Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I'm posting this in Small-Scale because I don't want to get too weighty on this, but rather commiserate with other smart people about how difficult it is to appreciate how not smart the rest of the world is. Or at least convince you that it's freaking ugly out there.
A little bit of background first.
I consider myself retarded and slow and like I make lots of easy stupid mistakes. My brain feels really noisy and like I would regularly kill people if I worked in an ER or intensive care because I'd mis-dose them or get confused about what step in what procedure we're following. (Though some of these are probably ADHD issues, which a psychiatrist agreed enough with to write me an Rx for, as an Adderall-seeking adult)
I found myself becoming a misanthrope in public school because I considered it extremely, absurdly slow and boring and my school didn't appear to care. I'm sure I didn't make it easy for them because I found everything so trivial that I wouldn't do the work. I also thought most of my teachers were slackers who just wanted an easy job and didn't look up to them in any way (though there were some diamonds in the rough) and perhaps my contempt came across my facial expressions. I started cutting classes to hang out in the computer lab and write OpenGL programs. I can see how few if any teachers wanted to take a risk and advocate for me or would even imagine I was bored to tears intellectually. I also had no friends in HS, not even other supposedly smart kids. I'm not autistic by any means. Everyone just seemed... off. And also my carefully cultivated set of friends on IRC were so much better.
I was so disgusted with school and other people that I never went to college. The thought of taking any step in that direction was a hard no, I was desperate to get out into the work force and got a computer job when I was 18 and didn't think much about intelligence, for awhile.
I've slowly, eventually come to terms with the fact that I have a fairly big cognitive edge over most people. I don't mean this with a sense of pride. I mean this in a sense of horror.
One thing that's confused me a lot is that over the last decade or two, "verbal IQ" has gone up considerably. In the olden days it seemed like people on the internet were either smart or they were obvious morons because the obvious morons couldn't write, being new to keyboards and chatting. But nowadays even the most dimwitted Redditor writes English fluently and they'll even use words from the scientific and intellectual classes to argue, so I would spend a long time arguing with people who were just never going to understand me. Like man-years, I'm sure.
Anyway, it was still really hard to realize I have a cognitive edge? Charles Murray argues in Real Education that many smarter people don't realize just how smart they are, due to sorting. They seek out other smart people and compare themselves and see that they have minor relative strengths and weaknesses and conclude the differences between them, and thereby everyone actually, are cases of nurture and not nature. Meanwhile the people who can't do basic arithmetic in their heads or who could never handle a hypothetical conditional don't enter your universe, or you probably sense you're not very alike and don't get to know their intellectual life.
A few things have broken me out of this. In the Parable of the Talents, Scott writes:
Disturbing.
Did you see the conditional hypotheticals thing? Scott again, quoting the anonymous IQ researcher posting to 4chan this time (so grain of salt)
I tried the "didn't eat breakfast" thing on a few people I know. All of the adults got it (whew). It's very interesting to try it on kids. Kids five and under can't do it flat out, but at about 6+ they can. Imagining that some people are forever 5 years old in that part of their brain is freaking wild.
Swiveling back to Murray in Real Education, he tries to convince you of how not smart the average person is by showing a series of fairly trivial 8th grade exam questions and detailing how wrong most kids get them.
The answer isD, productive and peaceful
55% of Illinois 8th graders get this wrong.
I've posted a few of these to Twitter. Some are mathy, and some are word problems. This one about the Asanazi drives some people berserk; people apparently can't separate the author's portrayal from their own portrayal, or do the basic constraint logic needed to rule the rest out.
I saw someone joke in a different part of Twitter that stuff like LSAT questions are designed to maximize toxic Twitter engagement and I have to concur.
Last one. Scott again, writes recently.
I don't really know what this PIIAC thing is, so I asked ChatGPT4o to generate an example question that demonstrate proficiency.
IMO you should be able to do this in your head in a few seconds. It feels embarrassing to even talk about something this easy and connect any hint of pride to it, like this is an example of any cognitive edge at all. Yet huge portions of the population will struggle with it. I asked an 11th grader taking AP classes this question and they said they would need pen and paper to figure it out(!) He at least knew how to organize it in terms of x.
I could see a grand majority of the population never writing it in terms of x = ... and solving that way.
I'm trying to fill a position at work right now. A sys admin role. I want to ask that gas mileage question during technical interviews but I'm afraid the people who will get it right will be so insulted that they can't believe I'm asking this, while the people who get it wrong will feel very unfairly brutally discriminated against because I could pop such an irrelevant-to-their-job question on them.
So. How do we expect to become a Star Trek, space faring civilization again? There's so much work to do that we need smart people for and so few smart people.
We know how to avoid being overwhelmed by 65 IQ adults. In childhood you can ensure they don't suffer the worst poverty and go hungry and give them a K-6 education. Then they'll have 80-90 IQ. That's still grim, but a huge accomplishment.
Ignoring the Flynn effect, do we have any idea at all about how to shift, say, the middle of the curve from 100 IQ to 130 IQ? Is there any therapy or drug or surgery anywhere on the horizon that could achieve this?
The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age; there are cases to be made for B and C and a nit to be picked about D.
B The author depicts the Anasazi as doing fine weaving. Both by using the word, in the case of sashes woven from hair, and implying it in the case of basket, with a mesh without holes. fine is more work than coarse. Doing all that work will keep them busy. The child is probably dragged round the supermarket on shopping trips. Meat comes from the chill cabinet. Perhaps neighbors go hunting, but the child is discouraged from asking to go too, because guns are scary and dangerous. Hunting sounds forbidden and dangerous; certainly exciting. Hunting long ago, with a bow or s spear sounds harder and more dangerous. harder speaks to the Anasazi leading busy lives. You hunt, you catch nothing (you cannot just shoot your prey) so you hunt again the following day. You are kept busier than people today who can guarantee to get the whole weeks shopping with one car trip to the supermarket. dangerous might stand alone to the adult mind, but a child will pick up the message that the Anasazi lead exciting lives. B is a contender.
C "baskets woven tightly enough to hold water." is a strange claim. The child might have been paying attention when history covered the Spanish Armada. Sir Francis Drake Singed the King of Spains beard. One historian emphasizes burning stocks of seasoned timber, needed for wet cooperage. Wet cooperage is when a cooper makes a barrel so well that it is suitable for storing water. That is much harder than dry cooperage and needs seasoned timber. Burn that and there are no new barrels for storing water on board ship. No barrels, no Armada. What the attentive child knows is that holding water is a major pain under earlier, lo-tech conditions of life. The author is depicting the life of the Anasazi as difficult in two senses. First they do impressive feats of basket weaving. That is technically difficult. Second, they are likely forced to do this by a lack of technology (though what has gone wrong with their pots? Why aren't they holding water in pots? Unsuitable clay? Lack of glazes?). We would ordinarily summarize the problems posed by lack of basic technology by saying that life was difficult.
The author talks of beautiful pottery and turquoise jewelry. The thirteen year old boy answering the question knows just what the author is talking about. It is the fine china that lives in the cabinet, and the Meissen figurines, with their boring pastel colors. The limbs are not articulated, eliminating any play value, and you are not allowed to play with them anyway because of their impractical fragility. Turquoise jewelry is stupid, girly crap. The author is implying that the Anasazi lead lives that are boring as fuck. dreary is one of the polite adult words for this, difficult and dreary. C is a contender.
D Since the author uses the word peacefully, the use of the word peaceful immediately makes D a strong contender. The problem lies with the word productive having two conflicting meanings. A school pupils perhaps learns the school room notion of productivity from history lessons on Luddites and weavers. Power looms made weavers more productive. A lot more productive. It made those who wore clothes better off by bringing down the price of cloth. That is a lot of people and a big price fall, so a huge gain overall. On the other hand, weavers who expected to be better off, because prosperity comes from productivity, were shocked to find the surplus of cloth and the resulting price falls more than offset the gain in the amount of cloth produced. productive is an output measure, not an input measure. productivity is a specific measure of output: output per hour of labor.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
The alternative meaning of productive lies at the intersection of pastoral romance and the Protestant work ethic. You are unproductive in the taverna, drinking Ouzo and playing Back Gammon. You are productive when you return to your farm and tend your olive grove. It is not about the fertility of the grove or the price of olives. You are unproductive when you play a video game; you are productive when you write the program for a video game (but why would any-one buy a video game if playing it is disparaged as unproductive?)
Since I'm middle aged and middle class I'm acculturated to school as a center of pointless busywork that keeps children off the streets. The devil finds work for idle hands, and we use the word productive to praise keeping those hands busy with the right kind of pointless busy work (such as making beautiful pottery that doesn't hold water, and turquoise jewelry). It contrasts with the word unproductive which disparages the forms of pointless activity preferred by younger persons or those of lower social class.
Answer D is checking that the children are picking up the correct meaning of productive. Are they well on their way to being middle aged and middle class? We wouldn't want them saying that the Anasazi are "unproductive and peaceful". We prefer them to have a fashionable sense of "Ted Kaczynski"-lite, and ignore the crassly industrial notion of productive.
I'm in a pickle. I don't know what my comment implies. On first reading I'm defending the intelligence of Illinois 8th graders. They are not stupid, the question is bad. On second reading I'm trashing a question, chosen by a clever person, to illustrate a point. That is to say, chosen by a person who is clever compared to other people. But the question is still trash, so even "clever" people are smug and stupid and we as a species are ultra-doomed :-(
The distracters aren't really effective if there's not a plausible argument for them. That's largely the point of distracters. The goal is to identify the best answer.
You are productive when you produce stuff. The question details 4 types of items and 2 crops that are produced. The crops are also produce.
There is a right answer, a wrong answer, and two distractors. The distractors focus the discriminating power of the test. If the distractors are almost right, even the clever get distracted and the test focuses on separating the very clever from clever. If the distractors are wrong, just not so blatantly wrong as the wrong answer, average test takers can find the right answer by elimination, and the detailed test results (separating out wrong versus distracted) serves to separate the very stupid and stupid.
The interpretation of
will vary depending on whether the distractors are nearly right or nearly wrong.
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