Windex007

Ok, so that's the crux of it that I think was unclear in your original post.

Your initial post was read by me (and presumably others) as "NATO without the backing of the USA isn't a meaningful defense group"

But I think what you're saying is "ENTRY to NATO with the USA pulling the strings is an unrealistic goal"

Even if the USA were to leave NATO or refuse to participate, there still isn't a better security guarantee than the remaining block being obligated to engage militarily in your defense, and the block still contains nuclear powers.

Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.

If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, that's a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesn't mean others are incapable. Because let's face it, secondary school isn't teaching formal logic.

That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.

And what if I called a rose a stinkweed?

I think it's a completely valid criticism, and I agree with the critism.

I just think semantic hang-ups are really... Exhausting and of minimal value. Terrible ratio.

Extend the principle of charity, hurdle it, then get to the meat.

I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a "general" problem?

I think it's still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.

But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you've mastered you'll be sitting on a 160+ result.

So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.

But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don't provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either...

A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of "athleticism", which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.

To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that's how they pitched it. It isn't. Tough shit.

But that doesn't suddenly imply it's nothing.

Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn't mean they're not measuring something.

So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn't "innate general intelligence". But to say it's as irrelevant as "freshness of breath" is maybe hyperbolic.

It's a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It's not BS, that's like saying the 100m dash is BS. It's just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.

Are you asking because you've memorized the speech and wanna give them a second helping of badassery?

I've read (and have no idea what to google to find a source so take my thoughts here with a heaping grain of salt) that it's not the hardest to be the "first" person to stand up. It's hardest and most important to find the second. After people see the second, it's much more likely to snowball. Some assholes would pucker SO HARD if there was a follow up.

I don't think it's as benign as just trying to get a rise out of people.

It's called "reconnaissance-in-force". Basically you scout by starting a low-cost battle.

Him and Elon do it all the time, but in the political space. They say things as a "joke", and then gauge the blowback. Then they decide if it's a joke or not post hoc.

It's always "a joke to own the libs" until it isn't. You know those "jokes" about how if he gets elected, you'll never have to vote again?

Some redneck spray painted shit like "go home" on a Mosque in my rural hometown. Like, literally illiterate levels of redneck. I think they literally spelled "Canada" wrong in one of the messages.

When people saw it in the morning, the community SWARMED the mosque with cleaning supplies to scrub it off. All the school kids made posters saying stuff like "You ARE home". By noon, the mosque was cleaned and windows plastered with the posters the kids made.

Kinda pissed me off that the national headlines neglected to mention the community response.

Made me realize pretty early on that ragebait sells and the media knows it.

There are probably countless instances of communities banding together that you'll never hear about. Doesn't mean they don't happen.

Ali G and Buzz Aldrin

Don't threaten me with a good time