Worldwide falling intelligence levels & the onset of "cable mania", coincidence?

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#42
Harry72 said:
You can have an educated intelligence IQ over 150 but still will struggle tying your shoe laces
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I did the MENSA entry test once and there wasn't anything in there which required an education beyond being able to read the questions.
You also had the opportunity to get culturally insensitive tests or completely non-verbal ones.
Even MENSA membership was largely independent of educational background.
 
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#43
Stuey said:
Ha ha ha...reminds me of a couple of weeks ago when I came to the front door of the house with my wife both with hands full of shopping and aimed the car key remote at the house door.
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Been there. Done that. You know you're working too much when you reach for your work ID/keycard to open the front door to your house. Or student ID. I did that more than once in grad school.

Tom
 
#44
Charles Darwin said:
Even MENSA membership was largely independent of educational background.
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As far as I understand it, their entrance test doesn't actually test intelligence. And in the deepest irony, MENSA says that they will NOT tell you your IQ score from the entry test. But if you fail they will tell you which percentile you tested within ... from which you can easily calculate your IQ score. For an institution that claims to cater to the crème de la crème of IQ that's remarkably dumb.

Tom
 
#45
Pano said:
Did you know that overall IQ scores are steadily increasing? The scores have to be periodically adjusted to keep the mean at 100. By our present numbers, people 100 years ago would test out as marginally impaired.
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These days we have people who spend 1/3 of their working life span at schools. That seems a real waste to me. No wonder we're collectively dumb because we're wasting our youth on stuff they don't need. AI may help if we can revise what & how we teach to focus on what is really needed and useful, what is suited to the skills and aptitudes of the individual, and let Chat GPT or equivalent be the tool that fills in the gaps. The internet can harness the collective knowledge of humankind so that future generations can achieve more.

Many years ago there was a newspaper article in the UK lamenting the state of British youth all piling into University and College instead of going out into the world and accomplishing something. Even in the workplace, many young people are micro-managed, there's not the freedom for them to use and develop their intelligence.

Have we collectively allowed society to evolve to condemn youth to a life of servitude, no differently than the Kings of old where intelligence is no longer being honed by evolutionary pressures.
 
#46
tomchr said:
As far as I understand it, their entrance test doesn't actually test intelligence. And in the deepest irony, MENSA says that they will NOT tell you your IQ score from the entry test. But if you fail they will tell you which percentile you tested within ... from which you can easily calculate your IQ score. For an institution that claims to cater to the crème de la crème of IQ that's remarkably dumb.

Tom
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They most definitely told me my score which I have confirmed with a few other IQ tests later on and the percentile I fall in.
 
#49
My father was far up there as far as IQ.
His special things were VHF antennas and antennas of all sorts. He also grew up it a time when the supposed antenna experts did not really know how high frequency antennas worked.
His day job was balancing large industrial fans or turbines. Also dealing with structural resonances.

On the other hand he also loved to run un fused power inside the cars. The best was for a bypap (night breathing) machine for mom when they would go camping. It was just especially bad when Toyota provided a fuse block with a spare slot just inches from whre he connected the 12 gauge wire to the battery.
 
#52
Coincidence

But they are correlated since both are functions of Heat Waves.

CR = F ( HW )
IC = G (HW)

but CR != J ( IC )...

well, you could I suppose numerically correlated them so from crime you could calculate the ice cream sales... but that would be one huge leap of faith. I don't know how correct such a function would be - speaking as a physicist, not a mathematician.

Crime goes on during heat waves.
Heat Wave (HW) -> Crime (CR): HW -> CR. (HW, CR )

Ice cream usage goes up during heat waves.
Heat Wave -> ice cream usage (IC): HW -> IC. ( HW, IC )

However, it is not symmetric.... there is no ( CR, HW ) nor ( CR, IC )

It is also not transitive

So you can not say that ice cream usage creates crime ( IC, CR ) nor the inverse ( CR, IC ).

Mensa? I never tried. I was too busy, didn't need the ego, Maxwell's Equations applied to plasma were hard enough... I felt I didn't want to deal with Egotists from the Political Science realm.
 
#54
Quite true. That's why I didn't use "iff".

Personally, I find correlation without causation senseless (abhorrent actually)... just like Wall Street "rocket scientists" play derivatives and momentum instead of playing attention to company fundamentals.
 
#58
6sX7 said:
But how does one prove definitely that there is no (possibly deep rooted) causation to a correlation?
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I think a reflexive, and likely transitive, quality will prove it. If you have x = f (y ) and y = f' ( x ).

It is possible to have y = f ( x ) and z = g ( x ) so that y and z are correlated, but y doesn't cause z and viceversa..

Imagine if y is volume of a mass of gas and g is the temperature of a gas... both correlated to x being the heat applied to the gas. The volume and temperature are correlated but they don't cause each other... it's the heat applied that causes them.
 
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