posted on September 17, 2020 11:14 AM by
u/haankso
62
u/sue_me_please38 pointsat 1600354785.000000
Huh, turns out you can quantify your own self-worth.
I am going to be honest. I’m a socdem when it comes to my view of
economics, and I do think Keynesianism is a pretty good school of
economic thought. I do think capitalist interests present an existential
threat, and that what we’ve done in the US is taken steps to ensure that
their interests are maximized, and consequently, set ourselves on a path
that has potential for our total destruction. But, despite this, I think
this is an issue specific to the US, and that if the right steps are
taken, a just social democratic society can form. Do you have any books
that make a case for a post-capitalist system? I just need an evidence
based conception of a post-capitalist society that is functional.
It’s hilarious how this poster can determine that the OP is within
the top 10% of high school students based on the fact that they can
write a bog standard TheMotte post. Of course you’re in the top 10%,
you’re one of us.
> I do think Keynesianism is a pretty good school of economic thought. I do think capitalist interests present an existential threat
He knows Keynes was a capitalist, right?
maybe they're saying they think capitalism has bad incentives but the government can control for them to keep the good an dispose of the bad? i disagree but i think i can see where they're coming from
I actually agree with the poster, just simply on writing style and complexity, ignoring the content. Most people can't write well. While that might be a pretty "meh" comment, it's above average for what I saw from my peers in writing classes for gen eds.
But for real I’m saddened that someone who took SSC in good faith is
potentially renouncing a promising career path because they got
galaxybrained into thinking IQ mattered to begin with
Also it’s a reminder that many SSC regulars are literal kids who are
just absorbing this stuff in earnest without any second thoughts
I always get the first instinct to mock them for being ridiculous people, especially how these posts always have people in the comments congratulating the OP that they are actually geniuses for using big words once before or whatever.
But you’re right, this actually is just really damn sad, it’s pretty much watching someone get desperate enough that they drink the cool aid.
The OP genuinely seems to be distraught by the news, this actually seems like something that can completely fuck up a persons confidence and self worth.
yeah this is sad as hell! I mean, I'd 100% be depressed and flailing too, if I were about to graduate from high school into this mess of a world, but preemptively getting permission to fail from *the SSC subreddit* is just so fucking dark
where are this kid's actual role models???
lol, same, although I have found a weird little niche where I can make good use of my distrust of authority, argumentativeness, and occasional periods of hyperfocus
[Tony robins/4 hour work week voice] Achtually, if you just hustled more you could easily hold a job, I heard that the being an online grifter is a growth market. Perhaps you should ask Scott A if you can be their unpaid intern for a year first.
E: But seriously it indeed sucks.
E2: And btw, yes, the 'unpaid intern' stuff is not made up, self help people actually gave that as 'hustling' advice. Clearly ~~people~~ ghouls who don't care about scamming others should go into self help as that is where the money/attention is [im lying btw, there isn't there only is if you are charismatic, tens of thousands of people are failed life coaches].
i have a similar shitty problem where i went to a "great" pedigree university and came out with average GPA.
when i apply to any job, the interviewer's always like "yo you went to [GREAT SCHOOL] so clearly you're a GENIUS and OVERQUALIFIED for this position"
no, fuck off, give me a job so i can help pay for my grandma's chemo treatment.
I sympathise, I really really do
I’m lucky enough that I’m nowhere near having to pay for other people’s shit besides the occasional loan to a friend or two who are having trouble, and I can live with relative stability without a regular income
However, working out how to write a CV for a straight-up boring desk job or something at a bar is a nightmare when your qualifications consist of a handful of bar and events jobs plus *oh yeah also* two degrees from [GREAT SCHOOLS] and they just don’t want anyone like that on staff because we’re too smart not to be difficult to manage (and because you’re a serial fuckup nobody in your field wants to take you on in a depression) and also you’re not actually that smart they just think you’re too big for your boots or whatever
“Academic” jobs may be straight out (when colleges are dying, not like they can give jobs now) but have you tried completely out of box choices?
Like the [Peace Corps](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Corps) or [Americorps](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps) or [Teach for America](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_For_America) or any of the volunteer services. They do pay, afterall
(maybe not Peace Corps now, during border lockdowns)
Late response but reading this fucked me up because my own life has been extremely similar, right down to being a serial fuckup repeatedly labeled “disabled” because I’m such a total fucking neurological mess despite that mad IQ score. If anything, the contrast between high potential and low achievement and not understanding why I find doing ordinary things intensely fucking difficult has both made educators consistently frustrated with me and completely devastated my sense of self-confidence and self-worth. And my biggest fear when hanging around actually smart people is that I’m “smart” enough to feel alienated from most people but not smart enough to actually distinguish myself among the *real* smart people who are driven and productive instead of fucked up and dysfunctional. So much of my adult life has been spent in unproductive, socially avoidant depression and as I reach the end of my 20s it’s like I can actually *feel* my brain getting less active and organized while younger ambitious people seem to have everything way more together than I do. Every day I’m both tormented by the guilt of having wasted whatever potential I might have had and doubtful that I ever really had any.
Hey you know what it might've been for me? I wear a super large hat--fitted size 8--so maybe the fact that I could never find a suitable fedora for myself kept me off a dark path.
IQ is valid and important when it comes to making policy
pronouncements attacking minorities and other undesirable types, but
when it comes to the prospects of white, middle class males it’s pretty
much irrelevant.
Edit: I don’t know if I need a /s here, but anyway these people are
very close to a breakthrough if only they knew it.
I think it’s fairly valid on an individual level. If he’d scored more than a standard deviation above or below that probably is a big enough to affect future college plans. I don’t think you can graduate from college while testing at iq 80 but if you’re within 10 points of 100, you’re *average*, and you’ll probably do fine. It’s like BMI, it works best at population level, on the other hand, if you’re testing in at obese or seriously underweight, unless you are a very serious athlete, that’s pretty accurate.
If your cognitive ability is so low that it's going to hugely affect your life in the near term, you probably already know that and don't need some test to tell you, just like if your BMI is too high (except there are interventions you can use to change your weight once you realize how bad it is). It's (intended as) more of a statistical tool for teachers and doctors who have to appraise lots of diverse people fairly and efficiently, not for individuals to ignore all the other decades of information they know about themselves.
A lot of people manage to get through college by working their butts off rather than being fast at solving puzzles. In fact, working your butt off is probably more helpful; no amount of cleverness can fake your way through an exam on a book you didn't read or problem sets you didn't do. There are a lot of smart dropouts because college is the first time they realize that they can't coast on wits alone anymore without doing the work. And plenty of people are able to succeed and even excel in their university education despite actual diagnosed disabilities like ADHD and dyslexia, not to mention the huge number who somehow pull it off in a second language that they don't speak as well as their first (which always makes me feel like an absolute dumbfuck when I try and probably convinces other people too).
he's not worried about being able to graduate, he's worried about whether attending college would be a waste of money and time. which is a valid question, though his IQ score won't be able to answer it for him.
I’m not denying that hard work is important. I just don’t think a fair impression is that it doesn’t matter at all. Grit probably matters even more, hence the trope of genius who never does anything worthwhile. But I don’t think you can out-grit a extremely low iq. Forrest Gump will always be unable to do high level math. Puzzles are not directly good measures of college ability.
Problem is whether the test *tests*
I have taken repeated tests - not for a few years now because it’s not been relevant to my life - which repeatedly show me up as very strong on reasoning and “disabled” level weak on a few other extraneous things *which (with a not particularly good tester) would often would have shown up in the raw numbers as being a poor reasoner*
So I feel compelled to point out that the linked poster is clearly a competent thinker with a likely (as they hypothesise) processing speed problem, which is roughly my experience since I was quite young
Obviously some people have issues with reasoning that can’t be denied - regardless of all the “it’s genetic” bullshit - but taking a single test will not tell you whether you are one of those people unless you are already fairly obviously low on the curve, and moreover the test will often be poorly designed for your particular issues
I think even the IQ test is largely a measurement of practice, TBH. If you don't call it an IQ test, then it is just like anything else that you have to practice for to score high. You want to do well at some technical Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/Facebook interview? You better actually have done various math puzzles, there is no innate quantity that will breeze you through anything like that.
>I think it’s fairly valid on an individual level.
It's really not, it's bullshit all the way through and a prime example of physics envy. For instance, they have hacked it to be Gaussian *by design*. Imagine physicists fitting their temperature measurements into Gaussian ranked scores, or biologists fitting their protein concentration measurements into bell curves without any justification. It makes absolutely no sense! If anything, you'd expect people's "intelligence" distribution to follow a power law: an elite of very very smart people and a fat tail of low-to-average people, just like in literally every skill.
Then you get the stupid little items that psychologists have decided should match one's perception of intelligence. Why? Just because. If you can't answer a bunch of high school math questions very quickly or guess the next shape in a pattern *the way the psychologist wanted you to guess* you're just not intelligent sorry. Again, in what planet, in what field does that make any sense?
And of course you get the seminal [objection by Labov](https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/ets/labo.htm) who successfully demolishes the whole "verbal ability" part of the tests. Turns out that if you want to score high on a verbal test you have to think and speak much like a psychologist. Who would have thought?
As I say, IQ test scores say much more about the testers than the tested.
> If anything, you'd expect people's "intelligence" distribution to follow a power law: an elite of very very smart people and a fat tail of low-to-average people, just like in literally every skill.
Yeah an argument I kept making was - imagine we re-norm running speed to be Gaussian distributed and to top it off go with the percentiles wankery. No, 99.999999th percentile will not outrun a bicycle, and if we figure out the limit the "100th percentile" (an extrapolated maximum) would be just a bit faster than a good athlete. It'd just converge to a limit.
Or take longevity for example. The longest living human is not going to live even to twice the first-world life expectancy.
But with IQ everyone acts all surprised that above a certain level differences seem to cease to matter. Even though that is absolutely what you would expect if you performed a very noisy measurement of, say, running speed, then renormed it to be Gaussian, and then tried to predict how many miles people walk over the next 10 years. The underlying quantity, if there is any quantity at all, would come to a rather abrupt limit, where healthy people who try are able to get pretty close to said limit.
I’m not saying it’s going to give a very high degree of accuracy. OTOH it does tell you if you have deficiencies in those areas. If you’re borderline stupid, no amount of study in the world is going to get you to score above average on a test of verbal ability simply because you cannot learn well enough to be able to use that kind of vocabulary. Even if we’re sort of blank slates, there are limits. You have a range of ability, and you’re probably not going wildly above or below that.
I’ll be as clear as I can. Your score is probably only accurate in giving you maybe +/- 20 points. It can put you into a very broad category. And that’s what the initial test was made for. It was a tool to find kids with special needs so that they could be given extra help or shunted to vocational training. It wasn’t made with college in mind at all.
I do wonder what Scott Alexander's verbal ability is, a number of times he shown he simply doesn't understand what he's reading. Yet he's a professional psychiatrist? It's very odd. Common sense dictates that there is a range of ability and a person is probably not going to perform wildly above or below that range, yet we have recorded evidence of Scott Alexander performing extremely badly at verbal skills.
always entertaining to see the clash between the “autodidacticism is
everything, fuck ‘status games’” sect and the “don’t worry, you can
still go to an elite law school” sect
I have come to district autodidacts - they always are missing major parts of their education both in terms of depth and breadth.
After all a formal education is an expert in a field guiding you to having a comprehensive education of said field.
Self trading is fine but tends to be a bit idiosyncratic (by design), and will avoid the hard stuff - for whatever definition of hard the autodidist has. Math is often a missing skill among the self taught I’ve seen.
> Math is often a missing skill among the self taught I’ve seen.
Which is funny, because among the things in STEM, mathematics is probably the *most* self-teachable. You don't need any lab work, and while instructors are *incredibly* useful you can and inevitably will have to get by just by yourself either from reading out of a book or from reading a paper. At the end of the day, pen and paper are a mathematicians best tools. And often they're only ones that matter.
(full disclosure: I'm a guy who had to withdraw from a math degree for medical and financial reasons and have spent the past five-ish years self-studying and doing independent research. I fully intend to go back, but I'm sorta stuck in a hard place rn.)
For sure, but there’s also really hard math. A lot of the computery people math and rationalists talk about simple logic and maybe intro to stats. But the real bears show up in multi variable calculus, ode, pde, and beyond. Like few people study ode/pde for “fun”
Differential equations are legitimately difficult fields and actively studied, but it's strange to list multi-variable calc there. Anything calc is just a tool nowadays and has been since the mid to late 1800s. There's not really a whole lot left to study or work out (and anything that is left to study is usually not called calculus, and would be hard for a student to recognize as calculus).
With all that said, since Grothendieck usually the really notoriously difficult stuff is anything born out of algebraic geometry.
take the test again a few times, you’ll find that you’ve mysteriously
become more inherently intelligent and worthwhile to the world, unless
you’re black, in which case it’s just random statistical anomalies
it always seems to be highly verbal people who post these threads,
never people scoring low in verbal and high in nonverbal ability.
probably because highly verbal people are used to feeling smart
as a social trait (and positional good) and don’t adjust well to having
that status threatened. people strong in other areas base their
self-concept less around “smartness” as a social trait and more around
what they can do.
oh I'm not going to argue against that (at the very least because I don't keep up with Scott's other posts), I just think that one article in a vacuum is really solid
That's kind of how Scott gets people, though. He compartmentalizes everything instead of letting the nightmare shit leak out and contaminate his other positions in the eyes of a casual reader.
Huh, turns out you can quantify your own self-worth.
It’s hilarious how this poster can determine that the OP is within the top 10% of high school students based on the fact that they can write a bog standard TheMotte post. Of course you’re in the top 10%, you’re one of us.
But for real I’m saddened that someone who took SSC in good faith is potentially renouncing a promising career path because they got galaxybrained into thinking IQ mattered to begin with
Also it’s a reminder that many SSC regulars are literal kids who are just absorbing this stuff in earnest without any second thoughts
I think they are role playing at life. “How’s your grit/conscientiousness?” … “What’s your charisma score?”
IQ is valid and important when it comes to making policy pronouncements attacking minorities and other undesirable types, but when it comes to the prospects of white, middle class males it’s pretty much irrelevant.
Edit: I don’t know if I need a /s here, but anyway these people are very close to a breakthrough if only they knew it.
always entertaining to see the clash between the “autodidacticism is everything, fuck ‘status games’” sect and the “don’t worry, you can still go to an elite law school” sect
take the test again a few times, you’ll find that you’ve mysteriously become more inherently intelligent and worthwhile to the world, unless you’re black, in which case it’s just random statistical anomalies
it always seems to be highly verbal people who post these threads, never people scoring low in verbal and high in nonverbal ability. probably because highly verbal people are used to feeling smart as a social trait (and positional good) and don’t adjust well to having that status threatened. people strong in other areas base their self-concept less around “smartness” as a social trait and more around what they can do.
honestly I think that the SSC article Scott wrote about this is really solid and a good response to people like those in the OP
it’s still sad to see someone feel that way because of the IQ test result they got