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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4484 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 30, 2022

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Or, more likely, the person writing this is the kind of graduate student that would write this shit, and feels nothing but obvious contempt for his interlocutors in prison orange, who then have no interest in playing along with his little games. The dialogue reads more to me like a dude being uncooperative than retarded. Like when I, as an annoying brat 11 year old, would try to get my schoolmates to play intellectual word games and they'd reply to every question with "cheese." Just to piss me off, which was easier than it should have been.

As though I went to San Quentin, organized a basketball game which none of the inmates were very interested in at all, and ran to 4chan to excitedly announce: did you know most convicts are actually very unathletic? Practically crippled! Just let me dribble right by them and make lay ups all day! They barely played defense, and when they got the ball they would almost always turn it over to me and then go back to barely playing D.

If these were prisoners, there’s probably also a very high rate of undiagnosed mental illnesses that could plausibly make dumb but not retarded people much worse at communication.

This is really one of those things that makes me wonder a bit about the concept of IQ. Like, IQ tests undoubtedly to some degree measure intelligence, but also some degree the willingness to cooperate, do what you're asked to do, be social (ie. obey the purpose of the test) etc.; both of these then probably have something to do with one's ability to do well in modern working world, stay out of trouble with law etc. but are still similar concepts.

This realization came to me when talking about "dog intelligence", a concept - it seems to me - to at least in your normal vulgar parlance be mostly related to how well the dogs obey humans when humans order them to do things.

If you have subjects who are not cooperative for sugar blood tests, and eat a lot before blood sample is taken, is it a problem of blood tests?

I can think IQ tests duration is limited to 30-60 minutes so willingness to cooperate has little effect (for most individuals) even if it makes measurement of intellect per se less precise.

Note for some important things willingness to cooperate matters more than intelligence! Just there isn't a good method to measure it, and it's much more prone to change than intelligence.

Re dogs: I'm actually going to disagree about the dogs, because have you ever met a smart breed of dog that belonged to an owner that didn't train it or stimulate it enough? They turn into nightmare criminals. A friend of a friend has this border collie that she never trained right, it'll do things like chew on a doorknob to get into the house from the garage, then methodically poop in every room in the house. Like a determined goal oriented criminal.

Maybe this metaphor is going in a different direction 😂

I have to admit I've never owned a dog myself, I'm just going by how people generally seem to talk about dog intelligence.

I think you’re right, most of the dog intelligence lists you’ll find are based off of trainability and willingness to cooperate with humans. Which makes sense, since that’s the main reason someone would want to know how smart a dog breed is. For instance, Beagles are usually ranked near the bottom of intelligence lists. I have a beagle: she is very clever, but stubborn as a mule and extremely focused on food. Training her was difficult because unless you had food, she usually wouldn’t cooperate. Once you were holding food, she’d “remember” how to roll over, sit, whatever. Stupid? Not at all. Independent and focused on “what’s in it for me?” Very much so.

A large amount of dog owners talk in such matter, but it isn't unclear if it's plurality or majority. And I think that people who have such vulgar "dog intelligence" concept deny utility of IQ tests.

I'd bet quite a bit that this story is really just complete fiction.

I think this was the Freakonomics guy, but there was someone who as a grad student who had to go to low income housing an get answers to a survey.

One of the questions was something along the lines of

How do you feel about being poor and black?

a) Very good

b) Good

c) Uncertain

d) Bad

e) Very bad

Of course the most common answer was

f) Fuck you.

reminds me of this

That was in Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day (it was his first exposure to Chicago's South Side residents as a grad student), but I've seen his work cited many times in Freakonomics content.

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