Every time I see someone bring up "IQ scores" I feel the need to repeat: IQ scores were literally invented by eugenicists and they've always been biased towards privilege
-
replied to Dan Sugalski last edited by [email protected]
@wordshaper @cwebber I did the whole IQ evaluation thing multiple times as a kid (moving to different states and each school district not knowing what to do with me). Got significantly different scores every time.
As an adult, shared that with an IQ enthusiast later and immediately "that's impossible. That cannot happen. Your IQ is a fixed number," and hey welcome to my brain.
But other than it's a stupid useless classist racist metric, those anecdotes are why I don't give IQ any credit.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I am not "against AI". I actually am very interested in building AI systems, but not the kinds which exist or are being pushed today.
To me, the important part of an AI system is its accountability.
We actually do hold much of our software accountable: if it does something bad, we actively change and repair it.
Corporations are rushing to flood the market with tools which don't care, have no accountability, don't have a stake in things.
That's depressing.
-
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber sounds like you're probably already aware of it, but the Rat Park experiment really gets to the heart of this. It turns out if you keep rats in an idyllic enclosure that meets all of their natural sensory and social needs, not just the typical depressing bare essentials terrarium that provides a minimum of food, water, and shelter - they *don't* choose the pleasure lever until they die. They end up mostly ignoring it to live a nice fulfilling life with their friends instead.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
The world is so depressing right now. One of the *only* reasons I am able to get up every day and face it is that I have work with @spritely where I think we can do something meaningful and interesting to change it, and bring hope. That and the wonderful people in my life are what keeps me going.
And it's *still* incredibly hard to get up in the morning.
But I believe we can do better, we can build tools and spaces for a world worth living in.
I have to believe it. I have to, to keep going.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I have said before that my primary life philosophy is an "Ethics of Agency", and I have talked about this before on a podcast episode https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/11-an-ethics-of-agency.html
I'm not interested in "happiness" as much, because I don't want a rat that leans on a lever. The "ethics of agency" thinking is a rough approach modification of utilitarianism that replaces the measurements of "happiness" and "suffering" in Utilitarianism with "agency" and "subjection".
But "subjection" is weighed more heavily.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber I'm going to cast doubt on this. How could the guy who is rich enough to never eat normal people food know anything about normal people food? Remember the wonderful keynote he gave that one year we went to pycon together? He's a petulant little man who doesn't want to read his email or go to the doctor.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber 100% agreed.
A couple of years ago I went through a full day of psychological profiling, and the majority of it was made up of six or eight different IQ tests. They weren't being used to determine a number but rather to have a clinical psychologist watch how I approach certain kinds of challenges.
I told this story a few times and people's eyes would light up and they wanted to know what my score was. Usually I explained that I don't believe these things have value and it was usually accepted, but when pressed I would invoke one of the tests that was an outlier because the instructions were presented wrong. I got a 60 on that one. So that's the number they get from me.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
It's not agency for the individual, it's agency *for everyone*. The goal is to improve the agency of all. But the purpose is still about agency, so you *do* care about individuals, in that the entire point is that a person is able to be and define their best selves. So there's a push-pull effect.
It's imperfect, but it's how I think about things. It's just one lens of many, but it's the main one I think about things through, in terms of ethics.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber I read somewhere that this only holds if the rat is trapped in an unstimulating environment. If provided an adequately stimulating environment, the rat will ignore the drugs button.
-
replied to aeva last edited by
@aeva Would love to see evidence of that, if you have a paper please provide it!
But I still think it's the case that even if the rat starts leaning on the drugs button, *it's not the rat's fault*, and that's my main point. My main point was that the rat was provided a system in which the rat couldn't win.
So even if that's true, that still holds to my point: we shouldn't blame the rat, we should blame the system.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
But the real point is that: we should be constructing the best world we can in which people can thrive.
Measurements and metrics can be useful, if taken in aggregate, but we know full well that any metric that is used as a primary goal ends up becoming its own tyrannical destruction of the rest. (And thus, it's not surprising that money as the primary goal ends up being hyperdestructive.)
I don't want to "know who's better". I want to help people be able to be better.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
This was an unexpected detour rant for the middle of the day. But it's something I care about. Perhaps I will collect it into a blogpost later.
I guess I will summarize, then leave the thread here...
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
It's incredibly easy to be full of despair right now. I get it, I feel it too.
Don't let anyone tell you that the people who are doing the best are because they *deserve* it or are "geniuses".
And also don't let anyone tell you that a group of people who by and large who seem to be suffering and aren't doing as well relative to the metrics of the system is because they're not worthy or have failed themselves.
We have to try to build the best world for each other we can, the best we can.
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Okay, I will add one more thing. Multiple people (thx @stellarskylark, @aeva, @martinvermeer) have brought up "Rat Park", a counterstudy where rats, if given a sufficiently stimulating environment, won't lean on the lever until they die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
This is actually great and in line with what I really wanted to point out, which is that the problem is that we shouldn't blame the individual, we should blame the environment. What environment do we give people?
So yes, yay, rat park!
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber I've done a decent bit of research on this for my AI piece, and I think that just taking a look at the original Binet-Simon test which has been cited to death by IQ researchers kind of speaks for itself to what the actual goals of this was
there's this famous image from the test where a child's intelligence was determined based upon if they could identify which women in the picture are "ugly"
and there's this absolutely fucked up line where they're testing the proprioception of 3-year-olds:
Sometimes a child shows his nose by thrusting it forward, without making any hand movement, or shows his mouth by opening it, as would an animal. This is, in fact, an animal stage, when the hand is still a paw, and not an organ used for significant or expressive movements.
literally IQ testing has not changed at all since these original tests in the early 1900's. sure, we've stopped overtly testing whether you're explicitly palatable to white eugenicists, but that's still been the ultimate goal
-
-
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber @stellarskylark @aeva @martinvermeer In multilingual comic form: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/#page-1
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@[email protected] I can relate in a number of different ways, but when I met you in person, I was floored at your knowledge and the depths of the subjects you shared with me.
To me, genius isn't an IQ score, philosophers immortalized in marble statue, or some kind of Renaissance master. It is the joy, willingness, and curiosity to chase ideas and share findings with great enthusiasm and passion.
You will always be one of my favorite people.
-
replied to Random Geek last edited by
@randomgeek @wordshaper @cwebber my scores varied wildly based on whether the questions had numbers in them, because I had an irrational hatred for numbers.
Numbers are vile things, they belong behind variable names so we don’t have to look at those dirty, filthy things.
-
-
-
replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber I love everything about this thread.
I see in the link to your Foss and Crafts episode that you reference Amartya Sen - and thus, presumably, the Capability Approach. (I don't remember if the stuff you're doing with Goblins is explicitly tied into this or if it's just a coincidence of naming!)
Anyway this thread made me think of a really good Rutger Claassen article that uses the Capability Approach to redefine agency:
-
-