V17

So, why don’t they show these pictures to the world?

Decency? I don't know that of course, I'm not saying that I'm sure about this, but not releasing photos of people that are too undignified or drastic is a relatively common policy.

Do you by any chance happen to have believed the US lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which the US lied about to invade Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?

I'm not from the US and I was not yet following US/international politics at that time. Also none of the people I talked about were americans ("our" ambassador being czech, a journalist-editor from France also confirmed seeing the photos), so I don't see it as particularly relevant anyway.

People are still spreading the beheaded baby horseshit

Honestly, the only context in which I see it is people complaining about it being a lie, but that may just be that we have different internet bubbles.

Personally I don't call it horseshit because several people that I consider trustworthy confirmed being shown photos of beheaded babies (though not 40 of them, but I've never even seen that claim anywhere, I've seen a separate early claim that 40 babies were killed in total, not specifically beheaded) by Israeli officials, one of them being our ambassador, who so far has been a completely trustworthy person as far as I know. We also do know that Israelis only showed some photos privately to selected foreign politicians, journalists and diplomats, because (apart from them saying so) the people shown described those photos and they were later released publicly. It is not inconceivable that the beheaded babies were among those not released to public for some reason.

It's a basic propaganda technique. You, to great fanfare, release some big fuckoff lie that makes the "other" look bad ("V17 FUCKS GOATS! V17 IS A GOATFUCKER, EVERYONE!") and then days or weeks later you follow up with the truth to head off any claims that you couldn't possibly be a REAL journalist ("Our apologies, it seems V17 was only washing his car. There was no goat. He did not fuck the car.") but you do so in as quiet and half-assed of a manner as possible.

The issue is that is not what happened. Apart from what I say above, the fact that white house representatives pretty much immediately walked back on that was widely reported by mainstream media a day later. Also, the attack was already so brutal that it changed nothing about how Hamas is being perceived. For most people, slaughtered civilians with marks of torture and burned babies (those were afaik released on photos, but I did not want to look to check) were unsurprisingly enough.

Compare that to a failed rocket of palestinian islamic jihad falling on a hospital parking lot, Hamas knowingly lying about it according to a released wiretap and people still arguing that Israel did it in similar threads on Lemmy.

Also I'll have you know that I fuck sheep, not goats.

This is absurd conspiracy-nut level of thinking. Among other reasons because this will likely end Netanyahu's career after the war ends, he's no longer immediately needed and investigations start (Israelis have a history of actually doing those properly because most see it as an existential threat to not have functioning defense mechanisms), and I'm pretty sure that he knows this. Which means that the reason for him to do this anyway would be because he's so selfless that he doesn't care about his career or power (even though after losing his career he's likely to face lawsuits for other things he's done) as long as this goal is completed. I hope you see how nonsensical it is for a super-populist politician under the threat of several investigations to selflessly give up his career and power.

So random rumors spread by soldiers should be treated as truth (because its pro-team Israel )

I thought that my quote on what happened in that case pretty clearly implied that it was a screw-up. Nevertheless, it was a relatively short-lived screw up which, unlike the claims of 500 killed by a supposed Israeli strike on a hospital, didn't seem to do any damage apart from slightly lessening the trustworthiness of media or Israel for some people.

reporting on what the ministry of health of gaza, officials in israel, and random israel soldiers all confirm

If you're talking about the hospital strike, I haven't seen anyone but the ministry of health of Gaza say what they said, and the ministry of health of Gaza is de facto Hamas. I do see Hamas, a terrorist organization, as implicitly less trustworthy than IDF, even though I don't trust everything IDF says, yes.

Both are entirely possible, even at once. Also it's not just "exactly this", it's generally a broader range of topics. And, to nitpick a bit, "relatively objectively" is not the same as "totally committed to the most objective possible view".

For another example of the former, as the guy below you says, years ago this was the exact modus operandi of (the english version of) Russia Today, until it reoriented and started targeting straight up pro-russian conspiracy nuts. Sputnik I think was always a bit out there, but I'm honestly not sure.

major explosion killing 200+ people

Is there any proof of that? From what I saw the estimates kept going down and down, with various OSINT groups claiming likely proof of merely tens of people and actual intelligence agencies more conservatively 100+, but not 200. It seems unlikely that if Hamas had the bodies of 200+ people they would not even take photos for propaganda purposes.

(shortened your quotes, message was too long)

IQ tests can be studied for. [...]

As far as I know, for properly administrated tests the scientific consensus is that this is not true, with a few small sample size studies showing some improvement and a lot of larger studies repeatedly failing to show anything. You provide no evidence, which in this particular case (something that goes against most of IQ research) would be warranted imo, so I can only guess what you mean in particular. As far as I know, even with potentially neglected children from environments with not enough stimulation, where the theoretical potential clearly exists, the results have been mixed.

(and it’s utterly ludicrous, incidentally, to conceive of “intelligence” as a single thing that can be boiled down into a single number!)

I don't think this is a popular claim in psychometrics and I haven't said so either.

IQ tests have major cultural components. [...].

A lot of effort went into mitigating this issue, and while it cannot be erased, it doesn't really invalidate IQ as a concept in any way. It is one of the reasons why we don't call people from more significantly different societies that one might very crudely describe as "primitive" unintelligent (and yes, some meanings of IQ can lose relevance in such societies), but afaik available evidence shows that there's not much difference between the results and usefulness of IQ in the US, Germany or China.

IQ test results vary by the quality of education available. [...]

Without more information you cannot say whether it indicated what you say or whether it indicates that more intelligent people tend to be more successful, which creates generational wealth/education differences on its own.

I am not claiming either, but let me give you a counter anecdote: Czechia doesn't really have bad neighborhoods and terrible schooling, we were forced to all be equally poor during 40 years of communism, which has only been changing quite slowly - there are about 2 real "ghettos" in the whole country, it's safe everywhere and schools are paid from state tax money, wages set by law etc. So there's almost no difference in funding between a school in a poor area and a "rich" area (with significant quotation marks), and most schools are on a similar level of quality.

Despite that, the studied qualities of IQ still apply here, and have done so since IQ research started here, even during communism where the societal differences were even smaller outside of the ruling class.

The obvious exception: you're too poor to provide proper nutrition to your children, you for live under constant existential stress etc. These likely lower your IQ and likely contribute the Flynn effect (see below).

IQ numbers have been rising over time to the point that someone who got an IQ score of 140 in the 1970s would score as a borderline idiot today.

This is incorrect and all it would take to know that is opening the wikipedia page on Flynn effect. Since different tests measure different types of intelligence and are standardized individually, it's not easily possible to say "IQ xxx in 1970 would be IQ yyy in 2020". But it seems to change by about 3 points per decade, the change has been slowing down and in some cases even reversing in some developed countries in recent decades, and the change has always been the most prominent in the lower end of the scale and not very visible in the high end.

Based on that we can be reasonably sure that a person with an IQ score of 140 in the 1970s would still be considered gifted at the least, and it is possible that they would score around 140 today as well. I'm sure that with some effort you could find some mathematician or physicist who was measured around that score in the 1970s and is still considered obviously briliant.

(if anything it might be a negative trend, given American politics in particular!). Yet if there wasn’t a built-in corrective factor applied that changes each year IQ scores would be rocketing skyward. Again this hints at something learned, and not intrinsic.

See above. I'm too lazy to go find if the US suffers from reverse Flynn effect, but there have been researchers claiming that median IQ has been going down, though I think it's not a mainstream consensus opinion. In any case, IQ has not been skyrocketing in the US for some time as far as I know.

Furthermore, the Flynn effect is an effect widely studied by actual scientists, it's not a thing that disproves psychometrics, it's an area of research of psychometrics.

So IQ measures something … but nobody can say what it is.

Literal books have been written on this. You just have to read them. The IQ is used because we know that it's a useful metric for many things, it's pretty much as simple as that.

My experience so far has been:

• "default" reddit, like /r/popular etc. has been worse, because reddit started using some form of "the algorithm" which pretty aggressively pushes controversial subreddits with high engagement, and those tend to be dumb and toxic. Amitheasshole, twohottakes etc. are the most obvious ones.

• customized, highly selective reddit with as much crap from the frontpage as possible unsubscribed from is not significantly worse than a year ago, but then again, it was already pretty bad a year ago. Since the API changes I've had 3 people block me to get the last word in an argument, for simply disagreeing with them, without me being an asshole. This is quite annoying in a small subreddit where such a person posts regularly, but it may have just been bad luck.

• Lemmy... Well, 3 things that I probably dislike about reddit the most, not because they're the worst things that happen there, but because they're so damn prevalent, are overmoderation (heavy handed deletions of posts and comment trees, unnecessarily locking threads that are even mildly controversial, things like banning people for ever posting in a controversial community etc.), strong american partisanship where if people realize you don't agree with them on everything with regards to society/politics/culture wars, they immediately assume you're from the opposite american camp and that you must have bad intentions, and finally simply people not being very smart on average.

Well, all three of those problems seem to be just as prevalent on large Lemmy instances, the first two even more in some places. And whereas on reddit many people understood that you're probably not realistically going to be able to create an alternative subreddit to some huge default with hundreds of thousands of users, so the "go make your own subreddit" copout is not very practical, here "go make your own instance" seems to be one of the default reactions to any criticisms.

That said, Tildes seems to be doing okay. It's even smaller and it doesn't really try to be a reddit alternative, but it's considerably smarter and more sane on average than both Reddit and Lemmy.

I don't think this is an argument against the usefulness of IQ. Firstly not all countries use standardized tests with such an influence (I'm from Czechia and we don't, there's a standardized high school leaving examination, but it's only necessary to pass, the score is generally unimportant for university admission). Secondly all you're saying is that the tests correlate with IQ. That does not make them or IQ invalid, it may just as well simply mean that they test how well a student does in school, and having a higher IQ tends to make studying easier.

But mostly, again, psychometrics is the one field of psychology that has relatively rigorous and reliable methodology. The idea that you disprove decades of research, from large scale statistic studies made with cooperation of state institutions to expensive and rare research like various twin studies, simply by saying "actually IQ doesn't matter" is naive at best. There really isn't a lot of reasons to say that apart from ideological ones.

So if that’s your argument do you just believe that israel has the right to go on a conquest and slaughter palestine? Genuine question.

I don't believe my comment indicated that. I simply don't believe that Palestine has the right to go on a conquest and slaughter Israel either.

There are things that Israel did that I strongly disagree with, in recent history most of them are connected to West bank settlements. There are more things that I disagree with that Palestine did. I think that the 1948 UN proposed 2-state solution would have been more than reasonable, and it would have likely put Palestine into a much better position than it's in now, but one can't change the past. We'll see if Israel government becomes more reasonable and thinks of a more current lasting solution, but I'm not holding my breath.

So for you, a millennia of history, distinct cultures, and dialect are meaningless.

Why do you think so? Jews also lived in the area, and the ones who came later afaik generally migrated and purchased their land legally, with the exception of migration during WW2, which was not legal, but imo pretty understandable since it was literally done by refugees running from the holocaust. People argue that it wasn't kosher since the region was under British control, but before that it was under the control of Osmans and before that the region was afaik under control of someone who conquered it for most of its history. It has never been a country.

Obviously this doesn't give Israel a claim over the whole region, but I don't think they have any less of a right for existence than Palestine.

IQ isn't even a good metric of intelligence, just of the ability to do well at IQ tests.

I've seen this repeated ad nauseam on reddit in any slightly relevant threads, but it seems completely unfounded. Psychometrics is one of the subfields of psychology that doesn't suffer from an apocalyptic replication crysis, like for example social psychology, and there's decades of research on IQ. Please note that I'm not saying that IQ is the most important measure of a person or anything like that, but it's a pretty good metric that demonstrably correlates to/predicts a lot of things with reasonable confidence.

The point of the movie is to show how stupid people are everywhere, and it's their fault that the world is going to shit. Which is an elitist, shitty argument. It completely ignores the direct involvement of those with a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of the world around them.

In my experience, in real life it's more common that people just don't care about wellbeing of others who are worse off/more ignorant, than it being malice, but otherwise I agree.

Sure, you can make an argument that a certain level of intelligence is inheritable... but not to such a degree that is implied by the movie, or by how people interpret it.

I agree with this as well, and with other critics you write below. I don't think it's a very good movie.

Sure, you may not have quite the same ability to quickly consume and interpret information... but most everyone has the ability to do it eventually. It's just a matter of how much you want to.

But I don't think this is the case. Firstly I don't like the "it's a matter of how much you want to", because that's very close to blaming a person for not being born smart enough. Secondly, even if what you say is true - it's a matter of time and effort - the reality is that at some point the time and effort needed would be so huge that it's the same as "not able to do it at all", because an information that was acquired/way to solve a problem that was found was only relevant ten years ago and is completely useless now. Most people simply don't have it in them to seriously work on a unified theory of physics, but most people (though a considerably smaller "most") also don't have it in them to be a good strategic leader of a company, who does nothing as complicated as theoretical physicists, but needs to solve problems in a smart way fast to be good for anything.