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Not so fast. He was right about you. I, too, believe that the majority of the world's population are bastards and dumbasses, but there are exceptions, and there are different degrees of bastardity and dumbassitude.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Except they're never any help when it's time to decide where to go out to eat.
It just grates me on all directions when overzealous parents mold their kid into some med school drone from day one. I live in an area comprised of Asian-Americans and Indians, and they all push their kids to overachieve so they can get into AP Bio in Senior year toting a 4.2 GPA and waving their 2400 SAT banner, then hop into medical school. This wouldn't be a problem normally, as smart doctors are usually an asset, but smart doctors who obviously have no personality except for their enormous egos and shallow credentials? I can't stand the people that do everything only for a grade or good-looking things to put on their college apps. Maybe I'm just spiteful or jealous, I don't know; I do know I may not be as smart as these people, but at least I'm not the nail on the wall that my parents can hammer in to hang all the medals and honors of my puppet-like accomplishments.
I know this comes off as arrogant in and of itself, but I am well aware of my own mediocrity. I am just a grade whore as the rest of them, but I have to fight with my parents every night I come home to make them let me get a job, or go on a trip, or tell them that under no circumstances am I going to be a lawyer or a doctor. I know I'm not good enough, and this wearying school career has left me so jaded with competition I am barely a viable candidate for any well-paying job. I lack real-life experience, which is really important, and unless I have to do something, I tend to avoid it.
Also: It annoys me that these ultra-smart people act like retards on the internet, too. People who get these great grades and are apparently brilliant turn into 5th graders when on AIM.
i seem to do okay, but i pretty much feel like a giant retard 90% of the time. I do not understand people who brag about test scores.
As for self-perception, I keep my ego in check by reminding myself that I've used very little of my potential, while others with fewer natural and economic gifts are going to retire billionaires, while I'll be lucky if I can make upper-middle class.
Well, you can blame a lot of people who put too much emphasis on the tests for that. We've programmed into our kids that test scores are super important. They're the new "penis size"
Well, they DO sort of have a huge factor in regards to your ability to obtain enough money to keep from wanting to kill yourself.
That would make a good motto for the SAT - "Score well, but if you don't, the world always needs ditch diggers!" They could even put a little picture of a guy with a shovel throwing dirt around.
Some kid made fun of me when I was twelve. He said "I bet you get A's".
We weren't from the same school. His school must have been fucked up.
Unfortunately, your school was the deviation from the standard.
I would love that.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Now, I'm not saying SAT scores actually are a perfect measure of intelligence. But if everyone thinks they're "above average," and everyone constructs their self-image by rationalizing external cues about our capabilities, there's going to be a lot of contradictions out there. And since it's been shown that we change our opinions on everything and anything so long as it benefits our self-perception, you kinda' have to be skeptical about every Dick, Tom, and Harry out there claiming the SATs are bogus tests.
Because remembering simple stock answers is a great measurement of ones intelligence?
Is that what I said? Try again.
I've had that in the form of book reports. Which seems ill-conceived since chances are he hasn't read the biography of our choosing. But who knows, I actually had an instructor warn us not to plagiarize because he, and I quote, "read all of the encyclopedias".
I loved going to Nerd School. It's certainly humbling.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
I don't think there's really a meaningful way of even defining intelligence, never mind measuring it. I've been IQ tested five times in my life (I went to a private school that was big on that kind of thing) and got wildly different scores each time. My thinking is that the form the test takes heavily influences the result, and there's really no way to eliminate that.
Really, if people are going to get into dick-waving contests about their intelligence, they need to decide what they mean buy intelligence, how they're going to measure it, and understand that no method of measurement is going to give the complete picture. I really doubt that's going to happen in a confrontational setting on a message board.
Except no one understands that. People with, facing it, comparatively crappy UAI's like 80 end up on Current Affairs and in newspapers talking about how their marks weren't actually that good, and then we get the token interviews from employers saying "he had an ok UAI but actually they're dangerously under-educated"
You know how some people say you can get a rough-estimate of someone's IQ by dropping the last digit of one of the old out-of-1600 SAT scores? On the one hand I don't buy it, on the other hand IQ is a meaningless measure anyway, and on my third hand if you drop the zero from the end of my SAT score you get my IQ. What does all of this mean? Nothing, so far as I can see.
Seems a bunch of people need to start being more mindful of the universal claims they make. I performed well enough on the SATs to get marked as a smart-kid by my classmates, and I just finished saying they don't mean much. Normally that wouldn't be enough to disprove a claim, but what you have here is a universal claim, which only takes one counter-example to disprove.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
Actually that comes out pretty close for me. Weird.
I would say, instead, that knowing how to do any specific thing is the perfect measure of intelligence.
Reminds me of my Master's Orals. Two hours locked in a room with three professors. I was sweaty.
But I've met two people in my life who are good at almost everything. Amazing at sports (like they can play any sport they want really well, no problem), math, biology, theoretical physics, crossword puzzles, card games, you name it. They're also socially very adept, which is the rarest thing. I find these people noteworthy expressly because they seem to be able to do everything, unlike everybody else, whose talents are in particular fields.
The only thing that these people aren't very good at seems to be writing long essays and shit, but I don't put much stock in that as a measure of intelligence.
And the internet is a terrible place for judging intelligence, even worse than SAT scores, probably (I don't know, I've never taken one).
I can't wait.
Largely because I'm verbally combative with professors anyway. That would just be an excuse.
Why? It's all people's thoughts, and not much else. Granted it's possible for people to have some great thoughts and be completely unable to express them, but then those thoughts aren't of much use anyway. So if judging intelligence based on people's thoughts and ability to handle conceptual shit competently is a shitty way to do it, what would be a better way? Bear in mind that this is not SE.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
I never said anything about knowledge. Being able to spit out facts and numbers and studies doesn't make people look smart, we have computers (which, incidentally, are not intelligent) for that. Please answer my actual question.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
My preferred way of judging intelligence (as I've mentioned before) is to see how quickly they can understand new concepts, whether it's in math, physics, language, whatever. School/university is probably the best place to do this, because it's very clear when a student is book-smart and just learns stuff by rote and when the student actually understands the stuff well, and most importantly: quickly.
It's a lot easier to sense that someone genuinely understands something when you ask them in real life as opposed to the internet.
An opinion isn't an argument. You could simply look up an argument and present it as your own, but you're going to get caught really quickly, and any argument you just look up online can easily be countered by just looking up one of the common counter-arguments for that particular argument. Perhaps the internet would be a poor place to judge people's intelligence if you're personally unable to spot this nonsense, but it's usually pretty easy to spot and then people won't be able to defend it against other arguments very effectively if they can't actually wrap their head around the concepts involved in their borrowed claims. And if they can actually wrap their head around the concepts sufficiently to defend their stated argument or claim, then it doesn't matter that they looked the original claim up. Which directly contrasts a classroom setting where you're usually actually not even permitted to challenge claims and arguments because it will disrupt the flow of discourse. I don't see how it would be any easier to tell that someone only has knowledge and not intelligence in a classroom than on the internet unless you just really don't know how to tell when someone knows what they're talking about and when they're just faking it.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
And I don't know how your classes were, but in my classes (well, I was always in the smart-people-stream my entire life), students were always allowed to challenge the way things are done. Time was not usually an issue.
Actually, as a particular example, in one math Linear Algebra class way back when, the teacher presented one way of proving a certain statement about matrices, and this one very smart person in the class asked the teacher 'couldn't you just do it this way?' and he and the teacher spent the entire rest of the class talking about it. The teacher didn't realize you could do it this way, and it turned out, after the teacher went home and thought about it some more, that it was a perfectly valid way of proving the statement. It was actually a really intuitive method. And everyone thinks math is supposed to be one of those 'you can't challenge this' subjects, but that's what sets a smart person apart. This same student argued with our physics teacher all the time - and they were not stupid arguments ithat dumb people love to have. They were really logical arguments and our physics teacher would try to respond as well as he could, because the textbook can't cover everything. So that's one way of knowing when a person is very quick on their feet - when they correct the teacher right then and there and are actually right about the correction.
And you can tell very clearly who's smart even outside of the classroom setting in schools. I don't think anybody's school experience consists entirely of a teacher talking at students and then the students quietly shuffling their way out of the classroom and never speak to each other about anything discussed in class.
You can always tell, when doing difficult homework assignments together or something, which guy is the smart one that understands the stuff quickly and finds out something that is not necessarily covered in the book by pure deductive skills. This is unlike the book worm who always has to go straight to the book, look up the relevant material and comb for the answer in the text.
Apart from body-language which is more telling of confidence than anything else in the first place, how are any of these not possible on the internet? Being able to look up answers and spit them out doesn't even look the same as discussion of the concepts involved. And seriously, body-language is a pretty shitty way to gauge intelligence especially when compared against the wording people use. And there's a difference between asking the teacher if an alternate method of solving something works and challenging the arguments and claims of other students, a very large, very obvious difference.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
Which I ignored because at my uni it's called plagiarism and ergo not a particularly intelligent activity to participate in. But it doesn't really matter anyway because there's nothing about a group-assignment that differentiates it from internet discourse except body-language. Having to look things up doesn't make a person look stupid, incidentally. Refusing to look things up if you're uncertain, however, does. Part of being smart is knowing where to find the answers that you don't already have.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
I guess it's different for like philosophy students or something, because this shit is encouraged in engineering/science schools.
Everything is about team work these days...
Besides, maths is all about plagiarism. Wouldn't get very far if everyone had to start from base principles for everything.
Spoken by someone who has only ever done math for academic purposes.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers