their previous 3 years writing essays.
After the first assignment, in which they did poorly, the pure-Ecotards saw the maths required for the next unit (a basic OLG model).
They shit themselves, saw the impending train wreck, and agitated for the subsequent assignments and exam to be watered down.
Faculty held their ground (but they changed the course the following year), but pure-Econometrics and joint Econ/Econometrics majors (i.e., me an my chums) were ‘asked’ to tutor the essay-writers.
So we had to babysit these tards (only one of whom got a ‘First’) while managing a study load that for us included
• Math Eco Theory (which was heavy on Optimal Control and Calculus of variations – taught from Leonard & Long and Kamien & Schwartz),
• Quantitative Economic Policy (which was heavy on Itō Calculus), and
• Econometric Theory (heavy on integral calculus, linear algebra and probability).
Oh… and on a historical note: that first-year Maths subject that I mentioned – it used to be a one-semester unit… it’s now split into 3 subjects, one of which is a second-year subject.
CREDENTIALISM.
HAIL KEK (I’m all about Kek today)
Claiming that everyone is really genetically a Jew must be some strange form of Jew-obsessed monomania I have not encountered before
Why not write in the 24th?
I did a Maths GCSE less than a decade ago. You can see just from looking at the sample questions that getting a pass would require getting at least some number of problems more complex than level 6, therefore if more than half of children got a pass then more than half of children are capable of doing it.
Its quite common among Jews.
Its sort of like when Europeans would claim Jesus and Buddha were really Aryans, and all culture is created by Aryans, etc.
People get that way.
I would further note that the Puritan heartlands:
It is a most impressive concentration of human capital.
Probably this article: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-puzzle-of-indian-iq-a-country-of-gypsies-and-jews/
Also this one by recman1.
One – it’s the north pole, isn’t it?
I agree. Indoctrinate them in math formalism first to be fluent in it and only then create ‘real life’ problems where math can be applied. When I used to teach and tutor there were many ‘real life’ problems but they were not really original. The original ones you can encounter at math olympiads. You could classify problems into different categories and recognize which math template was needed for each category. One way to help to tutor students who needed to catch up was to teach about the categories so they do not have to form them by themselves through many exercises. This approach reduces the number of problems one must solve to become proficient.
I think the ‘real life’ problems are created to address a frequent objection some may hear from student and parents nowadays: ‘What is it good for?’ or “Why do I need it?’ The answer to it should be strict and non utilitarian but elitists: ‘This is what education is about. In order to be educated that’s what you need.’ ‘If you want a vocation go to a vocational school or if you want to be a millionaire go to the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show.’
Jews aren’t numerous enough to make a significant difference in regards to this, though. Even if Jews are, say, 15% of the total White population in, say, New York and perform a full standard deviation above White Gentiles, they’ll still only add a couple of points to the average IQ of Whites there.
This is what TIMSS does (PISA and TIMSS correlate well).
PISA proxies the sort of problems that one encounters in everyday life, and is arguably a truer test of intelligence.
Also we don’t really have any truly impoverished and backwards countries like Afghanistan doing PISA. I am sure that plenty of children even in Tunisia or Colombia have seen revolving doors.
The 115 number for US Ashkenazim has about the same factual content as the book of Joshua or Misha Defonseca’s riveting Holocaust memoir (or her earlier riveting memoir of being a child victim of satanic ritual sexual abuse).
Mr Unz has already shown that the numbers are significantly lower than the claimed 115 – it’s somewhere in the masterful “American Pravda” material.
Also… I’ve said this before: if you want to do some ‘apples vs apples” tests, and test the ‘inherent’ chunk that can be ascribed to Ashkenazim per se… do some testing in a shtetl in the countryside around Lvov.
That would be fair – it’s the benchmark that generated the data used to paint SSAs as irretrievably backward. Get some kiddies from rural areas, give them fuck-all test prep, and use the resultant statistical bilge to reinforce some deeply-felt need to justify the history of Western paternalism and exploitation.
I’m sure that Goebells would love to have thought of that:
Jokes aside… the data on race and IQ is obviously problematic – the Irish problem, the Dutch problem (two populations that tested at average IQ of 70-80 in the 50s-70s, but are clearly >100 today). I guess they both get a pass because they’re kinda-white?
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I’m quite a fan of Gilad Atzmon’s “cognitive bifurcation” thesis (it’s not specifically Atzmon’s but he does a very good job of presenting it); I would bet that the raw data for US Ashkenazim would be solidly bimodal – with one mode at 95, and another at 125. It’s super super hard to get hold of that data, though… I wonder why that would be? It’s almost as if nobody wants folks to look at it.
Bog-standard Ashenazim are as dumb as a bag of hammers; smart Ashkenazim are as smart as smart goyim. Hyper-smart Ashkenazim (IQ above 135) are slightly less rare than hyper-smart goyim. It still makes a difference to outcomes, because group cohesion is a force multiplier for tiny intelligence differentials.
Actually, it states here that Massachusetts is 4.0% Jewish:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-population-in-the-united-states-by-state
Of course, since we’re only talking about Massachusetts Whites–who make up perhaps 60% of the total population in Massachusetts–we’re probably thinking of something like 7% Jewish.
Still, a White population which is 7% Jewish wouldn’t be enough for the Jews to have a significant impact on its average IQ. Indeed, the Jews in such a scenario should only add about one percentage point to the average IQ of Massachusetts Whites.
There is even revolving door syndrom in Tunisia.
Determinants of the « revolving door » syndrom in tunisian population of patients with schizophrenia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924933812754858
Give me a break.
Don’t white people claim that upper class Latinos are only smart because they are part white? And they do the same thing to American blacks vs African blacks.
So why would you be so shocked that there is also truth to this in white people?
Total hypocracy here.
Yeah, I suspect that you’re correct that India’s genetic ceiling for its average IQ is around 95. This means that, in theory, India should be capable of enjoying Greece’s living standards if it will actually be capable of raising its average IQ to its full genetic potential. This would be an extremely massive improvement over the status quo and thus is something that India should certainly strongly aim for.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Whites with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry in the U.S. are, on average, smarter than Whites without such ancestry. That said, though, I don’t think that Jewish ancestry should have a significant effect on the average IQ since even a White population which is, say, 10-15% Jewish should only see this Jewish admixture cause an increase of 1-2 points in its average IQ (assuming that Jews perform a full standard deviation above Gentile Whites, that is).
However, I’m not sure that I would extend this logic to American Blacks versus African Blacks. Yes, American Blacks have White admixture, but it is also possible that this is compensated by a negative selection effect due to slavery. In other words, the Blacks who became slaves might have, on average, been less intelligent than the Blacks who didn’t get enslaved.
‘advanced maths seems to be contradicted by the fact that over half can pass their Maths GCSEs’
beleive me there is no such thing as advanced maths on a gcse test. My maths gcse was pretty basic and this was 15 years ago (god knows how easy it would be today with the constant lowering of standards) but I still pulled a bad result (I have a learning disorder which means i am no good at maths). Most people barely scraped by. Private schools in the UK use a supplemental advanced maths test for applications to universities etc.
I read both Indian IQ analysis linked from Anatoly and I find both flimsy especially from rec1man.
I do think Indian IQ is suppressed due to disease, vegetarianism, and pollution. But what do you think will happen to this going forward? Pollution and disease will probably get worse, not better going forward.
And while I think the food situation can improve in India, I don’t think it will improve IQ as much as believed. North Korea is impoverished, but that doesn’t mean when their economy improves it will suddenly gain a lot of IQ points. Nor will this apply to Africa.
All of the proposed mechanism are marginal gains. Not something you can add 5 points here 5 points there until India is a Superpower!
If we are talking about genetic potential, why not do this with every country and compare the results? We could see Mexico overtake European IQ if they could remove drugs, teen pregnancy, and violent homes right?
You really cannot teach to the test with advanced mathematics. The answer is that there is no such thing as advanced mathematics on a GCSE test. My test was (by international standards) easy and even then I and most others only scraped by with a C. A freind of my sister retook a maths GCSE at age 30 (she is training to be a teacher) and only scraped by with a C.
The teaching of mathematics outside of private schools in the UK is a horrifyingly bad joke.
Isn’t it odd that the lack of effort is not equal across the six categories of questions? If I walk into a test saying, “I don’t care how I do at this test,” why wouldn’t I answer every question by filling in the first oval for each multiple choice question and finish in five minutes?
This is nonsensical excuse-making.
I was being very conservative, or only quite conservative, depending on what measurement is used to determine rankings.
When I was making decisions after undergrad, my alma mater (Monash) was 4th Econometrics department globally by research output as defined by what was thought to be the appropriate metric at the time – “standardised page count” (i.e., published output, weighted by the relative prestige of the journals in which research output was published).
That’s not an appropriate measure of undergraduate ranking, but was relevant as to whether I went further afield for graduate study (I had a full-ride open ticket to anywhere I wanted to go).
Of more relevance to grad study for me personally: Monash was outright best in the world – with GTAP at Purdue a good second – for my specialism… Computable General Equilibrium economic modelling. (It’s telling that the entire research centre where I was a PhD student moved to a different institution: it was genuinely “the jewel in the crown”).
For teaching, the old girl is currently ranked in the top 50 (#45), having dropped more than a dozen places in the last decade: the university’s leadership is MBA types – “never mind the quality, feel the weight of aggregate student fees” – so rigour has declined.
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Anyhow – that’s by way of showing that ‘top few dozen’ is still not over-egging the pudding, even though the department (and the University) is a shadow of its former self. (Technically, I guess ‘few’ is ‘not many but more than 1‘, which gives the interval [24,…,60(?)]
Frankly, anyone who graduates in the top handful of students from any of the top 100 universities in a technical discipline should probably be deemed “adequate” a priori in any relevant domain. My mentor finished at the top of his Honours year (in the 60s, at Monash) and did the same in his PhD coursework at Harvard (he finished his PhD the year his supervisor – Leontief – got the Nobel Prize). Other colleagues did likewise.
I think that’s probably true even today: for Econometrics, that would mean all the way ‘down’ to the likes of Georgetown, McGill, Carnegie-Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Sciences Po, and Paris I Sorbonne.
Those from universities ranked #101 onwards? Fucking bums, the lot of ’em.
HAIL KEK! (I’ll get that stupid meme-shit out of my system in the next few days).
Yes, they do. I mean the ones who acquired the IQ derangement syndrome. Most whites do not think about this stuff.
I was mistaken thinking you were a Jew. You are a self hating person of color. That’s why you are lashing out with the Jew thing to get back at the stupid whites. So I can understand you but acting stupid does not correct or cure the stupidity of others.
But the poster asked for scores only of white students. How do I know the white scores across those Canadian provinces?
If the kids are not confused by the question – then how do you explain the lower numbers who get the correct answer?
At school, if I remember, almost everyone could multiply 4 numbers, and we learn this at about 10 or 11 years old. So “maths” (multiplication) part of this question, is achievable by almost everyone at a much younger age. The difficulty for the kids in this exam, is the confusingly styled question (nothing to do with their multiplication ability).
If 15-16 year old students are really not almost all able to easily multiply numbers, then I will be wrong and shocked. However, it’s far more likely as a problem of incompetence in designing the questions. Now perhaps, not being distracted by the question is a skill in itself – but then it is still another skill.
I do not understand. Explain, pls.
Assuming you’re actually asking a question and not just asking Anon to explain his reasoning, you don’t (figure out the average). You use total distance and total time to calculate average speed. First principles.
For anything to first year of university (not actual maths or physics degree in university), this problem is just teaching.
Almost any child can, in theory, learn the necessary basics to a level to study subjects like engineering or undergraduate computer science course.
But often teachers are not adequate, or students not attentive, and if something is not clearly explained (and understood and memorized by a child), then the students rapidly become disorientated about things which would seem inherently simple to them if they had been taught well.
It’s not an issue of children being stupid, but of not having all steps clearly explained (and then practiced and memorized, before trying to learn a connected topic).
That judgement is not backed up by the list of prominent Puritans:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Puritans
Lists of prominent Unitarians and Deists are far more impressive:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unitarians,_Universalists,_and_Unitarian_Universalists
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deists
Levels of effort. Areas of interest.
Use yer brain, mun! (Said with Scottish accent)
Believe me, you can. But a student must be very motivated by something like fear and aspirations of his parents.
Probably you are a case of system failure like most people who think that they do not have what it takes to learn math. With some effort you could have been taught to pass much better than your C. You gave up and the system gave up on you too soon.
It is much harder to learn to write well than to do math on a moderate level yet most people, particularly those who failed at math, think they are good at writing while they really suck except that they were not flunked for mediocre writing skills while they were flunked for bad math.
The Fields Medal, awarded every 4 years, is called the Nobel Prize of Math, and 5 of the last 8 winners are from “low IQ” countries: 2 indians, 2 iranians and 1 brazilian.
Methinks winning the Fields Medal trumps scoring high on the PISA test. Yes or no?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal#Fields_medalists
Btw, the Brazilian winner looks mixed race. In other words part african, like the majority of brazilians. Indians of course are all mixed race as well.
‘Believe me, you can’
No really I have a rare learning disorder that means I am essentially incapable of anything other than basic math.
‘Probably you are a case of system failure like most people who think that they do not have what it takes to learn math’
I agree with this (though it does not apply to me as such). My twin sister has an iq of 144 (she took one pure ravens progressive matrices test-the only one she ever took and shes one of these people who has been convinced that iq tests are meaningless) and she only got a C in maths.Part of my point was that the teaching of math in the UK is abysmal and was particularly bad in my (otherwise perfectly average) school.
It is my understanding that Higher Mathematics was alot more abstract than the regular kind and that limited the ability of students to test prep it. Am I incorrect? Let me know.
‘It is much harder to learn to write well than to do math on a moderate level yet most people, particularly those who failed at math, think they are good at writing while they really suck except that they were not flunked for mediocre writing skills while they were flunked for bad math’
I really think that Math can be drilled very effectively but that higher math (calculas et al) is more abstract and that more people can be taught to write well than can learn advanced maths. Part of the problem with my writing now is the internet and smart phones-these have ruined my punctuation and grmmar.
Massachusetts was 73.7% White in 2014, maybe around 65-67% in the age range for the PISA test. Of those roughly 1/3 are full or part-Irish, a group that gets a lot of grief historically for not being as intellectual as other Northern Europeans. Italians (descended from Sicilians and Calabrians) are number two in size, making up over an eight of the total population. The English are a distant third, and I am not sure how many are old stock Colonial Yankees, because from 1850 to 1965 over 2.5 million Englishmen settled in America and many would have ended up in Boston for practical reasons, but most of these were working-class folk who flocked to the textile mills. The next group down are “French”, which in this case means French Canadians who came down from Quebec to do all sorts of menial, low-skill labor. Neither Jews nor Boston Brahmins are particularly large segments of the White population in this state, despite their outsized reputation. The Jews who settled up there were not even considered the best of that community, being predominately Litwaks who were seen as far more illiterate and backwards than the German, Austrian, Polish, or Ukrainian Jews.
Clearly, something very remarkable happened in Massachusetts during the 20th Century that allowed the children of the above groups to achieve such high outcomes in education and cognitive ability, but what that was I am not sure. No one is ever going to claim modern Mass is a pillar of clean, cleared-headed government, so my educated guess is that the communities they were very good at organizing themselves towards self-improvement and economic development in same way many German and Scandinavians communities did out in the Midwest during the same time period.
‘Almost any child can, in theory, learn the necessary basics to a level to study subjects like engineering or undergraduate computer science course’
im not sure about this i know i couldnt.
‘But often teachers are not adequate, or students not attentive, and if something is not clearly explained (and understood and memorized by a child), then the students rapidly become disorientated about things which would seem inherently simple to them if they had been taught well’
I see what you are saying here and I agree. I think the education system in the west has been deliberately sabotaged with bad teachers and a confusing pegadogy.
My point still stands about GCSE having nothing to do with advanced mathematics though…
Worth pointing out in this Russian blog: a disproportionately large number of Fields Medal winners are Russians. Disproportionate number of French names among the winners as well.
East Asians are represented by 2 Chinese, 2 Japanese and 1 Vietnamese.
Artur Avila, the Brazilian you are referring to may very well have African ancestry, about half of all Brazilians do. How much of his total ancestry is African is up for debate unless he ever bothers to take an autosomal DNA test and publishes the results. Like many of his countrymen, his appearance can change greatly due to the tanning of his skin or the styling of his hair.
https://62e528761d0685343e1c-f3d1b99a743ffa4142d9d7f1978d9686.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/56340/area14mp/25vq6wkd-1407895480.jpg
http://pictures.ozy.com/pictures/1500xany/2/0/8/77208_GettyImages-455259270.jpg
https://plus.maths.org/content/sites/plus.maths.org/files/news/2014/Seoul/f3.jpg
http://www.madrimasd.org/blogs/matematicas/files/2012/08/artur-avila.jpg
http://www.korea.net/upload/content/editImage/math-140814-1.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YA3eoRn3VcA/maxresdefault.jpg
All photos of Avila, and showing how radically he can change in appearance from one day to the next.
Typically I think most Brazilians are tri-racials, with some Amerindian in them as well. That combination gives them a more ambiguous look.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Artur_Avila.jpg
https://www.as-coa.org/sites/default/files/field/image/avila_thumb.jpg
I’d say that if there is a difference, it primarily has to do with two or three things. The colleges, hospitals, and also the tech companies on the 128 belt. Basically, some smart people are attracted to the state and have children there. Plus, since housing costs can be high, many people probably move to cheaper states. That is the result of both having been long-settled and also of zoning which requires a certain lot size for houses.
Where does that legacy of colleges come from? It might come from a mix of the English settlers and geography. Unlike NYC, Boston doesn’t really have a major navigable river nearby. The Charles is really quite puny and isn’t a highway into a rich agricultural valley like the Hudson is, so just as the North was less agricultural and more mercantile than the South, it could perhaps be said that Boston was less agricultural and more mercantile than NYC.
Like for example, there was Frederic Tudor who put ice aboard clipper ships and sold it as far away as India in China in the 1830s.
Good points all, but this:
As AK pointed out, this region has an extraordinary literacy level even in the 17th century, when it was a rough frontier environment. Yale and Harvard were founded well before the 20th century. So it seems that those Irish etc. newcomers often assimilated into the established framework.
Anecdote: Latin is common in public schools in this region, and some of the public secondary schools in New England also offer classical Greek as an elective.
Looks to be of about 10% African descent at most. Probably of typical upper class Brazilian background.
https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2015/02/state-iq-estimates-whites-only-2013.html
Hmm, the 5 states with the most intelligent whites voted for Hillary Clinton while the 5 states with the least intelligent whites voted for Trump.
Add the fact that Whites with post-graduate degrees voted most heavily for Clinton while whites with the least education voted most heavily for Trump. And all the best colleges and universities in America are located in the Blue Democrat states: the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Caltech etc
What conclusions can we draw from that, geniuses?
It’s a matter of degree though. Your average Brazilian triracial varies from about 60% to 80% European, more in the South and South-East, less in the North, North-East, and Central-West. His remaining ancestry is typically some mixture of African and Amerindian, with the former more common near the coastline, and the latter more dominant in the interior.
Whites make up the next largest group, and they are still a very significant segment of the population. Blacks as a recognizable minority are much smaller. Large-scale intermarriage among the lower classes after the abolition of slavery in 1888 significantly diluted their identity and heritage. Outside of certain regions and cities, Blacks tend to make up less than 6 or 7% of the population. Even Bahia, the state with the closest links to African culture more closely resembles the Dominican Republic than a New World Africa. The Whites in Bahia make up a substantial part of the population because they never left the land or abandoned the cities after the old system fell apart. What happened was that the population (of all colors and phenotypes) adopted elements of African culture, music, and cuisine but also altered it as needed. It has very little parallel with the experience of African-Americans in the United States, and the only neighboring country that sort of resembles it is Venezuela.
Brazil’s birthrate crashed in the late 1990’s and has never recovered, and it hit almost all segments of the population equally. It has been rather stable in composition for a long while now. Large scale Venezuelan migration into the North region may be the biggest change to Brazil’s demographics in over 50 years, but I wonder if the Brazilians will passively allow themselves to be overrun.
All of the above probably means little to outsiders who see Brazil as just another Third-World loser country that will never be able to reach its full potential. But within Latin America it is a very distinct bloc with its own unique high culture and folk traditions. It stands out from its neighbors in many positive respects, and rarely fails any harder than they do. The nation is in crisis right now, but my own feeling is that it will be limping along long after most of its rivals are gone. That is the nature of Brazil, a slow and lukewarm but enduring simmer.
I’m puzzled by what is meant by “crimestop” in this context. Sure, I’m aware of the Newspeak concept of crimestop in 1984, but you seem to be using it differently here. If so, please explain. Thanks in advance.
I am guessing closer to 25% African descent. He looks like Kris Humphries of the NBA:
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/111027074935-kris-humphries-kim-kardashian-1027-horizontal-large-gallery.jpg
Whose father is african-American:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yyq5MR6lKF4/hqdefault.jpg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yyq5MR6lKF4
Which means Kris Humphries is at least 25% african.
This is probably where behavioral biology matters. Germanic countries (and the US was definitely founded as one–with refs by several of the founding fathers to their Anglo-Saxon heritage and returning to more ancient ways of being like with the founding of England) are high trust, low corruption, and thus tended to create more efficiency, less waste, less money siphoned off by corruption. It’s a multi-layered issue.
South Korea is sort of sliding into a new form of Oriental despotism as US influence wanes, and Japan for example has issues that wouldn’t make them blink but would gall someone from a Germanic country, such as certain middlemen-types needing their palms greased often with cash gifts to smooth business transactions.
No doubt. Brazil will have a better future than Argentina. The 3 most unique, diverse and interesting regions in the Americas are:
United States
Brazil
The Caribbean Islands
Did you notice that the intelligent whites in those states voted differently from how the state as a whole went? 2 of the top 5 went for Romney in 2012, 2 democrat and 1 is evenly split. And the next 4 out of the top 10 were all for Romney.
On the basis of white voting only, I think Trump won something like 45 states, so I don’t know what conclusions you think you can draw from that other than non-whites like to live in the states with the best universities and not rural farm states.
I’m not sure about the future of Brazil, but I’d guess Venezuela is permanently ruined. Dysgenics, including emigration. The result is that they are unlikely to ever have a functional government. People will not want to move there but will want to move away.
A pity, since once it was a prosperous country.
Brazil’s greatest writer, and probably the greatest writer of prose in the Portuguese language, was also mixed race:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machado_de_Assis
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis….was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer. Widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature, nevertheless he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. In 1897 he founded and became the first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Machado’s works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1941, the Brazilian Academy of Letters founded in his honor the Prêmio Machado de Assis (Machado de Assis Award), the most prestigious literary award in Brazil. For his innovation and audacity in early themes, Assis is often seen as a writer of unprecedented production, being known for his irony and wide vocabulary. Among his most famous works are Dom Casmurro (1899), Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (“Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”, also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner) and Quincas Borba (also known in English as Philosopher or Dog).
https://abrilveja.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/machado-de-assis-aos-25-anos-original.jpeg
http://f.i.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/images/16204656.jpeg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Machado_de_Assis_1904.jpg
No I didn’t notice that. Where did you notice that? Give us the link.
Ah, here we go. I don’t know why I couldn’t find it before I posted my comment. 2008/2012/2016.
https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/11/2008-presidential-election-electoral.html
https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2012/11/2012-electoral-maps-by-sex-race-and_12.html
https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2018/05/trumps-2016-white-vote-share-by-state.html
The Irish in greater Boston retained a hard edge into the 1980s. Even as late as 2010 a negro might be verbally abused by low IQ Irish in Southie. Alas they have gone essentially full shitlib at this point, little different from their swine Puritan-descended neighbors, if perhaps not as smart, at the group level.
It is there in the link you linked you. Red means voted for Romney, blue means Obama, white vote only.
D.C. and Massachusetts are blue, New Jersey and Maryland red, Connecticut is 49%/49% in the top 5.
See my reply to myself above for links to maps at the same website for 2008, 2012 and 2016.
There is an actual Irish-American ghetto in southern Boston but most Irish in New England do not live like that. Many of them seem to have assimilated with the Puritans long before this decade (the Kennedy clan are famous examples).
Yes, they are indeed similar in appearance and racial features.
According to wikipedia, Kris Humphries is 25% African-American (his father is half African-American). Since African-Americans are about 80% African, this would make Humphries of 20% African descent.
So Avila may be 20% African also.
Thanks.
Considering that Trump won the national white vote by a landslide it is telling that he lost the white vote by a landslide in the 2 states with the highest white IQ: DC and Massachusetts where he got only 36.3% and 40.8% of the white vote respectively. In Connecticut he got 48% of the white vote. In New Jersey he got 50.4% and in Maryland 51.9%.
In stark contrast here are his percentages of the white vote in the lowest white IQ states, ranking from lowest IQ:
West Virginia 68.7%
Alabama………77.2%
Oklahoma…….65.5%
Mississippi….. 81.5%
Arkansas ……..71.4%
What a huge difference between the highest and lowest white IQ states. There seems to be a correlation between IQ and likelihood of voting Democrat among white Americans.
India will continue to get worse, as will Mexico, rest of Latin America, Africa, because the smart will continue to leave, leaving the country to be run over by the corrupt, the criminal, sick, poor, old, young, stupid…all thanks to the open border policies of the rich world which exacerbate inequality around the world.
In the colonial times we robbed the poor countries of their natural resources, now we rob them of their human resources.
You’re forcing it to be there because you want to see it man (or maybe just because you want to call your political opponents dumb).
Check the map at the bottom of the 2016 results that separates women out of it (and it’s mostly unmarried women who want the state to be their beta orbiting boyfriend).
If only white males voted, the only places Clinton wins is D.C, Oregon, Hawaii, and New Hampshire for 18 electoral votes to 520.
And DC has other reasons to vote Clinton, they are the establishment.
Even with women in the picture, Trump carried the white vote of 37 out of 50 states.
Of the 13 states he did not win, 10 are in the top 25 of IQ ranks, but his vote ranges from 36.3% to 49.9%, with 10 of the 13 in the 40s and 7 of the 13 over 45%. And this is counting DC as a state. DC is the establishment, we’re talking about who James Comey and Mueller voted for here.
Of the top 10 out of 50 states for IQ, Trump carried 5. So Trump cleaned house with stupid states but he still split the top 10 smartest evenly, including 2 of the top 5 counting DC (or 3 of the top 5 and 6 of top 10 not counting DC).
‘…Our task is to mobilize them as soldiers to crush and replace existing elites with ourselves.’
Nice to hear someone else with some common sense.
‘…In the colonial times we robbed the poor countries of their natural resources, now we rob them of their human resources.’
In that case, I for one wish to immediately repent and go and sin no more. If we go further and repatriate all of the arrivals, will that make amends?
‘…Considering that Trump won the national white vote by a landslide it is telling that he lost the white vote by a landslide in the 2 states…’
Sorting the vote by state is a fallacy in the first place. It was urban area — Clinton, rural areas — Trump.
Take two states: Missouri and Oregon. Missouri went for Trump, Oregon for Clinton. However, in both cases, the urban areas went for Clinton while the rural areas went for Trump. In Missouri it was Saint Louis and Kansas City for Clinton, everywhere else for Trump. In Oregon, it was Portlandia and Eugene for Clinton, everywhere else for Trump. The distinction was that Portlandia plus Eugene outweighed the rest of Oregon, but Saint Louis plus Kansas City did not outweigh the rest of Missouri. Heck, here in Douglas County, in ‘blue’ Oregon, Trump outpolled Clinton 66% to 25%. But then, the biggest town in the county only has twenty thousand people.
Look the electoral maps. Aside from such outliers as California and Massachusetts, it was practically universal. Like, I was following the returns on election night. Washington State was going for Trump!
I practically jumped out of my chair. Then I checked out what parts of Washington State were going for Trump. Oh: the Puget Sound urban areas haven’t checked in yet. So much for that.
‘What conclusions can we draw from that, geniuses?’
We can conclude that most college graduates are actually dumb shits.
They voted for Clinton.
Did some googling and could not find any hint anywhere of him being mulatto. There are many interviews with Artur Avila and his race is never discussed.
‘For anything to first year of university (not actual maths or physics degree in university), this problem is just teaching.
Almost any child can, in theory, learn the necessary basics to a level to study subjects like engineering or undergraduate computer science course…’
I taught high school math for three years, so I think I can comment on this.
It’s true — to some extent. My experience was that anyone of even moderate intelligence could do well in first-year algebra if it was taught well, he applied himself, and he had the rudiments of arithmetic down.
On the other hand, I never particularly enjoyed teaching geometry. Some kids just couldn’t get it. For those who could, it was a snap, and it probably wasn’t terribly important whether my lessons were well-thought out or not.
Brazil is the Land of the Future and always will be.
‘All photos of Avila, and showing how radically he can change in appearance from one day to the next.’
I’m sorry, but all I see are pictures of some white dude.
Maybe a touch of the ol’ tar brush, but evidently not enough to severely impact his IQ.
I don’t know if it extends to intelligence, but what comes through in people of mixed racial background is unpredictable.
My wife is from El Salvador, and since my daughter got curious and got some genetic tests done, we know she’s about two-thirds Indian — although she doesn’t look it. I’m white, it’s perhaps needless to say.
Anyway, our kids… You’d never know Lydia was Hispanic unless she told you — but she’s decidedly short — 5′ 5″. The Boy is this brown giant: 6′ 2″ — but darker than either me or his mother.
It’s too bad we didn’t have more kids. I wonder if we would have gotten small and dark on one of the rounds?
I’m guessing he is of old Brazilian stock so the mixing would have occurred many generations ago, involves African ancestry from various lines, and probably is the result of the overall genetic background of that population rather than some specific grandparent or great-grandparent. But I don’t know.
It’s a Trump and class thing, not a “Democrat” vs. “Republican” issue. High IQ whites voted heavily for Romney. They benefit from policies that Trump opposes, such as immigration of unskilled people (driving down cost of labor, making lawn work and home reno cheaper) and foreign manufacturing (making consumer goods cheaper) that harm less educated white people, and don’t face the consequences – those low-skilled immigrants aren’t moving into neighborhoods were wealthy high IQ whites live.
What percent african do you think this Haitian basketball coach is?
https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/tulsaworld.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/2/13/213b9bd5-8c63-5232-a8c0-73d54a01d388/5500522090125.image.jpg
Divide that by 2 and that would be how african his son, NBA star Blake Griffin, is. Blake is very often mistaken for Kris Humphries. Here he is with his parents:
https://78.media.tumblr.com/ae8de0d994d996aa84a0a59382a18965/tumblr_mk17jv4pU41rk1fawo1_500.jpg
“Mostly well to do yeomen and gentlemen” is a wild exaggeration.
Blake Griffin looks more African than does Humphries. His and Humphries’ mothers are light-skinned northern Europeans, whereas Avila’s European ancestors were dark Mediterranean people. This would make the two basketball players whiter-looking relative to their African ancestry than does Avila. For example look at the half-Italian, half-African actor Giancarlo Esposito:
https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/587ad80e2a677fe11973b503/master/pass/giancarlo-espositoo.jpg
Avila is much more European in appearance than him. Perhaps Avila is 10% African after all.
https://youtu.be/kWW4xzlrOWQ
https://youtu.be/xSDHhLCHxV0
There is a stupid program in Spain for semi famous people where they like to test the IQ of the guest with a real psychologist . The Argentinian who had been tested was the dumbest ever on the program (90 versus an average of 115) for most guests. She was known in Argentina .
Maybe the dumbest of Spanish and Italian migrated there ….
No one said that there aren’t smart high IQ Indians, so your example does not matter.
That’s a good point.
Still, it was only a one-off selection, which usually has smaller effects due to reversion to the mean. It was also probably not a very strong selection, because descending from a smaller or militarily weaker tribe doesn’t necessarily imply lower intelligence. There was also a reverse selection: those who survived the Middle Passage had on average lower genetic load (and so higher genetic potential IQ) than those who didn’t. And I bet you smarter slaves were also less likely to be worked to death and probably had higher status and so better access to women. (Although that selection probably went into reverse for the past century.)
One – it’s the north pole, isn’t it?
Finally, some one who has dared to respond!
Responses can be graded into 4 levels of “intelligence” (0, 1, 2, 3, definitely not to be confused with the PISA levels). Currently you are at Level 1 — the north pole works, but it represents an infinitesimal part of the solution set.
For those too lazy to look up the original question:
In decades (far too many!) of giving this exam, I have encountered one person of Level 3 intelligence.
Any one here?
‘For example look at the half-Italian, half-African actor Giancarlo Esposito…’
You may be keying too much on skin tone. He’s no competition for Avila, but Esposito’s features are pretty European; visualize his photo in black and white.
It’s interesting to realize that such a high proportion of the ‘blacks’ we are exposed to are actually mulattos or quadroons that we start to forget what actual 100% blacks look like. It’s not just figures in the media; ‘blacks’ in mixed neighborhoods or in white-collar occupations tend to be mulattos, while since Hispanics took over most of the menial jobs, full blacks just aren’t seen any more unless you go out looking for them.
It’s a separate issue to that. When it comes to small things like that they will act very much like native English. Japanese in particular will. Social experiments involving honesty sussed that out. What’s happening is this sort of extremely stratified system that existed before is re-emerging but with this big corporations and their owners on top instead of kings with opulent wealth and crushingly dirt poor peasants. Yes, people in Japan and South Korea are a lot more honest than say China, but that is a separate issue from whether they’re recreating the same general type of system that existed before. Which they seem to be.
To an extent this is also happening in western countries but it’s mostly the result of subversive alien elements pushing propaganda about “free trade” which has been universally disastrous for anyone but a few who directly benefit and are essentially stripmining these countries.
Or they’re just mixed with the natives which is the likely explanation since virtually all of them seem to be much darker than in Europe.
All indications are that corruption is declining and social trust is increasing in South Korea. I suspect something similar will occur in China as its economy and social institutions develop further, though there is no guarantee that the Chinese will follow exactly the route the Koreans did (although some broad outlines are similar, the Korean socio-economic trajectory is different from that of Japan).
If Pb 6 requires a 120 (wich I find amazing because it takes less than 10 seconds for me) , then white countries are capped at a fraction of 10% (from 2 to 7) and East Asian with an average of 110 of math IQ at a fraction of 25%. Shanghai is different because it’s an elite region .
What’s formidable is the difference between that and math Olympiad . math Olympiad pbs would be a level 100 if you consider progression from 1 to 6. That’s who fluid intelligence double every IQ points and a 150 IQ is 1000 more intelligent (for logic, not for regular bio-physical processes like handling ones heart or opening a beer can) than a 100 IQ person.
Draw a circle of 1km circumference around the South Pole. Any point on a lager circle around the South Pole that is 1km North from the first circle is good as a starting point. You are right there is a continuum of points that are solutions to your problem.
How can the poor kids be expected to understand anything about the concept of numbers as long as you silly Brits keep pluralizing singular nouns?
It’s math, for crying out loud!
No, sorry. I only remember the graph and when I googled, I found only a difference between local population and children of first and of second generation (first generation: children born abroad who came as children, second generation: born in a host country). Maybe my memory has failed me.
Whether regression or reversion to the mean people overestimate how it works in their imagination. Providing that mathematically the breeder’s equation is valid it applies to expected values only. The 2nd generation has some distribution of non-zero SD which must provide a room for offspring to violate the regression or reversion to the mean. Otherwise the standard deviation of population would be shrinking from generation to generation. Mathematically it is a convolution of two Gaussian function. If you took subpopulation below the mean and observe it over many generations the subpopulation would remain stable with almost the same distribution below the mean with some spillage going above the mean.
Now the genetic load is another crock of crap tautology that ToE is full of. It suppose to measure/predict the number of offsprings. It is possible that those who died on the ship if they were left in Africa would have had more offsprings than the survivors.
Incontinent ToE babble. I know it is very seductive and hard to resist and it makes you sound so smart but pause sometimes for a minute and engage in some thinking. You don’t want to end up being Karlinesque dilettante.
“For instance, about half of Americans are unable to correctly read a table and do a simple addition/subtraction calculation”
This explains a lot. I made the simplest possible strong proofs for the Holocaust case with just addition and subtraction thinking anybody can understand and check them. I see now that it is not that the Holocaust believers maliciously pretended they do not understand the arguments. Apparently they just are incapable of doing even that level math. Sad.
Almost any child can, in theory, learn the necessary basics to a level to study subjects like engineering or undergraduate computer science course.
I don’t know what dream world you grew up in, but this is complete rubbish. There are plenty of people, even quite intelligent ones, who no matter how well they were educated could not successfully learn undergraduate engineering and/or computer science.
Level 4 surely creates an anomaly. Despite being very tired and sleepy I was able to figure out the answers on the other 5 levels almost as fast as I could read them but Level 4 held me up with visualisation and interpretation. On returning to it I decided the diagrams were telling me that the two people could leap in where the arrow said Entry and out where it said Exit so that the first two would be in and out of the door in 60÷4÷3 = 5 seconds, 2×12 would be through each minute and the number for 30 minutes could be as high as 720. But surely that’s not as easy as Levels 5 and 6?
Sensible people will not follow your calculations because they are based on garbage data. Everybody believes you that you can add and subtract but the data you are using are garbage. You yourself might be an excellent computing machine but this is the case of GIGO. On top of it you come up with some crazy metaphysical and cabalistic symbology that suppose to reinforce your conclusions like for instance that the Nazis preserved Jewish hair for some cabalistic reason. I am sorry, it is hard to take you seriously then. Getting unhinged happens to smart people. Look at Ted Kaczynski or Breivik who was very capable.
But also, any point on a circle that is one kilometer north of of any circle around the South Pole whose circumference is any integer fraction of 1km would work just as well, and there are an infinite number of such circles.
So the solution set consists of the North Pole and any point on any circle centered around the South Pole whose radius is 1 + 1/2πn kilometers, where n is an integer from 1 to ∞.
Draw a circle of 1km circumference around the South Pole. Any point on a lager circle around the South Pole that is 1km North from the first circle is good as a starting point. You are right there is a continuum of points that are solutions to your problem.
Congratulations! You are now Level 2.
Any Level 3 out there? [Hint: there is a countably infinite set of such continuums/continuua].
Level 3!
“Spanish”
Cuban Spanish are Canary Islanders. Essentially these are Moroccans with some Spanish blood.
The same goes for many Latin American whites.
If you want to get down to their actual genetics, they are descended from Moroccan women who intermarried in Canary Islands with Spanish males.
Tamils have a reputation for cognitive ability, especially mathematical, and they are Dravidian are they not? I don’t know India very well (who can?) bit note that high tech and outsourcing appears to be strong in the south, notably in Bangalore (Bengaluru if you are a proud Kannada speaker in Karnataka State) but also Hyderabad and Chennai also (Madras). I have heard Tamils called the Jews of the East and they certainly seem to have got themselves both education and resentment in Sri Lanka despite being a small minority, rather like Jews in the Pale of Settlement.
I think the correlation would be much stronger with caste than with Dravidian DNA.
You managed to scare the hell out of me. Is an international, separatist movement to go live in Antarctica with penguins possible? Or, maybe we could figure out how to live on the moon? What can we, feasibly, do?
Idiocy of the Average.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC3Uo-ag_jI
Whether regression or reversion to the mean people overestimate how it works in their imagination.
You’re entirely correct here. I was initially quite impressed with the constant references to “regression to the mean” before I worked out that many, if not most, were misusing it and did not understand it at all, at least if my understanding of it is correct.
To be specific, and please correct me if I am wrong:
Person A has an IQ of 130. This represents a “genetic” (for want of better term) IQ plus a random element. One could figure out a probability distribution for the genetic element, which would have a mean less than 130 (i.e., it is more likely that a 130 IQ represents a “positive” random element than a “negative” one). It is this mean that would be “reverted” to in subsequent generations, in this case certainly well above 100.
Similarly, if you have a sub-group of below average intelligence, over time they will revert to a below-average mean (albeit somewhat higher than the original one).
Something like 1/6th of Massachusetts ancestry goes back to Puritans.
I haven’t bothered to sit up, grab pencil and paper and try some remembered mathematics but will ask you indulge me if I seek approval for a verbal version which puts the emphasis on there being an infinite number of circles around the S Pole on which one can travel 1 km W – or E – and end up in the same place. There are, correspondingly, an infinite number of circles 1 km N of the former circles.
The data I use is from American Jewish Yearbooks with very few well-known corrections. The results are the same if Yad Vashem data is used. I also compared the data to two main-stream Holocaust researcher’s data. Their numbers were practically identical for Western Europe and Poland. From any data I know one can derive the upper bound 400,000 to Auschwitz, the total death toll of 4.5M and that 260,000 survived Operation Reinhard. What data that I use you think is incorrect?
“the Nazis preserved Jewish hair for some cabalistic reason”
I see this hair issue irritated you. The reason is not cabalistic but prophetic. I think it is that “not a hair from your head will fall to the ground” is promised in prophesies of Tanakh and also in the New testament. As Nazis had to cut the hair to prevent diseases, the only thing to do was not to allow the hair to fall to the ground. I think the reason is that orthodox Jews needed fulfillment of end of the time prophesies before they could accept the return to Palestine. Consider also the fact that Rabbis were leading their people like sheep to gas chambers. That is a sacrifice, holocaust. It is also from prophesies, from Zechariah, cleansing of the people with fire. Consider Zvi Hirch Kalischer in 1842 saying that the time of redemption started in 1840 and if Jews have not returned to Palestine in 100 years (that is 1939), they will do so but with much suffering, and that Rothschild and Cremieux (high Jewish Freemason) are the people who will help them in the restoration of the Jews to Palestine (as they indeed were). Compare Kalisher to Hitler’s speech: if Jewish bankers again plunge the world into a world war, the result will be that Jews are pushed out of Europe. The threat of extermination of Jews, like in the time of Hamas, just before the second exodus. Holocaust, as the burning of the offering. It is language of exodus, messianic. Personally, I think Kabbalah and prophesies are garbage, but Mizraim logde Masons studied them, so did Martinists.
We apparently are now on different sides of the fence, so be it.
Actually, Telеgram usage declined in Russia since the ban was introduced. Keep up!
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3701472
They had very strong growth going into ban, but since then a decline of 23%.
“Person A has an IQ of 130. This represents a “genetic” (for want of better term) IQ plus a random element. One could figure out a probability distribution for the genetic element, which would have a mean less than 130 (i.e., it is more likely that a 130 IQ represents a “positive” random element than a “negative” one). It is this mean that would be “reverted” to in subsequent generations, in this case certainly well above 100.
Similarly, if you have a sub-group of below average intelligence, over time they will revert to a below-average mean (albeit somewhat higher than the original one).”
Regression to the mean in the case of IQ is a phenomenological rule that works to some extent. If both parents have IQ 130 and are from a population with average IQ 100 and genetic heritability of IQ is, say 60%, then the descendants tend to have IQ centered on 0.6*(130-100)+100=118.
However, the rule is phenomenological and not actually true. I tried to derive the rule from consideration of dominant, partially dominant and recessive IQ genes and their effect on IQ including the effect of lucky combinations. It seemed to me that the relation is not as simple as the rule and though the rule seems to work rather well, it is not simply that we have hidden gene alleles that are not expressed and that is why many descendants express gene alleles that are more typical to the population but are hidden in us. It depended on many things: some genes causing retardation are recessive, a few are dominant. Many IQ genes probably are partially dominant. The mechanism causing very high IQ is different from the one causing very low IQ. Not simple.
The questions seemed very odd in that you should read the questions backwards to do better. There is a lot of extraneous detail presented, and reading it in linear order requires accepting a bunch of assumptions and data before even getting to the task. Someone who is knowledgeable about doors, cars, hiking, or cycling might get bogged down thinking about the assumptions. It was telling that the last question was in many ways the easiest, and I was stumped by your comment “I suspect that many of you can do it in your heads within a minute.” Suspect? Within a minute?
Also, where did the IQ estimate of 120 to 125 come from? If 2% of the US can answer the question, given a mean IQ of 98, that entails an IQ of 128. Using a mean of 106 and SD of 14 for Japan and Korea gives an estimate of 124.
I found that :
Argentineans carried a large fraction of European genetic heritage in their Y-chromosomal (94.1%) and autosomal (78.5%) DNA, but their mitochondrial gene pool is mostly of Native American ancestry (53.7%); instead, African heritage was small in
You are at latitude 1 km north of the south pole. You walk 1 km south to the south pole. At the south pole you walk in circle around the fixed south pole counter clockwise (west) for 1 km. Then you walk 1 km north back to the starting point. Thus the answer is infinite number of points on the latitude of circle 1 km north of the south pole + 1.
Develop a language that requires understanding of polymorphism and near infinite overloading to understand.
Finnish power!
Hmm. beaten by time zone.
I think everyone can be taught to pass basic html classes, but using it might be another story.
Perhaps you can take a look here where, I think, I figured out the problem mathematically:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/vox-charles-murray-is-once-again-peddling-junk-science-about/#comment-1883701
the variance of children is V*(1-(h^2)^2) where V is variance of population and h^2 is heritability.
An example:
I am not sure.
There were IMO problems that were extremely hard, e.g. IMO 1988 Problem 6, which was field tested with a group of professional mathematicians who could not solved it in 6 hours and they expected the IMO competitiors to solve it in 15 min.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=math+olympiad+problem+6&uploaded=a&aq=f
The narrator a university lecturer admitted he took one year to solve the problem.
dats right. deskill everything. 🙂
“find x” “here it is” (circles x)
“What are you doing?” “I’m making these stupid bricks” (other guy, wipes sweat off his forehead, looks at the huge structure beside him) “I’m building the Chartres cathedral”
I didn’t work it out mathematically either (I was 12 when I came up with the solution). To say that
there [are] an infinite number of circles around the S Pole on which one can travel 1 km W – or E – and end up in the same place.
is correct as far as it goes, but it does not define which circles these are, because clearly most circles around the S Pole do not qualify (consider, for example, the circle with a circumference of 0.45 km).
The “qualifying” circles are in fact those with diameters 1/integer: 1, 1/2, 1/3 . . . ad infinitum, hence the solution set will consist of circles one mile N of these “qualifying” circles, which corresponds to the mathematical solution given by Intelligent Dasein — a countably infinite set of infinite spaces.
At the south pole you walk in circle around the fixed south pole counter clockwise (west)
It is impossible to walk “west” from the South Pole, any direction you walk is north.
Isn’t there some ambiguity in the question? Is the average per distance or time?
Your calculation assumes an average based on time. However, if the average is based on distance, then it’s not exactly 28.
I think everyone can be taught to pass basic html classes
But that is not the same as undergraduate engineering and computer programming, which was the standard I was referring to. Even a brief look at an undergraduate engineering curriculum will confirm that not everyone can do this, including many “intelligent” people:
https://web.uri.edu/engineering/files/CVE-Curriculum-and-Check-Sheets-Class-of-20181.pdf
For most people (about 75% of the countries) competitive pressure reduces the performance. For example the OECD PISA also survey the competition level among the student, the percentage who wanted to be the best. The results,
http://i63.tinypic.com/2v8fztg.jpg
For most countries, the higher WantBestPct the worse the performance, except for about 25% who thrived with competitions.
You believe that the US Jewish population went up by only 300,000 between 1937-1949?
Kaczynski has always struck me as perfectly sane and lucid; more so than some of the columnists here, to say nothing of the rabble.
Draw a circle of 1/(2^n) km for n=0,1,2,…. circumference around the South Pole. Any point on a lager circle around the South Pole that is 1km North from the first circle is good as a starting point.
Thanks, that’s essentially what I was trying to express verbally, I think. The basic point is that reversion is not back to the overall population mean, but to the inherited one. Perhaps an obvious point, but it seems to me that at least some people do not understand this correctly.
The biggest correlation of IQ tests with the real world is probably in how quickly a person can learn something new.
A high-IQ person will quickly master a simple task. As you go down the IQ ladder, the amount of time it takes a person to master the same skill increases. But once he’s achieved mastery, he’s generally as good at it as the high-IQ guy. Sometimes better, as the high-IQ guy gets bored and stops trying.
As the complexity of the skill we’re talking about increases, the lower IQ people take longer and longer to achieve mastery, and the lowest-IQ types successively peel off the bottom, with mastery simply beyond their ability no matter how much time is spent teaching the skill.
In the tests this articles discusses, it would be interesting to also track how long it took students to reach a correct answer.
If you look at the results in all the Olympiad competitions over the summer ( mathematics, Physics, Biology, Chemistry and so on)……then Russia did very , very , very well, (Ukraine did shit, of course). As for the Americans , ALL the winning contestants for their teams were either Chinese or Indian named. Particularly Chinese ( I’m sure not Japanese or Korean, but Chinese)
Now, Indians are very clever in general but this dominance of Asians, I think is mainly down to “lock them in the room all day” driven parents. Numerous people in the west have experience of Orientals of average intelligence obtain high academic results.
Russians who take part and do well in these events tend to be more strong-minded, independent-thinking people or “free spirits” ( let down by 1 POS who turns out to have been a Navalny hamster)
Western Universities may now have become more plentiful with Chinese professors/lecturers but I think this is more driven by economics and availability, particularly with the so-called “lesser universities” now becoming more prestigious as more qualified people go to live in the UK and US
In engineering the Chinese guys can understand and implement ad nauseum the mathematics behind the computer based methods in construction ( very simple but extensive and dull) , but could they come up with and have a firm grip on the classical “elastic” theory that underpins this and was the basis of engineering from the enlightenment period onwards?
Or could they come up with and be comfortable with the more part empirical/part-theory ideas that are the bases for soil engineering…….I heavily doubt it in both cases.
This is where the real fundamental understanding of engineering comes from….plus most of the creativity and intelligent thinking
Incidentally, I think the most large example of racism is not towards blacks or jews………but from aficionados of classical music towards Chinese/Japanese/Korean pianists and Musicians
“Programming is another kind of literacy” — A.Ershov
(holy f…, GT is getting good)
http://ershov.iis.nsk.su/ru/second_literacy/article
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fershov.iis.nsk.su%2Fru%2Fsecond_literacy%2Farticle&edit-text=&act=url
In Michigan, we like to pluralize/possessive certain words. People work at Fords and we go to Meijers and Krogers. They’re usually places named after people, so it might be Ford’s. Ain’t language grand?
Correct. Except I would suggest that it’s more accurate to refer to the native Guanches as Berbers rather than Moroccans, as the second term implies Arab/Muslim cultural and ethnic admixture that simply isn’t relevant to the Canaries.
The lesson in these IQ statistics seems to be that learning is a function of directed and encountered experience. Performance is a measure of ability to apply learned or acquired experience to a problem or situation of the type one’s culture expects its adults to perform in.
Learning (that is the processing of experience) occurs with every human breath.
The types of learning experiences are based in availability, access, random events. Each type of learning experience is a function of sensory access, if one cannot read, one cannot know the meanings of that words on the page, if one cannot hear one cannot know that the whistle sounds the time of day.
Availability of the mother, father, siblings, the extended family, the community, the society, and activities directed toward preparation for adult demands in a target society all figure in the ability to perform. IQ is a measure of the ability to perform on a test which must be read [visual sensory capacity assumed to be adequate ], understood [assumptions misdirect performance], and taken seriously ( I don’t feel well today or my mother just died or whatever, the gang will whip my ass if I do well on this test]
So much performance determined IQ depends on the ability to perceive, to remember, to recall experience that it is difficult to compare performance test results even between siblings. Another factor is the language, grammar used, and even the type of print used by those who prepare the test.
On no test anywhere have I seen a question like this..
Your intended victim is a 42 yr old female tourist, she walks with a limp, keeps a very large red purse strapped to her wrist, the purse contains a pistol and she runs around the block of her hotel at 8:00 pm each evening. Which of the following is most likely to be successful in transporting the money in her purse to your hands?
a. direct confrontation (beg or this is a holdup) b. artful brush by c. 2nd party diversion d. shoot, grab & run
Obviously the answer depends on the imagined capacity of the victim and the social setting of the offender among other things but not so obvious is that the answer depends on prior directed and encountered experience and an assessment of the risk. No one tested will have the same set of these prior experiences.
Girls who are high in math ability also tend to be high in linguistic ability, whereas this is less common in boys. A girl with high ability in two areas has a greater range of choices available to her than a boy with high ability in only one.
Crap, bad fraction. The first circle just needs to be 1/n
Completely wrong. Olympiad math are pure g for high school people interested in math. You can’t prsent it when your at university level !
And if you are audicious épigone, the way you handle figures in your site completely on criticizing anonymous error (if you even able to understand it ). If you are not , you are just rude .
…. Disqualify you completely on any IQ related matter
And I bet you smarter slaves were also less likely to be worked to death and probably had higher status and so better access to women.
Possibly. Though I suggest a highly intelligent slave is also more likely to “act uppity” and get himself into serious trouble with the master. The type of trouble that may significantly impact his survival and ability to reproduce.
OTOH, the highly intelligent slave was also probably far more likely to be trained in a skill and thus achieve a higher value to the master, giving him stronger incentive not to kill him.
call me tribal but I hate it when these clickbaity threads attract posters from other quarters of Unz Review.
This is a cute problem. I’ll have to pass it around.
km/h
You would be right (i guess because I don’t bother to calculate it) if the question were about the average by traject, indepently of each traject length. But the question explicitly ask to calculate the speed for the « trip to the river and back »
If calling you subhuman is really nasty, you should be more careful when reading and even more careful before criticizing. At a much higher cognitive level, there were many university math teacher who insulted Vos Savant Monthy Hall problem, and they had to eat their hat …
You singled out a single problem in a specific year to counter my claim.
Now look up the medal distribution over the years and how medals are awarded, and draw your conclusion on whether the average problems in IMO are something extraordinary.
That there are years when 100% score is achieved, not to mention multiple such performances, points that way.
In competition terms, if a genius mathematician was present, his genius would transpire in a distinct and huge advantage over others because he would have been able to solve a problem no one else was.
I am not a blogger, Epigon is the successor of Diadochi.
How well did you do at national and international math competitions?
I don’t place much value in social sciences and research, statistics presented by them, especially when their conclusions directly contradict my personal experience.
no, strike that.
you’re still wrong though, there’s nothing ambiguous about the question, but I lack the IQ points to tell you exactly why.
they’re asking for the average speed. speed is distance over time (v=s/t), so the average is presumably also over time because dimensions. what would the physical significance of average speed over distance be, anyway?
Thilo Sarrazin, ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab, Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen’, München 2010
argued, even before the mass immigration, how stupid immigrants destroy Germany.
They get lots of children, intelligent German women none, or one or two.
He also mentions that these days hardly anyone can read an intelligent article of a few pages.
I suppose this is demonstrated through ‘arguing’ by copying web site adresses, where someone finds something that seems to support his or her point of view.
The argument ‘this is such and so because of so and so’, something like that, is seldom seen any more.
Assertions all over the place.
The most stupid reproach is not having an own opinion, ‘hiding behind books or authors’.
These people think it is possible to grab an opinion out of thin air.
It reminds me about a statement about the holocaust “we know a lot for which we have no proof”.
How on earth anyone can know anything for which there is no proof, beyond my imagination.
North pole
Any point 1+1/(n*pi) distance from South pole
Alan Turing in WWII indeed selected applicants for the Enigma project by the speed with which they were able to solve problems;
Nothing special these days, any psychological test measures time.
“You believe that the US Jewish population went up by only 300,000 between 1937-1949?”
I looked at the US Jewish population data in
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2017/11/20/h4-finished-this-conspiracy-theory/
and after the table giving the US Jewish population I wrote:
“These numbers are odd to say the least. There is a huge range of uncertainty of a million in 1910, yet the upper bound is given in the precision of a person. The figure for 1930 is not given, instead there are figures for 1927 and 1937, and the one in 1927 is precise. ”
If you mean by garbage that the Jewish numbers may not be correct, that can be valid criticism. However, I wanted to derive a proof that uses numbers that Holocaust researchers claim are correct. Suggesting any other numbers would face the objection that their numbers are correct, they have studied the topic from whatever sources, while I obviously did other things than spent time on studying Jewish populations in different countries. Thus, I use Holocaust numbers and derive the contradictions to Holocaust claims. Yet, the Jewish numbers for Western Europe seem correct to me, as seem the immigration numbers and the Polish census of 1931. This is sufficient for Auschwitz, Operation Reinhard and 4.5M.
Your comment on the US Jewish population numbers being in doubt is justified. They are from a Jewish site, not from a denier site.Soviet and US numbers can indeed be largely incorrect, but I actually do not need those numbers. The DP camp numbers already force the conclusion that over 200,000 survived Operation Reinhard camps. This strengthens the conclusion that 1M had immigrated additionally from the Soviet Union because otherwise the losses are difficult to explain, especially as mass graves have not been verified.
as long as you silly Brits keep pluralizing singular nouns
In defense of the silly Brits one could point out that mathematics was originally a plural noun.
“Intelligent womens'” intelligence doesn’t seem to help them out very much in working out that having (non-autistic) children becomes a lot more difficult after 30, as does finding a man when the best men are already married or less attracted to them.
The whole of the article
Wacky science from five to six:
The list is endless.
The differences between societies, though real, consist of a multitude of correlations, variables that are as important. The differences between societies, though very real are secondary as to the planetary failing human experiment.
Point made: average IQ might boost the number of higher IQ individuals, that is it. That is why Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California for the “wrong” party. Our elites do not select for IQ brides, IQ off-spring, talent (in the real sense) in collaborators, systemic revisionism and open experiments. And on.
An average IQ of a hundred over the whole of the globe, would probably make matters worse than as is. The derivatives of higher average IQ societies are far more important then the short term gains. Metabolic overload probably.
The Holocaust has way, way more going for it as a plausible event then the laughably dumb lie of “mass rape” by the Red Army to the Nazi scum.
The Holocaust 6 million figure is based on a sensible extrapolation of 100’s of thousands of witnesses, documented victims, named victims from family of survivors also at camps, personal possessions recovered after liberation…and so on
The “mass rape” by the Red Army joke is extrapolated from……100 women listing “Russian” as ethnicity of father in Berlin ! This somehow then gets to 2 million rapes! With the added joke that not a single child at the time born 9-12 months after appears to have any features of anybody from the Soviet Union, wioth 1945 containing the higher proportion of Kavkaz and asiatics then any other year in the red army, for obvious reasons.
Official Soviet records show a strict discipline on this type of behaviour and no more than 250 soldiers
A very small number of “witnesses” of the “mass rapes” ……and most of them just paid German /NATzO scum
Would you rather have a society with mean of 95 and SD of 20 or a mean of 105 and SD of 10?
Important correction:
The “qualifying” circles are in fact those with circumferences 1/integer: 1, 1/2, 1/3 . . . ad infinitum, hence the solution set will consist of circles one mile N of these “qualifying” circles . . .
“The Holocaust 6 million figure is based on a sensible extrapolation of 100′s of thousands of witnesses, documented victims, named victims from family of survivors also at camps, personal possessions recovered after liberation…and so on”
Take a careful look at it yourself at some point, it is worth it, you’ll be surprised. I suggest nothing else than check it yourself. I did.
2. Any point 1+1/(n*pi) distance from South pole
Only works for n that is even:
2′. Any point 1+1/(2n*pi) distance from South pole
The average speed is not the average of the two speeds except if you ponder them by time, and not by distance as most people here have done (wich wrongly gives 28.3). But it’s really dumb to ponder by time when the time is already given to you. It would be different if you had the distance and speed and were looking for the time of each portion to compute the average speed
So to answer the guy who said he correctly average the speeds, it’s doubtful, but it’s really not bright . It’s applying a formula to complicate a simple deduction you can do in 10 seconds if you think straight.
The important amount of wrong answers in the comments thread has convinced me that maybe it’s true that people need a 120 IQ to understand elementary math like that .
For those who were able to do that at 4yo, you realize how lonely you are in this world ….
A couple of Russian Skripal suspects have been named. They are assumed to have used pseudonyms, so only their pictures are certain.
I think what it proves (though maybe not beyond reasonable doubt) is that Russia might have had a surveillance operation against Sergei Skripal. It’s impossible to know if such pairs of Russians often sniffed around Skripal, but that’s a possible explanation.
Another possible explanation is that a false flag operation team struck at the exact moment a suspicious looking (though perfectly innocent) Russian couple arrived from Moscow.
However, I think that with the suspects named, and I guess they are not outright lying (i.e. the two guys really did arrive from Moscow, really did leave the UK shortly afterwards, and really did visit Salisbury and were seen in the neighborhood where Skripal lived), some more serious explanations are needed from the skeptical community (i.e. us).
Because, if two Russians were there at the exact time of the poisoning, then that’s quite a bit of a coincidence. For example it makes a number of explanations (e.g. a poisoning unrelated to Russia and not a deliberate false flag) unlikely.
Well, that was gratifying. I could do all those maths questions easily, which puts me in the top five percent of New Zealanders.
Why am I not super-rich? If my auntie had not been good with money, I would today be the diametric opposite of rich.
I am chronically forgetful and disorganized. If a test could be devised to measure that and it were incorporated into an IQ test, I suspect my score would fall off a cliff.
I never wrote what n stands for :p n=2k, k ∈ N
Just kidding. You are of course correct. The circumferences of the circles are 1, 1/2, 1/3…; but the radii are 1/2, 1/4…
To tell you the truth, I was presented with this exact problem during a job application. Projecting the sphere onto a plane is what did the trick for me. To my amusement, other candidates commented on the test afterwards and singled out the simplicity of that problem: “the North pole, DUHH!”
How do they score less than 25% in multiple choice? That’s statistically impossible, which means there must be some intelligence at work.
Sure they’re not just trolling you?
I wanted to write regression to the mean, reversion to the mean is a different thing.
It means that the selection effect will get smaller, because of the part of the variance which is random. On average, it will move the descendants of the selected dumb subgroup (here the slaves) towards the mean of the original group. It only works for one generation, and if the part of the variance unexplained by genetics (which is mostly random) is 0.4, than the effect of the difference between the slaves mean and the mean of the original group will get that much smaller.
It’s quite simple why. The genetically determined IQ (GIQ) of those with a high IQ will be lower than their phenotypical IQ, and the GIQ of those with a very low IQ will be higher than their phenotypical IQ. Randomness works both ways, so for example those with an IQ of 130 will have people with a GIQ of 140 and 120 among them, but because those with a GIQ of 120 are much more numerous, there will be many more with a GIQ of 120 than with a GIQ of 140 among those with a phenotypical IQ of 130. So if you take a group of 130 IQ people, their GIQ will be lower (depending on the size of the random effect, i.e. the size of 1-h^2, or, in other words, on the size of h^2, where h^2 is the narrow sense heritability also used in the Breeder’s Equation), and so their children will have an average phenotypical IQ equal to the GIQ of their parents’ group. From that point on, no regression to the mean is going to happen.
It’s not tautology. Higher IQ people have higher life expectancy, even adjusting for lifestyle and income. At least part of the explanation is genetic load. It’s not at all obvious from the outset that this would be so, some people created complicated theories around how the smartness causes the longer lifespans. (Which is still possible, but since now it’s known that genetic load is causing the dumbness of many dumb people, it’s quite likely that the genetic load is depressing not only IQs but also lifespans.)
I don’t think that Puritans (or Anglians, wherever in England Puritans are from) have some magic genes that differentiate them from other northern Europeans. Rather, it’s a cultural emphasis on high education, industriousness, cunning, hard work, mutual aid, etc. Puritans set up the framework in New England and other northern Europeans such as Irish were able to adopt it, in general. And thus you have one of the wealthiest and most intelligent and educated societies in the world.
Of course, that framework also included harsh dour moralism, and this has morphed from Calvinist extremism to Progressive extremism.
True north or magnetic north?
The major part is natural selection. The fact that we in the West are engineering too much safety into our systems and processes is leading to a dumbing down of our native populations. The importation of third worlders is amplifying the effect.
I was selected to be in the French team but didn’t go because I used to spend 2,5 months holidays in south Spain in my family house with friends .
PhD in math have 1 chance in 10 000 to get a field medal.
Chances for Harvard PhD – the highest in the USA – is below 7 out of all their PhD in maths delivered since 60 years (I would guess 1 in 150)
Gold medalist (50 a year) have 1 chance in 100 (12 out of 1200 for last 24 years)
Perfect scorers have 1 chance in 10 (8 out of around 80 for the last 24 years)
So math Olympiad is the best high performance predictor there is for genius level activity. It’s the best reality advocate for any g theory because the math is absolutely not intensive in knowledge and require a lot of mental dexterity. That’s why it’s looked down by French math elite who prepare form Normale Sup very knowledge and proof intensive competition.
Math Olympiad is like a truly 5sd math IQ test …
All those questions were trivially simple. I am distressed to see those low numbers, even in the East Asian countries. For myself, I’m 64, and won’t have to live too awfully long on Planet Dumbass. But my kids … for them I feel bad.
The Russians are saying that the “names and photos” don’t mean anything to them, but this would appear to be a bit disingenuous since, if these 2 people really did fly back to Moscow on the evening of March 4, surely the Russians would be in a position to identify them.
There are some people with mental disabilities, that would prevent them.
For almost anyone else, it is only lack of sufficient clear teaching of all stages, and a lack of personal motivation (desire), that prevent this basic level of maths knowledge.
I.e. if a person is motivated to expend sufficient hours, and had access to the clear explanations and teaching of all stages, from the beginning – there is nothing to stop them (vast majority) from learning the maths required for entry to any main undergraduate course modules. It is lack of good teaching and personal desire.
There is nothing that is not open and accessible in the tools which are used – it’s just the need to have been clearly taught and studied all the way.
The subjects themselves are another issue (and these subjects can include difficult concepts and modules) – we are talking about the maths tools (outside the topic itself) required to reach the course.
True north or magnetic north?
True north.
Interesting question whether the answer works with the magnetic north and south poles, it probably depends on compass behavior in a perhaps nonobvious manner. Also of course the magnetic poles are not actually stationary, which might affect things — if I remember correctly the magnetic poles are moving around 1 meter per hour.
Stroop test is a decent measure of executive function.
Wow. I must say I am far, far less intelligent than I thought I was. It took me at least two minutes to understand the solution. Kudos if you really get that on your own while being 12.
Some otherwise smart people spend way too much time and effort worrying about thinning the herd when the effort should be directed toward getting the herd travelling in the optimum direction. I worry a hell of lot more about what the conditions will be 5 years from now instead of 500.
Math Olympiad 2018:
https://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx
Ukraine 4th place, its best result ever. Last year it was 14th place.
USA #1, Russia #2, China #3, Ukraine #4, Thailand #5, Taiwan #6, Korea #7, Singapore #8, Poland #9.
:::::::
Overall pattern of post-2014 winning for Ukraine.
This for computer science, engineering (and also topics like economics).
Canary Island Spanish is the official form of Spanish in Cuba. It would be accurate to describe the Cuban whites as combination of Basque and Canary Islander-basically Atlantic Mediterranean and Canary Islander.
OT: I’ve been measuring my reaction time weekly ever since 11/2017 when it was average for my age around 0.322, until 1/24/2018. I stopped recording weekly at that point, switching to monthly to avoid risks of retesting effect.
At any rate: after about a year of healthier living incorporating exercise and meditation, it has dropped to 0.266, or slightly better than average for my age(and the same as college-aged adults).
Since reaction time may be a proxy of neural speed and I’ve been spending more time on AK’s blog, this means that reading Russian Reaction will make you smarter.
I concede that I may be completely off base here. But let’s say the question was put this way:
Helen rode her speedster 1000 miles in 1 hr. Then she rode her bike 1 mile in 1 hr. What was her average speed over the distance of 1001 miles?
Is it 1) 500.5 m/h?
Or 2) 999 m/h?
It would seem to me that the latter makes sense if you appreciate the distance traveled. She traveled a 1000 miles in the first leg. (ie, 1000 m/h) Then she went just a mile in her second leg. (1 m/h)
So she went 1000 m/h for 1000 miles. And then just 1 m/h for 1 mile. What’s the average? But average of “what”? If it’s the distance of 1001 miles, is it unreasonable to give additional weight for that 1000 miles vs. 1 mile traveled?
However, if the question is posed as, “What was her average speed over 2 hrs”, then the answer is more unambiguously 1) 500.5 m/h.
How did they assess the level of competitiveness? Self-report of attitudes or some objective measure like hours of prep – or how many of them arranged to have their rivals woken every hour during the night before the tests 🙂
Prosperity is a function of intelligence and other things. If you look at raw intellectual capacity, various Asians are HUGELY superior to all others. The disproportion between small Asian populations and their overwhelming dominance at high-end universities and elite high schools, on tests like National Merit, are boggling. If memory serves, the 2016—I’m not going to check—Math Olympiad championship team of the US was all Asian. Is this success explainable by their IQ advantage? It would seem to indicate that they will shortly dwarf a cognitively comparatively dim European world. They are said to be genetically unable to innovate. True? They can sure engineer, as the Kirin 980 and Q-bit work suggests.
It would not work with magnetic references, not so much because they move, rather because of the offset from the true reference.
That’s a self-selecting minority, though. IIRC Igbo immigrants also do very well. Actual question of national significance will rely upon the ability of the larger population to coordinate in a healthy way. China still has a lot of problems, much which can’t be solved by money.
the IQ of the british diaspora is high because it imports smart people from all over the world , otherwise their real IQ is probably in the high 80’s like the southern US he he.
Kudos if you really get that on your own while being 12.
Here’s another one from age 12, albeit quite a bit easier: John has 2 girl friends, one on the North Side, the other on the South Side. Being totally impartial he lets “fate” decide which one to visit — there are an equal number of northbound and southbound trains per hour, and arriving at the station at a totally random time he takes the first train to appear.
The North Side girlfriend complains incessantly, however, that he does not visit her sufficiently often. Looking at his daily record, John sees that indeed 2/3 of the time he visits the South Side girlfriend. Is this an act of God showing favoritism, or is there a more earthly explanation?
Your point about maturation ages as you state it is irrelevant unless you think there could be group differences of the kind you attribute to individuals.
Fred, just want to say you are my favorite writer here at Unz. You write with intelligence and wit.
Please comment more on your own and other peoples articles.
Very good post, very mixed quality comments.
I have little time this morning so I’ll just assert my conclusions not prove them (credentials: MathPhD and consultant and teacher, 2400 GRE).
1) You can come up with as many excuses as you like about why groups do badly on a test but the correlation with real world success shows that you are merely explaining away, not explaining. Particularly pathetic are the comments criticizing the test questions for extraneous information, when ability to identify which information is relevant is a big part of what the test wants to measure.
2) The people voting for Trump being less smart doesn’t mean it was a stupid decision, more likely is that they correctly perceived that his policies would be better for non-smart people like themselves than Hillary’s would have been. You don’t have to be smart to figure that out.
3) Performance on all tests can be improved by study and practice, and it is possible to do this for IQ tests too, but that’s because enough of the right kind of study and practice actually makes you smarter.
4) Adult IQ is much more stable and reliably measurable than childhood and teenage IQ because educational systems vary widely even though most people eventually attain a personally suitable educational level.
5) No, most people cannot learn high school math sufficient to prepare for college work. Multiply the grade by 10 to get the IQ level needed to master it: 90 for basic algebra, 100 for geometry, 110 for algebra 2 and trigonometry, 120 for Calculus (AP BC exam “5” level). Subtract 10 points from that, which was about “mastery”, to get the level needed to get a passing grade with lots of effort and tutoring. Of course that’s a very rough guide because verbal and mathematical components of IQ can diverge substantially.
6) Being a good judge of the cognitive level of people you converse with is a very useful skill, if you pitch what you say correctly you make them feel smart rather than dumb or resentful (go for the highest level they can handle without slowing down the conversation if they pay 100% attention).
Obviously an Indian.
Easy to spot Indian trolls with an IQ of 82.
You have to ponderate by time not by distance .
If you do 100 km at 100km per h and then 200km at 200km per hour, you average speed is 150km per hour and not (166 km per hour). If you had done 50 km at 200 km per hour, your average speed is 120 km per hour and not 133km per hour.
If you are not able to logically see that the ponderation is by time and not by distance , you learn it by rote memory and once you applied it to many pbs, it becomes crystallized intelligence .
And that allows you to know your logical limitation and avoid jumping to conclusion. Alas, this other thing is also an inherited trait, but I believe people can contrôle themselves to a certain degree
He arrives in random time, but the trains don’t – my guess.
2 trains per hour in each direction.
Northbound arrive at :00 and :30
Southbound arrive at :20 and :50
So he takes the northbound train if he arrives any time between :20 and 0:30 and :50 and :00, but takes southbound train if he arrives from :00 to :20 or :30 to :50 at the station.
This might be wrong because I didn’t take the roundtrip/whole cycle duration into account.
Speed is already the average distance over time, so asking for “average speed” makes no sense.
(Only slightly trolling here.)
I have to remind people all the time how truly and horrifyingly stupid most people are. My interaction with anyone with an IQ lower than ~115 is 100% superficial: the gas station attendant, waitress, etc. I like to say the best random sample of people you can find is the DMV. Everyone has to go, can’t get their assistants to do it. Do you want to be ruled by the folks around you at the DMV? Democracy – even though we haven’t had it for some time – is so stupid.
Scotts and Anglo-Saxons?
According to the people who develop and administer IQ tests, such tests do not measure some objective thing called “intelligence”. They measure adaptation to the society in which you live. Thus, use of IQs to claim that this or that ethnic group is more intelligent than another is pseudo-science. Thus, if you administer an American-designed IQ test to the whole planet, Americans will naturally score higher and, since the people who design such tests are, by definition, well-educated, middle class people, their idea of what constitutes “adaptation” will reflect the values of educated, middle class people in that society. Such people will tend to score higher than people from other backgrounds. In addition, the figure of 100 is an average. Amusingly, all this information comes from an article some years ago on a site which peddles white supremacy. The author (foolishly!) linked us to the raw data, where the scientists who had conducted the tests provided the above expalnation by way of caveat. That site has never since repeated the mistake of linking its readers to raw data!
Lindbergh just after WWII visited Buchenwald.
There was a crematorium for two corpses at the same time.
Yet he accepted without any hesitation that 150.000 people were cremated there;
The idea of making a simple calculation did apparently not enter his mind.
Yet, I suppose, nobody sees or saw Lindbergh as stupid, he himself designed the flying fuel tank that took him over the ocean.
I’m unable to copy here two pages from a book about the CO2 nonsense, on the left page the IPCC data, on the right page the same data on a vastly different scale, one then sees there is no global heating, just tiny fluctuations over a very long period.
Homo sapiens, the words found out to see us as the top of evolution.
Alas, homo sapiens is just a herd animal, critical thinking has no place in a herd.
Any textbook politology explains that politicians hate intellectuals, they do not take at face value political fairy tales, that is, real intellectuals.
The Dutch fools that rule us have decided that the Netherlands in, say 2030, should no longer use gas for heating, heat pumps are to save the planet.
Alas, a calculation has been made, I neither saw it nor, of course, could do any check, that seems to show that these heat pumps use so much electricity that in future w’ll need more gas, for producing electricity.
That the plan is impossible, not just because of costs, but also technically, has been argued by many already.
Do you know what “diaspora” means? Apparently not.
He arrives in random time, but the trains don’t – my guess.
Precisely. Another example would be 4 trains per hour, northbound at 00, 15, 30, 45 and southbound at 05, 20, 35, 50.
[don’t think that “round trip/whole cycle duration” plays any role]
This sounds very convincing, but have you been to both or either country ?
Bottom of the barrel anti-Angloism
No.
To give an example, the speed of a bullet in the split second that it leaves the 4″ barrel of a .357 magnum revolver is apx. 1100 miles per hour. However the bullet will not go 1100 miles nor will it travel an hour. Nor does it speed remain consistent, it slows down constantly after leaving the barrel. It’s not an averaged speed over any length the bullet will travel, it’s an initial speed at the moment it leaves the barrel.
Exactly speaking speed is not an average distance over time it is measured as a precise distance per time. It is a quality that exists even in a (hypothetical) still frame of infinitesimal time and perfectly still and not going anywhere. It is a measurement of kinetic energy.
It can also be measured as something like ft-lbs/gram.
I’ve been to Ukraine, of course.
Haven’t been to Equatorial Guinea and will never go there. I guess I’ll have to live with second-hand accounts of African life, that’s one sacrifice I’m willing to make, lol.
Or here an easier example :
If you drive 80km at 120 km/h and then back at 80km/h,
If you erroneously pondered by distance it would be 100kmh when the real figure is 96km/h. Because you’ve done 160 km in 40+60 minutes, or 1.6 km a minute, that’s 96km per hour !
Now that should be easy ….
It was a joke, you silly man. The punchline was a hypothetical imagining of speed as a probability-theoretical construct instead of being framed in calculus terms.
Of course, many relevant aspects of maturation ages.
In some school systems, children are accustomed to taking tests at earlier or later ages, and in some there is no test-taking culture at all.
Between countries, the syllabuses themselves, children are often at very different stages.
Also many psychological traits mature earlier or later (girls on average maturing, in some aspects, earlier than boys).
We can add common stereotypes as well: such as how highest potential children are usually maturing later, while more superficial children ones are maturing earlier.
I have heard there is a test they can give you that can determine whether you can learn computer programming in advance of any knowledge of the subject. Some programming teachers are aware of these tests and hate them because it suggests they can’t actually make any difference with teaching – either you have the ability to learn computer programming or you don’t.
If I recall the test was all about interpreting syntax of code lines. You are not expected to know the correct syntax before you learn the code language, but what they were measuring was the consistency of your interpretation. If you interpreted syntax consistently you could learn to code, but if you interpreted syntax inconsistently the test predicted with very high accuracy that you couldn’t learn no matter who taught you or how long and hard you studied.
All the talk of standardized testing reminded me of this. Here is a fun puzzle that usually sends most people screaming for the hills.
http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/srat-Q.txt
I read somewhere dravidian southern India is much smarter than so called aryan northern india and is more developed and a lot less corrupt so maybe the 82IQ people are from the north , also a lot of silicon valley engineers are from the south of india.
I always thought that the true genius in Tolkien’s work was not the amazing world he crafted with its array of characters and various mythical beings, but the final scene in which the humble Hobbit has finally achieved the summit of the tremendous task he set out to do and then finally succumbs to the power of the ring.
“The ring is mine.” – Frodo
Peace.
What’s up with Israel at Level 6 only 2%?
How does this square with the oft comment about Jewish high IQ?
Again – multiplication is quite a universally accessible skill (we should expect children in all countries to have no problems from about age 10).
For crosscountry comparison, a test of multiplication would be suitable (although at a younger age).
However, this test format is more measuring people’s ability to decode the intentions of the question-designer, and is introducing high levels of irrelevant information. There’s no intelligence required to answer the questions beyond 10 year old’s level of arithmetic, but there is some skill to ignore how confusingly written the questions are.
So decoding these intentions, and filtering the distractions, is a skill in itself? Sure. But it’s a cultural dependent one, and will vary on your exposure to tests like this one, and your cultural similarity to the person who wrote the questions.
In some educational systems, children will be accustomed to well-designed questions, where all the information is relevant. In others, they will be accustomed to ones with useless noise, that has to be filtered.
Differences between national scores, will now largely reflect their habituation to this style of question, rather than the actual skills (which for some reason, are far more basic than suitable for their age-level).
In Russian exams (since around 2010), this style of question is now common in some of the exam, although without the same amount of noise. So now in Russia, the scores in the PISA will inevitably start to increase, as there is convergence in exam format. Is this an indication that the children are better at maths? No – it’s just a sign of acculturation to an American exam format. And the OECD itself will not view it differently, except with the additional belief that this is the correct pedagogy.
In reality, maths exams in school have been in complete degradation for the last twenty years (yet Russian scores in PISA will continue to improve). It’s an example where skill level of children is decreasing, as their PISA scores will increase.
He got the idea of the curse of the Ring from Wagner, though.
LOL. Maybe in the wealthier parts of Kiev. Is the fact that Eastern Europe is utterly corrupt and low trust just something people have to be taught again?
Did not know that – thanks!
I don’t know if Wagner was responsible for how the ring was ultimately destroyed; by the very one who had completely lost his soul to it above anyone else. Pure genius!
Peace.
Its the classic tale of not fighting evil using its own methods – one does not use the power of the ring, one does not fight power with power, one opposes power with humility, with weakness.
That’s the only meaningful victory because fighting power with power means becoming another version of your enemy.
This insight was well understood in all traditional cultures.
That’s what’s so disappointing about China – it chose to use the ring, despite more than anyone else, knowing better. Today, it’s impossible not to notice how China is becoming just like the worst aspects of America.
Jews have so much power these days because so many of them devote their entire lives to simply making money by any means possible (that’s why they can staff the NYT with Jewish mediocrities. Money comes first). It’s as if white people were to fight this by devoting all their lives to making money. They’d surely wrest power from Jews, having far more intelligent people, but they’d have to have the same policies (globalism, insecurity of work, etc) because those policies make the rich richer.
This is why traditional cultures saw contemplation as higher than action – and non-interference as the highest principle. America is already declining from its own insanity and internal contradictions – it never had to be fought or opposed, certainly not at the cost of ones own culture. It needed to be sidestepped, and waited out. Jews are losing their vitality and need to prove themselves quite without any one opposing them. And the Left is reaching unsustainable levels of insanity, internal division, rancor, backbiting, and is heading towards an implosion.
What is this “1+” for? When Intelligent Dasein wrote it I thought it was a typo but now when you write it I begin to wonder if I do not get something?
Because you start 1 km north.
Or: you have the choice of going from A to B by either pedaling your bike up a 20 km hill at 10 km/h and descending for 20 km at 40 km/h OR of going around the hill on the flat road of 40 km at a constant 20 km/h. Which will get you there faster and what are the average speeds? (by the way, this is a reasonable approximation of the real effect gravity has upon moving a body overland, which is why the railroads surveyed the Wild West and then ran tracks on the levelest grades available)
I don’t see any real signs that the native English, particularly the native English working class, are better behaved than their Korean or Japanese counterparts. The native English working class has a bad reputation for bad behavior, petty criminality, etc.
The English ruling class was famous for its immense, opulent wealth, especially its landed wealth and country homes. The English ruling class “solved” potential problems of social stratification and discontent by seizing and giving away free land in Ireland and the colonies. In other words, it exported its potential problems and managed having to deal with it internally.
The ring motif was from ancient Germanic legends, which is where Wagner got it from.
Frodo succumbing to it was Tolkien – although very much in accordance with pre-modern sensibilities.
“According to Kremer/Jones, it is the relative strength of the O-Ring sector in the developed world which explains why a hairdresser earns five times as much in Belgium as in Brazil, even though productivity between the two cannot be much different. Or why a coffee at a cafe costs 10x less than in Turkey than in Norway, even though the Turkish coffee will if anything be better. ”
I think this is basically Baumol’s disease. Although the irony here is that the “disease” really seems to lie in those societies who fail to experience it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
What is this “1+” for?
For any integer n, there are 2 concentric circles centered at the South Pole. The first has circumference 1/n, so that going 1 km west will correspond to precisely n revolutions. The second circle is 1 km north of the first circle, so everywhere on this circle will satisfy the condition (1 km S, 1 km W, 1 km N).
Any point 1/(2npi) will be located on the first circle with circumference 1/n. So 1+1/(2npi) will represent points on the corresponding 2nd circle, all of which are solution points.
Within a minute! LOL.
She rode 4 + 3 km in 9 + 6 minutes = 7 km in 15 minutes, and thus at an average speed of 28 kph.
The answer can be reached in no more time than is required to state the facts of the case. or about five seconds. So this is not a question of intelligence, it is a question of literacy and numeracy.
Intelligence may be limited by genetic factors, but in the broad middle range, population differences in IQ are all about availability and quality of schooling. Declining IQs of Americans, Brits and other Westerners is largely due to the transformation of schools from educational institutions to institutions for paying large salaries to numerous teachers engaged in pointless or counter-productive “administrative” activities, and for indoctrinating children in the religion of political correctness and white self-hatred.
But in the ancient Germanic legends the ring didn’t have power over its owners. The curse of the Ring was Wagner’s own invention. At least that’s what I read.
The comment about the productivity of hairdresers was nonsense.
Productivity is not a measure of business efficiency or anything similar.
It simply meausres gross value added per hour – this is an economic term and roughly means profit before wages and depreciation.
In the case of the hairdressers, their productivity is determined almost entirely by the market price for haircuts.
The market price of haircuts is, of course, determined by market forces within the economy – and has nothing much to do with the efforts of the hairdressers themselves.
Productivity is thus best thought of as a macro eonomic statistic, and caution should be used when using it on smaller units of the economy.
You want to walk 1 km south but not reach the South Pole. Therefore you start more than 1 km away from the pole (1+).
Projecting the sphere onto a plane (concentric circles) as Epigon describes in comment 281 is helpful for thinking about this and understanding the 1/(2n*pi) part.
Though it might consist of an infinity of starting points, we are talking about a small band between 1 and 1.16 km north of the South Pole.
The GRU hitman sent for Skripal was using the name Ruslan Boshirov, are they taking the piss?
Right. Thanks.
Being a true believer and being morally bankrupt are not mutually exclusive, it depends on what you truly believe in. In fact, one is often used to justify the other.
Read Brotopia. SV has sunk to Hollywood level of depravity, drugs, sex parties, hook-ups and spouse swapping are all the rage. Wherever there’s lots of money to be made, Jews will find their way there, and wherever Jews go, liberalism and debauchery follows. All the virtue signaling is just a way to make up for their personal failings.
The “true believers” of the left are faithful disciples of the religion of Liberalism. It is a religion that believes the end justifies the means, i.e. doesn’t matter if you lie, cheat, steal, kill, as long as your goal is to advance the cause of liberalism, your deed is justified. That’s why Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. feel justified to manipulate search results, ban conservative opinions and users, msm feel justified to deliver fake news to manipulate opinions, while the majority of the #MeToo perps are liberals. The left’s virtue signaling is used to justify and make up for their moral degeneracy.
Hollywood, Wall Street and the DNC are all full of true believers of the left, and all are morally bankrupt, because they are true believers of a morally bankrupt religion called Liberalism.
I got it.
That could be, I know it was a magic ring but I don’t know the details.
Much of Thailand remains a poverty stricken shithole. But of course it’s all relative. Compared to even bigger shitholes like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, it’s probably tolerable. But compared to Singapore, it’s a shithole, with scammers crawling everywhere.
Almost like AaronB just makes his drivel up
I look for America’s future, and I see Brazil.
by the way, this is a reasonable approximation of the real effect gravity has upon moving a body overland, which is why the railroads surveyed the Wild West and then ran tracks on the levelest grades available
Good example, but I suspect that the greater difficulty of laying tracks over hilly terrain played at least an equally important role.
Kudos if you really get that on your own while being 12.
Alas, that was the apogee of my mental development.
Wagner’s idea was that not only did the Ring give power to its owners, but the Ring in turn also had power over its owners (and even prospective owners) by changing their behavior. For example it binds them, making it impossible for all but the strongest to give it up voluntarily, and once lost, making them all strongly desire to get it back. Basically, they fall under the curse of the Ring, which in Wagner’s version is a literal curse of the Ring’s creator, Alberich, who stole the gold from which he forged it, but in turn it was stolen from him, too, so he cursed it.
The Ring’s curse in Wagner’s version also causes the death of all owners or prospective owners (except Alberich, who is the originator of the curse; his fate is unclear, though it appears that he dies at some point, too, and his last appearance to me seems to be just a ghost – it’s never explicitly spelled out), so basically it’s both highly desired by most characters and it’s also highly destructive. Usually they are killed while fighting for it, or while it’s taken from them.
The original German sagas only had the idea of the powerful Ring, but in the originals the Ring didn’t have power over its owners: it was merely a highly desirable thing which gave a lot of power to its owners. In a sense, the ancient Germanics didn’t seem to contemplate the fact that people desire this artifact so much that it actually gives it power over them. They also didn’t think owning it was or even could be a curse.
Interesting. I had no idea. Since Wagner far precedes Tolkien, I would say it’s definitely likely that Wagner’s The Ring was what inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though Wagner rarely gets the credit for it. Symphonies in the US almost never play Wagner. The Jews who dominate our classical music scene just can’t possibly play a Wagner piece.
Babeta’s feast.
Its interesting that Tolkien strongly denied it personally(“Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”), but was almost certainly influenced by it.
Two questions:
If a selection of countries (smallish subset of PISA participant countries, perhaps a single country) experiences an increase over time in math scores, may that be taken as indicative of a Flynn effect reflecting an underlying increase an actual intelligence?
If such an increase corresponds, with the appropriate time delay, to an improvement in physical environment, e.g. (re)introduction of dietary iodination or elimination of e.g. leaded gasoline, may we take it that the environment was responsible for the change in IQ, regardless of twin study correlations (which subtract the mean—of both genetic and environmental terms in the gene-invariant dose response/uptake model—by definition of the Pearson correlation coefficient)?
As the mean IQ is by definition 100, another check for real intelligence increase in the presence of Flynn effects is whether the IQ needed for a given cognitively loaded task is constant across generations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nS66IvbvcI
Tolkien himself denied it. He had a point: Tolkien’s One Ring is totally different from the Nibelung’s Ring in Wagner’s magnum opus, and yet he got the comparisons all the time. All the while he didn’t like Wagner much (I think one of the inspirations he got from Wagner was that he wanted to “get it right”), and so he got annoyed to the point of just flat out denying any influence.
Reality is probably in between: they both worked from the exact same Germanic myths, so a lot of the similarity is caused by that. Then there’s the fact that their work is quite a bit different, to the point that we could ascribe a great deal of originality to Tolkien even if he was working from Wagner only. But, crucially, there are a few points which Tolkien probably got from Wagner, and he didn’t acknowledge because he was just annoyed by all the comparisons, and also probably because he worried his originality wouldn’t be acknowledged.
I also think that the original ring in the Germanic sagas and songs was basically just a powerful thing, but it was also Wagner’s idea that it gave its owner the power to at least attempt world-domination. Since Tolkien’s One Ring is similar to the Nibelung’s Ring in that it’s all-powerful, it seems to be a Wagnerian influence on Tolkien.
Very interesting, thanks.
Wagner of course was heavily influenced by Buddhism and practically a Buddhist – so perhaps that was why he was able to make the leap that something that is intensely desired is a form of bondage and a curse, especially if it gives power.
Tastes vary. Singapore is my idea of death by boredom.
I like the organic, the alive, the chaotic, that which works with nature and doesn’t control it or sanitize it.
Thailand has many scammers, but if you think that’s bad, I think I was scammed 4 times in the New Delhi airport before getting into a taxi. I took it with a laugh – I love India.
I always loved this Tolkien stuff. He started from Kalevala, Kullervo’s story, but the later works really say something. They are not written for kids.
Tolkien’s ring is a secret society. I wrote some thoughts about it to the following post:
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/04/29/is-tolkiens-lord-of-the-ring-an-allegory-and-if-then-of-what/
Wagner had a society also, the Bayreuth circle. That is where European anti-Semitism started. The Bayreuth circle had ideas very similar to Theosophists and there for sure is a connection. Anti-Semitism was created at the same time as Zionism and both aimed to creation of Israel. Obviously there is a connection from the Bayreuth circle to Hitler.
No, because PISA exam does not test related to maths – but it tests some kind of ability of children to understand the culture of the person who made the test. In a sense, it is a score of how globalized the children are to OECD standards. There’s no intelligence involved in the test, as the questions are easier than the age-level.
Compare that Russia’s PISA math score increased since 2000, even between 2009-2015.
Now compare the difficulty of maths exams and quality of maths education in this time period. The level of maths exams and high school mathematics education is falling (becoming easier and reducing the range and depth of topics studied).
I admire Tolkien for putting together different influences – religious, mythological and historical – to create something that feels like it has character, like it comes from a particular place – Europe. And is not from some corporate committee, survey, or pie chart. It is in sharp contrast with a lot of modern fantasy which seems incredibly insipid.
Some people today hate his guts for doing it. They want to subvert the world he created in order to push their ideology. What will Bezos do with it, now that he has the TV rights? I think we can all imagine.
This is a cute problem. I’ll have to pass it around.
Here is another one, simple but elegant, which surprisingly few people (including scientists) have answered correctly over the years:
you need to take into account internal parasitism – the IQ gap means one easy way for smart people to make money is to prey on stupider people e.g. money lending.
a well-regulated society would prevent this, forcing the clever people to think up productive ways to make a living.
(of course what usually happens is the regulators then turn into a different kind of parasite)
i may have misunderstood your question but my understanding is the UN has been running iodine programs in parts of Africa for years and it works in the sense it raises the local average IQ but only to the local genetic baseline – so it’s like height, better nutrition makes everyone taller but not as tall as the Dutch )cos they don’t the bonus genes the Dutch have).
so for example if China’s average IQ has increased dramatically over the last 40 years or so (as reported and maybe due to increased fish consumption) then my guess would be people in the coastal cities always had that average IQ (cos genetic baseline) but the people living in the interior were well below the baseline (cos deficiency) and they are the ones who had a big jump – thus boosting the overall average. you’d need to know the regional data to know for sure.
Depending on the dimensions of the spheroid (the “Earth”), there may also be an infinite number of points between 1km and 2km north of the South Pole.
For example, begin at a point 1.15km north of the pole (A). Walk 1km south to (B). Walk 1km west, tracing a circle 0.15km north of the pole, and ending up at some point on that circle (C). Walk 1km north to (D). There is an infinite number of starting points A such that C is identical to B. All such paths also have D identical to A.
This example assumes that the cross-section (the circle of latitude) of the spheroid, on the plane of your westward walk, has a circumference of 1km / i, where i is a positive integer. For example, if the circumference is 0.2km, you’ll walk in a circle precisely 5 times (stopping at C, equal to B). The particular latitudes of these circles depend on the dimensions of the spheroid.
For reference, the circumference of the circle of latitude at 1km, on the actual Earth, is about 6km. At about 0.15km north, it is 1km (i=1). So all the points of this type will be at or south of 1.15km.
The answer to the question is still “infinity”, but it seems you’re also asking “which”.
the UK government directly accusing Russian intelligence officers of poisoning Skirpol implies…
(assuming premise: neocons are more evil than a normal person can imagine and the media are corrupt lying filth)
… that there is going to be another false flag gas attack when Russia/Syria go for Idlib and this time either it will be blamed directly on Russia or there will another kind of escalation e.g. an attack on a US ship.
(if US/Russia military are privately trying to prevent a war then it might be a good idea to quietly agree to mutually attack any unidentified subs in the vicinity.)
How do you discriminate the genetic baseline from the local mean of other (non-iodine) environmental variables not addressed in the intervention? Especially using twin correlations, or by other methods?
Note that e.g. lead paint is poorly detected, due to the combination of sporadic poisoning, short biological half-life, usually a single measure, and use of geometric instead of arithmetic mean to estimate population exposure, which may be shown (use a Poisson dosing process) to grossly underestimate arithmetic mean dose and thus arithmetic mean IQ deficiency.
By which means does one estimate infant and prenatal gross malnutrition (i.e. iodine aside), when such data for a given group has not been collected, and one measures the child or adult’s IQ?
Correction – doesn’t depend on the dimensions/largeness of the spheroid; true of all spheroids.
The first suggestion would do. Now the real question is, what matters, the mean or the next two SDs, in deciding who gets a say in policy making. We average apes decide on the frequency of our rulers indirectly, that should be conceded, but then, direct policy making by smarter individuals as ourselves seems to falter. A matter of absolute ignorance?
There’s no logical or empirical reason to accept the claim “IQ/achievement tests (etc) test intelligence.”
How do you separate genes and environment, nature and nurture, if they depend on each other? That’s why computing “heritability estimates” is a useless endeavor. Twin studies are useless.
I see that akarlin88 has attracted RaceRealist88
How do you explain the fact that they’re the single best predictor of life outcomes and job performance and that they correlate with self and peer assessed intelligence then?
http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf
http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/PSYC%20651/Huffcutt%20&%20Arthur%20(1994)%20Interview.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.799/abstract
It may be that the Bulgarians and Romanians have a larger variance than other European populations and that Bulgaria and Romania sorts through their populations to find those at the extreme RHS of the curve for math ability.
It should be remembered that the Catholic Church (and the Protestant religions as well) have discourage cousin marriage out to about sixth cousins as a way to avoid the concentration of wealth in the hands of clans, but it would also have served to spread the genes around and stop the concentration of certain skills among certain clans as well (until modern assortative mating came along with the advent of more people going to college.)
It seems likely that Bulgaria and Romania were not controlled by Catholic church or that parts of it were not.
Cf, also, the Endogamy practiced by the Jews, resulting in certain effects.
“Intelligence may be limited by genetic factors”
For this claim to hold there must be laws linking psychological or mental states with physical states (i.e., laws linking intelligence to brain states/structures or genes).
P1) Intelligence is a mental ability.
P2) If intelligence is a mental ability, then it cannot be “limited by genetic factors”, because for the claim that intelligence is “limited by genetic factors” to be true, there must be laws linking psychological or mental states with physical states (i.e., laws linking intelligence to brain states/structure or genes, since they are physical).
P3) But psychophysical laws do not exist (see Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism; Ross’ Immaterial Aspects of Thought; Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos; the Kripke-Wittgenstein rule-following argument etc).
C) Therefore intelligence cannot “be limited by genetic factors.”
If you are a moron there’s no logical or empirical reason to accept the claim “IQ/achievement tests (etc) test intelligence.”
FIFY.
The exams are divided now (since 2015) into base (easy) and optional advanced (profile) papers.
Looking at some of recent profile papers, it’s still the same mix of some easy, and some difficult or tricky questions, as was in the part C of the old exam.
Now considering that around half are still taking the advanced option, and the majority passing.
However, the number of students taking the exam is rapidly falling already since 2015, which is quite depressing.
On balance, the mathematics level is still surely a lot higher than in countries like America. (Where they have funny exams like GRE).
If the claim “IQ tests test intelligence” is true, then there must be construct validity for IQ. Construct validity for IQ does not exist. Therefore the claim “IQ tests test intelligence” is false.
P1) IQ tests are experience-dependent.
P2) IQ tests are experience-dependent because some social classes are more exposed to the knowledge and structure of the tests by virtue of their being born in a certain social class.
P3) Since IQ tests are experience-dependent, then how an individual scores on a given test is predicated on his exposure to the middle-class knowledge structure
C) So if IQ tests are experience-dependent because some social classes are more exposed to the knowledge and structure of the tests, then IQ tests test distance from the middle class and it’s knowledge structure, not “intelligence”; “IQ test scores” are really “middle-class scores.”
In the standard additive model, a correlation may be included between genes and environment. Although I reject that model, it is standard (Falconer equations, for example), and my argument assumes its validity.
Your argument assumes an instant or short time delay connection between genes and environment, which is unlikely. In light of recent mass migration (colonization of North America and trans-Atlantic slave trade), very limited correlation is expected between genes and environment.
The issue that I raised is that the correlations can only measure the ratios of variances of environment and genetic contributions (a covariance term may appear in the numerator if there is a correlation between genes and environment), and make no comment about mean genetic and environmental effects, by definition.
May 14, 2013 The Truth about School
Did you ever wonder how it is that kids spend 13 years from kindergarten to high school supposedly being prepared for life, yet when they get out they don’t have any real skills?
https://youtu.be/uAZqMaBY2MI
I’m glad you’re on this thread, I learn a lot on this subject from your posts.
One question, you said:
Does this case hold, for instance with, say, something like Down’s Syndrome (which, if I remember correctly, is due to genetic factors)? That certainly seems to make a difference in intelligence for people with DS no matter what their racial/ethnic background is.
Peace.
“How do you explain the fact that they’re the single best predictor of life outcomes and job performance and that they correlate with self and peer assessed intelligence then?”
IQ tests are constructed to predict school performance by testing for specific knowledge (see my argument on IQ tests and middle class knowledge above). The claim that “job performance”, “life outcomes” (which?) correlated with “intelligence” is evidence that IQ tests are construct valid is false. It’s a circular claim.
There is no justification at all for the claim.
mountains
(mountainous regions are often low iodine so my guess is regions that look like this
https://www.worldmapsonline.com/images/tp-eu-detail3_lg.jpg
will have unusually high variance)
If there’s no link between physical and mental states, then what reason is there to think that the physical world exists?
Down syndrome is a genetic disorder, not a psychological trait (intelligence is claimed to be a mental ability/psychological trait).
How does that follow? The physical is necessary for the mental to exist but the physical does not explain the mental, nor are there any (strict) laws linking the mental to the physical (see Donald Davidson).
I’m no genius, but I have to listen to 2 of my colleagues every day whining and complaining about every single blessed duty to which they have been assigned. They simply cannot grasp the importance of those duties. They think that everything they do is completely unnecessary and is being forced upon them by their supervisor’s immense stupidity. They spend at least 3 hours a day misunderstanding their supervisor’s instructions and then vociferously refusing to perform them. They are painfully dull witted.
I tell you, I am in Hell having to listen to these 2, a middle aged African-American woman and a young lady whose parents are some kind of Chinese ethnic minority (they speak a rare dialect of Chinese) who lived in Vietnam before emigrating. Every other sentence out of the young lady’s mouth is, “F$%k that $hit! I ain’t doing that $hit!” Last week my supervisor offered me the sister of the Chinese-Vietnamese ghetto girl to help me out in my Dept. I desperately need help, but.. I have had the chance to see her in action and she is worse than her sister, and I told him that I would rather be boiled in oil than have her join the worse than useless crew of people I already work with. He agreed with me. I have been taking as much vacation time off as possible because I just can’t stand to listen to these people.
1 For heritability estimates to be useful, then there can be no interaction between G and E
2 There is interaction between G and E
3 Therefore heritability estimates are not useful.
(Good book on the matter: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Versus-Understand-Interaction-Philosophical/dp/0262027372)
What’s the empirical/logical justification for the claim?
That doesn’t make any sense.
i guess you’d need example of twins being separated and then raised in a high vs low iodine environment (e.g. some countries iodized their salt at different times) – doing this might actually increase the correlation found in twin studies as it might find one explanation for some of the exceptions to the rule.
In mathematical olympiads, they test the maths skills of a few talented, not necessarily representative, kids.
In PISA, they are testing cultural conformity, of a wider sample of children, to the OECD’s educational psychologists. (Iit is not testing any maths skills, so much as question decoding – and the latter explains the differences between nations).
You would not expect such strong connection between these two things, as they are two quite different measurements.
They might still be interesting in themselves though. The PISA stuff really needs to read alongside the OECD’s own descriptions of their aims and ideology.
Their essays and methodology available online. (They want everyone to conform to their own pedagogical ideas, and PISA is their weapon for pushing their ideas through).
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa_19963777
P1, There are no relations between physical and mental states
P2, If a has no relation to b, then a cannot provide evidence for b
P3, We only have access to mental states
C We don’t have any evidence for physical states
Why?
You reject the claim that the physical (brain) is necessary for the mental to exist? How do we have access to mental states? The only mental states you can be sure of are your own.
That there is no lawlike relation between the mental and the physical means psychophysical reductionism is false (meaning mental abilities/psychological states/traits cannot be reduced to genes/brain states/structure), thus mental/psychological traits cannot be genetically inherited.
Where’s the error in my reasoning? Check out Davidson’s and Ross’s arguments against psychophysical reductionism and get back to me.
It’s a tautology because it leads to identical conclusion for different environments. Let suppose a population has two traits X and Y that are not correlated. The environment A selects for high value of X and environment B for low value of X. In the end result you will end up with two different surviving subpopulations which will have the same statistics of the trait Y. Yes you when confronted with the case of environment A would argue that the statistics Y would get altered if the suited your goals. Then few days later you could argue the same for the environment B.
Let consider a herd of sheep. The timid and risk averse stay inside the herd while the risk takers wonder around by themselves. When on the meadows the risk takers are more likely to be eaten by the wolves but when rounded up for the slaughterhouse are more likely to escape and survive and vice versa for the timid ones. Can we tell which ones are more intelligent? Timidity does not have to correlate with intelligence whatever it suppose to be for sheep.
Somehow you let yourself to conclude that survivors of the slave ship will be more intelligent. Why do you make this conclusion? Because you want this conclusion and the lax framework of tautological just-so stories of the ToE is very tolerant of undisciplined thinking.
We have no idea what traits if any were helpful in survival of the slave ship. This could have been totally random uncorrelated to any trait.
I don’t believe that is right. Maybe six or seven degrees or something, but not sixth cousins. That would be close to the whole population of a place. Anyway, illiterate people could only reasonably know their great, great grandparents, which means that 3rd cousins are about the max they would know. And that is what is reflected if you look at actual dispensations in parish registers.
I believe a degree of consanguinity works by connecting individuals. Groom to his father (+1 degree), to his grandfather (+1), to his great grandparents (+1), who are the great great grandparents of his bride (+4). Something like that.
Of course, Henry the VIII tried some legal argument about being very distantly related to his bride, that actually didn’t fly with the Church.
so define intelligence as a relative lack of genetic defects (i.e. intelligence = healthy brain)
easy peasy lemon squeezy
Is “intelligence” a mental ability (intentional state) or behavior (disposition)?
“The environment A selects for”
Why the intensional language?
*intentional
I believe that average 115 IQ askenazi Jewish comes from tests given in the NYC public school system in the 1920s for gifted children.
I’ve never seen any proof of an actual study in which a representative sample of ashkenazi Jews were given an IQ test.
The average Israeli Jew IQ is 95.
If anyone knows of a real study done about askenazi jewish IQ please let me know.
Let’s say “intelligence has a free-rider, trait T’. They’re correlated 100 percent, so if one is selected then so is the other. Natural selection cannot distinguish between “intelligence” and trait T’ because natural selection is not an agent (it does not have a mind to choose between the two coextensive traits), nor are there any laws of trait selection (laws can distinguish between counterfactuals). Since both options are false, natural selection cannot distinguish between coextensive traits. Therefore the claim that natural selection is a mechanism is not true. Natural selection does not explain trait fixation/speciation.
Science with predictive validity vs. Word Fetishism ……… who will win?
Are you not familiar with intensionality?
yes (h/t hubchik) the church ban was in degrees of relatedness so a cousin would be three degrees of separation and according to this chart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consanguinity
six degrees of separation would be something like first cousin once removed.
Can you answer the question? Whether or not psychophysical reductionism is true is a conceptual, not empirical, matter therefore empirical evidence is irrelevant.
For example, within families some siblings are somehow more exposed to the middle-class knowledge structure and some are not. Another interesting thing is that the exposure to the middle-class knowledge structure would mandate that heritability should raise with age, while it’s not (your all objections to the heritability calculations notwithstanding). Another is that people from lower classes can have and do have higher scores (and hence, higher exposure etc) than people from higher classes. Moreover, whatever are your objections to the predictive power of IQ tests, it seems they are higher than, for example, SES (especially since in modern society belonging to particular SES WILL be somewhat mediated by the intelligence and genetics).
RR88, I respect some of your work and articles on your site, but the claim that IQ tests measures exposure etc is just intuitively wrong.
First para: so what? How does that identify an error in my reasoning? The argument is sound.
“somewhat mediated by the intelligence and genetics” what’s the justification for this claim?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.15252/embr.201744140
The fact that we do not know the laws does not mean they do not exist. Hence, your reasoning is “X is true only if Y, we don’t know if Y, hence X is false”
What’s SSA? There aren’t any Shetls left in Poland.
A lot of the 1900 Jews who swarmed out of the E European Shetls into the public school systems of our big cities really were above average intelligent. That was very unfortunate because they were communists bent on changing America for the worse. And they succeeded.
if intelligence is (mostly) brain health then maybe it’s both and neither?
Level of development of O-ring sector, government policies (minimum wage? unions?), and actual competition between foolproof and O-ring sector workers may have something to do with it. Population size as well?
I am, that’s how I know you were using it incorrectly.
SSA = sub saharan African
If you really believe that there is no connection between physical and mental, then you have no reason to think that a non-mental world exists since the mental world could never provide you with any evidence for it. Even if you did think that we could know about a non-mental world (although this would be absurd as it would require relations between mental and physical), then you’d have to think that it was pure chance that the mental and physical states seemed to be in parallel. This is absurd.
Must affirmative action black women are like that. They spend more time avoiding work than they spend doing work. They really think they should be paid for gossiping, chuckling and chortling, planning potlucks and hours of personal phone conversations
Thanks.
Numerous a priori arguments establish that the mental is irreducible to the physical. Physical stuff exists. Mental stuff exists. The two are not equal. M does not equal P; P does not equal M.
“mental and physical states seemed to be in parallel”
How?
It’s not. If there is a regular difference between the siblings raised by the same parents in the same house, then you would have to be able to measure those differences. But you can’t.
There is also regression to the mean phenomenon, which is predicted and expected if intelligence is heritable, while IMO would have no sense if iq tests would merely measure exposure to the middle class values.
Because intelligent people will earn more and get to the higher SES. If intelligence is heritable, then their children would inherit their genes.
And intelligence has to be heritable, because there is no spiritual world and no mental states without physical structures and physical structures MUST be heritable somewhat. The fact that we don’t know the laws does not mean they do not exist.
What experiment would you propose to differentiate between two hypothesis:
(1) IQ tests are imperfect proxy for intelligence test, intelligence is measurable. The correlation with SES exists only because in modern world on average more intelligent people will have higher SES
(2) IQ tests measure exposure to middle-class values, and is not heritable.
I am genuinely curious.
What’s the difference between intentional and intensional?
“If there is a regular difference between the siblings raised by the same parents in the same house, then you would have to be able to measure those differences.”
People experience the “same” “environment” in the same way?
“physical structures MUST be heritable somewhat”
No one denied this.
“The fact that we don’t know the laws does not mean they do not exist.”
There are no laws.
“IQ tests are imperfect proxy for intelligence test, intelligence is measurable”
Create a test that’s no biased by class/current knowledge. But that’s impossible since IQ tests are, by their very nature, bound by culture.
“IQ tests measure exposure to middle-class values, and is not heritable.”
My argument establishes (1), as for (2), it can be “heritable”, it doesn’t affect my argument.
http://www.academia.edu/30672400/The_heritability_fallacy
Intensional = referentially opaque/non-substitutable
But I wasn’t talking about the claim that the mental is irreducible to the physical, I was talking about your absurd claim that there is no relation between mental and physical states.
If a bee stings me, then I feel pain etc.
A long response follows, hence the more tag.
Anomalous monism is a very confused concept. Let the mental operation be more than the external stimuli, for example, the physical working of the brain, which may be a stimulus or cause in itself, let alone more abstract systems such as memory. Take away the event über alles mentality, allow physical processes, and one may begin to model, within available computational power, the mental world of an earthworm. By various simplifications, one may approximate more complex mental worlds.
As for Ross, observe that his incompossible possible functions argument boils down to a predicate logical situation in which F_T(x) is the function in mind, and \forall_n F_{F,n}(x) are incompossible, but equal to F_T(x) for all x thusfar considered or physically estimated. Allowing human capacity for mistakes, the human mental capacity of interest to Ross is that the incompossible nature of an approximation can be recognised. It is not clear to me why the existence of this mental capacity should exclude the causation of this mental capacity from the physical workings of the neural subsystems of the human brain—his argument strikes me as a non sequitur, though the problem may be beyond the computational powers available for more than extremely rough approximation.
Nagel (admittedly per wikipedia) seems to rely on “common sense” instead of logic and falsifiable hypotheses. If a mind, e.g. as described through consciousness and Ross’s definitional thinking (action is based on implied definitions, rightly or wrongly applied), and if such a thought-action system allows greater chance of survival, then any coherent alternative does not disprove the evolutionary concept as reflecting nature, but is at best a competing theory.
As for Kripke and Wittgenstein, consider a physical analog. Is a single measure of blood lead equal to (or perfectly correlated with) dose? One can show it not to be under basic assumptions, yet that “quus” operation is the norm. A more likely explanation is economy of effort in the working of neural systems, which allows the recognition, on additional data, when “quus” is intended rather than “plus”—a non-physical mind is not needed to have the quus-plus paradox.
First time I have heard of this. Had to google to educate myself. Found lots of racism and snobbery in the classical music world directed towards Africans (anyone surprised?), despite the biggest name in European classical music, Beethoven, being of visibly African ancestry. But there were also examples of anti-asian racism:
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/7hi6ba/racism_n_classical_music/
There is a tendency toward racism against Asian musicians. They’re unjustly characterized as uncreative because they tend to be content to stick to the high romantic tradition of performance (or are HP, I suppose) and perhaps because of the prevalence of the Suzuki method worldwide.
A notable example of this would be pianist Dang Thai Son, a great pianist whose win at the Chopin competition is still aggressively minimized by many Europeans. There’s also a political aspect to this because some Japanese musicians won competitions (such as the Wieniawski competition) through obvious corruption, but there are far worse examples of corruption by Europeans (koff Pierre Amoyal) so that’s an unjust criticism as well.
Racism probably played a role in the history of black musicians, but I think it’s a minimal factor now. There are many Hispanic musicians: Urguayans, Mexicans, etc. Many of them are white Hispanics though.
One problem is that much of the iodine effect is in utero.
That merely leads to a distinction between narrow sense (genetic) and wide sense (genetic and environment correlated with genetic) heritability.
Total distance travelled was 7 km. Total time travelled was 0.25 hours. Please show us how you can come with an answer different from 28 km/h AND have it make sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUZEB-fy4Ek
I haven’t seen establishing (1), I have seen only postulating (1).
If IQ tests measures exposure to middle class values, then this has to be testable; there should be a set of experiments which would convince you it’s not true. If you say “well, those kids were raised in the same family, so they should have the same exposure to the middle-class values, but they have different IQ values, so they clearly had not the same exposure” AND “this kid from lower class have higher IQ than this kid from middle-class, so this proves he has higher exposure… etc” then it’s kind of “just-so” story (to borrow the term).
Especially, when the “exposure to middle-class” is measured by things like mental rotation or reciting backwards the memorized numbers.
From you argument, p1) IQ are experience dependent is true, but it does not mean it excludes possibility that it is ONLY experience dependent and independent of other factors.
this in turn influences your p3), since it means that the tests might measure exposure PLUS something more and it’s hard to say which influences the score more.
for example, height depends on being well-fed and genetic factors. In some societies people from higher classes would be better nourished and more healthy, but it would be wrong to conclude from that that height merely measures the distance from the middle class and height is illusion.
I would also like to know your stance on the regression to the mean. Do you think it exists? If it exists, how it would be explained by theory that IQ tests measure exposure to the middle class culture?
The author, as well as most commenters, has unnecessarily complicated the issue(s). The real question is: how to have a qualified discussion about anything?
Some of the prerequsities are:
one has to have knowledge of the field discussed. If you’re not informed, better stay out of it. In many cases, being informed means having read 20+ books on the topic.
one has to possess analytic-synthetic ability or logical culture (I don’t know how else to put it). If you’re mostly imaginative/freely associating type, better leave it to others (not that imagination is bad, it is great, but without logic it just creates muddle)
you have to have the ability to listen, ponder on others’ arguments (if they’re worth it) & not just preach your cause. If not, this is not a discussion. It is, on your part, a sermon.
There must be a few other points, but the above mentioned are basics of qualified discussion culture.
The real meaning of MPH- The Original- TCHappenings [youtube.com]
I wonder why I haven’s seen regression to the mean studies of IQ where you would determine the slope between children and parents IQs. The slope suppose to be the heritability h^2. There should be a lot of data available for doing it. Much more than doing twin studies which suppose to determine H^2. What is relation between h^2 and H^2 for IQ for a given society. The heritabilities are society dependent. They are not universal constants.
doh!
good point
is that racism or is cultural Marxist types disliking that Asian musicians only like the good classical music from before it was corrupted?
I will tell you what it means petaing to the british if you ask me poiltely
LOL do you work for the government? Or live in CA? Both?
Sounds like a chapter straight out of Heather MacDonald’s The Burden of Bad Ideas.
Also: among non-hispanic whites the voters with post-graduate degrees voted the most overwhelmingly for Clinton, while those without even a high school diploma voted for Trump by the biggest margin. Clearly there is a correlation between years of education and likelihood of voting Democrat, among white voters.
Earlier I showed a similar positive correlation between higher IQ and voting Democrat, among non-hispanic whites. So Democrats/Liberals have a significant built-in advantage among higher IQ and better educated white Americans.
In Western Europe too, the Conservatives are significantly dumber than the Progressives. The Far Right being the dumbest.
More likely gypsies.
Right. None were gentlemen. Most were low level tradesmen, not masters but journeymen. Yoemen were actually tenant farmers who were being squeezed out by the enclosure movement and sheep ranching.
yes – the upper middle class believe the completely false version of reality created by the media because they are insulated whereas people lower down the social scale see the truth with their own eyes.
I just assumed it’s a government office.
When I read that apparently IQ in the Netherlands had risen sharply from the fifties to the eighties I was amazed and also surprised. I don’t see at all that the generation now in their eighties is >20 IQ points dumber then the generation now in their fifties. I just read in the article of Flynn that the Raven test in question was done in 1952 on 18 year olds. That explains a lots. Those boys were ten year olds in 1944-45. Much of them, especially the ones living in the big cities in Holland, had a full time job scavenging for food and firewood in the period between October 1944 and the Summer of 1945. Also in the northern and eastern provinces these boys had big responsibilities, because all older men (>16 years old) must hide or risk transport to Germany to work there. Lots of those boys were either severely malnourished during those months or lacking basic food ingredients. Apart from that, after this experience many of these boys were less inclined to accept authority and not very well suited for schools anymore. I would not be amazed that the guys who took the tests in 1952 took it far less seriously then the guys who did a same or similar tests in the eighties, when indeed average IQ in the Netherlands among young people was probably much higher then it is now.
Conservatives tend to be more physically attractive, on average, than are liberals, however:
https://www.newsweek.com/attractive-people-vote-democrat-republican-easier-lives-study-794966
But research shows that intelligence is correlated with economic conservatism and social liberalism.
maybe that too but
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285556/
#
(hence himalayas – inland and mountainous – have a big problem with it – which you’d think might lead to them developing genes which process iodine more efficiently?)
(aka yetis uber alles)
Gas stations haven’t had attendants for the last 40 years. If you pay with cash you have to give it to a cashier but most people nowadays use debit or credit cards because it’s much faster.
Have you no neighbors friends or relatives? Don’t belong to any clubs or churches? Never get medical treatment? No need for a tax accountant or attorney?
Wow, 2nd degree seems kind of low. Indians and Filipinos could marry their aunts and uncles? That is like what the Inca did when they weren’t marrying brother to sister. Actually, I believe the Church did sanction one brother/sister marriage among the Inca as diplomacy – they were probably already married or something.
I guess it makes sense, if you are entering into an area where they might not have many strictures to start with, but they must have changed that eventually. I wonder what that says about the societal differences. If they really had a concept like monogamy to start with.
You didn’t deal with the meat of the objection.
They perform poorly on the PISA test yet do well on the Math Olympiads.
Are you proposing that we ditch universal suffrage and use an IQ of a 100 as a cutoff?
Great idea, Bliss! But why not make it 105 to take more blacks off the rolls? Or maybe something a little lower than that to make room for the full Talented Tenth.
With grade inflation and affirmative action and worthless subjects like Womens Studies, AfAm Studies, AsAm studies, yes, most college graduates are pretty dumb.
There is also the problem that many of them are followers and just not independent thinkers.
And yet it is the AfD etc who realizes that importing lots of low-IQ, low-Talent, high-propensity-for-violence individuals is not a good thing to do in the long run.
Perhaps your definition of intelligence is the Bizarro definition of intelligence.
another commenter said the disparity in Romania/Bulgaria could be explained by an unusually wide IQ variance among the population – my point was to offer one possible explanation for such a wide variance – iodine deficiency in the mountain regions but smart people along the Black Sea coast.
That makes sense. One wonders why Sicily seems to have been somewhat different.
i don’t know what the difference in Sicily was but generally it seems the church pushed the issue as far as the local resistance would allow – so if they were more lenient in Sicily (if that is the difference you mean?) it might just have been the priests were getting assassinated when they pushed too hard?
The nature of autism risk is not really known to science. Some say it’s paternal age or just inheritance of “geek” traits.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/does-older-sperm-cause-autism
With Holocaust denial and “Beethoven was black” already in this thread, I wonder if vaccines cause autism people are going to show up?
The 30-year-old brides are marrying their boyfriends after being together for several years. Low divorce rate among the educated class can be explained by that – no unpleasant surprises after the wedding.
An obvious nonsense. All characteristics of the organism depend on an interaction of genes and environment, and many mental defects and brain abnormalities have known and specific genetic causes, cf: Genetic Basis of Brain Malformations
Total distance travelled was 1001 miles. Total time travelled was 2 hours. There is only one mathematically possible average speed over either total time or total distance.
But if you start arbitrarily adding or subtracting chunks of time or distance that you don’t like, then you can get any result you want. Just not the correct result.
What’s your response to Ross’ Immaterial Aspects of Thought?
It can’t be both.
Or a combination of both, or a combination of both with other stuff… it’s actually a good question, and it’s not clear that anybody bothers to think hard enough about it.
My own ‘pulled out of my ass’ notion is that what we think of as intelligence is a combination of
① raw processing speed;
② domain selection; and
③ application-to-task.
The processor speed gives some indication of potential; the selection of the domain/s and the commitment to task are the things that determine whether or not the potential is put to practical use.
Drivers of all three things are combinations of genetics, nutrition (from in utero to adolescence), training, and social examples. Social examples aren’t changing anyone’s processor speed, obviously – but they will certainly affect the domain selection, and the commitment to task, even more so.
This is why I’ve said before that a person with an IQ of 120, coupled with some guidance and a lot of ‘grit’, should be expected to outperform a person with an IQ of 130 who doesn’t give a fuck and/or has had no (or poor) guidance. I say this as someone who was capable of spending a good half-decade (in the 80s) not giving a fuck, despite having had all the good examples in the world.
But on an equal-effort basis, the kid whose brain clock is running at 130 whatsits, will wipe the floor with the 120-tard. That’s one of the great things about having good cognitive ‘grunt’: once you get your shit in one sock, the return on effort is high.
So although we know IQ differentials across individuals contribute meaningfully to differences economic outcomes, I’m not convinced that it’s enough by itself.
I choose 130 advisedly, because it’s my observation that people with an IQ σ/2 above that are ornery buggers, who recognise a hamster wheel and tend to give it the miss-in-baulk (and or declare a curt nolle prosequi): the further up the cognitive spectrum you go, the more likely the individual is to be unmotivated to do things to impress others. Having an IQ above about 145 is pretty much the same as being actually autistic (not “child-psychologist autistic”, which is just a diagnosis of stupidity, expressed in such a way as to be palatable to parents of a type who take having stupid progeny as a personal slight).
.
A reasonable analogy is what people mean when they discuss “physical fitness” (in the everyday, non-Darwinian sense of the term).
Again, it seems pretty obvious that there is an interplay between genetics, nutrition, training/guidance and dedication.
At élite levels the genetic component stands out like dog’s nuts – and in one domain in particular: the men’s marathon.
A Kenyan – especially one from the Kalenji (sometimes Kalenjin) tribe – is vastly more likely to run a sub-2:10 marathon than any Westerner. There are Westerners who have done so (not many – only 14 Americans, vs 350-odd Kalenji[n]); and of course there are many Kalenji[n] who haven’t. But there’s an obvious ’tilt’.
The Westerners who have done so, were starting without the considerable genetic advantages of the Kalenji[n], and without the Kalenji[n]’s cultural ‘pain tolerance’ rituals the endow them with an understanding of the difference between actual pain and discomfort[1].
Conversely, Western athletes of even modest means have access to first-world nutrition, professional guidance… and of course élite athletes all have absolute commitment to their task.
The reality is, though, that ‘like for like’ (i.e., same nutrition, guidance and commitment) an arbitrarily-selected Kalenji[n] ‘good’ marathoner would eventually embarrass all but the absolute elite Westerner.
So we know that genetics makes a huge difference at élite level; and in groups with similar levels of genetics, the other factors provide differentiation.
We take that as read in sports, so why would it be controversial when the exertions are cerebral/cognitive rather than physical/cardiovascular?
We also take it as read that there is a significant mental component to physical/cardiovascular efforts, too – we tend to concentrate on motivation, as in the willingness to ‘dig deep’, ‘gut-run’ and so on.
But there is also a cognitive aspect: monitoring, recognising, interpreting and understanding the feedback that your body gives your brain in real time (either as-perceived, or via sensors). That’s critical for any sports performance longer than a 400m sprint.
It takes significant mental effort to perform a full-blown “threshold test”, for example – it burns, it hurts, you can’t get your breath, and you feel like your heart is going to come out of your mouth.
However familiarity with the test protocol makes a significant difference to results, and that difference cannot be explained by physical adaptation.
Consider the two primary ways of assessing ‘endurance’, for example:
• ‘constant threshold effort’ tests (where the subject picks an output level and tries to hold it for the entire test, and must abandon the test if the output level drops by more than 5%), or
• ‘ramp‘ tests (where the subject is required to perform consecutive blocks of a set time, at progressively-higher levels of exertion – again, failure to stay within the range of each block’s target means the test ends).
The very first time a ‘normal’ (i.e., relatively untrained) person does a ramp test, they will give up well before they hit anything close to their actual threshold.
This is because the first time you do a ramp test, the fact that it keeps getting harder is mentally confronting: it’s mildly dispiriting each time the resistance goes up.
If the same person does the same test the next day, their results will routinely improve by 10-20%.
And the same is true for ‘constant effort’ tests – for the simple reason that on first exposure to the test, semi-trained subjects simply don’t know how to pace themselves: they have no sense of what effort level they could barely sustain for 20, 30, or 60 minutes. Some people (young men, mostly) attack the test and ‘gas out’ before the allotted time… others are conservative and pick a level that is too low, and realise at the end that they had plenty left in the tank.
Once they do their first test and realise afterwards that they had either over- or under-cooked it, they perform vastly better (again, 10-20% in 24 hours is not uncommon).
People for whom near-threshold exertion is routine, are far more accurate in their perceptions of exertion – so much so that they can accurately assess what their heart-rate is at any point in a session, to within a 10-beat range… without looking at a sensor.
[1] Almost everything that ‘hurts’ doesn’t hurt as much as we think it does. Anyone who thinks that a papercut with lemon juice on it ‘hurts’, has never had to pass a kidney stone (nor have I).
“many mental defects and brain abnormalities have known and specific genetic causes”
The relation between the mental and the physical is not an empirical matter. The brain is a necessary pre-condition for consciousness/human mindedness (other irreducible mental (intentional states), but it is not a sufficient condition.
The brain is physical. Genes affect physical traits. The mind is not physical.
Are thoughts a physical or functional process? Thinking is what one does during an IQ test, right?
Been saying this for three years
Because of short of time I did not elaborate.
Not when you pivot your left foot fixed and directly on the south pole with the centre of gravity on your left foot, lift your right foot and swing it forward along the latitude circle (west) and plant it across where you are facing, drag/rotate your body anti-clockwise. Technically your right foot and most of your body are “walking” west. Then a little hop to exchange the right foot as the pivot and swing you left foot along the latitude circle backward (west) and drag/swing your body counter-clockwise (west). Since both your feet and your body are moving “west”, the second condition is satisfied.
The other proposals did not answer how the second condition is satisfied. You also took it for granted.
Serious question: is your name supposed to be ironic, or do you think the races are naturally behaviorally different, but reject the idea of IQ, or of them having different average IQs?
a healthy brain can’t be a factor in both?
Somewhat OT but speaking of the idiocy of the average:
another victim of the “it’s not the genes but the training that make pit bulls ornery” orthodoxy…
https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2018/09/04/woman-mauled-to-death-by-rescue-pit-bull/
Trying to hand wave the facts away? The national 15 yo OECD PISA scores are statistically very very significant for predicting the GRE Quant scores of the corresponding national university graduates (estimated age 21),
http://i68.tinypic.com/21khsn5.png
Even the PIRLS scores of the approx. 10 yo are statistically very very significant for predicting the national PISA scores. At approx. 10 yo the relative age effect is significant, the difference between the oldest and the youngest can be about 1 year. i.e. about 10%. A better prediction can be obtained by adjusting the national PIRLS scores to the total sample mean age at 10.14,
http://i65.tinypic.com/juwfwo.png
Even the approx. 10 yo national PIRLS scores are statistically fairly significant predictors for the 21 yo graduate GRE Quant scores.
http://i68.tinypic.com/2w38ga0.png
It PISA did not test substantial ability (not knowledge as GRE demands different set of knowledge) why it can very statistical significantly predict the GRE performance? Even with different syllabuses for the East Asian countries many of which are not in OECD why they performed so well?
Source? Thanks in advance.
Anatoly, thank you, this has given me a much better understanding of PISA tests. I had never looked into their actual content before.
It is now clear to me that the percentage scores are largely and perhaps unpredictably determined by the effort expended by those taking the tests; and those preparing the students.
The Level 6 question is a very straightforward speed = distance over time calculation of the sort which I’ve taught quite far left of the bell curve individuals to perform successfully, repeatedly and with much more complex framing.
Wherever PISA scores are being used to predict IQ scores, huge mistakes are being made.
PISA scores, in the OECD, seem mostly a predictor for social conformism, which makes sense given that they’re a pointless, rewardless test.
Great comment. One can easily drill low IQ individuals for this test.
Meanwhile, high IQ individuals would likely just work it out from previous experience.
(Very high IQ individuals probably wouldn’t bother.)
I think there’s not much cultural continuity.
I’ve not been to the Ukraine nor Equatorial Guinea but I have been to plenty of poor Sub-Saharan countries where life is substantially more enjoyable than “craft beer” and “boutique boardgames”.
It is Oxbridge and then the rest. Plenty of quick people at the latter but only the former are consistently so.
Rosie,
You are confusing intelligence with being a wise and/or a good person. There are many intelligent people who are neither wise, nor good.
Yes to your post.
I don’t think such a test is possible. At least not in a standard format. The results would be too random were the test not many hours or days long. Also, testing the ability to learn genuinely new behaviours requires the test creators to come up with new behaviours for every test, which would be extremely creative.
Iodine deficiency would pull the mean down and depress the LHS of the curve but a lack of iodine deficiency would do little to the RHS, especially compared with other countries, unless they too had an iodine deficiency.
In addition, it would seem to do nothing to support claims that there are high-performing individuals in those populations that help little with PISA (which samples pretty much the whole population) but outperforms the British and others in Math Olympiads.
I think you would need to demonstrate that the non-Iodine deficient portion of those populations had an average IQ above 100 in order to provide a sufficient number of high performing Olympiads compared with the much larger populations of England etc.
Ashkenazi Jews have high IQs. Only 45% of Israel’s population is Ashkenazi. The country of Israel is 75% Jewish, 20% Arab, and 4% other. Ashkenazis make up 60% of Jews in the country or 45% of total population. It should also be noted that 15% of Jews in Israel are Ultra-Orthodox, many of whom are poorly educated in secular subjects.
The Level 6 scores in English-speaking countries are due primarily to Asians. The US population is 5% Asian, United Kingdom 7%, Australia and New Zealand 12% each, and Canada is 15% Asian.
Why do those developing and least developed countries care? Those countries that reject/dont care about the concept of PISA as just like those cargo cult people hoping that prosperity will drop down from the sky. Otherwise they need the knowledge and resources to kick start their economy.
One way to achieve that is through foreign investments, like those happened to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and China. Who are those decision makers on foreign investments? They are those that attend the World Economic Forum. WEF regularly surveys the multinational corporate chairmen, CEOs, CFOs, etc about foreign investments. What do you know, their country preferences are very very statistical significantly correlated to the PISA scores, irrespective of if they have partially consulted the PISA scores or if PISA measures anything tangible. They might have influence how OECD frames the PISA survey.
http://i64.tinypic.com/2yl5n4w.png
Those countries that are poor performers will just wait for ever, despite the low wages the local workers are very hard to train. Those with oil or mineral resources will be extracted by the multi-national without leaving any industrial infrastructure behind.
Excellent trolling anon. Everyone with half an education considered doing what you did but then instantly smacked their head as to why they would bother. Doing this on a post about intelligence and also getting it wrong were nice touches.
If you mean that the existence of a mind cannot be directly known, other than to the possessor of the mind, your claim is correct.
But behavior indicative of the possession of a mind is never observed in the absence of a brain, so it is reasonable to assume that the brain is a prerequisite of mind.
In any case, there is a clear, scientifically established relationship between mental and neurological abnormalities, so we can conclude that your quibble about minds and brains is mere game playing leading to no useful or valid conclusions.
I can’t believe no one has pointed out (((Israel’s))) place in the standings. Can we now dispense with the myth of superior (((Israeli))) intelligence?
Compare the population of the UK with that of Bulgaria.
Bulgaria has a population of ~7M according to the latest info, while the UK has ~66M.
Reducing the Bulgarian population by ~20% for Iodine deficiency and the UK population by ~10% because of inbred Muslims and blacks, that still makes it hard for Bulgaria to come up with a people who could compete with the UK on the Olympiads (especially considering the Chinese in the UK who would be into that) unless Bulgaria has a sub-population with a much higher average IQ or a much larger variance.
fair point – the iodine thing might explain how one country could have a lower average performance than another but an equal performance at the top end but it wouldn’t explain a superior performance at the top end.
maybe romanians/bulgarians have more neanderthal genes?
Surely your own words “exceptional performance in mathematical olympiads” answers your own question?
What next? All the best stamp collections belong to us? A few people from our country are really good at Scrabble? Or Boggle…
GRE test is, of course, far less of joke than PISA – but that’s still another very silly test.
PISA is really a joke, let us be honest – although made according to OECD ideology (you can read their reports to understand their reasoning).*
Still GRE test is also a joke. I was going through this exam with a friend some months ago. We could not understand that language portion was supposed to be examining native English speakers. The essay part is challenging. But the rest, is like a test for foreigners to show they know some English words. And for foreigners this is easy. And yet native Americans are taking this test, for post-grad admissions? (If they only give it to foreigners, I could understand).
As for the quantitative portion, is generally very stupid – some silly trick questions, but idiotically easy if and only if you become accustomed to this kind of question, and it has no real testing of ability. Your score in the exam will be inevitably high, as long as you do a little preparation to see the kinds of silly questions they use. It’s useless for testing students for technical subjects.
While the verbal part of the test, will be inevitably high if you are a native English-speaking American, or if you have studied English to a high level.
More similar to this, would be correlation of PISA scores to iphone usage, or to age of first-marriage, and number of dogs per person.
The higher scores measure something – maybe that the teachers can keep the children focused on the exam for an hour. Maybe that the country has greater Westernization and acculturation to OECD methodology. Perhaps, that itself, correlates with various things.
In other words, it is useless, since it is not directly the skills it claims to test.
We could perhaps equally put the children to sit in the room for an hour, and correlate how still they sit, with their future GRE scores. The countries with children who sit more still and quietly, will receive higher scores in the future. That doesn’t indicate that sitting still is an accurate test of maths skills.
–
PISA is the weapon for OECD to push through its educational psychology. Their advice is something wholly bad.
Because PISA has no maths in it (even less than things like GRE), their advice seems to involve telling teacher how not to teach maths.
For example, they make a chart to show that countries where people memorize more in maths class, have lower scores in PISA. And then they conclude that students should memorize less things in maths class.
But PISA has no maths, so how is this even relevant?
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/ten-questions-for-mathematics-teachers-and-how-pisa-can-help-answer-them_5jlr56znxjr7.pdf?itemId=%2Fcontent%2Fpublication%2F9789264265387-en&mimeType=pdf
It sounds like a lot of work. I imagine the very smart people who do it must insist on getting a paid a lot for their labour.
PISA Maths tends to test the application of mathematical knowledge to solve problems set in real-world contexts. While others like TIMSS, SAT, ACT tend to test classroom contents. There is a different OECD test on “Creative Problem Solving” CPS (which measures students’ capacity to respond to non-routine, fuzzy and ill defined situations in order to achieve their potential as constructive and reflective citizens) from a different testing body supervised by OECD,
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa-2012-results-skills-for-life-volume-v_9789264208070-en
The creative problem solving ability can be characterized by the ability to utilize (existing) knowledge and the ability for new knowledge acquisition. In the OECD Creative Problem Survey CPS, various countries were survey for the 15 yo on their ability in these two respects,
http://i63.tinypic.com/5eimif.png
The test is objective interaction with computers (to take out the human element) which present the fuzzy and ill defined novel problems and some (not all required) knowledge, and additional info will only be given only when the candidate intuitively know what additional knowledge are required and ask/search for them. Significant number of students just stared blankly at the screen. Rote learning does not help.
There is tight relationship between the two characteristics, those above the regression line are generally more generalistic than specialistic and vice versa. If that is true then most western countries are more generalistic than specialistic whereas the East Asian countries are more specialistic, in complete contradiction to the commonly held narrative that they are mostly rote learners. (The testing organization is European.) What is more staggering is the gap between the top specialistic countries with the rest. Read the results from the OECD report. Very entertaining.
The North Pole and lots of places near the South Pole but I can’t be bothered to work articulate a full explanation.
TLDR, position yourself anywhere your 1km walk will take you through the South Pole and onto the line of latitude that is 1km in circumference…or 0.5km or 0.25km etc etc.
N cancels out S so W needs to cancel itself out.
No, they don’t. That is 1 out of a million. It seems that India and China are engaged in an educational cargo cult. “We gets pointless medals, we gets economic development”.
Having had the privilege to meet a number of British people who could potentially lay claim to such a rare title as top student in their national school year, I can assure you that none of them would bother with anything so silly.
Those types of awards have zero prestige over here. At least in the types of private schools that not only suck in most of the smartest people’s children but also, through full scholarships, take in the very brightest from the rest.
Is there? Or is it just towards and actually as banal an observation as that when I walk North to my neighbour’s house I am walking towards the North Pole? What mean?
“For those who were able to do that at 4yo, you realize how lonely you are in this world ….”
Yes, of course. As everyone here knows, Bruno at four years old was a greater prodigy than Gauss. Shortly after his fourth birthday, he had already worked out Gauss’s method of instantly summing integers from 1 to n. A day or so later, he was able to instantly sum a large number of even integers from 2 to whatever. He had read Euclid in the original Sumerian by the age of five and had quickly moved on to Teichmuller theory. When other boys asked for toys for their birthday, Bruno would request graduate texts on Riemann surfaces or harmonic analysis. As he approached the age of ten, he was completing his doctoral program at Jussieu. He has been working on a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis for some time and is said to be nearly finished.
None of this is surprising for a boy with an IQ of 175+ who may be the greatest mathematician of all times.
Coherent English, on the other hand, has always been beyond him. No matter; he’s very young.
So how old are you now, Bruno? Have you reached your teen years yet?
This seems to be the case with every empire that arose in the past, became decadent and crumbled. This is basically intro Ibn Khaldun 101:
https://fountainmagazine.com/2017/issue-117-may-june-2017/ibn-khaldun-on-luxury-and-the-destruction-of-civilizations
Well, what a run, eh? They’ll definitely be writing about this one in the history books.
Yet, in the words of another wise sage…
“I don’t know what they want from me. It seems the mo’ money we come across, the mo’ problems we see.”
Peace.
In computer science, it’s just needed to do your best studying all relevant maths courses in a standard way (can vary in module and university) – real analysis, linear algebra, discrete maths, probability theory, logic, etc. And then afterwards, you won’t get completely lost and confused by the topics.
But you don’t need to be a genius, or Cynthia Rudin – and you can a lot of the time use methods without understanding the theorems, or their proofs, underlying them (mathematical basis is a lot of the time not understood by people implementing them).
For example, datascientists are implementing often SVM algorithms for text classification. But how many of them know their way around functional analysis and Hilbert spaces, which underlies it?
I’m sub-Saharan African and I’m smarter than you. Prove that sub-Saharan Africans have an IQ of 70 or shut-up.
The irony is, like most race and IQ exponents, the fake Russian Anatoly Karlin is a complete moron. There’s no other way to characterize someone who believes that perfectly functional Africans have the same mental capacity as Special Olympics participants.
Thanks. This example was helpful.
I can see it from both points of view and I was wondering why. Why the intuitive pull to give weight to distance? I think I was conflating “average” with “expected mean” and overcomplicating.
I’m not sure if this means I’m low IQ or math retarded.
Not so sure there are many Scottish or English people with names that end with -berg, or -stein suffixes, and are the ones who created this nonsense propaganda. I’m sure there are some actual people who benefit from it financially who aren’t alien elements, though. You see for example the beneficiaries of imported scab labor–virtual slave labor really–who pass the costs off onto the taxpayer, continuing to argue for more of that rather than just paying a bit more for labor.
Not true for me. I try to do well on any test I take.
Also, schools in Asia have the same populations of undermotivated students. If effort is a factor in these tests, then either we can apply the same discount to all countries, or it accurately reflects that some populations have more high performance individuals who are driven to succeed.
99th percentile GRE
99th percentile GMAT
99th percentile LSAT
Kenyan children can’t recognise themselves in the mirror. Even crows can do that.
Self reported wanted to be the best. May be initial exploratory by OECD, but it did show up significant trend though OECD did not elaborate much about it even the trend is clearer than motivation or anxiety levels. The Economist Mag just ignored it (do not fit their narrative, they just concentrated on test anxiety and rubbishing standard tests).
From the OECD data, the Tunisians are serious about being the best. Plot of percent of students with MathOffSchoolTute greater than 4 hrs per week against WantBestPct,
http://i63.tinypic.com/2zgatjo.png
Except for Korea, the normal narrative about EastAsian spending too much time on tuitions is over-emphasized, they are just moderate. Even US and MX students had about the same amount of tutes compare to that for HK and TW.
And you clowns wonder why no one takes you seriously, why you’re relegated to the dregs of the Internet sewer.
Ironically, you have to be pretty stupid to believe that Kenyan children can’t recognize their own image.
My post wasn’t clear. I mention it as an example of something people are just implementing it like a “magic spell” with some overall feeling for it, but no deep understanding.
Most people are not studying the theorems that underlie it like this lecturer – Cynthia Rudin :
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-097-prediction-machine-learning-and-statistics-spring-2012/lecture-notes/MIT15_097S12_lec13.pdf
Obviously average people will not be like this, and neither even many people who use it for work. (Average computer scientist is not even close to a real mathematician, and the subject can therefore be a lot easier).
Do you have some sort of evidence that they can?
Provide evidence that you aren’t dumber than every Kenyan who ever lived.
And what need for writing insults?
The claim originates from this paper.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.726.1873&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I think it’s, as the people who wrote the paper think, children’s cultural unfamiliarity of you are expected to behave in front of a mirror (i.e. in the test, removing sticker from their face).
I think you’d be a less angry person if you just accepted the reality of your race instead of impotently raging at anyone who points it out.
I did, average Israeli IQ is 95.
Imago, I doubt he dey pass unn eng maths.
I do think though that you are underestimating the scope of heavy metal brain damage, let alone malnutrition induced. It is to be doubted whether the engineering feats, on which much progress was made in 1969, could be repeated by the corresponding generation today, using the same size group. Perhaps those born after 2006, but I doubt those born up to that year. Education cannot achieve miracles. A bit worrying with middle belt events arising from the same heavy metal induced brain damage—the past is prologue.
Or whether the electronic communication achievements that the larger neighbours to the west made in the 1950s could be made today, starting again from scratch. Money grubbing south east and south west is a symptom, not the disease.
Kenya’s economic problems in the 1990s seems to have eased some of the poisoning, and they are advanced in their fertility transition.
As the young are now unpoisoned relative to those born prior to 2006 (Pb) , now would be a rewarding time to invest in primary and secondary education. Someone should give Buhari a flogging—given his history, a little taste of his own medicine should not be a problem—and get schools funded.
Although given US support for ISIS in Syria, it would be wise not to share much Boko Haldiram intelligence that way—one should expect the US to pass it along. Is Maidaguri still in federal hands?
Yeah, it had unclear wording, so you couldn’t be quite sure what it was asking.
But, yes, depending on the precise question, both answers are valid.
Just depends on whether you figure the trip as one leg (whole round trip), or 2 separate legs (outgoing, incoming). Like the OP said, lazy test designers.
Nothing of that I mention has anything to do with corruption or high trust, you dumbass. One can enjoy craft beer and crimeless streets without high-trust government institutions. A population that doesn’t act like literal wild apes is enough.
OT
Why is it that truly bad news are not reflected on by the Unz Review bloggers? Steve Sailer didn’t write about the article written by a Trump administration insider (Pence?) in the NYT. And Anatoly Karlin has yet to write anything about the new Skripal development, which frankly seems to corroborate that it really was an incompetent GRU operation.
See discussion here:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/donbass-or-death/
AK: No conspiracy – I have just been quite busy with other matters this week, hence why I posted this piece (I keep a number of big pieces in reserve for periods of low blogging activity). I’ll cover that in tomorrow’s Open Thread
You still cling to the notion that Russians sent two assassins to eliminate a traitor agent who lost all relevance a decade ago, by using a supposedly Russian unique deadly poison – that failed to kill him.
Cui bono and basic common sense suggests otherwise.
The article is a sorry affair containing the usual “treason of negotiating with dictator Putin” nonsense.
Usual Jew York Times.
Why is it that truly bad news are not reflected on by the Unz Review bloggers?
Fiddling while Rome burns?
PhD … Piled high & deep.
Jews have so much power these days because so many of them devote their entire lives to simply making money
You are saying that Jews are more avaricious than the average bear. Are they also more unscrupulous?
Two thousand year old Jewish misdirection and trolling:
Matthew 16:26-28
26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Why is it that truly bad news are not reflected on by the Unz Review bloggers?
Perhaps the Unz Enquirer is more about directing rather than informing.
What happens in the southern hemisphere? I don’t want to start looking it up, since that might spoil the fun.
The standard explanation for seasons is that the northern hemisphere has summer when the north pole is tilted toward the sun, and that the distance of the Earth from the Sun has a negligible affect on the seasons (the Earth’s elliptical orbit is close enough to being a circle). Is it safe to assume, for the purposes of this problem, that the north pole spends roughly an equal amount of tilted toward the sun as it does tilted away?
Sad!
Well, I don’t believe Brazil will ever be any kind of great power, but at least they can be fun.
Bolsonaro’s antics have been fun to watch, like a Brazilian Zhirinovsky or Duterte.
I haven’t been following carefully l’affaire Skripal. But why do you think the new story should cause you to update your prior?
As far as I can tell, the British government has shown some pictures of some guys in what appears to be an airport, then some pictures of what appear to be the same guys on a street somewhere. They claim that these same guys entered the UK under some particular Russian names, and that they found residue of “Novichok” in their hotel room. Since the British government is not giving any means to falsify this story, and since they are known to lie about all kinds of other things, why should I pay attention?
(By the way, you may know that Craig Murray pointed out that there was some doctoring of the airport photos, at least of the time stamp, and that the airport photos are no longer on the MET website. This is perhaps neither here nor there, but doesn’t inspire confidence.)
Naturally, if people associated with the GRU did do something so incredibly stupid, then the Russian government should be very concerned about it, and some heads should roll. But does the GRU have a history of such idiocy? If they really had it in for Skripal, why not just handle it the usual way: “suicide”?
Earth’s speed varies during revolution, because the distance from Sun varies – Kepler Laws describe it.
These stuff are really too easy. Let’s just assume it was 30km away so the trip back was 1 hour and the trip there 1.5 hours. So 60km in 2.5 hours, that is obviously 24 km/h.
Just like with question 6 (if she rode 7 km in a quarter hour, how much in a full hour?) it is reformulating the question in an easier way what is key, not solving it.
In such reformulations I always set a variable at 1, in this case the duration of the trip back. Because if it is the distance or the trip to, I would have to work with less round numbers. This is really obvious help you can give yourself.
BTW poor Americans. If she ran to the river which is 900 yards away in 9 minutes and she found a shorter route 1200 feet away so she ran back in 6 minutes, what is her min/mile running pace? What is the mpg of a car that followed her all the way at the same speed and burned 3 fluid ounces of gas? LOL. I really hope your kids have to deal with shit like this at school, maybe it will make them adopt metric.
No I mean there is mental stuff and there is physical stuff. The mental is not physical nor is the mental reducible to the physical.
“In any case, there is a clear, scientifically established relationship between mental and neurological abnormalities”
Since the physical (brain) is needed for human mindedness it is a necessary pre-condition. Due to this, damage to the physical affects the mental (which I didn’t deny. No idea why you brought it up).
What’s the “reality”? There’s no logical or empirical reason to accept the claim that IQ tests test intelligence.
Well?
I believe in the biological reality of race. The existence of race is not a scientific question, it’s philosophical. Michael Hardimon’s minimalist and populationist race arguments and Quayshawn Spencer’s argument for the existence of Blumenbachian partitions establish the claim that race exists. One does not need to accept hereditarian psychological claims to accept the existence of race. Why the two positions are conflated is beyond me.
I don’t deny differences in IQ. I deny the explanations/conclusions people draw from the tests because their conclusions are untenable (there is no lawlike relation between the mental and the physical therefore mental traits cannot be genetically inherited).
Thanks for the comment. It is unfortunately irrelevant. I never denied genes affect the physical so your example is useless to me. I also know all about that. (It’s my job.)
Intelligence is either a mental ability or disposition. It can’t be both.
“I haven’t seen establishing (1), I have seen only postulating (1).”
My argument established it.
“If IQ tests measures exposure to middle class values, then this has to be testable”
The argument is a priori.
“but it does not mean it excludes possibility that it is ONLY experience dependent and independent of other factors.”
What other factors? What influences these factors? What’s the argument?
“since it means that the tests might measure exposure PLUS something more and it’s hard to say which influences the score more.”
P3 follows from P2. The questions on the test are not culture free. Therefore if one is not exposed to the knowledge structure of the test then they will necessarily score lower.
You need an argument that they test intelligence.
“I would also like to know your stance on the regression to the mean. Do you think it exists? If it exists, how it would be explained by theory that IQ tests measure exposure to the middle class culture?”
Has it been tested in humans?
This?
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/theimpossiblephoto.jpg?itok=dh0JsjCo
What exactly is a ‘non-lawlike’ relation? Is it random? Or is there just no connection at all?
What happens in the southern hemisphere?
The southern hemisphere is obviously the opposite of the northern hemisphere: long winters and short summers.
Is it safe to assume, for the purposes of this problem, that the north pole spends roughly an equal amount of tilted toward the sun as it does tilted away?
Roughly, but not exactly! 92.6 days tilted toward the sun vs 89.0 days tilted away (currently).
I will give you a one-word hint, if you need more just ask!
APOGEE
There is an empirical reason to accept the claim that IQ tests test intelligence. We can predict how well people perform in other mental tasks from how well they perform in IQ tests.
Earth’s speed varies during revolution, because the distance from Sun varies – Kepler Laws describe it.
You’ve got the basics, but I still need more. Which law of Kepler? And what explains that it is winter and summer that are “outliers” while spring and fall are essentially “normal” in length?
Different people might be exposed to the same experience and yet be affected differently. THerefore, your argument is flawed and in fact is not an properly built argument, you are just handwaving a lot of problems.
(1) IQ tests are experience dependent, but it’s like saying height is environment dependent, or sport ability is experience dependent.
Yet, just as height is also definetely heritable, and just as not all people would develop exactly the same abilities after exactly the same training, it’s wrong to expect that all people would get the same thing from experience. The ability to learn from experience and to transfer that knowledge is part what we commonly would call “intelligence” in common speech.
Hence IQ tests cannot measure solely the exposure to experience/culture/whatever, because, (unless you are blank slatist) different people do react to same thing differently. It follows that if IQ tests measure exposure to the middle class value then it also measures what people make of it, and since ability to learn is included in common folk definition of intelligence, then IQ tests measure also the intelligence.
Moreover, since different people react to different thing differently, the reasons for that (again, unless you are blank slatist or believing in spiritual world independent of material world) should be at least partially heritable. It does not matter here whether we can measure that heritability or not.
(2) Since you don’t know how experience influences the results of IQ tests and what parts of experience influence IQ tests, it’s wrong to assume “IQ are experience related” hence “experience=culture” and hence “IQ measures impact to middle class culture”.
(3) Since you don’t know how experience influences the IQ tests, you also don’t know whether the relation is linear or not. Proper nourishment definetely impacts height but only up to some point. Making children eat more and more will not make them even higher and higher, only more fat. Running more and more will not make you faster. Why can’t it be the same with experience? Maybe there is some threshold, after which any more exposure to whatever constitutes “experience” or “middle class values” does not affect in visible way IQ tests. You don’t know that (neither I am).
Because of (2) (we don’t know which parts of culture influence IQ tests) and (3) (we don’t know the relation and whether there is some threshold) it’s wrong and illogical to conclude that social classes are exposed in different way, in a way that meaningfully affects the IQ tests results. Maybe for the vast majority of population, except the poorest, abused etc, the exposure to middle class culture (or whatever it is which influences IQ tests) is enough and what only matters is what people would make of that exposure. I am not arguing it is, I am pointing the possibility which you have ignored, a possibility which makes your argument looks like a full of non sequiturs.
And even if (3) is false (i.e. there is no threshold above which further gains from being exposed to the “culture”), saying or proving that IQ tests are not culture free, or that they measure exposure to some culture is not the same as proving that they measure ONLY the exposure to some culture.
Note that above I do not argue that IQ tests measure intelligence. Merely I point that the claim they are solely measurement of exposure to culture/experience/whatever is wrong.
This has been debunked.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/the-impossible-photo/
Reality is a computer simulation, donate your bitcoin in this emulation of life to Karlin as a cheat code.
Russian performance on this Army test has been increasing rapidly since the 1990 cohort (so, equivalent of PISA 2006).
https://recrut.mil.ru/career/soldiering/test/start.htm
Which happens to be analogous to the increase in PISA:
https://sputnikipogrom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/03-russia-pisa-history-f.png
It’s easy to say weasel words and put out unreliable information based on hot air. It’s another to outright falsify things. It’s very easy to believe that the “of a type developed by Russia” weasel expression meant that… well, all they knew was that this type of poison had been developed by Russia, and knew nothing more.
Now the claims are getting less weasely, and more concrete. Of course they can still be outright lies, but it’d require the cooperation of more and more people. Porton Down could’ve been cool (after some internal haggling) with the expression “of a type developed by Russia,” because it’s true, though meaningless. Now some people would be lying: either they identified those people, or they didn’t. A number of people are involved in the investigation. Unless we want to get into 911 truther tier conspiracy theories, it looks way more likely that they are telling the truth. If they didn’t dare telling outright lies regarding the origins of the Novichok agent, why would they suddenly change to outright lies?
Therefore, it’s now very likely that two people using Russian passports traveled from Moscow all the way to Salisbury, and they were there on the day of the attempted murder. That is quite a bit of a coincidence. I don’t think it’s very likely that a third party falsified those passports. So either these people were Russians and their names matched their passports, or their passports were forged for the purposes of some Russian intelligence service. Of course, it’s possible that a third party somehow managed to do that, or managed to slip through the sloppiness of Russian passport controls. It’s just not very likely.
The Russians must know who those two guys are: they could show them on TV. One of them works as a pizza delivery man, the other one as a librarian. Here’s the pizzeria and the library they work in, respectively. They have nothing to do with GRU. Everyone would have a laugh.
It’s possible these people are Russian citizens living abroad in a third country. Even so, it must be easy for Russia to find out where they live. At the very least, that they live abroad. They could give journalists access to their former classmates and people like that. That way, at least, they might expose the foreign service (Israel? Ukraine?) using Russian citizens (and passports) to commit crimes in third countries. That’s what governments usually do, for example the EU countries whose (forged) passports were used by Israel to murder the Hamas leader in Dubai.
However, Russia pretends not to know who these people are. That’s not very credible. Until yesterday, the UK was putting out not very credible weasely information, while Russia didn’t say anything which was not consistent with their innocence. Now the situation changed: Russia is putting out not credible statements (that the names and photos meant nothing to them – sure they must know they traveled to and from a Moscow airport), while the UK is now sharing concrete evidence (photos of the suspects and CCTV images at the airport and in Salisbury) with the world.
Obligatory George Carlin reference:
https://youtu.be/8rh6qqsmxNs
You have courage to write an article like this, probably because there aren’t enough honest & courageous high I.Q. people around to support Your views. Really, we’re scared of the not too smart people. They tend to group think, and are such a large percent of the population, that if honest views such as yours are expressed, we put ourselves at risk.
I don’t find any source of information on this trust-worthy, so I don’t find it worth while trying to form an opinion. I’ve asked a few times now on Paul Robinson’s blog what are his priors for mischief-making in the British and Russian intelligence service. He hasn’t responded.
That said, there are a handful of plausible ultimate suspects: the British government, the Russian government, and the Ukrainian government (in alphabetical order). In none of these cases does it require a large conspiracy to arrange a job like this. For example, if it’s the British: You have one person who orders it, one person who does the poisoning, maybe another who plants some residue of “Novichok” in their hotel room two months later, and you have two guys who are asked to fly from Moscow, stay in a hotel in London, visit Salisbury, then go back. The guys flying back and forth between Moscow don’t have to know a thing, nor do they have to stay in Russia afterwards. So the situation is on a completely different scale from 9/11.
You are right, though, that it would be easy for the Russian government to look at the video record of those entering the country at the expected time. Given what we know of the Russian government, however, we can expect that they’ll take their time before acting and announcing conclusions. The appropriate response would have been “we’re looking into it” (regardless of who is or is not responsible).
I don’t believe he ever said that. And that would not be a good way to characterize the real comparison. Blacks with an IQ of 70 are generally not comparable to whites with an IQ of 70, not at the same age. A black with an IQ of 70 is often found to be much more socially normal, more able to talk and have friends.
It would be way more accurate to compare an adult African with an IQ of 70 to a white child of around 9 or so of average intelligence. You could have a society of 9 year olds. It would not be the same society, but it would not be absolute chaos and a return to the jungle, like a society of retards more likely would be.
Besides, many think that the genetic potential of Africans is closer to American blacks’ 85. They just don’t seem able to achieve it in their own societies. Not to mention, there are undoubtedly individuals and perhaps even groups among Africans with a higher IQ.
I believe your problem is that you see that as a hopeless situation, when it may be possible that there are different solutions: voluntary segregation of higher IQ blacks from lower, so they can form their own countries, or eugenics. Neither easy politically, but not entirely hopeless.
“THerefore, your argument is flawed and in fact is not an properly built argument, you are just handwaving a lot of problems.”
My argument is properly built. I’m not handwaving anything. Sure they may be exposed to the same experience (though, by proxy, social classes are exposed to different knowledge structures).
“The ability to learn from experience and to transfer that knowledge is part what we commonly would call “intelligence” in common speech.”
That’s what IQ tests test?
“Hence IQ tests cannot measure solely the exposure to experience/culture/whatever, because”
Sure it does, since middle class people are more likely to be exposed to the knowledge and structure of the test.
“Blank slatist”?
“(2) Since you don’t know how experience influences the results of IQ tests and what parts of experience influence IQ tests, it’s wrong to assume “IQ are experience related” hence “experience=culture” and hence “IQ measures impact to middle class culture”.”
The argument is sound though.
“Running more and more will not make you faster”
Ill pretend you didn’t say this.
“Because of (2) (we don’t know which parts of culture influence IQ tests) and (3) (we don’t know the relation and whether there is some threshold) it’s wrong and illogical to conclude that social classes are exposed in different way, in a way that meaningfully affects the IQ tests results. Maybe for the vast majority of population, except the poorest, abused etc, the exposure to middle class culture (or whatever it is which influences IQ tests) is enough and what only matters is what people would make of that exposure. I am not arguing it is, I am pointing the possibility which you have ignored, a possibility which makes your argument looks like a full of non sequiturs.”
We only need to know 3 things: (1) items are selected or removed on the basis of confirming to the test constructors presuppositions; (2) what’s on the test are more likely to be found in the middle class; and (3) classes are differentially prepared for the test due to exposure to different knowledge, not found on the tests.
“Merely I point that the claim they are solely measurement of exposure to culture/experience/whatever is wrong.”
My argument establishes my claim that “IQ tests measure distance from the middle class.”
“We can predict how well people perform in other mental tasks from how well they perform in IQ tests.”
It’s due to test construction.
The physical is needed for the mental to exist but the physical does not explain the mental. If there were a lawlike relation between the mental and the physical, then the claim “genes cause psychological traits” would be true. But it’s not.
Disagree. My IQ is round the 123-124 mark and I can solve questions quite harder than item 6).
(And still every coder I have ever known does visibly better than I. Can we really say overcoming item 5) means one can program?!).
Generally speaking, the world % left me agape.
One spends his days on Twitter, reading the best papers and blogs and books and comes to deem himself as bordering on dim-witted, t
completely oblivious to what the “real world” is like.
Dr. Thompson laid it out very well in his The Seven Tribes piece. Basically there are many (mental, then material and political and economic) worlds within what, for the sake of social rest, is publically and culturally believed a shared world. And each of these world understands very little of every non-adjacent world.
Could you get answers for all 6 items?
lol
Now, I am not so sure you or I would understand our reflection in a mirror, had no-one ever explained to us that it “is” us.
(Of course even having or not having someone wbo explains you what mirrors do can be traced back toIQ, as can “what education are people granted in country X”.)
Nonsense easily disproven by the existence of alcohol.
However, Russia pretends not to know who these people are. That’s not very credible.
On the other hand:
and
Agree and disagree. I think everything you stated is true. But… I believe that a population average score on IQ tests has an impact on that population overall economic performance. It’s a matter of productivity, not intelligence. Such tests can be at most treated as measures of an individual performance potential in specific areas, definitely not as scentific methods to quantify individuals’ intelligence.
“I’m not handwaving anything.”
You are. E.g. you have no idea which elements of the “knowledge structure” are important and how they influence the test results, you just assume that they exist and somehow are common only for the middle class.
“by proxy, social classes are exposed to different knowledge structures”
But you had not established that those are the same structures which are important for IQ tests.
Let me repeat once again, since it seems you had ignored this:
” Sure they may be exposed to the same experience” AND the results are different. I.e. it’s possible and even more, very likely, two boys may experience exactly the same things, and yet they can have different results. Which means that tests do not measure only exposure, but also how exposure influenced people.
Only blank slatists (supporters of the blank slate, i.e. that all people have exactly the same mental abilities and they differ only because of the experience) would deny that.
“Sure it does, since middle class people are more likely to be exposed to the knowledge and structure of the test.”
Sure it doesn’t, because you have not established that middle class people are more likely exposed to the structures which MATTERS.
Once again, siblings from the same family can have different IQ tests results. Either:
(1) Handwaving (and circular argument): they have different IQ because they have different exposure, and the proof that they had different exposure is that they have different IQ test results.
It’s not enough that the experiences are different, because not all differences would matter.
(2) They differ with inborn qualities how to react to the same exposure: ie. some react to it better, some worse, which means some learn and some don’t. which means some are more intelligent and some are less – which means IQ test measures intelligence (since usually we call people who learn fast “more intelligent” than those who learn slower, where learning is not limited to the school).
If you think (1), then you are making “just-so” story and the argument cannot be think to be sound. If you think (2) i.e. the IQ test measures imperfectly intelligence differences for people with the same exposure, then, obviously, it will also measure intelligence with different exposures, just less perfectly.
” (1) items are selected or removed on the basis of confirming to the test constructors presuppositions; (2) what’s on the test are more likely to be found in the middle class; and (3) classes are differentially prepared for the test due to exposure to different knowledge,”
No. (1) yes (2) that’s your presupposition, not proven (3) you have not established that this different knowledge matters in any way. Classes might have different exposure, but this does not mean that different exposure matters. Maybe the differences in exposures are so small, that they have no impact on the tests results except for the most poor.
You ignored all those possibilities and you have just repeated your previous argument. That’s why I am saying about “handwaving”.
You have also ignored the “threshold” possibility that is: the presuppositions are in fact so common within a given country, that for all purposes that could be ignored in modern western societies.
Also, by your idea, how to explain that children whites from lower classes have results comparable or better than children of blacks from wealthy families? It would be possible only if somehow “middle class blacks” were exposed to radically different knowledge. This is preposterous.
“Ill pretend you didn’t say this. [run more to run faster]”
Why? I thought this is obvious. I’ve heard it many times from the sportsmen that if you overtrain, you will not get any more results, and even your results will get worse. There is a point after which running more and more and more will not bring any more gains. If you will run 24h per day 7 days in a week you won’t get any better.
Which actually gave me a nice example. Imagine you have different cultures, some of which value running, some not. Some encourage jogging, some encourage sitting at the computer. Now let’s assume there is a simple run test, in which people measure your speed on 100m.
Obviously, the results of the run tests would be highly dependent on the culture. Obviously, you could say, in a sense, that results of the run tests “measure the distance from the >>run<< culture". But it would be wrong to conclude that because of that, the run test does not, actually, measure run speed, but it just measures a distance from "run culture".
Similarly, it's possible that in away, IQ tests measure how succesfully one imbibes middle class knowledge. But what if what we commonly think as "intelligence" is in fact equivalent with succesful adaptation to middles class values? Then calling "IQ test" "a test of distance from middle class", in my opinion, would only confuse the matter without bringing anything to the discussion.
Finally, I have only now noticed that I forgot to reply to regression to mean question. Frankly, I don't know. I have read so many times luminaries bringing this argument that I assume they have their studies done. But still, that would be a nice test to your theory: assume for a moment, for the sake of intellectual fun, that regression to mean in humans does matter. How would your theory explain that?
For that matter, how your theory would be invalidated? That is, what could convince you that your theory (iq tests measure only the exposure to knowledge and nothing more) is wrong?
????????????????? How does this rebut what I said?
That didn’t answer my question.
Is there a causal connection between the mental and physical? Is the connection lawlike, random or ‘non-lawlike’ in some way you need to explain?
But then why does prior cohabitation make divorce more likely?
hahaha you dumb sack of faeces! I was talking about all the Olympiads together this summer ….Ukraine is nowhere
As for this maths result that you probably spent hours looking up like the compulsive liar, Odessa-massacre denying insidious c*nt you are…….. Ukraine got to use their exact same team from the previous year , dickhead, …..otherwise known as cheating or something not normally done. Russia’s is an entirely different team from 2017.
Of course Ukraine are going to have an advantage you prick. Student competitions aren’t supposed to have the same team carried forward in the Olympiads.
Not only is this time-wasting bollocks that even Poroshenko, Avakov and all these other freaks won’t propogate but …
Oh no, wait, I’m sorry……Measles…post-2014 Ukraine has shot to the top with a brilliant health policy headed by the crazi Banderatard Canadian Nazi bitch
Now in Ukraine……28000 out of 41000 cases this year in Europe belong to Ukraine
Mr Diphtheria and TB also going “well”, not to mention the bribery in the healthcare ( and everywhere else) , quality of the treatment and hospitals. Perhaps Ukraines national “identity” involves equating Measles to getting a Rolex?
“post 2014 ” ukropia hasn’t got close to 2013 levels in quality of living you prick…..and that in turn hasn’t got used to 1990 levels you POS
FDI not even at 2016 levels , nevermind 2014 levels ( with Russia still by a huge distance the number 1 FDI in Banderastan)….same thing with interest rates, mortgage rates, everything…..and about a zillion other things proving the ineptitude of Ukropia
She biked 7 km in 15 minutes. How is the answer not 28?
We do get some really annoying types.
What I think is happening here is recruitment of parts of the expensive brain tissue to one function or the other.
That is, in blacks it is skewed towards social interaction because, at least for males, it is more important in their natural environment for attracting mates.
However, in whites, it is more skewed towards being able to solve complex problems because that is what is required in their natural environment.
In addition, there has been selection among whites and East Asians for a larger amount of brain tissue.
I didn’t want to be a huge spoiler initially.
Second law of Kepler dictates the answer.
The Earth is closest to Sun during Winter on Northern hemisphere and therefore the velocity is the highest so winter season defined by solstice and equinox lasts the shortest.
Conversely, Earth is at its furthest during Summer of Northern hemisphere, the corresponding velocity is the smallest, so the season lasts longer.
However, Spring and Autumn are not balanced and of equal length. Perihelion and Aphelion don’t fall on solstice days, so Spring lasts longer right now because solstice is sooner than perihelion. This exact question bothered me as a kid, as well as the stellar vs solar day difference and lunar/solar calendar relations and evolution. Physics is what got me interested in Maths, and I still harbor resentment towards theoretical Maths, theoretical Physics and Astrophysics because they are detached from scientific method and practical, worldly application.
As Flynn noted, Siberian villagers 1o0 years ago had IQs in the 70s. I have seen a number of modern Balkan villagers who led functional lives (raised families, worked, etc.) and who scored in the 70s on nonverbal IQ tests.
Africans almost certainly will have a lower ceiling for their average than do Europeans and Asians, but it is not 70.
You should never bother arguing with morons.
It only annoys the moron and wastes your time.
If your speaking about the math doing the test, I don’t think so. It must be a lot of fun. If someone is extremely good at recognizing faces, it’s not a lot of work for him to recognize anyone.
For pupils, it’s a great way to be admitted in the most selective programs. Even more famous that Putnam competition. And again, it’s not a knowledge intensive thing. Must preparation in the USA is simply selection of the 6 right candidates .
If you haven’t already, have a look at Craig Murray’s contribution today (“Skripals – The Mystery Deepens”) , which is far better than the one yesterday. The very real possibility he suggests is that Boshirov and Petrov met up with the Skripals on the morning of the 4th, during the “mysterious” period in which both Skripals had their phones switched off.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
Way too many comments in this thread. So am adding my own.
The pop band Devo (contraction of de-evolution band) talking about related things many years ago (starting to make a mark in the immediate post-punk-rock era, but havlng started a little earlier).
From what I have heard and seen, they were very smart people.
I have one non-Japanese friend of now (except by mail), he is, at best, IQ abt. 75. Puerto Rican and Dominican Republic parents. He is an idiot, born in N.Y., so a U.S.A. citizen.
‘Graduated high school’, as you ‘murrcans’ say, although a near-moron. It seems that graduation is only a matter of attendance there, even that, only at choice. Pathetic.
However, he has already polluted the gene pool here with four children.
Since he is a useless arsehole who has worked only one day after his one-year visa renewal in Feb., his aim is to get a new Japanese woman pregnant, to force marriage. I am not cooperating, avoiding the hideous man now.
Such factors are extremely dysgenic, and all over the place.
Not only here.
The morons are taking over (‘control’ would be the exaggeration).
The way I view it is through standard deviations. A white with an IQ of 70 is about 2 SD below their normal, whereas an American black with an IQ of 70 would be roughly about 1 SD below their normal.
IQ can also be thought of a proxy for health. Someone 2 SD below normal would be very abnormal or very unhealthy, whereas someone only 1 SD below normal would be much closer to the normal health. I view this as being related to mutational load and the structure of the brain.
I don’t think the test was particularly designed to show differences on the lower end, and that is why two children one black and one white who both score 70 will appear different.
How?
It is more complex than that.
One of the reasons is this: http://hosting.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/earth_precess.htm
Another is: http://astro.wsu.edu/worthey/astro/html/lec-precession.html
the form of “free trade” promoted by “scots and anglo-saxons” in the past wasn’t free trade it was mercantilism – forcing other countries to buy their goods.
the form of “free trade” the banking mafia promote isn’t free trade either – it’s using other countries as a base to leech the accumulated wealth of the western world into the pockets of the banking mafia.
mass consumption economic ideology is almost always self-serving lies.
This is true. I believe the general American notion that the average person should go through 12 years of school is quite silly. Probably related to diversity, since many other less diverse countries do not have this system.
I wonder if that will change though as they get more diverse. Germany has a track system. I’ve heard there are political pressures to destroy it, and I think it will be destroyed or altered, once a certain threshold is passed, unless something dramatic happens to change that course.
maybe you thought it was a trick question – are you naturally suspicious minded?
Way to fail the intermediate comprehension test I set for you!
Chemical or electrical modifications of mental state is a clear example of physical manipulation with mental effects.
You really shouldn’t bother arguing with morons.
However, I can see two effects of interest here, or perhaps more.
The genetic propensity for some individuals to be unable to resist alcohol consumption, making them very unsuitable as mating partners.
The general claim made by the moron that behavior is not genetically mediated is, of course, only something a moron would say. The evidence is clear.
Variable tilt of Earth (Milankovic cycle) impacts the date/moment of solstice and equinox, so of course it is a factor. But the primary cause is the variable velocity of Earth.
“You are. E.g. you have no idea which elements of the “knowledge structure” are important and how they influence the test results, you just assume that they exist and somehow are common only for the middle class.”
Because of the questions on the test.
“Which means that tests do not measure only exposure, but also how exposure influenced people”
So what?
“Only blank slatists (supporters of the blank slate, i.e. that all people have exactly the same mental abilities and they differ only because of the experience) would deny that.”
I never said that “all people have exactly the same mental abilities”, mental abilities are intentional states and are therefore irreducible to the physical.
“Blank slatist”?
“(1) Handwaving (and circular argument): they have different IQ because they have different exposure, and the proof that they had different exposure is that they have different IQ test results.”
A priori, different social classes are exposed to different knowledge. The argument isn’t circular.
“(2) They differ with inborn qualities how to react to the same exposure: ie. some react to it better, some worse, which means some learn and some don’t. which means some are more intelligent and some are less – which means IQ test measures intelligence (since usually we call people who learn fast “more intelligent” than those who learn slower, where learning is not limited to the school).”
What’s the cause?
“(2) that’s your presupposition, not proven ”
If you accept (1) then you accept (2).
“You have also ignored the “threshold” possibility that is: the presuppositions are in fact so common within a given country, that for all purposes that could be ignored in modern western societies”
What’s the argument?
“Why? I thought this is obvious. I’ve heard it many times from the sportsmen that if you overtrain, you will not get any more results, and even your results will get worse. There is a point after which running more and more and more will not bring any more gains. If you will run 24h per day 7 days in a week you won’t get any better.”
Clarify your statements. You made it seem like you can’t get faster at all.
“For that matter, how your theory would be invalidated? That is, what could convince you that your theory (iq tests measure only the exposure to knowledge and nothing more) is wrong?”
An a priori argument.
He likes to LARP as a genius, prodigy. So he must make sure that everyone acknowledges his exceptionality.
Who knows how he would have turned out had he actually competed, let alone won a gold medal at IMO.
Where’s the error in my reasoning?
Genes are a necessary precondition for behavior but it can’t be shown that genes are difference-makers for behavior.
Doesn’t refute the claim.
Volunteer for deep brain stimulation experiments.
You got it, I continue to be surprised by the fact that I have yet to meet a physicist (or indeed anyone prior to you) who has come up with the answer without some prompting.
You’re right about spring and autumn having different lengths (although not so marked as winter-summer). But it seems to me that for equal lengths perihelion would need to be early February or early August (as compared to the current 3 January), midway between mid-autumn and mid-spring, is this not the case?
The other interesting thing, if I remember correctly, is that due to the precession of the equinoxes in 13,000 years the situation (long summer, short winter) will be reversed.
That’s why there is a relationship.
I didn’t say nor even imply that. I think a logical mind is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary condition for creating genious work. I haven’t done anything remarkable and don’t really intend to try. I certainly lack the dedication among other things but the main thing is the lack of motivation. And my field is not math …
My point was not even precocity, that is not important to me, but the solitude of logical minds … certainly, they are other traits that bring same consequences .
There are no psychophysical laws.
Psychophysical laws exist?
i wonder if one of the collection of traits (good memory, faster CPU etc) which collectively make up what we call intelligence is the ability to handle abstractions – from my experience working with dummies that seems to be one of the main differences, people who are perfectly okay doing practical tasks like driving a truck can’t get their head around abstractions.
for example say what we call intelligence is the combination of x, y and z traits where each is necessary and each limits the effect of the others i.e. x+y+z gives the same intelligence x+y+2z
then say you have two populations one of which is 2x+2y+2z and one is 2x+2y+z who are about the same on practical (x+y) tasks but the missing z on the 2nd population makes them unable to deal with certain kinds of abstraction.
so in a way the antis may be right that IQ tests are designed for the people who designed them but that’s not necessarily a flaw in the tests – the tests might simply be telling us where the problem lies in the populations who can’t do them.
#
by extension is ability to deal with abstractions a mild form of mental illness?
1) if dummies were tasked with repairing military helicopters they’d be falling out of the sky every day
2) the military have IQ tests and only those who pass above a certain threshold are allowed to repair helicopters
3) military helicopters aren’t falling out of the sky every day
ergo IQ tests measure something which is a reasonable proxy for what we call intelligence.
obviously.
you seem to be hung up on the idea that “intelligence” isn’t a measurable thing so it can’t be measured but if you can measure a proxy then so what?
When I googled math Olympiad it came up on the first page. I then clicked on results. It took one-two minutes:
https://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx
Perhaps you are slow and it takes you hours to find what a normal person can find in one minute.
So in the math Olympiad Ukraine came in 4th place in the world.
False. Russia had the same leader in 2018 as in 2017 – Nazar Agakhanov.
https://imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2017
America had the same leader in 2018 as in 2017 – Po-Shen Loh. So did Korea – Yongjin Song. Japan, like Ukraine, had the same leader and coleader in 2017 and 2018. Japan came in 6th place in 2017 but 13th place in 2018, so your silly idea that retaining the team explains improved results is not supported.
Your excuses are as funny as your desperate “shouting” 🙂
It hurts you so badly that Ukraine keeps winning after getting rid of Yanukovich. You’ll feel better if you shout some more and tell yourself fairytales that Ukraine has become another Africa 🙂
Russia, Italy and France are up there, also. All of these countries have high anti-vaccination sentiment:
https://www.undispatch.com/europe-is-in-the-midst-of-its-largest-measles-outbreak-in-years-ukraine-is-a-big-part-of-the-problem/
https://themoscowtimes.com/news/measles-cases-jump-13-fold-russia-2018-62659
Measles Cases Jump 13-Fold in Russia in 2018
So measles are not something to brag about, for a Russian.
In the first quarter of 2014 FDI was negative 500 million in Ukraine. In first quarter 2018 it was positive $300 million dollars. It peaked at $1.4 billion in first quarter 2016.
Ukraine’s all-time high FDI was under Yushchenko – $6.5 billion in the 4th quarter of 2005.
Per capita GDP PPP on average is higher in 2018 than in 2013, in those regions that were part of Ukraine in both 2013 and 2018. Nominal GDP and wages in dollars are lower due to the currency devaluation. Crime is now slightly lower than in 2013, though not by much (I remember Russians boasting about the crime spike in 2014-2015 – sorry, it’s over).
Moreover, the parts of Ukraine that are doing more poorly in 2018 are those nearer to the Russian border and who are more pro-Russian. So you are just making fun at the expense of your would-be allies in Ukraine.
So what is a ‘non-lawlike’ relationship? Is it random? If not, what is it? Of course you won’t answer this question because you can’t, as any answer would be absurd.
At the same time, I think the average human is extremely intelligent for most cognitive functions outside of logical thinking : first the organism ability to maintain life and homeostasis is wonderful (who would be able to manage a liver ? Or manage blood presssure ?), the ability to learn the maternal language with extremely complicated rules and 40k words is awesome, the social skills etc . So the evolution made all living creature and human beings in particular a marvel of intelligence .
It’s just that the logical parts who are not pré-programmed and depend on our cortex are not as sophisticated. And that in this respect alone, the average person can look very dumb to people who are far on the right of the bell curve …
And you had a point (even 2 points), I ve worked on Boltzmann machines and have been published when doing my bachelor. And when I was a kid, I never played with toys. But I think it had more to do with a « mental condition » and in particular my lack of imagination than anything else !
the UK govt is priming people for the collective media narrative after the next gas attack which will be blamed directly on Russia imo.
(2) is true on the basis of test construction. Surely now you’d say there is validation of test construction since those who pass these tests can repair helicopters and those who score below can’t. But (1) you don’t need these tests to know if someone can repair a helicopter and (2) it’s not justification for the claim “IQ tests test intelligence.”
living as a minority is insecure
wealth is security
I just said that there are no psychophysical laws so the physical cannot explain the mental. That answers the question.
so you accept redefining intelligence as the lack of damage invalidates your position?
I see you have choosen not to answer to half of my post, this is fine, maybe it would be better going point by point.
“different social classes are exposed to different knowledge. The argument isn’t circular. ”
But this is not an answer! I am saying two kids, even the same gender,the same social class, the same family, they are brothers, yet they can have different IQ scores. You are saying well maybe they are in the same family, but they got exposed to different knowledge. THIS is circular argument, because it’s not enough to say that they have different experiences, because you have to show that the differences matter. Your argument is “they do matter because IQ test results are different”.
Talking about social classes is irrevelant to my argument and makes me think that either I can’t write clear enough (which I am willing to admit, not being native speaker) or you don’t bother to read.
“mental abilities are intentional states and are therefore irreducible to the physical.”
Of course they are reducible (in theory). When you write the program, you debug by looking at the assembler, not at the flow of the electrons etc but only that way it’s waaay easier for humans, not because it’s impossible (in theory, in practice it would be prohibitively expensive).
Postulating that something is not reducible to the physical is the same as postulating that spiritual world exist, which I, as an atheist and materialist, think as wrong. There are no ghosts, no soul, and no mental states changes without reflecting those changes in physical structure.
Any philosopher who think and argues otherwise is wrong, no matter how famous he was.
“What’s the cause? [that some react differently do same experiences]”
Two possibilities. Either blank slate (solely due to experiences, no inborn) or hereditarian (at least some of that is due to inborn qualities). I say blank slate position is absurd. If you say the differences are solely due to different exposure, it mean you came from blank slate position.
“If you accept (1) then you accept (2).”
No! There is non sequitur between (1) and (2). Surely the researchers have some presuppositions about what items should be. Some of those presuppositions would influence the test results and some would not. But there is no proof that exactly THOSE presuppositions which actually influence the test ARE actually more likely to be found in the middle class. Middle class is exposed to different knowledge/structure etc, but some of the exposure is shared. What if that exposure which actually matters belongs to things which are shared?
“What’s the argument? ”
“Clarify your statements. You made it seem like you can’t get faster at all.”
No, for Darwin’s sake! The example was intended to show that, while at first running more would help you, you will eventually reach the moment when running even more won’t help you.
The argument is: assume the exposure to culture influences IQ test results. Assume, for the sake of simplicity of an example, that you can actually measure it in a simple 0-100 scale. There could be that from increase from 0-10 would greatly improve IQ tests results, from 10 to 20 it would somewhat, while from 20 to 100 it would have no discernible effects.
Just as my example with food and height. Surely eating more healthy and more would increase chances of being higher, but only up to certain point. Eventually you reach the point when eating more no longer will increase the height.
You, OTOH, just assume that this is not the case. You assume, without any proof, that if test IQ requires exposure to some culture/knowledge/experience and middle class is exposed more (to that very elements which matter; and you don’t know which matter, you just postulate there some which matter), then it means the differences will necessitate higher results. But this is wrong assumption, because the alternative would be that you just need some minimal exposure, and what the lower classes got is good enough.
OT
A guy punched another, but because the jury agreed with him and didn’t like the political opinions of the victim, he was only fined $1.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/paw75y/man-who-punched-charlottesville-organizer-jason-kessler-fined-1-dollar-vgtrn
No. Once again, the fact that we don’t know such laws does not mean they do not exist. Hence, your argument is invalid.
On what do you base this assertion? In the US whites outnumber Asians over 12 to 1. Even assuming Asians have a higher quantitative IQ, the IQ threshold for level 6 (2% in the US implies about 130) is not high enough to overcome the difference in populations.
To see an actual calculation, use http://emilkirkegaard.dk/understanding_statistics/?app=tail_effects
I used a 12:1 population ratio, 130 threshold, and a 1 SD (unlikely it is that large in reality) mean IQ difference giving a 63/37 white/Asian split.
No your are right . And then I read in Robert Lindsay blog who claims to have a 145+ IQ to be bad at math . Maybe math is like pitch. A specialized ability. I was rude. I beg you pardon.
No I’m not, but I have found that there is a great deal of overlap.
Agreed, but what’s your point? Are you saying it’s just as well to be ruled over by the stupid as the intelligent? Hierarchy requires some sort of justification other than might makes Right. If not intelligence, what then?
Are you serious? Do you have kids?
I didn’t explain to my kids what a mirror is or told them that it is them in the reflection. I just told them “this is a mirror” and let them figure out what it does. This happens at around age two, speaking from a very hazy memory. It’s something so uneventful that I didn’t even bother to remember when it happened. I do remember when my kids started to walk or when they were potty-trained; those were more important milestones.
They’re not going to be “reducible” in some simple way.
But this topic (“mind-body problem”) is obviously an error not well understood by us yet.
At least more sophisticated materialist position, using concepts like “supervenience” nowadays to avoid some of the issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience
And lol, I’m not sure how RaceRealist88 believes this validates, or invalidates, rather more boring topic of results of OECD giving its confusing tests to 15 year olds in different countries.
if those tests reliably measure a proxy for what we call intelligence then sure.
sure – you can always use trial and error but expensive things, helicopters.
For all purposes of function, yes. Which is why your silly word games are meaningless; we’ve know about this since at least Delgrado.
Your argument is insane because you are. All your arguments on the subject are wrong, as has been shown in thread after thread, but you don’t care. No amount of disproof or pointing out fallacies ever has the slightest effect on you, you never acknowledge your defeats, your fixed idea that intelligence doesn’t exist or is unmeasurable is totally immune from all reality checks, even to the absurd point that you claim IQ is an invalid measure because IQ correlates with health and wealth!
Literally insane, delusional, and stinking up every thread on the topic with post after crazy post that reveals to everyone how delusional you are – so delusional that you think your compulsive flood of insane posts is actually winning over readers rather than just embarrassing yourself. Only fools agree with you but few argue any longer since arguing against this fixed delusion of yours has never done any good.
But that is absurd for reasons I’ve explained above. You just keep repeating it fetishistically. You are definitely among the top 3 worst AK commeters, maybe even beating the guy who wrote Anatoly’s rationalwiki entry and spent years trying to uncover an easter egg in a ps1 game.
East Asians are under 2% of the UK population. Even with a very generous estimate of Asian quantitative intelligence, they would still be a very small proportion of those at the right of the curve.
That is a comical rant. Really, proving the point
He’s correct in some ways, but just irrelevant to discussion of this issue. I think he is trying to say that intelligence is a not a scientific concept, in the sense of – it is not an actual feature of the world.
Of course this is true. Just as “tasty” and “beautiful” are not actual features of the world, although they require a certain arrangement of the physical world in order for us to perceive them.
With “intelligence” concepts – we use it as the way to talk about people with different test score results, people with different mental skills, people we consider good decision makers, or people who are unable to do certain tasks, etc.
Usually “intelligence” is used with some kind of behaviourist criteria, and we talk about people’s intelligence without needing insight into their first-person perspective or consciousness.
We could be talking about robots- and we might still talk about some showing more intelligence than others. Robots (as currently constructed) can have no minds or consciousness – yet we at the same time could easily consider some more intelligent than others. So it’s clear that belief in different people having different intelligence does not require or is not relevant to any controversial discussion of “mind-body” problem.
His argument is much more insane in it’s overreach. He argues there is no physical relationship to mental manifestation except a requirement for existence. That’s laughable due to obvious results of chemical or electronic interactions.
I think some non-African populations have obtained mutations that increase their IQ and give them better cognitive skills for tasks that are needed in a modern society, but they also have a lot of mutations that reduce IQ, while Africans have less mutations that increase IQ. This is what GWAS on IQ genes so far has shown, though African specific IQ genes have not been much studied.
Thus, a white person with an IQ of 70 usually has at least one mutation that reduces IQ quite much and also affects his performance in any society, even traditional one. But an African with IQ 70 does not have any mutations that reduce IQ much, he simply does not have those non-African mutations that increase IQ to the level that is needed in a modern society. So his performance in normal communication and operation in a traditional society is not reduced, but he is not capable of doing intellectually as demanding tasks of a modern society as members of certain non-African populations.
What I find amusing is that Karlin is unwittingly providing one of the premier venues for the undermining of the “strong” IQ theory, in direct contradiction to his intentions.
The universe cracks me up.
And, PEOPLE – settle down, people. Settle down.
The beauty of my argument is that genetics is completely extraneous to this. It is enough to show mental effects simply from neurochemistry as a reaction to exogenous chemicals. Denying it would suggest that flying while intoxicated has no mental effects and thus no negative consequences, a completely nutty position.
“Kenyan children can’t recognise themselves in the mirror.”
That does not mean low IQ. I think I am smart enough and to me all Kenyan children look alike.
He mentioned something above about Hilary Putnam?
I wanted to read this philosopher’s ideas for years, but I never have had any to read his book.
I skim read over a few articles like this though:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/multiple-realizability/
My God, Dmitry, you are discovering metaphysical truths about the world and the severe limitations of the scientific world view!
I guess one can say stone and glass may be needed to construct a beautiful cathedral, but its “beauty” is in no way limited by the physical properties of stone and glass. It can be outstandingly beautiful using very inferior quality stone.
So too, physical structures may need to exist for intelligence to manifest, but like beauty, there is no clear relationship between the “quality” of this structure and intelligence.
They merely appear together.
Sort of like cause and effect – they merely appear together, but we can’t say there is a Law there.
In fact, this argument is ultimately reducible to the conundrum of causality – you drink alcohol, and your faculties are altered – Can we say there is a Law here, or merely simultaneity?
Ah, what a mysterious universe!
It is worse than that. Either there is no connection between the mental and physical states/worlds, in which case there is no reason to even think that the physical world exists, or there is some connection which is non-lawlike, but that’s incoherent.
Indeed – it’s always the anomalies that I love thinking about:
“Scientists research man missing 90% of his brain who leads a normal life”
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.3679117/scientists-research-man-missing-90-of-his-brain-who-leads-a-normal-life-1.3679125
Also – OT, but connected to the mysterious universe thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGFq-qpkvbA
“Hundreds of eggs, abandoned at a dump site in Georgia, have hatched to free a swarm of newborn chicks. The emergence of the little tweeting babies has been filmed by locals, some of whom took the birds home.”
Love it!
Peace.
BTW, I should have written it earlier how awed I was by the simplicity on this one-liner refutation 😀 I was preparing a long list of effects of physical damages to brain and how they affect different mental abilities, and then… chapeau-bas, camarade.
Another one who finally beginning to see the light.
Impressive, my little ones.
Good stuff!
Indeed. Thus why I initially mocked it with the modern solipsism of computer simulation of reality. Nothing exists, so he should give everything he has(which doesn’t exist) to Karlin.
Thank you. Brevity is the soul of wit.
But you continually fail to take the next logical step, Daniel –
Why bother giving non-existent money to a non-existent person?
Take it, and you will be liberated.
Is it also because the arc on the ellipsis between winter solstice and spring equinox is shorter than the arc between summer solstice and autumn equinox? So even if Earth linear speed was constant winter still would be shorter than summer.
I don’t think solipsism.
He just believes in something like “Dualism” position on “mind-body problem”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism
And a lot of different kinds of this even.
–
There are even more hardcore views though, like Leibnitz, that believes that mind and body both exist, but there is no interaction. Instead they are separate realms that parallel each other as a result of grace.
Because I said so.
What’s the evidence you rely on to say they can’t. And what is distribution?
I gotta admit bro, you’ve had some great short quips over the time I’ve been reading your posts. Were you ever into (as a performer or producer of) poetry or song-writing or even comedy?
Peace.
But you don’t exist 🙂
If your idea of epistemology is that you know nothing then I might as well take you at your word.
The only sane conclusion I can take is to ignore you.
I am a published writer and you have almost certainly seen my group’s work in other places but I won’t dox myself.
Sanity is overrated. It suggests seriousness.
Me too. I got published at The Unz Review comment sections.
And my work, too, for example at Steve Sailer’s blog.
Me neither! Smart!
Good. Stay on track and dig deeper. You may find something. Intelligence and mind-body problem certainly deserves more depth.
Sweet – well it shows.
Peace.
Hee.
I really like writing; I was musing on utu’s comment that good writing is hard to learning and debated it internally for awhile. I think ultimately its one of those things that you can improve through practice, but having the right personality and mentality is essential, and how much of that is genetically influenced? My grandfather was a diplomat and journalist, so there’s definitely some heritage there.
My initial work was horrific, I still remember it faintly: my 15 year old self and the verbal vomit I must have inflicted on some poor beings. Over many years of practice, I’ve had some wins along with the reams of crap I produce so gradually I think that I’ve gotten somewhere. Adult life has made it harder, of course but I still try to do bits and pieces. Its “one’s soul” so to speak, an almost religious experience at times and a desire to, for what little it is worth, to produce something of beauty. Vanishing as it might be, its a joy to share one’s thoughts with others and hope that it holds some meaning for them too.
I liked the way Heath Ledger played The Joker too. He was very funny. Ultimately, though, nihilism is for teenage sophists. There’s no point.
Ah the age old quest for immortality and the hope that the pages of history will not fold on oneself as they have for millions of others and that you will be forgotten as a part of the human enterprise…not even a whisper through the ages that you even existed at all. The attempts to escape the inevitability, even if it be in the form of a social security number recorded in some archive deep below some mountain.
“O Farid! Do not speak bad about the dust for there is nothing like it.
While you exist it remain below your feet but when you die it covers your head.” – Farid uddin Attar (ra)
Peace.
If you believe meaning can only be found in physical existence, then you are the nihilist.
And being a joker comes from being so intensely serious that one sees through it all.
Unserious people like you stop st the surface, and take it all seriously.
Humor is the mark of the philosopher.
I honestly find that a bit silly. If a story of mine has made someone I care feel something, that’s all that really matters.
As Vonnegut said, if you try to make love to the world, you’ll just get pneumonia.
The only large-scale, trans-racial adoption study following Blacks well into puberty found those adopted by White upper-middle class households averaged 89 at age 17 – comparable to other Blacks in the surrounding Upper Midwest. The had regressed considerably since age 7, so let’s say they continue to regress in early adulthood and settle into 87 by age 30*. Blacks in this region have more White admixture.
I would guess 80-83 for average, un-admixed Bantus raised in a contemporary, middle class American setting.
Equalizing for environment (middle class American) I would guesstimate the following numbers for a few major racial groups based on 100 for Whites. Equalizing for environment means you can’t compare SE Asian street kids to White or Black Americans. Again, just a guesstimate based on lots of studies I’ve seen but can’t cite off memory.
NE. Asians: 103-106
US Whites: 100
50/50 mestizos; SE Asians; S Indians: 94-96
Pure Bantu: 80+
*Heritablility of IQ is low in childhood, increases sharply at puberty, and continues to increase very slowly and slightly until death (same pattern is observed for all measurable behavioral traits).
On a side note, posters on here need to reconcile their assertions with studies of Monozygotic Twins Reared Apart (MZA). MZA offer the best evidence and estimates of the heritablility of IQ. It’s the only true method we have to isolate heritability within certain environments. Note MZA studies are large, numerous, and replicate. Basically the gold standard of science. To make it at as brief as possible for the uninitiated:
MZA studies show:
-no effect of SES on IQ including environments as diverse as American working class to wealthy (there’s no evidence on extreme environments that I know of, eg: harsh physical abuse; growing up in a third-world slum, etc)
-in normal American environments (working class to wealthy), the heritability of IQ in adulthood is around .70-.78
For a quick summary, see “Sources of Human Psychological Differences” Bouchard et al in Science Vol 250.
For more detailed analysis, see Segal’s book “Born Together—Reared Apart” She was one of the main researchers in the Minnesota study.
It wasn’t meant to be a criticism. The certainty of one’s mortality is often the catalyst for some of the greatest efforts of human beings.
The spiritual realm certainly does not escape this – the spiritual masters of the path I tread mentioned often how one should reflect on the fact that one will never be able to recover the number of minutes and seconds that have passed one by, and that it should spur one to action to make the most of their life – especially striving towards one’s ultimate goal.
My point was not about trying to please people either; Caligula also made his mark on the world, but for the wrong reasons.
One figures out what one’s goal is and the specter of death lurking around the corner should spur one on to pursue it with excellence. If writing does that for you – awesome!
Either way, your diction and style makes it clear you have a refinement to your writing and have a good command of the English language.
Peace.
Great paragraph about the stupidity of the American system of units. I’ve made the same point before and been hooted down for doing so. But if only……if only they had studied chemistry, physics or engineering and used a system in which both weight and measure were directly related in base ten units then they would realize how crippling the American system is with its endless conversion factors.
Isaac Asimov made the same point in response to criticism launched by those who claimed that good ol’ Grandad passed tests in high school that we today can’t pass in college! Yeah, Asimov said, and let’s have a look at one of those tests. The first ten questions involved converting such things as hogsheads to barrels, ricks of wood to bales of hay, stacks of hides and so on. Utterly useless stuff, relevant only to persons steeped in those archaic units.
Make Unit systems as transparent as possible.
Asimov had some really crazy ideas too. He was for global government and mass immigration. He did, however, support nuclear energy which is an odd combination.
I think some people have aptitude for it while it is very hard for many. They teach creative writing in schools. I think it is an American invention. In the past some people wrote and some of them became successful writers though they got some ideas from other writers but on their own and not via teachers and creative writing workshops.
But when I wrote about it it was really a put down for all those who bailed out form studying math and accepted a self defeating belief that they were not good at math while probably thinking that they were good at something else like writing, which most often there were not. Yes, they can write but their writing skills are often equivalent to the skills of basic arithmetic. There is no phrase ‘I am not good at writing’ functioning in our culture while there is one for math meaning that everybody thinks that can write and even may think they are good at it. Contrary to a majority view I believe one can teach math to more people than good writing.
Good creative writing is really an interesting phenomena. Many great writers had completely different methods and mental processes. I am particularly impressed by those in 19 c and earlier who wrote on impulse like in a trans and their first version was final not needing any edits. I suspect that if you took computers away most contemporary writers would not be able to write as they are dependent on ability of doing countless edits. Good editing greatly improves things but often it can’t hide bad writing. Bad writing is a norm nowadays. An interesting case is Raymond Carver (who I used to like) who was really a creation of his editor.
Lay off the acid for a few months and get back to me.
https://i.imgur.com/fDDwiFW.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/aYvhRMp.jpg
No can do.
Says who? Physical beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. It is subjective. It varies in time and place.
Obesity on the other hand is an objective measurement. The states with the highest obesity rates are all Conservative Red States. The fattest states are also the ones with the lowest white IQ.
Do you find obese people physically attractive?
Global government was much more popular in the 1940s-50s than it is today. I think support for nuclear energy was even stronger then than it is now (Americans are relative atomophiles by global standards). So it’s only the mass immigration part that would be unusual.
This is true. By definition even. The physical can not create the metaphysical. The observable does not explain the observer.
These atheist-materialist IQists are all ass-backwards.
And yet poor white people are still better than your people. But I suppose hating them is a coping strategy, like claiming that Beethoven was black.
Is this the brilliant African philosophy I’ve heard so much about?
Same people who are forbidden by their religion to cohabit are also forbidden or discouraged to divorce.
What’s funny is that Karlin moved back to Russia hoping to convert Russians to the religion of IQism.
He wants to be the Prophet who convinces Russians that they are hopelessly doomed, by their own inferior genes. The Chinese, who outnumber Russians by 10 to 1, have on top of that a genetically unassailable 10 point IQ advantage.
So fuggedabout holding onto Siberia and the Far East fellow Slavic dummkopfs, is what he is trying to tell the “sovoks” (serfs?).
Maybe he is setting them up for a Han Yoke under Emperor Xi? He is a monarchist after all. Lol.
It has been shown.
See, for example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228198508_Genetic_Variation_in_Political_Behavior
You’re probably right: generational. Makes it an interesting question of how he was imprinted by the earlier culture, and how was it that the culture changed to imprint others differently.
You can really read some of his love for atomics in his fiction, but, much later, he used to even boost it in front of what I’d consider a hostile audience – college kids in the ’70s or ’80s. He also made a lot of gab about being a feminist, though I think that was part of his technique to pick up desperate women.
I’d still say global government is kind of weird for an American, esp. during the Cold War, esp. if you were born in Russia. I mean it is one thing to be a little naive about the UN near the time it was founded, but to actually boost the idea of a future one-world government in the ’80s or so is another order of magnitude greater in rarity, I think, even though it was an early theme of his.
As to diversity, I think he was one of those hypocrites who used to complain when the black school kids walked noisily by his apartment. He talked about how his old neighborhood had been ghettoized, but probably in the leftist sense of some conspiracy to keep blacks down.
For example:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/effects-of-physical-attractiveness-on-political-beliefs/D5214D0CAE37EE5947B7BF29762547EE
Physical attractiveness is an important social factor in our daily interactions. Scholars in social psychology provide evidence that attractiveness stereotypes and the “halo effect” are prominent in affecting the traits we attribute to others. However, the interest in attractiveness has not directly filtered down to questions of political behavior beyond candidates and elites. Utilizing measures of attractiveness across multiple surveys, we examine the relationship between attractiveness and political beliefs. Controlling for socioeconomic status, we find that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican. These findings suggest an additional mechanism for political socialization that has further implications for understanding how the body intertwines with the social nature of politics.
Sure, but people do have an intuitive sense of who is or is not attractive, with underlying aspects such as facial symmetry, pleasantness of demeanor, etc.
Obesity is also linked to poverty and race. Those obese Red states have a lot of people of color living in them. Those are the conservative people in those states.
The study controls for socioeconomic status and health: on average, wealthy attractive people tend to be more conservative than wealthy poor unattractive ones, similar phenomenon among poor people.
Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles are much more conservative than Westerners. And also much more attractive.
Within the USA, Utah is famous for how attractive its people are. It is a very conservative state.
Hmmm, seems unlikely.
White people in NYC are pretty good looking, and pretty damn liberal.
Its kind of like IQ innit – what studies SAY should be bears little relationship to reality.
Which, btw, doesn’t exist anyways.
I think we’ve reached a point where your typical modern scientistic person will look outside the window and see its raining, but will rather believe a study that tells him it isn’t.
Based on descriptions of his physical appearance by those who saw him in real life, Beethoven indeed had african ancestry. He would have been forced to use the black restrooms during the Jim Crow era.
http://theconcordian.org/2015/02/19/beethoven-may-have-been-african-american
EG is a tiny country with a huge oil production economy. The average GDP is meaningless, because the rich take most of the money and the poor live terribly. It’s a kleptocracy as a result, and thus not comparable to genuinely developed countries of similar GDP.
The linked source is bizarre:
Author is ignorant of really basic history.
Moors were not black-skinned and Spanish Netherlands aren’t directly north of Gibraltar.
Belgium was never Moorish territory. And Maria Magdalene was born near Koblenz, in western Germany, which was never owned by the Moors.
Was your post a joke?
And the more conservative among them are also the more attractive among them.
But they aren’t even that good-looking (unless they are immigrants from Eastern Europe), though they are thinner from all the walking.
Why link to something where one can easily find refutations in the comments section?
From commenter ‘Matteo De Nero’, and he doesn’t even touch on every error:
So where are the millions of socially abnormal retards among the white caucasian Levantine people of the middle-east (Syria etc) whose IQ is in the high 70s? If, as the American Association on Mental Retardation defines it, someone is mentally retarded if they have an IQ below 70-75:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2001/07/what_are_the_legal_rights_of_the_retarded.html
there should be many tens of millions of drooling ”white Caucasian” retards in the MENA region since the average IQ of that region is so close to the cut off point for mental retardation.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48d7/843f6ce714a684a93530a0c8b7da65d185db.pdf
If you think that refutes the eyewitness descriptions of Beethoven you need your head examined. Why do you think his contemporaries would lie about his looks?
And refute this:
https://78.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lypdk5KnkH1qglqe6.jpg
That’s Beethoven’s favorite portrait of himself. He would have been amazed if he could see the way he has been portrayed by later artists, painting from tainted imagination.
If you are so brilliant why didn’t you explain how matter creates the mind?
Go ahead, amuse us…
I never understood “creative writing” courses. I think that Scott Fitzgerald taught one once and it might have benefitted a few but its really silly for something that’s so personal, and when it comes to basic style and grammar, one would think that English classes are more appropriate for that.
At any rate, I learned in a rather traditional way, I suppose; through a guild and an artist colony, which was an interesting experience. I think that’s the best way to learn something like that, to be surrounded by peers of equal literary enthusiasm and to take notes from the masters more spiritually than literally. There was a writer(Nabokov? I think) who took the time to rewrite one of his influences letter by letter, word by word, until he could “feel” the thought process of the original writer. I’ve doing something like that once and I can attest to some value of it.
I’ve heard of the notion of the editor as a co-creator as of late. The notion escapes me – writing seems to be such a personal endeavour that having the editor engage too much would seem to wander into “writing by committee” which is sure to produce dross. But yes, its pretty amazing looking at today’s lit and then at say, R.E. Howard’s poetry-in-prose and wonder what the heck happened.
Why didn’t you say that to the trashy poster (DFH) whose racist insults Okechukwu was responding to?
Why didn’t you point out that children from Fiji, Peru, Grenada and St. Lucia were also part of the experiment?
I thought the Kenyan and Fijian children freezing before their reflections in the mirror showed higher development than reaching out to touch the reflection as if it was another child. The experiment was crappy BS and produced no really conclusive results.
Oh, God, did you ever nail it. The Black lady has been spending the last 3 weeks selling her neice’s lunches. Last week her neice sold us Jambalaya, which was delicious, but another co-worker and I said that the $14 price should have included cornbread as well. We got read the riot act. Apparently, Black people don’t eat corn bread with Jambalaya. We got a spoon and no napkins either. Co-worker spent hours touting the lunch, walking around, and making copies of the menu, with many revisions, because she is helpless at her clerical job. All of this went on at the City taxpayers’ cost. She is currently spending all of her time planning the next lunch, Fettuccine Alfredo with garlic bread. Very little, if any, work will be done during the sales of the neice’s lunches.
Yes to both!! I work for a City Government in California! Good guess!
Well, you pegged it!
The situation with MENA people is pretty analogous.
You have the current MENA average, and probably a genetic potential somewhat above that but not 100. There’s a similar question of whether this genetic potential can be fully actualized in their own society or only in a more prosperous foreign society.
Anyway, one would expect you’ve got to take the average of the MENA group as a reference point, when searching for true mental retardation of MENA people, and use SD from that.
I’d expect MENA people with an IQ of 70 to be quite stupid, but probably more functional than whites with the same IQ, though not as functional as blacks.
What’s funny is that AK is probably one of the most positive people about Africans in Unz.
Nothing online is really “published”. Its just digital bits uploaded. Graphic artist here. If your writing is in print and you did not pay to self-publish and its in the book stores.
If white Europeans who score 70 on the IQ test are drooling, poorly functioning retards while white Levantines and black Africans are not, then what does that tell you about the veracity of IQ tests?
Surely it can’t be a true measure of intelligence, can it?
I can’t see it, perhaps you should repost it in another format.
From a painter who knew and befriended Beethoven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beethoven-M%C3%A4hler_1804_hires.jpg
According to wikipedia:
”Beethoven apparently liked this portrait very much and owned it until his death.”
It is in book stores and this was way before there was this notion of “self-publish.”
These days, sadly, it’d probably be a lot easier for me to get published. I’ll just have to self-identify as a minority gender dysphoric male with lesbian inclinations.
Fun times.
I
So a person of one race with an IQ of 70 can be more “functional” (i.e intelligent) than a person of another race.
Lets extend this principle to high IQs as well, as is only logical – a person of one race with an IQ of 140 can be more intelligent, er, I mean “functional”, than a person of another race with an IQ of 140.
Yet comparisons between races are meaningful, and IQ measures the same quality across races.
face palm
In 20 years, when materialism is finished, they will write books on the astonishing mass psychosis that afflicted so many people, who somehow were still able to “function” in their daily lives despite suffering severe cognitive distress of some poorly understood etiology.
Perhaps Daniel Chieh as the only professional writer here will deign to do so.
I would put it this way…
There is absolutely zero correlation between intelligence and where one lies on the moral or political spectrum.
An indvidual can be taught by some person / organization that is intelligent / wise / moral, or taught by some person / organization that is intelligent / unwise / immoral.
People that are of average or even below average intelligence (to a point), can act morally good and take positions which would be considered wise if they were taught by an intelligent / wise / moral person or organization.
I’ll remember to include your fate in one of my scribblings someday.
One of the strongest notions that I’ve acquired recently from working with someone who is good-natured but really quite dumb(and probably mentally ill) is that “irrational” rules for society-positive behavior are not only valuable, but will be of increasing importance as the world becomes more dumbed down.
Thank you 🙂
I trust you will do me full justice.
No one, including a white person, who gets an IQ score of 70 is a “drooling, poorly functioning retard.” Someone with an IQ of 70 is capable of having a simple job such as bagging groceries, buying things (though counting change may be a problem), taking public transportation home and back, cooking simple things, getting dressed, etc. Some of them may drive. Someone whose IQ is 70 is more intelligent than about 2% of the general population. 1 in 50 people are not less intelligent than a “drooling, poorly functioning retard.”
IQ should be treated as a proxy. It is correlated better than just about anything else is to intelligence. That’s what gives it meaning, not that it is a 1:1 correlation.
I think that a paper test inevitably becomes less meaningful at the lower end, when you are trying to compare people on the lower end. It probably would be possible to design such a test, to compare stupid people, but it would probably have to be administered directly by another person and be much more costly.
IQ tests work better when you get closer to the norm. They also work well far above the norm. Just not well far below it, especially when you are comparing different populations.
Northeast Asians score higher on IQ tests than Jews.
But Jews possess a verbal dexterity ideal for deal-making while the Asian manipulates symbols autistically.
Thus far it means that lawyers run the planet.
These results are hard to believe. The questions top out at jr high algebra story problem level. This isn’t stuff you get rusty at, as perhaps with writing equations involving variables (let x = …let y = ). Even in jr high they gave you harder numbers to multiply or divide.
So if I have it right: 1) C 2) B 3) D 4) D 5) 11 am 6) 28 km/h. I hope I got those right after writing how easy they are.
Let’s see if any of you want to take on level 7. I’ve put a lot of thought into this question. Here it is, level 7:
Our cyclist Helen (from level 2 – more recent pic below) went on a 25 mile out-and-back bike ride. Helen averaged 20.57 mph on the way out, and 23.87 mph on the way back. What was her average speed for the ride?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f0/ff/95/f0ff95f7ddba6196ba447f27dca53417.jpg
I think comparisons at the middle or the higher end are much more valid than comparisons at the lower end.
Are people fully interchangeable when they have the same IQ, but it is not at the lower end? Is a Japanese=German=Somali, if they all have a 100 IQ? I very much doubt it. It is quite possible that each may have their additional seperate psychological norms. Maybe, one would make a better salesmen than the others.
But you’d probably do better to rank job candidates by giving them an IQ test than giving them Myers-Briggs, or by calling their references, or just about anything else, short of hiring them all and comparing them on the job.
I suspect interviews are a much better way to assess someone’s intellect than giving IQ tests. The German army created a far superior officer corps through that method than the Americans, who unsurprisingly relied on scientific testing.
Also, job related specific skills testing – as in, a series of problems and situations taken directly from the job that simulate what you’re likely to encounter and that will holistically assess your entire psycho-cognitive-social performance in relation to what’s required, including performing under stress in realistic conditions.
But that’s not my point.
My point is if a white person at IQ 70 is severely impaired but a black person isn’t, the tests are meaningless across races, and don’t measure functionality.
Agreed; if the initial postulate is true, I don’t know how you can escape the conclusion, unless you can find some other measurable variable as a multiplier or adjuster (like a modifier for personality or aptitude) to make it of use across a racial spectrum. Thus far, I don’t see anybody doing so.
Peace.
Influence indeed, Robert Michels, the sociologist who devised the Iron Law of Oligarchy
a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties.
“Who says organization, says oligarchy.” “Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy.”
The URL is hilarious. It says Beethoven may have been African American…
Sure, Russia is more politically conservative than many Western countries.
But within Russia? Let’s look for example at Moscow. It sucks up a lot of more beautiful women from across the country, so many attractive girls (at least for girls) are moving to live there compared to many other cities. And yet there is an atmosphere for the city of comparatively more liberal politics.
It was later retracted.
https://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion/
The retraction was probably overzealous: it retracted too much. And people reacted to that by believing the unscientific things they wanted to believe: there is no innate intelligence, everybody can be taught, we need better teachers, we get better teachers by having them go to school for longer, etc.
Why do the people here and Katlin fetishize IQ so much given that it was the high IQ types that pushed for moral degeneracy and like like promoting hookup culture and the gay rights movement? Possibly because high IQ types see their high IQ as a sign of superiority and so feel that they should not be bounded by old rules on sexual morality.
I’ve long been struck by the difference between Turkey and Mexico on PISA results. In Turkey, 6% score in the second highest rank and 1% in the highest rank. That’s not great, but it’s at least a noticeable number of smart people. In Mexico, only 1% make the second rank and 0% the highest rank. And yet Mexico doesn’t score all that badly overall, it just has only a tiny number of very smart and very hard working people.
That generally fits with my impression of the two countries. I went to a conference in an upscale resort town in Turkey and the grocery story across the street from the hotel carried a selection of books and magazines, some of which appeared to be intellectually serious. I had lunch with a smart Turkish journalist who now writes smart columns for the NYT. I used to exchange emails with a fellow in Istanbul who advised me that Derrida was as worthless as I assumed, but I should not dismiss Foucault out of hand.
Mexico, in contrast, appears to have a much smaller intellectual elite than Turkey.
Perhaps it has something to do with puritanism never getting a foothold in Mexico due to the counter-reformation keeping out potential puritans?
That’s very cute, trying to devise ever more ridiculous talking points to explain why the allegedly functionally retarded Africans are nevertheless perfectly functional. However, either IQ measures functionality or it doesn’t. Test your theories at a scientific conference and prepare for uproarious laughter. That’s before the men in white coats come and take you away.
You still haven’t presented concrete evidence that Africans have an IQ of 70. Don’t prescribe solutions to a “problem” that exists only in the minds of dumb and delusional white supremacists.
First of all, black Americans have an IQ of 91. Further, when adjusted for sociological and historical factors black Americans are likely the highest IQ population in the world. Secondly, achievement is modulated by a range of factors of which intelligence is not the primary causal agent. Besides which, an idea of achievement is highly subjective.
No. You desperately want me to see a made-up “problem” as hopeless. There’s absolutely no evidence to support the proposition that IQ tests actually capture intrinsic intelligence. There are plenty of Africans sitting in villages right now who are natively more intelligent than you. There are also many white high IQ types who are actually stupid with regard to native intelligence. Separated from their learned and highly structured environments, they’re useless.
The world doesn’t operate on the presumption that Africans are less intelligent. Every country on earth, be it the US, China, Russia, Germany, UK, etc., pursues Africa policy in the full knowledge that Africans are equal in intellectual capacity and intellectual potential. Yet you speak as though Africans being intellectually handicapped is a foregone conclusion that enjoys universal acceptance. But in fact it’s a position held by a vanishingly small fringe of racists and supremacists who aren’t very bright themselves.
Why didn’t you point out that children from Fiji, Peru, Grenada and St. Lucia were also part of the experiment?
Here’s an interesting interpretation of the results of the experiment from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kids-and-animals-who-fail-classic-mirror/
Business who are only there to make money and have no skin in the political game universally converged on interviews for candidates, not IQ tests. If IQ tests really worked, they’d be used for hiring. I do hiring interviews for elite programmers myself, and “intelligence” is not something I really screen for. Ultimately, “intelligence” doesn’t matter even in this very IQ-intensive job. Much more important is an ability to properly budget your time and decompose problems into step-by-step pieces.
At least in America, this is because the courts disliked them.
Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971)
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/
Take a trait, say height, which is easy and non-controversial to measure, and which, given good nutrition, is known to be highly heritable. If a Kalenjin man is as short as your average Mbuti, then there is probably something seriously wrong with him and you wouldn’t be surprised if he had other kinds of problems, while if a Mbuti man is as tall as the average Mbuti man, then you might reasonably expect him to be otherwise normal and healthy.
Given even a modest degree of heritability of intelligence (however defined or measured), it would be passing strange if every ethnic group on earth had the same mean level of intelligence. Some groups on average are going to be more intelligent than others, just as some groups on average are taller than others. Given two people P and Q of comparable intelligence, one from a group of high average intelligence and the other from a group of low average intelligence, I would expect P to be less functional than Q, since there is probably something wrong with P, while Q is probably just normal.
The only reason this is in the least controversial is that we have all been indoctrinated into secular humanism, which rejects the soul and so is left only with the brain as the defining characteristic of humanity.
If only there were some way of getting past subjective impressions and measuring actual cognitive abilities. Some kind of test that could be administered to people to see how well they do at this sort of thing. Perhaps some really smart people will figure this out and design tests like that and administer them widely to see what sort of results different people have around the world. You’d be in favor of that, right?
I was hired based mostly on a mathematical test. There were interviews afterwards. Though the interviews seem to be totally useless. I have yet to see an interviewer who could accurately predict on the job performance.
I don’t care about America, let it sink into the sea tomorrow. I’m talking about normal, sane countries.
OK, Bob. Let’s all sign up to be ruled over by morons. You first.
You’re absolutely wrong. Here’s the “one trick” you don’t realize: most people are very similar and stereotypical, at least in their professional aspects. I need about five minutes to slot a candidate into his proper role, and I’m rarely wrong. The rest of the interview is just there to make the candidate feel better, like he got a fair shake and all.
The other “one trick” you don’t realize is that often your idea of ‘on the job performance’ doesn’t match your manager’s idea. Very, very few companies actually put employee performance into managers’ KPI. Most do the opposite: your pay grade is directly proportional to the number of your subordinates. This means hiring lots and lots of incompetents is incentivized, hiring efficiently is punished. (Going up the food chain, this dysfunction is present on all levels: a company with lots of incompetents has a higher valuation, a country with lots of incompetents has a higher GDP.)
https://archive.org/details/TheAverageIQOfSubSaharanAfricans
Based on what?
https://img.ifcdn.com/images/d4bb00097bc88179c52f4fab954374ce9b0e15d10d2a3f6848e0631e59a9ee56_1.jpg
IQ is the best single predictor of life outcomes.
https://i.imgur.com/qIGdGqI.png
http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf
(n = 97,083)
Extreme levels of coping. White Rhodesians, who werequite possibly one of the highest IQ populations on Earth, turned Rhodesia, where Africans had been living in huts for tens of thousands of years, into a modern, advanced country.
It’s accepted by the majority of experts on intelligence.
https://i.imgur.com/5ThVCxW.png
This is true; higher IQ generally correlated with higher rates of poz.
Maybe a built-in upper bound for the species, a population control mechanism of sorts…
Peace.
Interesting travel observations.
Speculations:
Turks are basically acculturated Greeks (Greek IQ ~= 95; note that Turkey included some of the best Greeks – Ionia had the highest rate of human accomplishment, IIRC; also, a Greek friend observes that Turkey and Greece are incredibly similar, though he’s no particular fan of the Turks); acculturated Armenians (Armenian IQ ~= 90, but it might go higher, plus they certainly have the biggest smart fraction of any Caucasian country); a minor Central Asian component (IQ ~= 85, but could go higher); a very minor Slavic component from the Black Sea slave trade (IQ ~= 100); and Kurds (who are pretty dumb, but wouldn’t impinge much on the smart fraction share).
As I understand it, Mexicans are the union (to various regional degrees) of the descendants of Spanish conquistadors (who mostly hailed from Extremadura – hillbilly country, poorest Spanish region today, IQ perhaps 95) and indigenous Indians (IQ ~= 80).
Now we’re getting somewhere. This points to IQ being linked with environmental factors (functionality in society, etc.) which is what Prof. Lynn has spoken to when mentioning that Westerners of just a few generations ago would be functionally retarded by today’s standards in society:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI
Peace.
“If IQ tests really worked, they’d be used for hiring.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
I started my current career with an interview and an IQ test, but that was in the UK. I’m sure a poor IQ test would have ruled me out.
All your obsession with IQ scores here as the alpha and omega of everything makes you people come across as mentally retarded, yes IQ scores probably do play an important role in personal and success, but the big 5 personality traits, in addition to intelligence, are a lot more relevant when you count personal success as bedding a lot of beautiful women driving Ferraris and owning Patel Philippe watches.
I remained bothered by the level 4 question.
The obvious answer is 720, of course, but there’s a problem. The first “complete revolution” of the revolving door will not allow six people to enter the building, but only four. Two will remain inside the door, and not yet in the building. Every following rotation deposits six people, so the total number of people entering the building should be 718, and not 720. Or am I overthinking this?
While it’s true that IQ isn’t everything, it remains the biggest statistical correlation to financial success. The personality traits you mention are also important, but they are not as important as IQ. And financial success (in today’s world) is the most important fact in male sexual/reproductive success as well. Again, not the only factor, but more important than the others.
The downside to this are Chinese imports putting locals out of a business…Yin and Yang with there.
Do you have your candidates execute unit tests for functionality?
No you’re correct. And you can also get different answers still, if you determine whether people inside the door, can be counted, as inside the building or not. (There is ambiguity even in this part of the question)
A more intelligent, or intellectually honest, child will mark the four options to the question with “None are correct.”
Question is nonsense, for various reasons, which more intelligent children will be distracted by.
Children who get the “correct” answer, will be the children who can culturally guess what the examiner wants.
It’s a test of cultural closeness to the examiner, but also a test of the student having lack of deeper thinking.
The “maths” (2 multiplied by 3 multiplied by 4 multiplied by 30) is a question for 10 year olds. However, it’s being presented to 15 year olds – so it is far too easy for the age-group.
If the question was a correctly-designed question, it would write the 4 numbers, and ask people to multiply them. And in this case, we would expect the vast majority, to answer correctly.
–
By the way, if discussed this question in university, I would hope more intelligent or engineering students, would see it as question of mechanics, or even crowd dynamics, and think about how fast people (assuming representative sample of the population, which would include obese people, etc) can move through a door of a diameter specifically discussed in the question.
The door (with a specified 2 meter diameter) is very narrow. It could be that 240 is closer to the correct answer, to an engineer .
In reality, it also depends on the type of pedestrian involved.
https://d1rkab7tlqy5f1.cloudfront.net/CiTG/Over%20faculteit/Afdelingen/Transport%20%26%20Planning/Research/Competence%20Centres/Pedestrians/TRB2008.pdf
If only. But there isn’t.
What I’m trying to suggest is that this entire concept of extreme scientific control when it comes to humans and is misguided and stupid.
Elite institutions like the German Army and Oxbridge and Harvard rely on interviews fur a reason, and outperform institutions that don’t.
Countless people with perfect scores on scientific tests turn out to be people of utterly mediocre ability.
There are a lot of very poor business practices.
How many places in the US have surly blacks in positions where they interact with customers? Or otherwise rude employees? Why aren’t they fired immediately? I’ll answer: politics. It is hard to fire them, particularly blacks. You might get sued. It will be very expensive.
No, businesses are nowhere optimized for pure performance or best practices in every regard – that is a demonstrable myth.
How many require references? Just about all. How useful are they? I’ll answer: almost totally useless. The average person doesn’t have the integrity to give an honest evaluation of their acquaintances. Some employers just want to get rid of poor employees, so will give glowing references. The only way they are remotely useful might be in identifying axe-murderers, not serial-killer pyschopaths, who are more refined, just rabid axe-murders. Really, they just punish people without social connections.
IQ tests were banned in the US, exactly because they were useful. Can they be used in the most of the rest of the West? Where they don’t even have free speech? I doubt it. Sure, that might leave places like Korea and Japan and China. But as Karlin pointed out, people are smarter there, besides we are ignorant of their practices, and China, for instance, has a very demanding test at the end of high school that helps determine life outcome.
Many interviews in the US actually use questions designed to be substitutes of IQ tests. For instance, that exact puzzle question about going one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north, and ending up in the same place. How many points like that on the globe? That was one Microsoft used to use, along with many others, like why does a mirror seem to reverse right and left? And, I think that was a bit of vanity. In programing, you can easily ask programing questions to evaluate intelligence. It is not as perfect as an IQ test. But in many other fields, and even in simple jobs, it is much harder.
Jobs screen for intelligence all the time actually. Why do you think some require a bachelor’s degree, other’s a graduate or doctoral degree? Better to give an IQ test. It is much cheaper, much fairer, and much less dysgenic than credentialism.
Interesting point and I can’t say that it doesn’t have an impact.
I note that some (most?) of the “smartest” ones seem to take the scholarly and scientific path which indicates to me that the perceived “insecurity” is not evenly distributed.
Of course. The whole theory just gets sillier the more you examine it.
But the