https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/iq-scores-going-down-research-flynn-effect.html

It starts with a London-based researcher, Edward Dutton, who has documented decades-long declines in average IQs across several Western countries, including France and Germany. “We are becoming stupider,” announces Dutton at the program’s start. “This is happening. It’s not going to go away, and we have to try to think about what we’re going to do about it.”

It’s wrong to hint that scores on tests of memory and abstract thinking have been falling everywhere, and in a simple way. But at least in certain countries—notably in Northern Europe—the IQ drops seem very real. Using data from Finland, for example, where men are almost always drafted into military service, whereupon they’re tested for intelligence, Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since. Similar trends have been documented using data from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. At some point in the mid-1990s, IQ scores in these countries tipped into decay, losing roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of a point per year. While there isn’t any sign of this effect on U.S. test results (a fact that surely bears on our indifference to the topic), researchers have found hints of something similar in Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Edit: I won;t speak for anyone else, but I know i have been getting dumber since 1997. Once I left College, it has been all downhill!

 Easy E wrote:
Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since.

 Easy E wrote:
began to slide in 1997,

 Easy E wrote:
1997

The year King of the Hill came out. Co-created by Mike Judge, also co-creator of Idiocracy.

Did he open Pandora's Box, or was this his plan all along?

I blame reality TV, and it’s hellbent crusade to make the most vapid and moronic people famous.

It's always been there.

Bread and circuses.

IQ is junk science. I am extremely skeptical of any study involving it.

I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

 nels1031 wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since.

 Easy E wrote:
began to slide in 1997,

 Easy E wrote:
1997

The year King of the Hill came out. Co-created by Mike Judge, also co-creator of Idiocracy.

Did he open Pandora's Box, or was this his plan all along?

Nahh its all due to the catastrophic release of vast amounts of stupid following a car accident in a Paris tunnel...

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Hey! At least mine had some studies and such in it!

I can't find it but I recall reading a quotation by a member of the clergy about how the modern children and particularly teenagers and young adults of his time were drunken louts. Too stupid and lazy to achieve anything; to drunk and intoxicated with lust to ever amount to any decent human being.


And it was written several hundred years ago.

So if we are getting dumber and amounting to nothing then we've been doing it for a long time.

I believe this. There are tons of morons on this planet. But I think there has always been, its just now they have the tests to prove it.

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Hey! At least mine had some studies and such in it!

That's fair

I just think the premise is weird. People have always been idiots. Arguably all democracies are idiocracies because expecting laymen to understand the complexities of the national economy, foreign policy, and social ills is a completely asinine prospect. There's a saying in either law or medicine (maybe both) that clients/patients fundamentally are incapable of being fully informed because they can't understand the procedures and methods that surround them and I think democracy functions in a similar odd spot.

It's simply not very insightful to point out the 'idiocracy' and at this point I feel like threads about it being real are more common than people who've even seen the movie XD

If you dig hard enough, you'll find enough studies that say the opposite, that IQ is steadily climbing year after year.

I'm with Peregrine. I'm a very average individual, yet always tested relatively high. (YMMV, anecdote vs. data and all that jazz) I call shenanigans.

I agree that IQ is an inadequate measure of intelligence. However, it is a conventional measure and in some European countries the measure we use shows a decline.

Well, we DO have a former reality star, who's been in pro wrestling, and at least one porno star for president. Not sure how far off the suped up trike as the presidential motorcade is really.

I.Q. tests are generally written by people who consider themselves intelligent, and thus are written in such a way that people who think like the writer score higher than those who do not. That alone makes them highly suspect.

I knew a guy who tested poorly on IQ tests - around 90, below average. His grammar was atrocious, and he claimed to be terrible at math. But give him a real-world problem and he was VERY good at coming up with an answer... and would re-calculate baseball statistics on the fly while we watched a game.

But because the IQ test said he was below average, he believed it and played the role...

Really? People have literally been saying this all the way back since the invention of writing (and they were probably saying it before that as well, but that hasn't been recorded). Well, not entirely literally since they did not use the concept of IQ, but they did say that youngsters "these days" were stupid and badly mannered. Literally every human generation ever since the dawn of time has said that. And if even a bit of that is true, then humans must all have been unimaginable geniuses back in the Stone Age.
It must be said that Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo Sapiens though...

Also, as a sidenote, IQ is only a relative measurement. You can only compare IQ if the people involved take exactly the same test. With "studies" (really more pseudoscience) like this, that is virtually never the case. Different IQ tests are calibrated and set up differently, so comparing between different IQ tests is meaningless since you can't know whether the difference is due to a difference in IQ or a difference in the calibration or the specific questions.
For example, there is something called the Flynn effect in IQ tests. Since IQ tests are all supposed to average out at 100 (which is the 'default' IQ), test makers adapt their tests when they start to fall outside of the accepted range. This has, over the past decades and centuries, led to IQ tests getting progressively harder. It is estimated for example that an average person from 1910 who got a score of 100 on his test, would only be able to get a score of 70 on a present-day test (although again, it is hard to be precise on this since you can't be sure how much of the difference is due to differences in the test and how much of it is due to a difference in intelligence).

Anyways, none of it is going to matter since we will all be cyborgs in the future anyways. Complete with fully automated luxury gay space communism. We could just get an extra processor implant or something to increase our brain output, which already would be like a supercomputer.

Or difference in education, too. A college professor from 1910 would seriously struggle with a lot of concepts that the modern college freshman takes for granted. A factory worker from 1910 would be sunk without a trace.

Medical advances keep idiots from being killed off by natural selection. Then they have a bunch of kids that are also unable to be killed by their own stupidity.

Idiocracy is real.

I'm with LoH and Peregrine here.

However, one thing I will say, is that I've read a number of pretty damn good studies on the nature of intelligence (not IQ tests) and how it is changing. A number of the studies I've personally come across and read via my university library have stated that while many people are getting "smarter" we as a whole are losing certain elements of our memory. Basically, there are segments of the population wherein aspects of short term memory are less robust compared to similar populations of bygone eras. One of these studies did note certain specializations are affected differently. . .Ie, highly specialized trades, higher degree holders (usually focusing on PhD holders) are much more pronounced in the variations on what is remembered vs. what is not.


So, I'd say that on the whole, the educated population is getting smarter, however it may not appear like it because with things like google, we do not "need" to remember information for longer periods of time than it takes to satisfy whatever drove us to look up the information in the first place.

Yeah, it boggles my mind how crap my short term memory is especially when I think that people of older generations must have had great short term memory because they could not simply write everything down.

How many phone numbers does anyone remember these days?

However, memorisation is a skill that one can improve if necessary. I don't know how much it has to do with general intelligence.

Psychologists view general intelligence as the capacity for abstract thinking. I don't think anyone claims there is a reliable test for this, unless they have some kind of axe to grind. (Like "proving" that white people are naturally cleverer.)

I think one thing people overlook is that today there is VASTLY more information access and bloat than there ever was in the past. You've got news going 24 hours a day; the internet; a very wide social range; driving (that's one solid period of information and processing and choice making that you've got to make in one constant stream until its over) etc..

I would say that the average person today is bombarded by way more information and a lot of which is very casual or throw-away, but its still here. A lot of the time one sees stupid people its actually possible to find that they know a reasonable (or somethimes a lot) about a very specific subject; just that they don't have the wider splatter of knowledge.

In the past this might well have been more muted because many people trained in a craft or skill or worked within the family line of work. There was far less the idea that you'd move from being a factory worker to a shop manager to a farm labourer to a manager again and then something else etc....




I'd also say that a lot of "stupidity" can be wrong prioritizing. Take phone numbers, most people choose not to remember them today because we don't have to, we prioritize that we don't have to remember the string of numbers and thus repeat them over and over etc...; because its in the phone book or in the digital phone book. However its just as possible that people can prioritize, say, the name and address of superstars and their significant others instead of mathematics and sciences. We might consider that person stupid, however what it more correctly is is that they've prioritized in information that many of us would consider non-essential (or which would only be essential within a limited range of work placements).

There are also those who refuse to learn, you can see this groups like farmers (yes sorry I'm going to say it!). It's not that they are stupid, but that many of them simply consider a lot of school based academic work as non-essential when they've already got a lot of work (real work) at home on the farm, which they consider to be a higher priority. So they might not be able to do maths or english or science to a high level - but they can hook up a 3 point linkage, clean out the sprayer, birth lambs, handle livestock and rebuild half the engine of a basic tractor.



Intelligence tests try to avoid all this by being abstract, but that in itself can be a skill. I'd wager many people could boost their intelligence test scores if they were aware of the test content (even if only roughly what it would entail) and then practised before hand. So a smart person who takes quite a few tests might well appear smarter than they are because they've started to learn how to game the system. They know there's going to be that bit about remembering shapes so they spend time practising remembering random shapes from a selection etc...

I'd also say that a big cornerstone of learning is repetition and that modern school environments don't push repetition of learning as much as they possibly should. Things like times tables that many older generations know by heart, they know because they did them every single day repeating over and over for years. It was "drummed into them" and because they had to use them all the time (no calculators) it stuck

Something people overlook is that this is an average. However intelligent people by and large do not have children with less intelligent people. What is happening is that the lower end of the intellect spectrum in responsible for a greater portion of population growth. This means that while the average is indeed falling, that people are getting dumber is questionable--rather the less intelligent are the same they were before, there are simply more of them.

And honestly, intelligence is a skill. Some people have more talent for it than others, but I imagine we can all think of someone who squandered their capacity or someone who is not particularly bright but has learned to compensate by applying critical thinking & rational thought.

Ultimately I find the idiocracy idea great for comedy but in real-world application it is sensationalist nonsense that does not represent a real problem.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Hey! At least mine had some studies and such in it!

That's fair

I just think the premise is weird. People have always been idiots. Arguably all democracies are idiocracies because expecting laymen to understand the complexities of the national economy, foreign policy, and social ills is a completely asinine prospect. There's a saying in either law or medicine (maybe both) that clients/patients fundamentally are incapable of being fully informed because they can't understand the procedures and methods that surround them and I think democracy functions in a similar odd spot.

It's simply not very insightful to point out the 'idiocracy' and at this point I feel like threads about it being real are more common than people who've even seen the movie XD

Well, at least they put some research behind the thesis. IQ tests are a terrible measure of intelligence, but it is a conventional measure that has been used for sometime and that we can compare over time. You could easily make a "garbage in, garbage out" argument against it and I would not disagree.

However, this article at least uses the conventional benchmark to show that in some European countries where everyone is tested the same for military service, there has been a decline in the IQ score results over the course of time. Therefore, people are in general in these countries and in the demographics they represent getting "dumber".

Therefore, this is not the same as Socrates saying "Kids today!" or that people have always been idiots argument. This one is backed up by some form of conventional measure, a significant sample size, and actual data comparison to come to a conclusion. Therefore, this is way better than "Trump's election= idiocracy" type thread.

Thing is there are also other things to consider. First up is the quality of education, its no lie that the amount of bureaucracy has increased significantly in a lot of western schools and that the way many now operate there might well be a significant reduction in overall teaching quality and capability.

Another aspect is that whilst many people are drafted into the military, the scores are weighted on a segment of the society only. It could be that the overall picture isn't changing, but that those who are ending up enlisted represent a segment of society that is not as smart as others (ergo that there are ways out of enlistment for those - say - in further education*)

So part of it might not be a biological change, but a social aspect; both in the training of new youngsters and in the selection of samples for study. Personally my first instinct would be to look at education and how it is operating and what has changed over the years. I'd wager one would find more gaps and issues there than in the biological aspects.

Especially as the time frames involved are tiny when compared to genetic changes in society (esp for humans who breed very slowly compared to dogs, cats or other species that might more readily show such genetic migration over such a span of years)

*I've no idea if this is the case or not, its purely an example to illustrate that there might be selection bias in the samples.

 Easy E wrote:

However, this article at least uses the conventional benchmark to show that in some European countries where everyone is tested the same for military service, there has been a decline in the IQ score results over the course of time. Therefore, people are in general in these countries and in the demographics they represent getting "dumber".

I guess there's a part of me that wonders (and I'll admit I'm too lazy to actually look it up) whether Finland's military "IQ" test resembles anything like the US's ASVAB. . . As far as I've seen in other articles about our military test, is that it isn't measuring "IQ" at all. There's been a few places where I've seen people stating that there are a wide range of questions on our ASVAB that actually do not have a "correct" answer, because the various line scores are there to determine "how" the test taker processes thoughts and processes information. Which if that is actually true, goes a long way to explaining the 2 main/big circles of the "population groups within my MOS" (MOS being military job, for those who aren't aware). Basically, in my job in the military, there were guys/gals who were crazy book smart but lacked what you might call common sense or street smarts or, whatever term. The other main group were those who weren't what you'd call book smart, but DID have all the common sense/street smarts or whatever. . . And being that our job was a maintenance one, it always interested me to watch how the different "type" of intelligence went about troubleshooting a down system. . . . The hyper intelligent guys started in the book, very logical thinking A to B to C. The "street smart" guys started in the system, often taking things apart until things started looking "right" and then finding the problem by process of elimination.


With that big long story, I guess my point is, with the military ASVAB, it gave my job plenty of "smart" people (it was one of the tougher MOSs to qualify for in the first place, and there are almost no waivers for it), but that the ASVAB doesn't seem to measure IQ, but rather differentiates a person who can do a job from a person who cant, regardless of "how" they end up at a solution.

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Anyone else driven nuts that the movie is really just a replotting of 'Million Marching Idiots' yet gets the credit? Like it's the first time anyone ever thought of the premise.

The movie is a low-brow, unoriginal reboot of another story. You could litteraly argue that it itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 Easy E wrote:
I agree that IQ is an inadequate measure of intelligence. However, it is a conventional measure and in some European countries the measure we use shows a decline.

A decline in what, though? You can't just say "IQ going down, therefore everyone is getting the dumbs", there could be any number of reasons behind why, from easy access to knowledge through technology altering the way people learn and think, to stress and anxiety due to changing economic circumstances impacting people when taking the tests. Even if you believe IQ was a useful and accurate measure of intelligence in the past, is it any more in a world with the internet in everyone's pocket?

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I agree that IQ is an inadequate measure of intelligence. However, it is a conventional measure and in some European countries the measure we use shows a decline.

A decline in what, though? You can't just say "IQ going down, therefore everyone is getting the dumbs", there could be any number of reasons behind why, from easy access to knowledge through technology altering the way people learn and think, to stress and anxiety due to changing economic circumstances impacting people when taking the tests. Even if you believe IQ was a useful and accurate measure of intelligence in the past, is it any more in a world with the internet in everyone's pocket?

That's the $64 Thousand dollar question now isn't it. What are the reasons for the decline? Perhaps, we could even discuss theories and hypothesis in this very thread!

 Easy E wrote:

That's the $64 Thousand dollar question now isn't it. What are the reasons for the decline? Perhaps, we could even discuss theories and hypothesis in this very thread!

Well, undoubtedly a lot of it has to do with a taboo subject that starts with a P and ends with an "olitics". I suppose there are other academic means of discussing this as well. Since y'all know I love history and all that, I'd point to how prior to the 20th century, there really wasnt that much need for a hugely literal populace, and so the organized levels of schooling that we see today, simply didnt exist. Even in the early 20th century, it didn't take a rocket scientist to turn a wrench on an assembly line. There did come a point tho, that when we wanted to do things like, I dunno, launch living gak into space, that we needed a more educated workforce (on the whole), and so we saw increased care for educational efforts.


As others have pointed out, when it comes to actual educational stuff, it is no longer the case where one *needs* to memorize names and dates from class 1, so that they can pass a final. . . Control+F works just great. Same goes for using google and other internet functions. On the one hand, I think there is an affect on memory, but at the same time, I kinda disagree. . . For instance, ask a lot of people on this forum for the BS of a random 40k unit, and you'll no doubt find that many/most of them (particularly ones who play the army of the unit you mention) get the answer correct. I've met many people that can get 40k rules down after basically one reading, but cannot use the correct form of there, their, or they're. And this filters out to all sorts of things. Random baseball trivia, Star Trek/Star Wars background stuff, so on and so forth.

 Easy E wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I agree that IQ is an inadequate measure of intelligence. However, it is a conventional measure and in some European countries the measure we use shows a decline.

A decline in what, though? You can't just say "IQ going down, therefore everyone is getting the dumbs", there could be any number of reasons behind why, from easy access to knowledge through technology altering the way people learn and think, to stress and anxiety due to changing economic circumstances impacting people when taking the tests. Even if you believe IQ was a useful and accurate measure of intelligence in the past, is it any more in a world with the internet in everyone's pocket?

That's the $64 Thousand dollar question now isn't it. What are the reasons for the decline? Perhaps, we could even discuss theories and hypothesis in this very thread!

Well this might be a reason.

IQ tests were originally developed with a preference towards upper and middle class experiences, and a bias against lower class individuals(as well as certain ethnic origins). IE: Somebody with a higher social and education background was more likely to do well on the tests. It was not really an indicator of someone's intelligence, but rather an indicator of experiences. If you hadn't had certain experiences common to more educated and wealthy individuals you are less likely to do well. Basically they were meant to prove the riffraff were stupid and reinforce the wealthy's perception that they were smarter than everybody else.

Its possible that since most of the social norms and practices that were done by the middle and upper classes at the time most of the IQ tests were written are not longer practiced by most people of all social groups that people simply struggle more on these tests. Not because of lowering intelligence, but simply because the stuff the test actually tests you on is no longer really applicable to anybody it shows an overall decline.

If anything, IQ tests are really a test that predicts your social class, according to late 1800s/early 1900s class structures. They are not a measure of intelligence. Especially since intelligence isn't a linear spectrum but more like a multi-dimensional space where one person might have a high intelligence relating to one subject but a very low one relating to another.

Example: A Victorian Gentleman might be well versed in the fine arts of music, while a lowly street urchin won't be. So when it comes to Music the Gentleman is smarter. However the Urchin is almost certainly more intelligent when it comes to navigating the twisted backstreets of London. An IQ test would however show the Gentleman to be more intelligent, however thats not what it is actually measuring.

That certainly used to be the case and was used to justify various prejudices about race and class.

However, modern IQ tests are designed to test pure abstract thinking.

If there is a visible decline in intelligence in the test group, it could be caused by selection of a test group with declining intelligence, and not representative of the population as a whole.

For example, 30 years ago about 10% of British teenagers went to university. It is now about 40%. That would seem likely to dilute the talent pool a bit, resulting in lower average scores.

 Vulcan wrote:
I.Q. tests are generally written by people who consider themselves intelligent, and thus are written in such a way that people who think like the writer score higher than those who do not. That alone makes them highly suspect.

I knew a guy who tested poorly on IQ tests - around 90, below average. His grammar was atrocious, and he claimed to be terrible at math. But give him a real-world problem and he was VERY good at coming up with an answer... and would re-calculate baseball statistics on the fly while we watched a game.

But because the IQ test said he was below average, he believed it and played the role...

One of my brothers is that to a T. In school they said he was below average and needed special classes to learn and blah blah blah. He would come off kind of dumb in certain situations but he is gifted in being able to repair anything mechanical. Doesn't matter what it is,if it broke he can repair it,I guarantee it.

On thing I've come to firmly believe in is that, through nature/nurture (and in most cases its like a combination of the two) some people, esp when young, are very capable of learning theory. Ergo they can be book smart.

Others are very incapable of that kind of focused learning, however they react far better to hands-on situations and teaching.

Sadly modern schools focus far more on the book smarts than the hand skills and many hand-craft lessons are often far too short and of too high a density of students to staff to really make them good enough for most.
There is also a heavy bias in the system against practical skills with most of your grades and scores being book smarts and examination papers. .


I've often felt such students would benefit far more from being taken out of the classrooms for 3 or so days and being put into a practical apprentice situation. Ensure they get their key basics of reading, writing and maths, but give them something practical instead as the primary focus of their education. I'm fairly sure a good number of disruptive/failing students might well flourish under such a system far more than trying to beat book learning into them for most of their most formative years.

I definitely feel like something’s changed. For example, when I was a kid (and I’m talking from the age of four), we knew to stay off the road when cars were present, and we had a system in place to deal with it (the old call out “car” and move off the road system).

Now however, kids are actively charging out onto the road to literally play with the traffic. I pull into my street, one dopey kid shouts “yay” and literally runs as fast as she can towards my car with her arms outstretched as if I was I her parent, then gets all hurt and confused when I blast the horn at her.

However, I don’t think this is related to intelligence though. I think it’s more to do with discipline.

 KingCracker wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
I.Q. tests are generally written by people who consider themselves intelligent, and thus are written in such a way that people who think like the writer score higher than those who do not. That alone makes them highly suspect.

I knew a guy who tested poorly on IQ tests - around 90, below average. His grammar was atrocious, and he claimed to be terrible at math. But give him a real-world problem and he was VERY good at coming up with an answer... and would re-calculate baseball statistics on the fly while we watched a game.

But because the IQ test said he was below average, he believed it and played the role...

One of my brothers is that to a T. In school they said he was below average and needed special classes to learn and blah blah blah. He would come off kind of dumb in certain situations but he is gifted in being able to repair anything mechanical. Doesn't matter what it is,if it broke he can repair it,I guarantee it.

And this is why I’m solidly in favour of reworking the education system.

Me, I’m lucky enough to have an abstract mind. My IQ is somewhere around 130. You give me a maths textbook, and I’ll get it. But ask me to apply it to a real world problem, and I’m all sixes and sevens.

For those unable to do abstract thinking, why not show them a practical application? For joinery, it’s knowing your angles, and the properties of materials. Any joiner will want to measure up a job, know how to apply a reasonable margin of error, and tell the client a precise cost of materials. And indeed, which woods are suitable and why. Electrician? They need to be able to grasp the maximum safe load, and how much juice the mains provide, and how to divvy that up amongst the rooms, based on likely consumption.

A very lucky few can do both. But for everyone else, the education system needs to provide. Otherwise you get bright kids that happen not to be academic get bored and switch off. And for peeps like me, you end up with an unchallenging curriculum that bores us and switches us off.

Education. One size doesn’t fit all. So let’s work on that.

While that is very true, you also need the flexibility to be able to deal with people who blossom late or whatever. At what age do you assess kids and send them down one path or the other?

In the UK the problem is we start to separate the children at age 7 -- which is before some countries start teaching reading! -- and there isn't a proper non-academic path to send them down.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
In the UK the problem is we start to separate the children at age 7 -- which is before some countries start teaching reading! -- and there isn't a proper non-academic path to send them down.

One issue I think isn't just that we start separating kids into faster and slower learners/academic achievers, but that its very clearly communicated to the children. I think one thing that doesn't help is when kids who struggles are put into the "bottom" group or the "D team". Ergo its not just that you do badly in your subject, but you're also now in the bottom grade. In some subjects you can even end up in a group whereby you cannot achieve higher than a C grade in an examination.

Now the underlying concept is that those grouped in struggling groups should share more similar patterns and struggles than those in the upper and it means that you should be able to focus and improve on the lower students performance. The exam angle is that instead of giving them a harder test where they will score well below a C; you instead give/mark their paper such as that they should achieve a higher grade even though the maximum is lower. (ergo instead of sitting the normal and getting an E you sit the modified and get a C).

However moving up is very rare and I think that it sets a subtle tone and mental thinking in those students that they are failing; esp if they are in the bottom set for a lot of subjects (many kids will vary, they might be in the top in english but bottom in maths etc...). The principles are sound,but I think open to subtle miss-interpretation. As much as students have to have their basic skills and learning built on they also need confidence in themselves and in the system.


I also agree it really needs some practical focus, I think a lot of students would respond differently if they were getting even a most modest wage and given work for a few days a week; with on site skill training and a real world application. Heck these days they already make a lot of students do a work placement, which was never there when i went through school. I think its a very sound idea and should be far more pushed for as a more regular thing. It's very possible to go through school and uni and tick all the right boxes and come out with all the bits of paper but no real world understanding of what job(s) you can do or where you are going. Not everyone has a 5 year plan and a 10 year business target in life (in fact I'd say the majority don't)

 Overread wrote:
It's very possible to go through school and uni and tick all the right boxes and come out with all the bits of paper but no real world understanding of what job(s) you can do or where you are going. Not everyone has a 5 year plan and a 10 year business target in life (in fact I'd say the majority don't)

Absolutely. I had no real idea what I was going to do when my original career intention fell through. (Long story short, I was going to be a dentist but didn't *quite* get the A Levels.) I did a degree in Biology, but by the time I finished I'd pretty much had enough of it - plus, having chosen modules based on what I was interested in with no real career in mind, I then got to the end of my degree with knowledge that didn't really point to a career.

I more or less fell into IT and got my first job based on the knowledge I'd built up from getting games to run in the bad old days of DOS / Windows 3.1 / Windows 95. Still doing IT nearly 20 years later. Still no idea what I want to be 'when I grow up'...

Crispy78 wrote:

 Overread wrote:
It's very possible to go through school and uni and tick all the right boxes and come out with all the bits of paper but no real world understanding of what job(s) you can do or where you are going. Not everyone has a 5 year plan and a 10 year business target in life (in fact I'd say the majority don't)

Absolutely. I had no real idea what I was going to do when my original career intention fell through. (Long story short, I was going to be a dentist but didn't *quite* get the A Levels.) I did a degree in Biology, but by the time I finished I'd pretty much had enough of it - plus, having chosen modules based on what I was interested in with no real career in mind, I then got to the end of my degree with knowledge that didn't really point to a career.

I more or less fell into IT and got my first job based on the knowledge I'd built up from getting games to run in the bad old days of DOS / Windows 3.1 / Windows 95. Still doing IT nearly 20 years later. Still no idea what I want to be 'when I grow up'...

Yeah its very easy to have a single career path fall to one side or end up mostly doing a uni course either because its interesting or because its a subject you did well on in school. I recall one of the geography lecturers I had way back who was really annoyed that they were teaching us lots of theory on the course, but little real world practical application of the theory - nor really showing and introducing students to what they could do. His view was that uni had changed in its nature and approach, but that many lecturers and course structures (and even the whole examination end) hadn't changed with it. His view was it needed to step away from academic focus and move toward more vocational.

The answer to academic studies at university learning to no obvious career path (e.g. English Literature degree) are that university level study equips you with skills for research, studying, analyzing texts, formulating ideas and arguments and supporting them in well argued terms.

All of which are general skills for any kind of job which doesn't immediately required specialised knowledge or technical skills. (Any science based degree will also equip you with some useful mathematical skills.)

If you look up UK ambassadors, a suprising number of them have English degrees. It's probably because you don't go and go a degree in engineering with the idea of getting into the diplomatic service, but that said, all countries need diplomats as well as engineers.

Oh very true, but I think the key element isn't just learning how to research or analyse and such, but also where you can actually use those skills in a real job that isn't teaching/research/lecturing. Ergo in fields outside of the university setting. It's about bridging the gap and realising that for many university is no longer what it once was and that its function has changed to the point where its become almost a default part of most work setups (many employers don't even look at CVs if they don't have a degree listed, no matter the degree and even if the work has nothing to do with research or writing essays).

I am a History major and I have never failed to be able to translate my non-STEM skills into jobs, even ones heavier in IT and Statistics.

The challenge is employers do not want to actually give any training to anyone as that costs money. They just want someone to jump in and run from day 1. Therefore, the specific degrees are short-hand for 0 or no training needed for what you are hiring for.

How often do you hear business leaders whine about not having workers with the right skills? That is code for "We don't want to actual pay to build those skills, we want the government to do it via education"

Therefore, we can blame capitalism for our reduced IQ score...... okay, that was a stretch to try to stay on topic. You caught me!

 Overread wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
In the UK the problem is we start to separate the children at age 7 -- which is before some countries start teaching reading! -- and there isn't a proper non-academic path to send them down.

One issue I think isn't just that we start separating kids into faster and slower learners/academic achievers, but that its very clearly communicated to the children. I think one thing that doesn't help is when kids who struggles are put into the "bottom" group or the "D team". Ergo its not just that you do badly in your subject, but you're also now in the bottom grade. In some subjects you can even end up in a group whereby you cannot achieve higher than a C grade in an examination.

Now the underlying concept is that those grouped in struggling groups should share more similar patterns and struggles than those in the upper and it means that you should be able to focus and improve on the lower students performance. The exam angle is that instead of giving them a harder test where they will score well below a C; you instead give/mark their paper such as that they should achieve a higher grade even though the maximum is lower. (ergo instead of sitting the normal and getting an E you sit the modified and get a C).

However moving up is very rare and I think that it sets a subtle tone and mental thinking in those students that they are failing; esp if they are in the bottom set for a lot of subjects (many kids will vary, they might be in the top in english but bottom in maths etc...). The principles are sound,but I think open to subtle miss-interpretation. As much as students have to have their basic skills and learning built on they also need confidence in themselves and in the system.


I also agree it really needs some practical focus, I think a lot of students would respond differently if they were getting even a most modest wage and given work for a few days a week; with on site skill training and a real world application. Heck these days they already make a lot of students do a work placement, which was never there when i went through school. I think its a very sound idea and should be far more pushed for as a more regular thing. It's very possible to go through school and uni and tick all the right boxes and come out with all the bits of paper but no real world understanding of what job(s) you can do or where you are going. Not everyone has a 5 year plan and a 10 year business target in life (in fact I'd say the majority don't)

The 'bottom' or 'stupid' class thing is a TERRIBLE idea. Even slow kids aren't completely stupid. Once they realize they've been classified as stupid, they stop trying to become smart... or even educated.

The more of us there are, the larger the percentage of us that you're going to encounter are insufferable morons.

It's simple math...unless you are one of those morons, and then it's probably pretty tough.

 Peregrine wrote:
IQ is junk science. I am extremely skeptical of any study involving it.

I disagree, on the grounds that I like any "study" that tell me that me and my generation are smarter than the "average" person. I like a reason to feel smug, and to tell myself that my generation is the pinnacle of human achievement, and the Kids These Days represent a terminal decline.

Clearly smart people (you and me) need to be in charge. Some sort of breeding program where smart people (you and me) get to have lots of sex would also be a good idea. All for noble reasons, of course.

Its because we don’t have to think as much. We have equipment to think for us. I used to have a near flawless gift for spelling and was excellent at most math (except calculus); I struggle with both now, because I don’t need to use them anymore; I have programs that fix stuff for me. I can accept the idea that Idiocracy is going to happen.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Its because we don’t have to think as much. We have equipment to think for us. I used to have a near flawless gift for spelling and was excellent at most math (except calculus); I struggle with both now, because I don’t need to use them anymore; I have programs that fix stuff for me. I can accept the idea that Idiocracy is going to happen.

That isn't stupidity that's just normal behaviour.
It's the same for most people. If you don't use a skill then you lose the skill. Same in any field or craft. You aren't any more or less stupid than you were before, you just don't readily use a set of skills regularly enough to remember to do them. You can easily train yourself back to spelling well and would likely recover the skill fairly quickly.

It's the same for things like Pythagoras - most of us can do it, but if we've had no reason to find the length of one side of a triangle since our exams (which could be 10-20-30 or more years ago) then sure we are going to forget those bits of skill.

It's why most workplaces will have retraining and refresher courses for staff using specific equipment. They'll remind people how to do certain things; check that they've not fallen into doing bad practice or shortcuts that might endanger them or others; ensure that they are kept up to date with recent changes in machine, method and legalities etc.... It's not that the operators are stupid, its simply shoring up the natural effect of the brain dumping things it doesn't use or need regularly.



Of course this effect varies, some people retain very very good information retrieval and appear never to forget anything; others are far more in the moment and will forget things very rapidly. It's also a skill set that you can learn and thus also unlearn - ergo if you've been selling clothes for 20 years chances are you'l lbe really rusty at learning and revising for an exam.

 Elemental wrote:
(you and me) get to have lots of sex

Awww. <3 <3 <3 <3


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Its because we don’t have to think as much. We have equipment to think for us. I used to have a near flawless gift for spelling and was excellent at most math (except calculus); I struggle with both now, because I don’t need to use them anymore; I have programs that fix stuff for me. I can accept the idea that Idiocracy is going to happen.

But does it really matter if we move those tasks to labor-saving devices? From an external point of view I don't care if you solve a math problem entirely in your head or by pulling out your phone, all I care about is that I get an answer to it. We'll probably end up more dependent on certain technology, but that's the story of human history. Should we have been terrified of "idiocracy" because this new farming invention is replacing the skill of going out into the wilderness and finding plants? Did it ruin our society when we invented the ability to write instead of having to use the skill of memorizing all information? Of course not.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Elemental wrote:
(you and me) get to have lots of sex

Awww. <3 <3 <3 <3

Innuendo not actually intended. But there is often an odd eugencist undercurrent to this argument, at least when it moves into "the underclasses are reproducing more than the educated smart people!"

 Easy E wrote:
https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/iq-scores-going-down-research-flynn-effect.html

It starts with a London-based researcher, Edward Dutton, who has documented decades-long declines in average IQs across several Western countries, including France and Germany. “We are becoming stupider,” announces Dutton at the program’s start. “This is happening. It’s not going to go away, and we have to try to think about what we’re going to do about it.”

It’s wrong to hint that scores on tests of memory and abstract thinking have been falling everywhere, and in a simple way. But at least in certain countries—notably in Northern Europe—the IQ drops seem very real. Using data from Finland, for example, where men are almost always drafted into military service, whereupon they’re tested for intelligence, Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since. Similar trends have been documented using data from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. At some point in the mid-1990s, IQ scores in these countries tipped into decay, losing roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of a point per year. While there isn’t any sign of this effect on U.S. test results (a fact that surely bears on our indifference to the topic), researchers have found hints of something similar in Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Edit: I won;t speak for anyone else, but I know i have been getting dumber since 1997. Once I left College, it has been all downhill!

IQ is generally BS is it not?

Case in point, my IQ was 123 in High School. After a decade in College that same test now tells me I have an IQ of 141, as I would expect working in a science field.

But, I don't doubt that the ability of the public to critically think and analyze has taken a large hit. Just survey the current landscape in the US and what do you see?

Hollywood Types and Rappers tell young people that getting money and bitches are all that matters. It's a very dehumanizing view of the world that boils away all emotion and leaves nothing but a pile of materials in its wake.
Increased pushing for legalizing drugs in the US. "Alcohol is legal, so why not pot." That sort of mindset. Drugs and Alcohol are destructive, moderation, etc, argument, blah blah. Bottom line, I've never seen these things help someone, I've only ever in my life seen them cause suffering on levels I never wanted to imagine.
Children aren't really raised by their parents anymore and are instead raised by their computers. Unfiltered online content being beamed into their eye sockets all day every day.
The Media and the major american political parties are all in bed together with the banks and other business and wealthy elite pushing narratives, race wars, and generally keeping people focused on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion rather than record breaking deficits, governmental corruption and ethics.

In short, researching, learning, reading, questioning, and investigating topics in any and all fields is not encouraged anymore. These days we're all just supposed to "listen and believe" everything we're told from a comfortable position of authority.

 Elemental wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Elemental wrote:
(you and me) get to have lots of sex

Awww. <3 <3 <3 <3

Innuendo not actually intended. But there is often an odd eugencist undercurrent to this argument, at least when it moves into "the underclasses are reproducing more than the educated smart people!"

Wait. So stupid people get have more sex? Aw damn it. Why did I have to be so smart? It gets me nothing but trouble.
I guess the Hávamál said it already:
You should be only a little wise, never too wise.
A wise man's heart is seldom glad if he is truly wise.

And to be perfectly honest I'd rather be happy than wise.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Elemental wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Elemental wrote:
(you and me) get to have lots of sex

Awww. <3 <3 <3 <3

Innuendo not actually intended. But there is often an odd eugencist undercurrent to this argument, at least when it moves into "the underclasses are reproducing more than the educated smart people!"

Wait. So stupid people get have more sex? Aw damn it. Why did I have to be so smart? It gets me nothing but trouble.
I guess the Hávamál said it already:
You should be only a little wise, never too wise.
A wise man's heart is seldom glad if he is truly wise.

And to be perfectly honest I'd rather be happy than wise.

Live with Stupid College Roommates for a while and you'll see that they may get laid more often, but the rest of their life is often consumed from the resulting drama. "Well yeah I screwed X, but Y wasn't supposed to find out and now Z has slashed my tires and W is accusing me of sexual assault and V stole my wallet!"

I swear the most blessed person is the one guy in college who is the last to start drinking/taking drugs. A couple months of watching the results can quickly cure a person of wanting to get 'blasted'.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Elemental wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Elemental wrote:
(you and me) get to have lots of sex

Awww. <3 <3 <3 <3

Innuendo not actually intended. But there is often an odd eugencist undercurrent to this argument, at least when it moves into "the underclasses are reproducing more than the educated smart people!"

Wait. So stupid people get have more sex? Aw damn it. Why did I have to be so smart? It gets me nothing but trouble.
I guess the Hávamál said it already:
You should be only a little wise, never too wise.
A wise man's heart is seldom glad if he is truly wise.

And to be perfectly honest I'd rather be happy than wise.

It's not that dumb or uneducated people have more sex. It's that dumb or uneducated people either never learn to take precautions, or don't bother to take precautions. Everything else follows from that.

I've seen far too many book smart people with little to no common sense. A good example of this was when I was asked to help some med students at Tulane move an upright piano.
I got to their house and they loaded it up into the back of my truck, and without tying it down or securing it, said they were ready to go.
I asked how they expected to be safe with a loose piano when I went around corners and was told by one of them that weighed, maybe 140, that he would hold it.
Luckily for them I had a bunch of rope behind my seat and we tied the thing down, but I halfway wanted to let them try it their way just to see the education they would have gotten and how many corners I would have taken before they asked for a rope.

Relapse wrote:
I've seen far too many book smart people with little to no common sense. A good example of this was when I was asked to help some med students at Tulane move an upright piano.
I got to their house and they loaded it up into the back of my truck, and without tying it down or securing it, said they were ready to go.
I asked how they expected to be safe with a loose piano when I went around corners and was told by one of them that weighed, maybe 140, that he would hold it.
Luckily for them I had a bunch of rope behind my seat and we tied the thing down, but I halfway wanted to let them try it their way just to see the education they would have gotten and how many corners I would have taken before they asked for a rope.

Here you are confusing 'intelligence' with 'experience'. You can't expect someone to know everything and the outcomes if they've never experienced that circumstance (in this case physical laws).

Intelligence isn't just about knowing something that someone elses deems obvious because they have experienced it before. It's more about learning from an experience (i.e. not repeating the same thing over and over) and then being able to idenitfy and apply that knowledge effectively to other scenarios.

Intelligence (as defined in cognitive psychology) is very much about abstract thinking.

There are all sorts of logic problems to test intelligence.

The common mistakes people make with these problems arise because people tend to approach the situation from the angle of real world experience, which doesn't fit the abstract problem because real world experience tends to develop intuitive solutions to problems.

Here are some examples:

https://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/more/articles/try-this-3-question-test-of-cognitive-ability

Gotta say those fethed with me. I knew the first one wasn’t the most immediate thought I had but was too lazy to do math (ew). The second one is simple but the third one stumped me for all of a minutes because I knew the first thought wasn’t right but I kept overcomicating it in my head until I went ‘duh.’ That last one is almost cruel in its simplicity.

And is that really a statement about my cognitive skill or my recognition that an abstract question is always worded in a way that brings up misleading answers XD

i'm not qualified to judge you and this isn't a complete intelligence test. It's just an indication of the kind of abstract problem for which a higher rate of correct solutions correlates with higher IQ.

We could say that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the tests are designed to "catch out" people. But that's the point, They look like pretty straightforward real world problems, but the obvious intuitive solution is wrong and they need to be analysed logically.

A alternative example is the "nine dot problem", which is an abstract puzzle.

A certain amount of familiarity with those questions also colors it, with the bat/ball question in particularly being almost a cliché.

And IQ tests are fairly meaningful, and also limited, in roughly the same way measuring a person's height is a useful way to understand how large they are.

The first one is a practice question for the NYS GREs. So...I figured that one out about ten years ago (took me 15 seconds to work it out). Third one took about ten seconds, followed by a “duh” from me, and the second one I had to think about for a minute and went “wow, duh” yet again.

These aren’t actually hard tests, they’re more about patience and realizing the first answer isn’t always right.

Whirlwind wrote:

Relapse wrote:
I've seen far too many book smart people with little to no common sense. A good example of this was when I was asked to help some med students at Tulane move an upright piano.
I got to their house and they loaded it up into the back of my truck, and without tying it down or securing it, said they were ready to go.
I asked how they expected to be safe with a loose piano when I went around corners and was told by one of them that weighed, maybe 140, that he would hold it.
Luckily for them I had a bunch of rope behind my seat and we tied the thing down, but I halfway wanted to let them try it their way just to see the education they would have gotten and how many corners I would have taken before they asked for a rope.

Here you are confusing 'intelligence' with 'experience'.

They just had the experience of loading the whole piano into the truck. I probably wouldn't be able to draw a 100% correct force diagram but even without having experienced a loose piano while driving I wouldn't assume that holding it is a useful option. Maybe I just have some instinctive wary of a heavy piano, that one manages to load on a truck, and where the truck has enough power to move the whole thing. That just doesn't sound like a situation where me holding onto stuff would work out okay.

Maybe those piano people have watched too many of those videos where somebody transports way too big stuff in way too small cars? That could create odd expectations.

timetowaste85 wrote:These aren’t actually hard tests, they’re more about patience and realizing the first answer isn’t always right.

The questions are phrased to lure you into easy but wrong guesses instead of thinking about it. It's more psychology than mathematics.

 Polonius wrote:

And IQ tests are fairly meaningful, and also limited, in roughly the same way measuring a person's height is a useful way to understand how large they are.

Except just height isn't a good measure of how heavy someone is because its missing a variable. Someone could be 6.5ft tall and thin as a rail. Or they could be as wide as they are tall.

Its one reason why BMI is kind of useless to indicate obesity because it doesn't distinguish between a pound of fat or a pound of muscle. Most body builders are, according to the BMI, obese because they weigh more than someone of their height should, even though they're clearly healthy and not in anyway actually obese.

Yes, that's true.

However you could combine BMI with body fat percentage (from a different test) and height, and be able to select people who correlated with being large, strong and fit, purely from their stats. But you still might select someone with undetected early stage cancer, or a wide range of serious allergies or some other health problem.

Intelligence testing is a bit like that. You can take a set of tests, and the results correlate generally with the ability to do abstract thinking. It doesn't guarantee people will be good at any specific job.

Thats what I said.

You might use BMI or an IQ test in combination with other stuff to get actual results, but in and of themselves they are worthless.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

And IQ tests are fairly meaningful, and also limited, in roughly the same way measuring a person's height is a useful way to understand how large they are.

Except just height isn't a good measure of how heavy someone is because its missing a variable.

That was the entire point.

I wonder how much memory is affected on a larger scale by frequent exposure to real life economic stress, violence in media, pornography, abusive environment, various kind of toxic stress in childhood, etc.

 Vulcan wrote:
Or difference in education, too. A college professor from 1910 would seriously struggle with a lot of concepts that the modern college freshman takes for granted. A factory worker from 1910 would be sunk without a trace.

Also culture. If you aren't of the same culture or segment of society as the author, you aren't going to innately grasp the unconscious references, and thus perform relatively poorly.


Of course, it's important to reference what the Intelligence Quotient test was designed for anyway, and what it actually meant. It's an expression of Apparent Age (based on test results) divided by the Actual Age of the test taker. If a ten year old takes a test gets results expected for a ten year old, his IQ is 100. If he performs the same at 20, his IQ his 50. It is entirely expected that the results would go down with time (though results would also go up, yielding a far less stark measure than my example), as it was intended for identifying gifted or struggling children.


In the modern version, all the test does is measure how well you take tests. That isn't a particularly useful life skill.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Its one reason why BMI is kind of useless to indicate obesity because it doesn't distinguish between a pound of fat or a pound of muscle. Most body builders are, according to the BMI, obese because they weigh more than someone of their height should, even though they're clearly healthy and not in anyway actually obese.

Though bodybuilders tend not to be that healthy, let alone 'clearly healthy.' They don't have obesity related health problems, but they tend toward a lot of stress, strain and fracture problems which is also unhealthy, just in a different way.

Voss wrote:
Of course, it's important to reference what the Intelligence Quotient test was designed for anyway, and what it actually meant. It's an expression of Apparent Age (based on test results) divided by the Actual Age of the test taker. If a ten year old takes a test gets results expected for a ten year old, his IQ is 100. If he performs the same at 20, his IQ his 50. It is entirely expected that the results would go down with time (though results would also go up, yielding a far less stark measure than my example), as it was intended for identifying gifted or struggling children.

So, many cognitive and neuropsychological tests for children will provide an apparent age, but the Wechsler tests (either for children or adults) are normalized to a bell curve, not to age. So, 100 is median, 115 is one standard deviation above, 85 is one standard deviation below, etc. This maps with the classic definition of intellectual disability as being two standard deviations below the mean, or under 70. (Although modern practitioners will also look into adaptive functioning, as many people with IQ scores in the 60s are high funcitoning and not intellectually disabled)

FWIW, the opposite of that is also used as a guidepost for gifted individuals, with 130 being the IQ threshold for things like Mensa.

In the modern version, all the test does is measure how well you take tests. That isn't a particularly useful life skill.

First off, being good at taking tests is a valuable life skill for many professions, so don't knock it.

Second, IQ tests have value, especially when professionally administered. They measure raw ability in things like verbal reasoning, processing speed, memory, etc. They're key to diagnosing things like learning disabilities, due to a gap between intellectual ability and academic achievement. They don't measure everything of value, and they don't rule your destiny (I've known miserably unemployed geniuses and average millionaires). But... you aren't going to meet a lot of PhDs with IQ scores under 110, or skilled tradesmen with IQ scores under 80.

OTOH, you will find a depressing number of people with high IQs working menial jobs.

Once I left College, it has been all downhill!

Going was the problem in the first place.

 BuFFo wrote:

Once I left College, it has been all downhill!

Going was the problem in the first place.

Only cause employers are hell bent on hiring "experienced people only!" All entry level position nowadays do not pay nearly enough of a living wage. Or some of them do, but they're hiring lawyers, who have paid $100,000 for their degrees, and are starting on a $40,000 salary. They'll pay it off in their 40s. If they don't buy a house until they're 50. I've been lucky in that i live in NYC, and demand for higher degree jobs are actually pretty high. I was hired straight out of part time paid internship.

Edit: My dad bought a house in his early 30s upstate, and we were living in Midtown Manhattan, with rent at only $900 for a 2 bedroom. $40,000 30 years ago and $40,000 now is so absolutely insane. No one has ever imagined in their wildest dreams how different it was going to be, not even the most veteran of economic analysts.

Eh.

Abstract is something I’m good at. I can generally fill in the blanks when needed.

But applying smarts to say, my car that died yesterday (RIP Car you ar in hevven wiv da angles and Lady Di), nope. Just not gonna happen. Not without a manual and several hours and vehicles to study. Bloke that helped me? Genius when it comes to motors. Yes, I bought him a pint!

And this is why schools need to balance their syllabus. How many more kids would get maths if shown how it applies? Rather than purely abstract sums, use real life examples. Such as the load for electricity and data, and how to best share it. In terms of ‘resistant materials’, show, don’t tell.

Everyone is a genius at something. And the wider we cast the educational net, the fewer kids will drop out or switch off.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

And this is why schools need to balance their syllabus. How many more kids would get maths if shown how it applies? Rather than purely abstract sums, use real life examples. Such as the load for electricity and data, and how to best share it. In terms of ‘resistant materials’, show, don’t tell.

And it needs to be more than a theory of "Train A leaves station 1 at 2:30pm and travels at 40 miles and hour etc..." which is not only abstract but also rather daft because most students are going to go "but I don't do that, I just look at the arrival times board!"

Ergo its got to not just be practical, but the teacher needs to be able to show how its practical. If need be bring the car engine into the classroom to show how the maths works on it. I think school is trapped with too many teachers who either fell into teaching or wanted to be teachers and thus don't really inspire their students with the wide range of skills and jobs and practical applications of what they are learning.

Practical and applicable to modern life I guess is what we’re both getting at

And believe, it’s not the teachers at fault. It’s the syllabus. For us in the U.K., it’s kind of half arsed academia or nowt. Me, I did alright with that, but could’ve been challenged more. For those with different educational gifts and leanings, it was all but impenetrable.

For instance? Physics just did not land for me. Like, at all. Yet I’m still aware of what Physics actually is, why it matters, and why ever increasing out understanding is bloody important for the future of our species. Ditto biology and chemistry.

Now granted, one of my teachers turned out to be a (now convicted) person you really don’t want your daughters around. Ever. And he wasn’t much cop at it. But the same syllabus by different teachers yielded the same ‘huh’ result in me.

The UK Syllabus has become very political both from the government end and the school end. Government wants higher passing rates to make it look good whilst schools want the very same as it defines their budgets, attention and general ability to get students and teachers. State is tricky, but private is really hot on the league tables to the point where they want to offload under performing students a bit too much on "special needs" rather than actually focusing on teaching them (because its easier to weed out weaker students and just attract smart ones to start with).

I'd wager if the league tables went away it might do a lot of good in general for helping schools focus on teaching their students rather than gaming the system.


I also dislike how the syllabus system basically breaks if you go beyond the core text book learning. Because of how its marked students are expected to parrot specific answers to specific questions (which is being reinforced now with more multiple choice exams) ; however any student that learns more than the text book or researches outside of that book, or any teacher that encourages it ; all of that can result in a lower mark because they give answers (that might be more up to date and correct) that are not in the mark scheme.

Then they expect you to go to uni and flip that entire 15 or so years of teaching on its head

I’d agree with that.

League Tables are ultimately flawed anyway. Basically. The schools that got lucky when they were first introduced just kept on improving. Those less so? Only gone one way.

And that can be down to any number of factors, ineffective leadership, group of hard core dill weed students disrupting as much as possible, single bad teacher screwing over multiple classes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Though it might help if the Education Secretary actually had to come from a relevant profession.

I.e......NOT MICHAEL GOVE.

I encouraged my daughter to do International Baccalaureate instead of A Levels partly because the UK system is so politically driven, while IB is organised by a multi-national organisation which is pretty apolitical. I also think it's a better curriculum, offering a more broad-based education like Scottish Highers.

To got back to the Maths issue, though, lots of basic maths already is taught using real world examples, from "take one apple away from a bag of five, and how many left" to the questions about two trains on opposing tracks st different speeds and departure times.

It doesn't seem to help. In fact when you go back to those intelligence testing problems I mentioned previously, people tend to get them wrong precisely because they seem like real world problems, when they need to be analysed abstractly.

I think that maths becomes abstract very quickly when you get beyond the basics. Even something like calculating the area of a circle can't be done without an irrational number. What about differential equations, probability, and statistics? Lots of this stuff is very abstract and counter-intuitive.

Having said all that, I think it's important for everyone to be taught up to a reasonable level which at least allows them to critically evaluate things. In statistics, for instance, if you don't understand how the appearance of a chart can be altered by selection of the scales, you're probably getting conned every time you open a newspaper.

 Overread wrote:

And it needs to be more than a theory of "Train A leaves station 1 at 2:30pm and travels at 40 miles and hour etc..." which is not only abstract but also rather daft because most students are going to go "but I don't do that, I just look at the arrival times board!"

Ya know, reading this bit I suddenly thought of how there's probably only one crew of people in the world that actually do this (albeit a bit differently). . . and that's Jezza, Hamster, and Captain Slow. Usually it took the form of, "if clarkson leaves London in a POOWWWWWAful Lamborghini, James May is driving a boat, and Hamster is using public transport, who will arrive in Edinburgh first" type nonsense. . . but still. it's that idiotic algebra question acted out in real life

 Overread wrote:
And it needs to be more than a theory of "Train A leaves station 1 at 2:30pm and travels at 40 miles and hour etc..." which is not only abstract but also rather daft because most students are going to go "but I don't do that, I just look at the arrival times board!"

Ergo its got to not just be practical, but the teacher needs to be able to show how its practical. If need be bring the car engine into the classroom to show how the maths works on it. I think school is trapped with too many teachers who either fell into teaching or wanted to be teachers and thus don't really inspire their students with the wide range of skills and jobs and practical applications of what they are learning.

The problem with this idea is that for a lot of math (and science, etc) you just can't do anything practical with it until you slog through 15+ years of theory. You aren't going to get a meaningful math lesson out of bringing a car engine in, at least not for the level of teaching where the students don't already know exactly why they're taking the class, because those students aren't going to be able to understand anything beyond the most superficial analysis of it. They aren't going to have the years of calculus, thermodynamics, etc, to go beyond "the burny stuff goes here and it makes this thing turn". And at that point why are you wasting time on presenting the wikipedia article for "car engine" when you have important material to cover?

The algebra questions about trains may seem ridiculous, but who cares about whether it's trains on tracks or buses or whatever. It's just a set of nouns so you can state the problem in sentence form instead of presenting an equation to solve. The point is being able to identify what known and unknown information is involved, and how the pieces relate to each other. You are never going to solve that exact problem in the real world, but if you ever want to go anywhere in science/engineering/etc you're going to need the skills it teaches. If you want to be a minimum-wage retail worker who actually does need to solve bus schedules regularly, well, feel free to ignore the math problems because they aren't fun enough.

The whole point of algebra is that it uses abstract variables, unlike simple arithmetic.

Here’s the difference in my own understanding in secondary school.

With Algebra, it as clearly explained the letters are just stand ins. We know they’re a number, but not which.

With English essays? Nobody told us the word count was a limit, not a target.

And man, I wish they allowed peeps to read fun books.

My comment on the car engine was a little tongue in cheek (since the average teachers desk likely hasn't room for a car engine); but it was more about showing the students where what they are learning can be taken as a career option. And its not just about focusing on cars or any other single subject, its about showing the students that what they are learning is powerful, important and can carry them further than the end of year examination. Sure some students will already know where they are going, others (most) won't have a clue. Both groups can have their own reason for considering any core subject "pointless". It's just one avenue of inspiration for students and I think teachers should have a more active understanding of where the skills they teach can be taken in the world.



Grotsnik I think what really kills English classes isn't just the choice of books to read, its the heavy over analysis that goes on that kills them. When you're reading into every line, comment, colour choice etc.... I think that really kills otherwise half decent books. I also think that many older-style books are thrown at students when the only ones that will enjoy or get them are those who have read more and thus have a wider mental vocabulary and a better grasp of different writing styles. Shakespear isn't just boring, but its also really hard to get into for many and I think that part of that is because they haven't read much and thus its very hard to get their head around such tricky writing structure and style.

Of course the same can be said of any subject - more is better - and that at some point the inspiration must come from the student themselves (you can lead a horse to water and all that).

You've made some good points.

I don't know what it's like today, but when I was at school we didn't start any serious analysis of texts until O-Level. At prep school in the late 60s, early 70s we read aloud the recommended books in class, or read at home, and did some discussion on them. I remember these included King Solomon's Mines (1885), The Hobbit (1937), Animal Farm (1945), 1984 (1948), Lord of the Flies (1954) and others I don't remember.

I see these titles as an accessible selection of boy relatable fiction covering a suitable time period given it was about 1970. The purpose was to get youngsters into the habit of reading and thinking about literature, and it worked for me.

I can't remember doing Shakespeare or anything earlier than King Solomon's Mines until O-Levels. (When I encountered the desperately boring Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)

However I disagree that Shakespeare is boring. Shakespeare's plays contain all kinds of interesting plots, ranging from comedy to tragedy, with the historical plays mixing the genres. The problem with Shakespeare is the difficulty of reading a playscript compared to a normal novel, and even more, the difficulty of reading the language. Once you get your ear in, though, it becomes obvious why Shakespeare is still regarded as once of the pillars of world literature.

I know from my daughter's education that a lot more attention is now paid to the development of creative writing, and this requires reading well-written stuff.

Of course as you've mentioned, you can't compel children to have an interest in anything, and it's difficult to get people to bother with things they are not interested in.

Shakespear does tend to come out at GCSE level (old Olevel as far as I'm aware); however my view is that up until that point they don't build up enough to it so when it hits its a heavy slap in the face for many. Of course we make it through the experience, many getting decent to good grades; but it doesn't instil a love of the literature in most. Instead it tends to have the opposite effect on most who are not already very keen readers.

I'd wager if they teased more of that style of writing and encouraged more general wider reading at younger ages, there'd be a greater retention and at least respect creep in. I'd also say that one major failing of reading Shakespear is that it's a script not a book; it wasn't designed to be read, but instead acted. This, in a major sense, robs part of the experience because a play (like a film) is made to have actors and vision put life into the words.

Books I had for GCSE?

MacBeth. The cheeriest of all plays.
Buddy - it’s grim up north. His Mam’s left, and his Dad is a drunk
Empty World - OH NOES PLAGUE WIPE OUT MAN!
Z for Zacharish - OH NOES NUCLEAR WAR WIPE OUT MAN!!!

What I was reading?

Pratchett. And latterly, some of the original, pre-Black Library novels.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Books I had for GCSE?

MacBeth. The cheeriest of all plays.
..........
What I was reading?
Pratchett. And latterly, some of the original, pre-Black Library novels.

I had just read Wyrd Sisters before having to do MacBeth in school.
I am sure that affected my report, but made the work a bit easier to get though.

I like reading. I did not enjoy having to read Madame a ovary in school. At all.

Everyone can find a book they don't like.

The problem is to find enough books that people do like to get them reading and keep them reading so that they have the chance to develop critical faculties instead of being turned off the whole thing.

I believe some good work has been done with graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare.

(I remember learning Latin and French partly from Asterix books, because they are fun and you can cross read with the English version.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Macbeth-Graphic-Novel-Original-Unabridged/dp/1906332037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1540211866&sr=8-1&keywords=macbeth+graphic+novel

Just offer a variety of approved books. Let the students have their picks.

 Overread wrote:
Shakespear does tend to come out at GCSE level (old Olevel as far as I'm aware); however my view is that up until that point they don't build up enough to it so when it hits its a heavy slap in the face for many. Of course we make it through the experience, many getting decent to good grades; but it doesn't instil a love of the literature in most. Instead it tends to have the opposite effect on most who are not already very keen readers.

I'd wager if they teased more of that style of writing and encouraged more general wider reading at younger ages, there'd be a greater retention and at least respect creep in. I'd also say that one major failing of reading Shakespear is that it's a script not a book; it wasn't designed to be read, but instead acted. This, in a major sense, robs part of the experience because a play (like a film) is made to have actors and vision put life into the words.

The heavy analysis is rather the point of an English class (well, that and report writing, I suppose). I rather enjoyed it, especially when it came to comparing the themes and metaphor in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey to Terminator 2, or scene-by scene analysis of The Untouchables. I can't think of any works I enjoyed less after that sort of close analysis. What did kill them was having them read out line-by line by people who'd have trouble reading along if you cut off their index finger. Romeo and Juliet was a turgid load until I saw it performed onstage - I think seeing a good performance (watch Baz Luhrmann's film on DVD if need be; that works well IMO) first. I usually read ahead with the assigned novels, but I had a hard time getting my head round reading a stage script.

It is always difficult to take in a story in a form it was not meant to be consumed in. A play is meant to be seen, not read. It’s the same reason turning a book into a movie often flops.

Shakespeare classes really should use taped performances in addition to the text so people can follow it easier.

Totally agree that Shakespeare comes alive when actually performed. That's when youre ear gets tuned to the language and you begin to appreciate the poetry.

I wonder how many English schools don't have drama classes and facilities, and don't have the money to send pupils to professional theatre. Even so, they could use taped performances as you suggested.

You guys emphasize schools a lot. You're not wrong in doing so, but proper allocation of resource and technique into teaching kids is only one half of the equation. Without an infrastructure to support the schools, all it'll lead to is short term gain. What students are able to rapidly pick up will quickly fizzle out as the access to resources to make their dreams a reality fall out of reach. You need to work on standards of living, so that families can stop focusing ALL of their attention on balancing their own books, and start contributing money back into society, into the futures of family, and friends, into their own neighborhoods, and cities/towns. Both school and standards of living are important. But you need BOTH working together to create a progressive and stable society, and ultimately, a strong nation.

Reminds me of the rhetoric Neil Degrasse Tyson puts out. Smart, amazing man, extremely vocal about funding education, but again, missing the other half of the formula.

I also think that we need people from all walks of life contributing as teachers. the basics like math, science, language, literature, and history are just that, basics. And even then; here in New York City, things like literature and history are slowly becoming less important. They always tell you that everything is related to each other in school. but it DID NOT hit me until i was in college, or at least until my frontal lobe started reaching final stages of maturity. I suspect for many others here in the US, its been the same. You don't UNDERSTAND why literature is related to art. You don't understand why art needs math. You don't understand that math makes science work. And most of all, you dont understand that most crafts and professions today would not be what they are without art, math, science, history, and literature. Maybe if every year, the city or state paid people to take a years leave of their jobs to help teach at a local school, that special something about society, and civilization will rub off on kids, and help them contribute a bit more. Because civilization is truly beautiful. Of course there's a ton of ugly stuff, which was unavoidable because of differences and greed, and unfortunate natural events. But if you think about it from a mechanical perspective, its pretty beautiful. Too much people don't see it. Far too much. But thats also because I can afford such perspective from a priveleged circumstance, which many others can't.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Just offer a variety of approved books. Let the students have their picks.

When I was in High School, it was mandatory to have an English class for 3 years, and of them, there was only one that I enjoyed after a time. . . . See, in Freshman and Junior years we had mandatory Shakespeare (i think Romeo/Juliet was first, and junior year we read Julius Caesar), but sandwiched in the middle of that, was one of the best English classes I had (and I hated English class. . . history was, and still is my jam). In that class, sure we had a mandatory reading, and it was brutal and sucked. . . We read the Odyssey in that class.

But where that course made up for it, during a literature block, was a book report we had been preparing for since around week 2. . . . See, during the 2nd week of class we met with the teacher about what book we were going to read for this report. There were a few criteria. There was an "approved classics" list that he had prepared (and many good options on there), but if you didn't like any on the list, so long as you met a minimum page requirement you could simply tell him what book you were going to read. But, if the book you wanted to read didn't meet those 2 things, you could talk to him, and petition for why you should be allowed to use the book you wanted to. Now, this class was probably 15 years ago now, and I've certainly forgotten the book that I read for this class/report, but I do remember a few excellent presentations. One person convinced the teacher that he should be allowed to read A Clockwork Orange, another person read Hemingway.


So, long story short, I agree that school assignments ought to allow student choice, but it shouldn't be so rigid that teachers cannot make approvals for material that isn't on some list. I'd think that in that way, you'll get more student buy-in to reading, but at the same time, you're not getting book reports on 50 Shades or other terribly written works.

You guys had it easy in school. At least they didn't force you to read "War and Peace". It is super long, super dense and like half of it is actually in French...
Mandatory reading in Russian schools is pure suffering. Which, coincidentally is also what most of the books you are forced to read are about. Welcome to Russia, happiest country in the world!

Things that irk me #384658307

English Literatue Exams.

See, in the U.K., there’s two English exams (at least there were. I’m quite old now). English Literature, and English Language.

Language was more about one’s own skill in the language, measuring stuff like verbosity.

Lit? Oh that’s about telling the examiner what their pre-set opinion and interpretation of a given book is. Y’know, the exact opposite of how a book should be. Not allowed your own opinion on what the subtext is.

How do you know what the examiner's pre-set opinion is of any particular book?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
How do you know what the examiner's pre-set opinion is of any particular book?

Well your teacher has the marks scheme and guides you toward the right answers - or at least toward the right material to produce the right answers or somewhere along those lines.

Pretty much that.

It kind of defeats the point of being able to look into subtext when there’s only one accepted answer, no?

And yet somehow everyone doesn't get a A+.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh that’s about telling the examiner what their pre-set opinion and interpretation of a given book is. Y’know, the exact opposite of how a book should be. Not allowed your own opinion on what the subtext is.

I don't know how they do things in the UK, but I am a high school teacher in Canada in litterature and I don't want my students to regurgitate my opinion of the text they are supposed to analyse. I want them to explain their opinion of a given book and explain their reasonning. If that's how they do i the UK, that's fairly stupid. How can you evaluate the aptitude of a student in writting a dissertation if he doesn't even porduce is own arguments and reasonning?

Aye but it means you can farm out the marking of exams to any old teacher and they only have to read the marks scheme and then mark the works accordingly.

I recall my uncle (geography teacher) commenting on how he'd had one student give a very insightful argument in a bit of work and yet couldn't make it for any points since it wasn't one in the mark scheme.


The idea is that students produce their own reasoning with guidance so that they give the "right" reasoning. It also means answers that are not in the "text book" are risky to impossible to use. Another geography example was how we were taught about rivers and how our teacher told us right before the lesson that what we were being taught was wrong, but that he couldn't teach us the newer correct understanding, because we'd get no marks in the actual exam. Which is almost utter madness when you consider that the system not only discourages but will penalise any student showing initiative to read outside or around their subject

Then we go on to Uni and they expect the total opposite of students. Just as Uni needs to shift closer toward work training; GCSE and A-level need to shift closer to Uni style studies. Heck you could wipe out 1 whole year of uni (first year) if they restructured Alevels to be uni-style teaching.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
You guys had it easy in school. At least they didn't force you to read "War and Peace".

Yes they did. Right after Madame Bovary*. At least War and Peace is useful to kill rodents with, or to hold doors open, or as a letter weight.

*(I'm going to leave it as "Madame a ovary" in my old post, that's a hilarious autocorrect if I ever saw one!)

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Totally agree that Shakespeare comes alive when actually performed. That's when youre ear gets tuned to the language and you begin to appreciate the poetry.

I wonder how many English schools don't have drama classes and facilities, and don't have the money to send pupils to professional theatre. Even so, they could use taped performances as you suggested.

Mine certainly had no drama department. I was lucky enough to see three performances in five years (a rather experimental version of Romeo and Juliet with minimalist set dressing, a fairly standard performance of Hamlet and Macbeth with Derek Jacobi in the lead role. I only saw those last two because my younger sister's class was going and I blagged myself in.

I quite liked Baz Luhrman's film of Romeo and Juliet, and there was an interesting version of ... King Lear? Julius Caesar? On the BBC a decade or so ago set in Africa with an all-black cast*, and James MacAvoy was in a good production of MacBeth in London a couple of years ago that also modernised the costumes and sets I never saw a problem with doing that sort of thing; after all, that's just what Shakespear did with his history plays.

* Patrick Stewart once talked about putting on a race-reversed production of Othello, just because he always wanted to play Othello and that was the only way to do it without resorting to blackface.

Here's a logic problem from Radio 4's problem of the day feature.

Someone is driving on the motorway. Due to roadworks they have to drive at 30 mph for 10 miles, then at 60 mph for 10 more miles.

What is their average speed over the 20 miles?

(Change mph/miles to kph/km if you like.)

I'm getting that QI feeling of 'it feels so simple that it must be a trap', but 45 mp/h?

Similar feeling as sockwithateicket, but I've got 40mph?

Classic trap question. The speed you drove for each segment is a distraction.

Exactly. It's an example of how "practical problems" can be confusing because your mind tends to jump to the "obvious" real-world solution, when it needs an abstract approach.

That... doesn't seem the right way to calculate it, as though it's the answer to a different question.

You have a distance where you're able to drive at 30 mph.

You have a distance where you're able to drive 60 mph.

How long it took you to complete those distances doesn't affect how fast you were driving while doing so, surely?

But I did a History degree for a reason, so maybe I'm talking out of my arse.

You use your speed from each segment to calculate how long you spend on each segment. That gives you a total time, and total distance, for an average speed.

It's another illustration of the fact that humans have two modes of problem solving.

The normal mode is everyday pattern matching, in which the mind recognises a problem and quickly solves it by using a solution which has worked for similar problems in the past. This is generally good because it works very quickly.

The drawback is that problems can sometimes look familiar, but don't work the way you think. This fools the mind into picking an incorrect method of solving them.

In this case, we automatically think, "Oh, half the distance at 30 and half at 60, so average 30 + 60 = 45." Only this is wrong, because it's the time taken which determines the average speed, as shown by the solution.

Therefore the second mode of intelligence, which is abstract thinking, has to be used in situations like this. Abstract thinking is slower and more difficult than pattern matching, and it's what is normally meant by "intelligence".

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's another illustration of the fact that humans have two modes of problem solving.

Like explored in this book? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

I wasn't aware of that particular title, but it looks interesting.

My information came frome some of the psychology titles in the Oxford University Press "Very Short Introduction" series.

They are fantastic little books absolutely crammed with information.

It's got electrolytes.

I honestly think there is an ongoing effort to dumb down the american public by corporate leaders who want a stupid, ignorant, emotional, easily riled up and easily pacified populace to control, exploit and treat as a resource to be used and discarded.

I mean just look at american media. FOr the last couple decades it's glamorized and glorified the selfish, self indulgent, stupid, ignorant moron. Look at charlie sheen on "2.5 men" and remember he was one of the biggest and most well paid stars on tv, and look at the character he played!

Look at shows like "Jersey shore" and "Meet the Kardashians" and what they glorify. Loud, stupid, self indulgent ,shallow morons.

Stupidity, ignorance, shallowness, self indulgence, materialism, and similar traits are held up as the epitome of success. Meanwhile how are intelligent people portrayed?

Look at "the big bang theory". Intelligent people are objects of mockery, abuse, ridicule and stereotyping.

In some older movies scientists could be heroes who helped save thr world. In the original War of the worlds movie the lead character was a scientist, in the speilberg remake the lead character was a slag off who didn;t even keep track of when his kids were coming to visit or keep food in his place for them.

In the old flash gordon series Dr. Zarkov was a hero who fought to save earth and was respected. In a horrible flash gordon remake on the SFC years back he was a pathetic spazz everyone abused and bullied.

Scientists, intelligent people, educated people today are generally ignored in the media today or portrayed ad things you don't want to be, kids!

See, shallow, selfish, materialistic, stupid, ignorant people are easier to manipulate and exploit, and that;s what the corporate overlords want.

This says it all, just cross out government and write in corporations.

Yes, if you selectively pick out examples that fit your theory and discard everything that doesn't you can "prove" that kids these days are stupid and modern culture is in decline. Alas, in reality this is just the same old argument that has been made for literally thousands of years and still hasn't become any less absurd.

Just to name one obvious problem with your theory, even under the assumption of rule by corporate elites the elites still need scientific development to drive progress. You can't pacify the masses with consumer goods if you can't keep inventing the next new thing, and you can't do that without creating scientists and engineers to invent it. Capitalism requires educated people to function, and the last thing it wants to do is discourage people from becoming those useful tools and make itself vulnerable to being out-competed by rivals that do support education.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Edit:

Moving the discussion from the other thread here:

As to your comment, TMM is a commentary about a problem that is becoming more and more serious in modern society.

No, it's a failed attempt at commentary on a nonexistent problem. It makes multiple incorrect assumptions:

1) That intelligence is primarily a heritable trait rather than one that is primarily influenced by the environment. And that, as a result, the "morons" are permanently doomed to low intelligence and education is not an option. In reality intelligence is strongly influenced by the environment. A child growing up in poverty is going to struggle in life no matter how smart they are as a result of their genes, simply because they don't have the opportunities for education and success that someone with more money would have. But give that child better access to education, enough job security and income to be able to afford to spend time on personal development, etc, and they will do much better. The supposed trap of permanent low intelligence does not exist.

2) That birth rate is a product of low intelligence rather than low wealth and standard of living, and as a result the lowest-intelligence people will out-breed everyone else. In reality birth rate drops as standard of living improves, especially in the modern world where birth control is easy to get. The birth rate problem is not an unsolvable one, improve standards of living for the masses and birth rates drop.

3) That intelligence can be quantified as a single scale, preferably evaluated with a single IQ score, and easily judged as "morons" vs. "elites". In reality intelligence is far more complicated and IQ scores are pseudoscientific garbage.

4) That modern technology is somehow damaging our intelligence, disregarding the fact that our use of tools is what makes us unique as a species and that similar advances in technology did not create a sub-race of "morons". The TMM argument has to handwave away the fact that, for example, inventing writing allowed us to store information in permanent form instead of having to remember it but nobody would seriously argue that we were better off 10,000 years ago.

In short, it's the same tired old "KIDS THESE DAYS ARE STUPID AND DO NOT RESPECT THEIR ELDERS, OUR CIVILIZATION IS CLEARLY IN DECLINE" nonsense that people have been coming up with for all of recorded history, and probably longer.

Seeing this article recently reminded me of TMM.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/scientists-earth-endangered-by-new-strain-of-fact-resistant-humans

You do realize that this is a humor piece posted on a parody site, right?

It is the way of mankind to lament how far society has fallen, even while we deny their progress.

In Book III of Odes, circa 20 BC, Horace wrote:

Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more
worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more
corrupt.

Pretty cool huh? 2000 years ago the youth were appalling, and bound for nothing but trouble. Sure, these kids are filled with reality shows, rather than Punch and Judy puppet shows, but give a kid the necessary materials and their cell phone and they can build a boat, a gun, a house, or start a fire with a potato chip.

Every government uses propaganda to try to create ideal citizens- I would say that's becoming harder again, with the fragmentation of information streams. In my day (growing up in the 90s) you talked about the 2 or 3 shows worth watching on TV every week because that's all there was. These children just stream up whatever they like- its far more difficult to send some sort of cohesive message for what humans ought to be. Even their heroes are all over the place, from Captain America to Deadpool.

 Peregrine wrote:
Yes, if you selectively pick out examples that fit your theory and discard everything that doesn't you can "prove" that kids these days are stupid and modern culture is in decline. Alas, in reality this is just the same old argument that has been made for literally thousands of years and still hasn't become any less absurd.

Just to name one obvious problem with your theory, even under the assumption of rule by corporate elites the elites still need scientific development to drive progress. You can't pacify the masses with consumer goods if you can't keep inventing the next new thing, and you can't do that without creating scientists and engineers to invent it. Capitalism requires educated people to function, and the last thing it wants to do is discourage people from becoming those useful tools and make itself vulnerable to being out-competed by rivals that do support education.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Edit:

Moving the discussion from the other thread here:

As to your comment, TMM is a commentary about a problem that is becoming more and more serious in modern society.

No, it's a failed attempt at commentary on a nonexistent problem. It makes multiple incorrect assumptions:

1) That intelligence is primarily a heritable trait rather than one that is primarily influenced by the environment. And that, as a result, the "morons" are permanently doomed to low intelligence and education is not an option. In reality intelligence is strongly influenced by the environment. A child growing up in poverty is going to struggle in life no matter how smart they are as a result of their genes, simply because they don't have the opportunities for education and success that someone with more money would have. But give that child better access to education, enough job security and income to be able to afford to spend time on personal development, etc, and they will do much better. The supposed trap of permanent low intelligence does not exist.

2) That birth rate is a product of low intelligence rather than low wealth and standard of living, and as a result the lowest-intelligence people will out-breed everyone else. In reality birth rate drops as standard of living improves, especially in the modern world where birth control is easy to get. The birth rate problem is not an unsolvable one, improve standards of living for the masses and birth rates drop.

3) That intelligence can be quantified as a single scale, preferably evaluated with a single IQ score, and easily judged as "morons" vs. "elites". In reality intelligence is far more complicated and IQ scores are pseudoscientific garbage.

4) That modern technology is somehow damaging our intelligence, disregarding the fact that our use of tools is what makes us unique as a species and that similar advances in technology did not create a sub-race of "morons". The TMM argument has to handwave away the fact that, for example, inventing writing allowed us to store information in permanent form instead of having to remember it but nobody would seriously argue that we were better off 10,000 years ago.

In short, it's the same tired old "KIDS THESE DAYS ARE STUPID AND DO NOT RESPECT THEIR ELDERS, OUR CIVILIZATION IS CLEARLY IN DECLINE" nonsense that people have been coming up with for all of recorded history, and probably longer.

Seeing this article recently reminded me of TMM.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/scientists-earth-endangered-by-new-strain-of-fact-resistant-humans

You do realize that this is a humor piece posted on a parody site, right?

Historically most advances are made by a small number of people, I mean real advances, not gimmicks and finding new ways to market junk. Those people will always be around. I'm talking about dumbing down the majority, which sure seesm to be going on and deliberately being fostered in american culture.

Also notice I said american culture is being dumbed down. I see a lot of new advances come from china, and that worries me given what china is like. We used to see new scientific and technological advances being made in america, but lately china has been maioking majopr ones, like a breakthru in fusion power.

As to that article about fact resistant humans being a threat to the earth, gosh, you mean it was satire? I never saw that....

I guess some people don;t grasp things like satire.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Historically most advances are made by a small number of people, I mean real advances, not gimmicks and finding new ways to market junk. Those people will always be around. I'm talking about dumbing down the majority, which sure seesm to be going on and deliberately being fostered in american culture.

I don't think you understand how modern industry works. Aside from the fact that the "lone genius" idea is kind of limited in a world where technological advances often require things like millions of dollars worth of lab/manufacturing equipment just to build a prototype actually getting that advance from new idea to large-scale manufacturing requires a ton of highly trained people. Engineers to refine the initial idea into a finished product, industrial engineers to get the production side running, more engineers to keep things working properly once production begins, etc. And repeat this for each company across entire industries. Then add even more demand for mid-level skilled labor which, while not on the same level as the scientists and engineers and their college degrees, still requires a lot more than the mindless horde you describe. You simply aren't going to meet that demand without a functioning education system.

Really, if you want a sensible target for deliberately turning culture against the one that actually benefits your hypothetical all-controlling elites is people like the elites: bankers, CEOs, etc. IOW, the people who could actually threaten their power. An engineer is a useful tool for your hypothetical elites, able to do vital work for their benefit but limited in their ability to create a successful business outside of their control. That recent MBA graduate, on the other hand, might be able to turn a useful technological idea into a viable business plan and create a threatening rival. But if everone's idea of a CEO is some pathetic character from a comedy show maybe they don't get a business degree and never start down the path of becoming a threat. So the real plan we'd expect to see is encouraging a culture of respect for scientists/engineers/etc and making sure that the most promising students get directed to those fields while bankers/politicians/etc are made the subject of every joke and only the hand-picked families of the elite (who can safely be told about the scam) have any interest.

Also notice I said american culture is being dumbed down. I see a lot of new advances come from china, and that worries me given what china is like. We used to see new scientific and technological advances being made in america, but lately china has been maioking majopr ones, like a breakthru in fusion power.

Yes, and China is exactly the point. Your theory of an elite dumbing down culture (and the average person with it) to make the masses easier to control would involve the elites committing national suicide by handing over power to China. It would be an incredibly stupid plan by the elites, far beyond the bounds of plausibility.

As to that article about fact resistant humans being a threat to the earth, gosh, you mean it was satire? I never saw that....

I guess some people don;t grasp things like satire.

Some people like you? I mean, you're the one taking this Idiocracy nonsense seriously.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:


Historically most advances are made by a small number of people, I mean real advances, not gimmicks and finding new ways to market junk.

Don't forget that many times in science one person might take the credit for an idea, but often they were not alone. Sometimes they will have had teams of researchers working with them and alongside them. The name on the paper is just the lead researcher (or the one that managed to market and manoeuvre themselves into the newspapers attention), there can be swathes of people behind them who go totally unnoticed.
Furthermore many great ideas that are famously attributed to one person is, again, mostly a case of luck as well as discovery. Ideas like evolution were not developed by just one researcher, in fact several others were working along similar lines of investigation around the same period. Some even made phenomenal discoveries decades and generations before, but the ground work was never accepted at the time.
Also don't forget that there is a certain level of bias depending on what country you come from and, especially, history. Some countries developed and then fell far before others even developed. So a country that might boast great discoveries in their history today, might actually be shown to have copied or otherwise traded for that knowledge long in the past from other nations who fell. Even in the very early ages trade was very active and humans were trading ideas and materials across huge distances

So whilst we might think of the loan genius, we can't forget that the loan genius often isn't so much alone. That there were others alongside who helped; those who set the ground work and research before them and often others (sometimes in countries far off) who developed ideas at the same time.



Of course there are still people who work things out on their own for hte most part. They are often more limited in resources and what they can achieve and produce by working alone, and often with their own limited budget.

A good example of Overread's point is the Law of Refraction, also called Snell's Law, even though Willebrord Snellius (yes that is his real name) was the last to the punch. The Hellenic mathematician Ptolemy had already discovered refraction. he simply didn't have the angles right. Ibn Sahl however did get them right in the 10th century, and Al-Hazen not only created an accurate formula for refraction in the 11th he also dissected the human eye, named all it's parts (we still use some of them), and figured out more or less how it worked. And Snellius still basically tied with Descartes in Europe, both men publishing on Refraction at about the same time while Pierre de Fermat used the exact same math and principles to create a completely different theory (Principle of Least Time). And then Christian Huygens took Snellius' work and developed some early wave theory.

Science has never been about genius' making bold breakthroughs. Science is a successive series of smart folks smacking rocks together until one actually gets a spark and declares "I have discovered fire!"

 LordofHats wrote:

Science has never been about genius' making bold breakthroughs. Science is a successive series of smart folks smacking rocks together until one actually gets a spark and declares "I have discovered fire!"

Only today we spend the resources of a small country to make huge coil to smack two tiny atoms together to see what happens

 LordofHats wrote:


Science has never been about genius' making bold breakthroughs. Science is a successive series of smart folks smacking rocks together until one actually gets a spark and declares "I have discovered fire!"

And it's also about a bunch of people trying really stupid things and failing, repeatedly, because every now and then something stupid turns out to have been a lot less stupid than we thought.

Smacking rocks together does sound like a stupid thing someone would do because there's literally nothing to do

Speaking of the advance of science by team effort, the mystery of cubical wombat poo has been solved!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-46258616

This offers a potential new way to advance manufacturing technology.

Getting back to idiocracy, this movie was actually not a worst case scenario.

I think a much worse case is an elite that deliberately dumbs down most of the population, as I think may be happening at least in 'murca, then rules over them as unaccountable dictators.

That could be a far worse scenario than idiocracy. Imagine a totally detached elite like an aristrocracy, deciding to use the majority of dumbed down morons as entertainment. Wars being engioneered so bored overlords can play real life RTS level games, genetically compatabile morons being harvested for organs, etc.

Human history shows us how ugly an aristocracy, separated from the majority, can be.

I see you're just going to ignore my post about how your theory is nonsense in favor of posting an even more nonsensical version of it?

 Peregrine wrote:
I see you're just going to ignore my post about how your theory is nonsense in favor of posting an even more nonsensical version of it?

Perry, you have done nothing but throw buckets of condescending excrement on every post of mine you've seen. Kindly commit a physically impossible reproductive act. There, are you happy now that I did not ignore your post?

Sorry, but if we're at the point where you're honestly suggesting that the elites are breeding a sub-race of "morons" to play real life RTS games then yes, you're going to get some condescending comments. It's tinfoil hat nonsense.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And I'll note that your entire argument is condescending as hell towards the people you consider to be that lesser sub-race. So, probably not the best moral high ground to be complaining about condescending attitudes from.

Social structures can result in an elite structure, however what we have today in many western nations is totally different to what one might consider a traditional tiered society such as the Victorian or Edwardian ages in the UK. In those older systems it wasn't just money but breeding and family trees that defined boundaries of class. If you were born into a class that was where you stayed for the most part. You could move down, but moving up was very hard and wasn't just reliant on money or wealth or power.

Today that system is pretty much gone, there are some elements still kicking around, but the days when a lord or lady would never "speak" to a lower class worker in conversation are pretty much gone as a socially accepted/expected norm. The system today runs almost totally on money and wealth, so a pauper can rise up all the way to the top (look at Sir Allan Sugar for an example).
Today's system is far more fluid and whilst there are "old boys clubs" and "old money" elements still in there, its far more muted than it ever was.


Furthermore whilst we can argue that general education standard are slipping and have room to improve; the overall level of education is still pretty high for many countries (western developed at least). In addition libraries, the internet and many school systems are totally open now. Past times you had to apprentice and knowledge was often very closed off. Today knowledge is vastly more open and accessible than it ever has been in the past. So "breeding a dumb nation" isn't really a possibility. Heck most employers don't even really want employees today who don't carry some kind of degree to their name (I, and I think many of us, have seen very skilled people passed right over for promotion in favour of a fresh out of uni student just because the student has a bit of paper).

Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

Everyone is missing the main point of the movie, and that is: "UPGRAYYD GONNA GIT HIS MONEY!"

 Vulcan wrote:
Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

I sense an anti-management bias......

 Easy E wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

I sense an anti-management bias......

Call it a hypothesis based on observed evidence. I've worked in quite a few places, and in every one of them the corporate management has NO IDEA AT ALL how the offices that actually conduct profitable business actually function.

 Vulcan wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

I sense an anti-management bias......

Call it a hypothesis based on observed evidence. I've worked in quite a few places, and in every one of them the corporate management has NO IDEA AT ALL how the offices that actually conduct profitable business actually function.

There's a thing called "The peter principle" that holds a person is promoted until he reaches his level of incompetence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I've heard of that before, and it seems incomplete.

I've watched idiots get promotion after promotion, just to get them out of the way of the work being done at each level. Sadly, the people who hired/promoted them each time refuse to admit they messed up by hiring/promoting them in the first place... and refuse to just fire the bloody idiots and save the rest of us a lot of trouble.

 Vulcan wrote:
I've heard of that before, and it seems incomplete.

I've watched idiots get promotion after promotion, just to get them out of the way of the work being done at each level. Sadly, the people who hired/promoted them each time refuse to admit they messed up by hiring/promoting them in the first place... and refuse to just fire the bloody idiots and save the rest of us a lot of trouble.

I doubt this is happening at all frequently. As you said, firing a person solves the problem much more effectively if you want to get a disruptive person out of the way. The much more reasonable explanation is that promotion is near-inevitable if you stay in a job long enough, unless you screw up badly enough to convince everyone you don't deserve to go higher. So you keep going higher and higher, with the promotion looking like a reasonable reward for good work, until you reach a level where you no longer look competent (or are one of the rare few people who are truly competent at the highest levels) and stop getting promotions.

What I’ve seen is that getting promoted is often about looking clever and saying the right things, rather than a reward for genuine competence. It doesn’t mean they are stupid, but sometimes people who don’t have a high level of skill can get promoted up to a position putting them out of their depth and from there they tend to move sideways if their position becomes untenable.

No one is looking to employ someone ineffective at their job. But everyone has done job interviews or applied for positions or seen those around them go through the process and wondered why the hell they picked the person they did for the job. And that’s not hubris to have that observation, it’s known that interviewing people is a poor way to select candidates, you get people in HR who select candidates according to their imagined criteria when they don’t consult with the department that will be working with the new person. A lot of interview panels receive no training, so you get utter nonsense asked of applicants or one person on the panel has a particular agenda which overrides the logical best choice.

So it’s no surprise that genuinely capable people will get overlooked when you have some quick talking smartass who appeals to the easily impressed. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of crude brown-nosing. If you can talk the talk, the unremarkable can go places, short of being clearly incompetent.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
A lot of interview panels receive no training, so you get utter nonsense asked of applicants or one person on the panel has a particular agenda which overrides the logical best choice.

Tell me and this is very important, if you were a vegetable which would you be, a carrot, banana or a cabbage


And other generally nonsensical (and sometime trick) questions; found from a random website googled the night before. That said I also feel that if a workplace moves someone from Job A to Job B, then its up to the employer to ensure that the person is trained in Job B. You tend to see this FAR more in jobs that require formal certifications or tool use. Moving someone up in chainsaw work from ground cutting to felling wider trees isn't just a case of promotion, but of ensuring they've got the right training tickets (at the very least its "best practice" and if you don't your insurance likely won't cover you).

Management roles though tend to slip the net, even though management is a skill and is very different from many lower jobs where you're in production or development or another line of work.

It's not that those promoted are incapable, its that they are often promoted and then left high and dry without proper support to enable them to best perform their job. Plus we have to remember the inexperienced don't know what they don't know so they can't as easily self-learn as they might not realise the things that they are messing up on.

I've got a degree in management, which I studied for at night school, as well as a bunch of professional training and real life experience. It definitely made me a better manager, but it didn't help get me promoted. I realised you need to have a desk as close as possible to the boss, agree with what he says, and generally be 'pally' with the top table people.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
What I’ve seen is that getting promoted is often about looking clever and saying the right things, rather than a reward for genuine competence.

So true.

And that’s not hubris to have that observation, it’s known that interviewing people is a poor way to select candidates

The first study was in Italy, but others in other countries have followed, all affirming that it's actually more effective to promote at random than to promote via interviews.

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of crude brown-nosing. If you can talk the talk, the unremarkable can go places, short of being clearly incompetent.

It's literally been the bane of human organization since the dawn of time. Entire Empires have been felled by crude brown-nosing idiots who soothed the egos of the undiscerning.

What I remember from my management degree is that interviewing has a coefficient of correlation with job performance of about 0.2, which isn't very good but it's better than (for example) graphology which has a coefficient of 0.

There are cognitive psychology theories to explain this.

So. There are better methods of selection but they are a lot more expensive, and interviewing remains a kind of default.

Of course, measurement of job performance is a dicey proposition anyway.

The modern opinion of interviews is that it's a way for the company to give information to the candidate about the realities of the role, so it's a lot less to do with selection by the company and a lot more to do with acceptance by the candidate.

With current UK law defining an employed person as someone who has done 1 hour's employed work in the last fortnight (I think we can see here a correlation with the current record high level of "employment") one might question the realistic agency of a candidate for a job to refuse it based on an interview.

(Signed, an old cynic with a degree in management and 38 years experience in the UK job "market".)

[Drinks a whisky drink.]

If you;re in england why do you have a Japanese flag next to your name?

Oh, if you're an anti piracy officer, catch me if you can!

 Kilkrazy wrote:

With current UK law defining an employed person as someone who has done 1 hour's employed work in the last fortnight (I think we can see here a correlation with the current record high level of "employment") one might question the realistic agency of a candidate for a job to refuse it based on an interview.

Reminds me of when my sister was working retail, a lot of shops were using random hours. So yes you were employed, yes you had a job, but it didn't eat up all of the working week. Thankfully they wanted her for more than an hour a week, but the result was that you'd have a lot of days and random hours where you wouldn't be working. But because its random hours it means a person doing such work can't seek a second job easily and run two part-time jobs (which is effectively what random hours equates too).

And heck if government considers 1 hour every 2 weeks as employed no wonder the employment rate is going up if the "standard" is going down so far. 1 hour every 2 weeks isn't enough to pay for anything meaningful unless you've got that magical job that pays a fortune per hour. It really should be at least several days per week to be considered employed.Then again it might be linking that concept into other departments like benefit calculations and the like




Funny story on that last one I knew a chap who was on disability allowance who was doing photography. He basically couldn't charge a fair rate for his work because if he started drawing even a modest income his allowance would be significantly cut. The sad thing is the cut isn't proportional to the work pay in any way. So the system actually works against any who want to work, because they basically have to make quite a significant income to cover the loss of their disability allowance. Otherwise they can be working and productive, within the limits of their disability, and being punished for it. It might have improved in the years since I spoke to him, but that it was like that to start with clearly shows why many people can end up on disability or other allowances and are not encouraged to work; because taking up the entry level jobs and pay can put them financially behind where they were doing nothing.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

So. There are better methods of selection but they are a lot more expensive, and interviewing remains a kind of default.

I used to work for a company that specialised in psychometric tests and competency tests. Their argument was basically it was a lot cheaper to do the testing and recruit the right people.

If I remember rightly, before I actually interviewed to join them (in IT support), I took an Occupational Personality Questionnaire (psychometric test), a numerical reasoning test, a verbal reasoning test, a spatial awareness test and a logic / problem solving test...

There is a fairly low coefficient of correlation between personality type and actual job performance, except in very extreme cases such as major introverts being employed as circus ringmasters and that kind of thing.

The tests for reasoning and so on are more useful, though of course you can prepare for them. When I worked at Sony, we had a standard programming test for any programmer applicants.

In my years of management (about two decades) I have hired a lot of people. Most of the time you give them a battery of tests that you never look at UNLESS you can't decide between two candidates.

I agree that most companies give 0 support, skill training, or development in an organized way to people they hire. That costs money and takes time. Instead, they try to hire someone who has all ready done the job before somewhere else and has been really successful so they do not have to spend a dime on them. Of course, why is someone like that looking for a new job?

In my mind, there is a crisis in corporate Training and Development. That is always the first area cut to boost the share price or to help with the turn around.

 Overread wrote:
It might have improved in the years since I spoke to him, but that it was like that to start with clearly shows why many people can end up on disability or other allowances and are not encouraged to work; because taking up the entry level jobs and pay can put them financially behind where they were doing nothing.

Nope, this hasn't changed at all. There's a guy at my work who works one day a week, because if he works two days he looses all his benefits and becomes homeless.

That's a pretty common story. You need to have a very small income to qualify for most welfare programs such as food stamps or Medicaid; so small that having pretty much any full-time job will disqualify you. So, depending on where you live, it might be safer not to work and collect benefits and assistance compared to working full time and not making enough to meet the local cost of things like housing and medicine.

There isn't one state in america where a 40 hour a week job at minimum wage can pay the rent on a family dwelling.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html?fbclid=IwAR3hho0NADMGlpyCocqts5He5ibACdVVw7UnhrUgvKqaUuqbuiTiMwoKADY

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars

.....
Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

 reds8n wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html?fbclid=IwAR3hho0NADMGlpyCocqts5He5ibACdVVw7UnhrUgvKqaUuqbuiTiMwoKADY

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars

.....
Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

Gotta give them robots a real scare, y'know?

Best part is where the quoted problem with the vehicles is that they are following the law instead of flaunting it like a normal human being.

 reds8n wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html?fbclid=IwAR3hho0NADMGlpyCocqts5He5ibACdVVw7UnhrUgvKqaUuqbuiTiMwoKADY

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars

.....
Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

Yeah. As I said in the self-driving car thread, not everyone is just going to accept self-driving cars. Self-driving cars (and artificial intelligence in general) is going to be meeting lots of resistance down the road. Especially if there are more deadly accidents or other ways AI gets into the news in a negative manner. AI is scary after all, and so it won't take much for people to become antagonised towards it. Especially among working-class people who are already afraid that AI is going to be replacing them. Not to mention that AIs are being developed and pushed by major corporations such as Google, which really are scary.

Fortunately we have prisons to deal with resistance. Once automated vehicles demonstrate their superiority and become required by law we can start arresting and charging anyone who continues to attempt to drive a car manually or attacks an automated vehicle or whatever. I can understand why a company that is depending on cooperation from local governments would go easy on these criminals, but once mass adoption begins that will no longer be necessary.

Many of the fears about self driving cars are the same once people had about cars in general a century ago. Cars took many years to proliferate and become ubiquitous, there were lots of bumps along the way, and I suspect the same will hold true of AI driven cars. For places where transportation of people is not concerned, i expect we'll see this trend appear first, stuff like self driving trucks hauling cargo in networked caravans to achieve peak fuel efficiency. I don't expect I'll be able to buy a self driving car in the immediate future, but I expect that I won't be driving myself in 30 years either.

 Peregrine wrote:
Fortunately we have prisons to deal with resistance. Once automated vehicles demonstrate their superiority and become required by law we can start arresting and charging anyone who continues to attempt to drive a car manually or attacks an automated vehicle or whatever. I can understand why a company that is depending on cooperation from local governments would go easy on these criminals, but once mass adoption begins that will no longer be necessary.

Yeah, that is a great way to bring about dystopia and revolutions. That is not worth it over a stupid car. These people often have legitimate grievances that can be dealt with in a much friendlier and more productive way than by throwing everyone in prison, and these grievances need to be assuaged anyways or else there will never be any mass adoption. Trying to force automatic cars on people would be a good way to ensure that technology ends up in the dustbin of history. For a technology to become widely adopted it needs widespread public support.
The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

We should make a start-up company to automate prisons.

Let's not start this again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Fortunately we have prisons to deal with resistance. Once automated vehicles demonstrate their superiority and become required by law we can start arresting and charging anyone who continues to attempt to drive a car manually or attacks an automated vehicle or whatever. I can understand why a company that is depending on cooperation from local governments would go easy on these criminals, but once mass adoption begins that will no longer be necessary.

Yeah, that is a great way to bring about dystopia and revolutions. That is not worth it over a stupid car. These people often have legitimate grievances that can be dealt with in a much friendlier and more productive way than by throwing everyone in prison, and these grievances need to be assuaged anyways or else there will never be any mass adoption. Trying to force automatic cars on people would be a good way to ensure that technology ends up in the dustbin of history. For a technology to become widely adopted it needs widespread public support.
The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

You must not be familiar with peregrines pathological worship of artificial intelligence.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

It feels a little surreal when people talk about the coming automation crisis, because it's always presented as an inevitability, like the robots are going to rise up of their own accord and take away our jobs at gunpoint. When there's nothing stopping us from, you know, choosing not to have a crisis. Because we totally could. We could decide "let's hold off on replacing everything with computers until we have a solution for the employment problems".

Of course, I'm joking. Technological progress doesn't work like that because it's driven by profit and by fear (the colonial age taught us what happens if other countries get too far ahead technologically), and progress is a goal unto itself, even when nobody seems clear on what we're meant to be progressing towards.

At present machines are still not totally better than humans. One aspect companies have found in the medium to long term is that whilst machines can work longer and faster than humans; is that significant changes to the design of the product can mean that the factory has to be rebuilt - for major changes it might be from the ground up. As opposed to humans who would just require retraining in new methods.

So right now machines can be a big investment that saves money and generates additional production for a period of time; but in the long term can set a company up for a big investment need to remain current.


The big game changer will come when machines can more readily adapt themselves without requiring a huge outlay in rebuilding by humans. Of course such machines are going to come with a huge price on them so it might well be that there's a significant lag time between having the technology and it actually having an impact. Alongside that you've got a rise in requirements of resources for rare metals and a rise in electricity prices. So power for all those machines and components for them are going to be big considerations.

Idiocracy is all too likely, but i think under it mass starvatiuon would kill a lkot of people quickly so it would not last.

 Elemental wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

It feels a little surreal when people talk about the coming automation crisis, because it's always presented as an inevitability, like the robots are going to rise up of their own accord and take away our jobs at gunpoint. When there's nothing stopping us from, you know, choosing not to have a crisis. Because we totally could. We could decide "let's hold off on replacing everything with computers until we have a solution for the employment problems".

Of course, I'm joking. Technological progress doesn't work like that because it's driven by profit and by fear (the colonial age taught us what happens if other countries get too far ahead technologically), and progress is a goal unto itself, even when nobody seems clear on what we're meant to be progressing towards.

But you can't say that, because you just get called a luddite, or worse.

This was from a 30's buck rogers comic.

Of course it has always been acceptable for upper class women not to work, since they are maintained by their rich husbands, and society doesn't see this as a problem of idleness.

To be un-sexist, no doubt there are also upper class men sustained by their rich wives.

There are a few things we can learn from Idiocracy, number 1 is basically, let's make the smartest person president and assign people jobs based on their ability.

 Elemental wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

It feels a little surreal when people talk about the coming automation crisis, because it's always presented as an inevitability, like the robots are going to rise up of their own accord and take away our jobs at gunpoint. When there's nothing stopping us from, you know, choosing not to have a crisis. Because we totally could. We could decide "let's hold off on replacing everything with computers until we have a solution for the employment problems".

The trick being that the people driving the automation trend see the elimination of employment as a feature, not a flaw.

Which is itself flawed.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Which is itself flawed.

No argument there, but the Golden Rule applies here, and they have the gold...