The Trump Presidency | Biden Inaugurated

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In 2 short years I turned the US from a country that believes in human rights, freedom & justice into a truly Great Country that believes in low oil prices.
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Yeah, this just happened these last two years.
 
I'm doing a course on Coursera at the moment and came across this quote in relation to IQ...

Goddard said:
[E]very human being reaches at some time a level of intelligence beyond which he never goes … [T]hese levels range from the lowest or idiotic, to the highest level of genius. [T]he number of people of relatively low intelligence is vastly greater than is generally appreciated and that this mass of low level intelligence is an enormous menace to democracy unless it is recognized and properly treated …
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:nervous:
 
unchanged_lineup said:
I'm doing a course on Coursera at the moment and came across this quote in relation to IQ...



:nervous:
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That's not quite true. By laws of statistics if you plot the IQ scores of everyone on earth it should be a normal distribution with a certain mean and standard deviation. So there's always same number of people in the 10th percentile as there are in the 90th.

If you are comparing across eras and say the mean of this distribution has shifted lower now relative to a few years ago, then sure you can say the species is getting dumber as a whole.

I also don't see how you can treat IQ, it is highly heritable and like it or not someone born to a couple of dumbells is not going to end up smarter. There's a genetic upper bound for it.
 
unchanged_lineup said:
I'm doing a course on Coursera at the moment and came across this quote in relation to IQ...



:nervous:
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That would be the american eugenicist and all-round arse hole Henry H Goodard.


Goddard, a researcher, was fascinated with intelligence. He introduced a measurement for it to the United States. At the time, psychologists lumped people with cognitive disabilities in three broad categories: "idiot," "imbecile" and "feeble-minded" ("feeble-minded" being the least severe). Goddard thought the word was imprecise and unscientific, so he created a replacement. Borrowing a Greek root meaning "dull" or "foolish," he coined the term "moron." (It is worth stating the obvious: Today, none of these words are appropriate as medical terms.)

To Goddard, these "morons" posed a serious threat. He claimed there was a link between low intelligence and criminal behavior (he noted "crimes often seem foolish or silly"). And he worried about the quality of "American stock." Goddard was a prominent member of the eugenics movement that flourished in early 20th century America. As his colleague Harry Laughlin testified to Congress, eugenicists believed "the character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities; that is the hereditary physical, mental, and moral or temperamental traits of its people." They hoped "better breeding" could rid America of its flaws.

An astounding number of states (more than half) passed laws calling for sterilization of the "unfit," resulting in an estimated 60,000 involuntary surgeries. The early 20th century was also a time of record-high immigration to the United States, with new arrivals hailing mostly from southern and eastern Europe. American eugenicists worried about the influence of these unfamiliar people. For his part, Goddard wanted to ensure there were no "morons" among them.

In 1913, he sent female assistants to Ellis Island to recognize the "feeble-minded" by sight (women were more intuitive at this, he thought) and administer his tests. Immigration officers had performed cursory physical and mental health screenings for years, but Goddard's methods revealed an astounding result: 40 percent of the Jews, Italians and Hungarians tested qualified as "morons." He noted in his report, "Doubtless the thought in every reader's mind is the same as in ours, that it is impossible that half of such a group of immigrants could be feeble-minded, but we know that it is never wise to discard a scientific result because of apparent absurdity."

The following year deportations for "feeble-mindedness" doubled.

Despite being widespread in his day, Goddard's research findings were eventually challenged and disproved.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/codesw...95/it-took-a-eugenicist-to-come-up-with-moron
 
Ya see, so much to learn here. Redcafe is an intellectual powerhouse :)

Tell me about Stephen Jay Gould folks, I like the sound of him in a video I'm watching on "The Bell Curve".

Wednesday at Stoke said:
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I also don't see how you can treat IQ, it is highly heritable and like it or not someone born to a couple of dumbells is not going to end up smarter. There's a genetic upper bound for it.
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I think this is exactly the point that people disagree strongly with...

Time for a new thread perhaps?
 
unchanged_lineup said:
Ya see, so much to learn here. Redcafe is an intellectual powerhouse :)

Tell me about Stephen Jay Gould folks, I like the sound of him in a video I'm watching on "The Bell Curve".



I think this is exactly the point that people disagree strongly with...

Time for a new thread perhaps?
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I don't see how its disagreeable. There's been years of research that suggests fluid intelligence is heritable.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3.epdf
 
You have to despair at a society where people like him gather a large following.
 
'Sticking it to the libs' - no matter what the national or even personal cost - is a massively underrated factor in Trump's rise to power.
 
Just to make things a bit more clear, he was not discussing steam propulsion but the catapult system that launches the jets on a carrier. Currently it's steam based since there is a cheap supply of it from the nuclear power plant on board. The new carriers are being built with electromagnetic catapults.
 
Do all his suits come with flags attached?
 
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