Ariadne Conill 🐰
IQ and other psychometric assessments are not actually backed by hard science but vibes
so when someone brags about having a "genius level IQ", just write them off as a narcissist
sincerely, your local psychologist turned software engineer
humans and other animals are complex systems, while there are diagnostic tests which measure a degree of performance in specific skill areas, you can't really boil someone's intelligence down to a single number: the person who sucks at math might be a great strategist, for example
incidentally: psychometric evaluation is heavily biased toward performance in math and other hard logic categories in general, so-called IQ tests especially.
also while I am dropping truth bombs: Mensa has problematic connections with the eugenics movement
if it were up to me, primary education would be focused on fostering curiosity and empathy rather than psychometric scores
because those are truly the critical life skills
and indeed in countries where they have gone in that direction, it turns out happiness is higher and productivity is higher
teaching children to recognize patterns and systems is far more useful than math drills and "showing your work"
similarly, teaching children to explore and express their feelings through media is more useful than most of what is taught in school
and don't get me started on common core, I once had a tutoring gig for a while and helping with common core math homework literally made me want to uninstall
MsMerope@ariadne
I wish more people understood this.
One of the reasons I left teaching the littles was an implementation of "cook book" curricula that required us to teach them about snow in September (in a region that doesn't even see snow in December)
I wish more people understood this.
One of the reasons I left teaching the littles was an implementation of "cook book" curricula that required us to teach them about snow in September (in a region that doesn't even see snow in December)
@MsMerope I feel like common core was explicitly designed to make comparative psychologists like myself angery
@ariadne we had a superintendent who proclaimed that he wanted to walk down a wing of 2nd grade classrooms and as he left one room and entered the next the teacher would be picking up the end of the sentence that the teacher in the room he just left had started.
Though maybe the final straw was somebody walking up to a 4 year old on a tricycle and asking them what "performance standard" they were meeting when riding a tricycle....🤦
@MsMerope I mean the smartassed answer to that question is "phys ed" obviously
JulianCalaby@ariadne Best math teacher I ever had gave us a blank sheet of paper and asked us to divide 1 by every number between 1 and 50, then when we were done, showed us all the patterns we could see in all the decimals we got.
Bruce Simpson, Ph.D.@ariadne we are about to lose 1000 years of pedagogy...
✧✦Catherine✦✧@ariadne wait, people use psychometric scores in primary education? that's... wild
@whitequark yes that is the backbone of american primary schooling. it is called common core. they teach to pass the tests.
@ariadne that's horrible
artemist@whitequark @ariadne i went to special "magnet schools" for "smart children" from age 9, the entry tests seemed very much what i expect iq tests to be (lots of matching patterns, reading comprehension, and weird math problems)
@whitequark @ariadne yeah, i took those tests because there were other interesting people i could meet that way, but i never got a number back and i actively avoided anything that referred to iq, since i rightly believed it to be an absurd metric designed to accentuate racism.
@whitequark @artemist racism and eugenics, yes
John Carlsen 🇺🇸🇳🇱🇪🇺For a brief period while I was in primary school (perhaps before common core curriculum) our teachers recommended a few of us to take IQ tests (each two rounds of one-on-ones with psychologists). Not all of our parents shared our scores with us, but we all knew the minimum score that got us into the gifted program.
As an adult, I realized that I could probably get admitted to Mensa, but its narcissism turned me off.
j_bertolotti@ariadne The Mensa test is very good at selecting the kind of person who would take a Mensa test.
Jade
Riley S. Faelan@ariadne There's One Number mainly because racists insisted on there being One Number. Early on, there were multiple different theories of measuring intelligence (and later 'giftedness studies', once again, broke the One Number apart), but Spearman's "g factor" became the dominant one because it appealed to the "Race Scientists" of the early 20th century.
Chris Petrilli@ariadne phrenology without the physical calipers.
@ariadne what does a psychologist say about narcissism anyway
i've seen probably every possible take on the internet by now
@whitequark its complicated, I think in a lot of situations narcissistic behavior develops out of self loathing and the discovery that they can self soothe through maladaptive behavior
@ariadne that's useful and reasonable but i was thinking about something different
i think in practice i've mostly seen "narcissist" be used as an insult and as a leverage in an attack. this made it really hard historically to figure out how, if at all, one can make good conclusions about that type of behavior and its observations
@ariadne if someone tells me "X is a narcissist" I don't have any tools to find out if there's truth to it or they just really don't like X
asie@whitequark @ariadne
i think it's pretty hard for an unqualified person to conclusively diagnose someone from a distance; harder, even, than self-diagnosis.
flip side: is there a meaningful difference between "narcissist" and "unlikable/best to avoid, but in a non-narcissistic way" in day to day social life?
i think it's pretty hard for an unqualified person to conclusively diagnose someone from a distance; harder, even, than self-diagnosis.
flip side: is there a meaningful difference between "narcissist" and "unlikable/best to avoid, but in a non-narcissistic way" in day to day social life?
@asie @ariadne last time I was dealing with a (presumably) narcissist they've convinced a friend that she (friend) has weeks to live due to advanced heart disease, all based on an extreme degree of bullshit but one that you wouldn't know how to tell from truth without some training in cardiology. it was not pleasant, and it was most certainly not something I could have simply avoided (indeed I've tried doing exactly that in first place)
@whitequark @ariadne
i'm not sure if that's specific to narcissism. i think there are other mental glitches and/or disorders which can get you to that same point. which is my point, though perhaps expressed poorly - there are better ways to describe harmful, dangerous people than borrowing psychology terms in a pop cultural kind of way. such as calling them "harmful" or "dangerous".
i'm not sure if that's specific to narcissism. i think there are other mental glitches and/or disorders which can get you to that same point. which is my point, though perhaps expressed poorly - there are better ways to describe harmful, dangerous people than borrowing psychology terms in a pop cultural kind of way. such as calling them "harmful" or "dangerous".
@whitequark @ariadne right, i see
@asie @ariadne I also don't think "dangerous" is... a useful term here? anything worthwhile is dangerous. talking to me as you're doing right now is dangerous. there's a difference between mere danger and active, focused malice—frequently under the guise of help—which is really the issue I have moreso
@asie @whitequark yes, "know it all" behavior is a common expression of narcissism.
I hope your friend listens to the experts and follows their guidance...
princess pancake 
@[email protected] @asie @ariadne That's a subset of a subset though
Most people don't spend days finding our address, harassing peers into getting in touch with us, socially engineering and buying pwned information to tell us they own us and will destroy us if we spend time with people who actually care about us
For it to get this bad it's intentionally left unchecked for years or decades
Most people don't spend days finding our address, harassing peers into getting in touch with us, socially engineering and buying pwned information to tell us they own us and will destroy us if we spend time with people who actually care about us
For it to get this bad it's intentionally left unchecked for years or decades
@asie @whitequark @ariadne Doesn't that, in a way, make it a vibes-based personality assessment? Narcissistic traits are pretty common and many people work on theirs, so yeah I'd argue it's in practice a synonym for a "bad person"
@whitequark @asie yes. narcisstic personality disorder has very specific diagnostic criteria.
the generalized version is antisocial personality disorder, which is largely a catch-all.
LisPi@asie @ariadne @whitequark I think it's the modern equivalent of "pompous asshole", which is preferable to "narcissistic" because it doesn't misuse a mental illness (or any number of other descriptors) as an insult.
@whitequark oh yes, it has definitely become an insult in pop culture
Krzysztof Sakrejda@ariadne tiny nit to pick: psychometric tests are perfectly good at measuring specific things about a person's brain function in a repeatable way. Having that kind of assessment if you have difficulties with work or school can change your life for the better.
The completely careless ways educators, policy makers, the general public, and business people use the single numeric summaries of those tests is completely deranged and I agree with you completely there.
IQ as a single number is bonkers.
@ariadne ugh, missed one of your toots, NVM I'm mostly repeating what you said, sorry!
crow