EU referendum are you in or out

[Absolute_Zero]

Because Johnson is just the front end. Cummings is our Prime Minister.

Corbyn is the front end. Seumas Milne is our leader of the opposition... for a while yet.

[Rubisco]

That's worse. My point is that the left has to get away from this idea that people are stupid or being blindly hoodwinked. Some probably are, yes the media is distorting the message a little, but the majority of right-wing voters - even those for whom it looks crazy on paper that they would vote right-wing - are doing it in reasonable knowledge of what they are doing and who they are voting for, if not necessarily the full consequences of the complete policy set.

For whatever reason, right-wing people and policies are a better fit to the template of what they think a government should look like. Calling them sheep is not going to help.

They're not daft. What we're dealing with is a first-world working class who have become globally-connected and realised the massive privilege they have in being a citizen of the world's 6th richest country, even with Tory levels of wealth-redistribution within that closed system in global terms the poor here are upper middle-class. Acknowledging that privilege is far less ignorant than denying it. They are voting to protect that privilege. It's hard to sell a moral message of equality to struggling people for whom equality actually means less.

Labour's manifesto was economically nationalist, but left-wing thought right now couldn't be further from nationalist. Individual policies may have appealed, but it didn't have a solid ideological foundation. The working class aren't fools, they have their ear fully to the ground.

[Dio]

I honestly can't tell if that's sarcasm or if I'm missing the point there. I hate modern politics.

[gilesgoat]

.. I am not really sure if I fully understand what Rubisco is saying ...

[edit] - I accidentally clicked on the BBC News site .. .. I see that pic of Johnson and what he's saying .. if I could ( I can't ) I would leave UK IMMEDIATELY ! ..

.. we are living in really BAD times I am telling you ...

[Foozwah]

I honestly can't tell if that's sarcasm or if I'm missing the point there. I hate modern politics.

I took it as meaning the working class have their ears to the ground because they're having their heads trodden on.

Any other reading is absolutely laughable. Looking at the political situation in the UK, US and Australia at the moment it's quite clear that large numbers of people vote through a combination of ignorance and narrow self-interest whilst failing to notice they're being fucked over in the bigger picture.

[zip accident]

The problem is the poor getting poorer.

If the rich get richer and the poor get richer as well, who cares? It's the divergence that's the problem.

[Little stoned kiwi]

Looking at the political situation in the UK, US and Australia at the moment it's quite clear that large numbers of people vote through a combination of ignorance and narrow self-interest whilst failing to notice they're being fucked over in the bigger picture.

Don't be so narrow minded. 'People' as a collective are thick as pigshit all over the world.

[gilesgoat]

Looking at the political situation in the UK, US and Australia at the moment it's quite clear that large numbers of people vote through a combination of ignorance and narrow self-interest whilst failing to notice they're being fucked over in the bigger picture.

Don't be so narrow minded. 'People' as a collective are thick as pigshit all over the world.

So why is that if that's a fact and it affects the whole world ?

After all in a voting system is the majority that sums up the results.

So it "proves" that "as a collective, we are collectively shit ?" ?

[zip accident]

Looking at the political situation in the UK, US and Australia at the moment it's quite clear that large numbers of people vote through a combination of ignorance and narrow self-interest whilst failing to notice they're being fucked over in the bigger picture.

Don't be so narrow minded. 'People' as a collective are thick as pigshit all over the world.

So why is that if that's a fact and it affects the whole world ?

After all in a voting system is the majority that sums up the results.

So it "proves" that "as a collective, we are collectively shit ?" ?

The average IQ is 100. If an issue splits people on IQ lines (which almost never happens) then a bare majority has an IQ of 101.

[gilesgoat]

Looking at the political situation in the UK, US and Australia at the moment it's quite clear that large numbers of people vote through a combination of ignorance and narrow self-interest whilst failing to notice they're being fucked over in the bigger picture.

Don't be so narrow minded. 'People' as a collective are thick as pigshit all over the world.

So why is that if that's a fact and it affects the whole world ?

After all in a voting system is the majority that sums up the results.

So it "proves" that "as a collective, we are collectively shit ?" ?

The average IQ is 100. If an issue splits people on IQ lines (which almost never happens) then a bare majority has an IQ of 101.

I don't believe much IQ, once I tried an IQ test to my BIG surprise it was all about "reply this and that in X seconds" that for me is "mega terrible" I am NOT a "super fast thinker" I am more a "I need to think a bit more about all this".

I can do high level maths and coding but I am NOT the person that 'do this and that in 20 seconds' .. I need my time.

I never tried fully an IQ test but if that's the way is done I suppose my IQ is really low

[Dio]

IQ tests are great tests of how good you are at IQ tests.

[zip accident]

IQ tests are great tests of how good you are at IQ tests.

Yeah, but some people are a lot better than others. Still, humans are terrific at them, even the best of the animals which can be tested come in single digits.

[KlaxonCow]

"Intelligence" is not a single monolithic thing. A single object to be quantified in just a single dimension.

That fact might not be convenient, but it's true.

As acknowledged by the IQ test itself, in fact, which has questions targeting spatial orientation, logical reasoning, arithmetical pattern matching, linguistic competence, etc. which is targeting the various different parts of the brain that can be independently ranked. Not to mention the importance of memory, something that IQ tests actually try to avoid testing, lest "cultural bias" creep into their intended-to-be-universal metric.

(E.g. asking someone "who is the President of France?" is really just a memory test of a cultural fact that they may or may not have experienced before. Such a question is likely culturally bias, because imagine asking it of a Frenchman, a German and a North Korean. Surely the Frenchman would know, as it's his own president. Indeed, even within the French, there's obvious variance - consider if the President of France himself is taking the test, then the answer, in that case, is "me". The German is only next door, so she's got a good chance of having encountered this fact before, while the North Korean is trapped inside a closed country that tightly controls all "outside" information from import. If the North Korean doesn't know the answer, it's not really a test of their intelligence, but more a test of whether the regime has let that information in and they can remember it.

IQ tests attempt to purge all cultural bias like this - as the critique that this made previous IQ tests fundamentally "racist" hit home and it's desperately been avoided to pose anything that would inherently give a cultural European an inherent advantage over a cultural African, for example - but this means that the tests dodge memory tests, as if a good memory has no function on a person's intelligence? Yes, clearly not true.

Plus, the problem that those with eidetic memory - "photographic memory" - would ace that part of any such test with near enough 100%. But then we've got problems because some with severe autism, where they can, for instance, glance at something just once and then render an almost photographic drawing of it. Incredible memory, so they would rank highly for this, but would fail elsewhere. Another reason why IQ tests consciously avoid testing memory directly.

But this is clearly flawed, as memory is fundamentally important - and truly inseparable - to any intelligent task. But IQ tests avoid this like the plague, because they don't want to be called "racist" when Africans fail, simply because they don't know European history (but why should they know that in particular?) and they don't want to be mocked when people with certain mental problems end up acing their tests as "geniuses", yet struggle with eye contact and coherent sentences.

Which is a perfectly understandable motivation, but this dancing on eggshells means they cease to be a proper universal measure, ironically enough, because they're purposefully dodging the awkward questions... and leaving out memory, of all things, as if this fundamental skill has nothing to do with anything. Which is clearly not true, therefore the metric is conspicuously not measuring a rather vital component of "intelligence".)

And which brain injury / damage has made clear - in that those with brain injuries have, for example, lost their long-term memories but remain perfectly competent otherwise. Or have, say, dyslexia and struggle to even read the question on the paper - but if you individually test their vision, their visual pattern recognition, their spoken language skills individually, they could ace those and yet still can't read (because it's a "brain wiring" thing. The visual and language centres of the brain have trouble communicating with each other, but each part individually is functioning 100%).

Intelligence is a multi-faceted thing. There's some truth to the stereotype of a scientific genius who's doing remarkable work, but is also forgetful - poor short term memory - and misses birthdays, forgets appointments, can't remember names to faces, etc.

Intelligence is not a single dimension, so you can't sum it up with a single number, basically.

It's an inevitably crude metric. Which is unreliable for its imprecision and known "blind spots" that aren't even tested, or can't be tested lest it come up with problematic conclusions - due to its complete lack of nuance, from reducing it all to a single number that just can't express anything beyond a single dimension alone - where those with certain mental problems end up acing parts of the test.

And one could consider, for example, the late Stephen Hawking attempting the timed sections of the test. But, of course, he was impeded by the fact that he couldn't physical move and has to communicate via a machine that's controlled by eye movement and a twitch of the cheek. He's scrolling through the responses and "I'm sorry, you've failed and are an idiot, because you couldn't give us the answer within 10 seconds".

Boiling all this down - plus, no doubt, a hundred other problems with this whole idea that i haven't mentioned - to a single number?

Yeah, okay. If you want to do that, then fine. But it can't be precise, it can't be nuanced, it can't accurately capture a very complex multi-dimensional state. I can't take it too seriously as a metric of anything but the crudest measure of, as Dio had it, "an IQ test proves how good you are at IQ tests".

Also, here's the real test: repeatability. Try taking multiple IQ tests at different times under different testing conditions. If it's correctly measuring something objective, then you should end up with much the same score every time, yes? Well, "nullius in verba". Just try that and report back on the variance you find between scores.

And here's the thing. If you, say, got 123 one time, 134 another time and 158 another time again or whatever, then which number would you self-declare as, if someone asks? Yeah, you'll use the highest score. Well, that's misleading, isn't it? And once you've got that very nice 158 score, would you perhaps be motivated to never take an IQ test again, lest you lose that fluky outlier?

Because, oh, it's not just the tests themselves but the dubious way people wield and abuse the scores too.

Which is why anyone I know with any smarts that I respect almost universally does not take IQ scores too seriously.

Common sense: a single score in a single dimension for something so complex and nuanced can't possibly be genuinely useful or precise enough for anything, other than for showing off that you've "got your initials in the high score table", really.


By the way, how the hell are we talking about this in the EU thread anyway?

[Dio]

Because we're all stupid.

[merman]

Parliament voted down amendments to the Brexit Bill that would have protected EU migrants' rights, and reunited refugee children with their families.

Michael "frog face" Gove is now going to tear up the Freedom of Imformation Act while Boris reduces the number of days Parliament sits. All to prevent scrutiny of how Brexit is progressing...