Touchy 78, u r wasting evetyones time. You are not etiying for your own amusement, as or you would not go to such lengths to defend yourself, or eveb bother typing what you are thinking.
You make the point of your claimed profession then egen domeone asks you about it in the next post claim it is irrelevant and personal attack. No your own responses to constructive criticism are the personal attack.
I wasted probably 20 minutes reading that back and forth following on from where the relrvant comments were yesterday. There would be another half hours worth of the bullshit i scrolled right past. Doctors usually have better things to do, or if they do put their time in this, know better than to use really long one sentence paragraphs.
Bea Lever
March 31, 2016 8:58 pm
Hershel-
El Tucci the wordy thread dictator is off finding a cure for his verbal diarrhea .
Ed
March 31, 2016 9:13 pm
Llpoh, I ain’t actually retarded. I just have a whole different kinda smarts than most of my felluh Merkins. However, I do admit to being crazy as a bedbug. Still, bedbug though I am, the younguns are kind to me at pow wows because I’m an elderly.
Ed
March 31, 2016 9:17 pm
” Doctors usually have better things to do, or if they do put their time in this, know better than to use really long one sentence paragraphs.”
Hershel, I don’t know about doctors, but William Faulkner wrote fuckin sentences that had to be continued in his next novel. Hell, the name of one fictional county in Mississippi in his books was about twice as long as the name of the state.
I shit you not.
Hershel Pasternak
March 31, 2016 9:58 pm
Hardscrabble, IQ testing does not measure problem solving only, if at all. General knowledge is measured with questions such as “who is the president of the US?”. Any american knows because they can not miss it. People with no TV in villages dont know. Digit Span Frontwards and backwards measures memory. People with telephones are used to using arabic numbers and holding 8 or so in short term memory taking down phone numbers. Many other people have little or no practice. There are many other subtests used. In general more intelligent people have more general knowledge because they seek information in yes, problem solving. Better memory correlates with intelligence so is measured. Basic math also heavily favors people who have basic education. Indian villagers were too many times child labourers, kids in ghettos hardly sent to school. This is why the nonverbal or Performance, the second part of the test gives a way better picture of intelligence in people who have not gone through typical western culture and education. But even then the tasks or instructions favour americans, eg that eould be ‘favor’ to americans and the tests are american. You may think thats no difference but giving instructions is also unintentionally americanised. Eg. One person ordering two plates of take away. The american instructions is “I want/will have/will take two orders”. To other english speakers the instruction “ill have fried rice and chicken curry thanks. Thats one, and another one with noodles and beef please.” confuses american fast food workers. So even though the indian villager can do at least as well on average as the gmo fed american in eg Pattern Recognition, understanding the instruction can be a block affecting the score.
As i said earlier indians and chinese were dominating the entry to study medicine with the top marks into limited places so they had to devise a way to get more ‘native’ graduates in and used the interview. The indians and chinese probably speak their own languages at home so may not perform as perfectly in the interview. Still those indians who topped the scores in the entrance exams are the same race as the villagers who average as almost retarded using the american IQ tests, so its not a matter of better brains behind the national averages but the culture. All those indians and chinese who top the scores are wearing thick glasses at 17 yrs old because their culture is to study for endless hours while others are partying etc. Culture has everything to do with IQ.
EL Coyote
March 31, 2016 10:22 pm
Ed says: William Faulkner wrote fuckin sentences that had to be continued in his next novel.
Get the faulk out of here, Ed. Did you know Garcia Marquez called him the greatest writer? If you think jFish weeping at sundown is touching, a woman poisoning her wayward lover is pretty romantic as is a negro who purposely gets himself lynched after his beloved wife dies.
Steinbeck is cool, I never got into Hemingway. I prefer a story with sort of Samson and Delilah romance in it.
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 12:59 am
Knowing even less than shit about contemporary commercial farmers, Bea Lever writhes: “…unless your buddies at the commercial farms can plow with horses in the SHTF and use horse shit for fertilizer you may end up with bupkis.”
No, they don’t know animal husbandry, the tack and procedures of getting a team of horses (or oxen) to draw farm equipment – including not only plows of various types but also harvesting gear etc. – but the modern commercial farmer knows how to maintain and operate machinery far more complex and capable, to use pesticides and herbicides, to make use of long-range weather predictions (which may well survive various SHTF catastrophes and remain useful), to assess short- and long-term market demand for crops produced (SHTF or not, there will always be markets), and to use every kind of fertilizer, including composted manure from every conceivable source. The Old Order Amish, for all their experience with 19th-Century technology, do not, even though they’re acknowledged to be the best “organic” farmers around.
The principles of commercial farming – and anything less is merely sustenance agriculture, which may be immediately (over one or two years) necessary for survival but is incompatible with sustaining a civilization – are far better understood by contemporary industrial farmers, and that knowledge base doesn’t go away. As long as any of them survive – indeed, as long as any farm agents, agronomists, or plant science geeks in the employ of Monsanto and the other big agribusinesses survive – that fund of knowledge will come to the fore. “Preppers” seem to miss this. The objective has to include both short-term exigencies AND recovery, else all you’re doing is deferring disintegration and doom.
Again, find a copy of *The Last Centurian* (John Ringo, 2008) and get introduced to some informed speculation about how a SHTF situation might more reasonably be expected to develop and addressed. It’s also an entertaining read.
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 1:21 am
Stucky tries to comfort himself with the unfounded assumption that I’m “defensive and easily rattled,” forgetting that the first lesson I was taught upon posting on this Web site was that the usual crowd of commenters here are – in leftard Social Justice Warrior style, their general political preference for Rotarian Socialist (nee “Republican”) politics notwithstanding – invariably disposed to “attack the man” argumentum ad hominem when they’re confronted with disputation they don’t like but they’re too brainfucked to refute.
When they go off-topic and start attacking my STYLE OF EXPRESSION (and let’s remember, I’m not writing here either for pay or for publication in an indexed professional periodical), they get the broken end of the pool cue shoved briskly into that multitude of soft spots so well known to us with experience in Emergency Medicine. Then you keep twisting until they either pass out or discretion gives them cause to shut the fuck up.
Now, returning to the topic, Stucky had written: “I think that [the] ‘something’ [I’d been contending] is this; Kneegrows ain’t as dumb as most sez dey are … and Cracka’s ain’t as smart as we think dey is.
“Did I get that right, Doc?”
As usual, not quite. What I’ve been saying is that the test methodologies involved in getting intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, having been normed to assess cognitive function in Americans of European ethnicity (and culture) may not provide information valid in the comparative assessment of individuals from other ethnic groups (and, presumably, cultures). The East Asians seem to have an edge in Stanford-Benet and other IQ testing methods, but is that the effect of native intelligence or cultural factors (even down to what might be called “household culture” in the immediate family)? The jigaboos, the spics, the wogs – obviously do not.
This would seem to suggest that further investigation is in order, perhaps looking at White kids raised in East Asian families, pickaninnies and porch apes adopted by crackers, little jihadis ripped from dar al-Islam in their pre-verbal stages and raised by Lutherans, etc.
How to get at adequately-powered and well-controlled survey populations is an exercise (and a helluvan exercise it is!) I’ll leave to the student.
But we return to the issue of IQ test methodology. Sure, we can look at the graph above with all kinds of emotional loading, but what the fuck is the data used to plot that graph really saying? More importantly, what ISN’T it saying?
Meanwhile, Lipoh, again and as always, go fuck your ghee-lubricated subcontinental self.
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 1:29 am
ThePessimisticChemist whimpers: “Now this is the closest I’ve come to being insulted this entire thread.”
Oh, stick around, asshole. You’ve not yet begun to get proper assessment of whatever it is you use in lieu of character. How else could a prickly little git like you take such except as “being insulted”?
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 1:47 am
ThePessimisticChemist makes an attempt to say something on-topic with:
“1. The data holds true across multiple different test styles and published research. No matter what way you slice it, race has just as large an effect on IQ as nutrient availability and childhood stress levels.
“2. The world has moved towards a more modern, ‘Westernized’ approach to teaching and information dissemination. If you want to prove that someone’s culture is so alien from ours that it prevents them from recognizing patterns of shapes, then thats a whole other set of research papers. Have fun with that.
“3. Even in the medical industry. Even in the chemical industry. Even in the motherfucking world of particle physics….presenters take the time to speak their piece as plainly as possible.
“The only people who use as much superfluous language as this joker are lawyers, politicians, and writers being paid by the word.”
On that last, the stupid shit avoids appreciation of the fact that concision takes WORK (endless quotations throughout the literary word, particularly in letters, to the effect that “I’m sorry I’ve written at such length, but I didn’t have the time to make it shorter”) and – as I’ve already said, posts in “comments” threads like these are the epitome of light extemporanea. Unless this shit-for-brains “Chemist” were the editor of a periodical in which I’m seeking to publish a manuscript, he doesn’t get to ordain my style or content. He can critique the former here, in which case he’s properly told to go fuck himself. When he address the latter – as he’s attempted to do in the material I’ve immediately quoted – he can be reasonably asked to support the assertions he’s retailed and expand upon them.
I can provisionally accept his contention that “The data [on IQ test results] holds true across multiple different test styles and published research” because that’s not the point I’ve been making. Among the questions raised, however, is what testing methodologies are measuring, not to mention how those characteristics of mentation are being measured. Certainly, the data sets under discussion shows that “race [seems to have] just as large an effect on IQ as nutrient availability and childhood stress levels,” but if ethnicity is factored out of the investigation and other qualities of the participants (such as the cultures in which the study subjects had been raised) are factored in, what effects are manifest on Stanford-Binet and other cognitive function tests?
How much is truly “nature”? How much is effectively “nurture”?
One of the many painful lessons that an education, training, and experience in medicine teaches is that yesterday’s easy sureties are not uncommonly judged major brainfucks through the application of retrospectroscopy. This bit about “My racial IQ is better than yours, so you’re stupid, nyah-nyah!” has all the hallmarks of such a down-the-garden-path adventure.
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 2:06 am
Hershel Pasternak bitches that I “…make the point of your claimed profession then [when someone] asks you about it in the next post claim it is irrelevant and personal attack.”
Because, you dickwad, when the pitiful shits in this forum criticize what they suppose of my background and purposes for writing as and what I do, it IS a “personal attack” in purpose and practice. It’s classic argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy turned, a la Ayers’ *Rules for Radicals,* into a fucking TACTIC by the morally bankrupt and the intellectually malignant.
Look, you idiot, I consider it proper for me to speak about my own education, training, and experience simply because it’s pretty fucking unremarkable. You got that? I’m a primary care grunt, the epitome of the “local M.D.” denigrated by the secondary and tertiary specialists as worth little other than as a filter to triage the hypochondriacs from the “interesting cases.” I ain’t no particular bright light in the world of Big Science, and yet if _I_ can see flaws in the investigatory methods, the quality of data, the interpretation of observations, and the recommendations for action predicated thereupon, how the fuck do the “Big Science” mahoffs get away with pushing government policy predicated on error and/or mendacious bullshit?
I’m “lowest common denominator” in medicine particularly – the country G.P. – and the sciences generally. That’s what my curriculum vitae – and whatever I might parenthetically recount of it – means.
If _I_ can get this stuff, why the fuck can’t _you_?
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 2:26 am
Billy speaks of inspissated whale oil (gad, an 1874 Sharps 50-90! how the hell do you find brass for such a firearm?) and others discuss Cosmoline rust preventive….
One arms aficionado of my acquaintance had suggested that automobile degreaser equipment (and the non-polar solvents used thereby) can be made to work pretty well in getting Cosmoline (a waxy petroleum fraction) off even the most delicate parts of disassembled firearms. Lighter fluid, gasoline, kerosene or liquid petrolatum [“mineral oil”] all work to lessen the viscosity of Cosmoline and facilitate its removal, but they’re volatile petroleum fractions and because they’re usually heated when used to “soak” the Cosmoline-impregnated items, the fire hazard they pose is daunting.
Definitely a “don’t do this at home, kids!” kinda thing.
Hershel Pasternak
April 1, 2016 7:02 am
Take a breath Touchy, sounds like your turning blue half half way through, more oxygen and you might make more sense. Stanford-Binet was 1916, todays test is the WAIS. Ive covered some of the problems using it to get the graph data in another post above.
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 7:36 am
Hold your own breath, Hershel. Keep holding it. Yeah, like that. Ignore the hypercapnea, the hypoxia, and just pass right the fuck out.
There y’go. Now you’re in your optimal condition of function, and nobody has to put up with your shit anymore.
As for the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Score, presently in its fourth edition), while it’s the most widely-used of such cognitive function tests (much to Pearson’s enrichment), the Stanford-Binet (now in its fifth edition) is still in use because it’s applicable in the evaluation of young children. The WAIS was designed to assess adults and older adolescents, and therefore its clinical utility in picking up developmental abnormalities in the first decade of life is suboptimal.
Was the “graph data” in the plot above generated using the WAIS? Or is it an aggregation of results gotten using the various different kinds of cognitive function testing available? What was the source of said graph?
Bea Lever
April 1, 2016 8:51 am
El Tucci ! El Tucci ! El Tucci ! El Tucci ! El Tucci !
(The crowd roars for the thread dictator to speak)
Alas, El Tucci is still suffering from verbal diarrhea.
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 9:10 am
Posting perpetually without pertinence, we’ve got Bea Lever proving that vaginal yeast infections CAN achieve hematogenous spread that breaches the blood-brain barrier.
Gad, you can smell the necrosis when she hits the “Submit Comment” button.
Hershel Pasternak
April 1, 2016 10:00 pm
Touchy; “out.
There y’go. Now you’re in your optimal condition of function, and nobody has to put up with your shit anymore.
As for the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Score, presently in its fourth edition), while it’s the most widely-used of such cognitive function tests (much to Pearson’s enrichment), the Stanford-Binet (now in its fifth edition) is still in use because it’s applicable in the evaluation of young children. The WAIS was designed to assess adults and older adolescents, and therefore its clinical utility in picking up developmental abnormalities in the first decade of life is suboptimal.”
U raise eyebrows but get the benefit of the doubt for former wrong spelling of stanford-binet and not knowing the S In WAIS stands for scale not score, but any decent doctor knows that the WISC (Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children) is the juvenile counterpart to the WAIS and the most widely used test of intelligence with the right to use the term “IQ”. No decent doctor would substitute such a broad range of brain processes that fall under the term “cognitive function” in place of Intelligence specifically. If a medical doctor really needed or wanted to impress us with a lexicon of jargon on this subject they should use the relevant terminology of psychometricians. Your optimal state is obviously an incompetent putz.
The face on the sphynx in egypt is an african one because blacks built the pyramids, something nobody today can figure out or replicate the working process. 8000 yrs ago there was advanced aryan/harrapan civilization in the indus valley. Several advanced civs in the middle east such as assyrians, babylonians, aztecs on the american continent, greek then roman civilizations. All came up then went down, meanwhile europeans were wearing skins and throwing spears, then it was their turn at the top. A toyota is a much more economical, reliable and better engineered car than a chrysler. A suzuki was already far better than a Harley by 1960, and by Sony made Motorolla look stone age by 1970. What about real europeans, not just americans. Korean Samsung finished Finnish Nokia and all you buy in a BMW is a badge, not a better car.
European invention as evidence of greater intelligence doesnt check out. They did not even invent gunpowder that gave them the means to conquer other continents, that was the chinese. Many other races at different times have had their time to shine as the most advanced civilization, ours is already going down and its the corruption of the culture that does it. I dont think theres much difference between our brains, only if and how we use them.
Tucci78
April 1, 2016 11:28 pm
Hershel picks nits with regard to WAIS and WISC versus Stanford-Binet and other modalities of cognitive function testing and nobody should really give a shit, emphatically me. The last time I actually had to make concerted “drop-dead” use of developmental screening methods was during the Carter Administration, when I was running a Public Health Service clinic, and I’ve had no reason to keep current in that therapeutic area since about 1996. Like I said, “light extemporanea.” You want me hitting PubMed and the pertinent journals to put together something suitable for incorporation in the curriculum of an ACCME-accredited continuing medical education activity, PAY ME.
What _is_ pertinent to the graph at the head of this post is that standardized tests established to assess “intelligence” are not without inescapable intrinsic bias. Because they’re all designed to get meaningful data from the evaluation of intellectual function within a defined target population, they’re not normalized for study subjects who fall outside said population. Anything in “the relevant terminology of psychometricians” contrary to that observation? If so, I invite the disputant to CITE SOURCES supporting said assertion.
As for comparative cultural (and technical) achievements going back to the era of the Sphinx and the Egyptian pyramids, it’s helluva stretch to correlate speculations thereupon with standardized intelligence testing in use only a bit over a century in the modern era. For that matter, what the hell gives ANYBODY to contend that the population responsible for designing and crafting those Egyptian monuments is genetically identical to the wogs who’ve been inhabiting that region since Islam boiled out of the Arabian peninsula in the 7th Century? Engineering capabilities in the automotive industry and in consumer electronics may be even less reliably correlated with average IQ scores varying from one culture or polity to another, which would seem to be more robustly approached by way of political economics than by psychometrics.
As for the Europeans’ successful leverage of technology “borrowed” from other cultures, isn’t it still fashionable to cite Diamond’s *Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies* (1997) and perhaps also the rather less popular but still pretty interesting *The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor* (Landes, 1998)? Culture, not native intelligence, seems to play the big role in determining who colonizes (taking up “the White man’s burden”) and who gets conquistador’d, not to mention who innovates the economic model that facilitates large-scale industrialization and who copycats.
The aggregated data derived from standardized intelligence test scores applied across ranges of ethnic groups other than European Americans has, as I’d remarked, wonderful potential to lead the inadequately critical into error by way of reinforcing their prejudices.
Vide Hershel.
Hershel Pasternak
April 2, 2016 1:37 am
You are in agreement with what i covered further back filio mio. For a start the first question testing general knowledge is “who is the president of the usa? “. The most ignorant american gets 5 points (raw score) right there because they cant miss it. 3rd world villagers with no electricity and TV dont know. Ask an american who the president of kenya is and they would not know even though hes been in power since the 60s.
Basic arithmetic adding and subtraction, child labourers weaving faqari rugs in pakistan were working when other kids covered that.
Digit Span frontwards and backwards favors people used to taking down phone numbers, most 3rd world people never do that.
Uneducated people do way better on the Performance (nonverbal) section than the Verbal section and should be used exclusively for comparing different cultures. Eve then the instructions are more familiar to an american. I gave the example of needing to say “i want two orders” when one person orders two plates of food, wheras thats not what other english speakers say and the different instruction confuses american fast food worker. Picture Completion task also favors cultures familiar with the tasks shown.
The Ravens Progressive Matrices test for intelligence used by many militaries levels the playing field a whole lot but that would not have been used to get the data on the graph, because scores are expressed only by percentile rank, eg ‘he is at the 95th percentile’ not “he has an IQ of 130”. There are cultures with no form of writing who pass down mythology and history by oral tradition and they have to faithfully reproduce it generation after generation for thousands of years. Include a test for attention to detail and memory for recalling correctly a few thousand word story and see if they dont blow us out of the water.
EL Coyote
April 2, 2016 1:47 am
Tucci78 says: Posting perpetually without pertinence, we’ve got Bea Lever proving that vaginal yeast infections CAN achieve hematogenous spread that breaches the blood-brain barrier.
Gad, you can smell the necrosis when she hits the “Submit Comment” button.
Beaufort is a he. Whatever your smelling, I suggest you go check your upper lip.
Besides, the verse, he who is not against us is for us, applies here since Bea was on the sidelines above.
Llpoh
April 2, 2016 2:02 am
What a load of shit.
Tucci is an A Grade douchebag. Thousands upon thousand of words he posts, but I suspect no one is reading them as the some value of those words is not worth a bucket of cold piss.
You related to the recently departed flash, Douchie?
EL Coyote
April 2, 2016 2:10 am
I think flash said he’s Irish. And flash c&p’d but he wasn’t wordy himself. Stucky accused him of misogyny, whatever that is. All I know is he hated women, probably why I liked him.
Hershel Pasternak
April 2, 2016 2:12 am
“As for the Europeans’ successful leverage of technology “borrowed” from other cultures, isn’t it still fashionable to cite Diamond’s *Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies* (1997) ”
Yes, and we cant pride ourselves on mettalurgy since west were still stone age during the time the east was in the bronze age. The equivalent priciple of a gun barrel was also in use as bamboo used for blow darts and even the earliest drilling for oil thousands of feet deep in china over a thousand years ago. Low forehead neanderthal still lives on, seen on football fields any given weekend.
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 5:43 am
El Coyote reports that the asshole posting under the ekename of “Bea Lever” is genetically male even though he (she, it) keeps proving that she (he, it) is an utter cunt.
Who knew?
Meanwhile, Lipoh (whose origin and locale is supposedly somewhere between Sind and Bengal) still can’t post on the fucking topic of this thread, but fixates rabidly on what it (she, he) conceives to by _my_ person and character. How does one translate the concept of “argumentum ad hominem” into whichever of the subcontinental dialects in which this yutz manages what might be charitably called the process of “reasoning”?
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 6:13 am
Hershel makes “mensch” points by getting into the characteristics of these various IQ test modalities in finer granularity than I’ve ever given a professional damn about to support the argument that in most of these methods, study subjects drawn from cultures (and ethnicities) other than that comprising ‘Murricans of European origin are not optimally assessed because of norming differences.
So when speaking of an “Inconvenient truth” anent the scatter plots in the graph above, the verity is that while what it shows may, indeed, track the dataset(s), those criteria upon which the method(s) of assessment is/are predicated may not accurately reflect genuine mental acuity in the ethnic (cultural) groups into which the study subjects have been parsed.
Long story short, slants tend to do better than honkies on IQ tests as most of these tests are conducted while jigs and wogs and spics tend to turn in lower scores, and while this is a phenomenon suitable for triggering useful discussion (see Herrnstein & Murray’s *The Bell Curve*, 1994) and inspiring further investigation, it serves up justification for racial prejudices – including political policies like the libtards’ beloved outcomes-based “affirmative action” – not all that well.
Let’s get out there and get them federal research funding grant applications written. There’s taxpayer dollars to be grabbed for the squishy sciences’ departmental budgets.
Ed
April 2, 2016 7:45 am
“Did you know Garcia Marquez called him the greatest writer?”
Well, then Bring Me the Head of Garcia Marquez. Yeah, I remember “A Pantaloon in Black” That was a sad story. I like a lot of ol Faulk’s stories and they made great movies when a screenwriter got into it with the old boy to help him out.
Steinbeck and Hemmingway were both commies, but they wrote some enjoyable shit. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” has some hilarious lines from the character Agustin, and ol’ Papa captured the essence of the Spanish art of implying profanity or profane acts, rather than stating them, while making an insult.
Agustin’s line, “I befoul myself in the milk of the springtime” had me howling with laughter in the high school library when I read it. Steinbeck forged a dark blade, later picked up by Cormac McCarthy, who has gone on to surpass Steinbeck with it.
This exchange about novelists is kinda like two old battle-scarred drunks at the end of the bar ignoring the fistfight once it has become predictable. They discuss relative merits of songs that were on the jukebox before the fighters were born while the combatants slow and get tired of the fight…… ahaha
Maggie
April 2, 2016 7:54 am
EC, would you get Vodka another bottle of Popov? And check out my Dictatorial Merchandise photo of Brer Rabbit and HSF’s lovely syrup jug.
Maggie
April 2, 2016 7:58 am
Oh, and LLPOH? NO ONE is reading them except you guys who are exercising your verbal swordsmanship. Someone long ago gave me this great advice: Just skip right over the garbage posters and read only the comments from people whose opinions you respect.
hardscrabble farmer
April 2, 2016 8:17 am
You know what never happens, ever? You’ll never hear a bunch of farmers talking about how a milk cow and a beef cow are really the same thing except for how the tests are designed to make them seem different because the farmers are skewing the questions.
If you can’t see the differences between human racial subgroups, then you don’t want to.
Ed
April 2, 2016 8:24 am
OK, this is what I intended to reply to before I got sidetracked watching the fight:
“Mencken’s light is so dim it cannot be seen from the shadow of the truly great, including Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Williams.”
Here’s a quote from a sampler given to me for Christmas by my sister in law:
“In literature, as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others”
But, I would also add that comparing Mencken, a newspaper columnist, to that list of novelists is like comparing a bead loom artist to a list of peyote stitch artists. Both crafts use the same materials, but the artists will differ in procedures preferred, and the final pieces will serve for different purposes.
Ed
April 2, 2016 8:28 am
“Just skip right over the garbage posters and read only the comments from people whose opinions you respect.”
Miz Maggie, you might not read this, but I think your friend’s advice could help keep you from being annoyed, but it would also keep you from learning a lot of what you could learn.
Hershel Pasternak
April 2, 2016 9:43 am
hardscrabble farmer says:
“You know what never happens, ever? You’ll never hear a bunch of farmers talking about how a milk cow and a beef cow are really the same thing except for how the tests are designed to make them seem different because the farmers are skewing the questions.
If you can’t see the differences between human racial subgroups, then you don’t want to.”
What type of tests for cows are you talking about? We dont need a test to tell the difference between an asian and african so you wont hear anyone talking about testing for that either.
Physical difference aside, how do you show cultural diffs are nature over nurture. Why dont eddie murphy or obama do any shooting and stealing, how do they control the instinct?
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 3:50 pm
Hardscrabble Farmer avers: “If you can’t see the differences between human racial subgroups, then you don’t want to.”
Oh, there’s differences. The question I’ve got is about the extents to which standardized IQ testing puts up meaningful information about those differences. I grew up (and still live) about 20 miles away from the state institution in which Henry H. Goddard made his bones as an IQ testing proponent and arrant eugenicist a century ago.
Very progressive (in the worst, most pejorative sense as a bunch of arrogant bigoted normative assholes) was Dr. Goddard.
a Rose
April 2, 2016 4:51 pm
Hershel: If you want to carry the cow analogy farther, I’d say that Asians might be either excellent milk cows or superior beef cattle, but Europeans are BOTH, like Highland cattle, useful for either purpose but perfect at neither. What we lack in sheer brilliance we make up for with audacity.
That is what has made us so damn successful. Asians can be brilliant and insanely attentive to detail, but Europeans are smart enough to innovate and daring (or you might call it reckless) enough to try their exercising their innovations in real life. THAT is the big difference. While the Asians were perfecting the art of folding paper into sculptures and the striving for most delicate possible porcelain ware, we were building ships and taking over the world. We are not afraid to be crazy, messy, daring, outrageous or rebellious, and that has given us tremendous advantage, advantage that we are now squandering as we stifle free speech and force groupthink via PC.
As for IQ tests, you can argue about them until you are blue in the face but the reality is, groups of people can be very effectively measured by comparison of their accomplishments. Written language (or for that matter, degrees of sophistication of spoken language), architecture, social organization, engineering feats, music, art, drama, couture, technological innovation: all of these are excellent indications of ability. You don’t even need an IQ test, just look at how people have lived and what they’ve innovated and you can get a very clear picture of their abilities.
Tucci: You write to impress, not to communicate. There isn’t enough meat in your content to warrant slogging through it. Persnickety is correct: your syntax is odd and your combination of idiom, slang and formal language jarring and unnatural. I very much doubt you are who and what you claim to be.
Obfuscation is not the hallmark of intelligence. Succinct, carefully crafted compositions are infinitely superior.
Rose
April 2, 2016 4:53 pm
Dagnabbit, it should be ROSE, not “a Rose.” I thought I erased the stupid a and there it is again in the post above. Argh.
Stucky
April 2, 2016 4:57 pm
Rose
Oh oh! Now you’ve done it. You’re in deep doo doo. Tucci will write a 400 word post about you … and it won’t be nice.
That’s OK …. I actually mention Tucci in the intro to a post I submitted for tomorrow. He’s gonna LUV it!
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 5:10 pm
a Rose whines that I “… write to impress, not to communicate,” proving nothing more than that said Rose (like most other specimens of plant life) hasn’t got the equipment with which to receive communication containing abstract concepts.
Word play, you vegetable, is one of the many forms of amusement in which reasoning human beings indulge. You? Not so fucking much at all, eh?
Rose
April 2, 2016 5:47 pm
Tucci, Unimpressive response.
You do not indulge in word play, sir. Word play is an elegant dance much like fencing, a battle of wit and grace that is as delightful to participate in as it is to merely observe.
Your technique is rather more like flailing around with a bludgeon until you have rendered your audience senseless with boredom and frustration.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Your posts are doing you no favors in providing evidence of that virtue.
gilberts
April 2, 2016 5:54 pm
Cosmoline Rocks! You know you’re on the right track when you’re getting that out of all the nooks and crannies.
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 5:57 pm
Yet another idiot presuming to judge its betters, Rose fungates: “Unimpressive response.”
How the fuck would YOU know, plant life?
Is that “bludgeon” enough to shut you the fuck up? No? So where DID I store that glyphosate…?
Llpoh
April 2, 2016 6:00 pm
I love Roses.
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 6:08 pm
Llpoh reciprocates roses’ love of shit.
No surprises.
Rose
April 2, 2016 6:14 pm
When one trots out obscenity as a rebuttal, it is pretty evident that they have exhausted their store of intelligence.
Tucci, you are providing ample manure to serve as fertilizer for the more pleasant denizens of the garden of life:)
Hershel Pasternak
April 2, 2016 6:19 pm
Rose,
Audacity and invention and success have been enjoyed by so msny different races.
If audacity involves conquest and war, plenty of others did rhst too. Ghengis Khan and msny others.
Aryan/Harrappan civilization 8000 yrs old had many sciences and our own math did not work until we borrowed their concept of zero.
5000 yrs ago egyptian civilization built the pyramids. Teams of engineers today cant replicate how they got the geometry perfect or moved the huge blocks. Africans did that. Rhe face on the sphynx is african.
There are gigantic pictures carved in rock that can only be made sense of from flying over as well as very advanced architecture remains on the south american continent. Aztecs did.
There were advanced civilizations in the middle east, assyrians and babylonians.
There was greek 3000BC that the architecture was still copied in american landmarks.
Phoenicians sailed around the world thousands of years before european voyages of discovery.
Then rome, the most recent which we recognize and discuss as an empire and civilization that collapsed, making comparisons to our own. But there were so many others previously of all different races in the past 10 thousand years who would never look at europeans as inventive or intelligent because we were still hunter gatherers the whole time. If we were stuck in the stone age for the longest period we cant claim to being the smartest. Stone age people may not be stupid, eg aborigines having vasectomies to keep population down and not need to fight and make war to keep population down.
I think while theres obvious differences in the colour of skin and hair straight or curly hair, facial features. Adult male from anywhere has brain capacity of around 1800-2000ml and some instincts are hardwired but the thinking is a blank canvas,how we set up representations in our neural network is going to depend totally on our learning experience and that comes from culture you live in.
Rise and fall of culture through the stage of decadence has happened to others before and its happening to us now, as u said.
Even asians, while japanese engineers have run rings around ours in automotive and electronics, and a lot of high quality things its easy to see how the culture contributes to that. There are other islander asians whose culture unless it ever changes will keep them down and stupid forever. These never had a great civilization, and they actually value ignorance and discourage thinking. Cultures where lying and cheating is the norm, taking advantage of anyone not your immediate family, never questioning elders whose motives might not be your own interest, no accountability, promoting immaturity, saving face but not taking responsibility, breaking deals if you can, fake niceness to try and get something, unchecked laziness, excuses, corruption, hiding behind but not practicing religion and more.
All those negative culture traits can be found in some individuals in the better societies but they are not all normal for everyone. If you are born into a culture where all of that is normal and the way everyone is doing it, a better brain would only make you a better criminal or leech.
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 6:26 pm
“When one trots out obscenity as a rebuttal” (particularly when “one” is as loquacious as i’ve been criticized for being) “one” is merely striving to communicate within the bandwidth that a critter with the intelligence of an ornamental shrub might argubly be capable of receiving.
How can Rose be surprised (or even marginally offended) if “manure” (to use that euphemism Beth strove so hard to impress upon Harry Truman) is what she gets?
Rose
April 2, 2016 6:47 pm
A lady is taught to graciously accept the limitations of what a gentleman (and I am being VERY generous with that term here) has to offer.
You profer manure, I shall endeavor to turn it into blossoms as any good Rose would. Such alchemy, sadly, is beyond the scope of a fertilizer producer. In your hands, it remains merely manure, its lingering odor fated to drive others from the garden instead of attracting and delighting them.
Rob in Nova Scotia
April 2, 2016 7:20 pm
Rose
I shall endeavour to say that I love what you wrote. Your wit is a sharp as a thorn.
Cheers
Tucci78
April 2, 2016 7:20 pm
Rose, vegetatively fixating on personal attack against me, whines when she gets the same kind of shit in response.
Jeez, you’d think that an entity identifying with photosynthetic life would know something about reaping as she sows.
EL Coyote
April 2, 2016 7:25 pm
Rose says: A lady is taught to graciously accept the limitations of what a gentleman (and I am being VERY generous with that term here) has to offer.
I think Rose just hit LLPOH and Tucci below the belt. It has been an enjoyable dick fight, though. I sense this is by no means over. LLPOH has never left the scene of battle without a scalp.
Touchy 78, u r wasting evetyones time. You are not etiying for your own amusement, as or you would not go to such lengths to defend yourself, or eveb bother typing what you are thinking.
You make the point of your claimed profession then egen domeone asks you about it in the next post claim it is irrelevant and personal attack. No your own responses to constructive criticism are the personal attack.
I wasted probably 20 minutes reading that back and forth following on from where the relrvant comments were yesterday. There would be another half hours worth of the bullshit i scrolled right past. Doctors usually have better things to do, or if they do put their time in this, know better than to use really long one sentence paragraphs.
Hershel-
El Tucci the wordy thread dictator is off finding a cure for his verbal diarrhea .
Llpoh, I ain’t actually retarded. I just have a whole different kinda smarts than most of my felluh Merkins. However, I do admit to being crazy as a bedbug. Still, bedbug though I am, the younguns are kind to me at pow wows because I’m an elderly.
” Doctors usually have better things to do, or if they do put their time in this, know better than to use really long one sentence paragraphs.”
Hershel, I don’t know about doctors, but William Faulkner wrote fuckin sentences that had to be continued in his next novel. Hell, the name of one fictional county in Mississippi in his books was about twice as long as the name of the state.
I shit you not.
Hardscrabble, IQ testing does not measure problem solving only, if at all. General knowledge is measured with questions such as “who is the president of the US?”. Any american knows because they can not miss it. People with no TV in villages dont know. Digit Span Frontwards and backwards measures memory. People with telephones are used to using arabic numbers and holding 8 or so in short term memory taking down phone numbers. Many other people have little or no practice. There are many other subtests used. In general more intelligent people have more general knowledge because they seek information in yes, problem solving. Better memory correlates with intelligence so is measured. Basic math also heavily favors people who have basic education. Indian villagers were too many times child labourers, kids in ghettos hardly sent to school. This is why the nonverbal or Performance, the second part of the test gives a way better picture of intelligence in people who have not gone through typical western culture and education. But even then the tasks or instructions favour americans, eg that eould be ‘favor’ to americans and the tests are american. You may think thats no difference but giving instructions is also unintentionally americanised. Eg. One person ordering two plates of take away. The american instructions is “I want/will have/will take two orders”. To other english speakers the instruction “ill have fried rice and chicken curry thanks. Thats one, and another one with noodles and beef please.” confuses american fast food workers. So even though the indian villager can do at least as well on average as the gmo fed american in eg Pattern Recognition, understanding the instruction can be a block affecting the score.
As i said earlier indians and chinese were dominating the entry to study medicine with the top marks into limited places so they had to devise a way to get more ‘native’ graduates in and used the interview. The indians and chinese probably speak their own languages at home so may not perform as perfectly in the interview. Still those indians who topped the scores in the entrance exams are the same race as the villagers who average as almost retarded using the american IQ tests, so its not a matter of better brains behind the national averages but the culture. All those indians and chinese who top the scores are wearing thick glasses at 17 yrs old because their culture is to study for endless hours while others are partying etc. Culture has everything to do with IQ.
Ed says: William Faulkner wrote fuckin sentences that had to be continued in his next novel.
Get the faulk out of here, Ed. Did you know Garcia Marquez called him the greatest writer? If you think jFish weeping at sundown is touching, a woman poisoning her wayward lover is pretty romantic as is a negro who purposely gets himself lynched after his beloved wife dies.
Steinbeck is cool, I never got into Hemingway. I prefer a story with sort of Samson and Delilah romance in it.
Knowing even less than shit about contemporary commercial farmers, Bea Lever writhes: “…unless your buddies at the commercial farms can plow with horses in the SHTF and use horse shit for fertilizer you may end up with bupkis.”
No, they don’t know animal husbandry, the tack and procedures of getting a team of horses (or oxen) to draw farm equipment – including not only plows of various types but also harvesting gear etc. – but the modern commercial farmer knows how to maintain and operate machinery far more complex and capable, to use pesticides and herbicides, to make use of long-range weather predictions (which may well survive various SHTF catastrophes and remain useful), to assess short- and long-term market demand for crops produced (SHTF or not, there will always be markets), and to use every kind of fertilizer, including composted manure from every conceivable source. The Old Order Amish, for all their experience with 19th-Century technology, do not, even though they’re acknowledged to be the best “organic” farmers around.
The principles of commercial farming – and anything less is merely sustenance agriculture, which may be immediately (over one or two years) necessary for survival but is incompatible with sustaining a civilization – are far better understood by contemporary industrial farmers, and that knowledge base doesn’t go away. As long as any of them survive – indeed, as long as any farm agents, agronomists, or plant science geeks in the employ of Monsanto and the other big agribusinesses survive – that fund of knowledge will come to the fore. “Preppers” seem to miss this. The objective has to include both short-term exigencies AND recovery, else all you’re doing is deferring disintegration and doom.
Again, find a copy of *The Last Centurian* (John Ringo, 2008) and get introduced to some informed speculation about how a SHTF situation might more reasonably be expected to develop and addressed. It’s also an entertaining read.
Stucky tries to comfort himself with the unfounded assumption that I’m “defensive and easily rattled,” forgetting that the first lesson I was taught upon posting on this Web site was that the usual crowd of commenters here are – in leftard Social Justice Warrior style, their general political preference for Rotarian Socialist (nee “Republican”) politics notwithstanding – invariably disposed to “attack the man” argumentum ad hominem when they’re confronted with disputation they don’t like but they’re too brainfucked to refute.
When they go off-topic and start attacking my STYLE OF EXPRESSION (and let’s remember, I’m not writing here either for pay or for publication in an indexed professional periodical), they get the broken end of the pool cue shoved briskly into that multitude of soft spots so well known to us with experience in Emergency Medicine. Then you keep twisting until they either pass out or discretion gives them cause to shut the fuck up.
Now, returning to the topic, Stucky had written: “I think that [the] ‘something’ [I’d been contending] is this; Kneegrows ain’t as dumb as most sez dey are … and Cracka’s ain’t as smart as we think dey is.
“Did I get that right, Doc?”
As usual, not quite. What I’ve been saying is that the test methodologies involved in getting intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, having been normed to assess cognitive function in Americans of European ethnicity (and culture) may not provide information valid in the comparative assessment of individuals from other ethnic groups (and, presumably, cultures). The East Asians seem to have an edge in Stanford-Benet and other IQ testing methods, but is that the effect of native intelligence or cultural factors (even down to what might be called “household culture” in the immediate family)? The jigaboos, the spics, the wogs – obviously do not.
This would seem to suggest that further investigation is in order, perhaps looking at White kids raised in East Asian families, pickaninnies and porch apes adopted by crackers, little jihadis ripped from dar al-Islam in their pre-verbal stages and raised by Lutherans, etc.
How to get at adequately-powered and well-controlled survey populations is an exercise (and a helluvan exercise it is!) I’ll leave to the student.
But we return to the issue of IQ test methodology. Sure, we can look at the graph above with all kinds of emotional loading, but what the fuck is the data used to plot that graph really saying? More importantly, what ISN’T it saying?
Meanwhile, Lipoh, again and as always, go fuck your ghee-lubricated subcontinental self.
ThePessimisticChemist whimpers: “Now this is the closest I’ve come to being insulted this entire thread.”
Oh, stick around, asshole. You’ve not yet begun to get proper assessment of whatever it is you use in lieu of character. How else could a prickly little git like you take such except as “being insulted”?
ThePessimisticChemist makes an attempt to say something on-topic with:
“1. The data holds true across multiple different test styles and published research. No matter what way you slice it, race has just as large an effect on IQ as nutrient availability and childhood stress levels.
“2. The world has moved towards a more modern, ‘Westernized’ approach to teaching and information dissemination. If you want to prove that someone’s culture is so alien from ours that it prevents them from recognizing patterns of shapes, then thats a whole other set of research papers. Have fun with that.
“3. Even in the medical industry. Even in the chemical industry. Even in the motherfucking world of particle physics….presenters take the time to speak their piece as plainly as possible.
“The only people who use as much superfluous language as this joker are lawyers, politicians, and writers being paid by the word.”
On that last, the stupid shit avoids appreciation of the fact that concision takes WORK (endless quotations throughout the literary word, particularly in letters, to the effect that “I’m sorry I’ve written at such length, but I didn’t have the time to make it shorter”) and – as I’ve already said, posts in “comments” threads like these are the epitome of light extemporanea. Unless this shit-for-brains “Chemist” were the editor of a periodical in which I’m seeking to publish a manuscript, he doesn’t get to ordain my style or content. He can critique the former here, in which case he’s properly told to go fuck himself. When he address the latter – as he’s attempted to do in the material I’ve immediately quoted – he can be reasonably asked to support the assertions he’s retailed and expand upon them.
I can provisionally accept his contention that “The data [on IQ test results] holds true across multiple different test styles and published research” because that’s not the point I’ve been making. Among the questions raised, however, is what testing methodologies are measuring, not to mention how those characteristics of mentation are being measured. Certainly, the data sets under discussion shows that “race [seems to have] just as large an effect on IQ as nutrient availability and childhood stress levels,” but if ethnicity is factored out of the investigation and other qualities of the participants (such as the cultures in which the study subjects had been raised) are factored in, what effects are manifest on Stanford-Binet and other cognitive function tests?
How much is truly “nature”? How much is effectively “nurture”?
One of the many painful lessons that an education, training, and experience in medicine teaches is that yesterday’s easy sureties are not uncommonly judged major brainfucks through the application of retrospectroscopy. This bit about “My racial IQ is better than yours, so you’re stupid, nyah-nyah!” has all the hallmarks of such a down-the-garden-path adventure.
Hershel Pasternak bitches that I “…make the point of your claimed profession then [when someone] asks you about it in the next post claim it is irrelevant and personal attack.”
Because, you dickwad, when the pitiful shits in this forum criticize what they suppose of my background and purposes for writing as and what I do, it IS a “personal attack” in purpose and practice. It’s classic argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy turned, a la Ayers’ *Rules for Radicals,* into a fucking TACTIC by the morally bankrupt and the intellectually malignant.
Look, you idiot, I consider it proper for me to speak about my own education, training, and experience simply because it’s pretty fucking unremarkable. You got that? I’m a primary care grunt, the epitome of the “local M.D.” denigrated by the secondary and tertiary specialists as worth little other than as a filter to triage the hypochondriacs from the “interesting cases.” I ain’t no particular bright light in the world of Big Science, and yet if _I_ can see flaws in the investigatory methods, the quality of data, the interpretation of observations, and the recommendations for action predicated thereupon, how the fuck do the “Big Science” mahoffs get away with pushing government policy predicated on error and/or mendacious bullshit?
I’m “lowest common denominator” in medicine particularly – the country G.P. – and the sciences generally. That’s what my curriculum vitae – and whatever I might parenthetically recount of it – means.
If _I_ can get this stuff, why the fuck can’t _you_?
Billy speaks of inspissated whale oil (gad, an 1874 Sharps 50-90! how the hell do you find brass for such a firearm?) and others discuss Cosmoline rust preventive….
One arms aficionado of my acquaintance had suggested that automobile degreaser equipment (and the non-polar solvents used thereby) can be made to work pretty well in getting Cosmoline (a waxy petroleum fraction) off even the most delicate parts of disassembled firearms. Lighter fluid, gasoline, kerosene or liquid petrolatum [“mineral oil”] all work to lessen the viscosity of Cosmoline and facilitate its removal, but they’re volatile petroleum fractions and because they’re usually heated when used to “soak” the Cosmoline-impregnated items, the fire hazard they pose is daunting.
Definitely a “don’t do this at home, kids!” kinda thing.
Take a breath Touchy, sounds like your turning blue half half way through, more oxygen and you might make more sense. Stanford-Binet was 1916, todays test is the WAIS. Ive covered some of the problems using it to get the graph data in another post above.
Hold your own breath, Hershel. Keep holding it. Yeah, like that. Ignore the hypercapnea, the hypoxia, and just pass right the fuck out.
There y’go. Now you’re in your optimal condition of function, and nobody has to put up with your shit anymore.
As for the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Score, presently in its fourth edition), while it’s the most widely-used of such cognitive function tests (much to Pearson’s enrichment), the Stanford-Binet (now in its fifth edition) is still in use because it’s applicable in the evaluation of young children. The WAIS was designed to assess adults and older adolescents, and therefore its clinical utility in picking up developmental abnormalities in the first decade of life is suboptimal.
Was the “graph data” in the plot above generated using the WAIS? Or is it an aggregation of results gotten using the various different kinds of cognitive function testing available? What was the source of said graph?
El Tucci ! El Tucci ! El Tucci ! El Tucci ! El Tucci !
(The crowd roars for the thread dictator to speak)
Alas, El Tucci is still suffering from verbal diarrhea.
Posting perpetually without pertinence, we’ve got Bea Lever proving that vaginal yeast infections CAN achieve hematogenous spread that breaches the blood-brain barrier.
Gad, you can smell the necrosis when she hits the “Submit Comment” button.
Touchy; “out.
There y’go. Now you’re in your optimal condition of function, and nobody has to put up with your shit anymore.
As for the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Score, presently in its fourth edition), while it’s the most widely-used of such cognitive function tests (much to Pearson’s enrichment), the Stanford-Binet (now in its fifth edition) is still in use because it’s applicable in the evaluation of young children. The WAIS was designed to assess adults and older adolescents, and therefore its clinical utility in picking up developmental abnormalities in the first decade of life is suboptimal.”
U raise eyebrows but get the benefit of the doubt for former wrong spelling of stanford-binet and not knowing the S In WAIS stands for scale not score, but any decent doctor knows that the WISC (Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children) is the juvenile counterpart to the WAIS and the most widely used test of intelligence with the right to use the term “IQ”. No decent doctor would substitute such a broad range of brain processes that fall under the term “cognitive function” in place of Intelligence specifically. If a medical doctor really needed or wanted to impress us with a lexicon of jargon on this subject they should use the relevant terminology of psychometricians. Your optimal state is obviously an incompetent putz.
The face on the sphynx in egypt is an african one because blacks built the pyramids, something nobody today can figure out or replicate the working process. 8000 yrs ago there was advanced aryan/harrapan civilization in the indus valley. Several advanced civs in the middle east such as assyrians, babylonians, aztecs on the american continent, greek then roman civilizations. All came up then went down, meanwhile europeans were wearing skins and throwing spears, then it was their turn at the top. A toyota is a much more economical, reliable and better engineered car than a chrysler. A suzuki was already far better than a Harley by 1960, and by Sony made Motorolla look stone age by 1970. What about real europeans, not just americans. Korean Samsung finished Finnish Nokia and all you buy in a BMW is a badge, not a better car.
European invention as evidence of greater intelligence doesnt check out. They did not even invent gunpowder that gave them the means to conquer other continents, that was the chinese. Many other races at different times have had their time to shine as the most advanced civilization, ours is already going down and its the corruption of the culture that does it. I dont think theres much difference between our brains, only if and how we use them.
Hershel picks nits with regard to WAIS and WISC versus Stanford-Binet and other modalities of cognitive function testing and nobody should really give a shit, emphatically me. The last time I actually had to make concerted “drop-dead” use of developmental screening methods was during the Carter Administration, when I was running a Public Health Service clinic, and I’ve had no reason to keep current in that therapeutic area since about 1996. Like I said, “light extemporanea.” You want me hitting PubMed and the pertinent journals to put together something suitable for incorporation in the curriculum of an ACCME-accredited continuing medical education activity, PAY ME.
What _is_ pertinent to the graph at the head of this post is that standardized tests established to assess “intelligence” are not without inescapable intrinsic bias. Because they’re all designed to get meaningful data from the evaluation of intellectual function within a defined target population, they’re not normalized for study subjects who fall outside said population. Anything in “the relevant terminology of psychometricians” contrary to that observation? If so, I invite the disputant to CITE SOURCES supporting said assertion.
As for comparative cultural (and technical) achievements going back to the era of the Sphinx and the Egyptian pyramids, it’s helluva stretch to correlate speculations thereupon with standardized intelligence testing in use only a bit over a century in the modern era. For that matter, what the hell gives ANYBODY to contend that the population responsible for designing and crafting those Egyptian monuments is genetically identical to the wogs who’ve been inhabiting that region since Islam boiled out of the Arabian peninsula in the 7th Century? Engineering capabilities in the automotive industry and in consumer electronics may be even less reliably correlated with average IQ scores varying from one culture or polity to another, which would seem to be more robustly approached by way of political economics than by psychometrics.
As for the Europeans’ successful leverage of technology “borrowed” from other cultures, isn’t it still fashionable to cite Diamond’s *Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies* (1997) and perhaps also the rather less popular but still pretty interesting *The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor* (Landes, 1998)? Culture, not native intelligence, seems to play the big role in determining who colonizes (taking up “the White man’s burden”) and who gets conquistador’d, not to mention who innovates the economic model that facilitates large-scale industrialization and who copycats.
The aggregated data derived from standardized intelligence test scores applied across ranges of ethnic groups other than European Americans has, as I’d remarked, wonderful potential to lead the inadequately critical into error by way of reinforcing their prejudices.
Vide Hershel.
You are in agreement with what i covered further back filio mio. For a start the first question testing general knowledge is “who is the president of the usa? “. The most ignorant american gets 5 points (raw score) right there because they cant miss it. 3rd world villagers with no electricity and TV dont know. Ask an american who the president of kenya is and they would not know even though hes been in power since the 60s.
Basic arithmetic adding and subtraction, child labourers weaving faqari rugs in pakistan were working when other kids covered that.
Digit Span frontwards and backwards favors people used to taking down phone numbers, most 3rd world people never do that.
Uneducated people do way better on the Performance (nonverbal) section than the Verbal section and should be used exclusively for comparing different cultures. Eve then the instructions are more familiar to an american. I gave the example of needing to say “i want two orders” when one person orders two plates of food, wheras thats not what other english speakers say and the different instruction confuses american fast food worker. Picture Completion task also favors cultures familiar with the tasks shown.
The Ravens Progressive Matrices test for intelligence used by many militaries levels the playing field a whole lot but that would not have been used to get the data on the graph, because scores are expressed only by percentile rank, eg ‘he is at the 95th percentile’ not “he has an IQ of 130”. There are cultures with no form of writing who pass down mythology and history by oral tradition and they have to faithfully reproduce it generation after generation for thousands of years. Include a test for attention to detail and memory for recalling correctly a few thousand word story and see if they dont blow us out of the water.
Tucci78 says: Posting perpetually without pertinence, we’ve got Bea Lever proving that vaginal yeast infections CAN achieve hematogenous spread that breaches the blood-brain barrier.
Gad, you can smell the necrosis when she hits the “Submit Comment” button.
Beaufort is a he. Whatever your smelling, I suggest you go check your upper lip.
Besides, the verse, he who is not against us is for us, applies here since Bea was on the sidelines above.
What a load of shit.
Tucci is an A Grade douchebag. Thousands upon thousand of words he posts, but I suspect no one is reading them as the some value of those words is not worth a bucket of cold piss.
You related to the recently departed flash, Douchie?
I think flash said he’s Irish. And flash c&p’d but he wasn’t wordy himself. Stucky accused him of misogyny, whatever that is. All I know is he hated women, probably why I liked him.
“As for the Europeans’ successful leverage of technology “borrowed” from other cultures, isn’t it still fashionable to cite Diamond’s *Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies* (1997) ”
Yes, and we cant pride ourselves on mettalurgy since west were still stone age during the time the east was in the bronze age. The equivalent priciple of a gun barrel was also in use as bamboo used for blow darts and even the earliest drilling for oil thousands of feet deep in china over a thousand years ago. Low forehead neanderthal still lives on, seen on football fields any given weekend.
El Coyote reports that the asshole posting under the ekename of “Bea Lever” is genetically male even though he (she, it) keeps proving that she (he, it) is an utter cunt.
Who knew?
Meanwhile, Lipoh (whose origin and locale is supposedly somewhere between Sind and Bengal) still can’t post on the fucking topic of this thread, but fixates rabidly on what it (she, he) conceives to by _my_ person and character. How does one translate the concept of “argumentum ad hominem” into whichever of the subcontinental dialects in which this yutz manages what might be charitably called the process of “reasoning”?
Hershel makes “mensch” points by getting into the characteristics of these various IQ test modalities in finer granularity than I’ve ever given a professional damn about to support the argument that in most of these methods, study subjects drawn from cultures (and ethnicities) other than that comprising ‘Murricans of European origin are not optimally assessed because of norming differences.
So when speaking of an “Inconvenient truth” anent the scatter plots in the graph above, the verity is that while what it shows may, indeed, track the dataset(s), those criteria upon which the method(s) of assessment is/are predicated may not accurately reflect genuine mental acuity in the ethnic (cultural) groups into which the study subjects have been parsed.
Long story short, slants tend to do better than honkies on IQ tests as most of these tests are conducted while jigs and wogs and spics tend to turn in lower scores, and while this is a phenomenon suitable for triggering useful discussion (see Herrnstein & Murray’s *The Bell Curve*, 1994) and inspiring further investigation, it serves up justification for racial prejudices – including political policies like the libtards’ beloved outcomes-based “affirmative action” – not all that well.
Let’s get out there and get them federal research funding grant applications written. There’s taxpayer dollars to be grabbed for the squishy sciences’ departmental budgets.
“Did you know Garcia Marquez called him the greatest writer?”
Well, then Bring Me the Head of Garcia Marquez. Yeah, I remember “A Pantaloon in Black” That was a sad story. I like a lot of ol Faulk’s stories and they made great movies when a screenwriter got into it with the old boy to help him out.
Steinbeck and Hemmingway were both commies, but they wrote some enjoyable shit. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” has some hilarious lines from the character Agustin, and ol’ Papa captured the essence of the Spanish art of implying profanity or profane acts, rather than stating them, while making an insult.
Agustin’s line, “I befoul myself in the milk of the springtime” had me howling with laughter in the high school library when I read it. Steinbeck forged a dark blade, later picked up by Cormac McCarthy, who has gone on to surpass Steinbeck with it.
This exchange about novelists is kinda like two old battle-scarred drunks at the end of the bar ignoring the fistfight once it has become predictable. They discuss relative merits of songs that were on the jukebox before the fighters were born while the combatants slow and get tired of the fight…… ahaha
EC, would you get Vodka another bottle of Popov? And check out my Dictatorial Merchandise photo of Brer Rabbit and HSF’s lovely syrup jug.
Oh, and LLPOH? NO ONE is reading them except you guys who are exercising your verbal swordsmanship. Someone long ago gave me this great advice: Just skip right over the garbage posters and read only the comments from people whose opinions you respect.
You know what never happens, ever? You’ll never hear a bunch of farmers talking about how a milk cow and a beef cow are really the same thing except for how the tests are designed to make them seem different because the farmers are skewing the questions.
If you can’t see the differences between human racial subgroups, then you don’t want to.
OK, this is what I intended to reply to before I got sidetracked watching the fight:
“Mencken’s light is so dim it cannot be seen from the shadow of the truly great, including Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Williams.”
Here’s a quote from a sampler given to me for Christmas by my sister in law:
“In literature, as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others”
But, I would also add that comparing Mencken, a newspaper columnist, to that list of novelists is like comparing a bead loom artist to a list of peyote stitch artists. Both crafts use the same materials, but the artists will differ in procedures preferred, and the final pieces will serve for different purposes.
“Just skip right over the garbage posters and read only the comments from people whose opinions you respect.”
Miz Maggie, you might not read this, but I think your friend’s advice could help keep you from being annoyed, but it would also keep you from learning a lot of what you could learn.
hardscrabble farmer says:
“You know what never happens, ever? You’ll never hear a bunch of farmers talking about how a milk cow and a beef cow are really the same thing except for how the tests are designed to make them seem different because the farmers are skewing the questions.
If you can’t see the differences between human racial subgroups, then you don’t want to.”
What type of tests for cows are you talking about? We dont need a test to tell the difference between an asian and african so you wont hear anyone talking about testing for that either.
Physical difference aside, how do you show cultural diffs are nature over nurture. Why dont eddie murphy or obama do any shooting and stealing, how do they control the instinct?
Hardscrabble Farmer avers: “If you can’t see the differences between human racial subgroups, then you don’t want to.”
Oh, there’s differences. The question I’ve got is about the extents to which standardized IQ testing puts up meaningful information about those differences. I grew up (and still live) about 20 miles away from the state institution in which Henry H. Goddard made his bones as an IQ testing proponent and arrant eugenicist a century ago.
Very progressive (in the worst, most pejorative sense as a bunch of arrogant bigoted normative assholes) was Dr. Goddard.
Hershel: If you want to carry the cow analogy farther, I’d say that Asians might be either excellent milk cows or superior beef cattle, but Europeans are BOTH, like Highland cattle, useful for either purpose but perfect at neither. What we lack in sheer brilliance we make up for with audacity.
That is what has made us so damn successful. Asians can be brilliant and insanely attentive to detail, but Europeans are smart enough to innovate and daring (or you might call it reckless) enough to try their exercising their innovations in real life. THAT is the big difference. While the Asians were perfecting the art of folding paper into sculptures and the striving for most delicate possible porcelain ware, we were building ships and taking over the world. We are not afraid to be crazy, messy, daring, outrageous or rebellious, and that has given us tremendous advantage, advantage that we are now squandering as we stifle free speech and force groupthink via PC.
As for IQ tests, you can argue about them until you are blue in the face but the reality is, groups of people can be very effectively measured by comparison of their accomplishments. Written language (or for that matter, degrees of sophistication of spoken language), architecture, social organization, engineering feats, music, art, drama, couture, technological innovation: all of these are excellent indications of ability. You don’t even need an IQ test, just look at how people have lived and what they’ve innovated and you can get a very clear picture of their abilities.
Tucci: You write to impress, not to communicate. There isn’t enough meat in your content to warrant slogging through it. Persnickety is correct: your syntax is odd and your combination of idiom, slang and formal language jarring and unnatural. I very much doubt you are who and what you claim to be.
Obfuscation is not the hallmark of intelligence. Succinct, carefully crafted compositions are infinitely superior.
Dagnabbit, it should be ROSE, not “a Rose.” I thought I erased the stupid a and there it is again in the post above. Argh.
Rose
Oh oh! Now you’ve done it. You’re in deep doo doo. Tucci will write a 400 word post about you … and it won’t be nice.
That’s OK …. I actually mention Tucci in the intro to a post I submitted for tomorrow. He’s gonna LUV it!
a Rose whines that I “… write to impress, not to communicate,” proving nothing more than that said Rose (like most other specimens of plant life) hasn’t got the equipment with which to receive communication containing abstract concepts.
Word play, you vegetable, is one of the many forms of amusement in which reasoning human beings indulge. You? Not so fucking much at all, eh?
Tucci, Unimpressive response.
You do not indulge in word play, sir. Word play is an elegant dance much like fencing, a battle of wit and grace that is as delightful to participate in as it is to merely observe.
Your technique is rather more like flailing around with a bludgeon until you have rendered your audience senseless with boredom and frustration.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Your posts are doing you no favors in providing evidence of that virtue.
Cosmoline Rocks! You know you’re on the right track when you’re getting that out of all the nooks and crannies.
Yet another idiot presuming to judge its betters, Rose fungates: “Unimpressive response.”
How the fuck would YOU know, plant life?
Is that “bludgeon” enough to shut you the fuck up? No? So where DID I store that glyphosate…?
I love Roses.
Llpoh reciprocates roses’ love of shit.
No surprises.
When one trots out obscenity as a rebuttal, it is pretty evident that they have exhausted their store of intelligence.
Tucci, you are providing ample manure to serve as fertilizer for the more pleasant denizens of the garden of life:)
Rose,
Audacity and invention and success have been enjoyed by so msny different races.
If audacity involves conquest and war, plenty of others did rhst too. Ghengis Khan and msny others.
Aryan/Harrappan civilization 8000 yrs old had many sciences and our own math did not work until we borrowed their concept of zero.
5000 yrs ago egyptian civilization built the pyramids. Teams of engineers today cant replicate how they got the geometry perfect or moved the huge blocks. Africans did that. Rhe face on the sphynx is african.
There are gigantic pictures carved in rock that can only be made sense of from flying over as well as very advanced architecture remains on the south american continent. Aztecs did.
There were advanced civilizations in the middle east, assyrians and babylonians.
There was greek 3000BC that the architecture was still copied in american landmarks.
Phoenicians sailed around the world thousands of years before european voyages of discovery.
Then rome, the most recent which we recognize and discuss as an empire and civilization that collapsed, making comparisons to our own. But there were so many others previously of all different races in the past 10 thousand years who would never look at europeans as inventive or intelligent because we were still hunter gatherers the whole time. If we were stuck in the stone age for the longest period we cant claim to being the smartest. Stone age people may not be stupid, eg aborigines having vasectomies to keep population down and not need to fight and make war to keep population down.
I think while theres obvious differences in the colour of skin and hair straight or curly hair, facial features. Adult male from anywhere has brain capacity of around 1800-2000ml and some instincts are hardwired but the thinking is a blank canvas,how we set up representations in our neural network is going to depend totally on our learning experience and that comes from culture you live in.
Rise and fall of culture through the stage of decadence has happened to others before and its happening to us now, as u said.
Even asians, while japanese engineers have run rings around ours in automotive and electronics, and a lot of high quality things its easy to see how the culture contributes to that. There are other islander asians whose culture unless it ever changes will keep them down and stupid forever. These never had a great civilization, and they actually value ignorance and discourage thinking. Cultures where lying and cheating is the norm, taking advantage of anyone not your immediate family, never questioning elders whose motives might not be your own interest, no accountability, promoting immaturity, saving face but not taking responsibility, breaking deals if you can, fake niceness to try and get something, unchecked laziness, excuses, corruption, hiding behind but not practicing religion and more.
All those negative culture traits can be found in some individuals in the better societies but they are not all normal for everyone. If you are born into a culture where all of that is normal and the way everyone is doing it, a better brain would only make you a better criminal or leech.
“When one trots out obscenity as a rebuttal” (particularly when “one” is as loquacious as i’ve been criticized for being) “one” is merely striving to communicate within the bandwidth that a critter with the intelligence of an ornamental shrub might argubly be capable of receiving.
How can Rose be surprised (or even marginally offended) if “manure” (to use that euphemism Beth strove so hard to impress upon Harry Truman) is what she gets?
A lady is taught to graciously accept the limitations of what a gentleman (and I am being VERY generous with that term here) has to offer.
You profer manure, I shall endeavor to turn it into blossoms as any good Rose would. Such alchemy, sadly, is beyond the scope of a fertilizer producer. In your hands, it remains merely manure, its lingering odor fated to drive others from the garden instead of attracting and delighting them.
Rose
I shall endeavour to say that I love what you wrote. Your wit is a sharp as a thorn.
Cheers
Rose, vegetatively fixating on personal attack against me, whines when she gets the same kind of shit in response.
Jeez, you’d think that an entity identifying with photosynthetic life would know something about reaping as she sows.
Rose says: A lady is taught to graciously accept the limitations of what a gentleman (and I am being VERY generous with that term here) has to offer.
I think Rose just hit LLPOH and Tucci below the belt. It has been an enjoyable dick fight, though. I sense this is by no means over. LLPOH has never left the scene of battle without a scalp.
Ed, thank you, he wrote No Country didn’t he?