(By the way, regarding my last comment about a sudden conversion -- I know that's impossible because of all the machinery, equipment, etc. in many fields that uses traditional units. But if it were possible to just move everything over one day, I don't think it would take people that long to obtain a new sense of the new units, at least not for the things they tend to encounter often in their daily lives.)
Pro-metric folks talk about the ease of metric conversions, but that's mostly useless.
I absolutely agree with you for everyday use. Scientists and engineers obviously have a lot more unit conversion to do at times, but for everyday folks, it doesn't really matter if there are 5280, 5000, or 5317 feet in a mile -- short distances are expressed in feet or yards, long distances are miles. Everyday people rarely need to convert the two. And it doesn't matter if there are 128 ounces in a gallon or 130 or 117. You buy certain things in ounces, and other things in quarts or pints, and still other things in gallons (or half gallons). Conversion is rarely required.
That's not to say easy conversions are useless -- just for everyday use they don't tend to happen very often.
But, even more important, the most relevant aspect of using either any system of measurement, be it metric or English, is gut feelings. That's what used daily over and over again. I have a gut feel for how big 100 miles, 1 gallon, 160 lbs, etc. are, but I have to do the conversion from metric quantities to understand metric units. I can do the conversions, and I understand the math, but it's the intuitive understanding of the quantities that is useful. It is this one quality of measurement systems that allows the English system to continue to flourish despite its mathematical limitations.
I understand your point here, but I also disagree with how much of a challenge it would be to learn new intuitions. You already likely know how big a liter as well as how big a gallon is, assuming you've ever bought a large bottle of soda. Also, a liter is about a quart, so that's easy enough. Similarly, yards are about the same as meters, and pounds are roughly half a kilo. Go to the deli and ask for half a kilo of ham instead of a pound, and you'll get just a little more than you usually would. Easy enough. For smaller amounts, order in increments of 100 grams, which are a little smaller than 1/4 lb. each. Again, easy enough.
All it really takes to obtain that "gut feeling" you're talking about is a few anchor points. Take temperature, for example, which is a measurement people often encounter on a daily basis. In Celsius, 0 is freezing, 10 is cool, 20 is (cool) room temperature, 30 is hot, and 37 is body temperature (quite hot). Interpolate the rest from that. Easy enough. Read the daily temperature for a month and interpolate it into those anchor points, calibrate it to your own personal sense, and it will soon be easy. (Also, our human ability to sense actual temperature is so dependent on things like humidity, activity level, wind, etc., that being more precise than those few anchor points is rarely useful.)
Same thing would happen quite quickly with other stuff. Since the pound, yard, and quart have pretty good rough equivalents in metric, you can get most of the way there just with those. The rest is filling in the gaps -- a foot is about 1/3 of a meter, roughly 30 cm. So 10 cm is roughly 1/3 of a foot, or roughly 4 inches. 20 cm is roughly 8 inches. Etc. Again, you do this with maybe a few dozen measurements, and you get the rough sense down.
I agree that for people who are really good at just looking at something and saying "That's 8 inches by 4.5 inches," they're going to need to do more to calibrate that sense. But the general "gut feeling" for approximate size is pretty easy to acquire, if you just do it for a little while. I think if the U.S. just decided to suddenly switch all systems one day, there would be a lot of complaining and yelling and protests for about six months or a year, and then nobody would really notice anymore, because we all would quickly adjust.
By the way, after I wrote my comment, I did some searching. Until now, I was not aware of how "customized textbook editions" for specific universities has apparently become a thing in some places.
Needless to say, I'm appalled by this if it involves professors getting a kickback for including a chapter of their own in the "customized" edition. In my field, to my knowledge the standard intro textbooks have never come in any sort of "customized edition," so I didn't even know this was possible.
I could possibly see the justification for customizing a book to suit a particular syllabus, and as I could see how that might be useful. But if my department were getting a kickback for that, I'd feel very weird about that. And I probably wouldn't do that myself, because I have actually been rather sensitive to book prices in my classes and wouldn't want to prevent students from buying a used copy or selling theirs if they wanted to. (I'd rather prepare my own supplements anyway.)
Also, I do know there was a federal law passed a few years ago that required disclosure of textbook requirements from colleges ahead of time, so students would know what is actually required and there could be better monitoring of textbook abuses... I just had no idea things were this crazy.
Not to mention the nasty habit of "revisions" happening all the time. I do remember one $200-ish AP Chem book for HS we got online for quite a bit less... had the same material, but the pg numbers were off and the exercises were a bit different... obvious changes to make the book "obsolete". I wonder how much is the Author and how much is the Publisher making these minor tweaks to create artificial obsolescence?
I know some people who have written standard textbooks in a couple different fields. The general impression I've gotten from them is that they are usually NOT in favor of creating new editions all the time. Generally there are some kinks to work out in the first edition, but definitely by the second or third edition, things should be pretty set. The authors I've talked to have mentioned they are often under pressure from publishers to make changes to justify new editions. And, in fact, that's often why you see books start to accumulate new authors after a few editions -- it used to be "Intro to X by A" and now it's "Intro to X by A and B, 4th ed." and then a few years later it's "Intro to X by A, B, and C, 9th ed." Sometimes the old authors just think the book is fine, and they finally say no to doing anything new, so the book gets handed off to someone else to "revise" and bring in some new ideas or exercises.
People often overestimate the profits that professors earn from textbooks. Sure, those who write the really standard books in very popular fields (like the standard intro calc or bio textbooks or whatever) are probably making a lot of royalties. But once you get beyond those intro classes or get into more obscure fields, the number of copies sold may not be that big, particularly if there is competition among textbooks (which there usually is, even in smaller fields).
I'm not saying they aren't making money. But I've heard from multiple textbook authors (smaller markets) that they aren't making enough money to justify doing new editions and revisions as much as publishers would like them to. And keep in mind that most academics see their jobs as primarily research, not textbook writing, so they'd rather be doing something for real in their field rather than coming up with another set of stupid exercise questions for an intro book.
So, I'd say publishers are definitely in favor of creating artificial obsolescence. Authors? Maybe sometimes, but not as often as you might think.
Another shady practice is faculty writing their own textbook and then requiring it be used when they teach related courses, when it appears there's a well-accepted standard text in use by 90% of other schools where the particular subject is taught.
While in some cases this may actually be "shady," if a professor writes a book that actually gets published by reputable publisher, then you may be getting something that's more relevant and tailored to the class you're actually taking, rather than some generic textbook. (Only once, in grad school, did I ever purchase a book authored by the professor that I thought was completely useless -- we only used it for about a week of the class. But that also was not a textbook -- it was a monograph, and I now know the royalty rates for books like that, which are pretty darn minimal for academic books. This professor wasn't exactly making a lot of money off of having the 8 students in her grad seminar buy the book.)
As an undergrad, I don't remember so much of that, though. (My profs who actually wrote textbooks were mostly respected leaders in their fields and thus were actually the primary authors of the "well-accepted standard text," but that has to do with where I went to undergrad.) I do remember quite a few times when a professor would require a "coursepack" that was printed at the campus bookstore or some nearby printshop which was often a small fraction of the price that an actual textbook would be. Sometimes it was a collection of readings, and sometimes it was just the professor's notes. But I was generally glad to shell out less money for that than for an actual textbook.
I would also note that I've taught at the university level, and I've been involved in preparing coursepacks and have used them myself. In that case, I can assure you that even though you're getting a printout of my notes and handouts, etc., and maybe some exercises I've designed, I'm making NO profit whatsoever from it. The cost of the coursepack is almost always determined by the printing and binding cost, along with any rights secured by the printshop to reproduce selected readings, articles, etc. Maybe some professors get some kickback from it, but I certainly don't, and I'm not sure I could even request that at the printshop without doing something sketchy.
Perhaps you had some professors who were actually making extra money by publishing through a "vanity press" and then forcing you to buy their book -- if so, I do think that's a bit shady.
Newssites with comment section are somewhere in the middle, and no, blogs are not sufficient replacement, because people only read blogs they agree with.
Meh. These days, many people often tend to only read "newssites" that they agree with.
The boundary between newssite and blog, particularly for sites that allow a lot of bloggers, has become difficult to maintain. You get a lot of sites that tend to just accumulate stories written by people who all slant in similar directions. And even for traditional "newssites," the people who read the Wall Street Journal may hate the New York Times and may detest the New Yorker. Or the reverse. Or whatever.
Not that this is anything new, mind you. Most newspapers for as long as there have been newspapers have generally propagated particular points of view. We have this weird view that there used to be "objective, balanced reporting" that maybe existed for a few decades in the mid-20th century, but that's really not the norm.
So, in the end I agree with you that we need comments sections even on newssites -- at least it might have a chance of getting people out of their "filter bubble" and seeing some opposing viewpoints.
There have been situations in humanity's past when this would have been true of social/governmental organizations too. If the chief needs everyone to mobilize in order to avert disaster and keep the entire tribe from being wiped out, then you don't want a lot of debate. The whole setup worked pretty well for a while.
The Romans had a great way of balancing this. Usually they'd have a few different popular assemblies which would govern (with various checks and balances), but in times of crisis, they'd elect a dictator, who essentially had limited power.
But the dictator was expected to reliquish the power and resign at the end of the crisis. This myth of the ancient good citizen (who, stereotypically, would return to his farm again after the crisis was averted) was instilled in young Romans as an essential civic duty and the nature of power, which was only to be held for limited times (originally a strict criterion for all high Roman political offices).
Eventually the system broke down, but it worked well for at least four centuries or so, and it still allowed a kind of popular government to function without unnecessary accumulation of power in high offices, except in times of crisis.
Many things have worked better, as long as the guy on top was capable and uncorrupted. The problem is that eventually there's a successor who can't handle it, and then it all falls down.
While this is true, it's also something that can happen easily -- and historically HAS happened many times -- in democracies and other forms of popular government.
The problem with the masses is that they can always be manipulated and motivated to give up their power to govern themselves, particularly under dire conditions (or conditions that are *claimed* to be dire). Fear is usually the main thing here.
The ancient Romans had a very good system for dealing with this: the temporary dictator. Usually, they had a semi-representative republic, but in times of crisis, they would elect a dictator who basically had absolute power until the end of the crisis. There was a whole ancient myth developed around how a good dictator was always ready to reliquish his duties at return to his farm (like Cincinnatus).
For 400 years or so, the combination of an educated governing senate and occasion dictators who knew their civic duty was to resign was enough to keep things in check. But eventually the system began to break down, the checks and balances were observed less often, the traditional high offices which were only to be held once or non-consecutively were held by the same person for years on end, and eventually the Caesars kept a permanent dictatorship, which they then renamed as an office of emperor.
One could bring up many other examples from history where the "mob" basically elects a dictator into office -- they voluntarily turn over their power to crazy people who promise them things.
The fact that the public library is an actual place is important.
Another facet of having an actual place is that humans orient themselves around physical spaces in ways that just aren't the same electronically.
One of the most important ones to me is the bookshelf, particularly for non-fiction books (which is mostly what I read aside from classic lit). No matter how good Amazon's "products like this one" or "products other people have purchased" lists get, they still generally don't offer the same kind of discovery sensation of browsing on shelves for me. Amazon is very good at showing me books that other people like me already know about. It is TERRIBLE at showing me more obscure or older related items that people like me don't tend to know about already, but which might be just as good resources (or even better). Even a relatively small public library will often have some intriguing random discoveries for me when I'm browsing in an area devoted to a particular subject. And a large university is often a revelation.
Physical bookshelves make this sort of browsing possible quickly and efficiently. They also register an amazing sense of "location" that just doesn't happen on the web. I used to visit a small local public library every couple weeks when I was a kid and check out books (mostly from the science section). After a few years, I had exhausted many of the good books in that section, so I didn't go to that library much anymore. But I remember returning there maybe a decade later, and when I went back to those shelves, I saw many of my old favorite books, still in their same locations on the shelves, and I *remembered* where they were... it was actually a somewhat moving experience.
Now, of course, I have plenty of my own bookshelves in my home, and I have a similar sense of location -- even though I have thousands of books, I know basically where everything is. Whereas if I forgot to rename a PDF file I downloaded and/or forgot to put it in the right folder on my computer, I could have a lot of difficulty finding it.
It's also like the physical sense one often has of reading a physical book, which makes it very different from reading an ebook where the text can reflow on demand or when a font is resized or whatever. With a physical book, I can often find something I read again by thumbing through and thinking, "Yeah, it was about 1/3 of the way through the book, and I remember it was in the upper right corner of a page somewhere" and I can usually find it within a minute or two. Obviously a full-text search on an Ebook can often be just as efficient, but sometimes I don't remember enough unique words from the passage or sometimes it was a diagram or something... and I can find that instantly in a physical book.
Spatial organization is really important to memory. There was a well-known memory technique used in medieval times to memorize long lists of things and even entire books, which often involved imagining a very large building with many floors, and on each floor were many rooms, and in each room were many pieces of furniture with many drawers (or other containers), and within each drawer was some imaginary physical item meant to be a mnemonic for the things to be recalled. By "constructing" this imaginary building in your mind and repeatedly "revisiting" it as you memorized something, it would cement the text in your mind.
Nowadays this art of memory has been almost forgotten, but in a mostly oral culture where books were rare and manuscripts often could only be consulted in one place but copying was too expensive to take a copy with you, it was necessary for scholars to memorize large amounts of texts when doing research. There was a whole "craft of memory," and it mostly revolved around spatial metaphors.
Our modern physical libraries and books are similarly navigable when they exist in real space in ways that electronic materials often aren't. That doesn't mean that we can't make the electronic materials better and often superior in some ways, but we lose something when the physical orientation around books goes away.
I doubt there's some grand conspiracy to prevent men from becoming kindergarten teachers
Oh there most certainly is, only it's not women or feminists behind it but other men.
To be fair, I think it also has to do with mothers' fears as well.
It's the patriarchal stereotype that men cannot be nurturing which means any man who shows affection to children gets branded a paedophile - and that means getting hired in preschool or kindergarten teaching jobs become virtually impossible as too many parents will harbour such unfounded suspicions.
THIS. I never really thought much of this until I became a dad and had to take my small child to the park or something. Where I lived before, it was a community where stay-at-home dads and such were fairly common, so I don't think it was too out of place. But I moved to somewhere where it was almost always women who took their kids out (whether moms or nannies or whatever), not the dads.
It's really disconcerting to have to worry about what other people around you might be thinking. When I would walk my son to the park or to other nearby stores or whatever, I have occasionally been stopped by passers-by, asking if everything is "okay." One day when I was walking down the street with my 3-year-old kid, he got a little tired walking, so I picked him up for a while and starting walking a little faster and bouncing up and down a bit (which he loves). Soon, a car pulled over and an obviously concerned woman asked, "Are you okay? Do you need any help?" It wasn't clear whether the question was directed toward me or toward my son. (Obviously a man walking down a sidewalk quickly with a kid who was bouncing around a bit must be abducting him?)
After a few things like this, I started poking around on the internet and reading similar stories. I also happened upon discussions where various people were voicing concern about the very idea of a male teacher at an elementary school or at a daycare center. (Here's a representative discussion.)
Yes, there are pedophiles out there, but the media has mischaracterized things so much that people have completely irrational fears. Most of the "pedophiles" we hear about in statistics are adults who have abused teenagers, not little kids. If we want to look for abuse, we should be more afraid of the high-school coach or the high-school Spanish teacher with our daughters (or sons) than a guy in a daycare center. Actual pedophiles are quite rare, and even among those rare people, women have also been known to abuse young children too.
But nevertheless many people -- both men and women -- have this strong fear of men around small children, which didn't exist at the same level before the child abduction scares of the 1970s and 1980s. So, just at the time that women were seriously starting to take on different roles in the workforce, we had a social perception shift that took the idea of a male caregiver for young children from the "unusual" category to the "scary" category.
Frankly, I think it's sad. I personally couldn't imagine myself taking care of a bunch of young kids, but there are lots of guys out there who seem to be interested -- and we shouldn't just assume because they can care for kids that they are likely to be pedophiles.
Why is it so hard to believe that men and women might be interested in different careers or have different interests?
It's NOT hard to believe. It's probably true in some cases.
Do you think it's because of artificially stamped "gender roles" that society imposes on men and women?
In some cases, yes.
Doesn't it make sense that our societal mores and roles simply tend to align with gender-specific traits and talents evolved over the last hundred thousand years or so? Those traits, of course, are largely driven by biological realities, so unless men start giving birth, it makes no sense for them to compete with women for the role of nurturer and caregiver.
The problem with these sorts of argument is that they are the exact same arguments that were used for centuries (if not millennia) to justify not letting women do whatever random crap society thought they shouldn't be doing at that time. "Women are caregivers, who raise children and cook food barefoot in the kitchen" has been the rationale in the past for not allowing women to vote, not providing them with education, etc., etc., etc. In more extreme societies, it has at times led to much more harsh oppression.
Look -- obviously most Western societies have made progress in leaps and bounds over the past century or so in providing opportunities for womeI'm willing to go as far as saying that women are probably "biologically" more programmed to care for infants and very small children, because for most of history those kids needed to be breast-fed, and men obviously are not physically built to provide that. But beyond that, once kids are weaned, it's really hard to say there must be a physical, biological justification for why men can't be caregivers or might not be in certain social situations. n and not excluding them for random reasons.
But the problem is it's REALLY HARD to know exactly what may be "evolved gender-specific traits" and what may be "artificially stamped gender roles that society imposes." Do I personally think it's likely that our society change to a point where men are 90% of the caregivers for small children, and women do most of the work outside the home? No -- obviously not.
But it is hard to say what percentage of men would choose to teach elementary school or work in daycare or even roles like nursing or whatever if there weren't such prejudice against doing these "caregiver" roles. There are in fact organizations who are actively working to get more men involved in these areas, and they recognize that there are huge social roadblocks toward, say, convincing men to try nursing, even though it's a high-demand profession. (Even most of our representations of male nurses on television and movies are derogatory, reinforcing these notions.)
I'm sure some might think of me as a neanderthal for my shocking assertion that men and women have fundamentally different skills, interests, and behaviors because of biology, but it seems like common sense to me.
I don't think you're a "neanderthal" at all, or that your suggestion is "shocking." But lots of "common sense" assertions about the "natural biological" roles that men and women should play have been used in the past to significantly oppress women. Men aren't really built to breast-feed, and thus I think there's pretty solid biological proof that men are not physically as "qualified" to be primary caregivers for infants and very small children. But does that mean they can't or shouldn't give care to older children or to people as nurses or whatever? I don't think that's anywhere near as clear-cut.
So, it's really hard to separate long-standing social convention from biology, and I think we have to be really careful with our assumptions here... because a lot of things that were "obvious" about these things a century or two ago are no longer thought to be true.
Before I respond, let me be clear: I'm NOT arguing that quotas are the best way to fix this. Nor do I necessarily think Apple even has a "problem" here -- as others have noted, hiring pools in tech jobs tend to contain a lot of men, and white people are in fact the majority of people in the U.S.
However...
There is ONE thing that matters, and that is : who does the best work.
While I agree with you to some extent, the reality is that for most of history, that has NOT been the "one thing that matters." Getting a job was not just about whether you could do the best work, but whether you "looked like" other people at the company (maybe same race, sex, whatever), whether you went to the same school that the hiring manager did, whether your dad played golf with somebody who had some "pull" in the company, etc. And because of those latter things, even people who aren't really racist per se end up hiring people who are "more like them," because the college they went to also was skewed more white than most and the golf course is almost all for male white people, etc.
I'm NOT defending quotas here or saying they are a good solution to these problems. But the reality is that "who does the best work" is often only one of many criteria that goes into screening candidates or selecting someone to hire. And even though those mechanisms may not necessarily be overtly unfair regarding race or gender (though they may be unfair in other ways), they end up reproducing a result that is balanced toward maintaining the status quo.
And that also doesn't take into account the reality that there are in fact huge numbers of actual racist and sexist people who still live and work in the U.S. It's not polite to talk about it anymore, but it doesn't mean the attitudes aren't still around -- and just because one guy on the hiring committee doesn't explicitly say, "Let's move on from these three candidates because they're black" doesn't necessarily mean he isn't harboring prejudice.
So, I think it's important to recognize that "who does the best work" is actually NOT the only (or even primary) criterion for who ultimately gets hired in many positions. Some companies may actually succeed in doing that, and I applaud them. But there are often a lot of other subjective factors at play, and some of those may have racist or sexist effects (either intentional or unintentional).
Don't be distracted. He threw in a few kind words about the "sense of enjoyment" and he finishes by saying he didn't hate the conference. Surely that's not enough to make you think the author is objective?
No, that's not enough, though it speaks to his general feelings about the event. If this person simply was an opponent of Wikipedia or hated it, I doubt he would have thrown those bits in.
No -- to me, what made it more than a rant is the fact that there were plenty of proposed solutions and emphasis on ideas to improve things. There were plenty of negative issues brought up, but also discussion of many ways that things could get better.
I'm very interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems.*
As another commenter has already pointed out, you seem only interested in problems from an internal perspective. But things like the declining numbers of active editors come specifically out of issues like I quoted from TFA -- I was an active Wikipedia editor for a while some years ago, and I was driven away due to frustration with the hostility that new editors and specifically people who clearly had expertise were often met with. This is no mystery.
You have a system mostly governed by those who can cite byzantine policies (which are often ambiguous and conflicting anyway), rather than a system that rewards expert knowledge. Don't get me wrong -- I also realize there is a large class of people who edit Wikipedia who are not experts but spend a LOT of time cleaning up language, vandalism, etc., and I greatly admire those people. I've also encountered a number of those people who then took their contributions as license to declare themselves as "owners" of articles or to skew things in their favor as if they were experts on the subject matter.
I understand the problems very well -- and many of the issues in TFA were external manifestations of some of the issues you bring up.
But I've no time for disingenuous rants like this one.
I can understand that you are frustrated by the negative tone, the airing of "dirty laundry," etc. But what precisely makes this "disingenuous"? I got the sense of a guy who likes to be part of Wikipedia and was actually kind of excited to get together with his fellow Wikipedians, but also recognizes a lot of flaws and is willing to talk about potential solutions. I don't claim to be an insider (at all -- I haven't actively edited articles for many years; these days, the most I'll do is drop an anonymous note on a Talk page where I see an article that's really screwed up), but many of the issues are real problems with the public perception of Wikipedia.
It may be a resource that lots of people use frequently, but people don't think about that actively -- it's just another internet resource. They do notice when they see negative press coverage. Particularly if you ever want people to participate more or donate money or whatever, the first thing that needs to be dealt with are some big issues that are perceived by the public because they keep showing up in media articles -- and that's one of the highlights of TFA.
Well, this article he wrote is nonsense. I know nothing else about the guy.
He just takes every controversy and paints it as an unsolvable failure of the iron-fisted Wikimedia Foundation.
Funny -- it seemed to me like one of the most insightful and relatively balanced pieces on Wikipedia I've read in some time. Despite having a number of serious complaints, the author also talks about very positive aspects of the event, as in: "Wikimania was in many ways an inspirational event. There was a palpable sense of enjoyment and celebration in the air..." and later in the final conclusion "As I travelled to Wikimania, I worried that I might hate it. But my worst fears did not materialise." He clearly cares greatly about Wikipedia and wants to make it better.
In fact, some of the potential solutions he mentions address the biggest problems of Wikipedia and could finally be the path to solve them. For example:
Medical content, notably the current initiatives to have medical articles peer-reviewed by academic experts (Cancer Research UK is involved, and is now hosting a Wikipedian in Residence), and provide readers with a permanent and prominent link to that peer-reviewed article version. It's an excellent idea that in the long run could also be transferred to other topic areas. Experts might be more inclined to contribute and review articles if their work is guaranteed some lasting presence. We hope the Foundation will support that effort.
Wikipedia has grown over the years by leaps and bounds with all the wonderful contributions from random people. But for articles that have achieved a relatively good status, Wikipedia is spending more and more time fighting the "barbarians at the gates" who want to vandalize, post misleading information pushing an agenda, and just random editors with little expertise who wikilawyer their way into having the article the way they like, regardless of an expert consensus on the topic. All of this could be solved by keeping articles more "stable" (maybe have a separate proposed edits page, or an "experimental" page that could be edited by anyone and is not the default) and incorporating advice from subject matter experts.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is older than Wikipedia and the best resource on philosophy on the internet, shows how this can be done well. Wikipedia wouldn't have to let go of the option for the general public to edit pop culture articles on their favorite Star Trek or Buffy or Friends episode or whatever -- but for subject matter where there is a peer-reviewed expert academic literature available and experts who are willing to contribute, why not help make that possible?
Similar policies could solve some of the biographical article problems brought up in the summary -- even just holding proposed edits in a queue for experienced and validated editors to allow them would prevent nonsense such as that mentioned in TFA where a reporter has to complain about: "I have spoken publicly about my children having been born as a result of fertility treatment. And my Wikipedia page, which I didn't even know existed, contained a phrase along the lines of 'he wasn't man enough to impregnate his own wife'," a statement that went unchallenged on Wikipedia for nearly a month. The author (and the reporter complaining here) is right -- there's simply no excuse for that sort of nonsense, particularly when Wikipedia has such a poor track record of figuring out ways for real people to correct factual problems in articles about themselves.
If you estimate the distribution of all test takers for a given age category, then it is entirely possible to show that someone is 6.5 sigma from the mean, without actually sampling 1/10 billion people to be sure that all of them are less intelligent. That, after all, is the point of statistics.
First, note that most of the test norming has been done on samples of a few thousand people. The major IQ tests have been normed rather rigorously a number of times, but certainly not on samples of more than tens of thousands of people. Extrapolating an that outlier is somewhere around 6.5 sigma from the mean with any accuracy from such population samples is pretty difficult to begin with.
But beyond that, one has to ask whether it is even possible to measure "general intelligence" with a level of accuracy that we could pinpoint, literally, the smartest person in the world. I don't think we can. Maybe we could come up with a definition of "general intelligence" that accurately puts someone in the top 1% or top 0.1%, but beyond that, we're probably not able to differentiate with any precision.
So, the correct scientific and statistical conclusion to draw from an outlying score that appears to be 6.5 sigma from the mean in this case is -- "he's pretty far above average." Whether he's actually 4 sigma or 7 sigma is not really something any test can specify with any precision... and stating such a number is in fact meaningless. (The norms for modern IQ tests generally have a ceiling of 160 for that reason -- that's 4 sigma above norm. Beyond that, the tests make no claim, and that's probably appropriate given the ambiguity about what exactly we're measuring.)
A lot of interesting info until you get to:
Simply put, that's impossible, since there aren't that many people total on the planet. which is a isn't even wrong.
What's wrong with that statement? It IS impossible to norm a test that discriminates at a 1 in 10 billion level when maybe only a few hundred million people (maybe?) have taken IQ tests, and likely only a few million have actually been used in constructing the norming scale.
If you thought I was saying that there can't be a person who is actually at a level of 1 in 10 billion intelligence, well, that's not what I was saying. (Certainly that's possible, even if we don't have that many people on the planet.) Instead, I was saying it's impossible to create a test that would discriminate at that level given the data available... and even if we could, what exactly is it measuring? Unless the test is designed by someone near that intelligence level (unlikely), the results would be meaningless... and frankly would likely simply be confirmation bias (selecting for whatever the test designer's pet view of "intelligence" is).
Claiming to have a high IQ and not having achieved more than average is saying you had a headstart on everyone else and you wasted it.
I don't know -- I think you have a point that no one should go around bragging about a high IQ. But I don't agree with the rest.
After all, studies of people with high IQs have always shown weird results -- from the very first study groups in the early 20th century where they tracked a bunch of kids with high IQs, you find a huge number of them end up being mail carriers and accountants and such. They're more prone to mental illness, particularly depression. And salary studies usually show that the highest average salary occurs for people somewhere in the 125-130 range (if I remember correctly). Having an IQ over 130 or so usually demonstrates that you're actually less likely to "succeed" than those who are merely a little above average, if you consider "success" in terms of maximum monetary gain. It's true that Nobel Prize winners and such often tend to have higher IQs, but except for these few intellectual achievements (which often also involve high creativity, something poorly measured by IQ tests), high IQ people simply don't tend to end up with "high achievement" according to most social standards.
I don't know what exactly it is that IQ is supposed to measure, but propensity for success and high achievement isn't really one of them once you get into the supposed "genius" range.
This was actually something I myself had to discover too. I scored rather high on an IQ test when I was in primary school too, and I was selected out for special classes and such. For years, I struggled with this idea that I was supposed to "save the world" or something -- my high school teachers told me they thought I was supposed to go on to "cure cancer" or something.
And so until I got to graduate school, I was basically following other people's ideas about how I should live a "successful" life... and it just made me depressed and unhappy. Then, at some point I started actually reading studies about what high IQ really means, and I discovered that I was not alone at all -- many if not most people with high scores end up finding satisfaction in their lives doing things society doesn't consider the highest "success."
And that was an incredible revelation for me -- I then felt free to go do something I actually thought I might enjoy more, rather than worrying about proving how my IQ made me "successful." Sure, I have degrees from top universities, but I ended up in a field that is NOT know for making the "big bucks." On the other hand, I have a lot of time to pursue my random interests, and I'm much happier (and feel more "stable" in my life).
In sum: (1) no one should go around bragging about IQ, because it doesn't often correlate with what people think it does, and (2) living your life in a way that makes you happy is not "wasting it," no matter what your intelligence level. Just because you have some sort of greater abstract reasoning skills or whatever than the general population doesn't mean that you have to cure cancer or found a billion-dollar company or something to think your life is a "success." (Frankly, I also know of a number of very smart people who developed serious mental illness or committed suicide too, and I'd say it's probably better to do something that makes you happy and alive, rather than chasing somebody else's version of "success.")
Sure, achieving greatness is wonderful. But there are many forms of greatness. I can bake a pretty good croissant, for example, which requires a lot of time and effort, and that frankly makes me feel more satisfied than a lot of other "greater achievements" (by society's standards) that I've made in my life. But hey -- you should do what you want to, and if aspiring to greater things helps you, by all means, I wish you success in whatever form you think is best.
197 would imply there is someone out there with an IQ of 3 as well.
Some of the tests on young children with age correction can yield this type of figure. I wouldn't be surprised if he was measured with an IQ of 197 at an age of 5 or 6, but it would result in a much lower measurement as an adult.
Just to be clear, IQ originally stood for intelligence quotient, which was originally defined as mental age / physical age * 100. E.g., if you took a test at age 5 and scored as well as the average 10-year-old, you'd have an IQ of mental age 10 divided by physical age 5 (*100) = 200.
This sort of scoring is how Marilyn vos Savant, for example, managed to get an IQ score of 228 or something, which used to be listed as the highest IQ ever by the Guinness Book of World Records.
However, that kind of test scoring has been completely deprecated since at least the early 1950s, and even Marilyn basically was taking an outdated form by the time she was scored almost 60 years ago. Guinness recognized this, and so retired the record category.
Nowadays, IQ scales usually are based on standard deviations, where a score of +/- 15 from 100 constitutes one standard deviation away from the average intelligence for that age. And I'm assuming this Scorpion guy is not 70 years old or something, so there's no reason he should have taken an IQ test using the old scoring method.
So, if someone has a claimed IQ of 197, that would be about 6.467 standard deviations above the norm. That comes out to somewhere around 1 in 10 BILLION people. And keep in mind that age scaling requires comparison only with kids at the age of the test taker, so this guy's claim would require that the test had been normed against a large enough population of whatever age he took the test was to differentiate at a 1 in 10 billion level.
Simply put, that's impossible, since there aren't that many people total on the planet.
So -- the only explanation is that someone gave him an older form of the IQ test, which computed scores using that outdated formula of mental age / physical age. And that IQ formula was deprecated because it was shown to give stupid meaningless results. Which leads one to ask -- for a guy who claims to be so smart, why would he insist on citing a statistic that is meaningless and shows the person who administered the test was probably incompetent (since he/she used an outdated formula that doesn't agree with modern norms)?
It's totally cool to say something about Nigerian runners having long legs, or say "white men can't jump, hahaha" or "Asians are short" but if you say some people are genetically gifted in intelligence sets off everyone's alarm bells.
Actually, I would say it's pretty much not cool to say things that are intentionally stereotyping people, even when it comes to physical ability. There are short Nigerians, tall Asians, and white men who can jump in the world. And our preconceptions about "athletic prowess" often also harbor weird stereotypes that we may not even be conscious of.
My favorite example of this is the stars of professional basketball in the 1920s through early 1940s. You know who they were? Jews. Often specifically short Jewish men. At that time, basketball hadn't yet been dominated by only tall guys, "dunking" was not yet common, and it was a much more aggressive game than it often is today. Short ("well-balanced" and "fast"), "crafty, scheming" players with high intelligence were considered to have superior skills for the game -- which fit perfectly into Jewish stereotypes. (See here or do an internet search if you don't believe me.)
You may think this is an abberration, but such arguments have been made throughout history, for athletics as well as for intelligence.
I'm not saying that one can't find measurable differences between races -- certainly, on average, one can. The question is always what such differences mean. So, when it comes to intelligence, do IQ tests really show differences of "innate intelligence" between races, or have we just not properly controlled for educational quality or home environment or whatever? And what exactly about "intelligence" are we measuring -- there's a lot of disagreement even among educational psychologists who study this stuff about what exactly "general intelligence" is. Just because one group of people scores a few points above another group, does that mean the second group is actually "stupider" or does it mean that they just don't have certain skills the test tested, while they have other cognitive abilities that could allow them to perform just as well in real-world conditions if they were given the chance?
Again, I'm not at all saying such differences don't exist. I'm saying it's really hard to measure them accurately, and even when we do, we need to really identify what precisely we are measuring and what valid conclusions we can draw from that data.
Otherwise, we might just be doing something like assuming that Jews are the best at basketball without ever conceiving of the tall guy who can dunk the ball and do other things on the court that would completely change the game.
What I'm wondering is what implications this will have for standardized tests. Most of the tests assume that everyone is on the same playing field
I don't think that's true at all, and it probably never has been.
Early SATs were deliberately modeled after early IQ tests, which were designed to test "innate" intelligence and abilities. Nobody in the early days of testing ever worried about a "level playing field" -- they just wanted to determine the students most qualified for college or whatever. (Of course, about a century ago when this testing started, the only people likely to have that innate ability developed well were mostly richer kids who went to better schools, so the "playing field" was certainly much less fair.)
And by the way, many standardized tests are becoming increasingly skewed again in terms of a level playing field. Let's set aside the off-label use of "performance enhancing drugs" by some kids on intelligence tests. Even without that, you also have parents abusing the system to get their kids diagnosed with various obscure cognitive disorders (often those with flexible diagnostic criteria) to get extra time on standardized tests. Seriously -- some years ago I taught high school for a few years. At a lower-middle class high school, only about 1% of my students had testing accommodations for learning disabilities, but at a fancy private (Ivy League feeder) school I taught at a few years later, about 15-20% of my students had testing accommodations. I've taught at the university level since then, and I've noticed similar trends... and they are increasing.
So, no -- "standardized" tests have never really been a level playing field.
I'm willing to bet that the second they come up with a test for these genes, there will be lawsuits by school districts who lose funding over standardized tests
I really, truly hope this doesn't come to pass. Because if it does, it would require school districts to be gathering such information about students in the first place. And teachers already have to be vigilant about not being biased toward students or making assumptions about their abilities based on a few tests at the beginning of the year or what they've heard from other teachers or whatever.
Imagine a world where your teachers know your supposed genetically determined "aptitude" ahead of time? That's freakin' scary. Suddenly otherwise well-performing kids with "bad genes" will be shuffled out into special classrooms, because they are assumed that they can't perform at the same level as other kids. And let's not even contemplate how much pressure this puts on the test designs used to norm these "aptitude" studies which are used to determine the genes. There's a lot of disagreement about the nature of intelligence among experts who study this stuff -- imagine a world where we only have a narrow definition designed around the standardized tests used to pass out of school... and kids are sorted according to their genetic propensities for passing such tests.
The implications for creativity of thought and natural development of children with different talents are just too horrifying to contemplate.
1) What is meant with "skill at reading"? [snip] If they mean just the ability to convert symbols into sounds I'd assume the plateau for that is pretty low and most people reach it pretty early on in their lives.
Well, given that the study focuses on 12-year-olds, I'd say that many of them are probably still in the process of achieving their final reading skills.
If they mean interpretative ability, how do they quantify that, and how do they distinguish between correct and incorrect interpretations beyond a certain point?
Umm, the same way most standardized tests do in "reading comprehension" exercises? Your post has a couple ambiguous examples, which would be poor test questions. But there are plenty of ways to generate more complex reading tasks that involve understanding the structure of a complicated argument, etc. A lot of it also is in understanding the connotations of words and things that are not always conveyed literally but clearly implied to fluent native readers.
That's why analogies used to play a big role on the SAT, because they often require you to know more than just definitions for words -- you also need to know a lot about how they are used and the way they might connect to other concepts. But -- surprise -- analogies over the years have come under suspicion, essentially because they tend to test "innate ability" (e.g., IQ) more than other verbal tasks, and hence still show up on IQ tests. But SAT designers have been under pressure from schools to make the tests "more relevant" to stuff that is actually taught in high school, so analogies were removed, and more generic reading comprehension has taken their place. (From a more cyncial perspective, I would note that it's harder for the test-prep services to coach aspiring test-takers on tasks like analogies, since again it's harder to do than just memorizing definitions. Most good readers acquire the detailed knowledge of word nuances needed from actually, well... reading over many years.) But that doesn't mean that analogies can't show anything about comprehension or detailed understanding of the meanings of words.
Certainly you can reach a point when testing adults where it becomes difficult to design tests of reading comprehension and verbal ability that still have clear answers and don't suffer from the interpretive problems you mention. And that's why there is a lot of criticism of "high IQ" tests and whether they can really differentiate people once you get more than a few standard deviations above normal.
But for 12-year-olds, as in this study? There's plenty of ways to create unambiguous reading/verbal questions that show how their abilities are still developing.
More and more I'm getting a feeling that science has been down this road before. That our understanding of subatomic particles and the distant edges of the Universe is similar to the pre-Copernican use of epicycles to understand astronomy.
It's certainly possible that we're merely stumbling about to find a better theory, but I think the epicycles analogy is generally a bad one -- it was good science back in the day, based on what was "known" about the universe at the time. Now we know better, because we've figured out that some of the fundamental assumptions of the old model were wrong, but good scientists of the day had no way of knowing some of those things were wrong (and in fact had some good evidence that those things were right -- like a bunch of very logical arguments why the earth is not in motion and how various effects that should happen if it were in motion were not observed... most of those problems were only explained in the 1800s, centuries after Copernicus). (For detailed background on myths about epicycles, see here for example.)
Also, please note that Copernicus and Galileo both still required epicycles, since they presumed circular orbits. (Galileo rejected Kepler's correct empirical observations of elliptical orbits, since they weren't as "perfect" as the circle... which shows how far even great "scientists" of the day were invested in the old ideas.)
If anything, I think a better analogy for the kind of situation you're assuming in modern science would be with Galileo's theory of the tides, which he created even though it didn't make much sense (and didn't accord with empirical evidence -- it required only one tide per day at noon), but it allowed him to justify his heliocentric hypothesis. In effect, it was a whole new idea tacked onto the old models without empirical support and only needed to fill in the gap to "prove" that the earth was in motion (since other things needed the prove that hadn't yet been observed, and most wouldn't be until centuries afterward). In a similar way, trying to "prove" our newer Big Bang models and particle physics models has led to the introduction of dark energy, strings, etc.
Thus, dark matter/energy and string theory are similar new ideas built up out of the old ones to "fill in the gaps" as it were, and we don't yet know whether they will pan out. Epicycles, on the other hand, were a very old and extremely well-accepted idea (which both Galileo and Copernicus used in their theories).
Finally, I would also note that gravity too was a sort of "fudge factor" introduced by Newton without evidence: where does this "unseen force" come from? how is it transmitted? We still don't thoroughly agree on those answers, centuries later. But it made the math work out for Newton's idea of universal gravitation, just as some of our modern theories do today.
So the question is -- are these new ideas more like Newton's spooky occult theory of an unseen force acting at a distance, or more like Galileo's attempt to make up a theory of the tides to hold his model of the universe together? Only time will tell.
It is not altogether impossible that our models of gravity are flawed at supermassive scales at relativistic velocities, that there's corrections needed that would produce the same effect as currently theorized for this new kind of matter and energy.
Sure it is. And very smart physicists have considered this option, among many others.
Remembering that one should never multiply entities unnecessarily, one correction factor seems preferable to two exotic phenomena that cannot be directly observed by definition.
Of course it does. Something to remember is that "dark matter" and "dark energy" are perhaps bad names. They don't necessarily imply that there is something like "normal matter" or "normal energy" out there but is just "dark" (whatever that means). They're just convenient terms to refer to the mathematical "fudge factors" that need to be invoked to explain how things in the universe are actually moving. Whether they are actually caused by a dark form of "matter" or "energy" or whatever is up for debate.
But lots of smart people are working on this exact problem, and no one yet has come up with some sort of simple "correction factor" that would work for all of this.
But only if such a correction factor is theoretically justified AND explains all related observations AND is actually simpler.
By those criteria, we should have rejected Einstein's Theory of Relativity, since it fails 2 of the 3. Einstein's theory was NOT "theoretically justified" within Newtonian mechanics (and actually suggested a number of truly weird violations of Newton), and I certainly don't think you can claim 4-dimensional tensors of space-time are "simpler" than Newton's static and uniform space.
Truly great breakthroughs in science often are not "theoretically justified" within the old models of knowledge, particularly when they involve complex new mathematical models of something -- they just fit the data better. And while the good ones often are more "elegant," they are rarely "actually simpler."
We just have no clue as to what it is or how it works.
I'd like to point out that gravity is in the same category. Also time.
This.
When Newton was first discussing his theories of universal gravitation, the scientific community was rather skeptical, because it invoked spooky "unseen forces" acting at a distance (i.e., gravity). The previous Aristotelean model of physics asserted that "normal" terrestrial matter came to a nature place of rest (earth sinks down to equilibrium, air rises to equilibrium, etc.), since Newton's first law hadn't been realized yet. Instead, real-world friction, etc. tends to bring things to a state of rest, which accords with everyday experience. All motion had to be explained by a "cause," something that propelled it into motion, and ultimately the matter would stop moving once it came to its natural state of rest.
The motion of the planets could not be explained using this physics, so the celestial bodies were assumed to be of a different type of aetherial matter (or something) which was set in motion at the beginning of time or something.
That was the proper scientific theory of the day, and it accorded with empirical observation and common sense -- terrestrial bodies stopped, celestial ones seemed to go in continuous motion forever.
But Newton came along and equated the two -- and he developed a mathematics that described the motion. Unfortunately it depended on a "spooky" occult idea of forces acting at a distance. (Newton, of course, was really into the occult, alchemy, etc.)
So, scientists of the day were skeptical. Newton eventually even published an appendix with future editions of the Principia explaining that his model didn't depend on "real" unseen forces acting -- instead, he basically came up with the modern scientific ideal that says: if the math works and predicts the phenomena, that's enough for science. A scientific model need not be concerned with philosophical questions or ultimate causes of phenomena as long as it can actually make good predictions.
THAT, probably more than anything else, was the foundation of modern "science" laid down by Newton during the Scientific Revolution. People had been doing experiments and empirical investigations for millennia, but they always had to worry about ultimate "causes," which inevitably depended on somebody's pet theory of reality. After Newton, though, what matters is that the math works. Maybe the dark matter/dark energy model is hinting at some deeper aspect of reality and a more elegant theory that we will come up with many years from now... or not. But regardless, these ideas are exactly like Newton's "gravity" -- something which we observe, something we can have an accurate mathematical model of, but also something "spooky" that we don't understand completely yet.
That's what the modern scientific process is all about.
Depends on whose stats you look at. If you look at "metropolitan area," recent stats I see come up with around rank 8 (similar size to Houston and Washington DC). If you look at urban "agglomeration" (which actually measures connected urban land, rather than "metro areas" which are usually defined by surrounding municipal structures and may include more rural or disconnected surrounding areas), then Toronto may be more like 5th. But no matter how you calculate, it's one of the most populous cities/areas in North America -- it's not in any sense "small" as GGP termed it.
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(By the way, regarding my last comment about a sudden conversion -- I know that's impossible because of all the machinery, equipment, etc. in many fields that uses traditional units. But if it were possible to just move everything over one day, I don't think it would take people that long to obtain a new sense of the new units, at least not for the things they tend to encounter often in their daily lives.)
Pro-metric folks talk about the ease of metric conversions, but that's mostly useless.
I absolutely agree with you for everyday use. Scientists and engineers obviously have a lot more unit conversion to do at times, but for everyday folks, it doesn't really matter if there are 5280, 5000, or 5317 feet in a mile -- short distances are expressed in feet or yards, long distances are miles. Everyday people rarely need to convert the two. And it doesn't matter if there are 128 ounces in a gallon or 130 or 117. You buy certain things in ounces, and other things in quarts or pints, and still other things in gallons (or half gallons). Conversion is rarely required.
That's not to say easy conversions are useless -- just for everyday use they don't tend to happen very often.
But, even more important, the most relevant aspect of using either any system of measurement, be it metric or English, is gut feelings. That's what used daily over and over again. I have a gut feel for how big 100 miles, 1 gallon, 160 lbs, etc. are, but I have to do the conversion from metric quantities to understand metric units. I can do the conversions, and I understand the math, but it's the intuitive understanding of the quantities that is useful. It is this one quality of measurement systems that allows the English system to continue to flourish despite its mathematical limitations.
I understand your point here, but I also disagree with how much of a challenge it would be to learn new intuitions. You already likely know how big a liter as well as how big a gallon is, assuming you've ever bought a large bottle of soda. Also, a liter is about a quart, so that's easy enough. Similarly, yards are about the same as meters, and pounds are roughly half a kilo. Go to the deli and ask for half a kilo of ham instead of a pound, and you'll get just a little more than you usually would. Easy enough. For smaller amounts, order in increments of 100 grams, which are a little smaller than 1/4 lb. each. Again, easy enough.
All it really takes to obtain that "gut feeling" you're talking about is a few anchor points. Take temperature, for example, which is a measurement people often encounter on a daily basis. In Celsius, 0 is freezing, 10 is cool, 20 is (cool) room temperature, 30 is hot, and 37 is body temperature (quite hot). Interpolate the rest from that. Easy enough. Read the daily temperature for a month and interpolate it into those anchor points, calibrate it to your own personal sense, and it will soon be easy. (Also, our human ability to sense actual temperature is so dependent on things like humidity, activity level, wind, etc., that being more precise than those few anchor points is rarely useful.)
Same thing would happen quite quickly with other stuff. Since the pound, yard, and quart have pretty good rough equivalents in metric, you can get most of the way there just with those. The rest is filling in the gaps -- a foot is about 1/3 of a meter, roughly 30 cm. So 10 cm is roughly 1/3 of a foot, or roughly 4 inches. 20 cm is roughly 8 inches. Etc. Again, you do this with maybe a few dozen measurements, and you get the rough sense down.
I agree that for people who are really good at just looking at something and saying "That's 8 inches by 4.5 inches," they're going to need to do more to calibrate that sense. But the general "gut feeling" for approximate size is pretty easy to acquire, if you just do it for a little while. I think if the U.S. just decided to suddenly switch all systems one day, there would be a lot of complaining and yelling and protests for about six months or a year, and then nobody would really notice anymore, because we all would quickly adjust.
By the way, after I wrote my comment, I did some searching. Until now, I was not aware of how "customized textbook editions" for specific universities has apparently become a thing in some places.
Needless to say, I'm appalled by this if it involves professors getting a kickback for including a chapter of their own in the "customized" edition. In my field, to my knowledge the standard intro textbooks have never come in any sort of "customized edition," so I didn't even know this was possible.
I could possibly see the justification for customizing a book to suit a particular syllabus, and as I could see how that might be useful. But if my department were getting a kickback for that, I'd feel very weird about that. And I probably wouldn't do that myself, because I have actually been rather sensitive to book prices in my classes and wouldn't want to prevent students from buying a used copy or selling theirs if they wanted to. (I'd rather prepare my own supplements anyway.)
Also, I do know there was a federal law passed a few years ago that required disclosure of textbook requirements from colleges ahead of time, so students would know what is actually required and there could be better monitoring of textbook abuses... I just had no idea things were this crazy.
Not to mention the nasty habit of "revisions" happening all the time. I do remember one $200-ish AP Chem book for HS we got online for quite a bit less... had the same material, but the pg numbers were off and the exercises were a bit different... obvious changes to make the book "obsolete". I wonder how much is the Author and how much is the Publisher making these minor tweaks to create artificial obsolescence?
I know some people who have written standard textbooks in a couple different fields. The general impression I've gotten from them is that they are usually NOT in favor of creating new editions all the time. Generally there are some kinks to work out in the first edition, but definitely by the second or third edition, things should be pretty set. The authors I've talked to have mentioned they are often under pressure from publishers to make changes to justify new editions. And, in fact, that's often why you see books start to accumulate new authors after a few editions -- it used to be "Intro to X by A" and now it's "Intro to X by A and B, 4th ed." and then a few years later it's "Intro to X by A, B, and C, 9th ed." Sometimes the old authors just think the book is fine, and they finally say no to doing anything new, so the book gets handed off to someone else to "revise" and bring in some new ideas or exercises.
People often overestimate the profits that professors earn from textbooks. Sure, those who write the really standard books in very popular fields (like the standard intro calc or bio textbooks or whatever) are probably making a lot of royalties. But once you get beyond those intro classes or get into more obscure fields, the number of copies sold may not be that big, particularly if there is competition among textbooks (which there usually is, even in smaller fields).
I'm not saying they aren't making money. But I've heard from multiple textbook authors (smaller markets) that they aren't making enough money to justify doing new editions and revisions as much as publishers would like them to. And keep in mind that most academics see their jobs as primarily research, not textbook writing, so they'd rather be doing something for real in their field rather than coming up with another set of stupid exercise questions for an intro book.
So, I'd say publishers are definitely in favor of creating artificial obsolescence. Authors? Maybe sometimes, but not as often as you might think.
Another shady practice is faculty writing their own textbook and then requiring it be used when they teach related courses, when it appears there's a well-accepted standard text in use by 90% of other schools where the particular subject is taught.
While in some cases this may actually be "shady," if a professor writes a book that actually gets published by reputable publisher, then you may be getting something that's more relevant and tailored to the class you're actually taking, rather than some generic textbook. (Only once, in grad school, did I ever purchase a book authored by the professor that I thought was completely useless -- we only used it for about a week of the class. But that also was not a textbook -- it was a monograph, and I now know the royalty rates for books like that, which are pretty darn minimal for academic books. This professor wasn't exactly making a lot of money off of having the 8 students in her grad seminar buy the book.)
As an undergrad, I don't remember so much of that, though. (My profs who actually wrote textbooks were mostly respected leaders in their fields and thus were actually the primary authors of the "well-accepted standard text," but that has to do with where I went to undergrad.) I do remember quite a few times when a professor would require a "coursepack" that was printed at the campus bookstore or some nearby printshop which was often a small fraction of the price that an actual textbook would be. Sometimes it was a collection of readings, and sometimes it was just the professor's notes. But I was generally glad to shell out less money for that than for an actual textbook.
I would also note that I've taught at the university level, and I've been involved in preparing coursepacks and have used them myself. In that case, I can assure you that even though you're getting a printout of my notes and handouts, etc., and maybe some exercises I've designed, I'm making NO profit whatsoever from it. The cost of the coursepack is almost always determined by the printing and binding cost, along with any rights secured by the printshop to reproduce selected readings, articles, etc. Maybe some professors get some kickback from it, but I certainly don't, and I'm not sure I could even request that at the printshop without doing something sketchy.
Perhaps you had some professors who were actually making extra money by publishing through a "vanity press" and then forcing you to buy their book -- if so, I do think that's a bit shady.
Newssites with comment section are somewhere in the middle, and no, blogs are not sufficient replacement, because people only read blogs they agree with.
Meh. These days, many people often tend to only read "newssites" that they agree with.
The boundary between newssite and blog, particularly for sites that allow a lot of bloggers, has become difficult to maintain. You get a lot of sites that tend to just accumulate stories written by people who all slant in similar directions. And even for traditional "newssites," the people who read the Wall Street Journal may hate the New York Times and may detest the New Yorker. Or the reverse. Or whatever.
Not that this is anything new, mind you. Most newspapers for as long as there have been newspapers have generally propagated particular points of view. We have this weird view that there used to be "objective, balanced reporting" that maybe existed for a few decades in the mid-20th century, but that's really not the norm.
So, in the end I agree with you that we need comments sections even on newssites -- at least it might have a chance of getting people out of their "filter bubble" and seeing some opposing viewpoints.
There have been situations in humanity's past when this would have been true of social/governmental organizations too. If the chief needs everyone to mobilize in order to avert disaster and keep the entire tribe from being wiped out, then you don't want a lot of debate. The whole setup worked pretty well for a while.
The Romans had a great way of balancing this. Usually they'd have a few different popular assemblies which would govern (with various checks and balances), but in times of crisis, they'd elect a dictator, who essentially had limited power.
But the dictator was expected to reliquish the power and resign at the end of the crisis. This myth of the ancient good citizen (who, stereotypically, would return to his farm again after the crisis was averted) was instilled in young Romans as an essential civic duty and the nature of power, which was only to be held for limited times (originally a strict criterion for all high Roman political offices).
Eventually the system broke down, but it worked well for at least four centuries or so, and it still allowed a kind of popular government to function without unnecessary accumulation of power in high offices, except in times of crisis.
Many things have worked better, as long as the guy on top was capable and uncorrupted. The problem is that eventually there's a successor who can't handle it, and then it all falls down.
While this is true, it's also something that can happen easily -- and historically HAS happened many times -- in democracies and other forms of popular government.
The problem with the masses is that they can always be manipulated and motivated to give up their power to govern themselves, particularly under dire conditions (or conditions that are *claimed* to be dire). Fear is usually the main thing here.
The ancient Romans had a very good system for dealing with this: the temporary dictator. Usually, they had a semi-representative republic, but in times of crisis, they would elect a dictator who basically had absolute power until the end of the crisis. There was a whole ancient myth developed around how a good dictator was always ready to reliquish his duties at return to his farm (like Cincinnatus).
For 400 years or so, the combination of an educated governing senate and occasion dictators who knew their civic duty was to resign was enough to keep things in check. But eventually the system began to break down, the checks and balances were observed less often, the traditional high offices which were only to be held once or non-consecutively were held by the same person for years on end, and eventually the Caesars kept a permanent dictatorship, which they then renamed as an office of emperor.
One could bring up many other examples from history where the "mob" basically elects a dictator into office -- they voluntarily turn over their power to crazy people who promise them things.
So democracy isn't immune to this problem either.
The fact that the public library is an actual place is important.
Another facet of having an actual place is that humans orient themselves around physical spaces in ways that just aren't the same electronically.
One of the most important ones to me is the bookshelf, particularly for non-fiction books (which is mostly what I read aside from classic lit). No matter how good Amazon's "products like this one" or "products other people have purchased" lists get, they still generally don't offer the same kind of discovery sensation of browsing on shelves for me. Amazon is very good at showing me books that other people like me already know about. It is TERRIBLE at showing me more obscure or older related items that people like me don't tend to know about already, but which might be just as good resources (or even better). Even a relatively small public library will often have some intriguing random discoveries for me when I'm browsing in an area devoted to a particular subject. And a large university is often a revelation.
Physical bookshelves make this sort of browsing possible quickly and efficiently. They also register an amazing sense of "location" that just doesn't happen on the web. I used to visit a small local public library every couple weeks when I was a kid and check out books (mostly from the science section). After a few years, I had exhausted many of the good books in that section, so I didn't go to that library much anymore. But I remember returning there maybe a decade later, and when I went back to those shelves, I saw many of my old favorite books, still in their same locations on the shelves, and I *remembered* where they were... it was actually a somewhat moving experience. Now, of course, I have plenty of my own bookshelves in my home, and I have a similar sense of location -- even though I have thousands of books, I know basically where everything is. Whereas if I forgot to rename a PDF file I downloaded and/or forgot to put it in the right folder on my computer, I could have a lot of difficulty finding it.
It's also like the physical sense one often has of reading a physical book, which makes it very different from reading an ebook where the text can reflow on demand or when a font is resized or whatever. With a physical book, I can often find something I read again by thumbing through and thinking, "Yeah, it was about 1/3 of the way through the book, and I remember it was in the upper right corner of a page somewhere" and I can usually find it within a minute or two. Obviously a full-text search on an Ebook can often be just as efficient, but sometimes I don't remember enough unique words from the passage or sometimes it was a diagram or something... and I can find that instantly in a physical book.
Spatial organization is really important to memory. There was a well-known memory technique used in medieval times to memorize long lists of things and even entire books, which often involved imagining a very large building with many floors, and on each floor were many rooms, and in each room were many pieces of furniture with many drawers (or other containers), and within each drawer was some imaginary physical item meant to be a mnemonic for the things to be recalled. By "constructing" this imaginary building in your mind and repeatedly "revisiting" it as you memorized something, it would cement the text in your mind.
Nowadays this art of memory has been almost forgotten, but in a mostly oral culture where books were rare and manuscripts often could only be consulted in one place but copying was too expensive to take a copy with you, it was necessary for scholars to memorize large amounts of texts when doing research. There was a whole "craft of memory," and it mostly revolved around spatial metaphors.
Our modern physical libraries and books are similarly navigable when they exist in real space in ways that electronic materials often aren't. That doesn't mean that we can't make the electronic materials better and often superior in some ways, but we lose something when the physical orientation around books goes away.
I doubt there's some grand conspiracy to prevent men from becoming kindergarten teachers
Oh there most certainly is, only it's not women or feminists behind it but other men.
To be fair, I think it also has to do with mothers' fears as well.
It's the patriarchal stereotype that men cannot be nurturing which means any man who shows affection to children gets branded a paedophile - and that means getting hired in preschool or kindergarten teaching jobs become virtually impossible as too many parents will harbour such unfounded suspicions.
THIS. I never really thought much of this until I became a dad and had to take my small child to the park or something. Where I lived before, it was a community where stay-at-home dads and such were fairly common, so I don't think it was too out of place. But I moved to somewhere where it was almost always women who took their kids out (whether moms or nannies or whatever), not the dads.
It's really disconcerting to have to worry about what other people around you might be thinking. When I would walk my son to the park or to other nearby stores or whatever, I have occasionally been stopped by passers-by, asking if everything is "okay." One day when I was walking down the street with my 3-year-old kid, he got a little tired walking, so I picked him up for a while and starting walking a little faster and bouncing up and down a bit (which he loves). Soon, a car pulled over and an obviously concerned woman asked, "Are you okay? Do you need any help?" It wasn't clear whether the question was directed toward me or toward my son. (Obviously a man walking down a sidewalk quickly with a kid who was bouncing around a bit must be abducting him?)
After a few things like this, I started poking around on the internet and reading similar stories. I also happened upon discussions where various people were voicing concern about the very idea of a male teacher at an elementary school or at a daycare center. (Here's a representative discussion.)
Yes, there are pedophiles out there, but the media has mischaracterized things so much that people have completely irrational fears. Most of the "pedophiles" we hear about in statistics are adults who have abused teenagers, not little kids. If we want to look for abuse, we should be more afraid of the high-school coach or the high-school Spanish teacher with our daughters (or sons) than a guy in a daycare center. Actual pedophiles are quite rare, and even among those rare people, women have also been known to abuse young children too.
But nevertheless many people -- both men and women -- have this strong fear of men around small children, which didn't exist at the same level before the child abduction scares of the 1970s and 1980s. So, just at the time that women were seriously starting to take on different roles in the workforce, we had a social perception shift that took the idea of a male caregiver for young children from the "unusual" category to the "scary" category.
Frankly, I think it's sad. I personally couldn't imagine myself taking care of a bunch of young kids, but there are lots of guys out there who seem to be interested -- and we shouldn't just assume because they can care for kids that they are likely to be pedophiles.
Why is it so hard to believe that men and women might be interested in different careers or have different interests?
It's NOT hard to believe. It's probably true in some cases.
Do you think it's because of artificially stamped "gender roles" that society imposes on men and women?
In some cases, yes.
Doesn't it make sense that our societal mores and roles simply tend to align with gender-specific traits and talents evolved over the last hundred thousand years or so? Those traits, of course, are largely driven by biological realities, so unless men start giving birth, it makes no sense for them to compete with women for the role of nurturer and caregiver.
The problem with these sorts of argument is that they are the exact same arguments that were used for centuries (if not millennia) to justify not letting women do whatever random crap society thought they shouldn't be doing at that time. "Women are caregivers, who raise children and cook food barefoot in the kitchen" has been the rationale in the past for not allowing women to vote, not providing them with education, etc., etc., etc. In more extreme societies, it has at times led to much more harsh oppression.
Look -- obviously most Western societies have made progress in leaps and bounds over the past century or so in providing opportunities for womeI'm willing to go as far as saying that women are probably "biologically" more programmed to care for infants and very small children, because for most of history those kids needed to be breast-fed, and men obviously are not physically built to provide that. But beyond that, once kids are weaned, it's really hard to say there must be a physical, biological justification for why men can't be caregivers or might not be in certain social situations. n and not excluding them for random reasons.
But the problem is it's REALLY HARD to know exactly what may be "evolved gender-specific traits" and what may be "artificially stamped gender roles that society imposes." Do I personally think it's likely that our society change to a point where men are 90% of the caregivers for small children, and women do most of the work outside the home? No -- obviously not.
But it is hard to say what percentage of men would choose to teach elementary school or work in daycare or even roles like nursing or whatever if there weren't such prejudice against doing these "caregiver" roles. There are in fact organizations who are actively working to get more men involved in these areas, and they recognize that there are huge social roadblocks toward, say, convincing men to try nursing, even though it's a high-demand profession. (Even most of our representations of male nurses on television and movies are derogatory, reinforcing these notions.)
I'm sure some might think of me as a neanderthal for my shocking assertion that men and women have fundamentally different skills, interests, and behaviors because of biology, but it seems like common sense to me.
I don't think you're a "neanderthal" at all, or that your suggestion is "shocking." But lots of "common sense" assertions about the "natural biological" roles that men and women should play have been used in the past to significantly oppress women. Men aren't really built to breast-feed, and thus I think there's pretty solid biological proof that men are not physically as "qualified" to be primary caregivers for infants and very small children. But does that mean they can't or shouldn't give care to older children or to people as nurses or whatever? I don't think that's anywhere near as clear-cut.
So, it's really hard to separate long-standing social convention from biology, and I think we have to be really careful with our assumptions here... because a lot of things that were "obvious" about these things a century or two ago are no longer thought to be true.
Before I respond, let me be clear: I'm NOT arguing that quotas are the best way to fix this. Nor do I necessarily think Apple even has a "problem" here -- as others have noted, hiring pools in tech jobs tend to contain a lot of men, and white people are in fact the majority of people in the U.S.
However...
There is ONE thing that matters, and that is : who does the best work.
While I agree with you to some extent, the reality is that for most of history, that has NOT been the "one thing that matters." Getting a job was not just about whether you could do the best work, but whether you "looked like" other people at the company (maybe same race, sex, whatever), whether you went to the same school that the hiring manager did, whether your dad played golf with somebody who had some "pull" in the company, etc. And because of those latter things, even people who aren't really racist per se end up hiring people who are "more like them," because the college they went to also was skewed more white than most and the golf course is almost all for male white people, etc.
I'm NOT defending quotas here or saying they are a good solution to these problems. But the reality is that "who does the best work" is often only one of many criteria that goes into screening candidates or selecting someone to hire. And even though those mechanisms may not necessarily be overtly unfair regarding race or gender (though they may be unfair in other ways), they end up reproducing a result that is balanced toward maintaining the status quo.
And that also doesn't take into account the reality that there are in fact huge numbers of actual racist and sexist people who still live and work in the U.S. It's not polite to talk about it anymore, but it doesn't mean the attitudes aren't still around -- and just because one guy on the hiring committee doesn't explicitly say, "Let's move on from these three candidates because they're black" doesn't necessarily mean he isn't harboring prejudice.
So, I think it's important to recognize that "who does the best work" is actually NOT the only (or even primary) criterion for who ultimately gets hired in many positions. Some companies may actually succeed in doing that, and I applaud them. But there are often a lot of other subjective factors at play, and some of those may have racist or sexist effects (either intentional or unintentional).
Don't be distracted. He threw in a few kind words about the "sense of enjoyment" and he finishes by saying he didn't hate the conference. Surely that's not enough to make you think the author is objective?
No, that's not enough, though it speaks to his general feelings about the event. If this person simply was an opponent of Wikipedia or hated it, I doubt he would have thrown those bits in.
No -- to me, what made it more than a rant is the fact that there were plenty of proposed solutions and emphasis on ideas to improve things. There were plenty of negative issues brought up, but also discussion of many ways that things could get better.
I'm very interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems.*
As another commenter has already pointed out, you seem only interested in problems from an internal perspective. But things like the declining numbers of active editors come specifically out of issues like I quoted from TFA -- I was an active Wikipedia editor for a while some years ago, and I was driven away due to frustration with the hostility that new editors and specifically people who clearly had expertise were often met with. This is no mystery.
You have a system mostly governed by those who can cite byzantine policies (which are often ambiguous and conflicting anyway), rather than a system that rewards expert knowledge. Don't get me wrong -- I also realize there is a large class of people who edit Wikipedia who are not experts but spend a LOT of time cleaning up language, vandalism, etc., and I greatly admire those people. I've also encountered a number of those people who then took their contributions as license to declare themselves as "owners" of articles or to skew things in their favor as if they were experts on the subject matter.
I understand the problems very well -- and many of the issues in TFA were external manifestations of some of the issues you bring up.
But I've no time for disingenuous rants like this one.
I can understand that you are frustrated by the negative tone, the airing of "dirty laundry," etc. But what precisely makes this "disingenuous"? I got the sense of a guy who likes to be part of Wikipedia and was actually kind of excited to get together with his fellow Wikipedians, but also recognizes a lot of flaws and is willing to talk about potential solutions. I don't claim to be an insider (at all -- I haven't actively edited articles for many years; these days, the most I'll do is drop an anonymous note on a Talk page where I see an article that's really screwed up), but many of the issues are real problems with the public perception of Wikipedia.
It may be a resource that lots of people use frequently, but people don't think about that actively -- it's just another internet resource. They do notice when they see negative press coverage. Particularly if you ever want people to participate more or donate money or whatever, the first thing that needs to be dealt with are some big issues that are perceived by the public because they keep showing up in media articles -- and that's one of the highlights of TFA.
Well, this article he wrote is nonsense. I know nothing else about the guy.
He just takes every controversy and paints it as an unsolvable failure of the iron-fisted Wikimedia Foundation.
Funny -- it seemed to me like one of the most insightful and relatively balanced pieces on Wikipedia I've read in some time. Despite having a number of serious complaints, the author also talks about very positive aspects of the event, as in: "Wikimania was in many ways an inspirational event. There was a palpable sense of enjoyment and celebration in the air..." and later in the final conclusion "As I travelled to Wikimania, I worried that I might hate it. But my worst fears did not materialise." He clearly cares greatly about Wikipedia and wants to make it better.
In fact, some of the potential solutions he mentions address the biggest problems of Wikipedia and could finally be the path to solve them. For example:
Medical content, notably the current initiatives to have medical articles peer-reviewed by academic experts (Cancer Research UK is involved, and is now hosting a Wikipedian in Residence), and provide readers with a permanent and prominent link to that peer-reviewed article version. It's an excellent idea that in the long run could also be transferred to other topic areas. Experts might be more inclined to contribute and review articles if their work is guaranteed some lasting presence. We hope the Foundation will support that effort.
Wikipedia has grown over the years by leaps and bounds with all the wonderful contributions from random people. But for articles that have achieved a relatively good status, Wikipedia is spending more and more time fighting the "barbarians at the gates" who want to vandalize, post misleading information pushing an agenda, and just random editors with little expertise who wikilawyer their way into having the article the way they like, regardless of an expert consensus on the topic. All of this could be solved by keeping articles more "stable" (maybe have a separate proposed edits page, or an "experimental" page that could be edited by anyone and is not the default) and incorporating advice from subject matter experts.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is older than Wikipedia and the best resource on philosophy on the internet, shows how this can be done well. Wikipedia wouldn't have to let go of the option for the general public to edit pop culture articles on their favorite Star Trek or Buffy or Friends episode or whatever -- but for subject matter where there is a peer-reviewed expert academic literature available and experts who are willing to contribute, why not help make that possible?
Similar policies could solve some of the biographical article problems brought up in the summary -- even just holding proposed edits in a queue for experienced and validated editors to allow them would prevent nonsense such as that mentioned in TFA where a reporter has to complain about: "I have spoken publicly about my children having been born as a result of fertility treatment. And my Wikipedia page, which I didn't even know existed, contained a phrase along the lines of 'he wasn't man enough to impregnate his own wife'," a statement that went unchallenged on Wikipedia for nearly a month. The author (and the reporter complaining here) is right -- there's simply no excuse for that sort of nonsense, particularly when Wikipedia has such a poor track record of figuring out ways for real people to correct factual problems in articles about themselves.
If you estimate the distribution of all test takers for a given age category, then it is entirely possible to show that someone is 6.5 sigma from the mean, without actually sampling 1/10 billion people to be sure that all of them are less intelligent. That, after all, is the point of statistics.
First, note that most of the test norming has been done on samples of a few thousand people. The major IQ tests have been normed rather rigorously a number of times, but certainly not on samples of more than tens of thousands of people. Extrapolating an that outlier is somewhere around 6.5 sigma from the mean with any accuracy from such population samples is pretty difficult to begin with.
But beyond that, one has to ask whether it is even possible to measure "general intelligence" with a level of accuracy that we could pinpoint, literally, the smartest person in the world. I don't think we can. Maybe we could come up with a definition of "general intelligence" that accurately puts someone in the top 1% or top 0.1%, but beyond that, we're probably not able to differentiate with any precision.
So, the correct scientific and statistical conclusion to draw from an outlying score that appears to be 6.5 sigma from the mean in this case is -- "he's pretty far above average." Whether he's actually 4 sigma or 7 sigma is not really something any test can specify with any precision... and stating such a number is in fact meaningless. (The norms for modern IQ tests generally have a ceiling of 160 for that reason -- that's 4 sigma above norm. Beyond that, the tests make no claim, and that's probably appropriate given the ambiguity about what exactly we're measuring.)
A lot of interesting info until you get to: Simply put, that's impossible, since there aren't that many people total on the planet. which is a isn't even wrong.
What's wrong with that statement? It IS impossible to norm a test that discriminates at a 1 in 10 billion level when maybe only a few hundred million people (maybe?) have taken IQ tests, and likely only a few million have actually been used in constructing the norming scale.
If you thought I was saying that there can't be a person who is actually at a level of 1 in 10 billion intelligence, well, that's not what I was saying. (Certainly that's possible, even if we don't have that many people on the planet.) Instead, I was saying it's impossible to create a test that would discriminate at that level given the data available... and even if we could, what exactly is it measuring? Unless the test is designed by someone near that intelligence level (unlikely), the results would be meaningless... and frankly would likely simply be confirmation bias (selecting for whatever the test designer's pet view of "intelligence" is).
Claiming to have a high IQ and not having achieved more than average is saying you had a headstart on everyone else and you wasted it.
I don't know -- I think you have a point that no one should go around bragging about a high IQ. But I don't agree with the rest.
After all, studies of people with high IQs have always shown weird results -- from the very first study groups in the early 20th century where they tracked a bunch of kids with high IQs, you find a huge number of them end up being mail carriers and accountants and such. They're more prone to mental illness, particularly depression. And salary studies usually show that the highest average salary occurs for people somewhere in the 125-130 range (if I remember correctly). Having an IQ over 130 or so usually demonstrates that you're actually less likely to "succeed" than those who are merely a little above average, if you consider "success" in terms of maximum monetary gain. It's true that Nobel Prize winners and such often tend to have higher IQs, but except for these few intellectual achievements (which often also involve high creativity, something poorly measured by IQ tests), high IQ people simply don't tend to end up with "high achievement" according to most social standards.
I don't know what exactly it is that IQ is supposed to measure, but propensity for success and high achievement isn't really one of them once you get into the supposed "genius" range.
This was actually something I myself had to discover too. I scored rather high on an IQ test when I was in primary school too, and I was selected out for special classes and such. For years, I struggled with this idea that I was supposed to "save the world" or something -- my high school teachers told me they thought I was supposed to go on to "cure cancer" or something.
And so until I got to graduate school, I was basically following other people's ideas about how I should live a "successful" life... and it just made me depressed and unhappy. Then, at some point I started actually reading studies about what high IQ really means, and I discovered that I was not alone at all -- many if not most people with high scores end up finding satisfaction in their lives doing things society doesn't consider the highest "success."
And that was an incredible revelation for me -- I then felt free to go do something I actually thought I might enjoy more, rather than worrying about proving how my IQ made me "successful." Sure, I have degrees from top universities, but I ended up in a field that is NOT know for making the "big bucks." On the other hand, I have a lot of time to pursue my random interests, and I'm much happier (and feel more "stable" in my life).
In sum: (1) no one should go around bragging about IQ, because it doesn't often correlate with what people think it does, and (2) living your life in a way that makes you happy is not "wasting it," no matter what your intelligence level. Just because you have some sort of greater abstract reasoning skills or whatever than the general population doesn't mean that you have to cure cancer or found a billion-dollar company or something to think your life is a "success." (Frankly, I also know of a number of very smart people who developed serious mental illness or committed suicide too, and I'd say it's probably better to do something that makes you happy and alive, rather than chasing somebody else's version of "success.")
Sure, achieving greatness is wonderful. But there are many forms of greatness. I can bake a pretty good croissant, for example, which requires a lot of time and effort, and that frankly makes me feel more satisfied than a lot of other "greater achievements" (by society's standards) that I've made in my life. But hey -- you should do what you want to, and if aspiring to greater things helps you, by all means, I wish you success in whatever form you think is best.
197 would imply there is someone out there with an IQ of 3 as well.
Some of the tests on young children with age correction can yield this type of figure. I wouldn't be surprised if he was measured with an IQ of 197 at an age of 5 or 6, but it would result in a much lower measurement as an adult.
Just to be clear, IQ originally stood for intelligence quotient, which was originally defined as mental age / physical age * 100. E.g., if you took a test at age 5 and scored as well as the average 10-year-old, you'd have an IQ of mental age 10 divided by physical age 5 (*100) = 200.
This sort of scoring is how Marilyn vos Savant, for example, managed to get an IQ score of 228 or something, which used to be listed as the highest IQ ever by the Guinness Book of World Records. However, that kind of test scoring has been completely deprecated since at least the early 1950s, and even Marilyn basically was taking an outdated form by the time she was scored almost 60 years ago. Guinness recognized this, and so retired the record category.
Nowadays, IQ scales usually are based on standard deviations, where a score of +/- 15 from 100 constitutes one standard deviation away from the average intelligence for that age. And I'm assuming this Scorpion guy is not 70 years old or something, so there's no reason he should have taken an IQ test using the old scoring method.
So, if someone has a claimed IQ of 197, that would be about 6.467 standard deviations above the norm. That comes out to somewhere around 1 in 10 BILLION people. And keep in mind that age scaling requires comparison only with kids at the age of the test taker, so this guy's claim would require that the test had been normed against a large enough population of whatever age he took the test was to differentiate at a 1 in 10 billion level.
Simply put, that's impossible, since there aren't that many people total on the planet.
So -- the only explanation is that someone gave him an older form of the IQ test, which computed scores using that outdated formula of mental age / physical age. And that IQ formula was deprecated because it was shown to give stupid meaningless results. Which leads one to ask -- for a guy who claims to be so smart, why would he insist on citing a statistic that is meaningless and shows the person who administered the test was probably incompetent (since he/she used an outdated formula that doesn't agree with modern norms)?
It's totally cool to say something about Nigerian runners having long legs, or say "white men can't jump, hahaha" or "Asians are short" but if you say some people are genetically gifted in intelligence sets off everyone's alarm bells.
Actually, I would say it's pretty much not cool to say things that are intentionally stereotyping people, even when it comes to physical ability. There are short Nigerians, tall Asians, and white men who can jump in the world. And our preconceptions about "athletic prowess" often also harbor weird stereotypes that we may not even be conscious of. My favorite example of this is the stars of professional basketball in the 1920s through early 1940s. You know who they were? Jews. Often specifically short Jewish men. At that time, basketball hadn't yet been dominated by only tall guys, "dunking" was not yet common, and it was a much more aggressive game than it often is today. Short ("well-balanced" and "fast"), "crafty, scheming" players with high intelligence were considered to have superior skills for the game -- which fit perfectly into Jewish stereotypes. (See here or do an internet search if you don't believe me.)
You may think this is an abberration, but such arguments have been made throughout history, for athletics as well as for intelligence.
I'm not saying that one can't find measurable differences between races -- certainly, on average, one can. The question is always what such differences mean. So, when it comes to intelligence, do IQ tests really show differences of "innate intelligence" between races, or have we just not properly controlled for educational quality or home environment or whatever? And what exactly about "intelligence" are we measuring -- there's a lot of disagreement even among educational psychologists who study this stuff about what exactly "general intelligence" is. Just because one group of people scores a few points above another group, does that mean the second group is actually "stupider" or does it mean that they just don't have certain skills the test tested, while they have other cognitive abilities that could allow them to perform just as well in real-world conditions if they were given the chance?
Again, I'm not at all saying such differences don't exist. I'm saying it's really hard to measure them accurately, and even when we do, we need to really identify what precisely we are measuring and what valid conclusions we can draw from that data.
Otherwise, we might just be doing something like assuming that Jews are the best at basketball without ever conceiving of the tall guy who can dunk the ball and do other things on the court that would completely change the game.
What I'm wondering is what implications this will have for standardized tests. Most of the tests assume that everyone is on the same playing field
I don't think that's true at all, and it probably never has been.
Early SATs were deliberately modeled after early IQ tests, which were designed to test "innate" intelligence and abilities. Nobody in the early days of testing ever worried about a "level playing field" -- they just wanted to determine the students most qualified for college or whatever. (Of course, about a century ago when this testing started, the only people likely to have that innate ability developed well were mostly richer kids who went to better schools, so the "playing field" was certainly much less fair.)
And by the way, many standardized tests are becoming increasingly skewed again in terms of a level playing field. Let's set aside the off-label use of "performance enhancing drugs" by some kids on intelligence tests. Even without that, you also have parents abusing the system to get their kids diagnosed with various obscure cognitive disorders (often those with flexible diagnostic criteria) to get extra time on standardized tests. Seriously -- some years ago I taught high school for a few years. At a lower-middle class high school, only about 1% of my students had testing accommodations for learning disabilities, but at a fancy private (Ivy League feeder) school I taught at a few years later, about 15-20% of my students had testing accommodations. I've taught at the university level since then, and I've noticed similar trends... and they are increasing.
So, no -- "standardized" tests have never really been a level playing field.
I'm willing to bet that the second they come up with a test for these genes, there will be lawsuits by school districts who lose funding over standardized tests
I really, truly hope this doesn't come to pass. Because if it does, it would require school districts to be gathering such information about students in the first place. And teachers already have to be vigilant about not being biased toward students or making assumptions about their abilities based on a few tests at the beginning of the year or what they've heard from other teachers or whatever. Imagine a world where your teachers know your supposed genetically determined "aptitude" ahead of time? That's freakin' scary. Suddenly otherwise well-performing kids with "bad genes" will be shuffled out into special classrooms, because they are assumed that they can't perform at the same level as other kids. And let's not even contemplate how much pressure this puts on the test designs used to norm these "aptitude" studies which are used to determine the genes. There's a lot of disagreement about the nature of intelligence among experts who study this stuff -- imagine a world where we only have a narrow definition designed around the standardized tests used to pass out of school... and kids are sorted according to their genetic propensities for passing such tests.
The implications for creativity of thought and natural development of children with different talents are just too horrifying to contemplate.
1) What is meant with "skill at reading"? [snip] If they mean just the ability to convert symbols into sounds I'd assume the plateau for that is pretty low and most people reach it pretty early on in their lives.
Well, given that the study focuses on 12-year-olds, I'd say that many of them are probably still in the process of achieving their final reading skills.
If they mean interpretative ability, how do they quantify that, and how do they distinguish between correct and incorrect interpretations beyond a certain point?
Umm, the same way most standardized tests do in "reading comprehension" exercises? Your post has a couple ambiguous examples, which would be poor test questions. But there are plenty of ways to generate more complex reading tasks that involve understanding the structure of a complicated argument, etc. A lot of it also is in understanding the connotations of words and things that are not always conveyed literally but clearly implied to fluent native readers.
That's why analogies used to play a big role on the SAT, because they often require you to know more than just definitions for words -- you also need to know a lot about how they are used and the way they might connect to other concepts. But -- surprise -- analogies over the years have come under suspicion, essentially because they tend to test "innate ability" (e.g., IQ) more than other verbal tasks, and hence still show up on IQ tests. But SAT designers have been under pressure from schools to make the tests "more relevant" to stuff that is actually taught in high school, so analogies were removed, and more generic reading comprehension has taken their place. (From a more cyncial perspective, I would note that it's harder for the test-prep services to coach aspiring test-takers on tasks like analogies, since again it's harder to do than just memorizing definitions. Most good readers acquire the detailed knowledge of word nuances needed from actually, well... reading over many years.) But that doesn't mean that analogies can't show anything about comprehension or detailed understanding of the meanings of words.
Certainly you can reach a point when testing adults where it becomes difficult to design tests of reading comprehension and verbal ability that still have clear answers and don't suffer from the interpretive problems you mention. And that's why there is a lot of criticism of "high IQ" tests and whether they can really differentiate people once you get more than a few standard deviations above normal.
But for 12-year-olds, as in this study? There's plenty of ways to create unambiguous reading/verbal questions that show how their abilities are still developing.
More and more I'm getting a feeling that science has been down this road before. That our understanding of subatomic particles and the distant edges of the Universe is similar to the pre-Copernican use of epicycles to understand astronomy.
It's certainly possible that we're merely stumbling about to find a better theory, but I think the epicycles analogy is generally a bad one -- it was good science back in the day, based on what was "known" about the universe at the time. Now we know better, because we've figured out that some of the fundamental assumptions of the old model were wrong, but good scientists of the day had no way of knowing some of those things were wrong (and in fact had some good evidence that those things were right -- like a bunch of very logical arguments why the earth is not in motion and how various effects that should happen if it were in motion were not observed... most of those problems were only explained in the 1800s, centuries after Copernicus). (For detailed background on myths about epicycles, see here for example.)
Also, please note that Copernicus and Galileo both still required epicycles, since they presumed circular orbits. (Galileo rejected Kepler's correct empirical observations of elliptical orbits, since they weren't as "perfect" as the circle... which shows how far even great "scientists" of the day were invested in the old ideas.)
If anything, I think a better analogy for the kind of situation you're assuming in modern science would be with Galileo's theory of the tides, which he created even though it didn't make much sense (and didn't accord with empirical evidence -- it required only one tide per day at noon), but it allowed him to justify his heliocentric hypothesis. In effect, it was a whole new idea tacked onto the old models without empirical support and only needed to fill in the gap to "prove" that the earth was in motion (since other things needed the prove that hadn't yet been observed, and most wouldn't be until centuries afterward). In a similar way, trying to "prove" our newer Big Bang models and particle physics models has led to the introduction of dark energy, strings, etc.
Thus, dark matter/energy and string theory are similar new ideas built up out of the old ones to "fill in the gaps" as it were, and we don't yet know whether they will pan out. Epicycles, on the other hand, were a very old and extremely well-accepted idea (which both Galileo and Copernicus used in their theories).
Finally, I would also note that gravity too was a sort of "fudge factor" introduced by Newton without evidence: where does this "unseen force" come from? how is it transmitted? We still don't thoroughly agree on those answers, centuries later. But it made the math work out for Newton's idea of universal gravitation, just as some of our modern theories do today.
So the question is -- are these new ideas more like Newton's spooky occult theory of an unseen force acting at a distance, or more like Galileo's attempt to make up a theory of the tides to hold his model of the universe together? Only time will tell.
It is not altogether impossible that our models of gravity are flawed at supermassive scales at relativistic velocities, that there's corrections needed that would produce the same effect as currently theorized for this new kind of matter and energy.
Sure it is. And very smart physicists have considered this option, among many others.
Remembering that one should never multiply entities unnecessarily, one correction factor seems preferable to two exotic phenomena that cannot be directly observed by definition.
Of course it does. Something to remember is that "dark matter" and "dark energy" are perhaps bad names. They don't necessarily imply that there is something like "normal matter" or "normal energy" out there but is just "dark" (whatever that means). They're just convenient terms to refer to the mathematical "fudge factors" that need to be invoked to explain how things in the universe are actually moving. Whether they are actually caused by a dark form of "matter" or "energy" or whatever is up for debate.
But lots of smart people are working on this exact problem, and no one yet has come up with some sort of simple "correction factor" that would work for all of this.
But only if such a correction factor is theoretically justified AND explains all related observations AND is actually simpler.
By those criteria, we should have rejected Einstein's Theory of Relativity, since it fails 2 of the 3. Einstein's theory was NOT "theoretically justified" within Newtonian mechanics (and actually suggested a number of truly weird violations of Newton), and I certainly don't think you can claim 4-dimensional tensors of space-time are "simpler" than Newton's static and uniform space.
Truly great breakthroughs in science often are not "theoretically justified" within the old models of knowledge, particularly when they involve complex new mathematical models of something -- they just fit the data better. And while the good ones often are more "elegant," they are rarely "actually simpler."
We just have no clue as to what it is or how it works.
I'd like to point out that gravity is in the same category. Also time.
This.
When Newton was first discussing his theories of universal gravitation, the scientific community was rather skeptical, because it invoked spooky "unseen forces" acting at a distance (i.e., gravity). The previous Aristotelean model of physics asserted that "normal" terrestrial matter came to a nature place of rest (earth sinks down to equilibrium, air rises to equilibrium, etc.), since Newton's first law hadn't been realized yet. Instead, real-world friction, etc. tends to bring things to a state of rest, which accords with everyday experience. All motion had to be explained by a "cause," something that propelled it into motion, and ultimately the matter would stop moving once it came to its natural state of rest.
The motion of the planets could not be explained using this physics, so the celestial bodies were assumed to be of a different type of aetherial matter (or something) which was set in motion at the beginning of time or something.
That was the proper scientific theory of the day, and it accorded with empirical observation and common sense -- terrestrial bodies stopped, celestial ones seemed to go in continuous motion forever.
But Newton came along and equated the two -- and he developed a mathematics that described the motion. Unfortunately it depended on a "spooky" occult idea of forces acting at a distance. (Newton, of course, was really into the occult, alchemy, etc.)
So, scientists of the day were skeptical. Newton eventually even published an appendix with future editions of the Principia explaining that his model didn't depend on "real" unseen forces acting -- instead, he basically came up with the modern scientific ideal that says: if the math works and predicts the phenomena, that's enough for science. A scientific model need not be concerned with philosophical questions or ultimate causes of phenomena as long as it can actually make good predictions.
THAT, probably more than anything else, was the foundation of modern "science" laid down by Newton during the Scientific Revolution. People had been doing experiments and empirical investigations for millennia, but they always had to worry about ultimate "causes," which inevitably depended on somebody's pet theory of reality. After Newton, though, what matters is that the math works. Maybe the dark matter/dark energy model is hinting at some deeper aspect of reality and a more elegant theory that we will come up with many years from now... or not. But regardless, these ideas are exactly like Newton's "gravity" -- something which we observe, something we can have an accurate mathematical model of, but also something "spooky" that we don't understand completely yet.
That's what the modern scientific process is all about.
Depends on whose stats you look at. If you look at "metropolitan area," recent stats I see come up with around rank 8 (similar size to Houston and Washington DC). If you look at urban "agglomeration" (which actually measures connected urban land, rather than "metro areas" which are usually defined by surrounding municipal structures and may include more rural or disconnected surrounding areas), then Toronto may be more like 5th. But no matter how you calculate, it's one of the most populous cities/areas in North America -- it's not in any sense "small" as GGP termed it.