Continuing coronavirus happenings (Part 4)

The main problem with measuring “intelligence” is the roughly infinite different types of intelligence. I excel at pattern recognition and data recall, but suck at mathematical reasoning and brute memorization. Social and emotional intelligence fall somewhere in between. I’ve seen papers using 30, 60 and more different scales of “intelligences.” And that’s before we get into people who are intelligent, educated idiots (the surgeon general in FL springs to mind.) I suspect “intelligent is as intelligent does” is likely the best we gonna get.

Edit cause i am insufficiently caffeinated.

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Ah, the most important type of intelligence of all. :wink:

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(This is yes-and for your point, Doc.)

For those who are interested, ref. Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, or any WAIS-IV IQ test applied to a neurodivergent person.

The executive summary is: the whole concept of an IQ is a statistical fiction, and the idea that it reflects some actual quality of “intelligence” which has been labelled g is seven kinds of nonsense resulting from getting it entirely backwards.

An IQ test is not a test, it’s a whole bunch of tests, testing different things. There are tests for linguistic memory, numeric memory, spatial orientation, pattern recognition, general knowledge, vocabulary, processing speed, comprehension, problem solving, all sorts of things. The trick then is that the results of all those tests are mathematically mapped onto a scale, where the results of the general population form a normal distribution bell curve, where the mean is 100 and standard deviation is 15. This means that you would expect roughly two thirds of the population to have an IQ between 85 and 115. That’s literally how it’s defined.

The thing is, each of these subtests is individually scaled, then the results all averaged up for the final number. The idea is that if you score at a certain point on one test, you are likely to score more or less the same for the others. That’s how it tends to look for Neurotypical people.

For a neurodivergent person, though, that goes out the window. I, for example, score very differently for spatial orientation and vocabulary than I do for working memory. At a certain point, if the subtest scores vary too far from each other, then the pattern is of far more significance than the average.

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… um, today is Monday, NYT :confused:

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I don’t qualify yet.

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… IT’S MID-SEPTEMBER NOW JOE :exploding_head:

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Free 5 G upgrade!

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Alright, folks, let’s get it done!

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Now I do, got an appointment for later this month.

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Pretty sure we’ve heard this song before. And learned absolutely nothing from it. Do I sound frustrated?

Donald Glover Reaction GIF

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I know, eh? Another ship running aground… /s

Family members were on a scientific cruise of a similar nature earlier this year and a COVID outbreak happened. What with it being a boatload of scientists, this triggered fairly comprehensive precautions, and those precautions were enforced with rigour (and success).

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Just when you thought travel back in time wasn’t a thing… Ontario :canada: shows the way… :persevere:

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This weeks Masking on Airplanes Report: on both West Coast US to East Coast US and return flights, I can report a significantly higher mask ratio than I’ve seen in over a year, pushing 50%. Reflective of both a COVID resurgence but also encouraging sign that people are aware of it and reacting to protect themselves and others.

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