You also pose a number of serious questions which I pass over:
>Most of the time, the best (in the "bright" sense) coworkers I had where educated in really expensive schools and went to good Universities.
>Take the Flynn effect for example. Are more intelligent people being born today than a few years ago? Or we're better schooling people?
These are large questions that are ripe for longer discussion. To some extent-- for instance, with no ripple effect from the depression-- perhaps not "birthing" more intelligent people, but yielding more from nutrition and other effects.
Not every bright person goes to a Tier 1, nor should. But access has increased dramatically in the past half-century, which means, a lot of the bright people you meet in the US will have gone to the top Tier, an received that education.
A better question, for me, might be-- what should the education for the next tiers look like? At the moment, it seems to be a mixture of watered down elite "liberal arts" education, and purely tech education-- "become a radio tech, forget anything else."
Neither seem to work very well to me, for the majority of the population.
Well, if we're moving to that level, I'd prefer Piaget to Binet, at which point you get an IQ assessment that lasts 8-16 hours and is highly variegated by task and skill.
And you could of course look at what happens in France or Germany and so forth, when a full third or society or so have access to relatively high-quality education.
My brunt here is-- that's not what's happening in the US. In the US, with a "failing education system," two-thirds of the population is being told to strive for positions of which, there is only room for 3% or so, and of which, only 3% or so are qualified. They're also often told, that their self-worth is tied to being one of those classes.
Equally, they're provided with education to become one of these things, and blithely told by their teachers and professors that they can become one of these things, when in reality, they really can't, and the education they're being given, is more of a Potemkin exercise than a reality.
I am reminded of an anthropology student at a third-tier state university, who sincerely believed that her career path was to become an anthropology professor. She continued to believe this despite having grades so low that she could not gain admission to the graduate program in her state, and after getting 550/800 on her GRE subject test.
A fresh-minted Ph.D. from the anthropology program at Yale might have a 1/3rd chance of securing an academic career-- the odds for this poor woman were probably closer to 1 in 1000. Yet she was surrounded by people like her, spending years of their lives, and accumulating debt, working towards a goal that they can't achieve.
And thinking that if they work in an office or at a restaurant or in a factory-- all contributions to society-- , that it's not good enough, and that they're too good for such positions.
Well, what's it take to play in the NFL versus the Farm Leagues? It's the same-- in fact, sports at the professional level, display even more of a demonstrable tendency towards what seem to be purely genetic pre-requirements.
The distinction you're making is between being a research assistant or lab tech, and being a research scientist. Again, I didn't say the US should not encourage people to pursue science-related "careers." I claimed that large segments of the population that they can become future scientists (or doctors or... what not) and then spending the money to provide them with "education," loosely speaking, to become things they will not by all odds become, is a waste of resources and thus, in simpler language, just plain stupid.
That's not poor in America. That's black in America, which is a different thing.
More seriously, your poor in America, crack-mom etc example is certainly a heart-wrenching anecdote, but how many of the people in the US in the top 1% or even 5% by intelligence live in such circumstances? You might as well tel us about the genius who is struck by lightening every month, and then hit by a bus on his way to Stanford.
Sure, there are a few guys or gals out there like that, but they don't matter STATISTICALLY. They're extreme outliers-- not representative.
Otherwise-- I didn't say growing up in the US was fair, or that it was easy, or even that the system worked for people in the circumstances you describe. The brunt of my thesis is that it makes absolutely no sense to spend resources, and "prepare," people for careers that they have no chance of performing in.
Otherwise-- sorry, there are problems, certainly there are problems, but for the vast majority of the "poor" in the US who also have the demonstrated intelligence, the opportunity is there. There may be other problems and injustices in the system, but the idea that the poor and intelligent do not have access to education in the US, is largely a combination of bunk and resentment.
But coming up with a problem to solve is also part of problem solving, "creativity" is part of intelligence (if a part of intelligence that is often not measured well by IQ tests in the US), and general intelligence increases the ability to acquire/remember learned skills "experience." So you haven't gotten us anywhere.
But: success? Who said anything about 'success'? OP was about "future scientists."
Sure, in the US the first indicator of future wealth is the size of daddy's wallet and mommy's tits. Which may or may not have anything to do with intelligence. But if we're talking about generating functioning, effective scientists-- not scientists playing scientist because of daddy's money-- then the factor that matters is grey matter, not green stuff.
It is not about the fact that someone with a 150 IQ might be "unmotivated." That has nothing to do with it.
I'm sorry, if you need to master multivariate calculus, or regression analysis, or any of 100 other skills where IQ is a strong predictor of ability and performance, then IQ does matter a lot, and hard work, dedication and the like don't mean that much.
If your IQ is 100, for many of these tasks, you'll be able to solve them but it will take 2, 5, or 10 times as long. There will be some things that will be immediately obvious to a 150+ IQ, that you'll NEVER get-- or that will take you a week to work out.
For some percentage X of those tasks necessary to being a scientist, the person with 100 IQ will either take much, much longer-- on the order of 10x or greater-- or simply be unable to complete the task. X is greater than 30%.
That's all. The performance difference is significant and huge. And every sub-120 IQ here can mod this down all they want. It doesn't change the reality and never will. Only 3% or less of the population can perform the tasks. Finding those 3% and training them, is the task, not "inspiring" anyone.
No, actually, when you're poor and smart in the US, you apply to the Golden Dozen of colleges and universities, and get a full ride -- all elite universities currently essentially provide full rides for admits with familial incomes less than $75,000/yr, which isn't exactly "poor." When you're a little less smart, you go to the next tier and get a "merit scholarship" and actually get PAID to attend. When you're rich-- well, the money can help a little, and that upsets the meritocracy a bit.\
The problem comes when you're poor, and stupid. This makes you willing to take on $50K in debt, to spend eight years at Lower Nowhere State University.
Crap. One./er actually bothered to look at data. I am astounded and amazed.
Seriously, however, while hard work (and being willing to be an hours slave to the establishment) is a part of it, all of these positions remain significant indexed by IQ.
Oh come on. We've reached the point where everyone has to feel good about themselves, and be told that they can make a meaningful contribution to society blah blah blah. What a load of crap.
If your school didn't shout this mantra, then congratulations. You went to P.S. NoWhere, along with the rest of America's nobodies. You are effectively (though not exclusively) tracked out of being part of the economic elite.
This changes nothing about the situation. No one with an "aptitude for science" is less than two standard deviations above the Bell Curve. These people are effectively found by standardized testing, and the best path for the US, would be to devote resources to them instead of Buffy and Bill. The idea that people need to be "inspired to science" is a myth propagated by high school science teachers who want better salaries.
And look where those admissions slots go-- people who are largely in the top percentile as measured by grades, test scores or any other standard measure. (Sure, you're right, the US needs more of them, has a deficit of doctors, but getting admitted is a factor, largely, of demonstrated intelligence).
Hog-poop. IQ is a rough measure of problem-solving ability. Science is about problem-solving, medicine largely is, and law should be. If you don't have the neurons for it, you don't have the ability; someone with a greater than 150 IQ is five standard deviations above the average and is going to master (solve) a lot of problems faster and better than the average joe.
Anything else is liberal BS and wishful thinking. Deal with it.
Sure, it "is not fixed." Perhaps you can train your brain to perform a half of a standard deviation above your average. But that's about it. It's reality. It's fixed.
You may not like that reality, but the kind of thinking you seem to be espousing, is that which makes my niece with a 19 ACT think she can get into a good college and get a scholarship, without work. She thinks she's entitled to it. And that's about all she thinks.
And I didn't say "a job in the science professions." I wrote "a scientist." And the reality is, only 1% of the population, more or less, has the intelligence and wherewithall to perform as a "scientist" and not a "research assistant."
How many professors are there in the US population, for instance? How many undergrads are taught that they can become professors? The difference is over 1:1000, and that's a problem.
Is not to inspire future scientists. It is that every kid with an IQ of 90 or more is told that they can be a doctor, lawyer, or scientist, and allocated resources as if they could, when only the 1st percentile or less can actually fill these positions.
I don't see how 'movies' solves this problem: instead, it makes people with Wal-Mart skills, think that they *should* have a better lot in life, and resent that something is wrong if they don't, and spend money trying to get degrees that are meaningless, and so forth ad infinitum.
The Problem is the the mentality of government workers: Peter Schaar, Secretary of Public Information, pushes for more transparency. "Even though citizens have had a legal right to public information for five years, there are still many functionaries, that build walls around information," he stated to the SD. Above all, the financial sector is a particularly bad information hoarder.
Transliteration is the process of taking representation of expressions in one character set, and "trans-" "literating" them into another character set, with the idea of producing a representation that in the 'target' language will be 'pronounced' as it would be 'pronounced' in the 'origin' language.
Since Google translate is using phrase-stem based approaches, I'm actually surprised that it took it so long to get good and simple back-forth. However, the result in German is in no way impressive. It would sound to the average German-speaker on the street, as -- let's try a better example, the current headline on Süddeutsche Zeitung:
>The crux of the public service culture: The Federal Commissioner for Freedom of Information, Peter Schaar insisting on more openness. "Although citizens in five years have a legal right to access information, there are still too many authorities, the support, " he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In particular, the financial information is a persistent objector. Daniel Kuhr, Berlin
That has enough errors in it, that the 'crux' of the matter is substantively missed and the reader is deceived if they think they've got anything but a very fuzzy picture of what's going on.
>Google translate already does a stunningly good job with similar languages. German to English is quite good, but the two languages are so close transliteration almost always works. Also German is a very ordered rule based language, English is a mess. I have no idea about the various forms of Chinese.
To German:
>Google übersetzen bereits tut ein erstaunlich guten Job mit ähnlichen Sprachen. Deutsch auf Englisch ist ziemlich gut, aber die beiden Sprachen sind so nah Transliteration fast immer funktioniert. Auch Deutsch ist eine sehr geordnete regelbasierte Sprache, Englisch ist ein Durcheinander. Ich habe keine Ahnung über die verschiedenen Formen der Chinesen.
Back to English:
>Google translate is already doing a surprisingly good job with similar languages. German to English is pretty good, but the two languages are so close transliteration almost always works. Also, German is a very minor rule-based language, English is a mess. I have no idea about the various forms of Chinese.
Not too bad, except for turning Deutsch into a very minor language, and the fact that many native German speakers might laugh at the heavily angliciszed version of German there. The PP used 'transliteration' for 'translation,' so I guess you can't blame GT for that.
A better, more interesting question might be, how GT is likely to change the form of the languages.
I was trying to think of an amusing joke, which would no doubt be modded down by all the AC's swarming and insulting the Chinese.
Suffice to say that the fact that Chinese will be the most prevalent language used for chatter between grandma and the kids, does not make it the "dominant" language of the internet(s).
As for a fluff journalist summary on/., which means next to nothing or is downright deceptive-- welcome to/. This is not exactly new, is it? I beginning to think this is why some countries have a problem with people shooting journalists!
Whatever. It's called sarcasm, which is a linguistic construct you are evidently unable or unwilling to take the time to comprehend, regardless of your UID.
The immediately following post takes the same view as me (or anyone with a sense of humor, or an IQ above 100)-- the summary is terrible, because it says exactly that the book tells you how to write "Hello World," and a poor summary that is contradicted by the article is STUPID.
Otherwise, having been here for well over a decade, I'm pretty much in agreement with those who believe that/. has been invaded by idiots, and the moderation system fails because idiocy is modded up while insight, humor or dissent is often modded down by the abusive, brain-dead morons it allows to be users.
Slashdot Mirror
Spelled correctly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
You also pose a number of serious questions which I pass over:
>Most of the time, the best (in the "bright" sense) coworkers I had where educated in really expensive schools and went to good Universities.
>Take the Flynn effect for example. Are more intelligent people being born today than a few years ago? Or we're better schooling people?
These are large questions that are ripe for longer discussion. To some extent-- for instance, with no ripple effect from the depression-- perhaps not "birthing" more intelligent people, but yielding more from nutrition and other effects.
Not every bright person goes to a Tier 1, nor should. But access has increased dramatically in the past half-century, which means, a lot of the bright people you meet in the US will have gone to the top Tier, an received that education.
A better question, for me, might be-- what should the education for the next tiers look like? At the moment, it seems to be a mixture of watered down elite "liberal arts" education, and purely tech education-- "become a radio tech, forget anything else."
Neither seem to work very well to me, for the majority of the population.
Well, if we're moving to that level, I'd prefer Piaget to Binet, at which point you get an IQ assessment that lasts 8-16 hours and is highly variegated by task and skill.
And you could of course look at what happens in France or Germany and so forth, when a full third or society or so have access to relatively high-quality education.
My brunt here is-- that's not what's happening in the US. In the US, with a "failing education system," two-thirds of the population is being told to strive for positions of which, there is only room for 3% or so, and of which, only 3% or so are qualified. They're also often told, that their self-worth is tied to being one of those classes.
Equally, they're provided with education to become one of these things, and blithely told by their teachers and professors that they can become one of these things, when in reality, they really can't, and the education they're being given, is more of a Potemkin exercise than a reality.
I am reminded of an anthropology student at a third-tier state university, who sincerely believed that her career path was to become an anthropology professor. She continued to believe this despite having grades so low that she could not gain admission to the graduate program in her state, and after getting 550/800 on her GRE subject test.
A fresh-minted Ph.D. from the anthropology program at Yale might have a 1/3rd chance of securing an academic career-- the odds for this poor woman were probably closer to 1 in 1000. Yet she was surrounded by people like her, spending years of their lives, and accumulating debt, working towards a goal that they can't achieve.
And thinking that if they work in an office or at a restaurant or in a factory-- all contributions to society-- , that it's not good enough, and that they're too good for such positions.
That's the tragedy, if not a recipe for disaster.
Well, what's it take to play in the NFL versus the Farm Leagues? It's the same-- in fact, sports at the professional level, display even more of a demonstrable tendency towards what seem to be purely genetic pre-requirements.
The distinction you're making is between being a research assistant or lab tech, and being a research scientist. Again, I didn't say the US should not encourage people to pursue science-related "careers." I claimed that large segments of the population that they can become future scientists (or doctors or ... what not) and then spending the money to provide them with "education," loosely speaking, to become things they will not by all odds become, is a waste of resources and thus, in simpler language, just plain stupid.
That's not poor in America. That's black in America, which is a different thing.
More seriously, your poor in America, crack-mom etc example is certainly a heart-wrenching anecdote, but how many of the people in the US in the top 1% or even 5% by intelligence live in such circumstances? You might as well tel us about the genius who is struck by lightening every month, and then hit by a bus on his way to Stanford.
Sure, there are a few guys or gals out there like that, but they don't matter STATISTICALLY. They're extreme outliers-- not representative.
Otherwise-- I didn't say growing up in the US was fair, or that it was easy, or even that the system worked for people in the circumstances you describe. The brunt of my thesis is that it makes absolutely no sense to spend resources, and "prepare," people for careers that they have no chance of performing in.
Otherwise-- sorry, there are problems, certainly there are problems, but for the vast majority of the "poor" in the US who also have the demonstrated intelligence, the opportunity is there. There may be other problems and injustices in the system, but the idea that the poor and intelligent do not have access to education in the US, is largely a combination of bunk and resentment.
But coming up with a problem to solve is also part of problem solving, "creativity" is part of intelligence (if a part of intelligence that is often not measured well by IQ tests in the US), and general intelligence increases the ability to acquire/remember learned skills "experience." So you haven't gotten us anywhere.
>Almost half of the American population believes in creationism.
And G-d made it that way!
Seriously, this is what happens when you let people who don't have the brains, breed... what was that movie?
But: success? Who said anything about 'success'? OP was about "future scientists."
Sure, in the US the first indicator of future wealth is the size of daddy's wallet and mommy's tits. Which may or may not have anything to do with intelligence. But if we're talking about generating functioning, effective scientists-- not scientists playing scientist because of daddy's money-- then the factor that matters is grey matter, not green stuff.
A doctor is like a mechanic? Do you have any idea of the body of technical knowledge a surgeon has to keep current on? Any idea?
(Stops to laugh).
I can certainly see why a doctor rushes you out of the office.
This is about "producing future scientists."
It is not about the fact that someone with a 150 IQ might be "unmotivated." That has nothing to do with it.
I'm sorry, if you need to master multivariate calculus, or regression analysis, or any of 100 other skills where IQ is a strong predictor of ability and performance, then IQ does matter a lot, and hard work, dedication and the like don't mean that much.
If your IQ is 100, for many of these tasks, you'll be able to solve them but it will take 2, 5, or 10 times as long. There will be some things that will be immediately obvious to a 150+ IQ, that you'll NEVER get-- or that will take you a week to work out.
For some percentage X of those tasks necessary to being a scientist, the person with 100 IQ will either take much, much longer-- on the order of 10x or greater-- or simply be unable to complete the task. X is greater than 30%.
That's all. The performance difference is significant and huge. And every sub-120 IQ here can mod this down all they want. It doesn't change the reality and never will. Only 3% or less of the population can perform the tasks. Finding those 3% and training them, is the task, not "inspiring" anyone.
No, actually, when you're poor and smart in the US, you apply to the Golden Dozen of colleges and universities, and get a full ride -- all elite universities currently essentially provide full rides for admits with familial incomes less than $75,000/yr, which isn't exactly "poor." When you're a little less smart, you go to the next tier and get a "merit scholarship" and actually get PAID to attend. When you're rich-- well, the money can help a little, and that upsets the meritocracy a bit.\
The problem comes when you're poor, and stupid. This makes you willing to take on $50K in debt, to spend eight years at Lower Nowhere State University.
Crap. One ./er actually bothered to look at data. I am astounded and amazed.
Seriously, however, while hard work (and being willing to be an hours slave to the establishment) is a part of it, all of these positions remain significant indexed by IQ.
Oh come on. We've reached the point where everyone has to feel good about themselves, and be told that they can make a meaningful contribution to society blah blah blah. What a load of crap.
If your school didn't shout this mantra, then congratulations. You went to P.S. NoWhere, along with the rest of America's nobodies. You are effectively (though not exclusively) tracked out of being part of the economic elite.
This changes nothing about the situation. No one with an "aptitude for science" is less than two standard deviations above the Bell Curve. These people are effectively found by standardized testing, and the best path for the US, would be to devote resources to them instead of Buffy and Bill. The idea that people need to be "inspired to science" is a myth propagated by high school science teachers who want better salaries.
Imagine what it would do it if WAS a requirement :)
And look where those admissions slots go-- people who are largely in the top percentile as measured by grades, test scores or any other standard measure. (Sure, you're right, the US needs more of them, has a deficit of doctors, but getting admitted is a factor, largely, of demonstrated intelligence).
Hog-poop. IQ is a rough measure of problem-solving ability. Science is about problem-solving, medicine largely is, and law should be. If you don't have the neurons for it, you don't have the ability; someone with a greater than 150 IQ is five standard deviations above the average and is going to master (solve) a lot of problems faster and better than the average joe.
Anything else is liberal BS and wishful thinking. Deal with it.
Ever read the Bell Curve?
Sure, it "is not fixed." Perhaps you can train your brain to perform a half of a standard deviation above your average. But that's about it. It's reality. It's fixed.
You may not like that reality, but the kind of thinking you seem to be espousing, is that which makes my niece with a 19 ACT think she can get into a good college and get a scholarship, without work. She thinks she's entitled to it. And that's about all she thinks.
And I didn't say "a job in the science professions." I wrote "a scientist." And the reality is, only 1% of the population, more or less, has the intelligence and wherewithall to perform as a "scientist" and not a "research assistant."
How many professors are there in the US population, for instance? How many undergrads are taught that they can become professors? The difference is over 1:1000, and that's a problem.
Those kids must be going to the school designated for the second arc. With the hairdressers.
Is not to inspire future scientists. It is that every kid with an IQ of 90 or more is told that they can be a doctor, lawyer, or scientist, and allocated resources as if they could, when only the 1st percentile or less can actually fill these positions.
I don't see how 'movies' solves this problem: instead, it makes people with Wal-Mart skills, think that they *should* have a better lot in life, and resent that something is wrong if they don't, and spend money trying to get degrees that are meaningless, and so forth ad infinitum.
PS. The German paragraph goes more like this:
The Problem is the the mentality of government workers: Peter Schaar, Secretary of Public Information, pushes for more transparency. "Even though citizens have had a legal right to public information for five years, there are still many functionaries, that build walls around information," he stated to the SD. Above all, the financial sector is a particularly bad information hoarder.
OK, so you don't know what transliteration is :).
Transliteration is the process of taking representation of expressions in one character set, and "trans-" "literating" them into another character set, with the idea of producing a representation that in the 'target' language will be 'pronounced' as it would be 'pronounced' in the 'origin' language.
Since Google translate is using phrase-stem based approaches, I'm actually surprised that it took it so long to get good and simple back-forth. However, the result in German is in no way impressive. It would sound to the average German-speaker on the street, as -- let's try a better example, the current headline on Süddeutsche Zeitung:
>The crux of the public service culture: The Federal Commissioner for Freedom of Information, Peter Schaar insisting on more openness. "Although citizens in five years have a legal right to access information, there are still too many authorities, the support, " he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In particular, the financial information is a persistent objector. Daniel Kuhr, Berlin
That has enough errors in it, that the 'crux' of the matter is substantively missed and the reader is deceived if they think they've got anything but a very fuzzy picture of what's going on.
Let's test this theory:
>Google translate already does a stunningly good job with similar languages. German to English is quite good, but the two languages are so close transliteration almost always works. Also German is a very ordered rule based language, English is a mess. I have no idea about the various forms of Chinese.
To German:
>Google übersetzen bereits tut ein erstaunlich guten Job mit ähnlichen Sprachen. Deutsch auf Englisch ist ziemlich gut, aber die beiden Sprachen sind so nah Transliteration fast immer funktioniert. Auch Deutsch ist eine sehr geordnete regelbasierte Sprache, Englisch ist ein Durcheinander. Ich habe keine Ahnung über die verschiedenen Formen der Chinesen.
Back to English:
>Google translate is already doing a surprisingly good job with similar languages. German to English is pretty good, but the two languages are so close transliteration almost always works. Also, German is a very minor rule-based language, English is a mess. I have no idea about the various forms of Chinese.
Not too bad, except for turning Deutsch into a very minor language, and the fact that many native German speakers might laugh at the heavily angliciszed version of German there. The PP used 'transliteration' for 'translation,' so I guess you can't blame GT for that.
A better, more interesting question might be, how GT is likely to change the form of the languages.
I was trying to think of an amusing joke, which would no doubt be modded down by all the AC's swarming and insulting the Chinese.
Suffice to say that the fact that Chinese will be the most prevalent language used for chatter between grandma and the kids, does not make it the "dominant" language of the internet(s).
As for a fluff journalist summary on /., which means next to nothing or is downright deceptive-- welcome to /. This is not exactly new, is it? I beginning to think this is why some countries have a problem with people shooting journalists!
~
Did the OP actually use American Baptists as an example of thinking you're better than everyone else (but being wrong)? Heh.
Whatever. It's called sarcasm, which is a linguistic construct you are evidently unable or unwilling to take the time to comprehend, regardless of your UID.
The immediately following post takes the same view as me (or anyone with a sense of humor, or an IQ above 100)-- the summary is terrible, because it says exactly that the book tells you how to write "Hello World," and a poor summary that is contradicted by the article is STUPID.
Otherwise, having been here for well over a decade, I'm pretty much in agreement with those who believe that /. has been invaded by idiots, and the moderation system fails because idiocy is modded up while insight, humor or dissent is often modded down by the abusive, brain-dead morons it allows to be users.
See: http://slashdot.org/journal/239880/Slashdot-moderation-is-awful