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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (172140)	10/7/2005 3:59:07 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Ed, good points all, in your post, and not incorrect [to use a Pommy double negative]. <one of the views of the authors who presented those statistics was that higher income families tended to provide a richer intellectual environment and a stronger base of SAT tested knowledge for their children. If that's true then how do you quantify whether some, or all, of the correlation is genetically based as opposed to environmentally influenced? As the entire series of articles seems to suggest; the conclusion you can draw from these studies is "not enough information." > Quite true, but I don't resile from a conclusion for lack of data. I go with what I do know to be true and fill in gaps as more data comes in. As I berate offspring, sundry nephews and nieces and anyone who will listen, every little thing that we walk on, every tap we turn on, every light switch we flick, every table on which we rest a cup and every cup, has got a vast swathe of do or die effort behind it. None of it sprang into being by intelligent design at the arrival of consciousness of said ingrates. In about 1993, I was driving a company car, with a nephew aged about 16, over Newmarket Viaduct in Auckland. I asked Google for an image and after a couple of minutes all I'd got was a webcam of our Market Road offramp looking south from Newmarket Viaduct trafficnz.info click on the Market Road cam to see what's happening right now 500 metres away from me. Google is amazing. I should have added "every click of the mouse" to my list of things above. Anyway, he was bemoaning how he didn't have anything [being from a poor family] and the rich people take everything and so on. I pointed out to him that he was sitting comfortably in a car travelling at 100 kph over a huge viaduct with a cellphone right there enabling a call to anywhere in the world for a low cost [prices had come down even then] heading for a house which was large, warm and comfortable past supermarkets loaded with food of high quality and low cost [if he chose the healthy stuff of course] and with a high-powered brain in his skull. He was sitting in the lap of luxury and moaning about it. I explained that who has a piece of paper saying they own something doesn't affect whether he is enjoying the benefit. He didn't own the viaduct or car, but was getting the benefit anyway, without even paying anything. Even if he did have to pay for something, such as using the phone, the benefit he would get would be large compared with the cost to him. That's the nature of buying something, there is always a consumer surplus of greater or lesser amount. The benefit to the consumer exceeds the cost or they wouldn't do the transaction. I explained how swarms of people had worked all their lives and produced the vast panoply of things which he took for granted. His great great grandparents on down built everything he could see, using poor tools such as wheelbarrow, pick and shovel to hack a road over mountains. Without lifting a finger, he inherited all that had gone before, including the DNA which they passed on having survived the billion year history of challenge which petatrillions of others did not do. Vast legions of humans and chimpoids before him had been born, struggled to survive in horrible circumstances and squeaked through to reproduce the next generation. He could immediately wear the cloak of civilization and all he had inherited and go on to do more and enjoy more. The equivalent child gazing around at age 16 in Kabul is not so fortunate. Whining about not owning much having never done anything is ridiculous. Similarly, the rich kid sitting the SAT has enjoyed all the good stuff which his well-off parents have provided which the 16 year old in Afghanistan has not enjoyed. Of course the Afghan can't do well on SAT as they can't even read english. They won't have a clue how many angles there are in a triangle. Yet they might have an IQ of 150. They will flunk SAT. So yes, of course the cultural context will have an effect on how well somebody does. For the illiterate Afghan youth, the effect will be huge. For a poor youth in Chicago's slums, the effect will not be so large as they have tv and friends and will have used a form of english and will have heard of triangles in rap. High intelligence children from the USA slums will nevertheless do very well on SAT. It's hard to keep the really intelligent down. One way or another they seem to sneak a peek at a magazine, or listen more assiduously to things on tv. I bet they all have tvs. Not that I advocate tv anywhere near children. We didn't have it in the house in their early years. I'm not quantifying how much of the SAT result is due to the inherited wealth-effect. I think that only a small portion of the result will be due to wealth-effect. That's my judgment having read a lot of things and seen a lot of people and having thought about things quite a lot. One could argue that the wealthy chicken produced the smart egg, or the smart egg produced the wealthy chicken. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I think either way, they are both chickens. Before I lose this post via a spastic click or glitch, I'll post it. I'll answer more later. Meanwhile, as you can see on the cam, I will NOT be playing golf today. NZ's weather is hideous. Unless one is a duck. If there were tradable citizenships, maybe people would understand a bit better what they have inherited, when they see something like $1 million in value that they own, going down when they vote for dumb things and up when they vote for good things. Mqurice PS: The left hand webcam shows Spaghetti Junction which is a better view of what I was telling my nephew. Note the equipment and people [hiding from the rain and lightning just now probably] working to build more roads and bridges so that more young ingrates can whine about how poor they are while enjoying the efforts of those who have gone before.

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (172140)	10/7/2005 6:31:55 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<the world has gotten so complex that the relative need for people with a big grasp of ideas and solutions is greater than it has ever been and the percentage of such people hasn't grown> On the contrary, the percentage of people with high intelligence has grown. See Flynn Effect, not to mention the fact of our big human skulls. Though if you mean the distribution of intelligence is the same old curve, stretched to the right, then that's true. The smart ones make things more and more difficult for those at the left of the curve to cope. There is strong pressure and that makes evolutionary pressure too. Women select for success to breed. They rate intelligence well up their list of mating requirements. The process has been underway for millennia [as shown by the fact of humans not being like chimps, for many thousands of years]. The process is really fast now, with 6 billion of us seething and breeding and failing and dying. Those who succeed, go on to have another go and see if their DNA and ideas can get through the next round. The filtration process is rapid. Their challenges are increasing. As you say, a willing strong back is not enough for many these days. 6 billion!! That's huge. faculty.plattsburgh.edu It looks as though more have lived in the last 200 years than in all of history [though I haven't quite done the maths and don't have data on ealier life expectancies]. What will happen next, is that people will live where they have high speed cyberspace. Those who can use cyberspace will gravitate in a human crystallisation process to optical fibre nodes, forming, literally, a new form of brain and new form of humanity = smarter and symbiotic with It, like mitochondria tucked into cells. When we bought our last house, number one on my list of requirements was fast cyberspace. Now I need an upgrade from ADSL. Where's the fast, free, fibre? Japan, USA, Korea, Ireland, etc... The fibre won't come to me. I have to go to it. Mohammed went to the mountain. Hey! You can't tell me Google doesn't have incipient if not actual intelligence. It gave me this link: members5.boardhost.com They were discussing poor people and how to educate them. So, which will move, the mountain or Mohammed? Of course fibre will spread more yet, but people will do a lot of moving to where they need to be. It looks like crystallization to me. Like oil and limestone out of the ecosphere and into permanent graves [other than a bit of erosion]. Okay, they aren't strictly crystals, but they are like going to like. The much bemoaned gaps are not going to close. They are going to widen. It's not a knowledge gap, or wealth gap, or electronics gap, it's a brain-power gap, which is mostly a DNA gap. Giving a chimp a computer won't be any use to them, and people with low cognitive abilities will not make a lot of use of cyberspace, just as they never made much use of libraries, which sat there empty. Mqurice