There’s a simple solution to this, actually. Just keep the current universal suffrage system and then slowly improve society using a systematic eugenics program. Easy!
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That was the dream in the 1920s, things just took a wrong turn. It turns out that “dumb people who shouldn’t breed” tends to look a whole lot like “people who don’t look like me.” It’s akin to picking the best college students by drawing from among members of elite campus fraternities
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Pretty sure Keed was being sarcastic. Right? Right?
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I know, and I actually wasn’t being serious, just saying that any kind of non-universal suffrage system shares disturbing parallels with the mindset of eugenics.
In 2016, someone commented to director Mike Judge on how prescient his 2006 film “Idiocracy” was. “It wasn’t that fucking prescient, we were off by 490 years”, he replied.
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I know you were joking, and eugenics has the unfortunate consequence of very quickly sliding into human rights abuses and depriving people of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” among other things. That’s not only inherently bad, it’s socially unstable.
Maybe yea, but it is a good general predictor of a lot of different things, and since there is no other metric to really go off of re: intelligence, it’s the one we’ve got to work with.
There are a lot of different kinds of tests too that attempt to solve the issues with ones like the stanford binet.
For the record, I can’t think of a single person that posts regularly on this site that would score below 125. I firmly believe that.
As with any test, they are an imperfect measure, but they can give us a decent idea of where an individual falls on the curve.
We don’t count Sklansky as a regular poster?
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My wife’s an IT recruiter and a couple of her clients put candidates through CCAT tests (which I also sat when I went from contractor to permie at a company here a long time ago)…
…which are similar to IQ tests (I think - it’s a very long time since I sat one) but with more emphasis on verbal reasoning.
Don’t know if these are common or even used in the US.
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I believe in some respects that “intelligence” is a thing, but I don’t think it’s a neat or a unitary thing (or even an 8-factor multivariate thing). Measuring “intelligence” with IQ tests is like measuring max bench press by testing 100-meter times. There’s some genuine correlation, but it’s a pretty crude metric.
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There is a thread on the front page of 2+2 politics right now where dude is arguing that the Earth is flat, and he’s not trolling. Should he get the same vote that you do?
Not directed at any specific poster, open question.
One of the biggest failures of a pencil and paper standardized test that an individual sits down and completes is that the most meaningful problems in the world to work on are worked on by teams. Basic interpersonal competence plus average “intelligence” contributes more to society than a person that can sit down and complete a test really well.
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They’re usually a kind of self troll. I mean deep down he knows it’s not true (unless he really is a literal moron), but for his own reasons he wants to play devil’s advocate and see if he can construct arguments to trash other people’s beliefs…a bit like Toothsayer and most of his posts (plus triggering liberals).
I can only go off my own tech experience, although I am friends with a statistician that had to take something similar to this. In much of the tech world, as many here are aware, we have a rough equivalent of IQ tests where we are given pointless problems to solve that have little real world consequence, as a supposed measure of how good of a programmer the person is.
I’ve been somewhat of a manager and I rarely cared how people did on those because they’re a shitty predictor of who is likely to be a good worker or team player, much like IQ tests are poor predictors of real world success.
That’s not really the point. All the ones who believe Corona is a hoax, or that anthropogenic climate change isn’t real etc., will vote for candidates who will enact policies congruent with those beliefs, at which point whether their motivations become irrelevant.
Yep.
Interestingly, the one I took also had a third part (on top of the maths and verbal reasoning parts) that was a psychological section asking how you feel and/or react in various situations, some of which you realise are very similar.
Random thought: Anybody who thinks Peter Thiel is smart shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
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Well…your flat earth guy is imo usually not as sincere as the man made climate change denial or covid hoax idiots, so taking the latter two…
I don’t think that’s good enough reason to exclude them from the democratic process, no (incidentally I also think prisoners should be allowed to vote).
How about people who swear there are fairies at the bottom of their gardens or who see and talk to leprechauns? They do exist (the people, that is).
Oh, you mean the bible thumpers? Yeah, fuck them in all.