| ▲ | voidfunc a day ago |
| America is huge and there's a lot of exceptionally stupid people especially in the South and Midwest. Not much I can do about that over here in the coastal Northeast. |
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| ▲ | yard2010 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's not about stupid people, there are stupid people everywhere, it's about the .1% elite controlling all the wealth and power, using flaws in the ways humans work (stupid or not every human has to have shelter and food to survive). |
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| ▲ | b00ty4breakfast a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "us smarties would never fall for such obvious bread and circus. not like those silly dumdums what live in {region}!" said without an ounce irony as the proverbial rug is yanked right out from under your feet |
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| ▲ | hermannj314 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was offended and then I defined "exceptionally stupid" a few ways and all the statistics support this claim. I'm still offended though. Fucking a lot of smart people in Mass., Vermont, Conn., New York, Maryland, DC. |
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| ▲ | matthewfcarlson a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m pretty sure anywhere there’s a lot of people (the northeast of the US for example) you’re going to find a lot of smart people. | | |
| ▲ | hermannj314 a day ago | parent [-] | | People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states. Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers. | | |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think you will find that fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence regardless of where you live. The average does tend to vary from state to state. It actually is a bit lower in the southern and midwestern states, but only by a few points. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-... |
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| ▲ | tptacek 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is just an extrapolation of NAEP testing. It's more or less a chart of SES and how many students in each state need English language supports. People tend to believe without questioning it that there are geographical/regional surveys of "IQ". But have you ever been compelled to take an IQ test as part of a survey like that? I've never heard of that happening. In fact: those kinds of surveys do not exist. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah. The linked source is upfront about that, but its the closest thing we have to a real study sadly. As I said, the averages are close anyhow. Scholars have from time to time thrown their careers away by trying to get better numbers, inevitably some group doesn't like the outcome and they become embroiled in endless debate while their career implodes. For example, the major sources cited in The Bell Curve have had their titles stripped and been hounded to the ends of the earth. All these years later people are still specifically authoring papers to debunk their work. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... We will never see real numbers. This, or other things like it, are literally the best it will ever get unless someone sacrifices their career, and maybe their own safety, to gather better data. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's a persistent myth that it's impossible to do science in this field and that people who try are cancelled. That's obviously false. You can just look this up. It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles --- just watch arguments between behavioral and molecular geneticists on Twitter some time. The people who actually are (/were) hounded are people like Richard Lynn, the godfather of "average IQ by country" data sets. That's because their data sets are fraudulent; not in a subtle way, but very directly: for instance, data for Sub-Saharan African countries are taken in many cases exclusively from mental health facilities, the only places IQ tests are done in any significant numbers in those places. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | > the only places IQ tests are done in any significant numbers in those places. > It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles One of these things must not be 100% accurate. Do you know of any real dataset thats based on actual testing? I can't find one for the life of me. I've looked. If someone just... tested people we would have numbers. They aren't. Its been 30 years since the bell curve and our data is no better now than it was then as far as I can find. There must be some reason for that discrepency. *EDIT* To clarify, I don't think Lynn was right, and even if he was he was an asshole. I'm just annoyed that nobody followed up and did it properly. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, those statements aren't in tension at all! The idea that there would be reliable data for country-by-country or even state-by-state IQ comparisons is an extraordinary claim. Think about the amount of work that would go into generating representative samples. Globally? Forget about it. It does not follow from the intractability of that problem that nobody's doing intelligence or behavioral genetics research. Plenty are, which is why there are front page stories on HN about the "missing heritability" issue. Again, I think it's interesting that the notion of these data sets don't flunk more people's sanity checks, because most of us have no recollection of ever being asked to take an IQ test. I sure haven't. A mass testing regime none of us have ever heard of, apparently run in secret, is generating global IQ rankings? That doesn't sound weird to you? | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I dont think the problem is intractable at all. We have the internet now and can just test people. We don't. Yes, that would be less accurate than a test administered in office by a professional, but it would also be more accurate than basing it on educational attainment or standardized tests intended for other purposes. With a little effort the tests true purposes could easily be disguised. These very clever researchers know this, they just won't. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't know what to tell you about reducing this problem to an online survey and hoping for the best. There are people doing actual science --- including with modern IQ tests --- working on these problems. I think the bigger thing here is that, outside of message boards and Twitter, there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ". | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ". Thats also a fair theory to explain the lack of real data. Given the frequency with which I've had similar conversations it feels off to me, but that may just be my bias. It certainly seems to be a very interesting problem to researchers. Thirty years later it is still cited frequently enough that Elsevier is having to hunt and destroy papers that cite it. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-rev... | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about. What there isn't is a global country-by-country survey of representative samples of people to generate "average IQ", not because such a thing would be forbidden knowledge (we're awash in data that would be equivalently "forbidden"), but because the cost of such a project likely swamps any utility it might have. It's an idee fixee of message boards. The data discussed in the Guardian article you cited there is fraudulent. They're hunting it down because it's bad data. It's exactly the same impulse as the Data Colada and Retraction Watch people, which is celebrated on HN. But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it. I'm not mad the ox was gored, just that nobody replaced it after they were done sacrificing it. Bad science deserves to die, but in my mind it should always be replaced with better science. Not just left as an empty gap. > Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about. I wish I could find it. Neither Google, Kagi, ChatGPT, or Gemini could point me towards anything relevant. They just keep spitting out the old discredited hogwash. Maybe that's more a failing of the search engines than of the science though. Either way, I appreciate the conversation. It's a topic that fascinates me, even if it isn't particularly relevant to my own life. I hope you have, or are actively having, a great holiday! | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sasha Gusev and Alex Strudwick Young are two good follows on opposing ends of the spectrum of research beliefs here, both link constantly to new studies. From a more psychometric and behavioral perspective, Eric Turkheimer is a good starting point. On the other end of the spectrum from Turkheimer is Richard Haier. These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work in these fields. | | |
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| ▲ | golem14 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Come on, there are exceptionally stupid people almost everywhere. No need for ad hominem. |
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| ▲ | 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | jmeister 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Flock helped catch the Boston/Brown shooter. |
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| ▲ | Natfan 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | the guy who took himself out? what did flock do to assist there? | | |
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