> No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
It seems to me, then, that your primary objection is not that IQ scores are inaccurate, but that intelligence shouldn't be measured in the first place?
Which makes me think that you don't want anyone doing research into whether human intelligence is changing at all.
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
The first IQ test was developed by Binet and Simon in France, and it was all about predicting academic success of children. Virtually all IQ tests are predicting academic success. Cultural component is a big part of it. For example music education is associated with better grades. Maybe no one knows how it works, but it does.
No one knows what intelligence is, all the tests are like "lets identify a group of smart people (normally it is something like a group of high performing students), find correlates and build a test measuring correlates". No good definition of intelligence and no casual reasoning, just a correlative one.
How IQ 100 becomes a median? Lets take a big enough sample, get their test score and then normalize numbers so median will be 100 exactly. The creators of tests know that you can't compare IQ numbers from different populations. You can investigate the difference, but a direct comparison is nonsense. Even comparisons between different age cohorts of the same population are questionable at very least.
It doesn't mean that iq numbers are meaningless, but we shouldn't confuse them with intelligence, and we definitely shouldn't treat them as absolute numbers. They are relative measure.
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
In Germany we have pretty good employment protections (I think at least!), but this would be legal too. You have a 3 month grace period where the employer can terminate the contract without giving much reason - you gotta survive this period then the protections kick in and they can’t just terminate the contract without a justification and notice period.
It sucks but I think in this case even the best protections won’t help much.
I use my custom email address and forward to posteo, for me there is little to no lock-in; I could go to another service tomorrow and wouldn’t have to change anything
I was looking into Posteo a while back but was turned off by the recycling of addresses. After leaving the service it's available to anyone after a fixed time.
Fwiw calculators were banned in my school. Only started to use one in university - and there it also didnt really help with anything as the math is already more complex
I was allowed to use calculators when I started algebra in seventh grade.
I found that calculators didn't help all that much once you got into symbolic stuff. They were useful for the final reductions, obviously, but for algebra the lion's share of the work is symbolic and at least the relatively cheap two-line TI calculator I was using couldn't do anything symbolic.
I know that there are calculators that can do Computer Algebra System stuff, and those probably should be held off on until at least calculus.
I don’t think you can write off Apple or Microsoft just because Thiel made some investment in them.
Being the VC to a company’s round B, C, and D (adding up to maybe 40% ownership/control) is VERY different from simply throwing some money at a trillion dollar company to see some returns.
At least with Chrome i can use ublock - not so with safari.
The best browser is ofc Firefox but everyone seems to have forgotten that bc of bad publicity or whatever
This implies they had some sinister plan to claim all your data as theirs or something which is ridiculous - they didn’t back down from anything but changed the wording of the legal text to make it easier to parse for non-lawyers.
There is no political will in the US to spend billions of dollars and institute a national draft and have tens of thousands of soldiers dieing.
That would probably cause Vietnam War-style protests if not an outright civil war
I don’t think air dominance will hold up for long if a plane costs billions and a drone a couple thousand. Any interceptor rocket the US uses will set them back millions versus literal peanuts on the other side.
Add that Iran is basically a mountain fortress and they’ll run out of money very quickly; disregarding that prolonging the war will be __very__ unpopular in the US.
They really got themselves into an unwinnable bind
How does a drone costing "a couple thousand" take out a plane? It doesn't.
Shaheds and quads offer no threat to US air superiority. Iran can fling them at the ground targets willy-nilly, sure, and that will inflict causalities on FOBs and ground forces. There's no ready-made solution to low end attack drones. But the sky is going to remain with the US. This allows US to dispense JDAMs at anything that pops its nose out into the open. Which doesn't play well with the notion of "positional trench warfare". Any "position" like this is a liability when the kill loops are tight and the sky speaks precision munitions.
If a major ground operation happens, I expect it to look closer to "2024 Gaza urban warfare hell" than to "2024 Ukraine open field war of attrition". Defending forces hiding from the air power in urban formations, causalities and collateral damage from the attackers trying to flush them out, humanitarian consequences from supply lines interdictions.
I very much agree that "the war is unpopular in the US" is a severe pressure on how much US can accomplish in practice. But what US sets out to do, how hard the US commits and how much can US actually accomplish there all remain to be seen. They could well purge the regime, destroy the key weapon facilities or grab-and-hold the oil fields before the domestic audience runs out of patience and pressures the politicians, or votes the decision-makers out.
Keep in mind: Iran isn't running off a pool of limitless resources either. The regime was already struggling a lot before US and Israel declared open season on the leaders - and the external pressure only buys you this much cohesion. Iran's military infrastructure is not in a tip-top shape, their income streams are dubious, they don't have many allies left after the proxy purges, they don't have reliable weapon suppliers overseas, and their own weapon stockpiles and production are unlikely to be sustainable in any way. They can sustain much more manpower losses and tolerate more hardship, sure - but there is no limitless tolerance. A regime that purges protestors by the thousands can't rely on its population being willing to suffer and die for it.
So there's nothing inherently "unwinnable" about this. It's a horrid mess of unknown war goals, questionable decision-making and dubious war sustainability, on both sides. Outcomes are very hard to estimate without some damn good intel.
This isn't middle ages. Most modern wars have dubious cost-benefit at best. Doesn't stop them from being fought and occasionally even won, no.
If US sets its war goal at "secure the strait and the oil fields" or "dismantle the regime" or "dismantle the nuclear program" and pulls that off, doesn't matter how many billions they would have sunk into the affair and how much they would actually have gained from it. From a military standpoint: a war goal was set and accomplished.
Whether US can actually set such a goal and then accomplish it is debatable, but it is not in any way impossible.
Given that Iran was able to close it? Definitely not "secure" then, no. Let alone now.
If US has a goal of keeping the global oil prices low, then those specific goals make sense.
"Dismantle the regime" can be accomplished with both direct action, and with a more long term "destroy the regime's income streams and supply chains and let it implode". Both are on the table, and the latter can overlap with "seize the strait and the oil infrastructure".
> Given that Iran was able to close it? Definitely not "secure" then, no. Let alone now.
They were able to yet didn't because doing it was sure to provoke a response. In fact if Iran acted first to close the strait it would surely have pulled in all of the European powers.
The only reason they clode the strait is because the US struck first so they had nothing to lose anymore.
"Securing the strait" is completely incoherent as an objective for this war.
Tell that to Trump and his glorious way of bombing Iran. Nothing against the idea itself, the Mullahs all but asked for it to happen.
But the execution? That was a level of dogshit I haven't seen in the time I was alive lol. Even Russia was better prepared with their invasion of Ukraine.
Both Trump and Netanyahu had a somewhat solid perspective on not getting utterly wasted in the next elections. Instead they go on one of the most ill-prepared wars in modern history, with results that may seriously upend the global economy if not lead us to WW3 outright.
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