Understandable considering both have one head, have to bend down to drink from a pond and are afraid of lions etc.

tinyurl.com/2cjbtt

Pinker latched onto it. It got a treatment in the Economicist. It got an applauding frontpage piece in New York Magazine. I’m glad it wasn’t met with insane condemnation like the Bell Curve or Rushton’s work, but people basically LAUDED IT. Am I REALLY the only one who’s distrubted by this? Disgusted? The air of encouragement that met it? I hope to god not. I’m honestly scared with the way the intellectual community is heading when things like that are now met with these kind of responses.

If wearing a suit wasn’t a valid measure of high intelligence wouldn’t it be the case that a random testing of people who work in jobs that are generally associated with high intelligence (scientist, etc.) would find no general correlation of professional status and wearing a suit?

If I haven’t not failed to figure out your multiple negatives incorrectly, then no, this is a schoolboy correlation/causation error: wearing a suit is not a valid measure of “intelligence” and neither is success in IQ tests, although both of them may correlate with professional status…

It’s like writing a paper on how “mammals” purr, when you actually meant to talk about cats.

Not necessarily. Performance on an English GCSE might well correlate with mathematical ability, even though it is not a valid test of mathematical ability per se – correlations, particularly weak correlations, do not imply that you have a good measure of something. Conversely, even if it is a good measure, you might be restricting the range because everyone in the field has to have an IQ above X, but after that you have both a restricted range of IQs (thus getting a reduced correlation) and maybe other skills (say in science, self promotion) are more important within that population once they have demonstrated a requisite degree of ability (in say maths).

“Also, not a single one of him drinks alcohol like a Muslim.”

Lots of people with Down’s that I know drink alcohol – are you sure you aren’t thinking of children with Down’s?

I do worry, however, about who is being offended. Is it offensive to Asian people because Downs persons are somehow inferior to ‘normal’ people?

This ‘paper’ achieves nothing and is full of offence in that it stereotypes whole groups of people. Stereotyping is almost always offensive.

I don’t think, however, that claiming the comparison is offensive to Asian people is anything other than being offensive to Downs people.

It still can only mean one thing.

Or indeed by the miners in my home town in the 40s and 50s. If you’re used to it, the so-called ‘miner’s squat’ is very comfortable. It had to be – the men had to work in that position for an entire shift.

I am (was) an engineer rather than a scientist, but the whole thing reads as nonsense and superficial to me.

Geoff

How about measuring it by the number of papers published in the Top 200 Journals per thousand (or ten thousand) adults in the population?

I am trying to make the general point that developing insightful scientific experiments or trials or whatever requires one to carefully consider what one is trying to measure and how it can achieved.

I’m trying to say don’t ask “I want to measure intelligence, what practical way is there to do that”, rather ask “what do I really mean by intelligence”. If someone can define it clearly enough then they be able to measure it, then they may have an insightful piece of research. Otherwise all you have is “X correlates with Y”.