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Posted on 19-06-04, 15:14 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Posted by Kawa
Just FYI, wertigon's silly thing is now in the theme list, along with a marginally less eye-searing variant.

Oh no. I thought I should have included a disclaimer so you wouldn't get any ideas.

You shouldn't blame wertigon for it though. I mean, don't blame me either (if you use that thing, whatever happens is entirely your fault), but he had nothing to do with it.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-05, 00:44 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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It is impossible to write the number 0 as a decimal integer literal in C and related languages.


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-05, 15:39 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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They live in a country of starvation and set their money on fire? Isn't that like 1/50 of the monthly minimum wage?

Technically, that note is in one piece. In most countries, damaged banknotes are legal tender as long as they aren't dyed and have less than 50% missing. That one has like 10% missing, tops. No idea about the rules in Venezuela, but it should have some value.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-05, 15:41 in Wired Noise Cancelling Headphones...
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Posted by Kakashi
I want headphones that are not only noise-cancelling in the traditional sense, but will also double as a tinnitus cancelling hearing aid. I'll be getting one of those in a couple of months and I'm curious as to how my over-ear headphones will interact with them.

Does that even work? Isn't the whole deal with them that your hearing around 18 kHz or so is busted and the ear does AGC to compensate?


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-06, 17:03 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by Screwtape
What is "fair", though? An ideal test would be a function "subject skill -> score", but in practice these kinds of tests are usually functions like "available study time -> study effectiveness -> teaching effectiveness -> encouragement -> question comprehension -> ability to handle stress -> subject skill -> score", and each of *those* inputs are themselves functions of other things; for example, a student's ability to understand a question can depend on their physical ability to read (is the printing too small?) and their ability to understand the language (what if the question uses a weird word or grammatical structure only native speakers would be familiar with?) as well as their knowledge of whatever subject the test is testing.

Not sure about your point with the native speakers. Who else is it going to test? An exchange student who'd wish to study in America would still have to speak English, even if he's just going to study engineering or something like that.

I don't think the SAT has too odd wording. I could understand it fine as an ESL speaker. The verbal parts do, obviously, but that's the whole point of them.

It does introduce a somewhat undesirable correlation, but since they usually just use the average it shouldn't make that much of a difference in practice.

Dyslexics kind of have the same issue. What could be done? Where I went to school, they'd get all their tests in yellow with slightly bigger letters, and a bit more test time. And I suppose that might help. But the increased testing time reduces the predictive validity. If they have 90 seconds per question instead of 60, that increases their score despite not reflecting a higher skill, and obviously they won't take their whole degree at 67% pace. So unless their condition makes them read slower so that the test takes exactly 1.5x more time, it's just an unfair advantage. It sucks, but there's no way around it other than institutionalized cheating. At the end of the day, all that can be done fairly is slight adjustments that maybe helps a tiny bit (more readable tests).

Short of these kinds of edge cases, I maintain that it's 100% fair. It has a very strong correlation to IQ, far stronger than to grades or socio-economic status.

In particular, poor people often score poorly on "available study time", "study effectiveness", "teaching effectiveness", and "encouragement", the combination of which can drown out the contribution of factors like "subject skill".


It's true that teaching affects your mathematical abilities. But those SHOULD be tested. Say you have a student with good innate abilities who has never went to school. Would it really be a good idea to let him into university? I mean, he does lack the basic prerequisites. And you can't really say, "sure, he can't hack it, but he's also poor so it evens out," now can you?

Whatever knowledge he has going into the test, that is the knowledge which will be used both at university and during the test. And you might say some people know less about, say, maths. But they'd also do worse in college. And you might say they could brush up on the maths they're missing out on between taking the SAT and going to college. But then why couldn't they do it before taking the SAT?

At the end of the day, the SAT (and tests like it) can only really measure how good a person is at doing that specific test. It's often unclear how well that particular measurement correlates with things we actually care about, like "how will this student fare at college". And in situations where we know the correlation isn't strong, the easiest, most straight-forward fixes just try to spread the problem more evenly rather than fixing it.

You can. It's trivial to measure graduation rates vs. SAT score/GPA, and then determine a correlation ("predictive value"). Unfortunately, I can't find any English studies breaking it down by major. But it appears as if grades have a slightly higher predictive value, varying by major. I would guess this is because they reflect conscientiousness, while the SAT reflects intelligence. In other words, the SAT is closer to your ideal subject skill -> score test.

This doesn't make the SAT unfair though. It's a far better measure of intelligence than GPA is of conscientiousness, and it was never designed to measure the latter. That schools in many cases might not want to measure the former is another story, and hardly the SAT's fault.

As I understand it, America is in the middle. The government has organised for student loans to be available to everyone, and guarantees those loans, so the tax-payer has to pay for it all. However, students are required to repay the loans, and student loan debt cannot be discharged, even through bankruptcy, so these loans don't actually provide the "concentrate on your studies, not your finances" benefit that is the whole point of a scholarship, and so the only people who take out student loans are the ones who were already 90% sure they could afford to go to college. That is, America has done most of the work for a fraction of the benefit.

Posted by CaptainJistuce
Also, american higher educatien costs have risen far faster than inflation. So the amount of debt you take on in student loans is highly burdensome. And since said loans are exempt from the debtors' financial relif options, if your degree does not result in the income you expected(spoilers: it doesn't because you were lied to), you're just fucked over for life.

America does have scholarships too. And most European countries still require students to pay their costs of living, for which the state gives them loans.

But yes, it's an inefficient system. It punishes failure too harshly, and thus incentivizes the schools to have low standards ("if you get in, you'll get out") and high entrance requirements. Entrance requirements which because of politics are sub-optimal.

The colleges are also far more expensive than elsewhere because of this. To study abroad as a foreigner and pay their tuition fees is often cheaper than studying in your home state, which seems completely insane to me.

The optimal might be to have education be completely free and have no entrance requirements whatsoever other than citizenship, and then fill the first year with extremely cheap and hard courses so that 90% or something drop out ("fail fast"). This would stratify for the exact same traits that would be important later on, while having absolutely no undesirable political implications.

Of course, then people would complain about little Timmy not getting his degree, so it'd never happen either unless there already was such a tradition and anyone complaining would get mocked for their perceived incompetence. You do have weed-out courses already, but it could be made far more brutal efficient.

And most of the other solutions break in countries that have minorities, which are pretty much all of them considering women usually can go to university in most countries.

For instance, the Soviet Union had oral exams. Completely impossible to cheat on. But biased against Jews, because the professors didn't like them. So if you have Jews, you can't do that.
(Also sub-optimal, because it's quite expensive and doesn't screen for conscientiousness)

Or you could assign people devilishly difficult take-home tasks. For instance, "learn these 1000 words in a non-Indo-European language in a month". But then a detailed analysis might find that men/women/Blacks/Asians/Jews score higher/lower on this task, and back into the rubbish it goes, together with the SAT.

You could also argue that since while intelligence is immutable, conscientiousness is mutable, and if the former be much more important for producing important research, schools should try to reduce the importance of the latter, for instance by trying to train it. But this would be very hard to implement in practice, and of dubious value.

On one hand, sure, that's what it means to be a sovereign state.

On the other hand, just because a thing is legal doesn't make it right.

Well, there's a up- and downside to everything. The upside is that when they're done, they'll have more or less 100% homogeneous country with a tremendous degree of social stability, which will be great for the economy and also for the people. I mean, America does mass surveillance and mass incarceration too. China just merges the two and gets a far higher efficiency (in terms of units of repression per unit of social stability) doing so.

One might point out that such a policy still would be very repressive, but only socially unstable countries tend to need such repression in the first place. Japan and Switzerland are very stable and have extremely high degrees of privacy. So if it is achieved, odds are the total repression would eventually go down.

The downside is of course that it might be considered genocide, which is generally considered quite unpleasant to be on the receiving side of, and which also might garner sanctions for the perpetrators. On the other hand, what's done is done, and a sufficiently dedicated government, having performed a cost-benefit analysis, could just stall and then sacrifice a few officials to the UN/ICC when finished. YMMV, I guess, depending on whether you're Chinese or Uyghur. On the other hand, all the Uyghurs which are left will be considered Chinese and thus be positive of what has happened, so the approval rating of it would tend towards 100%.

It's definitely a complex issue though, I'll give you that.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-06, 17:09 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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It feels futuristic, definitely. I like the Windows-esque error messages.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-06, 17:26 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Posted by tomman

Actually 1/400th since April 15th (if you were to be paid with those, you would receive 4 wads). This lone note is not enough for paying the bus fare, but you could buy a lollipop with it.

They reset the money again? Wasn't min wage 5000 bolivars?

At some point, the Central Bank and local governments even explicitly told banks and retailers to REFUSE damaged bills. I even doubt that the Central Bank itself would want to replace this one (notwithstanding the fact it would involve a very expensive trip to its only two branches in the entire country).

(For future reference: if you have to ask, the answer usually is "that's now how things are done here, dude")

No no no, I wasn't implying you had a functioning central bank or anything. But for collecting, someone might be interested if it were legal tender. Hey, look on the bright side: if it isn't legal tender, maybe you could sell it on MercadoLibre.
Did you sell the ones in the archive post, now that they're not circulating anymore?

And even in the unlikely event that they were to replace it, at most you would get a random new note - the average nobody can't just go and ask "hey, can you give me another bill with these specific numismatic specifications?".

I don't even think they'd give you bills. At least here, you'd just get it deposited into your bank account (provided they feel like it - the central bank of course hates cash).

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-06, 19:24 in Something about cheese!
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Also, I forgot to add:
Traditionally (and I realise this varies wildly over time and between cultures), universities are centres for education and research, rather than (say) for amassing political or financial power, and so you have traditions like "scholarships" where people who have great potential are literally given money so that they can spend energy on education and research instead of earning money. However, there's always more talented students than rich philanthropists funding scholarships, and a lot of economic potential is wasted.

Due to assortative mating, this is not as big of an issue one might think. Since intelligence causes socio-economic status, and intelligence (and by extension, SES) is strongly heritable, the people who would make great contributions to science are to a greater extent found within the upper classes. In other words, the potential loss from talented students who can't afford college is commonly overestimated, and in particular when considering social class rather than direct socio-economic status. America furnishes for a good example: despite students generally having to finance their own education, they are still world-leading in research. (as well as PISA testing, after disconsidering ethnic minorities)

This is not to say that it's not an inefficiency, but it's smaller than commonly thought and exaggerated by media.

Also, since college education is mostly ceremonial, the inequality conferred by the loss of access to it isn't that great - with sufficient dedication (e.g. conscientiousness), anyone could download the relevant textbooks off of libgen/piratebay and look up whatever they're missing out on online. They could then sit the exams only and thus test out of the degree.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-06, 19:29 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Would it be possible to make the "Edit" button available for all posts as a logged-out user, but requiring authentication like regular logged-out posting does?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-06, 20:11 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Yep.

No other board I know of has the "post while logged out" feature either. But it seems reasonable that you should be able to do either both or neither.

(On second thought, most imageboards actually have this feature as well, requiring a password for post deletion even for users with tripcodes)

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-07, 13:47 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wareya
That's some grade A classist bullshit right there.

It might be grade A classist, but it isn't bullshit. Many studies have been done about the impact of IQ on SES and vice versa. They have found that IQ causes SES and is heritable (genetic, mostly). From this it ought to follow that, predicting IQ from SES, higher average values will be found among the upper classes and that these will be genetic, no?

Here's an interesting essay on the matter: https://www.gwern.net/Everything
Of relevance to this particular discussion is the graph from Hill et al 2018, which shows intelligence to have a genetic correlation of 82% with household income.

Posted by CaptainJistuce
Social darwinism at it's finest, to be sure.

I don't see what's so Social Darwinist about it.

I think that colleges should have more weed-out courses. I don't think this is a very controversial view, and at any rate hardly a classist one. It would in fact be slightly beneficial for the lower classes and for society as a whole. It is slightly Darwinist, I'll give you that, but not more than the ordinary weed-out courses already are.

I also claim that "the people who would make great contributions to science are to a greater extent found within the upper classes," but I've never advocated for any selection pressure to be applied just because of this. I don't even think it's a good idea that the student gets (directly) charged to go to college, just that the inefficiency is smaller than it might appear at first glance. To be clear here, it is still an inefficiency, and the whole American student loan system seems like a complete disaster.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-07, 15:40 in GNOME: "Please don't theme our apps"
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Posted by Screwtape
The thing is, humans hate change, and they are also very, very good at inventing reasonable-sounding justifications for however they happen to feel at any given moment. When some kind of change is announced, it's a safe bet that 90% of the response will boil down to "I hate change" with creative variations. As such, the actual comments themselves are unnecessary; the only interesting information is whether the reactions are significantly more or less than the expected 90% of the total volume.

Well, not exactly. They'll be negative, but they'll make up some reason for it. And this reason can be more or less bad.

If the criticism is over really inane stuff ("I don't like the font"), then one should just treat it like praise, kind of like "damned by faint praise" but the other way around. Praised by faint condemnation?

Supposedly, this is customary in some countries (I think it was China I heard it about). As in, they'll always give negative and only negative feedback, but if it's over some inane stuff that just goes to show there aren't any actual flaws they could find.

The signals for "this response is not knee-jerk reaction" are things like: longer than average (but not too long), tidy paragraphs instead of sprawling run-on sentences, maybe some formatting like lists and headings, basically anything that indicates the author spent time thinking about the reader instead of scrawling the hottest take they could. None of those things require close reading or empathetic consideration. It's possible some useful and interesting responses get accidentally scooped up with the unhelpful ones, but nothing is ever perfect.

I'm not sure about this. I've seen perfectly reasonable technical points made in broken English laden with racial slurs, and abject nonsense argued for with very properly written text.

For the former, just visit any technology forum with sparse moderation. For the latter, just take a look at any Medium post arguing for a stupid idea.
As for deleting or at least hiding such comments, if someone is serious about listening to interesting feedback, they'll want to come back and re-read that feedback, and show it to other people. That's a lot easier without the unhelpful distractions, even if only because they don't have to scroll so far.

But the "distractions" they removed didn't seem to have much difference to the critical comments they kept. They were a bit angrier, but they seemed to have about as much merit.

It's literally impossible to have a theme so perfect that everybody likes it; the best you can hope for is a theme good enough that changing it is more trouble than it's worth. I'm pretty sure it's also impossible to have a theme so ugly that everybody hates it; Amiga Workbench 1.0 and Windows 1.0 didn't immediately doom their respective product lines.

They don't have to like it, they just have to find it okay. I find those two okay, especially when compared to DOS. A theme designed by God, everyone would find perfect. My point isn't to bring theology into a technological discussion, it's just a thought experiment: if you had a perfect theme, theming support wouldn't be needed.

And the worse the default theme, the greater the need for theming, and vice versa. Or with your words, the better the theme, the less the ability to change it is worth. So say someone made a truly atrocious default theme: text in #EEFFEE, background #FFEEFF. A theming support for such a distro would be imperative. While if it were the MacOS theme, people would presumably think, "eh, I'd rather have it than not, but this is good enough". So a criticism of the GNOME default theme is definitely relevant and shouldn't be deleted, because the goodness of the default theme has very much to do with the value of theming support.

A widget toolkit with a theme engine makes some things awesome and some things terrible; a widget toolkit that can't easily be themed (like macOS and Windows have) keeps everything mediocre. Is that better? Maybe? Sometimes?

Windows does have themes, although you need to modify some system files to use them.
/nitpick

More likely, Xfce's default theme is close enough to boring grey-and-blue Adwaita that it doesn't cause any problems. Some Linux vendors have much bolder branding, say in brown and orange, and just to stand out they do unusual things like have menus and toolbars in light-on-dark while the rest of the application is dark-on-light.

I'm using some theme I downloaded off the internet, "Paper" it's called. One theme in the list ("Orangine") has dark-on-orange menu bars and otherwise dark-on-light. Picking random themes from the list (e.g. light-on-dark themes) doesn't immediately seem to cause any issues. Higan runs on several different platforms with several different themes, I've never heard of any theme breaking its UI.

GTK+3's theme engine I guess doesn't make it easy to have wildly different colour-schemes for different parts of the window, so themes that want to do that have to add a bunch of custom rules to tweak each supported application... but there's no way to limit a particular rule to a particular application. So if a standard GNOME app happens to name one of its toolbar widgets "switcher", the Linux vendor theme says "widgets named 'switcher' use light-coloured text". Then a third-party app happens to also use the name "switcher" for some other widget that's *not* in the toolbar, so it winds up with light text on a light background.

Doesn't this imply there's something horribly broken with it if it's so inflexible? They couldn't use something else than CSS for this?

You do realise that application authors and GTK's maintainers are different people, right?

But application authors could refuse to ship applications with theming support. For instance, if they'd use imgui, theming wouldn't even be possible.

To go from "I do not need this thing" to "None of the six billion humans on the planet needs this thing" is quite a feat of extrapolation. Does it genuinely not occur to you that if you don't understand a thing, maybe you just haven't yet encountered the problem it solves?

Of the seven billion humans on Earth, how many have computers? Of those, how many speak English?

The "problem" it "solves" has been already been solved by far simpler means such as transcription, English education, and HTML entities. In particular, RTL is completely incomprehensible why it has to be supported on so many levels. Wouldn't it be enough to have the text input convert RTL -> LTR, and then have all the intermediate presentation layers work as usual?

Case in point, I'm an ESL speaker and I bloody hate localization. Arabs don't even bother writing with Arabic letters, they use the ad-hoc transcriptions of Arabic (e.g. أسعد -> as3ad) because RTL is so god damn wonky (e.g. try pasting "بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ" into the terminal and see what happens). Chinese and Japanese often use their local character encodings due to that whole Han unification thing. And for technical discussion almost no matter the language, this is either done in English straight-up (e.g. Linux kernel) or in the local language with almost every single noun replaced by a direct loan from English ("he connected to the server, then liked a post and added the guy who made it to his friends list").

When you've reached that level, you might as well pull a Torvalds and switch over to English. Then suddenly everything works again. You can now use a spell-checker while writing your documentation, for instance.
Not strictly relevant to the point under discussion, but I do want to point out PHP's famous "expected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" error.

Ah yes, the famous "it adds some character to PHP" token.
I stand by my claim however. T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM is easy to google, while :: and 4996 are not. Of course T_DOUBLE_COLON would be preferable, but you can't have it all here in life.

GNU Mailman and INN say hi.

No mailing list ever embedded me a jQuery.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-07, 17:06 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Do you have ADB?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-08, 21:58 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon
This is true, to some extent. But there is a thing called learning on the job. If I start out as a web developer and then slowly learn how to program 2D games, my knowledge of vector graphics and some Calculus will come naturally - albeit slow.

If you have 60 seconds to answer a question, and one person gets it wrong in 45 seconds and the other gets it right in 90 seconds, which one is the better student?

SATs in general though? Should only be used to ensure baselines are kept and little else.

That's only true under the assumption that the SAT tests for actual skills. It doesn't. The questions are very basic, and are just used as a politically correct proxy for IQ. This is also why you have limited time to complete them. Say you have the following question, for instance:

27 = 3*((14 - x)^2 - 7); solve for x

a) x = -10
b) x = -6
c) x = 6
d) x = 10

Given unlimited time, you could just try all the possible answers even without knowing algebra, or double-check your work until you're content there are no errors. Thus, it's imperative that the time restrictions are strict. With tight enough time restrictions, even the best of the best will inevitably make some errors, which will make it possible to set a meaningful score. If anyone with half-decent mathematical abilities is to ace the test, like in the school's tests, then it would start to clip quite rapidly, in effect making it into a simple pass/fail test.

The ideal test would of course never clip, although this would make it pointlessly arduous for the >99.9% of students who were not at risk for that anyway. Case in point: the SAT's perfect score (1600) doesn't correspond to an actual perfect score; a whopping 1 in 1430 students get the former, while only a handful of students a year (no exact numbers, but at most a few dozen) would get perfect raw scores.

[Why couldn't they brush up on maths before taking the SAT?]
A lot of different reasons. For instance, it is proven that the oldest child of a family often takes a disproportionate amount of responsibility in raising their younger siblings. Especially if one or both parents are unable to step up - which is very common in poor families who often see all kinds of abuse and addictions of some sort, be it cocaine, gambling or video games.

As the child grows up to an adult, they may have a second chance.

There's no limit to the amount of times you could take it, though. Replacing it with grades would make this issue far worse, since for those you do have to go to school, and can't retake once you're done.

You are aware IQ is a very, very poor measure of anything, correct? Unprepared they may tell a persons ability to reason logically, but IQ tests do not do much of anything. I took a test once, think I scored around 130 or so. You can absolutely game these tests though, and by the third time I took it I raised it to 190.

No, I am not. IQ is a very good predictor of life outcomes, not only in matters of education and money but also of health and relationships.

You probably took an online test, which are widely considered to be extremely poor estimates. IQs have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. If you would have scored 190 on such a test, that would put you +6s above the population - approximately one in a billion, or one of the seven smartest people on Earth. As you might imagine, gathering a billion people to make norms for an IQ test would be prohibitively expensive, to not say impossible, why you could not have received this score from a legitimate IQ test. I believe the WAIS-IV has a cut-off at 145 or thereabouts, for instance.

It's true that Matrix Reasoning, the most common elements of these on-line tests, to some extent is a teachable skill, but this does not hold true for all the other fifteen tasks.

Learning is all about making mistakes, and the earlier you make them, the better. Not to mention, in most countries as education has risen, so has the IQ score of those countries.

Talent does not an athlete make. Talent, combined with practice and even MORE practice, that makes an athlete.

It's true that it's important to make mistakes while learning. It is however discouraged to attempt to learn the subject matter while taking the tests. While making mistakes while learning is good, making them on the tests is not, since by then you're supposed to know the subject matter.

It's also true that IQ scores have risen slightly (Flynn effect), but this is better explained by better nutrition, healthcare, etc decreasing the amount of children whose developing brains get harmed. The average scores of high scorers have not risen by much:
Posted by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Rise_in_IQ
the [Flynn] effect primarily reduced the number of low-end scores, resulting in an increased number of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores. In another study, ... the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half, and ... gradually decreased as the IQ of the individuals increased.


It's also true that talent alone doesn't make an athlete. But talent is a prerequisite for becoming an athlete. Someone with a low prenatal testosterone exposure, for instance, simply does not have the ability to become a (good) athlete, and no amount of practice can compensate for this innate gap in ability.

U.S. system - Take a loan. It's only $500 000, covers only tuition, and we'll even be generous and let you pay off your loan within fifteen years, plus interest of course. That'll be $3000 a month.

I don't know how you arrive at this figure. If they study for four years, that's $125k a year. I don't even think Ivy League costs this much. The average tuition for a regular university over there is something like $30k a year, less if you study in your home state.

This results in US loans being extremely, extremely high with many people taking a side job while in college, while Swedes only need to work if they want some extra spare cash to pursue some hobby or make travel plans. From my perspective, it's completely broken. But then there are nuances I'm probably missing here. :)

Well, the US has incredibly high tuition costs for reasons unknown (the botched loan system, I would think). If an American goes to Stockholm to study, he'll have to shell out SEK 90,000 to 140,000 SEK a year, $9.6k-$14.9k. The tuition fees as well as costs of living in other parts of the world are far lower.

In closing, I think the U.S. school system is heavily skewed towards the already rich getting educated and the more unfortunate ones being left in the dust, which is sad because that means Ivy League universities will eventually lose out on the geniuses born into the working class. It will take decades for this to be apparent, however.

Yes, at least in theory. But as I explained, this is not such a big deal in practice, simply because there aren't so many geniuses born into the lower classes. "The working class" usually refers to middle-class people, and they tend to be able to afford college.

I agree that it's still an inefficiency, but it's a far smaller inefficiency than other issues with the American school system. For instance, the devaluation of objective and strongly predictive measures like the SAT in favor of far worse measures with abysmal predictive value (legacy, essays), which is done to "improve" the representation of ethnic minorities. It would be far more honest to find accurate measures (e.g. straight IQ tests), and then just norm both entrance and course exams based on protected class and write this on the degree. Then, by definition, the representation of protected classes would be exactly equal to that in the general population, and so would the average grades.

It's true that this would transform the schools into diploma mills for some combinations of protected classes and degrees, but it would also mean that the schools would be free to select objective and predictive measures without ever having to take disparate racial impacts into account, which probably would make it worth it. American students usually score within the top 5 on PISA rankings after disconsidering ethnic minorities, so there is a tremendous untapped potential.

Employers who wished to be politically correct and ensure a correct representation of ethnic minorities could then choose to not apply the norms in reverse to get back the real GPA.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-08, 21:58 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Do you have ADB?!

If not, then try editing https://github.com/vvviperrr/SimpleRT slightly - it doesn't need root.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-09, 21:10 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon
The Flynn effect indicates a *massive* increase in IQ, and IQ in and of itself is not an absolute number. Therefore, saying IQ determines success is the same as saying good grades determine success. Yes, people with good grades in general will succeed better in life, but the correlation is the other way around. Education brings better IQ, and I have never met a person whose grades could not be improved by studying.

Yes, but this massive increase only applies for the lower half or so. In other words, it can take someone from poor to average, but not from decent to excellent. Thus, for the purpose of scientific research, it isn't very important.

IQ is in and of itself an absolute number, in the sense that it has a high test-retest validity and a strong predictive power.

It's true that grades also predict life outcomes, but grades are caused by intelligence and not the other way around. We can verify this by looking at the genetic heritability of IQ as determined by, for instance, twin studies.

And no, this is not a PC thing, this has been proven by a ton of scientific studies. A high IQ does give you a certain advantage statistically but is not causative. It's like saying a poor person or a person of darker skin will never reach success because the odds are stacked against them.

The article doesn't provide any evidence for your claim, it's just some Quora answer without sources written by a random executive I've never heard of.

Someone with an IQ of 70 could never reach any kind of success, no. Someone with an IQ of 90 could hardly become a prominent researcher. And a person with an IQ of 110 would be rather unlikely to win a Nobel Prize (then again, so is everyone). And so on, and so forth.

Don't get your point about poor people. Their average IQ is probably lower than that of the middle and upper classes, making success less likely, but far from impossible. This has been known since antiquity.

If you have done 20 problems like this the answer is easy - Realise (14-x)² = 16 --> 14 - x = 4 --> x = 10. If you have done none of these, the answer is hard. And you need to know what (14-x)² even means. And therein lies the rub.

Whatever problem you are faced with, your experience dictates what you find easy and not. Two persons of equal intelligence but where one studied 4x as much as the other will lead to the person studying more achieving much better on the test. It's all about preparation.

It becomes far less easy when you're doing 20 of them in a row and have a minute each. Even someone with perfect skills will eventually slip up. For instance, to solve it the right way as you suggest requires one to know that sqrt(x^2) = x. Someone who has more time doesn't need to know this just to brute-force the answers.

For regular subject tests, it's true that practice makes perfect. This is not to the same extent true for the SAT. It is true that you can improve arithmetic skills and such, but eventually a cap will be hit. For instance, about 500 students (out of 1.7 million) each year score perfect scores, and out of those probably just a few dozen have actual perfect raw scores. If it were trivial to train for the SAT, why isn't this number higher? Shouldn't at least 5-10% score perfect scores, necessitating new norms?

Regarding the loans bit, yes I exaggerated, but my American associates do have to pay around $1000+ a month minimum due to their bad deals on loans. So this is real world experience. And if you want to know what a loan costs you per month, see for instance https://studentloanhero.com/calculators/student-loan-payment-calculator/.

Well, sure. But then they'd have loans of around $120k, if we go with 15 year repayment and 6% APR, which for a 4-year degree would imply $30k a year. This is clearly excessive, it's what a middle class person earns after taxes. Other first-world countries aren't nearly this expensive to study in, even without any government aid.

Posted by Kakashi
Plenty of people with mental illnesses have high IQ's.

Well, where do you think the "mad scientist" archetype comes from?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-09, 23:17 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon
So, in other words you agree with my point that IQ = Knowledge. Great! :)

No. IQ = Genetics; the various social classes differ genetically.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-10, 10:00 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon
See, that's where Science does not agree with you.

Genes are a fickle thing. Two sets of genes will produce an offspring that may or may not have beneficial traits. Two smart people could end up with a retarded kid with an IQ of 65, for instance. In fact, two black people can give birth to a white child; and two white people can give birth to a black one. It is not common, but it happens.

Well, she's hardly White. But with white skin, sure.

The phenomenon wouldn't be unheard of, anyway. Even if the child on average would end up like the average of their parents' IQ scores, there are still contributions from non-shared environment and the like. Same thing for height. It's still a genetic trait, and it still correlates with social class.

If your statement is true, that IQ is in the genes alone, this means we should see a wide scattering of IQ all across the social classes. Just like genetic diseases, that strike both highborn and lowborn alike and indiscriminately. Do we really, though?

Conclusion: Your statement is fatally flawed.

How do you conclude that "IQ is equal across social classes" from the premise "IQ is genetic"?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-10, 14:15 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon

If a good IQ score is genetically inclined, then it would have a similar spread as genetic diseases. It doesn't.

It doesn't follow. Skin color is obviously genetic, yet it's not equally spread across the population. The mechanism causing social stratification for IQ is quite simple: IQ leads to SES/Educational level, and assortative mating takes place for at least one of those. I don't see how this could take place for genetic diseases, unless they would also cause SES/Educational level.

Instead, there is a very clear correlation that the lesser the Socioeconomic Status (SES), the lower the IQ of that person. Furthermore, studies of infants being adopted from poor SES to high SES parents, compared to high SES natural borns, have shown that the adopted kids had a similar IQ to it's foster siblings and/or high SES friends.

Untrue. The experimental design you suggest ("identical twins reared apart") is excellent, and it suggests a correlation of around 0.75, or an R2 of ~58%, meaning that about 58% of the variation could be explained by genetics alone. Unrelated children reared together have a correlation of 0.04, which is hardly better than chance.

So, studies have been made and shows that while some genetic may play a part, it's minor and most of it is about SES. I do not know how much clearer this can be said, you are simply in the wrong here. :)

I would not call 57-86% heritability minor.

There is no evidence to suggest that SES would be a causative factor. The contributions from shared environment (e.g. SES) are extremely low (according to the study cited above, 0.04, which is even lower than I'd expect) with genetics+nonshared environment accounting for >95%.

Posted by CaptainJistuce
SWEET MERCIFUL ALTHENA, JUST STOP TALKING.
Social darwinism was disproved over half a century ago. The lower classes are not actually genetically inferior.

This is an exceptionally uncomfortable argument as here in America we've substituted classism for racism since shortly after overt racism became illegal, so it is difficult to not read that as "people of color are poor because they are genetically inferior to white folk", though I'm fairly sure that was not your intention.

BUT even ignoring that... America has also had a few decades of overt class warfare as the richest people have made a quite successful attempt to destroy the middle class, fattening their own wallets at the expense of society. The middle class shrinks more every year, with the vast majority of those households falling down the ladder rather than moving up.
So either everyone that isn't rich is mutating to become genetically inferior, OR social darwinism is a load of complete hogwash, social class has nothing whatsoever to do with genetics, and you're full of shit.

Sorry, I missed your post. I didn't intend to ignore it.

I have never advocated for Social Darwinism, I don't know from where this accusation comes.

Your second paragraph makes sense. I don't think I can or even want to address it directly because it's such a sensitive topic, so I'll just say that making a position illegal doesn't make it any more or less true, and that it's an absurd claim that just because the position is unacceptable it's wrong. Popularity is a decent heuristic in general, but consider that in this case the various races having the same IQs is more a matter of dogma than of legitimate scientific inquiry. This doesn't mean it's automatically wrong, nor that I believe it to be so, but it does mean the heuristic ceases to be useful.

This is the failure of the Republican party, I suppose. They went for dog-whistle politics and thought they could both have their cake and eat it, but then people started taking things too literally and genuinely thought they were concerned about "states rights" and joined up. Then again, combining racism with fiscally liberal policies is far more politically unacceptable than with fiscally conservative such due to the horrors of the Second World War. In other words, they had no choice but to do this. If you want a less controversial example, go with Israel. A right-wing party that's critical of Israel, oh boy, that's some ground you don't want to tread on. While a left-wing party doing the same is acceptable, because there are not the same problematic associations to it.

I don't think your point about shrinking middle class is relevant. Any number of transforms can be applied to the incomes, as long as the relative order stays the same. It's possible that increased nepotism would decrease the causative value of intelligence for SES. In fact, I would reckon this is the case for the extreme upper classes. For instance, it is far more common for elite colleges to grant legacy preference than others, which would mean they'd have a less apt student body than good but not strictly elite such. This also rhymes well with the anecdotal evidence I've heard. Then again, sour grapes.

At any rate, this doesn't prevent the general point from holding. As you can see in the second graph in this post, when holding intelligence constant the class difference disappears for the high- and low-IQ students.

Posted by Kakashi
Certainly not from those I am referring to.

Not quite sure I follow. Nikolas Tesla was very smart and very insane. For a more general example, engineers do like their terrorism, on both sides of the pond.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-10, 18:33 in Something about cheese!
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I have never once stated that, it is a grossly dishonest misrepresentation of the facts. The probability is indeed somewhat lower, but hardly impossible.

If we use SAT as a proxy and disconsider ethnic minorities, we get that there's a 152-point gap between the extremely affluent (Family income > $200k) and the extremely poor (Family income < $20k). Between the lower middle class ($20k-40k) and upper class ($160k-$200k) the gap narrows to 96 points. One standard deviation is 200 points. So the difference is somewhere between 0.5-0.75 SD. I'll go with the lower one, because it makes for a more realistic comparison.

The standard deviation of the IQ scale is 15 and the mean is 100. This would imply the difference is 7.5 points, if we use the SAT as a proxy for IQ. Let's take "high" to mean +2 SD, or 130 IQ.

For a population with m = 96.25 and s = 15, P(X ≥ 130) = 0.012
For a population with m = 100 and s = 15, P(X ≥ 130) = 0.023
For a population with m = 103.75 and s = 15, P(X ≥ 130) = 0.040

In other words, someone from the lower middle class would be about 50% less likely to have an IQ above 130 than someone of average income, and someone from the upper middle class should be about 75% more likely to do so.

So it's hardly "basically impossible," nor is the chance "very low". Considering that the SAT as a proxy for IQ also mixes in conscientiousness etc (which is far stronger among better-off people), the differences are likely even smaller.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
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