No way; there is nowhere where min. wage is $15 - and besides I’m talking about a specific instance. Which goes like this:
Him: (Looking up from the computer) They just approved $15 minimum wage.
Me: :dubious: Is it signed into law? And if it is when is it going to start?
Him: In a few months.
Me: Hmm, are you sure - let me look at the article.
The article just said it passed through the first part part of the process and the earliest it would be implemented if it did get accepted would be 2018; which is miles away from “we’re getting $15 minimum wage in a few months.”
Same thing with the Jared story; at that point their was little information out. So, he was right in that one instance - but the process he used to reach his conclusion seems the equivalent of a blind person throwing darts and hitting a bullseye.
And I am an idiot, and somewhat of a lunatic with a dash of dimwittedness thrown in for good measure - so I’m not comparing myself to him. As far as work goes, I don’t really even bother asking him about things much - I always go to other people because they are much more thorough in there approach to getting and receiving information and also do not forget to leave out critical details. He always seems to think the sky is falling; so, for example instead of looking behind the empty box to find the full box he just assumes that we are all out. But we’ve never been out of master links ever.
He is a pretty cool guy though all in all; I just find this quirk of his personality interesting. He is obviously very intelligent to me - anything that doesn’t give him some emotional reaction he is able to learn very quickly. I even encouraged him to take a promotion when it came up - it was between him and me - and I sure as hell didn’t want it. It was one of these 10% pay increase, 90% Advil consumption increase types of promotions.
[QUOTE=GuanoLad]
…I was sure I carefully thought through my actions in a logical manner. The fact that they didn’t turn out the way I predicted was hardly my fault, but I got blamed. It confused and frustrated me.
[/QUOTE]
If you’re convinced your way of doing things is logical and it still doesn’t work out and you’re frustrated as to why, and this happens a lot, you may wish to consider the possibility that it really was you.
[QUOTE=you with the face]
don’t even think it means that. “Common sense”, to my hear, means knowledge basic enough for a commoner to have. Has nothing to do with prevalence, and all to do with simplicity.
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No. You’re referring to common KNOWLEDGE, not common sense.
Common knowledge consists of learned facts that almost anyone should be expected to know; Barack Obama is the President of the United States, football is a sport, Brazil is a warmer country than Canada.
Common sense (as used in English today; it is used as a term of art in many philosophies) implies the ability to use knowledge and perception to make wise judgments and comport oneself in a manner that is not unusually incompetent or antisocial. It is common knowledge that fire burns things. Common sense dictates that one should not start a campfire in your living room. Common sense is essentially that set of simple judgments that almost anyone who is sober and not an idiot would make. My favourite examples is that I was once married to a woman who ran a small customer service call center, and every month or so one of their several thousand customers would try to make a credit card payment by MAILING THEIR CREDIT CARD TO THE COMPANY. That is a lack of common sense; common sense dictates that one should not send their credit card away in the mail.
Of course, common sense can on occasion be wrong; an extreme example would be the Monty Hall Problem, as the common sense answer is “it does not matter if you switch,” which is wrong, and accepting that it is wrong is so difficult to overcome that people find it hard to believe even when it is proven to be wrong. In many more complex cases a problem cannot be understood via common sense and sometimes the application of common sense will lead one to the wrong conclusion.
It didn’t happen a lot, it happened a few times in my 20s. And in retrospect, sometimes it was me, sometimes it wasn’t. But I was accused of not having common sense, yet what I thought I was using was common sense, it seemed logical to me, it just came to a different conclusion: therefore, in my opinion, common sense isn’t common, there are too many variables.
Nothing like a thread where dopers get to post their IQs. Maybe we should create a separate forum for that? I just want as many members of our community as possible to feel satisfied.
Well I am 61 YO and still riding about 4K miles a year. My touring bike is the 9-speed and my roadie is a 10-speed. There is an 11-speed in my future. N+1.
Although I have a healthy IQ, I prefer spending my spare time doing physical stuff like riding a bicycle or doing half marathons.
Years ago I had an article published in The Bulletin which is the magazine of American Mensa. It was about bicycle riding.
A lot of conspiracy theories and also pseudoscientific woo type things are started by and/or spread by people with high intelligence. A lot of them are smart enough to realize that our existing knowledge does not explain everything, but they are not well educated enough in scientific skepticism and theories that partially explain it and thus are drawn to outlandish ideas.
A lot of the Pyramid Power/Pyramid Prophesy/Egyptology Woo authors have backgrounds in Mechanical Engineering, Architecture, or other “smart” fields that provide access to a lot of knowledge but don’t necessarily ground them with as much skepticism and scientific rigor that they could have gotten in another field.
I’ve never understood why posting your IQ score is a problem, I don’t see it as any different than threads where people say they are 6’2" or whatever. Both are attributes the person has no control over.
I honestly have no idea what my IQ is. I’ve never had it tested.
I’m generally perceived as highly intelligent, mainly because I know tons of stuff. But while that makes me a useful partner in Trivial Pursuit, I don’t know how much it says about my overall intelligence or the value of my opinions on a wide range of subjects.
But you CAN improve your IQ score. Or maybe a different way to put it is that you can score badly on an IQ test for various reasons, and if you eliminate those reasons you can score much better if you retake the test.
Did you get enough sleep the night before the test? Did you eat sensibly? Do you have a cold? Are you familiar with this sort of test taking?
And the most important one, do you care whether you score as high as possible on the test or not? I remember as a kid taking a standardized test and working hard to answer all the questions on time. Later I was talking to another kid and he told me he got bored and just marked the bubbles at random. My mind was blown, I had never imagined that someone wouldn’t care about trying hard to get a good score on the test. I could imagine someone who tried hard but couldn’t understand the problems very well. But I couldn’t imagine someone who contemptuously marked the test at random, because they couldn’t be bothered.
That kid, if he were given some reason he believed that it was really important to score well on the test, could have improved his score dramatically. He wasn’t an idiot, he just didn’t care. And why should he have cared?
Or take my dad. He made it all the way to 9th grade back in the 1950s, when they finally figured out that he couldn’t really read. They put him in remedial reading classes, and suddenly he wasn’t borderline mentally retarded anymore.
Are IQ tests something that are routinely done at some point in one’s education? Did I get one at some point and just have no idea? Cause I don’t think I’ve ever had an IQ test, and I certainly have no idea what the results were if I did.
Was there some day in second grade when we had this done or something?
Sure there can be fluctuation but the same is true of height. It’s more the idea of mentioning it being some taboo that I don’t really understand. I suppose it’s how much weight you give any given attribute that matters. Myself I have a fairly high iq, below average height etc. I chalk them all up to things that just are what they are and not a reflection on my relative worth as a person.
I went to a Catholic school that tested our IQs in the 6th grade. That would have been around 1966. IQ tests were quite the thing back then.
Story: The test results came in and our homeroom teacher said that she wasn’t allowed to give us the scores. Then she said that she had to go to the principle’s office and would be back in 10 minutes. She also warned us to not talk. She left the folder with the IQ scores on her desk and walked out of the room.
My buddy Greg (who now is a dean of a university) and I ran up to the desk to see our scores. Some kids went up a minute or so later. Some kids didn’t seem to care at all. Others were warning us that we were going to be in big trouble and at least one snitched on us to no avail.
It was obvious to both Greg and I that our teacher was giving us an opportunity to see our scores. In retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that Greg and I scored the highest in our class.
IQ Tests were given to kids in NYC schools in the early '60s. IQ scores went with our names in the teacher’s student book in 7th - 9th grades - kids in front of the class reported to everyone what theirs were.
BTW just to blow our own horns, the probability that a Doper has been on Jeopardy is about 2 orders of magnitude higher than the probability that a random person in the US has. We are not a representative sample of the US population, as if anyone would doubt that.
I just thought of a bug in my study - I did not correct for non-US dopers who would not have the opportunity. So the results are even better than I thought.
I myself think IQ is an interesting measurement. Of course is measuring the ability to do something, but I think the mind is too complex to apply such a rigidly hierarchical value system to intelligence as a whole. This opinion is backed by a decent amount of contact with people in the field and also a fair amount of reading on the subject - but it mostly boils down a gut reaction more than anything. I’m actually surprised thread took this turn.
The guy I work with is interesting to me because he is obviously very bright in many ways, but his emotions seem to dominate his thinking in a way I have not seen before.
Probably the easiest example is when we were talking about our wage increase in comparison to union dues. He was pissed about the union not arguing for a high enough wage and then was saying that the wage increase doesn’t cover the union dues. I was like huh? we’re getting a dollar an hour, that more than covers it. He responded “that’s only $10 extra we make.” I’m like what? it’s $130 - we only pay the union dues once a month.
