I hope one of the questions is: Do you use the word "garner"?
Just kidding. I took Murray's test. According to the above-quoted Washington Post story ("The most out-of-touch places in America"):
Scores range from from 0–100, a full score meaning that someone is completely in tune with working-class culture. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Newshour audience is largely composed of fancy people. The median score was around 40 out of 100.I got a 20.
Take the test here.
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269 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 269 of 269@DBQ:Gabriel cites the statistics of height as a comparison. This is misleading when comparing it to the restaurant statistics. One action you can choose to participate or not, eating at a restaurant (if one is available to you). This might tell you something if you disdain the Applebee's or choose the Applebee's. The other participation statistic (height), you cannot chose, unless you cut off your legs or something. You are the height that you are. No choices about it. Everyone participates.
You can choose to lift weights or not. You can choose to watch Ohio State football. You can choose work on an oil rig. That fact that some small fraction of women does some of these things, does not mean that a survey that asked you about them be wrong if it suggested you were a man if you did any of them.
Dust Bunny, I agree with you 100%. Gabriel is on a posting rant today. He had 23 posts last I counted about half an hour ago.
"Murray is hated by the left because of his Bell Curve book" -- there are a lot of papers out there that explain away the bell curve for IQ by redefining IQ (a.k.a. discredit Murray), sort of the reminds me of global warming as a mirror image where it fits the view of people who want the world to change for the better so well that it must be true regardless of actual data.
Gabriel, use of the word helotry just cost you 25 points, whatever your original score.
Blogger Titus said...I got a 30-am I fab?
No. I got a 20 and couldn't believe it, because I am not klike you at all. I thought you'd get a 0.
You can choose to lift weights or not etc etc etc
True you can choose those things. A good survey or study would throw out the outliers like the oil rig woman or weight lifting babe. And as I said. These are not really good surveys. Fun. But not worth much.
This survey seems to be assessing those things (mostly) that you choose to do and assuming that everyone has the same availability of choices. Of course you cannot choose what your parents did for a living, so mostly personal choices.
You cannot choose how tall you are. However, a good statistical study will also throw out the obvious outliers like the one 7'2" woman or the one 4'3" man when considering the data as an entirety.
Just being pedantic. Can't help myself :-)
Yeah I want to know about Madison Man too.
"Re. doubt about towns not having any of the named restaurants: Haven't been through all of these lately to check but Google up restaurants in Alice, George West, Three Rivers, Premont, Zapata, Rio Grande City, Roma, Crystal City, Carrizo Springs, Raymondville, Eagle Pass, Freer (all in Texas; many are County Seats)."
I've driven US 281 from San Antonio to Mission plenty of times. Stop at Slap Yo Mamma BBQ in George West every time.
"If the average brain surgeon (say) has an IQ of 140, the field will not be just disproportionately Asian, it will be almost completely Asian. Murray thinks that this is problematic for society. A libertarian wouldn't care."
I don't think it is problematic but it does a few interesting things to society. My Asian medical students often have problems with interpersonal relationships with patients. Neurosurgeons of my acquaintance also have interpersonal relationship problems. I have a couple of stories in my book.
Add the two together and you may have real issues. The Asian students sometimes have trouble with empathy and understanding some social relationships. It sounds racist but others agree. They are very good in math and science but how many Asian psychiatrists are there ? Probably a bad example since my own opinion of psychiatrist IQs is not very positive,
Daniel Bell once said Army officers and doctors should have IQs about 125 and not higher or lower.
I am as comfortable at a country diner as dining at a 4-star restaurant. Go ahead and try to pigeonhole me. You can catch me later at the Apple Store sipping a latte.
"If the average brain surgeon (say) has an IQ of 140, the field will not be just disproportionately Asian, it will be almost completely Asian."
This isn't true (this particular speculation). High-IQ distributions are a bit messier than this assumes. The tails are not smooth, and some of the Asians in question, in the US or other countries where one finds large numbers of brain surgeons, are the edge of the "native" distribution, so one cant extrapolate the size of the 140-average pool based on the people who show up in the US. And etc.
What is true is that the 140-average IQ group would be very disproportionately Jewish.
There is hope for Titus !
Your namesake (by some route or another, whether acknowledged or not) is Saint Titus of Crete.
Titus was a gentile converted by Saint Paul, and was of great use in early Christianity.
Consider, one day, the dead end of the pagan life you lead.
"What is true is that the 140-average IQ group would be very disproportionately Jewish."
Not proportionally, but in raw numbers. If there were a billion Ashkenazi Jews in the world, what percentage of brain surgeons would be Ashkenazi Jews?
58. And I have a PhD and work in a very high-tech place.
IMO, a low score means you intentionally avoid certain things and kinds of people.
66 and I never eat at restaurants.
Daniel Bell once said Army officers and doctors should have IQs about 125 and not higher or lower.
Interesting thing is that according to the Bell Curve, that isn't far off for a mean of Doctors' IQs. It was interesting that the mean for almost all doctorate degrees, whether MD, JD, DD, DDS, PhD, etc. was about one standard deviation above the mean. It was surprising, given how so many MDs are so full of themselves. It was surprising that they were all so close together. The one exception was doctorates of education, the type that teachers get by going to summer school for enough years, and there the mean was just above the population mean.
My last post was cute - the Capta (or whatever they call it) called for me to pick out pictures of pickup trucks. (And, this one is commercial trucks).
"It was surprising, given how so many MDs are so full of themselves."
I don't think doctors are that concerned with IQ. I was an engineer and would just as soon have continued in that but every engineer in 1961 was getting out of engineering.
I think the thing that gives us big egos, and I wrote about this a little in my book, is the feedback from patients who tell us how wonderful we are. I never believed them and thought that they were telling us that as part of a power relationship. In private, I think a lot of people dislike and resent doctors. It's just a bit risky to get into an argument with someone who you depend on for life and health.
Older people are much more demanding. I saw a whole article a week or two ago about doctors who really dislike their patients. Some of this is Obamacare and some is the changing attitude of medical students. They don't want to put in the hours or work as hard. Most primary care in the future will probably be from nurse practitioners and PAs.
My wife was a nurse practitioner after we got divorced, She was the "family doctor" for my daughter-in-law's family and they loved her. She is very smart and we are back together now.
fizzymagic said...
58. And I have a PhD and work in a very high-tech place.
IMO, a low score means you intentionally avoid certain things and kinds of people.
Yes, I think a lower score means that you are farther from the common experience of life. I missed a lot of the TV show questions because I rarely watch commercial television. I have Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix and AcornTV (brit), so I can always find something more interesting to watch than the dreck that dominates prime time broadcast TV. There are so many commercials these days.
I wonder, I think the questions may not really match what the more common experience is.
TV watching is a case in point. Just Youtube is more popular than most TV.
We don't watch the usual shows, gave that up years ago by mutual consent, just the odd movie on cable.
How "redneck" am I ? My favorite Youtube shows are Forgotten Weapons, C&Rsenal, Hickock45 (and I own no guns, more Walter Mitty) and The Great War (highly recommended btw). Can be watched with wife on the couch, she doesn't need to hear the cannons and gunfire.
Lol, right. Like it ever WAS. Listen to what the over-educated dummy bigots believe. Ahhh the good old days when the elites knew what the underclass wanted. Give me a frucking beak.
I love the insinuation that "mainstream" culture is white. Mainstream culture hasn't been white since the Beastie Boys and NWA got white kids into rap.
Or Chuck Berry got white kids into rock and roll.
Just shows you how myopically stupid a technocratic elitist like Chuck Murray can be. Plugging and chugging numbers and applying stats is something that we'll program computers to do before they will ever "learn" the "skills" of ingenuity, resourcefulness, human interaction and cultural literacy. And true, universalistic cultural literacy, not this shit about Leave It to Beaver or Lawrence Welk or whatever it is that presumes pastimes engaged by white crackers are somehow superior forms of entertainment and/or cultural engagement than their equivalents among the lowly brown people.
"Listen to what the over-educated dummy bigots believe."
They aren't over-educated. They are under-educated, for the most part.
Its amazing how poorly read most of these people are.
We are dealing with a parochial subculture.
What a deuce. Whites shrink as a percentage of the population and electorate every year but Bumbling Bell Curve Brainiac Murray poses this elegant presumption as if this shrinking slice is how we should define "mainstream." What a bungling toad. Yes, mainstream is what shrinks and shrinks every year. Keep your eye on the laser-pointer dot, Whitey!
They aren't over-educated. They are under-educated, for the most part.
I was talking about Murray.
Murray is well educated and intelligent, but in a robotically myopic way.
The way all people who presume some intrinsic value in elitism and IQ tests are.
Charles Murray isn't a technocratic elitist.
He was warning ABOUT technocratic elitism.
And it takes much more than plugging and chugging numbers.
"The Bell Curve" is a very complex work, and far more about concepts than numbers.
True universalistic cultural literacy is actively avoided by the modern liberal elite.
One cannot even begin to explain Confucius to them. Or the modern classic of American literature, "United States Naval Operations in World War 2", Samuel Eliot Morison, ed.
As for rap, it is noisy trash.
I do recommend you read "The Bell Curve".
Among a few other things.
As for the value of intelligence (and related matters of character), it would help if you have been a hiring manager at some point. This stuff does matter in reality. Try teach class A how to troubleshoot a CNC system vs doing the same with class B.
Charles Murray isn't a technocratic elitist.
He was warning ABOUT technocratic elitism.
Right. And replacing it with racism and IQ foreordination.
Ha ha hahaha.
Like I said, read "The Bell Curve"
Technocracy was supposed to be the RESULT of "IQ foreordination".
He wasn't advocating it, he was predicting it. And lo it is coming to pass.
Which he saw as a BAD THING.
And the high-IQ master-class is remarkably uneducated, narrow, and parochial.
My standard disclaimer: IQ is not a real thing. It is a psychological construct. The simplest organ in the body, the heart, requires at least four numbers to describe its function with some semblance of completeness. The function of the brain is still well beyond our understanding yet many people seem perfectly comfortable using a single number as a summary of function. It is madness.
Think about it. Psychologists came up with the IQ score, nuff said.
"Right. And replacing it with racism and IQ foreordination."
Everything R&B knows about The Bell Curve and Charles Murray he learned by reading about in The Nation.
ARM, I believe that current thought is that IQ is a feature of some underlying feature called "g", which has to do with how well and quickly information is recognized and classified.
If there are dumb people and smart people, their must be measurable quantities called 'dumbness' and 'smartness'. For some reason, even the people that think that intelligence is a social construct would rather be operated on by a smart doctor than a dumb doctor.
IQ (the result of various tests which try to measure it) is a very good, if simplistic filter.
If you want to hire ten out of a random pool of 100, and you can expect 50% duds in a random sample, using a filter test could improve the keeper rate to maybe 80% (just an example; many industry tests did better). This sort of thing isn't perfect, but its extremely valuable.
Most of these tests are nearly as good as most industry-specific aptitude tests in predicting future performance. Most of the industry-specific (or company specific) tests have gone away in the US, since they were deemed discriminatory, but they are quite popular elsewhere. The AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test)/ASVAB is the only widely-used one left, in the US. The SAT/ACT is a similar test that also works extremely well.
Example of a simple industrial test -
http://www.shell.us/content/dam/shell-new/local/country/usa/downloads/careers/careers-iab-prep-guide.pdf
Every one of these is very highly correlated with IQ tests. Sometimes they are used as substitutes for IQ tests. They are measuring SOMETHING important, for certain not everything important, but something, indeed, that is useful.
Terry said...
For some reason, even the people that think that intelligence is a social construct would rather be operated on by a smart doctor than a dumb doctor.
Surgery was a poor choice for this argument. Surgery requires good, or preferably great, fine motor control. A lot of very smart people are lacking in this area. If my choice for surgeon was someone of average IQ with outstanding fine motor skills or a genius klutz, I am going with the average IQ guy every time.
" I missed a lot of the TV show questions because I rarely watch commercial television. "
Me too but I still got 65.
"I believe that current thought is that IQ is a feature of some underlying feature called "g", which has to do with how well and quickly information is recognized and classified."
Yes and I think this is important but usually misunderstood.
Ritmo is in great form. McDonald's let out early today. Must have been the breakfast shift,
"If my choice for surgeon was someone of average IQ with outstanding fine motor skills or a genius klutz, I am going with the average IQ guy every time."
You are correct. The chief of surgery at the Mass General when I was there was a guy who was very bright, very knowledgable on transplantation and could not handle a scalpel without cutting himself.
60 for me. Grew up in the country, worked in a factory, and served in the military.
Don't watch tv series, don't go to movies.
I scored a 33. But I really feel like I am higher on the scale in practice.
And I agree about surgeons not needing to be geniuses. It's a learned skill where practice makes perfect.
Quoting myself:
For some reason, even the people that think that intelligence is a social construct would rather be operated on by a smart doctor than a dumb doctor.
"All else being equal" :)
Not that intelligence is always the optimal feature for a job. I knew a retired military guy, not stupid, but not smart, very by-the-book. Unimaginative and easily entertained. When it was his turn to pick a movie, he would always pick one of the "Veggie Tales."
His job in the military was to stand guard over munitions.
49 points.
This is me:
11–80: A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents. Typical: 33.
39
I quit eating out, never go to the movies, don't watch any TV series except on Prime.
Murray's book Coming Apart was better than The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve notes that all studies agree that blacks are one standard deviation below whites on IQ tests. That means their average IQ is 85 and half are below that. Now that isn't so in real life; half below 85? Impossible. But Murray never deals with this problem which has to be an artifact of testing. That is why he gets called a racist.
But in Coming Apart he wrote a better book on how the collapse of standards and values is really affecting people. And he wanted to show how people making policy decisions weren't in touch with this pain because they weren't in touch with the people suffering - they didn't work in the same places, serve in the military, play on a team, buy the same things, or go to the same shows or restaurants. At the very end of my working career it was hard for me to get a job and I took what I could get and this is when I worked with a lot of hard working people whose children and grandchildren were "coming apart." It makes a huge difference in family conversations as I'm sure my loved ones are all 5's.
Thought that perhaps the initial 75 was somehow flawed, so I took a retest. Seventy-four the second time.
Twenty-four years in the military, Thirteen plus years as a Boy Scout leader and life in rural areas of Texas and Maryland have their impact. Additionally, in Texas many urban homeowners have pickup trucks, handy for hauling compost, mulch, pavers, and camping gear. The Master's degree was from a small regional South Texas university, so not too thick a bubble there.
I'm proud to say that my was score was 64.
I would have scored higher but I don't watch those TV shows that are popular.
I don't eat much at restaurants either so that lowered my score too.
72.
I got a 7. Ouch, I'm fucking elitist. Sue me, so I prefer Stella Artois and Guinness to American swill they call 'beer'.
But I did know who Jimmie Johnson is!
Rhythm and Balls said...
What a deuce. Whites shrink as a percentage of the population and electorate every year but Bumbling Bell Curve Brainiac Murray poses this elegant presumption as if this shrinking slice is how we should define "mainstream." What a bungling toad. Yes, mainstream is what shrinks and shrinks every year. Keep your eye on the laser-pointer dot, Whitey!
4/12/16, 7:12 PM
Holy crap dude, are you trying to out-Nazi the Nazis?
buwaya said...
IQ (the result of various tests which try to measure it) is a very good, if simplistic filter.
Steve Hsu has a lot on 'g' and its validity.
DBQ - lifting weights doesn't automatically pile on the muscle. Genetics will determine how much you can add, not so much protein shakes. Mesomorphs add muscle the easiest. Endomorphs are fatties and ectomorphs are thin but can't add muscle to save their lives.
IQ is real and everyone can recognize there are smart people and dumb people. IQ tests are measuring real differences in cognitive ability, and we should be using these tests to understand why there are differences between people and how to improve all of those numbers in total, and not worrying if there are subset differences that remain.
There is an interesting IQ trend called the Flynn Effect, where the raw scores on IQ tests have been increasing over the last 80 or so years. Few people realize that IQ is a normalized score for the entire population, with the average raw IQ score adjusted to 100 and the standard deviation typically adjusted to 15. But on tests that have remained similar over the years, the raw scores have been steadily climbing. This effect means that the IQ of 100 in the US in the 1930's is the equivalent of an IQ of 80 in the 1980s.
It is unclear if this is due to some combination of better nutrition, child rearing, public health, and/or other causes.
"with the average raw IQ score adjusted to 100 and the standard deviation typically adjusted to 15. "
Read some 1900 sixth grade textbooks sometime. It's humbling.
Doctors rely on memory much more than engineers. Engineers rely on reasoning and solving puzzles.
Junk quiz; don't put any stock in it. But then, it was released by NPR, which knows a LOT about being in a "cultural bubble" and darned little about the real world.
I got a 45, because I do not watch TV and haven't bothered with new movies. And because after being an Air Force brat and then spending 21 years in the Navy, I've never lived below the "poverty line".
Michael K said: ""If the average brain surgeon (say) has an IQ of 140, the field will not be just disproportionately Asian, it will be almost completely Asian. Murray thinks that this is problematic for society. A libertarian wouldn't care."
I don't think it is problematic but it does a few interesting things to society. My Asian medical students often have problems with interpersonal relationships with patients. Neurosurgeons of my acquaintance also have interpersonal relationship problems. I have a couple of stories in my book."
"Asian" isn't a good description, because Asia is freaking huge. "Asian" goes from Pakistani to Indian to Thai to Vietnamese to Filipino to Chinese to Japanese, and there's not a whole lot of commonality among those. (Technically Iran is in Asia, but most people don't consider Iranians as "Asian", since they're more Caucasian than anything else.)
And the "interpersonal relationships" issue comes from CULTURAL issues concerning arrogance and sexism, especially among the Pakistani and Indian groupings. Chinese too, to a lesser extent.
AReasonableMan said...
tim in vermont said...
Depending on
Why so bitter, buddy. Part of living in a bubble is hating anyone who has different views than oneself. You seem to live in a tiny little bubble.
I thought he was your neighbor.
In bubbleville.
Over by dere.
58
12! And I'm voting for Trump! How can this be? Aren't I supposed to be some kind of Oxycontin-addled trailer-dweller?
I admit to living in a bubble, but it's kind of a weird one.
And ARM,it would be more interesting if you pointed out what wasn't true about what I said. It was an observation, not bitterness.
tim in vermont said...
And ARM,
Bubble Boy is Back. You are the male version of April Apple, a one-dimensional hater. And, you didn't say anything sufficiently coherent to warrant a response. Hate is an emotion, not a concept.
I see one guy spewing hate here.
Apparently my comment was sufficiently coherent for you to classify it as hate. Maybe you can explain that reasoning? Or is explaining why you lapsed into ad hominem beneath you?
48. Thought it'd be higher than that.
Doctors rely on memory much more than engineers. Engineers rely on reasoning and solving puzzles.
Which is why it is good that I never went to medical school. I doubt that I could have passed, even if my life depended on it. Still, from the point of view of a math major in college, engineers memorize much too much, and so often, it seems, really don't understand the equations that they are using, but rather, just how to crank the numbers. I ran into this going back and taking EE courses after graduating from law school and working for 15 years as a computer engineer. As a former math major, what was important was learning the how and why, and not really memorizing the equations (I can remember taking a trig test in my mid-20s where I derived the formulas I used, since I had forgotten them). The engineering students instead had to be able to crank the equations in their sleep.
Also, law school appears to require a lot more analysis, and much less memorization than apparently does medical school. Talking to a sleep doctor awhile back, and he admitted to being narcoleptic. I asked him how it had affected him in medical school. Apparently not that much, since through much of it, he was moving around, and so didn't fall asleep. But, then went on to say that law school was much harder, because it required mostly analysis, which was much harder when you are half asleep.
tim in vermont said...
Apparently my comment was sufficiently coherent for you to classify it as hate. Maybe you can explain that reasoning? Or is explaining why you lapsed into ad hominem beneath you?
He's a liberal. They hate anything not perceived as liberal.
McDonald's let out early today. Must have been the breakfast shift,
You seem to know much more about McDonalds than I ever will. Is that where you regularly ate in between marriages?
Doctors rely on memory much more than engineers. Engineers rely on reasoning and solving puzzles.
Oh, so that explains why you can't reason for shit!
I am working my way through these various posts hoping to garner a few more laughs. But I wonder if you would score higher than a 20 now that you run around like a wild person living part-time in the back of F-150 pickup truck. I wrote to Charles Murray once about the book he co authored with Herrnstein (I dare not speak its name), and was pleasantly surprised that he wrote me back. Interesting that the authors pointed to a concentration of cognitive elite about 30 years ago, and my last stop in Garner Town was about diversity in law school. I guess following the trail I am on would inexorably lead to me to a densely garnered miasma of smug.
@Dave
You got me to take the test again and I got 20 again even though I had a new yes on that truck question.
As before, I had trouble answering the question about the education level of my neighbors.
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