Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

Einherjar86 said:
That's true. But then how do we explain those college undergrads involved in social activism? I don't know exact numbers, but I have a feeling that the average college undergraduate's IQ isn't so deflated that her reading comprehension is compromised...?
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Well to your prior point about the relatively small number of college undergraduates doing the sort of extreme political activism like those interviewed, it's obviously not a problem with the average undergraduate. The constant pushing of everyone towards post-secondary education, and the plethora of grants, loans, and scholarships, plus reduced academic standards (compared to what someone like me would find ideal), plus AA type programs, all work towards allowing people in that cannot function well in an academic environment for any number of reasons.

When someone is in an environment where they are overwhelmed, they can respond in a variety of ways. I saw a relatively normal looking kid become a shell of himself after 2-3 weeks of bootcamp: bedwetting, open sores, practically catatonic at certain times (obviously he was sent home). He was an outlier of course (no one else out of the ~60 of us was sent home for "failure to adapt"), and in an environment where although overwhelmed, everything was extremely controlled.

For someone of average intelligence and a substandard cultural background, being thrown into the high pressure/gentrified nature of academia + hearing language about oppression + being away from home/low supervision + any other number of other radical life changes, this could lead to other sorts of acting out. Self harm, protesting, vandalism, etc.

Einherjar86 said:
I would agree that significant differences exists between those with drastically different IQs, but I guess I'm hesitant to blame reading comprehension for the current practices/beliefs of social activism. Those who are uneducated and non-academic probably aren't even visiting the wikipedia pages for the kinds of theorists we're talking about, and those who have cause to (i.e. your average Humanities undergrad) most likely have the intelligence and supporting structures in place necessary to comprehend the material. So I think that more often it comes down to either complete unfamiliarity or an unwillingness to put in the time/effort to understand.

If the common college protester superimposes a set of progressivist values over theoretical materials and appeals to this as justification, I would be less inclined to blame reading comprehension than simple laziness.
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Well you asked how science tests this. I listed the two most relevant tests I could think of. Unfortunately the kind of specific tests one would need to run to sort of answer these questions would probably never get funding.

I also think you're a "victim" of the Dunning-Kruger effect on this, as are many intelligent people (including myself until hearing about it/experiences in the last few years). Even if reading comprehension isn't an issue (that is, one can read the words and understand the literal definitions), this doesn't mean one can fully grasp theories. Studies are somewhat limited, but there is some evidence that general intelligence/IQ cannot be thought of as existing on a smooth continuum. Rather it is more stair-stepped, and that there may be certain thresholds required, (or maybe certain genes switched on or whatever), for a person to be able to understand or perform at "the next level". As far as I've been able to determine, an IQ of 120 is a supported threshold. After that, differences are almost entirely about hard work/study/etc. 120 is also firmly +1SD on the distribution curve, with only ~20% of the population holding that IQ or higher. Recent percentages of 18-24 year olds in the US enrolled in some sort of post-secondary education was ~40%. That's large difference.

As far as laziness or unwillingness go, it's hard in many cases to tease apart incompetence and indolence. A complete or at least general lack of interest in serious/certain topics is a sign of the inability to actually deal in them satisfactorily (of course this isn't some sort of foolproof test).
 
That's a good response. And I think you're right that in many cases it's a mistake to totally separate "incompetence and indolence," as you say. They probably inform one another to a significant degree.
 
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/

Super long read (typical for SA), but the subject matter is right up your alley (futuristic book review). The final section might even allow for a tl;dr summary:

VI.

I guess what really bothers me about Hanson’s pooh-poohing of AI is him calling it “a comic book plot”. To me, it’s Hanson’s scenario that seems science-fiction-ish.

I say this not as a generic insult but as a pointer at a specific category of errors. In Star Wars, the Rebellion had all of these beautiful hyperspace-capable starfighters that could shoot laser beams and explore galaxies – and they still had human pilots. 1977 thought the pangalactic future would still be using people to pilot its military aircraft; in reality, even 2016 is moving away from this.

Science fiction books have to tell interesting stories, and interesting stories are about humans or human-like entities. We can enjoy stories about aliens or robots as long as those aliens and robots are still approximately human-sized, human-shaped, human-intelligence, and doing human-type things. A Star Wars in which all of the X-Wings were combat drones wouldn’t have done anything for us. So when I accuse something of being science-fiction-ish, I mean bending over backwards – and ignoring the evidence – in order to give basically human-shaped beings a central role.

This is my critique of Robin. As weird as the Age of Em is, it makes sure never to be weird in ways that warp the fundamental humanity of its participants. Ems might be copied and pasted like so many .JPGs, but they still fall in love, form clans, and go on vacations.

In contrast, I expect that we’ll get some kind of AI that will be totally inhuman and much harder to write sympathetic stories about. If we get ems after all, I expect them to be lobotomized and drugged until they become effectively inhuman, cogs in the Ascended Economy that would no more fall in love than an automobile would eat hay and whinny. Robin’s interest in keeping his protagonists relatable makes his book fascinating, engaging, and probably wrong.

I almost said “and probably less horrible than we should actually expect”, but I’m not sure that’s true. With a certain amount of horror-suppressing, the Ascended Economy can be written off as morally neutral – either having no conscious thought, or stably wireheaded. All of Robin’s points about how normal non-uploaded humans should be able to survive an Ascended Economy at least for a while seem accurate. So morally valuable actors might continue to exist in weird Amish-style enclaves, living a post-scarcity lifestyle off the proceeds of their investments, while all the while the Ascended Economy buzzes around them, doing weird inhuman things that encroach upon them not at all. This seems slightly worse than a Friendly AI scenario, but much better than we have any right to expect of the future.

I highly recommend Age of Em as a fantastically fun read and a great introduction to these concepts. It’s engaging, readable, and weird. I just don’t know if it’s weird enough.
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http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/may/29/boys-books-earnings-adults

Blank slate based study finding:

Men brought up in households with less than a shelf of books earned only 5% more as a result of the extra year’s education, compared with 21% more for those who had access to a lot of books. And those that had access to books were more likely to move to the better-earning opportunities in cities than those without books.

The men’s first job was also much more likely to be a white-collar job.

The economists offer a number of theories for the results. “Perhaps books matter because they encourage children to read more and reading can have positive effects on school performance. Alternatively, a home filled with books indicates advantageous socio-economic conditions.”

The number of books in a child’s home can effectively predict their cognitive test scores. This may indicate a home that encourages cognitive and socio-emotional skills, which are important for economic success in life.
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More likely scenario: The kind of people who kept books in the house were more intelligent, thusly valuing books, and had more intelligent children. I think my parents had 5-6 bookshelves crammed full of books (unfortunately only 1 of those wasn't religious/James Birch Society stuff, but that 1 was chock full of classic fiction and philosophy texts), and we had a separate bookshelf of children/YA books in my/brothers room. Unfortunately we were never introduced to the philosophy stuff, only the classic fiction.
 
I didn't grow up rich but probably am an outlier. My mom stayed home and my dad wouldn't pursue a real career because he kept trying to become a pastor.
 
I've been spending time with Land's The Thirst For Annihilation lately, and I have to say that it's a stellar piece of philosophical writing. I realize he's disowned most of it, but to be honest I think we can detect a lot of his current philosophy in it. It's ostensibly a study (in the loosest sense of the word) of Georges Bataille, but contains what I think is a more important undercurrent (or subtext) of post-Kantian thought. In short, Land positions Kant at a crucial explosion-point in the history of Western thought, particularly Enlightenment thought.

The following passage seems rather tangential and inconsequential in passing, but I think it actually sums up a major aspect of the book: that the concept of death occupies a space in the history of Western thought that illuminates how it constructs itself epistemologically.

With Kant death finds its theoretical formulation and utilitarian frame as a quasi-objectivity correlative to capital, and noumenon is its name. The effective flotation of this term in philosophy coincided with the emergence of a social order built upon a profound rationalization of excess, or rigorous circumscription of voluptuous lethality. Once enlightenment rationalism begins its dominion ever fewer corpses are left hanging around in public places with each passing year, ever fewer skulls are used as paperweights, and ever fewer paupers perish undisturbed on the streets. Even the graveyards are rationalized and tidied up. It is not surprising, therefore, that with Kant thanatology undergoes the most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.
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How we treat death says a hell of a lot about how we think of ourselves as subjects, and this line captures a major detail of this phenomenon. I feel like we can correlate this with a Lutheran model of religious authority. In many ways, Lutheranism and capitalism (as a sociohistorical shift that occurs with the displacement of landed wealth by moveable property) go hand in hand, and society's treatment of death reflects this association. Ever since The Cloud of Unknowing, death has been an epistemological space that both necessitates the existence of a god and renders that existence eternally necessarily inaccessible. Kant puts a new twist on death by re-imagining it (implicitly) as a justification for individual, private interest par excellence. This translates onto transcendental subjectivity: i.e. we all die, but because our deaths are our own, we are all justified in pursuing our own interests. Land's comment suggests that the way death is treated in society as a collectively experienced phenomenon reflects its newly-discovered individualist consequences.

I think this is a great quote, mainly because I find death to a fascinating concept in critical theory - what it stands for, and what it tells us about societal/cultural organization.
 
I find this an interesting line of thought. It does seem that death has become almost entirely sterilized and nearly forgotten at this point. Paradoxically, at the same time that the ranks of the elderly, as a proportion of the population across the developed world, are swelling, they are at the same time completely marginalized in terms of culture. The "hip" ages tap out at 40, the "Viagra/plan for retirement" ages cap out at 60. Of course this is all in terms of corporate marketing - which is pretty much driving culture as far as I can see.

Things are moving too fast for many of the elderly to have any relevant input, and even for the ones who do, the youth are no longer inclined to listen, you know, cause earbuds and grandma ain't hip yo. So when the elderly finally die it's a chance for some inheritancial gimmedats if any is left, and an omg wtf do we have to go spend all this fucking time at the funeral home and church, goddddd. At least I can play games on my iphone!

While some of this stuff may be protestant descended (taking the moldbuggian/landian cultural cladistics with a measure of seriousness), I don't see this at all as "religious". In Christianity, death is simultaneously a time of sorrow for the loss of the family/community, as well as a time of rejoicing for the deceased have merely gone to a better place, which all the saved ones will also eventually go to to join them. (I recommend the 16hp song "Wayfaring Stranger" for a perfect picture of this).

I think we are in a way already in this "accelerated economy" that SA spoke of, hearkening to Land. The current level of atomization, which is really caused simply by the necessity of human movement to chase capital, is rendering any sort of longstanding community nearly impossible. it's not that we can't connect, it's that we are rarely going to get too close to anyone because everyone keeps having to move, or we assume that they will (and are usually right). There's a reason I know much more about people on this forum than any of my neighbors in the amount of time that I've been on this board: I keep changing neighbors/they keep changing. Why invest that effort? While this is completely rational, that this is the situation does create a problem for a social animal such as we are.
 
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Dak said:
I find this an interesting line of thought. It does seem that death has become almost entirely sterilized and nearly forgotten at this point. Paradoxically, at the same time that the ranks of the elderly, as a proportion of the population across the developed world, are swelling, they are at the same time completely marginalized in terms of culture. The "hip" ages tap out at 40, the "Viagra/plan for retirement" ages cap out at 60. Of course this is all in terms of corporate marketing - which is pretty much driving culture as far as I can see.
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Tom McCarthy would agree. His most recent novel, Satin Island, is about a "corporate anthropologist" that tries to write a "great report" about our cultural era.

Dak said:
Things are moving too fast for many of the elderly to have any relevant input, and even for the ones who do, the youth are no longer inclined to listen, you know, cause earbuds and grandma ain't hip yo. So when the elderly finally die it's a chance for some inheritancial gimmedats if any is left, and an omg wtf do we have to go spend all this fucking time at the funeral home and church, goddddd. At least I can play games on my iphone!

While some of this stuff may be protestant descended (taking the moldbuggian/landian cultural cladistics with a measure of seriousness), I don't see this at all as "religious". In Christianity, death is simultaneously a time of sorrow for the loss of the family/community, as well as a time of rejoicing for the deceased have merely gone to a better place, which all the saved ones will also eventually go to to join them. (I recommend the 16hp song "Wayfaring Stranger" for a perfect picture of this).

I think we are in a way already in this "accelerated economy" that SA spoke of, hearkening to Land. The current level of atomization, which is really caused simply by the necessity of human movement to chase capital, is rendering any sort of longstanding community nearly impossible. it's not that we can't connect, it's that we are rarely going to get too close to anyone because everyone keeps having to move, or we assume that they will (and are usually right). There's a reason I know much more about people on this forum than any of my neighbors in the amount of time that I've been on this board: I keep changing neighbors/they keep changing. Why invest that effort? While this is completely rational, that this is the situation does create a problem for a social animal such as we are.
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These are all more sociological symptoms, but important nonetheless. There's a reason why death occupies such a canonical space in literature of the twentieth century, especially in postwar fiction.

Also, I love "Wayfaring Stranger." They actually didn't write that song, it's an old traditional folk piece (I think...).
 
@Ein: Another correlation with that IQ/college problem stat of ~50% of students potentially not smart enough. Over 50% of post secondary respondents on a mental health related survey reported significant issues (stress, anxiety, etc iirc). Can't pull it up atm to see the details, but I'm not surprised.
 
Dak said:
@Ein: Another correlation with that IQ/college problem stat of ~50% of students potentially not smart enough. Over 50% of post secondary respondents on a mental health related survey reported significant issues (stress, anxiety, etc iirc). Can't pull it up atm to see the details, but I'm not surprised.
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Not sure if this is the basis for the blurb I read, but I found this:

http://ccmh.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3058/2015/02/2014-CCMH-Annual-Report.pdf

Holy shit a lot of people self harm. I've never even considered self harming, ever. I don't even understand the inclination (like, I know the reason as per textbooks but you know).

Page 20 has most of the relevant charts. Ongoing ~50% reporting attendence for mental health counseling. ~30% medicated (holy fuck). Recent spike to 10% hospitalized. Growing trend of self harm, 21-23%. Hospitalizations trending close to suicide attempts, and spike to ~30% (parallel medication) for considered suicide.

I contend that this issue is significantly traceable to "expanding the franchise" of higher education, which unfortunately has already been significantly dumbed down even over the recent decades to try and "meet them in the middle".
 
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Ok, now that I've gone back into the pub sober and more awake, some important qualifications to that data:

This 2015 Annual Report summarizes data contributed to CCMH during the 2014-2015 academic year, closing on June 30, 2015. De-identied data were contributed by 139 college and university counseling centers, describing 100,736 unique college students seeking mental health treatment, 2,770 clinicians, and over 770,000 appointments. e following are critical to understand when reading this report: 1) is report describes college students receiving mental health services, NOT the general college student population. 2) is report is not a survey. e data summarized herein is gathered during routine clinical practice at participating counseling centers, is de-identied, and then contributed to CCMH.
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Tried doing some quick searches for data on total student bodies or total counseling and such data is hard to come by, and what I am finding is slightly dated. I did find this:

http://www.collegecounseling.org/wp-content/uploads/NCCCS2014_v2.pdf

Nothing about total numbers of the population, but pretty much everything is trending in the wrong direction.

Edit: Found this, is supposed to be surveying the broad student body

http://healthybodiesstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/HMS_national.pdf

On page 7, reporting only 51*% have "Positive Mental Health". Page 4 has "Key findings". Pretty large sample size, an average of 29% of the total student bodies at participating institutions. Validated measures were used as well, not just new constructs for the survey.
 
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This and your previous post are pretty incredible.

Are you correlating poor mental health with poor(er) intelligence? Or are the stats themselves doing that...? I only perused them, honestly. Too many numbers. :cool:
 
Einherjar86 said:
This and your previous post are pretty incredible.

Are you correlating poor mental health with poor(er) intelligence? Or are the stats themselves doing that...? I only perused them, honestly. Too many numbers. :cool:
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I'm saying the high levels of anxiety and depression are (probably) partially coming from people being overwhelmed with even the watered down rigour of modern academia, concomitant with the various tugging and challenges of modern cultural expectations of young or excuse me "emerging" adults. It's not a perfect correlation, and some people are a little more "hardy" than others, but I believe there appears to be enough there to go on for someone to start researching in that direction.

Unfortunately it would completely go against the ideology of education and attainment in America: "You can do/be anything!", "Everyone benefits from a college education", etc., and so would have extreme difficulty getting any funding to say the least. At this point anyway.

BTW, with all the recent social media uproar over the Brock Turner thing, and the 1 in 5 number etc getting trotted out as per usual, I found some other data for that. Campus sexual assaults/rapes are one thing generally trending in the correct direction:

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf
 
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