For example, who is more intelligent, someone who has a great deal of practical street smarts, or someone who can learn every word in the dictionary in one sitting?
'Streets Smarts' is not a form of intelligence, it is a form of wisdom. It is a set of accumulated knowledge about how to act in certain situations (many of them dangerous). Based on the meaning of intelligence, if you took two groups of 1,000 people who have no experience on the street (no Street Smarts) with all members of group A having IQ=100 and all members of group B having IQ=120 and put them on the street, you would expect that after x days/weeks/months, group B would have accumulated more Street Smarts. Intelligence (let's use 'g', general intelligence) is basically how fast you can learn.
As for someone who can learn the dictionary in one sitting: while intelligent people tend to remember things better (not universally), anyone who can memorize the dictionary at one sitting is some kind of savant. I wouldn't necessarily expect her to be very intelligent.
What about emotional intelligence, is someone who is capable of memorizing a dictionary more likely to thrive within a romantic relationship?
The fallacy here is using the term 'emotional intelligence'. Why not say 'people skills'? Terms such as 'emotional intelligence' exist to try to discredit or deny 'g', a factor of 'general intelligence'. There is a movement in American (at least) to claim that Intelligence does not exist. One tactic has been to dilute the term by prepending all kinds of unrelated modifiers. How about 'sports intelligence' (formerly known as athletic prowess). 'Musical intelligence' used to be called 'talent'.
Basically, the problem I have with studies like this, is that they actually focus on a subset.
Yes, they focus on the subset of skills and talents that is called 'Intelligence' (or 'general intelligence' or 'g' if you want to see past attempts to pollute our understanding of intelligence).
Here's a thought to help us cut through the BS: we have many IQ tests which resemble each other very little but correlate very highly. Whether or not what they are measuring exists from the same sets of genes, we can now say that we can measure 'g'. Do not assume that high g will equal economic success*, or happiness, or health, or anything else that is desirable. But yes, we can measure g and g is what we meant by Intelligence until the PC crowd tried to destroy the term.
* Actually, my experience on this is skewed. You will probably find a high correlation between IQ and economic success if you avoid the highest IQs. I know many people in Mensa, one of whom is a janitor, several are substitute teachers (and earn less than full-time teachers), several are unemployed, many have never been well paid. Some of these people have terrible people skills, some aren't motivated by money at all! A sursprisingly large number of Mensans are postal carriers (perhaps they prefer solitude, and they probably scored very highly on the Civil Service Exam, so they got hiring preference.) For those who don't know, Mensa membership is only open to those with IQs in the top 2% in their nation.
Not by design. As with Assualt Rifles, it sometimes happens that landmines maim rather than kill, but (unlike blinding weapons) landmines were not designed to be non-lethal (hence the high-explosive and shrapnel).
I agree that war is part of our basic nature, it is born from the failure of politics.
Or perhaps war is the inevitable result of the existence of politics. Politics is necessarily competitive and adversarial. The rewards are immense and the most desireable seats are naturally limited (the smallest bodies governing the largest areas have the most concentrated power and the highest prestige).
Politicians need to be seen to be "doing something". Successfully governing a quiet Utopia will be boring and look easy. Rivals can offer 'more' or 'less' or 'cheaper', and some number of people will fall in line. Good, stable governance is not safe from agitation.
And when things are going really bady: throw a war. Everybody will show up for the first year or two, and by the time they have realize how much you have screwed things up, you can say things like "stay the course", "don't change horses in mid-stream", and "we would dishonor the memories of those who have already died if we didn't kill a bunch more."
You should read Eisenhower's entire 'Cross of Iron' speech. One paragraph is often excerpted (rather well), but the entire speech is even better. It is amazing that such opinions could come from a General and a Republican. You can see h/crossow low the Republican party has sunk in the last ~50 years.
Maybe if they both get hurt financially this sort of thing won't happen again.
Yeah, because Sony learned their lesson when Betamax got kicked in the nuts. The only thing that could make this story funnier were if it were Panasonic instead of Toshiba going up against Sony.
Falling back on terms such as 'Intellectual arrogance' is lazy. We have tools to measure intelligence to a fairly high degree of certainty. I can tell you how many Americans are smarter than I am (+/- ~100K). It is true that no one has done a good job of correlating the various tests between nations, so we can't compare internationally.
Even in San Francisco, the average home price is ~$400K, and in the tech hotbed where I live (not CA), I paid $150K for a spacious 4 bedroom.
BTW, growing-up I lived in two places that could be called 'the boonies'. IIRC, 100% of our AP English students went away to college (the local CC had a poor reputation). I know that the three smartest students didn't go back, and I would be surprised if even half of them did.
This rural brain drain is not an original idea. As early as WWI, rural dwellers lamented, "How can we keep our boys on the farm after they have seen gay Paris?" Look at rent control in NYC after WWII. After we had so many deaths, why was there an explosion in the need for housing in NYC? Were boys from New York returning with French and British wives in such large numbers to cause problems? No, mostly it was people from less urban areas deciding not to return home. And from personal experience, the cream-of-the-crop at our boonies High School was scouted (usually offered scholarships) to leave the area and go to college. What makes you think that this brain drain isn't happening?
And since this helps soothe the well-paid, "I know more than you", urban digerati here on Slashdot... we won't be seeing this thread get modded very far.
Newsflash: some people do know more than other people. And when companies start filling $50k+ positions, they usually seek-out those who know more. So yes, the rural backwaters are being drained of brains as fast as universities and corporations can draw them out. This has been going on in the US for roughly 50 years, so it is not ridiculous to posit that the average San Franciscan likely does know more than the average Kansan. Viva la urban digerati.
The only problem with windows, is that it is designed for the Average User.
Windows isn't designed for the Average User. It's designed for the enrichment of Microsoft's shareholders. And it has served them much better than it has served any of us.
Who cares what OS was used to run the program that allowed this development?
The doctors probably shouldn't care, but this is a news site for Geeks. We care about the OS. We (most of us) like to see companies ignore FUD and bogus TCO studies. We (most of us) gleefully point-out that when lives are on the line, many companies don't trust Microsoft products.
Booting the machine in Knoppix requires that the 'bad guy' have physical access to the machine. Even if physical access cannot be well restricted, you can turn-off 'boot from CDROM' in the bios, and password-protect the bios. Now the 'bad guy' has to open the machine, find the motherboard-type, find out which jumper clears the bios password(s), etc. Most machines can also be padlocked shut, so now the 'bad guy' needs to bring a Dremel or such.
If you made $10M as a spammer and had to repay $20M, even successful criminals would be deterred.
Can you think of any legal way for this guy to earn the other $10M? At my relatively-highly-paid IT job, I can figure making about $3M (2005 dollars) in my career. Fining someone $10M who isn't uber-rich is silly. Amazon patent class silly. You might as well making 'curing cancer' part of the guy's sentence.
If they can't pay up, I'm sure there are some boys in Fallujah...
You really don't seem to have much respect for our troops. Most of these guys aren't rocket scientists, but they are highly trained and skilled professionals. If you want to shoot a spammer in the head, do it. But don't inflict that loser on a platoon of honest troops; it could get them all killed.
The real problem isn't that free markets "don't work". They do - in fact they're the only system that actually works.
That depends on what your definition of 'works' is. If you want to maximize the concentration of wealth in the fewest number of hands, then free markets are probably the best mechanism. If you want a well clothed, fed, housed and educated populace who have the time, energy, ability and right to participate in a democracy, then free markets kind of suck.
No theft, sure. No fraud, yeah. But that's it.
How about no child labor? How about preventing you from forcing your employees to work unpaid overtime and/or work in hazardous conditions just because you can guarantee that none of the employers in your town (who happen to be members of your country club) will hire them if they refuse.
Slashdot Mirror
'Streets Smarts' is not a form of intelligence, it is a form of wisdom. It is a set of accumulated knowledge about how to act in certain situations (many of them dangerous). Based on the meaning of intelligence, if you took two groups of 1,000 people who have no experience on the street (no Street Smarts) with all members of group A having IQ=100 and all members of group B having IQ=120 and put them on the street, you would expect that after x days/weeks/months, group B would have accumulated more Street Smarts. Intelligence (let's use 'g', general intelligence) is basically how fast you can learn.
As for someone who can learn the dictionary in one sitting: while intelligent people tend to remember things better (not universally), anyone who can memorize the dictionary at one sitting is some kind of savant. I wouldn't necessarily expect her to be very intelligent.
What about emotional intelligence, is someone who is capable of memorizing a dictionary more likely to thrive within a romantic relationship?
The fallacy here is using the term 'emotional intelligence'. Why not say 'people skills'? Terms such as 'emotional intelligence' exist to try to discredit or deny 'g', a factor of 'general intelligence'. There is a movement in American (at least) to claim that Intelligence does not exist. One tactic has been to dilute the term by prepending all kinds of unrelated modifiers. How about 'sports intelligence' (formerly known as athletic prowess). 'Musical intelligence' used to be called 'talent'.
Basically, the problem I have with studies like this, is that they actually focus on a subset.
Yes, they focus on the subset of skills and talents that is called 'Intelligence' (or 'general intelligence' or 'g' if you want to see past attempts to pollute our understanding of intelligence).
Here's a thought to help us cut through the BS: we have many IQ tests which resemble each other very little but correlate very highly. Whether or not what they are measuring exists from the same sets of genes, we can now say that we can measure 'g'. Do not assume that high g will equal economic success*, or happiness, or health, or anything else that is desirable. But yes, we can measure g and g is what we meant by Intelligence until the PC crowd tried to destroy the term.
* Actually, my experience on this is skewed. You will probably find a high correlation between IQ and economic success if you avoid the highest IQs. I know many people in Mensa, one of whom is a janitor, several are substitute teachers (and earn less than full-time teachers), several are unemployed, many have never been well paid. Some of these people have terrible people skills, some aren't motivated by money at all! A sursprisingly large number of Mensans are postal carriers (perhaps they prefer solitude, and they probably scored very highly on the Civil Service Exam, so they got hiring preference.) For those who don't know, Mensa membership is only open to those with IQs in the top 2% in their nation.
Actually, the point was innuendo based on the American (English too?) idiom: beating off.
Not by design. As with Assualt Rifles, it sometimes happens that landmines maim rather than kill, but (unlike blinding weapons) landmines were not designed to be non-lethal (hence the high-explosive and shrapnel).
Or perhaps war is the inevitable result of the existence of politics. Politics is necessarily competitive and adversarial. The rewards are immense and the most desireable seats are naturally limited (the smallest bodies governing the largest areas have the most concentrated power and the highest prestige).
Politicians need to be seen to be "doing something". Successfully governing a quiet Utopia will be boring and look easy. Rivals can offer 'more' or 'less' or 'cheaper', and some number of people will fall in line. Good, stable governance is not safe from agitation.
And when things are going really bady: throw a war. Everybody will show up for the first year or two, and by the time they have realize how much you have screwed things up, you can say things like "stay the course", "don't change horses in mid-stream", and "we would dishonor the memories of those who have already died if we didn't kill a bunch more."
I know that the Romans sank into depravity, but I have never read a credible account of the Romans beating off the Visigoths.
You should read Eisenhower's entire 'Cross of Iron' speech. One paragraph is often excerpted (rather well), but the entire speech is even better. It is amazing that such opinions could come from a General and a Republican. You can see h/crossow low the Republican party has sunk in the last ~50 years.
Yeah, because Sony learned their lesson when Betamax got kicked in the nuts. The only thing that could make this story funnier were if it were Panasonic instead of Toshiba going up against Sony.
I hate to break it to you, but robots are the product of Intelligent Design.
Even in San Francisco, the average home price is ~$400K, and in the tech hotbed where I live (not CA), I paid $150K for a spacious 4 bedroom.
BTW, growing-up I lived in two places that could be called 'the boonies'. IIRC, 100% of our AP English students went away to college (the local CC had a poor reputation). I know that the three smartest students didn't go back, and I would be surprised if even half of them did.
This rural brain drain is not an original idea. As early as WWI, rural dwellers lamented, "How can we keep our boys on the farm after they have seen gay Paris?" Look at rent control in NYC after WWII. After we had so many deaths, why was there an explosion in the need for housing in NYC? Were boys from New York returning with French and British wives in such large numbers to cause problems? No, mostly it was people from less urban areas deciding not to return home. And from personal experience, the cream-of-the-crop at our boonies High School was scouted (usually offered scholarships) to leave the area and go to college. What makes you think that this brain drain isn't happening?
This is the one case where there can be "too much RAM".
Which of these things are you saying does not naturally exist: corporation, soul, or 'Intellectual Property'?
Newsflash: some people do know more than other people. And when companies start filling $50k+ positions, they usually seek-out those who know more. So yes, the rural backwaters are being drained of brains as fast as universities and corporations can draw them out. This has been going on in the US for roughly 50 years, so it is not ridiculous to posit that the average San Franciscan likely does know more than the average Kansan. Viva la urban digerati.
There are some towns in Utah where this definition breaks down. Most of the Middle East too.
Windows isn't designed for the Average User. It's designed for the enrichment of Microsoft's shareholders. And it has served them much better than it has served any of us.
Sort of like how all those restaurant owners in NYC 'need' the protection of the Mafia.
The doctors probably shouldn't care, but this is a news site for Geeks. We care about the OS. We (most of us) like to see companies ignore FUD and bogus TCO studies. We (most of us) gleefully point-out that when lives are on the line, many companies don't trust Microsoft products.
No, but it's funny asking /.'ers if blindess can be caused by habits.
It's a WORN backup system: Write Once, Read Never
Booting the machine in Knoppix requires that the 'bad guy' have physical access to the machine. Even if physical access cannot be well restricted, you can turn-off 'boot from CDROM' in the bios, and password-protect the bios. Now the 'bad guy' has to open the machine, find the motherboard-type, find out which jumper clears the bios password(s), etc. Most machines can also be padlocked shut, so now the 'bad guy' needs to bring a Dremel or such.
Can you think of any legal way for this guy to earn the other $10M? At my relatively-highly-paid IT job, I can figure making about $3M (2005 dollars) in my career. Fining someone $10M who isn't uber-rich is silly. Amazon patent class silly. You might as well making 'curing cancer' part of the guy's sentence.
If they can't pay up, I'm sure there are some boys in Fallujah ...
You really don't seem to have much respect for our troops. Most of these guys aren't rocket scientists, but they are highly trained and skilled professionals. If you want to shoot a spammer in the head, do it. But don't inflict that loser on a platoon of honest troops; it could get them all killed.
To be fair, the only people who got 'hurt' by all of that spam were AOL users. Let's all repeat the helpdesk mantra: Stupidity should be painful.
Don't you mean: ((The O(n)e) Goo(d)) (Lan)gua(((ge is L)i)s)p
GWB and co. are not Conservative; they are 'neo-cons'. True Conservatives such as John McCain are as marginalized by the neo-cons as the liberals are.
That depends on what your definition of 'works' is. If you want to maximize the concentration of wealth in the fewest number of hands, then free markets are probably the best mechanism. If you want a well clothed, fed, housed and educated populace who have the time, energy, ability and right to participate in a democracy, then free markets kind of suck.
No theft, sure. No fraud, yeah. But that's it.
How about no child labor? How about preventing you from forcing your employees to work unpaid overtime and/or work in hazardous conditions just because you can guarantee that none of the employers in your town (who happen to be members of your country club) will hire them if they refuse.
Yes, but people evolved to eat cow-moving muscle.