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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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The United Auto Workers have gone on strike: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-union-strike-three-detroit-three-factories-2023-09-15/

What happens if Ford and GM simply say: "okay, you're fired"? This seems to have quite a few benefits, mostly that they can get rid of union workers and remove the threat of another strike.

I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

It should be noted that Tesla is not unionized, and will not be a part of this strike. Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?

I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something. I do think that workers should have an adversarial relationship with their employer, but it seems to me like unions have all but destroyed the american auto industry. I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.

Union jobs offer stability and benefits for no upside. It's not like you can go from warehouse to CEO with union , like you can with a start-up. no stock options either. It's not like you can get a raise for exceptional work, it's all collective. So it tends to benefit the median or mean instead of the outliers who really excel. So there are downsides to joining a union. But I agree that overall they seem overpaid relative to the value they create.

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here). The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.

(And I hate unions but I think this is a good understanding of what their people want)

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)

Lolwut?

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)

Lolwut?

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results

Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?

The story so far—our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests. Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years—to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.

This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests—ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven’s Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.

This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.

I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.

The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/#comment-476694

We have this argument every year. Points in favor include:

  1. Survey IQs mostly match survey SATs from IQ/SAT conversion tables.
  2. One year we asked ACT and that matched too.
  3. One time we made everybody describe which IQ test they took and in what circumstance, and the subset who took provably legit IQ tests given by provably legit psychologists weren’t any different from the rest.

I don’t doubt that a lot of the overly high numbers are people who took a test as kids which wasn’t properly normed for kids their age or something.

Interesting. I dont recall any of these polls or participating in any.

There are no good counterarguments to the standard objections that:

  1. People with impressive IQs highly disproportionately respond to "what's your IQ" questions, for the same reason that rich people disproportionately respond to salary threads, and extremely fit people to gym threads, and promiscuous people to threads about sexual histories etc etc etc. The infamous internet picture thread rule holds true - people who post in 'show us your face' threads on anonymous forums are either (a) delusional or (b) hotter than the average user of said forum.

  2. People Just Lie On The Internet. For an even moderately intelligent midwit, coming up with plausible context for a very high IQ score (where it happened, which test it was, how it correlates with ACT/SAT/GMAT/LSAT scores) takes 5 minutes of research via Google. Of course people lie most to themselves, misremember things, think "oh yeah, I'd definitely have gotten y instead of x score if I'd had a better day or had prepared a little more so I'll just say I got y".

  3. The Motte is now like 10 years out of SSC / LW and has a related-but-substantially-distinct audience. Rats are disproportionately high IQ silicon valley weirdos, the CW thread - /r/Motte - website progression and long lifespan of the community, plus big overlap with /r/drama, redscarepod, various other culture war conversation communities picked up a large number of people of more modest intelligence. Sure, likely still well above average, but not 99th percentile.

Despite 1 and 2, I believe old LW being 130-140 and remaining close if lower as it's grown. More than a few posts there are just college-level math, and many of the remaining posts are analytic philosophy tier in attention to detail, precision, and length (not that either are necessarily true as a result), and often come from people who were math/physics majors. 3 is correct though.

I kind of assume this community is 135 IQ. Scott Sumner once said that Iq level doesn’t read the nyt they go somewhere on the blogosphere. My scores would test around there. I’m curious if not here then where would 135 IQ people go?

I haven’t found an above.

Scott Sumner once said that Iq level doesn’t read the nyt they go somewhere on the blogosphere.

Bill Gates probably has an IQ of at least 155, maybe 160 or higher (Harvard Math 55, publishing something interesting on sorting in undergrad etc), and apparently reads the New York Times cover to cover every day. It's a weird thing to say that smart people don't read the news. But in general it's a fallacy to assume there have to be publications that have an average audience of IQ 135. There may be, but they'll be things like some kinds of math journals in niche subfields, not things that cover general interest topics, like this place.

There may be some similar academic discussion boards for math/physics, but a mainstream political discussion board like this one is never going to be predominantly 99th percentile. There are subreddits like some of the ask-X where the politics may be odious but the raw quality of the writing is on the same level as here. You don't need to be 99th percentile to write most posts or comments here. I'd say the 25th percentile bound of The Motte regular users (more than 200 comments per year) is maybe 90th percentile IQ, sure.

apparently reads the New York Times cover to cover every day.

This makes me think less of his intelligence rather than more given the NYT articles I've actually read. That paper has been incredibly suspect and dubious the entire time I've been paying attention to the media.

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Ya he might. Nyt definitely aims for more of the top 10%. But what’s north of there?

It’s the blogosphere or Reddit.

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