One of my readers recently posted a link to a discussion on a change of policy at Cal State, according to which incoming students no longer have to sit placement exams for Mathematics and English. The aim is to reduce hurdles for students so that they can graduate sooner. Yes, you read that correctly: if any resemblance of standards keeps those IQ90 morons typical US universities seem to be full of from graduating, then better do away with them.
The debate happened at Hacker News, a discussion site for, mainly, web developers, which are the bottom tier of the tech sector. Due to the strong focus on the Bay Area, it is no surprise that that place is a festering SJW cesspool. Here is what one of those cucks had to say:
Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. What this will do is allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need. Remedial courses put an undue financial and time burden on students who would be better served with a bit of motivation and support to get through actual 101 level courses.
Sorry, leftist libtard, but you clearly should have spent more effort educating yourself! Before that change those students only had to pass placement exams, and if they didn’t then they most certainly should take remedial classes. Quite frankly, if they don’t pass those exams, they shouldn’t even be allowed into university, but that’s a different issue.
It’s funny how the left thinks that “a bit of motivation and support” is all it needs to get Jose and Airwrecka (look it up!) through college. We’re talking about people who should have been kicked out of high school. By the time they enter university, they are looking back at a lifetime of abysmal academic performance, yet “a bit of motivation” is supposed to help them. I don’t know how bad things are at Cal State (probably really bad), but what you see at decent European universities in the first semester doesn’t instill you with much hope either. I recall a student, incidentally a muzzy, who believed that parentheses were purely decorative. He just dropped them, and of course basic algebra wasn’t really to his liking either, so parentheses were the least of his problems. The SJWs in the admissions office must have been high when they decided to let him in.
Those individual tragedies are bad enough. However, we enter the realm of the absurd when we consider the utter perversion of higher education that has been going on for at least half a century. There was a time when you had to be rich or smart to get into university. For the rich, they were finishing schools. Some of the rich were pretty smart, so that was fine. The predecessors of today’s leftist then observed that people with a university degree get all the cushy jobs and rise to positions of power, so, in their utter imbecility, they concluded that if we only admitted Aisha and Kareem to university, they’d get cushy jobs too, as if the number of those jobs depends on the number of graduates. I can’t even fathom such stupidity. Besides, plenty of jobs with fancy-sounding titles are very stressful and demanding; someone with a low IQ could of course not even do them.
Unsurprisingly, leftist social engineering once again didn’t work out. Instead, we now have countless useless degree programs, shitty universities with low standards, and graduates who wonder why they can’t get a job even though they went to “collage”. The fundamental issue is that we are dealing with limited bandwidth. The number of jobs that require (genuine) university education is rather limited. In order to mask this, there is now a myriad of shitty universities that don’t teach their students anything. Nominally, they also end up with a degree, but one that is simply worthless. The end result is that graduates lament that they are underemployed, when the problem is that the jobs they thought they could get were all taken by people who got a real education. There are more graduates than ever, with the result that the barista at Starbucks with the nice perky tits has a degree in English Literature from Cal State even though she barely has a grasp on English grammar.
On an even more cynical note, one could make a very good argument that tertiary education was expanded to mask long-term unemployment. Politicians often don’t think past the next election, so what do you do if you hold power in a recession, say in the 1970s, and there are suddenly a lot of young people who don’t have work? How about you park them at university! That is precisely what happened in the Western world. In the UK, they opened up a few dozen shitty universities to park people for a few years. However, in Germany they took it to 11. It was not at all uncommon that people would take 8 or more years to get their first degree, which was roughly equivalent to a Master’s. In comparison, in the UK you can earn a Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD in a total of 7 or 8 years.
One really wonders what would happen if every country closed down the bottom 40% of universities. There is good reason to assume that their graduates don’t benefit much from the experience at all. Instead, people waste their time and money. Well, technically they waste taxpayer money, but financial literacy isn’t anything they would possess anyway. If you think there is significant research being product at mediocre universities, you need to get your head checked. They don’t produce valuable research, and their graduates don’t need their degrees either. Without wasting four years at university, people could work towards their life goals right away. Airwrecka could directly go on welfare, Suzie could start working at Starbucks right away, and if Matt wants to have the “college experience”, then a return ticket to Cancun should do the trick just fine.
Aaron, have you read this dead-on essay by Nassim Taleb?
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577
I have. My post was focussing more on the opposite of the Ivy League, though.
Sadly there is big money in university.
Their intention is to get as many students so they get money for each person.
Aaron, you mention this muzzie with shitty algebra skills, you went to a university in the UK if I am not mistaken.
Around 2002-ish?
How was the situation back then in regards of this shitty SJWism?
I was under the impression that this leftist bullshit accelerated recently 2008<, but it seems not.
No, that happened in Continental Europe. I recall preferential treatment even back in high school, when we were carted to the local university and got a tour. We were told that they had special programs to support women, including grants and even positions for junior academics. Students weren’t quite as batshit insane as they nowadays are, though, and there were no bathrooms for the “third gender” either.
What is the root cause(s) of the existence of low IQ humans (if you can call them that) in your knowledge?
In my opinion it boils down to evolutionary pressure, or the lack thereof.
Add inbreeding.
Well low iq is relative. A number that’s considered low by today’s standards was average a couple of centuries before.
And the same number would have been considered high if you go far back in time.
For there to be high and average iq there has to be low IQ. Because they’re all relative off of each other.
Do you think the Ancient Greeks had low IQs?
Lol, why would I think that? I didn’t say “Everyone 1000 years ago had a lower IQ than anyone today”.
Was the average IQ of the planet 1000 years ago lower than the average IQ of the planet today? Yes. Just like the average human height (on the planet) is higher than average human height 1000 years ago. But there were places 1000 years ago where the average person was taller than the average person today…
The point is that:
– Evolutionary features don’t evolve equally
– It’s not like everyone gains the same additional height everywhere in the world
– Some guys are born taller, in some countries, for some reason, and if they get laid more, the average goes up…. but it’s an average. Short guys still exist.
Let’s state, for the sake of the argument, that at one point the various human races diverged, probably at different points. Some evolved further in environments that posed different challenges. Thus, it is safe to assume that those challenges led to different adaptations. Ending up with a higher IQ than other races is a consequence of that. By stating that “in the past” average IQs were lower, we’d have to further specify what time you are referring to, and what race. It is, for instance, rather inconceivable that there was ever a point, after divergence, where sub-Saharan Africans were more intelligent than — let me use that term for simplicity — Aryans. Clear evidence is the dearth of cultural achievements in the habitat of the former.
I also question that the average IQ was lower a thousand or two thousand years ago. (Yes, of course, IQ is a much more recent concept.) For instance, look at what Roman engineering has achieved. It is absolutely mind-boggling. There are countless structures that still exist. How many of our contemporary buildings do you think will still stand in one or two millennia?
To simplify as much as possible:
Asking “Why do low IQ people still exist” is EXACTLY the same as asking “why do short people still exist”.
I could, but then I am not writing a pHD dissertation, just a comment reply :).
I was just making a general point that is true. It doesn’t need to be precise, again I am not writing a book or a dissertation.
Fact: If you go back in time long-enough, we were all single-cell organisms, did we have a lower IQ then? So my statement holds true.
Fact: IQ isn’t distributed equally, nor is any human trait. Some IQs will always be “low” compared to others.
That proves my point actually. My point is that evolution isn’t a linear process that happens all at once everywhere.
The fact that there’s a time period where people are smarter, followed by a period where IQ (even in the same location) goes down proves the point.
– Over shorter periods you can find it going up and down, to where the ancestors could have been smarter than the descendants
– Over a long-enough timeline, IQ grows (at any location)
IN THE MEANTIME there will be people with lower IQs, because that’s how evolution works. It doesn’t upgrade 100% of the population at the same time.
If it is true that the IQ of a population rises and falls, then what has been holding the sub-Sahran African population back for millennia?
It seems you allude to the Flynn effect, but the research surrounding that topic is hardly convincing, with people speculating that in the 1932 the average IQ in the US was 80. Yet, someone with an IQ of 80 is, quite literally, a moron who is unable to follow instructions. Even basic language acquisition may be elusive. I would say that intelligence, height, and life expectancy improved on average in the 20th century because of economic progress. However, even in a time when the average worker had a life expectancy around 35 years, had little education, and was malnourished, the upper classes were taller, more intelligent, and lived longer. We have simply closed much of the gap between the rich and the poor because food is plentiful nowadays, occupations that wreck our body are rare, thanks to to automation, and education is universally accessible.
No i’m not talking about the flynn effect, just that evolution doesn’t work in a linear fashion. It’s not that if a trait starts increasing it will then just go straight up from then on. It’s not how evolution works.
I’m not even talking about IQ in specific. Evolution in general isn’t linear in shorter timeframes. It just doesn’t work that way. Over a long-timeframe though everything looks linear. It just depends if you’re zooming in or zooming out of a graph.
The only thing I related to was this question:/b>
Question: “Why are there people with low IQs”
I will answer a different way, if it helps capture where I’m going with this:
Answer: For the same reason that poor people exist.
There have always been poor people, there will always be poor people. Because it’s relative to the location and time.
I’m not going into why different locations/populations have different amounts of whatever.
That’s not my point. My point is there have to be poor people. There have to be guys who get laid a lot and those who get laid very little. There have to be shorter people and taller people. There have to be people who are less muscular or more muscular naturally. It’s just how evolution works. This is a more big picture kind of a thing. It isn’t just about IQ.
It seems I misinterpreted your post. Yes, as long as there is a wide variance in the IQ distribution there will be people of low IQ.
Yes that’s all I was saying 🙂 In a tongue-in-cheek sarcastic way almost, but it didn’t translate.
Kind of like:
– Why are there short people?
– Because it makes the tall people tall 🙂
Won’t there always be low iq people then even if we get rid of all low iq people today?
Where do we put the passing mark?
You must be trolling. By weeding out the low-IQ people, we would effectively shift the bell curve to the right. Well, the US Army doesn’t accept recruits who have an IQ below 85, according to one of Jordan Peterson’s lectures. This is one standard deviation to the left of the mean. The reason is that those people are unfit to do anything, and this is not an exaggeration. (Note for nit-pickers: The US Army uses an “aptitude test”, because they can’t call it an intelligence test. The outcome is the same, though.)
“By weeding out the low-IQ people, we would effectively shift the bell curve to the right.”
And the effects of evolution wouldn’t take that long. 2-2 generations and we’d very likely have significant results already
Worked with foxes, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox
Trolling is an accusation commonly rendered at unseen people on the internet who have differing views. (Stressing on the word differing) But I don’t have a differing view from yours. (from what you write here) I am actually thinking of ways to eliminate low IQ imbeciles by first defining who they can be.
That’s pretty easy. Have them all take an IQ test. If they score really poorly, say 80 or less, they get exposed to social engineering efforts that make sure they won’t be able to procreate. This would even work in a non-fascist society. In a fascist society, you could take care of that problem in a much more efficient manner, though.
“Well, the US Army doesn’t accept recruits who have an IQ below 85”
An industrious idiot is far more dangerous than a lazy idiot.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/
Many would ask “Why? Wouldn’t a hard working idiot drone really useful for the Rothschild/Bilderberg/whatever so he can keep shattering stones for pennies without questioning anything?”
We’ve seen this on slapstick comedy: the idiot tries to prove he isn’t an idiot, so he tries too fucking hard and starts wrecking shit because, well, he’s fucking stupid and is unable to forsee the consequences of his acts.
“social engineering efforts”
I’m curious what you are thinking of. Do you mean some way of instilling guilt?
The fascist easy version would simply be medical intervention I guess (what a nice way to say it, eh 😛 )
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of incarceration as well as restricted freedom of movement. The former is just a more extreme interpretation of the latter. You don’t have to put those people into gulags either. You could have walled-off districts for the underclass, and then you simply let nature take its course. Wasn’t that the premise of Escape from New York?
There are a number of issues at work here and it is not simply the fact that we put a lot of people in educational programs that either don’t belong and/or won’t learn much of any use. Education is presented as a silver bullet for issues like the disintegration of domestic manufacturing of products, foreign workers, and the automation of more and more jobs. Obviously, it sounds bad to say that a person’s future is low-paying service sector or temp work. Retraining sounds a lot better.
“There was a time when you had to be rich or smart to get into university. For the rich, they were finishing schools. Some of the rich were pretty smart, so that was fine. ”
And even the ones that weren’t that smart had at least a little education force-fed them: a little history and geography, a little literature and philosophy. They had at least been made to think about stuff.
I say: bring back latin. Having latin as a baseline prerequisite to becoming a bachelor of the arts was a fine way to filter out the dumbasses.
“I say: bring back latin. Having latin as a baseline prerequisite to becoming a bachelor of the arts was a fine way to filter out the dumbasses.”
It doesn’t. Looking at all the so-called “Germans with a migration-background” dumbasses who passed Gymnasium with Latin, it doesn’t serve shit, if the exams aren’t hard enough.
I never had Latin, but French and Spanish instead, and so far it has served me much better than anybody who’s mentally jerking-off on his Latin-skills helping him for whatever.
French is tricky enough and requires quite some intelligence if you want to speak it well and it has a very practical application, i.e. there’s a couple of developed countries where you can speak it. (Plus, the jump from French to Spanish is minor. You can see that when you look at which non-French-speaking Europeans migrate to the French-speaking part of Switzerland: Mostly Spanish, Portuguese and Italian as opposed to the Balkans going to the German-speaking part of the country.)
I say: Whatever you use, set the hurdle high to wipe out dumbasses, but preferably chose something that has a real world use.
P.S. out of pure curiosity- what exactly is Bachelor of the arts? you studied playing an instrument?
Only a small fraction of German high schools (“gymnasium”) offer Latin, so the observation that there are unqualified high school graduates does not invalidate the statement that Latin is an effective filter. I’d say it works exceptionally well.
“so the observation that there are unqualified high school graduates does not invalidate the statement”
OK, that’s true. I’d still argue that the requirements to not fail because of Latin need to be higher.
“Only a small fraction of German high schools (“gymnasium”) offer Latin”
That’s strange, when I went to high school 2000 it was actually hard to find one which did not impose Latin. Maybe because this was in Bavaria where supposedly the high school diploma is the hardest to get.
Compared to the high school leaving examination in Bavaria, the ones in the other states are laughable. It would be even more difficult if Latin was mandatory, which it is not. There is normally a choice between, at the very least, French and Latin. English is mandatory. (I took Latin myself. Part of my motivation was that it was known to be a very difficult subject. As a consequence, I felt even prouder when I graduated top of my school not only in Mathematics and English, but in Latin as well. Ah, to have been young and smug!)
This goes a bit off-topic, but did your competitiveness in school not make you look arrogant to your classmates?
Or, I guess, in other words: were you a popular kid at school?
I was not. In Germany, leftist indoctrination has gone so far that good students routinely got mocked, sometimes even by teachers. You have to keep in mind that in Germany, and many other Western countries, teachers are by far the dumbest among university students. It’s a complete travesty that you have people who barely made it through high school end up as teacher in the German system. I even had teachers who deliberately graded my exams poorly in an attempt to lower my grades, but the few times that happened I imposed my will on them and confronted them right in class. They never did that again. On a related note, I don’t think I was particularly competitive. For instance, I am certain that I put in a lot less effort for my A+ in Mathematics than all those thick kids did who barely scraped by with a D.
“but the few times that happened I imposed my will on them and confronted them right in class.”
I’m curious, what was the reaction of your classmates?
My guess is something like “oh smartass again, unhappy with a B, etc…”
(Streber, usw.)
Yes, that is precisely how it went down. On top, one of my former class mates accused me of “haggling” over my grades.
This is interesting. I too had this feeling when I was in school. The feeling that I am doing less work studying but gets more done in the end. However, for some things later on in life after school I think I did work hard as well.
I have a Bachelors degree in Aviation Management and International Business from St. Cloud State University. My alma matter has a “Masters in Social Responsibility”, yet they closed their Aviation program. I am currently working to get an FAA Airframe and Powerplant license (went to trade school for this). I have my Powerplant rating, and am testing for my Airframe rating.
There is a university in my city that has a pretty strong computer science department. However, they are churning out more people with degrees that have “gender” in their name than computer scientists. The difference is at least a factor of 2, which is mind-boggling. You can blame the government for that because to the university administration it doesn’t seem to matter where the money comes from, and you can apparently find many more space cadets who want to study something related to “gender” than people smart and hard-working enough to make it through a technical degree.
East Asians are supposed to be high IQ according to some nowadays. That’s strange. 100 years ago, no wise white men would think so (in the open). The smartest ones would serve for the Gouverneur-général de l’Indochine française, as secretaries or translators, the less gifted one would be allocated to collaborators (their kids would go to Colonial Schools but had to bow down to the white men’s kids anyway), and commoners would be, well, dragged the pouche-pouches for superior white high IQ whites.
Seems like white people “are being consumed” by the guilt they have exacted on East Asian societies 100-150 years ago.
About the Indians, once in a lifetime could you have a true high IQ son of India (Ramanujan). The rest were just dirty brown skin Hindus anyway.
As one counter example, I’d like to mention that Hitler spoke fondly of the Chinese and Japanese and even considered their culture superior to the Germans’.
May I respectfully ask for your sources?
Read this on Hitler’s view on the Asian honorary Aryans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_Aryan
The relevant part is the following:
“Pride in one’s own race – and that does not imply contempt for other races – is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them.”
Is this the source you read from
“The Political Testament of Adolf Hitler”? from Wikipedia? (No sarcasm intended)
(Sigh)
Japanese, maybe. China, well…, Vietnam…..
This was the source I could find most easily. However, if you think that it is not a reliable one, then just read up more on Hitler and Nazi Germamy. It is a well-known fact that the Japanese were considered “honorary Aryans” by the Nazis. I encountered such references multiple times.
“Pride in one’s own race – and that does not imply contempt for other races – is also a normal and healthy sentiment.”
Words from a politician who fooled millions other guilty anyway?
That is just illusion. The Japanese were so proud that they…the Chinese? The Chinese held Vietnam so dearly that they punched their little brother in 1979. But then the war that ravaged the Vietnamese souls 4 years ago was more about New Imperialism and much less about white Yankee hamburger boys.
They were motivated by Nationalism.
It is just ideologies, today a sacred one, tomorrow a pile of garbage.
And we’ve never learned.
Sleazy, I know, I know. I don’t mean it.
But Japan? Far away to be a real fool to be contempted, too handy as an ally to counter Soviet Union. So why not praise them?
China? German Nazis sold weapons to Kuomintang Chiang Kai Shek. Why not praise them anyway? The helmet of Chinese Kuomintang (heroes of China) originated from Germany.
Why didn’t he praise India, very deep and beautiful civilization, or Persia, homeland of the poet Firdawsi? What about Korea? Or even better Mongolia, for their past martial achievements?
Ah, pragmatism and diplomacy.
I don’t think India has a productive culture at all. Just look at the descent into madness that has been happening ever since the British left that country. The Japanese, on the other hand…
But it is not the Indians that want it to happen. It is the expansion of Islamic kingdoms that introduced such a complexity into India. The Ghaznavids, the Ghurids from Afghanistan mountains, their offshoot the Delhi Sultanate. Tamerlane the Brutal, and Babur. Ah, Allah u Akbar.
You refrain from China, so mighty the Qing (the Manchus who forced the Ming people to shave their heads) that they were mopped up by all great Imperial Powers. So why praise these rootless kids anyway?
To readmit the beautiful past of China is to accept its tragic end. So they must part with their ancestors anyway. (No tears)
So is Vietnam who had no choice but to join barbarian Communism to win their independence, and now they regret deeply (not in the open) about the current system. Which way should we go, what did we do wrong? We were rather isolated anyway? “Hundred years of solitude” may be? We are lost now.
What is it to praise Imperial Japan anyway? They massacred their “co-racers”, they hated their neighbours to the bone, and had no qualms to torture others for fun. Healthy? Right? They were just like Nazy Germans after all?
Do they both now even dare to look back at their past?
That’s a different topic altogether. The point was merely that Hitler praised Japan. Make of that what you will.
Thank you for your reminder.
To me, it is just Hitler’s propaganda.
I sadly read this:
https://www.quora.com/What-did-Hitler-think-of-Japan-and-the-Japanese
He said that Japan purged Mein Kampf of racial slurs seem to be confirm by a…Japanese movie that I saw but…could not remember it’s title.
Anyway, people love winners, and politicians are not of scientist type. That is my final word.
I’d rather think that what you call IQ is what we definitely as our learning culture and tradition in East Asia. A legacy of passed down from the sage Confucius. We gracefully follow this tradition and pay due respect to our ancestors. To us, we will always live under their shadows.
“or instance, look at what Roman engineering has achieved. It is absolutely mind-boggling. There are countless structures that still exist. How many of our contemporary buildings do you think will still stand in one or two millennia?”
Isn’t it also the case that they prefer to use long-lasting materials? Chinese (Han dynasty) engineering feats were not small but hardly anything visible nowadays (a bit of exaggeration), that’s because they like to use perishable materials (woods, bamboos, etc).
The Romans probably picked those materials deliberately. Also, the early Romans most certainly thought millennia ahead and assumed that various structures would simply last forever. Hitler likewise had a time horizon of millennia and plans for the capitol of the Third Reich, Germania, were well underway, but eventually cut short.
“Compared to the high school leaving examination in Bavaria”
What is the name of this exam in German, I am curious.
In Germany, education is organized on the state level, thus each state can set its own standards. The German name is, in all states, “Abitur” or “Allgemeine Hochschulreife”.
“I even had teachers who deliberately graded my exams poorly in an attempt to lower my grades, but the few times that happened I imposed my will on them and confronted them right in class. ”
Even though this was the past, consider yourself to be lucky that you could “impose your will on your teachers”. In my society, “never even try to outshine your masters” is the rule, not an exception. It does help kids to develop an extra level of social skills though.
On the other hand, most teachers at my time was trained rigorously in pedagogy.
“(I took Latin myself. Part of my motivation was that it was known to be a very difficult subject. As a consequence, I felt even prouder when I graduated top of my school not only in Mathematics and English, but in Latin as well. Ah, to have been young and smug!)”
Is textbook regulated by a single education ministry? Or you have a choice to choose textbooks?
BTW, did they still taught you at the time how to read Fraktur? That is definitely the key to link you to the past of your country.
There are several available text books. They need to get approved by the educational ministry in Bavaria before they can be used in state schools, though. Schools buy those textbooks and distribute them among their students. There are no tuition fees, so this is paid for by the taxpayer. Also, educational publishing is pretty big business, so sales people often visit schools and hope to get a contract for a particular subject or even all subjects.
I wasn’t taught Fraktur in school, but I picked it up pretty quickly when I read a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that was printed in the 1930s.
Curious, how old where you when you read it?
“There are no tuition fees, so this is paid for by the taxpayer.”
Well, that’s good right, it gives many bright kids chance to advance further in life. Otherwise, they would have to drop out of school and join the workforce early to supplement the income of their families.