Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
– George Carlin, as quoted by the Cobden Centre.
Ok, here is the ‘real’ SQOTD 😀
If investors were rational, they would choose their investments on the basis of valuation. Cheap assets good, expensive assets bad. Markets are tricky things and tough to beat or even match, so it helps to have an edge. No other characteristic has more bearing on the likelihood of an investment’s long term success than its starting valuation. That tiny word “if” carries an awful lot of freight, though. The reality for many is that, consciously or otherwise, they favour financial assets that have self-evidently “worked”, in that their prices have risen strongly in the recent past. Human beings are nothing if not straightforward extrapolation engines. This is not to denigrate price momentum, which is a perfectly respectable trading strategy, but it is to denigrate the animal spirits of the average investor, who has an unerring tendency to conduct investment strategy by way of the rear view mirror.
Lol, true. Half the people have below-average intelligence and a quarter of the people have below normal intelligence. (10 IQ points below the mean), and 1 out of 9 is borderline retarded. (Yes, ‘retarded’ was once psychometric terminology so cool your jets PC-ers.) 😉
There is a lot to be said for Carlin’s hilarious quote. If you actually look at IQ tests and see what is required to score 100 a person has to be kind of dim to achieve that.
With the caveat that “Statistically speaking most people aren’t that much stupider than you are”. After all its a steep bell curve and pretty crowded in the middle.
If you want to set the SJW cats among the pigeons add “ethnic origin” as a dimension.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Nice mindset, but do you imagine this elitist attitude will help the cause of liberty and individualism? If majority of human race are nothing than easily led and manipulated herd of two legged cattle, why should they have any freedom, rights or voice?
Yes, I rue the day that I discarded this advice and began buying ideas instead of machines and buildings. Such ungrounded voodooism led me into failures such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Sun . . . companies whose main assets defy accounting valuations.
It all depends on why you are investing. If you want a nice safe repository that will slightly outperform inflation, buy index funds. If you are looking to actually invest in concepts that will make you money, you need to pay attention to intangibles, too.
After years of trying to live my life according to a liberty, individualist credo and help others to see the benefit of it, I’m finally beginning to think that maybe the “elitists” are right 🙁
The story of the sheep that fights off the wolf with a jawbone – the other sheep report him to the sheepdog for illegal weapon use!
Perhaps, only those at the upper end can perceive and benefit from a liberty/individualist approach, in which case, perhaps yes, those below are only fit as cattle. I don’t want to believe that but reality and experience as the world “reverts to the mean” seem to be indicating that it might be true.
As soon as any group loses its freedoms and permissions, it is easy prey for harvesting by those who still have those freedoms. It may cost us in efficiency and order, but allowing freedoms to even the stupid keeps the non-stupid honest by preventing this harvesting, and so is always worthwhile.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
At the risk of being a pedant: Wouldn’t that be the median person? (Assumptions: arbitrary distribution of a single parameter intelligence.)
PS: I don’t believe that intelligence, usefulness to society, or any other metric about how convenient you are to someone else should have anything to do with whether or not your rights are respected. Rights are a mutual non-agression pact among people forming a nation together. What incentive do (supposedly genius) aristocrats give to (supposedly dull) masses to put up with them if they won’t respect their rights?
A society based on a small group of people exploiting the rest is not a society: It’s a war waiting to happen.
Democracy relies on the simple fact that the Colonel’s Lady and Rosie Grady both have a very good idea where their self-interest lies. And in terms of self-interest the Colonel’s Lady has always thought it unwise to upset Rosie O’Grady and Rosie O’Grady has always been well aware of the dangers of alienating the Colonel’s Lady. It has been the female of the species that has ensured our survival: if were up to the male we would have been extinct long ago.
But the almost exclusively male upper power matrix is having a great deal of difficulty in getting its collective mind around the fact that the ground is shifting from under their feet. The sciences are increasingly giving access to all sorts of technology to everyman: for good or for evil. They really do believe that democracy is some sort of confidence trick and that the “masses” are just that: some sort of inert lump to be manipulated with sight of hand and rhetoric whilst serous people like themselves get on with the serious business of organising the world to their advantage: seriously.
They are going to be in for a very, very rude shock.
Half of everything is below average.*
* Elementary particles excepted. Proper term is “median”. Your mileage may vary. Not to be applied to those bigger, stronger, and meaner than you.
Unless you are better armed than they are. God made man. Sam Colt made him equal.
People aren’t stupid so much as they lack the skills or conviction to think critically.
Most people react intuitively. It’s emotive, and that’s why politics is saturated with fear and paranoia.
As a civilization, we were moving away from this, as logic and reason led to more abstract and careful thinking.
But our schools are taking us backward, pushing kids to feel passionate about things that we should be considering objectively.
And in this sense, we are certainly getting dumber.
“half of them are stupider than that” “Proper term is ‘median'”
At the risk of being lumped into the lower half by the professional mathematicians and statisticians here, it seems to me that with a sufficiently large population and a normal distribution (both of which are present here), there is no practical difference between the arithmetic mean (the “average”) and the median. So in this case the pedantic quibble is both irrelevant and incorrect.
I await your brickbats.
Fun fact: In nature, you end up seeing a gaussian distribution when you take the sum of many non-correlated random variables. You’d get a bell curve if identical random number generators were taking an IQ test. You get a bell curve when measuring the velocity of gas particles along any arbitrary axis: It doesn’t mean that there exist some population of gas particles that are inherently faster than other gas particles. (Not saying differences in learning ability can’t exist, but I get really annoyed with the IQ-ists and their claims.)
People need to slow down and think about what they are really measuring before ranking people according to “goodness”, and trying to fit them into some ‘level’ of society. In fact, that whole idea is poisonous.
Also: I’m not altogether sure that distributions of ability test scores do naturally come out gaussian. Didn’t the psychometricians have to play games with how they normalized their IQ tests to fit the distribution into a bell-curve in the first place?
You’d get a bell curve if you took a test drawn from a large pool of questions of approximately equal difficulty and subject matter over and over again.
You’d get a bell curve if you took a test where how the questions were scored had nothing to do with what you answered.
(I guess what I’m trying to say is that this particular distribution as the result of a test, especially after you recenter the norm and tweak the kurtosis and renormalize the standard deviation, is almost devoid of any intrinsic meaning! For the test to mean something, you’d have to provide some kind of correlation between the test scores and some other physical/sociological referent.)
In Larry Niven’s science fiction novels, there was a hypothetical eugenics program run by a race of slightly crazy aliens on mankind attempting to breed for luck. People who were subjected to random risks and survived/came out ahead were favored in the child-permission-lottery imposed on Earth. The protagonist pointed out that they didn’t end up with humans who had any advantage on future random challenges, they just ended up with the tail end of a meaningless normal curve!
At the risk of being lumped into the lower half by the professional mathematicians and statisticians here, it seems to me that with a sufficiently large population and a normal distribution (both of which are present here), there is no practical difference between the arithmetic mean (the “average”) and the median. If something is actually distributed normally (without any tweaks to score weighting) then yes, mean and median are equivalent. It was pedantic, but if someone is going to claim to be smarter than the dim masses, he’d better not err in the field he’s using to demonstrate his superiority! 😛
The reason we use median in place of mean for certain things like income in a particular career field is that many things aren’t distributed symmetrically about the mean: Log-gaussian, power-law, or other asymmetric distributions reflect that you’re looking at a process that isn’t a sum of uncorrelated random influences. (ie – if you already have a million dollars, you can do things to make money faster than someone starting with $1000). Exo-planets are apparently roughly 1/r^2 distributed in size (though obviously that can’t continue down to zero size).
I won’t attempt to refute MadRocketSci (I lack the mental equipment), but it seems to me that the original Carlin quote which started all this wasn’t really an assertion of his own intellectual superiority as much as a disparagement of almost all humans!
Since socialist-style planning and managing of society is a task “for which no human wisdom would be capable” (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, quoted from memory), it matters less what you think the distance is between the average (or below average) and the ‘elite’. If the public are sometimes stupid enough to let the self-called ‘elite’ try, any such ‘elite’ are always stupid enough to fail.
And yet, when smart people try and make decisions for stupid people, judging by the results their IQ scores may as well be around 50.
Oh, and I don’t think IQ is normally distributed. In fact I’m not sure it could be unless you could have IQ scores below 0, or the max you could receive was 200. (Maybe this is the case; I don’t know.) Probably there is a long thin tail of very clever people, but the tail to the left (towards the full retard horizon) is probably fatter for longer.
Indiana Jones: “Nazis. I *hate* these guys!”
Full disclosure: I’m not really objective or unbiased when it comes to the IQ-ists and psychometricians, and the idea that people should be assigned a place in society in childhood by latter-day phrenologists. I actually have personal cause to be furious with these quacks, and I might hold forth if you don’t mind your thread being hijacked, and if I decide it’s wise to divulge such a personal story.
Someone also said “stupid is as stupid does”.
And I’ve seen a lot of intelligent people do highly stupid things. I’ve also seen a lot of lower intelligence people follow highly effective rules of thumb that have proven very sensible.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this particular distribution as the result of a test, especially after you recenter the norm and tweak the kurtosis and renormalize the standard deviation, is almost devoid of any intrinsic meaning!
Utterly incorrect.
Case 1: If I measure gas particles’ speed, I will get a Normal distribution. If I measure them later, I will get the same distribution for the same temperature. But different particles will be the fast ones, and others will have slowed.
Case 2: If I measure heights of people I will get a Normal distribution. If I measure them a week later I will get the same distribution. But this time the tall ones are still the tall ones.
IQ falls very much more into the second case than the first. Quality IQ tests will show little deviation for individuals who take it, because the best way to do well in such tests is to be clever. Luck generally won’t get you very far if the test is long enough and sufficiently difficult at the upper end. There’s a long and quite detailed literature on this. Not liking that doesn’t make it untrue (just as not liking that African-Americans are, taken as a group, slightly less intelligent than White Americans also doesn’t make it untrue).
IQ is quite a good proxy for intelligence. Those that score well in IQ tests tend to be higher educated, earn more and be happier — because intelligence makes those things easier. This would not be true if IQ was just some random thing.
Seems to me that this would hardly be a hijack. Sounds fairly well on-point.
The investment markets are distorted, massively distorted, by the power of government regulations (which make the “aristocracy of pull”, influence with government officials, so important) and by the vast Credit Bubble policies of the Federal Reserve.
This is why people who have never produced anything, or managed any productive enterprise, such as Warren Buffett, are multi billionaires.
As for the “New Economy” – people who have technical knowledge (I do NOT have such knowledge) tell me that Facebook and so on are not very well designed. So why are the leading figures in Facebook, Google (Google routinely rigs search results, on political grounds, – that should be the kiss-of-death for a search engine in a competitive market) so wealthy?
Listen to Mark Z. (the founder of Facebook) – it is not that political matters do not interest a technical genius (and see above – is he really a technical genius, if Facebook is not actually very well designed from a technical point of view). Political matters clearly do matter to him (he talks of little else) – and nearly everything he says is STUPID, incredibly STUPID (dumbed down Frankfurt School of Marxism stuff about racism-sexism-homophobia-transphobia…..) the average person is NOT this stupid – not even close. Mark Z. is clearly inferior (yes inferior) to the average person picked at random – yet he is a multi billionaire.
One can not reasonably respect such an economy – such a government regulation dominated, “cheap money” mess.
I’m struggling to picture this. Which may just be me finding my own position under this curve, of course.
Darin, it can change of course, but most people ARE currently nothing (other) than easily led and manipulated herd of two legged cattle, and saying so or not saying so doesn’t matter, because their self esteem has NOTHING to do with not delivering bad news to the blue pill people. Self esteem is earned, which means nothing to the people who have rejected the concept of needing to earn one’s keep, i.e. those that understand that Liberty means the right to act, not the right to “have stuff”, as ANTIFA has said, “by any means necessary”.
The thing is, Liberty, aka, the right to act, and in the case of property rights, the right to earn or produce and keep (and dispose of as one sees fit) is an easy concept to learn, but it’s not in the interest of the Warlocks to teach this in government indoctrination centers, aka public schools. One doesn’t need to be exceptionally bright to grasp the concept of self sovereignty, “negative” rights (Liberty) and the non-aggression principle. But alas, there is a general human tendency towards collectivist tribalism, either in the form of paternalistic church or paternalistic state…or both in the case of Czarist Russia, ancient Roman Catholicism and Islam.
Both are “religions”, one overtly, and statism as a crypto-religion. Statism/collectivism tends to be a crypto-religion with articles of faith. (Explain the gender wage gap fallacy to a leftist and watch them ignore your attack on their faith and repeat their mantra of mystic belief as if you never said a word to them).
P.S. I should add that Warlock means liar, oath breaker, deceiver in it’s original meaning. A warlock is someone skilled in manipulating other people’s perception of reality (magick) by nafarious means and propaganda. Slithery Clinton, for example, is a warlock.
I ran across an excellent article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books about Facebook, which really does answer this question (but probably not exactly in the sense that you meant the question – it’s simply the best article I’ve seen how why FB and Zuckerberg are so dominatingly wealthy.)
It’s long, but well worth the time if you have an interest in FB and Google and how they secured, and might lose, dominance, and if you can get past the author’s political biases to the left.
Do a google search of ‘Euopean People History’ and click the Images link and then laugh out loud as your screen fills with black folks. LOL.
Chip, it’s also important to remember that there is a stupid-intelligent scale and a completely different foolish-wise scale, with only a loose association between the two. Intelligent people are as prone to folly as they next guy. Who among us has not played the fool for love in their youth? “Smart” people are particularly prone to emotion based folly, as they, (we), are perhaps less skilled as socialites, having spent our time and energies pursuing other matters. Professional magicians and con men are well aware that “smart people” even “scientists” are particularly easy to dupe as they’re used to an environment condusive to ligitimate forms of thinking rather than people gunning to con them.
“Political matters clearly do matter to him (he talks of little else) – and nearly everything he says is STUPID, incredibly STUPID (dumbed down Frankfurt School of Marxism stuff about racism-sexism-homophobia-transphobia…..) the average person is NOT this stupid – not even close. Mark Z. is clearly inferior (yes inferior) to the average person picked at random – yet he is a multi billionaire.”
Successful people in complex environments like business are preferable in politics. But there’s an argument to be made that people who find extraordinary success at their first attempt through perfect timing and positioning, and then spend their entire lives within this small universe isolated from the social costs of bad governance, are probably the very worst potential politicians.
A lot of the tech billionaires are in this category. They think winning an algorithm lottery translates into universal wisdom, when often it means they can be incredibly stupid about stuff most people deal with over the years in the outside world.
One example I see all the time is rich techies obsessing about the culture of their companies. The founders of Netflix, AirBnb etc will regale you with their rigorous interview process as they titrate the perfect mix of skills and values. But then ask them about immigration and they want the border erased because there’s apparently nothing special about Western cultural values.
The bell-shapped curve is nothing more than a natural or Gausian distribution of data.
‘Smarter’ is sometimes useful, but I’ve never seen where it is categorically ‘better’; sometimes you need someone tall enough to reach the top shelf, and a short genius would be useless.
Have you ever noticed that people who object to reporting “Group A has a lower mean IQ than group B” are really working from the premise that lower IQ is a mark of inferiority? Not all that tolerant on their parts, is it?
Yeah, and “(s)he has a nice personality” means your blind date is going to be awesome. 😆
I still can not get over Search Engine (a Search Engine) being found, repeatedly, to rig search results on political grounds (for example try looking for Sky Customers complaining over the loss of Fox News – and you will be led, instead, to attacks on Fox News) and yet keeping its utility position as a Search Engine.
Google does not even try to hide its political bias – yet we all still go along with the myth that it is objective and scientific (uses mathematical what-nots).
Indeed it is. But to get a random number generator to err.. generate a Gaussian distribution you’re going to have to use some sort of transform like this.
“You’d get a bell curve if identical random number generators were taking an IQ test”
I’m hesitant to step into this, not being a competent statistician, but if a computer generated a series of truly* random numbers between, say, 0 and 200, if plotted would those numbers not form a straight line rather than any sort of curve (“normal” or otherwise)?
* Yes, I am aware that such computer-generated numbers aren’t truly random, but it’s sufficient for our purposes.
Oh yes, indeedy.
Culture is what gives value in long term.