Here: "House pushes toward historic change in voting procedures as pandemic sidelines Congress."
Such an unpleasant look for him. Either wear the mask or don't. And why are these people using the medical supplies and not the washable cloth mask they tell us to wear? And how inept is it to put your finger on the inside? That's actually quite gross even in times of plentiful supplies.
I've already been thinking that much of this mask business is theater, but they're not even getting the theater right.
I've saved the image — a photo by Patrick Semansky/AP — in case WaPo thinks better of its choice and replaces it.
I'm not going to call Schumer an idiot — the way Trump haters call Trump an idiot — because I happen to know that he scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT and was his high school's valedictorian. He went to Harvard undergrad and for law school. I'm seeing his IQ estimated at 170. He's super-smart. There's no doubt about it. I'm watching what he does, and he's not taking the risk of contagion too seriously. He's in a vulnerable group too — he's 69 years old (the same as me).
Having written that, I wanted to see what IQ people assign to Donald Trump. Of course, it's all over the place. He's an idiot! He's a genius! But at Quora, I found this interesting answer — by Tony Reno in June 2017 — to the question "To all those with IQ above 135, how high do you suspect Donald Trump’s IQ to be?"
When I took the test for Mensa I scored at 152, and best I can tell he’s got a higher IQ than I do.
Here’s the thing, When an IQ differs from yours by more than 20 points, much of what the other person is doing, either direction, is unfathomable to you. It’s as if you are speaking different languages.
I see so much that candidate Trump did and that President Trump is doing that seems to be to be over the head of a lot of people viewing him. They also confuse the reports by his enemies with what he’s really done and said.
A high IQ doesn’t make you perfect, but he just expertly navigated a minefield like I’ve never seen done before....
Back away from your biases and ask yourself, would you want to be president if you had a billion dollars, a penthouse apartment overlooking central park and a supermodel wife?
Every assumption about his motives is vacuous at best. “Putin blackmailed him to run the most amazing upset in political history?” Give me a break.
What he did and is doing while single handedly battling every media outlet (believe me, Fox News was not his friend during the campaign) the active campaigning of a sitting president (unprecedented in the history of our democracy), the non-stop criticism of the Hollywood stars and professional comedians.
Who in power was on Donald Trump’s side this election season? The Koch brothers didn’t fund him. People in his own party worked against him as late as the last month of the campaign.
Saying his IQ is anything but extraordinary would be like watching a football player repeatedly score the winning touchdowns despite the efforts of half his own team and most of the referees on the field, and then say that player’s not much of an athlete.
The man is brilliant on levels I’ve never seen.
Let me clue you into his so-called craziness in tweets and other communication. Every “outrageous” statement has a very clear purpose. It is to get someone to look where the media don’t want them to look. Everytime someone looks they find out that they are being lied to. Most of the time people won’t look because the tweet will be about something they don’t care about and the surface analysis, “another crazy tweet,” will hold sway. But every now and then they’ll look deeper. With each deep look a few more people are converted from “Trump’s crazy” to, “The media and most of our leadership are lying, and Trump’s exposing it.” Every move over because a new part of the higher, permanent, un-moveable base.
President Trump’s strategy is incredibly patient, incredibly long term. He’s not trying to win over every person every day. He’s trying to build a loyal following one voter and one issue at a time. All of his strategies are ratchet strategies. If you followed the whole election season the phrase that kept coming out over and over again is
“He’s got this loyal base that is with him for the distance, no matter what.”
But no one bothered to look into why that was so, or why it was such a one-way move. Despite media outcries to the contrary there are almost no, former Trump supporters. This was a very carefully planned strategy, not to go for a broad win by saying it's easy to accept things, but to go for permanent loyalty by exposing what’s really happening to the country one complex issue at a time.
When I first started watching the debates I thought he was wrong on almost every issue, but issue after issue the more I looked the more sense he made....
President Trump is definitely the brightest president I’ve seen in my lifetime. If you’re fooled by his simple-speak, his, “The best words” you’ve never run a company or sold a product. Simple speak is command speech. Simple speak gives clarity where big words only confuse people. The majority of big words exist to equivocate, hedge your bets. That’s not how a commander gets reliable action because it has people afraid to act out of fear that they got the commander’s will wrong. President Trump is way, way above 150 by the standards that were in play for testing when I took the test in 1988. So even given adjustments both for the Flynn effect and the way IQ switched to a statistical rather than age-ratio scoring standard, he’s still above 140 today.
Posts
340 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 340 of 340Grant is my officially designated personal hero. I love everything about him, even his flaws. His flaws are those of a man with good character. He was a decent honorable man, and his decency and sense of honor are, IMO, major contributing factors to his manifest brilliance as a military leader. He is quintessentially American: his character embodied all that was good about the old-fashioned ideal of the American character. He was plain spoken and clear thinking, calm and adverse to bombast, just like his boss (Lincoln). He reminds me of my dad, may he rest in peace. Is there a quotient-score for character, like there is for intelligence? If there is, Grant's score must be stratospheric.
Drago ... the moron
Good character is a kind of intelligence. It can't be measured only experienced. Grant had it.
An IQ of 170 is theoretical physics level smart.
Schumer is not a 170. Unless he's been purposefully acting like middling-intelligence political hack all his life while secretly solving problems in particle physics.
No idea about Trump. Also don't care.
In a president you want a person who has good gut instincts. Nixon was a high IQ guy. So was Carter, they tell me. Both wretched presidents.
To be gleeful that a possible remedy doesn't pan out does not speak well for one's humanity.
I also really admire Grant--his accomplishments, but like Roughcoat his character too shines through the pages of history-- and am glad to see the revisionist strain of historians reviving interest in him and his presidency, because the taint of corruption and alcohol and time had more or less landed his presidency in the failed presidency category. He was way more interesting and his presidency more successful than that.
ARM was about to regale us with the "details" of this "study".
Let's all see what our resident ChiCom Propagandist moron has come up with.......
To give false hope to people about a snake oil cure doesn't speak well for one's humanity, or intelligence.
Grant's main advantage over his predecessors was his courage to stick with a winning strategy in the face of the losses suffered during the battles of 1864.
Grant had a reputation as a "butcher" because he was willing to press on in the face of heavy losses because he knew that the logistics of the situation favored the North.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM6-NXANI1o
Roughcoat - the measure is "EQ" or Emotional Intelligence. https://www.iq-test.net/eq-test.html
Roughcoat - the measure is "EQ" or Emotional Intelligence. https://www.iq-test.net/eq-test.html
Roughcoat @ 1:59: "Good character is a kind of intelligence. It can't be measured only experienced. Grant had it."
I am so stealing that.
Perhaps ARM should start by addressing the following from his non-study "study" first:
All patients in this SURVEY were male. ALL of them. Hey, that sounds like a solid way to start a "study", doesn't it?
But wait. There's so much more....
Average patient ages ranged from 59 to 75 with a median age of 70 (for those treated with hydroxychloroquine), 68 (for those treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin), and 69 (for those receiving standard treatment alone).
The patients were also disproportionately black. According to the census, 13.4 percent of United States population is black, but in the study, 68% (HC), 59% (HC+AZ), and 65% (No HC) of the patients were black.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1
Well, case closed, eh ARM?
LOL
ARM has become as ridiculous as Russian Collusion Truther Inga....which is not surprising, as ARM is a Russia Collusion Truther too.
Finally, some good news:
Two cats test positive for coronavirus
"Not a single poster (or Ms. Althouse) expressed any skepticism about Schumer having a perfect score on the SAT."
I remember reading an article about Schumer's teen years. He did well on the SAT and was a teen employee of the Kaplan group in NY who trained kids how to beat the SAT. They paid kids to memorize test questions so they could debrief after the test and teach the answers. As I recall he took the SAT many times. So I believe he got a 1600 on at least one attempt. Harvard and Harvard Law alone means a likely 135 140 IQ minimum. He did not go to one of the exclusive NY high schools, which is a bad sign, but he was valedictorian where he went, so I'm sure he is highly smart, but by no means the smartest HS grad in NY during his senior year. A self reported IQ of 170 from a politician means only that it was not higher than 170.
ARM is still reeling from the fact that just about every western nation in the world has had to return the purposely defective and shoddy equipment provided by ARM's Beloved And Heroic People's Republic Of China after ARM spent a month or two praising the ChiCom's for their "generosity".
Heckuva job ARM.
Seriously, the people who wrote the articles, or fed it to the press, are either morons, like ARM, or they were deviously smart enough to compare apples to oranges so that the headline could fool people- the dumb people, like ARM.
Drago: You say that a very high % of the patients were black...but what were the comorbidities? Were they evenly distributed across the trial arms? Personally I don't think melanin is a big predictor for outcome from Wu Flu, but I think obesity, diabetes, congestive heart failure, hypertension, asthma, might have something to do with it.
To give false hope to people about a snake oil cure doesn't speak well for one's humanity, or intelligence.
ARM chooses to make medical judgments on an Ad Hominem basis. Trump "touts" a remedy, ergo it's snake oil. QED.
unclear, like with the pitch guys
One can't help but notice that ARM is at least smart enough to know better than to try and defend this non-peer reviewed non-study "study" that has so many flaws that a 8th grade stats student would say: WTH?
The big takeaway is that HCQ, with Az and Zn has been given to patients for 60 years and is currently being used across the globe by thousands of doctors everywhere when its called for to save patients with good results.
ARM wants to label them all snake oil salesmen and have these people die....all to help the dying Biden campaign.
Yes, ARM wants people to die to resuscitate a dying political campaign.
Interestingly enough, many reports out now that the ChiComs were working quietly behind the scenes to begin marketing a "vaccine" against this virus......
.............if true, that would be very very interesting indeed.
Very.
Owen: "Drago: You say that a very high % of the patients were black...but what were the comorbidities?"
Good question. We know that statistically African Americans are vastly overrepresented in the comorbidity category but I haven't had time to look thru the entire SURVEY (not "study" (that was for ARM's benefit, though he won't understand why)) to see if that is broken out.
It was my understanding from a different summary of this survey that the comorbidities were not included, which raised even greater suspicion that the "survey" was cooked up with one purpose in mind.
daskol --
Well said. I totally agree. Grant's presidency was indeed more successful than is generally thought. As for his alcohol problem -- it really ceased being a problem early in the Civil War. He pretty much gave up drinking for the duration. I believe he was known to drink to excess only once during the war. Also I believe his problem was exaggerated by his enemies. John Keegan is my source of information about Grant's drinking. Keegan said that the trigger for his worst drinking bouts, which took place long before the war when he was a young officer, were prolonged separations from his beloved wife. Have you read Keegan's chapter on Grant in "The Mask of Command"? Keegan has the highest of high opinions of Grant, both as a military commander and as a great good man. For me, Grant embodies what is best about the American, and especially the Midwestern, character.
I think, maybe, the key difference is that ventilators were used twice as often on the non-HCQ/ZPack group. That could explain the difference in mortality all by itself- again, no ceteris paribus. What is missing is the description of actual care given in all arms of the observation- is the care all the same, but for A, B, C, etc.?
Thumbs up emoji to those praising Grant. What an amazing man. It's great to see recently that his presidency is being reevaluated. He was a much more virtuous president than given credit for, despite his mistakes.
@Yancey,
First, re Close Encounters, touche!
Concerning this, "Lee beat Grant more than the reverse during that campaign if you just count up the casualties, and a lesser man than Grant might have stopped the advance in face of those losses, but he didn't."
I can't find it online, but I remember seeing a Confederate soldier quotation from his journal. He had been up against several Union generals. The difference with the soldiers under Grant was that "we kept beating them, and they kept coming back. They just didn't stop coming back."
"Or was Trump just hoping to buy some influence, as the NeverT's would likely say?"
When wealthy people donate large sums of money to a candidate for office, it's always to buy influence. (They may--or may not--also actually believe in and support the candidate and his or her platform and stated goals. But they always expect to buy influence with their material support.)
its good to be king
I too find it hard to believe that Schumer has an IQ of 170. I think he is smart, but most people with an IQ that high have a hard time communicating with normies, making success in politics unlikely.
When wealthy people donate large sums of money to a candidate for office, it's always to buy influence.
I gotta say, Robert Cooke nails it with this one.
IQ testing is most valid and useful as a population-level policy tool - exactly that which leads to fears of confirming racial bias, etc. But if it is so it is so, and must be faced squarely.
IQ really does matter wrt performance in skilled work. My own experience here. Character matters, perseverance etc., but you cannot make an adequate technical worker from a person on the left of the normal distribution. And the utility of such a person increases vastly with intelligence. Which is not sufficient in itself, but it is one of the necessities.
IQ testing as its been discussed above, concerning just the extreme right tail of the distribution (IQ 120+) is the least important part of it. What matters for public policy is the significance of and what to about the median and left tail. Right tail freakouts are all about power struggles and social position maneuvers, or an aspect of neuroses.
"Mask of Command" - Keegan
Highly recommended.
Does not seem to be available on Kindle unfortunately.
"When wealthy people donate large sums of money to a candidate for office, it's always to buy influence."
Ron Winkleheimer: "I gotta say, Robert Cooke nails it with this one."
That's merely been true since about the beginning of time.
tcrosse said...
ARM chooses to make medical judgments on an Ad Hominem basis. Trump "touts" a remedy, ergo it's snake oil. QED.
This is so ridiculous it is funny. Trump doesn't know the first thing about drugs or drug trials - not one useful fact. Of course you assess the expertise of the 'expert' proffering an opinion. Laura Ingraham doesn't know shit either.
The other think missing from the articles are the demographics of the study arms, and the conditions of the patients being given HCQ/ZPack and those who weren't. I have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that doctors don't want to prescribe these drugs unless they feel like there is no other option- that is a kind of selection bias that has to be accounted for.
The other missing detail is where are the endpoints- what is the status of the patients right now. Are they all dead and/or recovered, or are they still in the hospital?
I have written it before, I am very skeptical of the HCQ/ZPack/zinc claims- having worked in this field in my career, I am probably more aware of how "good results" can be completely misjudged by those who don't work in this field. But this also makes more aware of how failure can also be seen where it isn't. In short, it easy to get fooled by bad studies and unethical researchers. There good reasons we run double-blind studies on a large scales in pharma.
If one expects a worker to troubleshoot an instrumentation connectivity problem, for instance, to know how to test for categories of problems and rule them out, to home in on the root cause - this is a question of intelligence. You can train and train, and create troubleshooting rubrics and workflows - test x, if result y test z, etc. But it just doesn't work.
ARM: "This is so ridiculous it is funny. Trump doesn't know the first thing about drugs or drug trials...."
LOL
ARM has already abandoned defense of his moronic non-study "Study", that was actually a clear skewed survey meant to deliver a political outcome.
Poor ARM.
Meanwhile, do you know what ARM's Beloved and Heroic People's Republic Of China ChiComs did on April 18...at the very moment the entire world had been awakened to the ChiCom's and ARM's "Generosity" campaign lies?
The ChiComs just decapitated the democracy movement leaders in Hong Kong by arresting the 15 leaders.
Mind you, this was at a moment when ARM was offering unrestrained praise for the ChiComs and their global "leadership".
Say goodbye to earlier ARM approved ChiCom lies about "One China, Two Systems" with Hong Kong about to have the living daylights squeezed out of it....all the while western leftists cheer them.
And this then explains why the ethiopian marxist and ChiCom-owned Tedros of the WHO has been launching attacks against Taiwan.
Taiwan knows they are next....and Taiwan now realizes just how many ARM's there are in the world who would be happy to see Taiwan smothered by the ChiComs.
Damn I hate it when you guys start a milhist discussion without me.
I think Brooks Simpson probably has the best take on Grant the general and president.
Roughcoat mentions Keegan, and I'll second-- Keegan is very uneven but MoC is one of his best in my estimation. It's an interesting take.
There was some expensive hardback quarterly back in the 60's (Horizon ?) that had an article about IQs of historical personages. I recall they rated Grant at 130, and Goethe at 200 (!) or so--I can't remember any others, maybe Napoleon at 160 and Newton and Einstein in the 180s ?
Narr
The things one remembers
Taiwan has long known how many ARM's are in the world.
Those are practical, cynical people - in good ways and bad.
Nobody in East Asia has any illusions about China.
The real mystery is what the US will do if the day comes.
It is a mystery even in Washington I think.
buwaya said...
Taiwan has long known how many ARM's are in the world.
I have a close colleague who is Taiwanese, he would think lying piece of shit. I wouldn't go that far.
How's Spain working out?
"To give false hope to people about a snake oil cure doesn't speak well for one's humanity, or intelligence."
ARM, would you take it? Would you prefer to not even be told about it working on others?
Trump doesn't know the first thing about drugs or drug trials - not one useful fact.
My point exactly. Whatever Trump says on the matter should have no bearing for or against.
Grant had superior "qualities of character and temperament," the most important things in a commander, in addition to his high intelligence and physical courage.
Narr
So Clausewitz might have put it
" Trump doesn't know the first thing about drugs or drug trials...."
Yea, and we were told he didn't know the first thing about running for President. Do you consider yourself qualified to talk about politics?
"maybe Napoleon at 160 and Newton and Einstein in the 180s"
Ah! That finally explains Napoleon's last words on St. Helena as he lay dying:
"J'aurais dû être un physicien théoricien."
I can face off good buddies in Taiwan with you ARM, one was my B-school roommate, another was my high school shooting partner, another was my Engineering school study group. I have been to their weddings. I have been to Taiwan.
You are a sick sack of fecal matter.
tcrosse said...
Whatever Trump says on the matter should have no bearing for or against.
And it doesn't, for me. Not so true for most people here.
It does reflect very badly on him as an intellect and as a human being. In a crisis a real leader does his best to deal in truths.
That Keegan book looks great, thanks for the heads up.
I will no longer respond to ARM.
Some people are a waste of life.
You can train and train, and create troubleshooting rubrics and workflows - test x, if result y test z, etc. But it just doesn't work.
Many years ago when I was a Solaris Sys Admin I installed a patch bundle on a server and it immediately broke the system. Had to reload the OS and restore from backup. Put in a case with Sun, and got told a week later that it wasn't the patch bundle which had undergone testing. Must have been something else. So, I installed the patch bundle and the system died again. Put in another case with Sun, and they told me the same thing. So, I did a binary tree search of the patch bundle. Installed half the patches. That didn't break the system. So broke the remaining and patches into two sets and installed one of those. Eventually I identified the bad patch. It fixed some issue with the disk IO and it didn't like the way the disks were cabled.
His great skill at Total War doctrine and denying the other guys even the possibility of having a supply chain....as citizens of Georgia, North and South Carolina can attest.
That was the whole point of his campaign. He chose not to fight face to face as Grant did. Grant probably had no choice as Lee was on inside lines. Lee also discovered the benefits of trench war on defense. Sadly, Sir John French and Haig, the other British commander, never learned. Pickett's charge was a preview of the Somme.
buwaya said...
I will no longer respond to ARM.
Some people are a waste of life.
The nasty little traitor won't speak to me. There's a loss that will take some time to recover from.
You ran this country down the entire time you lived here and then, having sucked a good living out it, you left, still complaining. Despicable.
A warrior’s genius is always more than the quick perception of problems and their solutions that seems to be over the head of everybody else in the group. That is what IQ tests measure: the quick appreciation of situations. But the warrior genius also has a quick read of the persons he is fighting against and the persons on his side. That is where The Donald outclasses everybody. He has standard genius trained in tactics of a warrior. Think Julius Caesar. Think George Patton. Think Donald Trump. All highly offended the political Generals who could not compare to them. But they had undying loyalty from theirArmy of followers.
buwaya, spent years running down California and Californians. Then, instead of moving to Texas or Louisiana, he moved to the EU. Fucking unbelievable. He has the credibility of a carny barker.
I have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that doctors don't want to prescribe these drugs unless they feel like there is no other option- that is a kind of selection bias that has to be accounted for.
Probably the worst criteria as it seems best given early. The politics of this are amazing. We'll sort it out once it doesn't matter.
Long ago, when I was a resident in surgery, total parenteral nutrition was published. I may have been the first in Los Angeles to use it, at least the first at LA County. There was a whole Journal of Trauma about 'Danang Lung," as ARDS was called at the time. I guess I have been an early adopter all my career. Both were later validated.
ARM is really a nasty piece of work, isn't he? As bad as Ritmo and Chuck, I think.
Yancey, I guess Napoleon was smart enough to know that being a polymathic Kraut poofter was out of his grasp!
Narr
A fellow's got to know his limitations
Grant's great virtue was his courage and unflappability. After the first day at Shiloh, Sherman was worried and frightened of the next day. Grant was sitting under a tree. Sherman a]said, "Well, we've had the devil's own day, Grant." Grant sat there and said, "Yup. Lick 'em tomorrow though. " And they did.
Michael K, really nasty piece of work
ARM @ 3:08: "buwaya, spent years running down California and Californians. Then, instead of moving to Texas or Louisiana, he moved to the EU. Fucking unbelievable. He has the credibility of a carny barker."
Whoa. Dude.
Painful menses?
ARM: "The nasty little traitor won't speak to me."
Once you go Full Beijing Boy like ARM, everyone who doesn't go with him is a "traitor" to the cause.
The only thing missing from ARM's avatar is a Little Red Book.
Owen: "Whoa. Dude. Painful menses?"
We are on the cusp of another classic ARM meltdown. It won't be pretty.
Beijing Boy ARM: " In a crisis a real leader does his best to deal in truths."
If you like your ChiCom talking points you can keep your ChiCom talking points. No one is going to take them away. Period.
ARM: "I have a close colleague who is Taiwanese,...."
Many Germans personally liked Jews, but when the time for choosing came, they went with the totalitarians.
I feel sorry for ARM's alleged Taiwanese friend.
I wonder if that friend is aware of ARM's non-stop pushing of ChiCom propaganda on Althouseblog? I'll bet this friend is not aware of that......
Owen said...
Painful
You are the pussy complaining about a few hard truths spoken in a public forum. Drago has obvious psychological problems, but buwaya wanted to play the 'above the fray' intellectual. Let him do it in Texas, see how far he gets.
Bankruptcy for NY/NJ/IL/CA?
McConnell says he supports letting states declare bankruptcy amid coronavirus
You can be a genius... and be an idiot sometimes. For common sense is not all that common and I've seen book smart people do exceptionally stupid things.
But I've never seen a real idiot do a series of real smart things.
Is Trump a genius. Oh yea. No doubt about it. How in the hell could he have done what he has done? You can't be THAT lucky!
I just pray he has a way of taking care of all this national debt!
And I say things not because I support Trump (I do now but I only voted for him cause Hillary was just so bad..) but cause it's just a fact.
Paul said...
I just pray he has a way of taking care of all this national debt!
I think we only need to look at his personal history to know what this will be - stiff the creditors.
Sigh.
"adjustments both for the Flynn effect"
Flynn effect took place on the left side of the bell curve, so there's little or no adjustment for smart people.
IQ has nothing to do with how many vocabulary words you've learned.
There's actually a very strong correlation between the two, ~..75
That Schumer once scored 170 on an IQ test
Nobody claimed that he did: someone "saw an estimate", whatever that means.
Saying somebody has a 170 IQ is the same as saying somebody has a 145 IQ.
Saying that might be the same, but scoring that differently indicates a big difference in intellectual ability, as measured by patents, scientific papers published, etc; income less so. See the Hsu link.
And the utility of such a person increases vastly with intelligence. Which is not sufficient in itself, but it is one of the necessities.
The old "necessary but not sufficient".
What matters for public policy is the significance of and what to about the median and left tail.
Quite true - the right side functions pretty well regardless "public policy" (welfare, schools, housing subsidies, etc).
ARM: "I think we only need to look at his personal history to know what this will be - stiff the creditors."
Another debunked lie!
LOL
Keep 'em coming ARM! The "next one" will be the lie that sticks! But always the "next one".....
“Blogger rcocean said...
Its never clear whether Trump's critics are playing dumb or really are stupid. Do they *Really* think Trump is an idiot? Or it just part of their propaganda.”
Trump critics are like Zaphod Beeblebrox—you never know whether a Trump critic is “pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.”
Adults who publicly rejoice in being "gifted" or having a high IQ are somewhat pathetic. Trump has a bit of that...think "stable genius." Biden has some too, sadly.
The further one gets on in life, the more pathetic it is to fall back on test scores as a measure of worth.
All that, as well as the off the charts character of the praise for Trump's IQ, suggests that Tony Reno is a fool and his opinion isn't worth much.
Politicians have to combine book smarts, policy smarts, electoral smarts, rhetorical smarts, emotional smarts, etc. It's part nature, part nurture, and part life experience. The notion that at this point IQ score would have much to do with how a 69 year old and a 73 year old do their jobs seems silly.
Turning to Trump, his problems are emotional and moral, not cognitive. IQ has nothing to do with them.
Turning to Trump, his problems are emotional and moral, not cognitive.
Too successful in business, then ? Pretty funny,
“Wendybae said:
I am a conservative, and I was rooting for Ted Cruz. I wasn't a Trump supporter then....but with all of the great things he has accomplished that the Politicians for life haven't ever gotten to (and never will) I am proudly going to vote for him again...even if I have to walk 10 miles through Coronavirus zombies. The other option will end America as we know it.”
This tracks my experience. I voted for Cruz in the primary, but voted Trump in the general election—really, was there another choice? I knew he was a life-long democrat, but I voted for him because he wasn’t Hillary, and as long as he kept not being Hillary I was happy. I didn’t expect much.
However, I have been pleasantly surprised. His judicial appointments alone are worth the price of admission—this will reshape the judiciary for decades. I am certain the everyone who voted for him in 2016 will vote for him in 2020. And I know he has made many converts.
Victor Alfonso said...
It took you three attempts to post your malware link. Have your master beat you, boy, so that you learn how to do it better next time.
When alive Ricard Feynman was considered the greatest theoretical particle physicist since Einstein. One day some of his junior staff, while straightening out some of his old papers came across paperwork from his childhood indicating he had a measured I.Q. of only 127! At first, they were hesitant to inform him fearing he might become either angry or chagrined by the news. Finally, after screwing up their courage to inform him, they were astonished to find him laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming down his cheeks:"To think I have done so much with so little!" he explained..
The next time anyone cites an IQ above 150, ask them what IQ test they took and how it was administered.
Lots of people talk about measured IQ without any clue as to how that is actually done and who administers the test
- interested observer who is probably the only person here licensed to administer an IQ test, aside from J. Farmer.
Schumer worked for Stanley Kaplan when he was getting his exam prep business going, so he had familiarity with the kinds of questions the exam asked, and had probably done dozens of practice exams. Whether he actually knew the questions on the exam that he took is less likely. Since he was on the East Coast, how he could exploit time zone differences is hard to say. By the standards of the time, Schumer and Kaplan did "cheat." ETS kept saying that you can't study for the exam, so I took them at their word and didn't study for it. I wish I "cheated" and took a prep class.
DBQ staDust Bunny Queen said..."...Some very smart people, do the dumbest things..."4/22/20, 10:06 AMted:
I agree 100% - Bill Clinton and Ted Kaczynski! But I also agree that their limited experience [Clinton - politics / Kacynski - mathematics] is what made them fall from grace. If you're not well rounded in life and partake in several disciplines and human interactions your IQ is a trophy.
Trump was a successful real estate entrepreneur [in the most competitive market in the USA], successful Media and TV Star [ 15 years], top speaker/writer[self-help guru - like Tony Robbins], and now successfully honing his Presidential chops. Can't remember a President who was successful in so many different fields.
George Washington was a successful in private business and the business of war before his presidency, and Ike and US Grant were victorious generals. They are the only people in Trump's league when it comes to pre-presidential achievement.
Michael K @ 2:59: "...Pickett's charge was a preview of the Somme." I am no military historian (but love Keegan and others, e.g. "Killer Angels"). I could not agree more with you. I've been to Gettysburg and walked that field. It is simply unimaginable to me that anyone could have reached the wall. What a colossal waste. And how could the military observers --thick on the ground then, and plenty to follow--not have figured out how much worse it would be, when the Maxim gun was fully deployed?
Keegan's "The Face of Battle" tells all.
As a species we are incredibly stupid. Not to say that, as individuals, we aren't just as stupid.
I've thought a lot about IQ since my big stroke a decade ago. I sometimes wonder if I was ever all that smart. I had/have/am getting back a phenomenal memory. Combine that with compulsive reading of all I could lay my hands on, I naturally tested well without any need for creative thinking.
Recently I began looking at my sudoku playing. Before stroke I started the day with sudoku, my goal being not to solve but to solve quickly. Sundays I would do the big 16 square puzzle in the NYT. After stroke I could still solve the puzzles, but had to go step by step through the algorithms. and it took me years to enjoy working all but the easiest ones. I hadn't consciously been using algorithms before, just looking at the puzzle and getting the answers by gestalt. Is that intelligence? Understanding quickly as a whole without stepping through the logic? Or is it simply a thorough grounding in the applicable logic? I'm using sudoku, of course, to stand in for wider ways of thinking about problems.
I know fewer and fewer answers. The memory is returning, the gestalt comprehension is slower coming back.
I do know that Schumer is the anti-Cincinnatus.
virgil xenophon @ 4:24: "When alive Ric[h]ard Feynman was considered the greatest theoretical particle physicist since Einstein. One day some of his junior staff, while straightening out some of his old papers came across paperwork from his childhood indicating he had a measured I.Q. of only 127! At first, they were hesitant to inform him fearing he might become either angry or chagrined by the news. Finally, after screwing up their courage to inform him, they were astonished to find him laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming down his cheeks:'To think I have done so much with so little!' he explained..'"
Thanks, VX. I love Feynman, warts and all. This is a lovely anecdote and, dare I say it, illustrative of another dimension of intelligence: fearlessness. Confidence. It may appear as insufferable cockiness, at least to the groundlings; but I think intelligence (especially in the thin air of high high IQ, where there are few other players and few ways to test one's thinking) is a hammer and it needs an anvil. It looks at the world and it generates hypotheses, and then it tests them, and sees what's left from the experiment, and then it tries again and again. Endlessly. We all do this, but perhaps the high-IQ wizards do it more, or in a more lonely (therefore less domesticated) fashion.
What's my point? Courage. Any of us can use more of it as we try to figure out the world. Maybe those with IQ of "X" and an extra dollop of courage, of confidence in their own judgement about "how things really are," are actually smarter than their paper IQ would suggest.
Great comments, I'm only 1/3 of the way through. But I saw this and contemplated a bit.
Does someone with an IQ of 150 change a tire faster than someone with an IQ of 100?
No. But he will change 1500 tires, A LOT faster. A LOT. That's what High IQ's do. Improve, or re-invent systems. My brother was smarter than I. When presented a task, my brother would create a system. I would attack, out muscle, out run, out last, and finish a single task before my brother would get started with the system. If it is a one of, something rare, I'm better, if it recurred, my brothers brain won out.
Iowan2 @ 4:55: excellent point. Yes. Higher IQ represents (IMHO) an ability to work with abstractions. To extract from "what is in front of me" the core principles and the parameters and variables; and build a mental model, test it against reality, tweak it, keep track of the changes, tweak it again. Over and over and over. At a very high clock speed. And next thing you know, the guy has built a system to change a boatload of tires way faster than the rest of us.
We pay big money for that. There's a reason why we do. It saves the rest of us from changing fucking tires for the rest of our days.
Another example of IQ. My son is a mechanical engineer. He designs and builds hydraulics. Where he works, the Union was threatening strike, and office staff got assigned and trained to do line work. When the Strike happened, my son and one other engineer were assigned to a room that normally had 3 people in, assembling hydraulic pumps. My son and his partner could do 80 pumps a shift. The average output for the 3 man crew was 30 per shift. The line people put together pumps. My son and his partner put together a system, pumps came out the other end.
Smarts (IQ) always comes out ahead. A lot ahead.
Michael K.
We actually don't know how successful he was in business, because he won't show us his tax returns or his sources of income.
We do know, however, because it is public record, that:
a. he was given or inherited a ton of money, much of it using questionable tax devices.
b. his businesses have been in bankruptcy a number of times, and that following one of those bankruptcies he used another questionable tax strategy to claim his lenders' loss as his own, shielding his income from media and licensing from taxation as his own. The public investors in those projects, however, were wiped out.
c. he has a history of dishonoring financial obligations to both large and small creditors, to the point where the leading New York banks ceased to lend to his real estate projects.
d. he has repeatedly lobbied Forbes with false versions of his net worth that they have refused to accept.
My own guess is that if Trump had simply taken his parent's gifts, and his inheritance, and put it into a Vanguard account that bought the S&P 500, he's be worth more now than he actually is worth. I'm interested in how you would document a competing claim.
The "smart people" are starting to see reality.
This story, if true, doesn't invalidate IQ testing at all; that's a very silly idea.
Is it true Feynman's IQ score was only 125?">"Is it true Feynman's IQ score was only 125? (Hsu)
Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest-thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet, it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test.
I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton.
It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided — his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities.
I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate — including general relativity and the Dirac equation — it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things."
++
He'd presumably get all the math/geometry related questions right on the general-IQ test in school without even trying, so, FWIW, if the story is true, I think he was just fucking around with the verbal part of the test, or perhaps with the whole test, writing random answers or making the answer dots fit a pattern (he wouldn't be the first person to do so!) - he was often a not-very serious person ("Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!").
Stephen @ 5:10: All of us have sinned and come short of the glory.
You are running after the car, yelling at the rear bumper, something something about bankruptcy net worth something something.
Sure, there may be some "truth" to what you want to share with us. No doubt there is: a powerful amount of truth!
But the real action is ahead of us. What can you share with us now, about Trump's ability to help us survive and thrive in what lies ahead, that is worth our attention?
Back to the issue of IQ: there is (maybe) "backwards IQ" and "forwards IQ." The former is really great at analyzing what went wrong and at building thick books on how to do it next time. And the former is way better at scoping what we are likely to face, roughing it in, starting to direct resource at it, recruiting talent (and winnowing existing talent) to prepare for it, adapting quickly to sudden moves, INSPIRING people who are desperate for inspiration, with a quick bright boost of even-half-true optimism.
That, also, is a kind of intelligence. In my book, worth a lot more than a 5-second gain on guessing which pattern matches what.
"...And the former is way better at scoping what we are likely to face..."
should be:
"...And the LATTER is way better at scoping what we are likely to face..."
We actually don't know how successful he was in business, because he won't show us his tax returns or his sources of income.<
Pardon me but that is horse shit. His 1995 tax return was leaked to Maddow and he paid $25 million in income tax that year.
Are you a CPA with a year to sort through them?
AA states..."...I've had the chance to know a quite few people who I pretty much know for a fact have a very high IQ and NONE of them were people I would trust to run anything that actually had an effect on real people. The mere idea scares me. They could be amusing to talk to for a while... but you were unlikely to feel terribly good about it in the long run..."
AA, excellent, that was my point a number is meaningless, like 170, unless you've conquered several disciplines, like Trump. Tunnel Vision always gets you in trouble.
Just read some of ARM's comments - Tunnel Vision - 'Orange Man Bad'.
Lots of people talk about measured IQ without any clue as to how that is actually done and who administers the test
- interested observer who is probably the only person here licensed to administer an IQ test, aside from J. Farmer.
I never took one but was a 1956 National Merit Scholar, the year they awarded 100 total. The National Board followed us for 25 years. We were all supposed to be at or above 150. Other than that I have no idea. I don't know my SAT or my MCAT. Good enough is all I know. I have always been suspicious of Mensa people. They are like Vegans. 30 seconds after you meet them, they are telling you.
Blogger Stephen said...
Michael K....I'm interested in how you would document a competing claim.4/22/20, 5:10 PM
All of your points a opinions and claims. No factual evidence. Yet, when you look at President Trump today he survived all of your opinions/claims. He's still a billionaire and you're not!
4/22/20, 5:04 PM
Blogger Stephen said...
Michael K.
"...We actually don't know how successful he was in business, because he won't show us his tax returns or his sources of income...My own guess....
Stephen that's about all that's worth. Because your ignorance of finance is perfect in your other sentence. You do know that Tax Returns only measure income. There is no requirement to attach a personal balance sheet (only for companies). And since it's none of your business what do you care. Do we know need to know every minute detail of one's financial results or personal life. Then I demand to know how Obama got into Harvard? No do you see how stupid such a question is.
4/22/20, 5:10 PM
I think we are figuring out what Stephen is and he looks a bit like ARM. Not as nasty but getting there.
At the risk of starting another milhist WW1 discussion that will consume all my energy and attention for the next4 12 hours and eventually drive me crazy, I’ll say this:
Concerning the strategy of attrition in the Great War, I recommend the author William Philpott and two of his books: “Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century”, and “War of Attrition: Fighting the First World War “.
Both are available as Kindle books, very inexpensive; and both are available as Audible books, also fairly inexpensive, and very well executed.
Both books were game changers for me. Philpott argues for the absolute necessity and ultimate efficacy and success of attrition; that attrition was the only viable strategy for fighting and defeating Germany.
Keegan argues similarly in his history of the Great War, where he observed that the combatant armies were too strong – not too weak – to conduct open warfare and the battles of maneuver characteristic of most earlier wars.
In “Three Armies” Philpott makes two very interesting points:
1. The Battle of the Somme crippled the German army beyond repair, and the crippling process was achieved through a deliberately applied strategy of strategy of attrition. After the Somme the German army became progressively weaker, the Allies progressively stronger. The Somme doomed Germany to defeat.
2. The Allied and German armies actually suffered MORE casualties during the two mobile phases of the war, 1914-15 and 1918, than they did during the static trench warfare phase, 1915-1918. This was especially the case in 1918. The Germans suffered catastrophic casualties in their great (and highly mobile) spring offensives of 1918; and the Allies suffered similarly enormous (if not castastrophic) casualties in stopping the Germans and then counterattacking their way to victory.
Regarding Keegan: He’s a great historian, a terrific writer/stylist, and a highly original thinker on the theory and practice of war. I’m biased: one of my best friends was a good friend of Keegan’s and would put him up at his house whenever Keegan visited America (which he did often, he loved this country). I feel as though I know Keegan, through my friend.
I agree with Keegan’s views on war, insofar as they are opposed to Clausewitz. Keegan throws down the gantlet to Clausewitz and the Clausewitzians in the first sentence of his highly controversial book on history of war, stating: “War is NOT an extension of politics by other means.” The rest of the book amounts to a brilliant argument in support of that statement.
There you go. Lay on, McDuffs!
Michael K. said ... I have always been suspicious of Mensa people. They are like Vegans. 30 seconds after you meet them, they are telling you.
My ex-wife was in Mensa. She used to tell people all the time. We worked in a psych hospital with lots pt grad students and they nicknamed her "Ms. Mensa." She stopped bringing it up.
Mensa is a vanity organization for people who test out in the top 2-3% of the population. In other words, 10 million Americans can qualify for membership.
I should also point out that my GRE scores were far better than my ex-wife although we both tested out at the same IQ.
- looks at nails and polishes them
SAT tests, even back in the day, have never been particularly hard. They're like sitting down with a puzzlebook. If you've done enough puzzles to get good at them, you can solve the puzzlebook perfectly without much effort.
There is a certain amount of testing stamina required, because they don't give you a comfy chair. But aeh, it's only a few hours of sore butt.
Understanding people, making predictions, solving problems with real world complexity: that's a lot harder than an SAT.
Michael K @ 6:09; Excellent comments, I hope to dig into/behind them and eventually learn enough to be a sparring partner. In the meantime, thanks much.
The great historical ironic tragedy, the collective failure of military IQ (and some generals are very smart, don't fool yourself) is not that European soldiers ignored the ACW* but that they ignored their own subsequent experiences.
The Franco-Prussian War saw bloodbaths bigger than Gettysburg and Fredericksburg**; the Russians and Turks slaughtered each other bigly in 1877; the Brits took terrible drubbings early in the Boer War; the Russkis and Japs likewise in Manchuria; the Balkan Wars before 1914 . . .
But. None of these engaged both the full passions and full energies of powerful coalitions with world power status at stake.
* Charge of the Light Brigade? How about von Bredow's Death Ride, or the Prussian 38th Brigade, or the suicide of Michel's cuirassiers at Woerth?
Narr
And in 1914 most cavalry troopers in Europe carried a lance!
Philpott argues for the absolute necessity and ultimate efficacy and success of attrition; that attrition was the only viable strategy for fighting and defeating Germany.
What does "attrition" mean in this context?
I met Sir John Keegan, and threw down the gauntlet--"Did he stick to his prediction that battle may have abolished itself?" He winced and said everywhere he went somebody was sure to ask him that. But I can't recall the context or date--maybe the early 1990s--and I don't remember his exact answer either.
He was asked about religion by a rather attractive but no longer young female grad student who was thinking about making a spiritual retreat--he seemed very knowledgeable of the different rules for different orders, much more than she was!
I did like the man, and I respect a lot of his work, but he was sometimes slipshod--he called Moltke the Younger Moltke's son (bzzzt, nephew), he buys every 1914 BEF myth in his WWI book, and his account of Grant in Tennessee in early 1862 is a hash.
As for Clausewitz, Sir John took the Blimpish approach, and stuck his fingers in his ears while chanting NANANAICANTHEARYOU!
Narr
See Christopher Bassford on Keegan on Clausewitz
it's somewhat like marius and the jugurthan wars, he was the third commander in that long drawn out conflict, include one of the metelli, to succeed now Sallust was a lieutenant of Caesar, so perhaps his perspective was skewed.
Michael K, you seem to like to win at checkers by tossing over the chessboard.
Your claim is that Trump was a success in business. My claim is that he may well have done better by simply putting the $400+ mill he got from his parents into an index fund. Neither of us can prove our claims, because we don't have either tax returns or financial statements, and Trump's business is privately held.
Mike Bloomberg and others doubt that Trump is worth even $1 billion. What's your evidence to the contrary? Let's say, charitably, he's worth $2.5 billion (right on the Bloomberg Financial estimate for 2020). Also charitable because the value of his real estate is probably in the tank now because of coronavirus.
Since the start of Trump's business career in the 1970's, the S&P has gone up by a factor of about 25, with an average annual yield, including dividends, of 9+ percent.
I did some rough back of the envelope calculations. If the time line were 20 years, Trump's $400 million would be worth about $2.4 billion. If the timeline is 30 years about $5.6 billion. These figures suggest a pretty high likelihood that he would have done better as a passive investor, particularly if he had been able to combine that with being a reality TV star!
Now this is all very rough, and speculative. But when you figure that Trumps actual financial history involves a lot of lying about his net worth, some pretty well documented fraud claims, and some very big business failures that would have been even bigger had his father not bailed him out, it doesn't seem that unlikely.
So tell me again, why are you so sure Trump was a successful businessman? Because he says so?
Cathal Nolan in His "Allure of Battle" argues that most large wars since about 1700 or so have in reality been decided by attrition. Great and decisive campaigns and battles are very exceptional, and serve mostly as accelerants of attrition.
Narr
Hint: Big Battalions!
Attrition seeks the defeat of the enemy through the wearing down of his forces rather than their comprehensive destruction. The process is one of exhaustion rather than annihilation; see especially, in this regard, Hans Delbrück's writings on Ermattungsstrategie vs. Niederwerfungsstrategie.
iowan2 said...
Another example of IQ. My son is a mechanical engineer. He designs and builds hydraulics. Where he works, the Union was threatening strike, and office staff got assigned and trained to do line work. When the Strike happened, my son and one other engineer were assigned to a room that normally had 3 people in, assembling hydraulic pumps. My son and his partner could do 80 pumps a shift. The average output for the 3 man crew was 30 per shift.
Strike. Meaning union job. Meaning this example is meaningless.
Knew someone who got out, got a union job, lasted one month, reenlisted. He and his buddy hired at the same time got the midnight shift, because, they were the junior guys. They competed against each other and produced 30 perfectly good widgets in a night. Next night the union rep was there to greet them. Told them it was only possible to produce 3 widgets per worker, per shift. When they said, "Nah, we produced a lot more.", the union rep said "I don't think you understand. You will only produce 3 per person per shift, that's all that can be produced..."
Clausewitz somehow forgot, in the millions of words he wrote and the thousands of pages he produced on the subject of war, to consider and address logistics and the importance thereof in the waging of war.
He also failed to understand hence to adequately address the role that human nature and culture plays in armed conflict.
Keegan did not make these mistakes.
I'll give Clausewitz credit for admitting that his vast ruminations on war were meant to be descriptive not prescriptive.
But that does not absolve him of his aforementioned failings and the havoc they wreak the validity of his theories, his descriptive approach not withstanding.
His failings guaranteed that he would view war as a fundamentally political act undertaken to achieve political or policy ends. It's a very rational approach to reach an understanding of war -- and very typically German. And it goes a long way to explaining why the Germans lost two of the greatest wars in human history.
Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam
I've been curious about that, since the top five finishers are not ranked and their scores are released as an unlabeled group. I expect one could figure out who might have gotten the high score, or maybe someone with inside information leaked it, or maybe things have changed, but I would like to know the source for the Feynman claim. One of my high school friends finished seventh as a sophomore and got his score, the next year he was in the top five and didn't.
So tell me again, why are you so sure Trump was a successful businessman? Because he says so?
I'll give you a reading assignment and then I am done with your TDS,
Read Conrad Black's biography.
Black is a very successful businessman and well regarded author of biographies. He knows Trump personally and his biography goes into some detail on Trump's business history with a skeptical POV. He did business with Trump when he had him redevelop the Sun Times building in Chicago. He writes that he was skeptical of Trump's business reputation when they project was considered.
Read it and get back to me.
The Battle of the Somme crippled the German army beyond repair, and the crippling process was achieved through a deliberately applied strategy of strategy of attrition. After the Somme the German army became progressively weaker, the Allies progressively stronger. The Somme doomed Germany to defeat.
My personal opinion is that Germany was defeated by the Influenza epidemic of 1918.
Similarly, I think Napoleon was defeated by Typhus in 1812. Napoleon was very good about vaccinating his troops in the Grande Armie and gave Jenner a lot of credit publicly. BY 1870, the French had forgotten Napoleon's practice and suffered thousands of smallpox deaths in the Franco -Prussian War. The Prussians vaccinated their troops.
The British suffered 10,000 dead from typhoid, which is water born and the result of poor field sanitation, in the Boer War.
One thing the Somme did was convince the RAMC that they had to start using blood transfusion. I have a lecture on military medicine.
And in 1914 most cavalry troopers in Europe carried a lance!
I recall reading somewhere that by the end of the ACW cavalry was being used as mobile infantry, that they would dismount in order to fight. I expect scouting was also a major role, but it doesn't sound like they went charging into prepared ground forces. I'd be interested in hearing from someone better informed about the use of Civil War cavalry.
My personal opinion is that Germany was defeated by the Influenza epidemic of 1918.
I blame Ludendorff.
Chuck,
Consistent with your recollection, the newspaper report of the 1939 competition that is on line does not say that Feynman had the top score. Instead, it lists the top five in alphabetical order, with Feynman listed first. So it may be that when people say Feynman had the top score, they are jumping to a conclusion that the public data does not support.
Newspaper excerpt here: https://twitter.com/phalpern/status/866697021230657537/photo/1
Michael K.
Conrad Black is a convicted felon with a long history of questionable business dealings; not to put too fine a point on it, but his reputation for truthfulness is not strong.
He wrote a hagiographic biography of Trump in 2018, while at the same time pursuing a federal pardon.
In 2019, Trump pardoned him.
So not a witness I would bet money on, if I were you.
In any event, anecdotal evidence from one deal wouldn't change my argument, or prove yours. I have close friends who were in New York real estate in the 1980s who found Trump to be both dishonest and personally despicable. It's also clear that the Taj Mahal deal in the mid 1990s was a gigantic fiasco.
My point is that you have no idea how much money Trump actually has, or how he made it, and until you do, my theory of his business acumen and self discipline (which is that he hasn't done any better than he would have tucking his inheritance in an index fund, and may have done worse) is at least as valid as yours.
Feynman was the type who was charming to people who didn't have to live with him, which just reinforces the idea that IQ is quite independent of EQ.
I say this because his son and I lived in the same living group as undergrads, and at that time he was a confused and unhappy person. That was many years ago and I haven't kept track, but last I heard he was doing well, and I hope it is so. But he suffered considerably from having a famous father, who was very long on brilliance but short on the skills that help you raise a well-adjusted child.
Conrad Black is a convicted felon with a long history of questionable business dealings;
OK I am done with you. You are an asshole with heavy duty TDS. You have never read any of his books I can tell without asking.
Go away and join ARM in the shit house.
I tried. I should have known you were another with a blank profile;.
Note to Stephen:
Michael K doesn't deal well with reality. Don't take it personally. And yes, Conrad Black is not a beacon of truth.
ARM and "Stephen" are twins. Got it.
The British thought that if they attacked the Germans often enough and hard enough, they would wear down the Germans. But the attacker always had higher losses, so the strategy had real problems. To be sure the Allies had more manpower than Germany and Austria - especially if you took the colonies into account - but there have always been people who described the attrition strategy as madness.
What won the war for the Allies was the blockade of Germany, and the entry of the US into the war, and the failed German 1918 offensive, which cost Germany more troops than it cost the Allies. Of course, the war was going to be won or lost on the Western Front, and of course the Allies felt like they needed to be attacking. They weren't going to just sit there and look at the German positions. They were going to try to win the war by attacking. Generals and politicians felt that it would end the war and believed that the country demanded offensive action. But the attrition strategy resulted in the unnecessary loss of lives. Did it really bring the end of the war closer? Could the allied commanders have behaved differently?
John Mosier's book The Myth of the Great War is worth a look. The impression I got from him is that historians who defend attrition are often doing so out of British national pride and bloody-mindedness. It couldn't have been a waste, they think. It had to have won the war.
Did it really bring the end of the war closer? Could the allied commanders have behaved differently?
Churchill was right in his Dardanelles strategy. Had the Navy followed through, the war might have been a year shorter.
But McClellan might have ended the Civil War in 1863 at Antietam.
Trump tweet about liberate reminds me of Conan - Of course the Barbarian
striking thechain
Cavalry was almost always used for recon, raiding and skirmishing. At Gettysburg, two Union cavalry brigades, Buford and Gamble, fell back while skirmishing with Heth's Division, gaining time for infantry to arrive. OTOH, on the second day, Kilpatrick's brigade did take a run at Confederate infantry, earning him the nickname "Kill Cavalry."
There were a number of big cavalry v cavalry engagements, such as at Gettysburg or Yellow Tavern.
My GG-grandfather served in the 11th Illinois Cavalry from September 1861 to the end of the war. After serving in the Mississippi campaign, Shiloh and Vicksburg, they were stationed in Memphis to fight the guerilla forces of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The 11th was involved in numerous small battles with Forrest.
However, the 11th suffered only about 20 KIA and 200 dead of disease. The infantry would say you never did see a dead cavalryman.
Love both Grant and Sherman, who I have a special fondness for due to his manic-depression.
Cavalry charges with saber in the ACW are virtually non-existent. I know of one in West Tennessee in 1862, and there may have been a few others, but most cavalry was employed as mounted infantry -- move on horseback, fight on foot, with rifles. Even on horseback they would have been in loose order and using pistols as often as not. As Ed Bearss used to say,
"There were no plumed cavaliers riding under Nathan Bedford Forrest."
The French and Prussians used old-fashioned ranked cavalry charges in 1870 and got massacreed for their troubles.
Mosier is thought-provoking, not all of them in his favor. He does point out, quite fairly, that the Allied generals consistently misled their political bosses as to their plans and failures, exactly like the the other powers' generals did, and they got fixated on elite, often colonial troops, who got fed into great offensives and shot down like non elite troops.
Ferguson points out that until the very last months of the war the Central Powers consistently inflicted more losses on a monthly basis than they suffered; but they had fewer men to trade even at a good rate.
And the Allies would have been out of the war by mid-1915 if the USA hadn't been there as a backstop for finance and production; they would have been out of the war in mid-1918 if the
Allied high council hadn't made a priority of getting Yank bodies to France ASAP.
Roughcoat, don't embarrass yourself any more about Clausewitz. Just one easy reference: On War, Book Five, Chapters Ten through Sixteen.
Clausewitz will be of value for serious thought about war for centuries yet, and of historical value for longer; he was a man of wide culture and experience, writing for his own understanding, not a professor looking to knock down a straw Junker.
Narr
Anyway, Bassford
When Trump had the bankruptcy problem, he was able to salvage his position by interpreting the tax law as giving him, I assume because he was the general partner, all of the tax loss carry-forwards steming from the bankruptcy. It withstood government challenge, and the result was the tax law had to be changed by Congress to eliminate this interpretation.
A member of my bookclub is a retired law professor from a school in the top third of the rankings, his speciality is tax law. According to him there are only about 5 or 6 lawyers who completely understand all of our tax law. I doubt that Trump, a non-attorney, had that knowledge, but what he had and still has is the intelligence to find that skilled attorney, and they made history, and changed the tax law.
This is an example of his cunning and leadership. Some, understandably, do not like this. But might it not be better to have such a person working for you rather than against you?
Michael,
Tipping over the checkerboard. With profanity and personal insults, too. Not a good look for someone who claims that the person he is arguing with is deranged.
Steve
I remember Feynman at the Challenger inquiry dunking the O-Ring material in his ice water.
The whole story in one little experiment.
Pretty good for IQ of 125.
Way back in the thread Francisco D. said: "But if both are experienced at tire changing, I would bet on the lower IQ person. "
Quick story. Back in 1997 I invented something for the company I was working for. Overnight, it quadrupled sales in a product line. Dozens of people from the home office, me among them, had to decamp at a production plant 1500 miles away so that we could get the products out by Christmas. I semi-automated a small part of a production process at the plant, so I sat and worked and de-bugged this new process alone for about 12 hours. Then we brought in a normal plant worker, 60 year old male that I assume was lower IQ than me. This process required getting a product from a bin, reading a barcode from it, etc., lots of manual manipulation. We worked side by side for about 2 hours and when I looked up, he had done more than twice as many as I had.
I had been doing it for 12 hours and he just picked it up and did way better than me. I was puzzled.
His shift ended and a new worker took his place. Surely the first guy was a prodigy. Nope. The new girl, who was in her early 20s, kicked my ass even more. Never assume someone doesn't have unexpected skills just because their IQ might be lower than yours.
I think we can all agree Trump is either a savant or an idiot savant.
High IQ Haiku
Protects you, not me?
Senator reconsiders
Gives mask the finger.
Blogger Stephen said...
Michael K.
Conrad Black is a convicted felon with a long history of questionable business dealings; not to put too fine a point on it, but his reputation for truthfulness is not strong.
He wrote a hagiographic biography of Trump in 2018, while at the same time pursuing a federal pardon.
In 2019, Trump pardoned him.
So not a witness I would bet money on, if I were you.
In any event, anecdotal evidence from one deal wouldn't change my argument, or prove yours. I have close friends who were in New York real estate in the 1980s who found Trump to be both dishonest and personally despicable. It's also clear that the Taj Mahal deal in the mid 1990s was a gigantic fiasco.
My point is that you have no idea how much money Trump actually has, or how he made it, and until you do, my theory of his business acumen and self discipline (which is that he hasn't done any better than he would have tucking his inheritance in an index fund, and may have done worse) is at least as valid as yours.
Anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all.
Since you nor the good dr. know anything about his business dealings both arguments are moot.
Comparing money invested in the S&P to money made in a business career is comparing oranges and submarines.
Is Donald Trump smart? Yes. Does he have a higher than average IQ? Probably. Is it higher than yours? Well. Your the one arguing about a third party IQ on the internet.
Rusty,
No. I am uninterested in Trump's IQ, or Schumer's. I expressly said in my initial comment that I though that IQ scores were not a helpful way to think about people who've had 40-50 year careers.
I then said that Trump was plenty smart, and that his problems are psychological and moral.
That's when Michael K. countered that Trump's moral and psychological failings were belied by his success in business. And so we moved to the question of how successful Trump actually was as a businessman.
I recognize that we can't make a firm judgment about Trump's success, because he won't provide the data, and because he's often not truthful about the matters he does discuss, like the amount of money that his parents channeled to him. But the normal rule when people won't make customary disclosures and tell untruths is to infer that the truth would not reflect well on them. So wouldn't you agree that, in the absence of better data, Trump's own conduct suggests he was not particularly successful, given the massive advantages he started with?
Conrad Black is a "convicted felon" like General Flynn is a confessed felon. Both were miscarriages of justice. Black's convictions were reversed on appeal except one case where the appeals court justice reinstated one charge that had been reversed by another court. The prosecutor of this travesty was Fitzgerald of Scooter Libby fame.
I assume "Stephen " is no reader so will end the conversation at that.
Robert Cooke wrote: ""When wealthy people donate large sums of money to a candidate for office, it's always to buy influence."
H.L. Mencken described political donations as, "...an advance auction of stolen goods."
Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...
You have to give credit to Trump for knowing that you can't lose money investing in oil and the stock market, or buying a casino. 4/22/20, 1:22 PM
You do know that's how risk works - right? Trump has done all three and still is a successful billionaire? You're reaching for something, but I can't fathom your 'trend of thought'? Oh, I get it, you're are infected by another 'Virus' - called 'TDS'.
" But the normal rule when people won't make customary disclosures and tell untruths is to infer that the truth would not reflect well on them. So wouldn't you agree that, in the absence of better data, Trump's own conduct suggests he was not particularly successful, given the massive advantages he started with?"
Who's rule is that?
But to answer your question. I have never had the opportunity to do business with the man. So the rest is none of my business.
Post a Comment