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Meet the new right, same as the old right.
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Becoming?
Becoming?
just in the last few centuries
IQ is to intelligence as BMI is to obesity.
Loosely correlated at best.
Don’t you mean weight? Forgive my ignorance but I’m pretty sure in the medical world BMI is literally what determines obesity.
It’s only a rough guideline. There’s Olympic athletes that would be considered overweight based on their BMI that are basically all muscle. It’s a decent guideline for your average person, but there’s outliers that don’t fit in that scale. After all, you’re making a judgment based on just 2 parameters.
So it’s a decent guideline like you said, barring some extreme exceptions like olympic-level athletes which aren’t a high percentage of the population.
Nah, its off in a lot more ways. Bone density, it exaggerates tall peoples "fat"ness, and short peoples "thin"ness, racial differences, differences between the sexes, so on and so forth.
Its a 200 year old formula that’s extremely generic. There are newer ones that are better, like waist to height ratio, hip and height, body comp, etc. Each one of those has some flaws too, but the waist to height is apparently pretty damn accurate. Way more than BMI. But it doesn’t work for certain ethnicities, children, or people with medical conditions that would enlarge their waist.
My workout partner in college was clinically obese based on his BMI. He was like 6% body fat and had more than average muscle mass but was not huge. He was built like Hugh Jackman as Wolverine except shorter. There’s lots of guys like that. Not sure I’d consider them to be extreme exceptions.
I was considered obese by BMI standards in high school, when I was outside with friends riding bikes all day and phys ed at school where I lifted weights daily. I would be impossibly thin if I tried to achieve it now.
No, BMI is directly a function of weight.
Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health. A body mass index (BMI) over 25 is considered overweight, and over 30 is obese (From the WHO)
Obesity is quantified using BMI by medical organizations because there isn’t an effective way to quantify it otherwise, but it’s in the same way as using IQ is a shorthand for intelligence or the DSM is used to describe mental illness. It needs a qualified professional to use the raw data point in combination with other factors in order to tell you if your body fat is actually unhealthy.
High body mass does also add its own strain independent of fat, but the actual intent of the term obesity is about whether you have a level of excess fat that lowers health outcomes, not size by itself. (It also wasn’t actually ever intended by it’s creator as a measure of health, just as the broad stroke data point it is.)
But the alternative to being high weight without high body fat % is high muscle mass, which is only a thing in a few humans.
IQ is indeed not representative of intelligence because we can’t represent a lot of functions of intelligence in a sensible test.
The DSM is a list of diagnostic criteria. Hopefully patient-facing shrinks don’t use “raw data” outside of said diagnostic criteria to make judgements on diagnoses, otherwise they’re just using arbitrary non-spec information.
What other raw data is used in the weight example?
It’s a thing in a good number of humans. Once you do pretty much any strength training (or just heavy lifting) at all, BMI loses its value pretty quickly. It’s a rough indicator.
The DSM is definitely not intended to be stand alone. It is a set of general guidelines and definitions to inform the evaluation of a mental health professional. Most people check a good number of boxes on a good number of those checklists. The checklists are a tool to be used in collaboration with the professional judgement of the doctor. Almost every individual checkbox is “checked” or not based on the doctor’s subjective evaluation.
Muscle mass and general body composition are part of it. Some people are naturally bigger and healthier at more weight than others. Some are naturally smaller and healthier at levels that would be unhealthy skinny for others. Presence of other obesity related illnesses are another. If you’re showing signs of heart disease, breathing issues, etc, in addition to being big, that’s a sign that losing weight will improve your health outcomes. BMI is a very rough yardstick that is used for the purpose of evaluating populations over time. It is not a good way to look at the health of a single individual without context.
Once you do pretty much any strength training (or just heavy lifting) at all, BMI loses its value pretty quickly. It’s a rough indicator.
So it seems like there’s just an exception in the few gymrat type folks out there and athletes. Still seems like a small exception group compared to the general population. That aside, the bit about certain people being healthier while bigger/smaller seems anecdotal and unscientific afaik.
Most people check a good number of boxes on a good number of those checklists.
I don’t think most people would check many boxes for schizophrenia or gender dysphoria or even ADHD, though as always the real test is whether the meds help.
As for GAD or something more unspecific it’s really more about whether it impacts their life negatively or not which is a presumption under which those checklists are meant to be taken.
Still, I’ve never heard of someone checking off all the boxes while self-diagnosing and then going on to not be legitimately diagnosed outside of a few cases where supposed professionals usually apply some discrimination based on immutable characteristics.
Almost every individual checkbox is “checked” or not based on the doctor’s subjective evaluation.
Yeah this kind of just demonstrates that the doctor’s part of the equation is utter bullshit
“Gym rats” means anyone who’s ever played a sport. Or done a job with manual labor. Or did any of many other things. BMI is “unscientific as fuck”. It was literally never intended to be used anything like how it’s used. It was solely intended to give a broad strokes single number for size relative to height (in a very limited initial population). There is no actual basis for its use anywhere.
The entire DSM was designed for the sole purpose of being used by a doctor. It was never intended to be used to self diagnose, or in literally any context outside of being used by a professional. The doctor’s part of the equation is the whole point and the only thing that makes the DSM useful in any way. It is not standalone. It is a tool to enable doctors to have a consistent framework and process to do their job.
But anyways, this is all way off topic.
The entire point is that treating very rough, loose yardsticks as the “truth” for complex phenomena is nonsense.
It is strongly correlated. High IQ reliably predicts high performance in a variety of cognitive tasks (even ones not covered by the IQ test).
To pretend that IQ is a sham is dangerous, because that would suggests that definite proof to the contrary makes the fascists right. Which it doesn’t.
Firstly because statistical correlation is useless for individual outliers (e.g. high BMI Olympic athletes). It says something about a population, but can only suggest something about an individual (high BMI can mean someone is overweight, but further analysis is required to make a diagnosis).
Secondly and more importantly because using synthetic metrics as a proxy for the value of a human life is an abhorrent practice that has only ever led to misuse and dangerous if not catastrophic or outright genocidal policies. I don’t mind IQ tests as an indicator for psychiatric diagnoses, or for aggregate research on human cognition. But if, for any reason, someone’s IQ needs to be made public or handed over to an institution, then we’re on the road straight to fascism.
It’s correlated to a very narrow subset of skills that are a small part of intelligence. It’s a predictor of successful outcomes in the broad sense, but considering the strong correlation to access to education and other similar environmental prerequisites to healthy development, claiming there’s a particularly strong causal relationship between IQ and success is relatively bold.
My whole assertion is that using IQ as a value measurement is fundamentally not very useful. In the specific case of race (or cultural background, or whatever), there’s no functional way to control for the confounding factors, so you can’t really draw any conclusions about the “merit” of the relevant population at all, even if IQ did that.
The people who defend it use it because it’s racist. That’s why they want it used more.
Like I said IQ should never, ever be used as an entry exam or any other kind of social determinant. Not least because of the racist/classist history. However, it does have a signification and legitimate uses, and to pretend otherwise is scientific negationism. We do not have to listen to racist conspiracy theories about why some populations have a lower IQ than “us”, when we have known and repeatedly demonstrated for many decades that differences in IQ at the population level is entirely predictable by education and health (the Flynn Effect). That’s it, that’s the necessary and sufficient counter-argument to the racist arguments you’re referring to.
Put another way, education does not just make people educated; it makes them more intelligent. Someone who has gone through standard schooling is empirically proven to be statistically better at novel abstract thinking than someone who never went to school. Which is kind of obvious when put like that, but you can’t prove or study that phenomenon scientifically without the use of tools like the IQ test.
Poor african countries have a lower IQ than the world average, and that is an irrefutable fact. Does that mean:
a) Life outcomes are not shaped in anyway by socioeconomic background, therefore [insert racist theory here]
b) I refuse to look into the possible causes and therefore IQ tests are racist
c) We can infer that poor populations would benefit from increased financing of childcare and education, it’s a winning move for literally everyone.The topic of IQ tests is really uncomfortable because it unearths the really uncomfortable fact that socioeconomic and geopolitical factors have not given us all an equal shot at life, even down to how intelligent we are likely to become as adults. It challenges the myth that anyone can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps, work at mcdonald’s, and become a triple harvard graduate. But it’s not neuroscience’s fault that the world is unfair.
It’s not just racist, it’s also ableist and sexist too
Controlling for confounding factors is, like, half the point.
Racists will tell you
[x country]is lower IQ than[y developed country]. Which is probably true. What they won’t say is that that average IQ is probably the same as[y developed country 100-200 years ago]. IQ being affected by education is the whole fucking point; widespread access to a good and long education provably leads to a more intelligent population, which we have seen time and time again with industrializing countries (including in the West since the IQ test is old enough that we can see the average IQ rising since the industrial revolution).And when the scores rise, they’re adjusted to the mean. Because 100 means of average intelligence, and the average intelligence rises, so the average is adjusted for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Ulric Neisser estimated that using the IQ values of 1997, the average IQ of the United States in 1932, according to the first Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales standardization sample, was 80. Neisser states that “Hardly any of them would have scored ‘very superior’, but nearly one-quarter would have appeared to be ‘deficient.’” He also wrote that “Test scores are certainly going up all over the world, but whether intelligence itself has risen remains controversial.”
No, it provably leads to a country that scores higher on an IQ test.
IQ is not intelligence.
Can you please give a definition of intelligence that does not correlate with IQ? Because scientists have been trying, and as far as I know, failing.
Or I guess we can keep pretending that intelligence is fully inquantifiable and therefore we won’t be able to quantify how socioeconomic background affect people’s wellbeing. I guess that does have the upside that we don’t have to face the hard truths of our world, that unequal access to healthcare and education does affect people’s cognitive abilities and that the worse life outcomes of poor people being self-inflicted is a myth perpetuated by the ruling class to justify their continued oppression. No, it must be the IQ tests that are racist.
The fact that it’s affected by environment is the evidence that it’s not intelligence. Intelligence is not malleable. IQ is.
[citation needed]
“Sex, Lies, and Brain Scans” talks about IQ and the problems with IQ. There’s also “Delusions of Gender” by Cordelia Fine, and “Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasia.”
First, I have had a neuropsych evaluation done and an IQ test. It has areas that are subjective and open to interpretation by the test administrator, already making IQ tests suspect. There is no way to quantify intelligence using actually measurable data. Sound is measured in Hz, light in nanometers, and these things fit nicely on a scale with numbers. Intelligence doesn’t require something so discrete. Octopuses, parrots, elephants, all have different brain anatomy from us and each other and are all quite intelligent. It’s hard to say what the secret sauce even is, let alone measure it quantifiably.
Many neuropsych tests aren’t actually able to prove anything substantial about the brain itself or a person’s abilities, short of serious cognitive tests like the clock test which is also fallible. The reason for this is that most human intelligence is pretty close to each other and it’s actually hard to find substantial, consistent differences in the population. Think of how close in intelligence a bear is to a human - trash can design at Yellowstone is famously difficult because bear and human intelligence overlap so much. Humans are much more alike cognitively with each other than a bear.
Second, we have the issue of implicit bias and priming. That tells certain groups if they are allowed to be “good” at something, if something is “meant” for them, if they will do well at it. When controlled for cognitive bias, IQ levels across most groups are equal and IQ tends to start to measure persistence/“resiliency” between the groups - which can be affected by something as simple as a coffee that morning or bad sleep.
Last, we have actual medical conditions that make it hard to communicate and pass an IQ test, but the person’s IQ is intact/normal for them. There are musical geniuses that aren’t picked up by IQ tests, as well as athletic geniuses (Wayne Gretsky), artistic geniuses, and social geniuses.
You’re getting push back because people loathe the idea than an intrinsic value like IQ might define them. Same reason the bullies kicked my ass up until high school. They thought I had something they weren’t born with, couldn’t compete with, thought I had an unfair edge.
Sorry folks, IQ is a large component of who you are, and no, you can’t control that number. OTOH, back to my childhood ass beatings, I wasn’t much smarter than the other kids. 119 IQ, tested the same at 6 and 16-yo, “bright normal”, nothing to write home about. I did well in school due to my parents drive and my love for knowledge. None of my friends took a diploma on graduation night and none had as low an IQ as I. Go figure.
IQ is a legitimate part of you, like it or not. Emotional quotient is as well. I know damned well that my IQ is far higher than my wife’s, and her EQ is stunning compared to mine, makes a nice balance. But does that mean I’m smarter than her? I would argue it does not. People called my last boss a “dumbass”, but only because his IQ outstripped his EQ.
tl;dr: IQ scores are important and defining, but there is much more to get the gestalt of a human being.
I guess when you’re all white and stupid, these things become important to you
Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.
We report longitudinal data in which we assessed the relationships between intelligence and support for two constructs that shape ideological frameworks, namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). Participants (N = 375) were assessed in Grade 7 and again in Grade 12. Verbal and numerical ability were assessed when students entered high school in Grade 7. RWA and SDO were assessed before school graduation in Grade 12. After controlling for the possible confounding effects of personality and religious values in Grade 12, RWA was predicted by low g (β = -.16) and low verbal intelligence (β = -.18). SDO was predicted by low verbal intelligence only (β = -.13). These results are discussed with reference to the role of verbal intelligence in predicting support for such ideological frameworks and some comments are offered regarding the cognitive distinctions between RWA and SDO.
“becoming”
Definitely the strongest word here, seeing how much lefting it’s doing.
I would spend up to $50 for a pay per view of Trump taking a fair IQ test. Mr. Room Temperature IQ would do bigly well.
Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
Result- 180 IQ
I don’t understand how they square defining themselves as beacons of intelligence when we’ve seen so many times in history how fascists target anyone they deem “intellectual” because they could pose a threat to the regime.
I guess you also have to subscribe to the racist and blatantly untrue ideology, which the majority of truly intelligent people do not subscribe to because it’s racist and fucking stupid.
People should stop using a term ‘race’ for humans because there’s no scientific evidence that humans have races.
Being white or black doesn’t have anything to do with having different race in biology. It’s just a skin color that is different.
I think the closest term for genetic and environmental (cultural?) differences in human population would be phenotype, and these definitely exist. But keep in mind I do not know much about biology, so I might be wrong here and there, I only rephrase Wikipedia.
While I dislike the concept and you’re right that it’s a made up construct, I need to mention that made up constructs still impact our lives. A phenotype is just a phenotype until it costs you a job or makes your home value go down. At that point, race is something you have to confront simply because racists exist.
The problem is, humans instinctually categorize people because it’s easier to process. This can be as reasonable as knowing a person in a uniform works at a place, or life saving like identifying someone shady, who very well might harm you. If the phenotype of skin color ends up associated with something incorrect or misleading, however, you then have a very benign thing (appearance) leading to very real outcomes (racism).
Hope that makes sense. Race is stupid, but people judge others for all sorts of things. Otherism is very real.
This is such an interesting topic!
I completely agree that race as an idea as steeped in false science and racism, but I always find it really difficult to consider race when it’s used as a positive force as well- movements like US civil rights have massively reduced racism, partly by using race as a concept (such as black pride).
On the flip side, neoliberalism often advocates “color-blindness” as an idea (don’t acknowledge/consider people’s race) which is a great ideal, but in practice often seems to amount to turning a blind eye to on going racism.
Colorblindness has its roots in white settler colonialism over Native Americans, including the schools they made them go to. This helped settlers assert their claim to these lands.
That’s why it’s not as common in the south, where it was important to hilight race to assert control over black people.
The historical context of race is what still affects people to this day.
I think ethnicity and intersectionality are a better thing to focus on when around others (more socially acceptable and less threatening/charged), along with individual experience. Race is just one way to look at somebody but there’s many many other layers and they all work together.
Framing it this way makes things worse, even though it’s true. The focus has to be on moving towards everybody understanding, talking like, and acting like it’s the bullshit that it is. We don’t want to state the truth in a way that hand waves it away and centralizes the lie.
Race is a bullshit concept and we need to fix the damage caused by idiots not getting it.
My discovery about how the human cognitive system works on this some years ago has led me to the conclusion that everybody defaults to being prejudiced via this pathway - we all just assume shit about people we don’t know purely based on how they look and talk - hence racism is the default.
So not being racist isn’t a simple passive act of not being so, it’s the active trying to stop one’s natural tendency to prejudge others on how they look and prejudge entire groups of people whose “membership” is defined in our minds by things that have nothing to do with their actions or ideologies, and spotting when we do fail to stop ourselves doing it and walking back those prejudgements we made about other people.
This is why so many people who think they’re not racists still go around prejudging entire groups of people, but they only do it on the positive side (ex: “Jews have Modern Values”) or reserve their racism for groups against which it’s not unfashionable to be racist (ex: " Muslims are violent"), when the real non-Racist posture would be to not even consider group “membership” in passing judgment, only the actions and words of the individual or ideology you’re judging (so both Zionists and Islamists are violent and do not have Modern Values, because that’s their ideology - something they chose, not something they were born with or into - and you can’t prejudge entire ethnicities or religions based on some people in those having certain behaviours or ideologies)
Yes, we often refer it it as a heuristic because it’s a mental shortcut. There are ways to counter act it, such as described in the contact hypothesis (e.g. get to know a group by having interdependence with an out group). Having a shared category with someone can also help, like being part of the same team, organization, etc.
For example, a study looked at the response rate at a sporting event when researchers approached people to participate; a black researcher and a white researcher. Under control conditions, the black researcher had a harder time getting white participants to help and to a lesser extent, vica versa. However, when they wore the same team hat, participation was close to even. The idea is, the hat showed that they belonged to the same in-group, reducting or eliminating the hesitation of participation.
I often forget author names but I can probably dig it up later. There’s a lot of studies about this in social psychology since there’s a general interest in getting people to stop being so damn racist, haha.
Great explanation
Big talk from the ham sandwich race
IQ is eugenics. It was developed by eugenicists to do eugenics. It’s not just a matter of controlling for bias, the whole endeavor is a logical fallacy (reification).
It’s a bad instrument and should be abandoned.
it was designed to help find which children needed extra help with school work!
Binet and Simon worked closely to develop more tests and questions that would distinguish between children who did and did not need help in attending regular education. In 1905 they published a preliminary version of their test for measuring intelligence (chased by a committee set up at Bourneville’s instigation to decide on this). The full version of the test with age-appropriate standards was published in 1908 and was known as the Binet-Simon scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet#Later_career_and_the_Binet–Simon_test
It was then used by others to push eugenics
In 1908, H.H. Goddard, a champion of the eugenics movement, found utility in mental testing as a way to evidence the superiority of the white race. After studying abroad, Goddard brought the Binet-Simon Scale to the United States and translated it into English.
Following Goddard in the U.S. mental testing movement was Lewis Terman, who took the Simon-Binet Scale and standardized it using a large American sample. The first test was published in 1916 and called “The Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale”. A revision was published in 1937 and now called the Stanford-Binet scale. The name of Simon was all but erased from the record and this has been the reason why Simon’s contribution to the development of the test has been overlooked in much of the 20th century and early 21st century.[14]
The Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale was no longer used solely for advocating education for all children, as was the original objective. The new objective of intelligence testing was ultimately “curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency”.[15]
The far right can’t even spell IQ.
Eye-que
This is not new at all https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
The far right guy called Adolf Hitler and his little group was also pretty obsessed with it. I have no idea where the author of this piece has been hibernating all this time, because they never stopped obsessing over race.
Because they’re worried that other races are more attractive and they’re idiots?
One is made up and they other they don’t have.
Both are made up. The second one to legitimize the first one.
i didn’t click the article because im stupid and lazy, - but all i need is the title to share an old german saying with you:
“he, who sits in a house made of glas shouldn’t throw rocks”
“Wer im Glashaus sitzt, solllte nicht mit Steinen werfen”
It’s common in the US as well. We say “He who lives in glasshouses should not throw stones.”
deleted by creator
Philip Glass shouldn’t throw houses. There, I said it
People shouldn’t throw glass rocks.
What about smoking rocks, IN the glass? Sounds pretty MAGA to me.
