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Yeah, there’s a meme on Anglo-reactionary Twitter, which I will do a post about at some point, that essentially says well you know popular democracy was designed for and works for 130 IQ Anglos. And the further you get away from that, you know, either the worse your democracy becomes or the less democracy you can have. Much of the American system over the last 150 years and before (thanks in some part to the wisdom of the founders) has been engineering things so that they still kind of work even when most voters aren’t 130 IQ Anglos, but there’s a limit to every system. Brazil is a democracy. India is a democracy. There are localized corruption issues but, generally speaking, these are countries in which the most popular party wins a majority in the legislature etc etc. They are still poor and dysfunctional.
I'm not sure my observations really correlate directly with "democracy only works with 130 IQ Anglos" and more, our entire society is developing pitfalls left and right in fundamental activities that everyone needs to navigate (getting a job, feeding yourself, managing your money) where the only winning move is to not engage in a whole swath of behavior.
I mean, to illustrate my point, maybe I'm getting old, or I am too paranoid about dark patterns, or what. But I got my driveway done. Dude who did it sends me an invoice. It's been generated in some off the shelf business solution, so I'm not mad at him about what comes next. But in the process of attempting to accept and pay for this invoice, it pitches me a credit card, with no obvious way to say "No I don't want a new credit card" without also shutting down the whole process. But after looking at the screen for a few minutes trying to find the hidden "I don't want a credit card, but I would like to pay this invoice button" and failing, I hit the "No Thank You" button and the whole process shut down, and it told the guy I had rejected his invoice.
I ended up paying him by check before he left.
Another example, I'm at a museum, and they have a CR Code you need to scan to take you to the page where you can reserve tickets for a particular exhibit. I have an old phone (because I refuse to upgrade perfectly good phones every 2-3 years just because), with a QR code reader that used to be reliable. I scan the code, and I now know but didn't at the time that after scanning the code, instead of displaying it's contents, it displayed an ad which looked like it's contents. I click the ad not knowing it's an ad, it takes me to a page asking for my credit card. I think this doesn't look right, so I show it to the attendant at the kiosk asking if this is the correct form to get tickets for the exhibit. They assure me it is. It wasn't. My credit card got stolen. I should have trusted my gut on that one. I didn't realize until after the fact that the QR Code reader I'd been using extremely sporadically over a decade had become enshittified with predatory ads. These days Brave on mobile has a QR Code reader built in, but I'm not sure that was the case at the time. Although I may just not have known. Regardless I'm irritated at the constant state of shifting sands under my feet revealing pit traps I'm expected to avoid.
Once upon a time, as a young teen on warez sites, there was always the game of virus roulette. You'd go to download a no-cd crack off GameCopyWorld.com, which still exists, and you were presented with 3-6 buttons that all said "Download" on them. All but one were predatory ads which caused you to install a virus. Only one was the actual download link to the no-cd crack.
The no-cd crack may also be a virus.
Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you. I like to think I'm not a retard, but it's getting to the point where it tricks me from time to time. I can't imagine how normies fare. If Financial Audit is any indicator, not well.
Well yes. You didn't pay for a QR code reader or buy a phone where someone is paid to write it as a native/bundled app. So the only incentive structure remaining is for someone to write a free one with the hopes of monetizing it later.
Or you could have just paid $50 for the game. Steam doesn't distribute malware and their website is pristine.
No, everything is an app and every app needs a business model. Sometimes the business model is clear (you pay us $90/yr, we give you app). Sometimes it's less clear but still approximately benign (you use Reddit, they sell the ability to mass-train on their content to AI company). Sometimes it's clear it's ad supported (Facebook, Chrome) with varying degrees of scrupulosity on their origins. Some are indeed funded philanthropically like Brave or Signal. Some are fundamentally scammy.
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Even though the QR code reader built into my phone camera works fine as far as I can tell, the phone in general is old, slow, and doesn't handle apps or webpages with ads well, so I pretend like it doesn't work. A few weeks ago I had to pull a Karen at a bar to get the bartender to give or tell me what the drinks were, since I was absolutely not going to scan their QR code on my phone, and sit there reading 30 drinks off my old, slow, sad phone/wallet. He produced a tablet for me. I was saddened but bought a foofy drink anyway.
A week ago, I tried calling AAA to have my car towed. Previously, it was 7 miles free. Now it's apparently 3 miles free, and after that you're supposed to pay the rest in cash (it was going to be $80 or so), or read a stranger your credit card over the phone. I didn't believe that could possibly be the protocol. I said that I couldn't possibly pay that way, that's not how anyone pays for official services, and demanded that he offload the car on the side of the road. He said he should probably return it to my house then. I said he could return it to the three mile mark. He said I would have to pay for the return trip. We finally settled on him dumping my car on the side of the road, and me reading my credit card number to a stranger over the phone, to be charged $30 for the misunderstanding. My husband brought all the kids, gave it a jump, and it made it to the mechanic. I guess I should have tried that first, but was worried it was the kind of thing that would get worse if I tried continuing to drive it while malfunctioning.
I attempted to cancel AAA, but apparently all I can do is remove the auto subscribe, and write myself a note to check whether they try to take money anyway some months from now (which Amazon Kids has done, and unsubscribing involved multiple text chats and phone calls). Not dealing with weird shady towing practices was literally why I've been paying for AAA all this time! That is literally their value proposition!
When I taught at a charter school, a WhatsApp chat group was the official means of group communication, and I had to use the Microsoft Authenticator app to log into Gradebook, which cause innumerable problems. I have seen a couple of restaurants that don't have physical menus, just a QR code that you are expected to scan to order. At my hotel, all the VIZIO TVs demand that you make an account or download the app before they let you watch so much as a single channel.
It's extremely annoying.
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I'm kind of worried over what I'm supposed to do to support my parents in this stuff as they age. They've never been great with consumer tech, especially smart phones. I'd be perfectly willing to drive over and help them occasionally to fix something or install something, or just show it how it works. But it increasingly feels like a never-ending battle. The apps, like you said, just get more confusing and more malicious. My parents are not at all senile, but increasingly at that "i'm too old for this shit" phase where they really don't want to bother learning new tech. I don't want to bother, but I feel like I have no choice.
It used to be the case that you could always opt out by calling a place on the phone, or driving to their physical store, or paying someone in cash. Increasingly it feels like we just have to use the app, which will constantly change without warning. That feels really predatory and impractical, and I can't believe it's being allowed in our society where the average US senator is 65 years old and heavily weights the opinions of old people.
When I was doing my master's, one of my lecturers was telling us about how the quality control standards on the Apple App Store are much stricter on the Google Play Store. After one too many instances in which some child was paying some scummy pay-to-win game on his parents' iPad and racked up four figures' worth of "micro"transactions, Apple apparently established a blanket policy of banning games targeted at small children. (I may be misremembering this somewhat: obviously you can install games from the App Store meant for small children. I think the crackdown was targeting games which seem to be marketed towards children, but which contain microtransactions.)
All well and good, I thought: children's brains aren't fully developed, this is common sense. But what about people at the opposite end of the telescope? Elderly people being taken in by Indian call-centre scammers and Nigerian princes is already a known issue. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where the App Store will simply prevent you from installing an app if you exceed some age threshold. Sure they'll be accused of ageism (that's literally what it is) or discrimination against people with dementia, but I'm sure they'd rather ride that wave of negative publicity than the much bigger wave of bad publicity associated with thousands of elderly people having their bank accounts drained because they mistakenly installed an app which looked like WhatsApp but was actually something else entirely.
What I don't understand is how absolutely swamped with shovelware and cheap scams every app marketplace seems to be.
Mobile app stores have been bad for a while -- any popular game will have tons of shitty knockoffs with similar names available for download almost immediately -- but in the last few years, even Nintendo of "Nintendo Seal of Quality" fame has their eshops flooded with low-effort sleaze like "Hentai Girls: Golf"
Clearly this is a solvable problem; Reddit and Facebook purchased armies of jannies to carry out "Anti-Evil Operations" against wrongthinkers. The depressing conclusion would be that there are enough slop enjoyers and straight-up cretins out there to make stricter app store curation a financially unwise decision even taking into account the reputational damage caused by this slop. But I'm hoping there's some other reason for it.
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Oh man, I should have included this story, but I forgot.
I had to sign up for a fucking app for my daughter's pediatrician! They literally handled all test results, scheduling, messaging etc exclusively through the Healow app, which was dog shit. I installed it, and attempted to get the account set up and synced with the doctors office properly, in their fucking lobby, and the piece of shit refused to work. Even just handing them my god damned phone and asking them to do it for me, they couldn't fucking do it. Eventually it just fucking worked for reasons that are opaque to everyone after trying enough times, but then eventually the app refused to update and wouldn't work anymore because my phone was too old. Because when you aren't wrestling with dark patterns and enshittification, there is always planned obsolescence.
We have a different pediatrician now. They have an ongoing problem where our Nurse Practitioner which we see is lazy about getting her files submitted, so our billing is always messed up. Nothing major, sometimes they tell us we owe a copay several weeks after we thought we were caught up. But at least there are actual people there we can speak to reliably, and they don't force us to go through a god damned enshittified app.
Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.
I see you are unfamiliar with the Healow app. Yes, it is shitty because they lock you in, and completely stop giving a fuck. It's more or less ubiquitous with Doctors offices, and if your Doctors office uses an app, it's probably Healow. I'm not even aware of another one. I think the Inova hospital system near me doesn't use it... yet. But virtually every other doctors office we had to use in Northern VA used it, although some were better about requiring it than others.
Mine uses Medical Brain.
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That sounds like a nightmare. I've had much better experiences with healthcare in 3rd world countries that don't use apps.
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At some point, I think at least 2-3 years ago, the default Android (and IIRC iOS) camera apps got the ability to scan QR codes. Honestly I try to have as few apps on my phone as I can get away with, though.
ETA: searching says it was 2017-2018 for Android.
Definitely before 2020 for Apple.
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A cursory search says Brave didn't get this feature until Nov 2022. But it's an AI generated answer, so trust but verify. The event at the museum occurred probably summer 2021.
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I'm sure the 130 IQ value is primarily for illustrative purposes, but there's no way in hell that when "popular"/modern democracy was established, the IQ of the average voter was in the 130s. I doubt you'd get there even if only considering land-owning freemen, let alone universal franchise for all "Anglos". It might be doable with a tight oligarchy, but that's not particularly democratic, is it?
To elaborate, 130 IQ is around 98th percentile. Early American democracy would probably have an average of 105-110, accounting for property requirements (implying some education and capabilities). The more universal it got, the closer it approached the population mean.
Since so many reactionaries and conservatives think that was America's heyday, by all right you only need 105 IQ "Anglos" to pull it off. That's not nearly as high a bar. Depending on which stats site you trust, that's only China, SK, Iran, Japan and Singapore. Well, minus being Anglos, but the Ancient Greeks weren't either and they did alright.
I can't speak for US and what bars one had to meet in order to be granted franchise there, but in 1900-01 Lower House elections in the Austrian part of Austria Hungary, 6% of adults had the right to vote. Assuming the population average IQ was 100 and enfranchisement being totally correlated with IQ, this correspends to the cut-off being 123.
But another way to think about it, is taking the meme to mean the average voter should have 130 IQ. Thus one has to find L, such that integrate(x*exp(-((x-mu)/15)^2/2)/sqrt(2pi)/15,x,L,infinity)/integrate(exp(-((x-mu)/15)^2/2)/sqrt(2pi)/15,x,L,infinity)=130. mu being population average IQ, and L the IQ bound for franchise, such that the average voter has 130 IQ. I don't have a CAS at hand to calculate L myself.
Apart from @EvanTh remark that the 6% of the voting class were not top 6% of the IQ, people 125 years ago had significantly lower IQ. This phenomenon is known as Flynn Effect and it has only recently started to plateau or even reverse.
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What makes you think their voting requirements were closely associated with IQ?
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Genuinely kind of surprised that our site doesn’t support native latex.
I mean, he could have used unicode and abbreviated the error function 𝒩 or φ, and the cumulant Φ which is perfectly usable notation. Would have saved like 80% of the chars and 90% of the parens. Not that I would object to having better math support here.
A cutoff of 123 does correspond to a (rounded) average value of 130 by my calculation (for a population mean 100). I didn't understand the need for a CAS though. Seems like something that any modern programing language can numerically solve for. Or just Newton's method if you're too lazy to open up the documentation for your favorite solver and can only remember one root finding algorithm like me.
Edit to add the calculation in case anyone doesn't trust my math (nullius in verba, etc):
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Yes of course, it’s a laughably high threshold. That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108, so gentry landowners having a say 116 average really wouldn’t be out of the question.
Wild. Where can I find out more?
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Basic argument: Victorians had faster reaction times than moderns. Reaction time (which is known to be about 20% correlated with IQ at an individual level) may be a better measure of true population-level g if the Flynn effect (rising population-average IQ test scores over time) is driven by education and not g. If you convert the average Victorian reaction time into an IQ based on the modern reaction time-IQ curve, you get 108. And a 8 IQ-point drop in genetic g is consistent with what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility over the intervening 150 years.
Counterpoint - why do we think that "ability to function in modern society" is better measured by reaction time than performance on IQ tests? All the work which validates the IQ-functionality correlation uses test scores and not reaction time.
How does that work? Under what population parameters?
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There's an obvious potential confounder, and it seems to be present. I checked the first American study showing 208ms (Thompson, H. B. (1903). The mental traits of sex. An experimental investigation of the normal mind in men and women. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.) and the subjects it used were University of Chicago students.
I checked a later American study (Anger, W. K., Cassitto, M. G., Liang, Y. -X., Amador, R., Hooisma, J., Chrislip, D.W., et al. (1993). Comparison of performance from three continents on the WHO-recommended Neurobehavioral) showing 275.9ms. It used subjects living in working class and entry-level white collar housing. The University of Chicago is an elite university and in 1903, universities in general were considerably more elite than today (or 1993). These are different populations.
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