A couple in Paris enjoyed some wine near the Arc de Triomphe on Saturday — while protesters set bins on fire and looted stores nearby.

The Greatest Factory Ever Built youtu.be/6bOhX9Xgw1I?is=8c6d… via @YouTube

My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do

holy shit i asked claude to make a video on western civiization

It’s been a helluva 24 hours on this platform. Apparently I kicked a hornet’s nest when I said there’s no such thing as a “heritage American” in any meaningful racial sense. We’re all basically mutts anyway, and deriving a superiority complex from accomplishments to which you personally contributed precisely nothing is vainglorious nonsense. What’s especially funny is how these self-appointed “heritage Americans” want to inherit every ounce of ancestral glory while accepting none of the shame. They’ll claim the Founders’ courage, the pioneers’ grit, the soldiers’ sacrifice, and the builders’ industry as evidence of their own superiority. But slavery? Jim Crow? Racial violence? Whoa, whoa, whoa. That was other people. Nothing to do with me. Sorry. If you want to take personal credit for everything your ancestors did well, you don’t get to suddenly become an individualist when the ugly parts come up. Here’s my hot take: Preserve whatever is actually worthy of preserving. Save the songs, traditions, recipes, stories of courage, faith, sacrifice, and resilience. Celebrate your heritage freely and without apology. But do it without the bigotry, too. Leave the racist wickedness in the past where it belongs. You do not honor your ancestors by embalming their sins. Better yet, carry your own weight. Make your own contribution instead of freeloading off the accomplishments of people five generations before you while hiding behind a medieval-knight avatar and cosplaying at greatness from your couch. Character is not hereditary. You want an inheritance worth bragging about? Live a life your descendants will someday be proud to inherit. You can keep calling me every grotesque name you can invent. Rapist. Mudshark. Fat Jezebel whore. Whatever. I don’t give a flying fig what maladaptive keyboard cowards think or say about me. If the trans lobby couldn’t shut me up, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. I could be the worst woman who ever walked the earth and the argument would still be true: You don’t get to cosplay your ancestors’ greatness while contributing none of your own. Stay mad, fellas. The truth is resilient.

Be honest. If you jumped into a manual car, could you drive it?

Warped Nostalgia from a parallel world. (Image circulating widely on the Web.)

The dirty secret about BBC articles about intelligence: They’re rigged. This BBC hit-piece on cognitive ability and IQ is wrong at almost every step. sciencefocus.com/science/iq-… The BBC’s Science Focus argues we should ‘kill IQ scores for good’ because they don't measure the entirety of human capability. This is a Logic 101 failure. IQ or ‘intelligence quotient’ is indeed often measured using questions that test logic, memory and reasoning. Why? Because these are the components of rationality. How people do in them is crucial in daily life and success over time – to whether they will give you good advice, or bad, to whether they are competent or incompetent. Cognitive ability tests are indeed often standardised so that the average IQ is 100, with around two-thirds of people scoring between 85 and 115. So far, so Ok. But the hit piece claims we should ”kill IQ scores for good”. Let’s see how well it makes this case. The meat of the hit piece is that IQ isn’t a perfect and totalising measure of the entire of human capability. The non-sequitur conclusion from this obvious truth? Don’t use cognitive tests. That’s a fail on logic 101. At best, this is like criticizing paying attention to a predictive feature – say the location of a house – because it is “incomplete”. In an over-determined world, the argument to ignore everything which is not a total account of everything is an argument for complete ignorance. Defining intelligence Part of the problem with cognitive ability, critics argue, is that IQ scores simplify an incredibly complex characteristic. The truth is almost the reverse: intelligence researchers always emphasize the need to measure many - as many as you can - different cognitive tasks. That’s why the Wechsler adult intelligence test has a 15 (recently increased to 17!) distinct sub tests. So much for simplifying. The truth is that the real simplification was a major discovery: the surprising discovery that all those dozens of cognitive tasks, from art to physics, to reasoning, to memory to technical drawing, to mental rotation and so on all correlate highly: that there is a general factor of intelligence. This general factor grabs so much of the variance in cognition (around half) that it is nearly always the single best predictor of performance not just in school, but at work, and in life. Because it is general, it predicts things falling far from the test used to assess it. Journalists and activists imply that unlike taking someone’s “height or weight, which are simple to measure and can be described with a single number, intelligence is a multi-faceted trait.” This exposes another persistent myth: Height, exactly like cognitive ability, is driven by hundreds of components: vertebrae height, femur length, cranial height. Just like the g-factor in intelligence, genes that make one body part taller tend to operate systemically. Both are highly heritable, highly polygenic, and possess a strong general factor alongside specific compartments. The journalist claims “Scientists haven’t even been able to agree on a definition.” This old trope (it goes back to an off-hand 1923 comment by Boring in a weekly magazine that IQ is “what the tests measure”) is foolish for two reasons. First, there are numerous papers detailing consensus agreement on what intelligence is. Second, science doesn’t work by biblical decree: researchers construct falsifiable theories about intelligence, and test them. Always has been this way. The critique is like critiquing physics for not “defining temperature” at the outset rather than puzzling over what it meant, working on measures, arguing about what disagreement between measures meant, and, in the never-ending process that is science, realizing that temperature was the average kinetic energy of molecules in a substance. Intelligence is a very important and valuable trait. And it is the most reliably and validly measured trait in all of human behavior science. And it is not even close. Test scores are stable over multiple decades, and the plethora of tests developed over time all converge on the same trait. To attack cognitive ability because if doesn’t measure everything about human adaptability and thriving is absurd. The critique is like suggesting that muscle strength, because it fails to explain everything about sporting performance is useless or “flawed”. The opposite is true. By breaking performance into distinct features linked to distinct biologies: pulmonary function, muscle strength and speed, coordination, etc., we can explain human performance. It’s not a flaw that muscle strength doesn’t explain all of lung function, it’s a feature. Likewise the finding that intelligence tests don’t explain all human capabilities like creativity, or empathy is not a valid criticism. It makes as much sense as finding the theories in physics unifying electricity and magnetism are flawed or even malicious (!) because they don’t explain the strong forces inside the nucleus. It’s… well, it is a fundamental misunderstanding. The claim that while “IQ tests do a good job of measuring conscious problem-solving skills, they can’t assess whether we choose to apply those skills at the right moment, rather than falling back on our instincts” is simply false. Bright people have much better intuitions, including intuitions about when a problem that appears easy to a novice is one which in fact will require conscious effort to solve. That’s why general ability is almost perfectly correlated with rationality: the ability to not be lured by easy but wrong solutions. Again, the critics of cognitive ability research are being..well, a fundamental misunderstanding of individual differences. Far from it being the case that “IQ scores are only loosely correlated with academic achievement, the general factor of ability (g) correlates at ~0.8 with academic achievement! This exposes another persistent myth from the IQ hit-squad – that IQ is “just school smarts”. The truth is that IQ is both the most practically relevant skill (it out predicts all other measures in assessing work performance) AND it shines above all other measures at predicting performance in school. IQ tests are correlated with school performance in kids who have never previously sat an IQ test. The lengths of “what-aboutery” in IQ hit pieces is, to be honest, simply staggering. IQ scores “might” risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – a poor score early in life “might” influence how a child is taught, what opportunities they are given and even how they view themselves. On the other hand, a good score can let a kid skip a class and work on material more suited to their ability. Advance their knowledge more rapidly, and bring us the fruits of more years dedicated to exploiting that trained intelligence to the benefit of us all. Bob Sternberg is cited as arguing that “The attributes [of intelligence] are universal. You need practical intelligence everywhere. You need creativity everywhere. But what is practical differs from one place to another.” But how much does it differ? Performance on ability tests predicts, for instance, the broad swath of economic development across all countries. Bright people placed in novel environments and forced to learn new responses excel in this kind of “practicality”. So much so that adaptation – coping with novelty – is core to the definition of intelligence! Intelligence at its heart is solving and storing the answers to problems. In our own society these have changed dramatically, and IQ keeps on predicting who will do this, at least as well as it ever did. The evidence suggests if anything intelligence is more relevant now than ever, due to the complexity of technology. But theories of the origins of human intelligence emphasize that this adaptability –perfecting new tools, interacting with other people to solve problems, strategizing, learning, remembering is precisely the human niche. To suggest these abilities are not relevant outside our society is implausible. But it’s testable. Do the genes identified as causing higher ability in studies in the WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) world predict performance in the global south? The phenotypic structure of g remains consistent across cultures, and as global GWAS data improves, the biological architecture will likely prove as universal as the architecture for height. This hit-piece mentions that “Standard IQ tests” rely heavily on skills that are developed through formal education. That’s back-to-front to what the developer of the modern ability test (Binet) set as his goal. Knowing his task (set by the French government as they rolled out universal education and found many children struggling) was not to measure education, but to measure educability - the ability to learn. So he precisely chose materials from outside of school. Materials that were present universally in daily life. As to the idea that intelligence is somehow inconsistent with the idea of learning, this is both fundamentally wrong (IQ is precisely about learning) and, personally I don’t know anyone who thinks we learn nothing at school or in life. It’s a straw man. Equally, however, no one with experience (for instance teachers) can fail to observe that children learn at dramatically different rates). The two ideas – that most of what we know we learn or discover, and that people differ in their rate of learning and discovery– are distinct and separate findings: individual differences in learning rate (cognitive ability) and effects of systematic practice on the curated cumulative knowledge of a culture (education). This hit piece then veers off from merely wrong to malicious. Something more sinister Short circuiting the reader’s thinking for them, the author pre-concludes a sinister and “disquieting” side to IQ scores. The sin? To “compare nations’ average IQ scores”. The author suggests psychologists shouldn't bother collecting nationally representative cognitive data because it ‘isn’t useful.’ Fortunately, global economists and initiatives like PISA and TIMSS ignored this advice. Their data shows cognitive performance predicts national socio-economic success (GDP per capita, human capital) with surprising precision across the globe. But the hit-piece concludes that psychologists and anthropologists should not invest the ‘time and energy needed to collect nationally representative data on IQ” because “this data just isn’t useful”’. So, are the massive and “dangerous” national differences an artifact of poor sampling which would disappear under improved measurement? If so, seems like it would a GREAT idea to invest the trivial resources to measure this… Luckily, economists, and global efforts like PISA and TIMS have stepped in to do just this: improve representative measurement of cognitive performance globally. Their findings align extremely closely to the predictions from smaller IQ-based studies, and far from being “not useful”, predict national socio-economic success and the trajectory of success, with nearly equal accuracy across the world, and with a surprisingly high degree of precision. If we wish to predict performance, cognitive tests are doing a great job trans-nationally: Countries with lower average scores exhibit lower (often many times lower) outcomes on measures like GDP/capita, social capital, human capital etc. The hit pieces on IQ, then, arise not because the tests don’t predict well - they do all too well - but instead because of that this means in terms of the causes of achievement. The choices often fall to culture (“people are identical, but some cultures crush development”) versus the consensus in when scientists are surveyed, which is that people differ in ability AND that this is both a cause of low performance cultures, and is in part caused by the culture (and in part by genes), often in a mutually reinforcing harness or loop. This question will be resolved by biologically informed studies. However, as people contain both their genes and their culture, the difference often doesn’t matter for prediction (although it does for explanation). The end of the line for IQ? The hit-piece author notes that “IQ has held such a prominent position for so long” because it’s easy to measure. That’s quite the acknowledgment (!). But of course IQ tests have retained the influence they have, despite concerted opposition, not because they are quickest test on the shelf (they aren’t), but because in predicting future performance at school or in work IQ reliably outperforms everything except direct measures of prior performance on the same tasks. People are not “suckers for things that are easy to measure” – they are choosing measures that work. The conclusion of this hit piece is a nadir or reasoning (a good vocabulary test item): “it’s unlikely that any test can ever fully capture the complexity of intelligence across the full spectrum of cultural diversity” Therefore “Since IQ scores tell us so little and can be used to do so much harm, maybe it’s time we abandon them for good.” Let’s take this seriously for a moment. If tests struggle to capture the complexity of intelligence, the logical response would be to develop tests of intelligence that do capture this complexity and work in different cultures. But doing this is “business as usual” for test developers. Many test developers have tried to be culture neutral, and the results just do not differ materially from the tests we have. They either get the same rank order results, or add bias. Personally, I would say that measures such as inspection time and reaction time have probably been underutilized, but in general, a lot of people have expended enough energy that I think it’s fair to conclude that the tests have explored this potential dark matter of intelligence and come up empty handed. Point 2 is simply an opinion - “I think these test should not be used”. As a factual claim it is not coherent and is at odds with the known facts. IQ scores out-predict all other measures of performance. Personality doesn’t come close. IQ predicts performance in the workplace. It predicts it on day one, and it predicts the slope of learning across time. Oddly enough, IQ predicts performance ratings for decades despite (or perhaps because of) accumulated experience. Ability predicts performance in manual tasks and in professional tasks. It predicts school. It also predicts number of patents, and the likelihood of gaining a Ph.D.. It predicts number of academic publications. It predicts achievement in management and leadership positions. In short, the idea that cognitive ability “tells us so little” is about as misinformed and misleading as it is possible to be. About as misleading and incoherent as it sounds if you say it out loud and listen to yourself. The second part of the conclusion is, however, even more disconcerting. If we were to abandon everything which may be “used to do harm”, IQ tests would be near the bottom of any thoughtful list. Apart from the banal examples (“cars can be used to do harm should we ban cars?…”), ability tests have long been one of the only valid objective means for people from less well-off backgrounds to demonstrate talent. As universities across the United States are finding out, and almost universally reversing, without the SAT (which functions as a very good IQ test), they cannot identify talent, and, every bit as consequentially, cannot gauge if students are capable of performing adequately. For this educational purpose alone, not to mention the massive under-utilized value in the workplace for employer seeking talent and job seekers seeking recognition of their potential, we should be increasing, not abandoning the use of cognitive ability testing. It’s only rational to do so.

57 years ago today, H.R. Pufnstuf made its debut. Who else loved this show?

400 to 1. My money is on the chimp.

Year after year, I encounter variations on the same bad arguments, propped up by the same ahistorical premises. I could address each in turn, but I think there's some value in just resurfacing these replies and highlighting the common threads in ALL of these “critiques”.

Please watch this clip