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I just took another batch of IQ tests for some poor suffering undergrads and felt that they were hilariously swingy.
I've always scored around 130; but one or two questions can drop your right out of/into that bracket , and the pattern recognition questions are easy to get wrong through test format. Eg, in this test there was a sequence of numbers displayed such that the question number looked like it was part of the sequence. I only noticed because it made the sequence all fucky.
This ontop of the other (crapyer) test where you basically play word association half the time, the whole enterprise of IQ testing fills me with doubt. I have no doubt I am "intelligent" enough to be somewhere near where I test on the bell curve, but 97th percentile feels way too high to me. I feel like a better test would be to present my with a piece of broken machinery I've never seen before and timing me while I try to fix it, only that's kinda hard to feed into numpy for pretty graphs.
Are the IQ tests used for actual funded trials different than what is used by starving students, are all of them shakey as hell buzzfeed affairs, or am I just biased against them for some reason?
Were they IQ tests, or were they just researching cognition and making sloppy estimates? An actual IQ test is standardized and normed, and administered by professionals (not, generally, undergrads).
In my experience, it is often incredibly difficult for smart people to truly grasp how stupid most people are. This is an extremely pesky fact because it's almost impossible to discuss without sounding hopelessly pretentious, but the fact remains--a good portion of American college students, who statistically represent the "best and brightest" ~40% of their generation, cannot follow or construct a formal argument without extensive coaching.
And I mean this in the most basic, technical sense of identifying premises and relating them to conclusions. For example, I once made a presentation about LSAT success to a room of undergraduates aiming for law school. I grabbed some sample questions from the LSAC website, that I figured would be easy enough to serve as a clear example of "what to expect" without scaring the audience too badly. In an audience of about 20 upperclassmen, there was one student (a physics major) who was able to answer the questions. Everyone else was totally mystified. For reference, here is a recent LSAC sample question:
Now, the LSAT is not an IQ test, but the point is that I work with university students all the time, and I am actively aware of things like how many struggle to pass the logic classes, algebra classes, etc. But even then I constantly find myself overestimating their ability to just engage in basic reasoning tasks. And no, I'm not an ivy league professor, I'm not teaching our nation's elite, but estimating from SAT ranges most of my students are generally within the 110-130 IQ range. With a bit of coaching and regular study, they can be trained to do things like pass an algebra class, though most will forget what they've learned within a decade or two, especially if they don't put it to use in their professions.
In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott Alexander writes a bit about the strength of "filter bubbles" that separate the "red tribe" from the "blue tribe." In my experience, there are also filter bubbles that separate people by IQ. I have red-tribe friends running a wide range of apparent intelligence levels. I also have many blue-tribe friends, but all of them are either lawyers or college professors or similar. Low-IQ blue tribers might as well not exist, as far as my social experiences go. I'm sure they do exist--I am reminded of their existence any time I accidentally read reddit without logging in!
If you're testing in the 97th percentile I can't imagine why you'd feel biased against IQ tests, which seem to be telling you something most people want to hear: that you're really special! This may be muted because you don't feel special (possibly as a result of IQ filter bubbles), or because the way in which you are special doesn't amount to much if it isn't paired with some mixture of conscientiousness and luck. But finally it is probably important to remember that, as a statistical measure, IQ is of much greater use when discussing populations than when discussing individuals. Yes, knowing an individual's professionally-established IQ probably gives you some information about them, but IQ ranges in professions are nevertheless quite broad.
TBQH, red tribers don’t segregated themselves by IQ to nearly the same extent as blue tribers.
This sounds intuitively true to me, but I've never explicitly noticed this before. Do you know of a study/source measuring this, or is just obvious anecdotal trends? And why do think it is this way? Is it just that the Blue Tribe places intelligence on a pedestal and so care about it more when selecting friends and relationships, while Red Tribers are more down to earth? Is it because of Blue Tribers congregating in universities and cities and that somehow drives this segregation, while Red Tribers are more likely to stay in their hometown and mingle with everyone else who lives there?
When I was a kid, my school peers were all fellow AP-track kids with similar 1400-1600 SAT scores. Nowadays the majority of those kids all went to similar selective colleges, my peers from my selective colleges were mostly other kids who were AP-track kids at their own high schools. At work, my peers were at their own selective colleges with other AP-track kids from other high schools. And so on and so forth. I met my wife in college, her college friends and work peers all track similarly. A lot of our Blue Tribe hobbies "appropriate to our class" like Yoga and Rock Climbing and Art Galleries just expose us to other people who attended other selective colleges etc etc ditto ditto.
On the other hand, my friends from the Boy Scouts, from Church, and from local team sports ranged. Some were average (1200 SAT) kids from similar suburban houses. Some of my lifelong best friends from scouts lived in trailer parks. Some of my friends from church are good people, but basically not that bright, cardboard factory workers. Even today, guys at my gun club range (lol) in profession, from engineers to cops to trash collectors.
That's the basic argument: Blue Tribe life is all about professional attainment and as such focuses itself in work-home-status hobbies that stratify class (and thus largely IQ) lines. Red Tribe life centers itself around cultural institutions that cut across classes.
This is the basic argument of [Coming Apart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book); I would note that both my argument and his only apply to White Americans and not evenly to other races for complicated reasons.
Okay, I have to link to this. Yes, he's shouty, but it's part of the performance image he's built up.
"This is food for sheep and people who do yoga" 😁
Thanks, I hate it.
More seriously though, what is this meant to convey? That asparagus is high class? This might be wildly pedantic but IME that's very much not the case - I live in a rural area with a lot of ditches not near cropland or irrigation systems. As a result there's a rather vibrant scene every summer for about two weeks where wild asparagus is freely available to anyone who feels like pulling over to the side of the road and walking down into the tall grass to snap off a pound or two (or twenty) of the stuff. It has a very similar vibe to people who go mushroom hunting after a good rain, something that could be considered "outdoorsy" or "being in tune with nature". In practice I've found that it's more people who are already farming/gardening/hunting/fishing, drive their F-150 three blocks to the town gas station for their Marb lights, started working when they were sixteen and held down a job somewhere doing something ever since.
No, I think it was just funny. Who on earth thinks of putting asparagus into a sweet cake? Some kind of savoury quiche or tart, sure - but a cake? It was an 80s recipe, but I have to agree with Hollis that it does have the vibe of "whole organic vegan all-natural gathered under the light of the full moon" types.
I've gone mushroom picking in the fields with my dad as a youngster years back, but we never thought of "okay, now coat them in chocolate and stick them on top of an apple tart" 😁
Hey, fair enough. To me that recipe just looks like a tweaked carrot cake with ferns instead of root vegetables, sounds kind of gross but I might give it a shot.
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