The question on hand is a matter of rhetoric, not truth: What are the reasonable interpretations of what Damore wrote? What were his intentions? What might a reasonable reader think were his intentions?
In fact, Damore's intentions could be innocent enough, and he still could be justly discharged if he chose his words poorly and a reasonable person interprets his words as a purposeful insult.
I would further note that insinuating insults while purposefully hiding behind a thin veneer of ambiguity is a very common rhetoric gambit these days, especially on the 'net and similar media. It is a passive aggressive tactic for trying to getting away with tossing insults, where the perpetrator pulls out the victim card the moment there are any consequences.
Read the suit, if you have any doubts Damore knows how to play that game.
The scientific or historical truth of isolated statements is not necessarily important.
It is very easy to be abusive by insinuating via carefully chosen facts to bring to the discussion, by implying linkages from context while avoiding stating the linkage outright.
Let me give you an example. Not serious. All for illustration.
I see your words and note that we should keep in mind that most rapists are men. That is undeniable fact. It does not surprise me so many men rush to defend Damore, obviously.
My example is a bit silly, but it illustrates the principle. By mixing fact, weirdly stated opinions and juxtaposing them carefully, it is easy to make ugly insinuations, including insinuations that will rise to the level of "promoting a hostile work environment". The best part is my own slovenly thinking can be used to fuel my self-righteous (sounding) defense. "Hey dude. The facts are facts. You just cannot handle the truth or an honest opinion. Ever hear of Hume's fork?" I just dump on you all the responsibility for being offended by my dumb words. I never actually said anything bad about you directly, right?
If I said the above to you in a work environment, it would be stupid for me to whine about discharge. Another example...
Why we have so few women working as engineers here at Google is a complex topic. We should remember that women are more likely to suffer from diagnosable mental conditions like neuroses.
I tried out the usual kind of insurance in 2017. My wife and I are over the moon about changing back to an HMO for 2018 -- it is both cheaper and better.
Yes, that is weird. But he also doesn't mention the kid's age. Keeping a six year old off Facebook is reasonable. But if you keep a 14 year old off social media, you are basically turning the kid into a social outcast. For an teenager trying to navigate the awkwardness of puberty, the last thing he needs is some asshole uncle micromanaging his social interactions.
If you don't want your kids to hate you, then you should avoid using parenthood as an opportunity to impose your weird idiosyncrecies on them.
Well, I am definitely imposing my idiosyncrasies on my kid.
Kids should have friends. Friends should be friends by doing things together and actually talking to each other. I do not see that social media as a net positive towards those ends at all, and it is and likely to get worse rather than better.
Furthermore, it is a myth that children should be dependent on deep attachments formed with peers. Yes, that is what they do when the bonds are not maintained properly with family, but that is a desperate survival mechanism for victims of a weak social order, not something to be sought after.
One big reason teenagers are so awkward is we enforce strong age segregation in the young, with the result awkward kids have no other option but to turn to equally clueless kids for guidance about the most difficult topics in life. That may be normal, but should we assume normal is actually healthy? Would you try to learn calculus from a buddy who is struggling with basic geometry? Why are life skills so different?
Public sphere difficulties that can be solved by mere supergenius level cleverness are eventually taken cared of, albeit usually by incremental efforts of many individuals instead of one savior. Then we stop calling then controversies, and the are relegated to boring stuff in the history books.
The intractable problems are controversies exactly because there exist fundamental disagreements about how to frame the question(s) for making decisions about what price must be paid or value that must be comprised -- that requires a consensus shaped by leadership that can rally the consent of the governed.
I have been convinced for a long while that blockchain technology is important. What the last few weeks has convinced me is that Bitcoin itself is the walking dead. Because now that there is enough limelight to go around that some shines on its competitors, the low switching costs will mean Bitcoin will have to compete on its technical merit over the long haul. It cannot survive on the vacuous "gold standard of cryptocurrency" hype forever.
While we do not know exactly how "coin" will fit into the future ecosystems of blockchain technology, we have numerous reasons to suspect Bitcoin itself is ill-suited to succeed. Miners fleeing to greener pastures will drive the fees up and indirectly increase volatility, which will encourage normal consumers to shrug and choose something else. Eventually, it drifts down in transaction volume and price to where it is vulnerable to a run on the currency.
In the long run, Bitcoin is deader than dead, crushed by newer and technically superior competitors. Perhaps they will last. Or not. We are still proving out the true value of blockchains and whether this money thing is so important is not yet known.
It turns out that stability against inflation is not intrinsic to vapor backed currencies, at all. Because while the gold fetishists loved talking about every gov't being a future Zimbabwe, the unfettered free market will "print" more and more cryptocurrency faster than a gov't ever could. We are only seeing the beginning of competition to Bitcoin.
A few central banks trying to clamp down on Bitcoin trading is only the very beginning of a radical change in the political structure of the world. Over the next 50 years we'll see the end of social democracy and high-tax, high-regulation governance.
Gov't might perhaps have to shrink a bit, in the face of cryptocurrencies. But they will just tax physical assets more directly. Property taxes on homes, offices, vehicles. Payroll taxes. Sales taxes. All in gov't backed lucre -- pay it or go to jail. That may work out well for the oligarchs, but it is not going to be any kind of anarchist uptopia.
To answer Mr307, what you said sets the stage for how Bitcoin could die. The miners demand higher and higher fees from the user, stifling its popularity growth. The miners themselves sour on Bitcoin, because newer and technically superior new blockchain ecosystems offer more consistent profits. And then someday someone with a biggish pile of Bitcoin dies and the heirs want to cash out. A sudden influx of must sell Bitcoin on the market crushes the price at every exchange.
I read 12 pages in and skimmed another dozen or so, and I am only more convinced than ever that Google will demolish Damore. He has nothing. But he does like to whine about management failure to promote him for his conservative views.* If you have a particular part you thinking interesting, cite it.
* I do recognize that he was probably being clever in his snark there, something I rather like, personally. But it is not going to help in trial, and looks childish in a legal document like this. But I am sure that some lawyer was happy to be paid well to write this stuff up -- when you are paid well to lose by a loser, might as well go BIG (in the lawyer fees)
The whole point of the word "Dixiecrat" as used in political discussions in the 80s was to point out that a good portion of the Southern Democrats (not all, but many) had more in common with the common 80s GOP stance on civil rights, religion, military than the Democratic Party that was largely dominated by members of the NE. There have always been regional differences within the Democratic Party -- that is apparent even 200 years ago.
It is quite easy to create a straw man, by taking an overly simplistic view of politics, then cherry pick the data to "disprove it".
It is really quite funny how completely out of touch most of the Google critics are when it comes to the chances of success at trial. What are the odds the CEO did (1) "Hey, fire this guy for what he said.", versus (2) "A few of these things he said seem to me might they violate existing policies. Please have HR review it and get back to me in writing with what they determine"?
In the second case, Damore's suit is simply doomed. It requires very little bureaucratic skill to take down a blabbermouth and be 100% in compliance with the law.
It is unfortunate Damore could not have written in a more succinct and focused style, because he did write a few uncomfortable and controversial arguments that were well worth discussing. Pity. But Damore himself has to own that. White male privilege is insufficient to protect him from the consequences of his own actions, in today's world.
In 20 years, there will be lots and lots of blockchain technologies used under the covers in ways most people will not notice, and only a few crypto currencies that anyone cares about, but the pure vaporous/fiat ones will not be considered important. Bitcoin specifically will be deader than dead, as in worth exactly zero, killed by later generation crypto currencies which were technically superior.
Once people stop believeing it's valuable, it stops being valuable and that's when hyperinflation happens. At that point being backed by a state or not makes little difference.
You ducked the main argument with a distraction, by simply handwaving that the gov't does not matter, which is a stupid fantasy only popular among bullion sheep, well, and now crypto sheep. Of course, it is always possible for chaos to engulf the US gov't or US economy, and the USD take a beating -- but that is not saying anything everyone doesn't already know. By handwaving that everyone stops believing in, say, the USD, you are handwaving on the scale of "oh, the US gov't ceases to exist" or "oh, the zombie apocalypse is hard on the USD".
If I were a juror, I would seriously consider an argument along the lines of "This white noise is very similar to that white noise. He are some frequency distributions. Compare to these other examples of white noise. This specific similarities are not arbitrary. This is infringement because it is purposefully close copying." But that requires naming identifiable properties beyond "I own white noise".
I suppose. But that seems to imply an argument that this arrangement of white noise is similar to that arrangement of white noise by specifiable nameable qualitiies, that do not devolve into a claim on all white noise.
I think it does make sense to argue that the piece intentionally was crafted in a specific manner that it would appear to be a piece of John Cage's work. Which is at least a leg to stand on in the court of law. I expect a song called Billy Gene by Micheal Jackson that sounds really similar to a particular old hit might run into trouble as well. Arguing "oh, it's an homage to a great artist I admire" may not be a great defense.
And yet people keep accusing them of not paying their "fair share" when they are already paying their share along with a lot of other peoples' share.
Depends on what you mean by "fair share". The most common argument, endorsed by some people of significant sophistication and perspective like Warren Buffet, is that most very wealthy pay a lesser percentage of their income in taxes than the typical middle class taxpayer.
They have been saying that for over a century. We laugh at those experts who a century ago said their new scientific techniques are free of cultural bias. Everyone will laugh at the new version of the same stupidity a hundred years from now. In fact, I am laughing now, because I know enough about these tests to see there is too much pseudo-science.
I saw what you did there. You danced around the heart of my argument (pun intended) by denigrating a perfectly valid measure of mental prowess, thereby graphically demonstrating my point: that this thing masquerading as "a reliable measure of general intelligence"* is chock-filled with cultural bias. It really does not matter how much you do or do not care for dancing, if general intelligence is genuinely general, my thought experiment is highly valid.
Mind you, cultural bias is not automatically a terrible thing, if we are honest about it. The gatekeepers of the educated/professional world of university and business prefers certain characteristics that include both problem solving and sufficient habitual social conformity to the status quo -- thems who have the gold make the rules.
As for improving the tests, lots and lots is already known about test design -- this is hardly a new field. The problem is the best improvements are expensive. The real world wants something that is cheap enough to be a practical measure to apply to hundreds of thousands of children every year; something that works pretty well 90% of the time and gives garbage results 10% of the time will be forgiven if the price is right.
*IMHO, general intelligence might well be a thing. I just think we are much less good at measuring it than we pretend.
Of course, one of the beautiful things about claims about general intelligence being general is it should not matter what subject matter is used for the test.
Why should we use this boring book learning to assess children? We should teach the subjects a new dance routine and see how quickly they can learn it. I would love to see the kids from Palo Alto HS line up next to kids from Oakland on the auditorium stage, to shimmy for their chance to get into Harvard.
The bottom line is the IQ test is culturally biased because we would not have it any other way. It would be very easy to come up with other things that test "general intelligence" with other flavors of cultural bias. The cultural bias on hand arguably has a degree of justifiable practical value, because the principle bias is towards certain kinds of book learning, and no one would much care about this topic if the ultimate stakes were not college educations and similar to groom the next generation for highly education professions.
2: If she learns about which edge of a shingle to seal, she should not be asked the question, and it should not be counted. It would be as invalid whether answered by a knowledgable 6 year old or by a 50 year old roof layer.
It's the ability to deduce an answer that the tests aim for, not knowledge. In order to test the ability to deduce, questions should be about things the question taker does not know, but have enough underlying knowledge to be able to think their way to an answer.
That is an excellent textbook answer as to how an "intelligence test" ought to be designed. But where the rubber meets the road, standard instruments are standard instruments. No one ever does a detailed pre-test of each subject to figure out if certain questions might be problematic. If the subject is showing a confused look on their face, the test administrator is bias towards assuming that demonstrates the question is working the way it should, not rock the boat with questions about whether their chosen career is a sham.
There is actually a lot of excellent research about how to make tests in general that will be more reliably valid. That research is routinely ignored because it is too expensive to do things the right way. As a practical matter, you get what you pay for. The problem comes in when pretending standard instruments are better than they are -- that is the sham.
Furthermore, I think it is routinely downplayed how the emotion context matters to the results of these tests, and how draining the experience can be to young children. That is why throwing in just one inappropriate question early in the battery of questions can skew the results, because the psychological toll of one or two bizarre questions (bizarre in the subjects eyes) can hurt the stamina of the subject in a way that really matters.
If it were only named "Scholar Quotient", it might have been less likely to be an abused notion. But having attached the word "intelligence" to this kind of testing early on, it has been abused. And thus it is rightly challenged as meaning much less than most people think it means.
Slashdot Mirror
The question on hand is a matter of rhetoric, not truth: What are the reasonable interpretations of what Damore wrote? What were his intentions? What might a reasonable reader think were his intentions?
In fact, Damore's intentions could be innocent enough, and he still could be justly discharged if he chose his words poorly and a reasonable person interprets his words as a purposeful insult.
I would further note that insinuating insults while purposefully hiding behind a thin veneer of ambiguity is a very common rhetoric gambit these days, especially on the 'net and similar media. It is a passive aggressive tactic for trying to getting away with tossing insults, where the perpetrator pulls out the victim card the moment there are any consequences.
Read the suit, if you have any doubts Damore knows how to play that game.
The scientific or historical truth of isolated statements is not necessarily important.
It is very easy to be abusive by insinuating via carefully chosen facts to bring to the discussion, by implying linkages from context while avoiding stating the linkage outright.
Let me give you an example. Not serious. All for illustration.
I see your words and note that we should keep in mind that most rapists are men. That is undeniable fact. It does not surprise me so many men rush to defend Damore, obviously.
My example is a bit silly, but it illustrates the principle. By mixing fact, weirdly stated opinions and juxtaposing them carefully, it is easy to make ugly insinuations, including insinuations that will rise to the level of "promoting a hostile work environment". The best part is my own slovenly thinking can be used to fuel my self-righteous (sounding) defense. "Hey dude. The facts are facts. You just cannot handle the truth or an honest opinion. Ever hear of Hume's fork?" I just dump on you all the responsibility for being offended by my dumb words. I never actually said anything bad about you directly, right?
If I said the above to you in a work environment, it would be stupid for me to whine about discharge. Another example...
Why we have so few women working as engineers here at Google is a complex topic. We should remember that women are more likely to suffer from diagnosable mental conditions like neuroses.
I tried out the usual kind of insurance in 2017. My wife and I are over the moon about changing back to an HMO for 2018 -- it is both cheaper and better.
Yes, that is weird. But he also doesn't mention the kid's age. Keeping a six year old off Facebook is reasonable. But if you keep a 14 year old off social media, you are basically turning the kid into a social outcast. For an teenager trying to navigate the awkwardness of puberty, the last thing he needs is some asshole uncle micromanaging his social interactions.
If you don't want your kids to hate you, then you should avoid using parenthood as an opportunity to impose your weird idiosyncrecies on them.
Well, I am definitely imposing my idiosyncrasies on my kid.
Kids should have friends. Friends should be friends by doing things together and actually talking to each other. I do not see that social media as a net positive towards those ends at all, and it is and likely to get worse rather than better.
Furthermore, it is a myth that children should be dependent on deep attachments formed with peers. Yes, that is what they do when the bonds are not maintained properly with family, but that is a desperate survival mechanism for victims of a weak social order, not something to be sought after.
One big reason teenagers are so awkward is we enforce strong age segregation in the young, with the result awkward kids have no other option but to turn to equally clueless kids for guidance about the most difficult topics in life. That may be normal, but should we assume normal is actually healthy? Would you try to learn calculus from a buddy who is struggling with basic geometry? Why are life skills so different?
Correct.
Public sphere difficulties that can be solved by mere supergenius level cleverness are eventually taken cared of, albeit usually by incremental efforts of many individuals instead of one savior. Then we stop calling then controversies, and the are relegated to boring stuff in the history books.
The intractable problems are controversies exactly because there exist fundamental disagreements about how to frame the question(s) for making decisions about what price must be paid or value that must be comprised -- that requires a consensus shaped by leadership that can rally the consent of the governed.
On the nose.
I have been convinced for a long while that blockchain technology is important. What the last few weeks has convinced me is that Bitcoin itself is the walking dead. Because now that there is enough limelight to go around that some shines on its competitors, the low switching costs will mean Bitcoin will have to compete on its technical merit over the long haul. It cannot survive on the vacuous "gold standard of cryptocurrency" hype forever.
While we do not know exactly how "coin" will fit into the future ecosystems of blockchain technology, we have numerous reasons to suspect Bitcoin itself is ill-suited to succeed. Miners fleeing to greener pastures will drive the fees up and indirectly increase volatility, which will encourage normal consumers to shrug and choose something else. Eventually, it drifts down in transaction volume and price to where it is vulnerable to a run on the currency.
In the long run, Bitcoin is deader than dead, crushed by newer and technically superior competitors. Perhaps they will last. Or not. We are still proving out the true value of blockchains and whether this money thing is so important is not yet known.
It turns out that stability against inflation is not intrinsic to vapor backed currencies, at all. Because while the gold fetishists loved talking about every gov't being a future Zimbabwe, the unfettered free market will "print" more and more cryptocurrency faster than a gov't ever could. We are only seeing the beginning of competition to Bitcoin.
A few central banks trying to clamp down on Bitcoin trading is only the very beginning of a radical change in the political structure of the world. Over the next 50 years we'll see the end of social democracy and high-tax, high-regulation governance.
Gov't might perhaps have to shrink a bit, in the face of cryptocurrencies. But they will just tax physical assets more directly. Property taxes on homes, offices, vehicles. Payroll taxes. Sales taxes. All in gov't backed lucre -- pay it or go to jail. That may work out well for the oligarchs, but it is not going to be any kind of anarchist uptopia.
To answer Mr307, what you said sets the stage for how Bitcoin could die. The miners demand higher and higher fees from the user, stifling its popularity growth. The miners themselves sour on Bitcoin, because newer and technically superior new blockchain ecosystems offer more consistent profits. And then someday someone with a biggish pile of Bitcoin dies and the heirs want to cash out. A sudden influx of must sell Bitcoin on the market crushes the price at every exchange.
I read 12 pages in and skimmed another dozen or so, and I am only more convinced than ever that Google will demolish Damore. He has nothing. But he does like to whine about management failure to promote him for his conservative views.* If you have a particular part you thinking interesting, cite it.
* I do recognize that he was probably being clever in his snark there, something I rather like, personally. But it is not going to help in trial, and looks childish in a legal document like this. But I am sure that some lawyer was happy to be paid well to write this stuff up -- when you are paid well to lose by a loser, might as well go BIG (in the lawyer fees)
The Masters of Nanotechnology. Though Zor perfected it within a Matrix that regenerated protoculture via seeds of the Flower of Life.
The whole point of the word "Dixiecrat" as used in political discussions in the 80s was to point out that a good portion of the Southern Democrats (not all, but many) had more in common with the common 80s GOP stance on civil rights, religion, military than the Democratic Party that was largely dominated by members of the NE. There have always been regional differences within the Democratic Party -- that is apparent even 200 years ago.
It is quite easy to create a straw man, by taking an overly simplistic view of politics, then cherry pick the data to "disprove it".
It is really quite funny how completely out of touch most of the Google critics are when it comes to the chances of success at trial. What are the odds the CEO did (1) "Hey, fire this guy for what he said.", versus (2) "A few of these things he said seem to me might they violate existing policies. Please have HR review it and get back to me in writing with what they determine"?
In the second case, Damore's suit is simply doomed. It requires very little bureaucratic skill to take down a blabbermouth and be 100% in compliance with the law.
It is unfortunate Damore could not have written in a more succinct and focused style, because he did write a few uncomfortable and controversial arguments that were well worth discussing. Pity. But Damore himself has to own that. White male privilege is insufficient to protect him from the consequences of his own actions, in today's world.
In 20 years, there will be lots and lots of blockchain technologies used under the covers in ways most people will not notice, and only a few crypto currencies that anyone cares about, but the pure vaporous/fiat ones will not be considered important. Bitcoin specifically will be deader than dead, as in worth exactly zero, killed by later generation crypto currencies which were technically superior.
Us cantankerous ones were told we didn't grok it in 1999, too. Boy, we learned our lesson.
Once people stop believeing it's valuable, it stops being valuable and that's when hyperinflation happens. At that point being backed by a state or not makes little difference.
You ducked the main argument with a distraction, by simply handwaving that the gov't does not matter, which is a stupid fantasy only popular among bullion sheep, well, and now crypto sheep. Of course, it is always possible for chaos to engulf the US gov't or US economy, and the USD take a beating -- but that is not saying anything everyone doesn't already know. By handwaving that everyone stops believing in, say, the USD, you are handwaving on the scale of "oh, the US gov't ceases to exist" or "oh, the zombie apocalypse is hard on the USD".
If I were a juror, I would seriously consider an argument along the lines of "This white noise is very similar to that white noise. He are some frequency distributions. Compare to these other examples of white noise. This specific similarities are not arbitrary. This is infringement because it is purposefully close copying." But that requires naming identifiable properties beyond "I own white noise".
I almost snorted my soda there. Props!
I suppose. But that seems to imply an argument that this arrangement of white noise is similar to that arrangement of white noise by specifiable nameable qualitiies, that do not devolve into a claim on all white noise.
I think it does make sense to argue that the piece intentionally was crafted in a specific manner that it would appear to be a piece of John Cage's work. Which is at least a leg to stand on in the court of law. I expect a song called Billy Gene by Micheal Jackson that sounds really similar to a particular old hit might run into trouble as well. Arguing "oh, it's an homage to a great artist I admire" may not be a great defense.
And yet people keep accusing them of not paying their "fair share" when they are already paying their share along with a lot of other peoples' share.
Depends on what you mean by "fair share". The most common argument, endorsed by some people of significant sophistication and perspective like Warren Buffet, is that most very wealthy pay a lesser percentage of their income in taxes than the typical middle class taxpayer.
They have been saying that for over a century. We laugh at those experts who a century ago said their new scientific techniques are free of cultural bias. Everyone will laugh at the new version of the same stupidity a hundred years from now. In fact, I am laughing now, because I know enough about these tests to see there is too much pseudo-science.
I saw what you did there. You danced around the heart of my argument (pun intended) by denigrating a perfectly valid measure of mental prowess, thereby graphically demonstrating my point: that this thing masquerading as "a reliable measure of general intelligence"* is chock-filled with cultural bias. It really does not matter how much you do or do not care for dancing, if general intelligence is genuinely general, my thought experiment is highly valid.
Mind you, cultural bias is not automatically a terrible thing, if we are honest about it. The gatekeepers of the educated/professional world of university and business prefers certain characteristics that include both problem solving and sufficient habitual social conformity to the status quo -- thems who have the gold make the rules.
As for improving the tests, lots and lots is already known about test design -- this is hardly a new field. The problem is the best improvements are expensive. The real world wants something that is cheap enough to be a practical measure to apply to hundreds of thousands of children every year; something that works pretty well 90% of the time and gives garbage results 10% of the time will be forgiven if the price is right.
*IMHO, general intelligence might well be a thing. I just think we are much less good at measuring it than we pretend.
Of course, one of the beautiful things about claims about general intelligence being general is it should not matter what subject matter is used for the test.
Why should we use this boring book learning to assess children? We should teach the subjects a new dance routine and see how quickly they can learn it. I would love to see the kids from Palo Alto HS line up next to kids from Oakland on the auditorium stage, to shimmy for their chance to get into Harvard.
The bottom line is the IQ test is culturally biased because we would not have it any other way. It would be very easy to come up with other things that test "general intelligence" with other flavors of cultural bias. The cultural bias on hand arguably has a degree of justifiable practical value, because the principle bias is towards certain kinds of book learning, and no one would much care about this topic if the ultimate stakes were not college educations and similar to groom the next generation for highly education professions.
2: If she learns about which edge of a shingle to seal, she should not be asked the question, and it should not be counted. It would be as invalid whether answered by a knowledgable 6 year old or by a 50 year old roof layer.
It's the ability to deduce an answer that the tests aim for, not knowledge. In order to test the ability to deduce, questions should be about things the question taker does not know, but have enough underlying knowledge to be able to think their way to an answer.
That is an excellent textbook answer as to how an "intelligence test" ought to be designed. But where the rubber meets the road, standard instruments are standard instruments. No one ever does a detailed pre-test of each subject to figure out if certain questions might be problematic. If the subject is showing a confused look on their face, the test administrator is bias towards assuming that demonstrates the question is working the way it should, not rock the boat with questions about whether their chosen career is a sham.
There is actually a lot of excellent research about how to make tests in general that will be more reliably valid. That research is routinely ignored because it is too expensive to do things the right way. As a practical matter, you get what you pay for. The problem comes in when pretending standard instruments are better than they are -- that is the sham.
Furthermore, I think it is routinely downplayed how the emotion context matters to the results of these tests, and how draining the experience can be to young children. That is why throwing in just one inappropriate question early in the battery of questions can skew the results, because the psychological toll of one or two bizarre questions (bizarre in the subjects eyes) can hurt the stamina of the subject in a way that really matters.
If it were only named "Scholar Quotient", it might have been less likely to be an abused notion. But having attached the word "intelligence" to this kind of testing early on, it has been abused. And thus it is rightly challenged as meaning much less than most people think it means.