Analytics wrote:I just mention all of this to emphasize that I'm really not as arrogant as I sound. In some ways I'm smart, in other ways I'm not, and in any case none of this has anything to do with somebody's intrinsic worth as a person. Further, smart people use their intelligence to do mental gymnastics and justify false beliefs as often as they use it to figure out the truth. Just because somebody is smart doesn't mean they are right.
This topic sucks. Talking about your IQ in detail is a lot like talking about your income. It's a personal thing that everybody is generally aware of but that you just shouldn't talk about in public.
You would be surprised at how long I have been around under various names. So I decided to take this one.
I have been doctoring quite a bit lately. One doctor asked me how I do when one of my problems is not bothering me. I had to reply, "Denial goes a long way." She had a good laugh at that. Same with the prohibition against saying anything negative about Mormonism, the wrong ears might hear it. Eventually it can become a prohibition against even thinking anything about Mormonism. Such a restriction on the mind.....
I was surprised when someone, in the role of a Special Olympian, asked me what my IQ was. I told him quickly, and was somewhat embarrassed.
Problems with auto-correct: In Helaman 6:39, we see the Badmintons, so similar to Skousenite Mormons, taking over the government and abusing the rights of many.
Analytics wrote:I'm glad you are enjoying the thread. I am too. Do you remember a couple of months ago when I said something to the effect that one of the things that attracts people to Mormonism or keeps them going through the program was the hope of scoring a hot Mormon chick as a wife? I forgot the specific details, but that was the gist. You called me out as being sexist and excluding you. That's when I learned that you are a woman and somehow got it into my head that it was important to go out of my way to make you feel included in the conversation.
Well thank you, Analytics, I really do appreciate your thinking of me and wanting to include me!
Maybe I can clarify, what I was trying to express to you several months ago was that when you said "one of the things that attracts people to Mormonism or keeps them going through the program was the hope of scoring a hot Mormon chick as a wife", a woman reading that sentence cannot help but feel that you were defining people as men. How can a woman feel anything but excluded upon reading that in the middle of a conversation in which she had been fully participating???? (And no offense to the lesbians and bi-s who WOULD want to score a hot chick as a spouse, but you did say Mormon wife.)
In order not to exclude a woman, all you have to do is talk to your audience, both men and women, as people. For example, if you had said "all people want to do is score a hot Mormon chick as a wife, or a well-hung Mormon dude as a husband," or even "all people want to do is score a hot Mormon spouse," it would have been fine.
Bending over the other way and treating a woman differently in a conversation, specifically and only because she is a woman, is just the same thing in the opposite direction, which is what I meant when I said I didn't know why you were singling me out by saying "does that help?"
Don't worry, I feel very welcomed here in most conversations, and having you treat me the same as you would any man participating is all it takes to indicate you are including me. but like I said, I really do appreciate you thinking of me. Thanks!!
Hey Lemmie,
I thought it would be nice to reach out to you on a real-name basis. My name is Roger Loomis. I resigned from Mormonism in 1998, and my story at the time is posted as #96 on Exmormon.org. I'm also the original curator of lds4u.com. I would have done a blog, but the concept hadn't been invented back then.
When I'm not wasting time on these boards, I'm an actuary in Kansas City.
You remind me a bit of Mary Tyler Moore. You got spunk!
Best regards,
Roger
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Thanks for continuing to summarize. I don't have the linchpin yet but I keep thinking I'm being led along a line of thinking that is obvious on the one hand, yet totally counter-intuitive when pressed, based on real life experience on the other. I want to distill what is really wrong with this picture but so far I only see lots of little problems. The BS detector went off for chapter 1 but yet, I can't yet say what the problem exactly is.
Some things you're writing come as little surprise. I almost burst out laughing at the quote you have basically saying that child prodigies are fifteen times less likely to be in poverty than mentally disabled, downs syndrome etc. I'm glad they figured that one out for us.
One attack on Adam Smith capitalism found on Google is that Darwinism shows that individual success doesn't always translate to group success. Moose antlers are cited as too big, making the moose community as a whole slow for predators. Well, the animal kingdom as a whole, to my way of thinking, is still held together in a broad "self-check". Big antlers to me don't defy Adam Smith, but are like Holland taking the wrong road for two minutes, in the grand design of nature. My suggestion early on of asberger communities in silicon valley -- assume for sake of argument not a myth -- would be an example of a "moose antler" check on inbreeding smart people. Even the authors point to low birth rates (coming up?) as a problem for the elite. And are moose communities or lion communities any more successful and neighborly than rabbit communities? Are human communities more successful than bacterial communities?
There are aboriginal tribes that have been stable and "happy" for thousands of years. Is a high rise filled with Wall Street brokers really better off in their human relations than these tribes thanks to their IQs? (assuming the IQs are higher -- either authors wrong because not higher, or wrong because the difference does not make for more stable community) I was blown away on my mission in SA: the townships were some of the friendliest, most community oriented, and CLEANEST communities -- every house is spotless -- i've ever seen and no HOA needed. How is that even possible?
Something is missing. In the Darwin analogy, it seems like the authors are saying that smart people are akin to an invasive species that will dominate everything. IQ is like big antlers for a moose, but the moose just breed bigger and badder until they're king of every jungle. No Marxist revolution possible, it seems to me, after the moose have taken it all for themselves.
One way of looking at the author claim is silly. Suppose an alien civilization 10x smarter than humans: why, they must have dead zero divorce, never do drugs, and be super fulfilled, right? To give the authors some credibility, in my opinion, we have to introduce some kind of sudden change in ecology that allows one trait to turn a species invasive. This apparently is the technology revolution. So start with a state of equilibrium, and then something changes, and then the trait in question, IQ, works toward resource depletion for those without the trait and it's a downward spiral for the losers.
But if you were to eradicate everyone below 120, then a utopia will not follow because a new distribution will form, and assuming the ecology can significantly benefit the new elite, then the resource depletion for the next-gen 65 is a new crisis.
Well, carry on with the reviews, still reading.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
Plugging away here, this chapter compares how IQ and the Social Economic Status (SES) of your parents affect your chances of finishing high school or college.
In the author's own words:
The usual picture of high school dropouts focuses on their socioeconomic circumstances. It is true that most of them are from poor families, but the relationship of socioeconomics to school dropout is not simple. Among whites, almost no one with an IQ in the top quarter of the distribution fails to get a high school education, no matter how poor their families. Dropout is extremely rare throughout the upper half of the IQ distribution. Socioeconomic background has its most powerful effect at the lowest end of the social spectrum, among students who are already below average in intelligence. Being poor has a small effect on dropping out of school independent of IQ; it has a sizable independent effect on whether a person finishes school with a regular diploma or a high school equivalency certificate. To raise the chances of getting a college degree, it helps to be in the upper half of the distribution for either IQ or socioeconomic status. But the advantage of a high IQ outweighs that of high status. Similarly, the disadvantage of a low IQ outweighs that of low status. Youngsters from poor backgrounds with high IQs are likely to get through college these days, but those with low IQs, even if they come from well-to-do backgrounds, are not.
Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 143). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
The picture of where this is going is getting pretty clear. I predict that is will eventually argue that dull blacks do about as poorly as dull whites, and bright blacks do about as well as bright whites. Thus IQ--the thing that explains low performance in whites, is also the best explanation for low performance in blacks. Of course that conclusion is based on the presumption that when blacks or whites both get 105's on IQ tests, they both really have the same level of g.
If you buy into that, then the problem circles back around to what causes so many blacks to be relatively dull. Is it simply their genes, or are there environmental factors that cause the black distribution of intelligence to be different than the white distribution?
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
I think that it is safest to operate on the assumption that most of the difference is due to environmental factors. Even if there are genetic factors (maybe high IQ slaves were more uppity and therefore had more trouble surviving slavery), the waste of human potential in assuming otherwise is too tragic. People who are bright but are taught to have no hope (like the young man we were discussing in PM) are more likely to self-destruct or turn their rage outward.
We are talking about 300 years of injustice here, and although the color line is getting more and more blurry, there is still fear and anger on both sides.
Problems with auto-correct: In Helaman 6:39, we see the Badmintons, so similar to Skousenite Mormons, taking over the government and abusing the rights of many.
Plugging forward, this is my least favorite chapter. The basic point is that while the vast majority of people in all cohorts are gainfully employed and productive members of society, people lower on the IQ scale have higher rates of either being unemployed or not participating in the labor force. Having a low IQ leads to a higher rate of being disabled, and also to a higher rate of not working if you aren't disabled.
Again, this chapter is quite reliant on the NLSY data. While the first section of the book was a blend of data and an economic argument about why having a high IQ is advantageous, this section of the book is just describing several regressions on this one data source.
In the authors' words:
Economists distinguish between being unemployed and being out of the labor force. The unemployed are looking for work unsuccessfully. Those out of the labor force are not looking, at least for the time being. Among young white men in their late 20s and early 30s, both unemployment and being out of the labor force are strongly predicted by low cognitive ability, even after taking other factors into account.
Many of the white males in the NLSY who were out of the labor force had the obvious excuse: They were still in college or graduate school. Of those not in school, 15 percent spent at least a month out of the labor force in 1989. The proportion was more than twice as high in cognitive Class V as in Class I. Socioeconomic background was not the explanation. After the effects of IQ were taken into account, the probability of spending time out of the labor force went up, not down, as parental SES rose.
Why are young men out of the labor force? One obvious possibility is physical disability. Yet here too cognitive ability is a strong predictor: Of the men who described themselves as being too disabled to work, more than nine out of ten were in the bottom quarter of the IQ distribution; fewer than one in twenty were in the top quarter. A man’s IQ predicted whether he described himself as disabled better than the kinds of job he had held. We do not know why intelligence and physical problems are so closely related, but one possibility is that less intelligent people are more accident prone.
The results are similar for unemployment. Among young white men who were in the labor market, the likelihood of unemployment for high school graduates and college graduates was equally dependent on cognitive ability. Socioeconomic background was irrelevant once intelligence was taken into account.
Most men, whatever their intelligence, are working steadily. However, for that minority of men who are either out of the labor force or unemployed, the primary risk factor seems to be neither socioeconomic background nor education but low cognitive ability.
Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (pp. 155-156). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
This chapter was truly awful. Up until now it felt like I was reading a scholarly book about sociology, perhaps of inconsistent and controversial quality. This chapter feels like pure propaganda.
Here is the summary in the authors' words:
Rumors of the death of the traditional family have much truth in them for some parts of white American society— those with low cognitive ability and little education— and much less truth for the college educated and very bright Americans of all educational levels. In this instance, cognitive ability and education appear to play mutually reinforcing but also independent roles.
For marriage, the general rule is that the more intelligent get married at higher rates than the less intelligent. This relationship, which applies across the range of intelligence, is obscured among people with high levels of education because college and graduate school are powerful delayers of marriage.
Divorce has long been more prevalent in the lower socioeconomic and educational brackets, but this turns out to be explained Once the marriage-breaking impact of low intelligence is taken into account, people of higher socioeconomic status are more likely to get divorced than people of lower status.
Illegitimacy, one of the central social problems of the times, is strongly related to intelligence. White women in the bottom 5 percent of the cognitive ability distribution are six times as likely to have an illegitimate first child as those in the top 5 percent. One out of five of the legitimate first babies of women in the bottom 5 percent was conceived prior to marriage, compared to fewer than one out of twenty of the legitimate babies to women in the top 5 percent. Even among young women who have grown up in broken homes and among young women who are poor— both of which foster illegitimacy— low cognitive ability further raises the odds of giving birth illegitimately. Low cognitive ability is a much stronger predisposing factor for illegitimacy than low socioeconomic background.
At lower educational levels, a woman’s intelligence best predicts whether she will bear an illegitimate child. Toward the higher reaches of education, almost no white women are having illegitimate children, whatever their family background or intelligence.
Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 167). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
The most obvious problem with this chapter is they don't adequately address the rather obvious and widely accepted fact that economic stress leads to marital problems and divorce. They look at the relationship between IQ and divorce and the relationship between the economic status [u]of your parents[/I] with whether you get divorced, but they don't consider you own current economic status!
We can safely say the reason they don't show the statistics on this one is because it doesn't support the case they are making about low IQ. They do address it verbally like this:
One final point about the divorce results is worth noting, however. These findings may help explain the common observation that divorce is less likely when the husband has high education, income, or socioeconomic status or that marriages are more likely to fall apart if they start when the couple is afflicted with unemployment. 16 If we had showed a breakdown of divorce rates in the NLSY by social and economic measures alone, we too would have shown such effects. But each of those variables is correlated with cognitive ability, and the studies that examine them almost never include an independent measure of intelligence per se. Some portion of what has so often been observed about the risk factors for divorce turns out to be more narrowly the result of low cognitive ability.
Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 177). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
That's a copout. If people who make $100k a year with a low IQ get divorced more often than people who make $100k a year with a high IQ, then they would have an interesting story. But if the actual proximate cause of broken marriages are economic stress, it is misleading to say the broken families are caused by the things that cause economic stress rather than the economic stress itself.
The other thing that gets to me on this one is the notion that divorce is necessarily bad. People having the options to get out of bad marriages is a good thing.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
But if the actual proximate cause of broken marriages are economic stress, it is misleading to say the broken families are caused by the things that cause economic stress rather than the economic stress itself.
Right. If you suck out resources but allow the high-IQs to escape, then the social problems are due to lack of resources. If the authors were to ever watch The Walking Dead, they'd see that when the institutions that keep the "elite" safe fail and everyone is hungry, the high-IQs will commit the greatest atrocities to survive.
The other thing that gets to me on this one is the notion that divorce is necessarily bad. People having the options to get out of bad marriages is a good thing.
And the cost of divorce is lower for poor people, it's freaking obvious. Wealthy businessmen don't get divorced because that's a lot of freaking money, but in my experiences with business trips and so forth, executives have very little issues cheating.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
Re: Disability and IQ A person with a high IQ and a physical health problem can compensate and still usually do well. A person with a low IQ and a strong body can compensate and still usually do well. A physical health problem in a lower IQ person is more disabling because they don't have the compensatory skills. They consider it so because it is so.
How can I explain this in a way those guys will understand?
Problems with auto-correct: In Helaman 6:39, we see the Badmintons, so similar to Skousenite Mormons, taking over the government and abusing the rights of many.
But if the actual proximate cause of broken marriages are economic stress, it is misleading to say the broken families are caused by the things that cause economic stress rather than the economic stress itself.
Right. If you suck out resources but allow the high-IQs to escape, then the social problems are due to lack of resources. If the authors were to ever watch The Walking Dead, they'd see that when the institutions that keep the "elite" safe fail and everyone is hungry, the high-IQs will commit the greatest atrocities to survive.
Excellent example! It's easy to be a model citizen when you are comfortably living in abundance. That's true regardless of IQ.
Gadianton wrote:
The other thing that gets to me on this one is the notion that divorce is necessarily bad. People having the options to get out of bad marriages is a good thing.
And the cost of divorce is lower for poor people, it's freaking obvious. Wealthy businessmen don't get divorced because that's a lot of freaking money, but in my experiences with business trips and so forth, executives have very little issues cheating.
Exactly. This chapter has a rosy view of the past, back when America was great. The statistics it describes and the way it is framed is basically saying that sin is "strongly correlated with low cognitive ability."
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
but like I said, I really do appreciate you thinking of me. Thanks!!