I am a little smarter than average.

[Bmoboy]

At least according to my grades.

Top reading group in 6th grade.

“A course” and college prep classes in high school.

Accepted at several good colleges.

Test well.

Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

Just smart enough to realize I’m not that smart, but smarter than folks who are average or below.

And that’s scary.

70 million. And their friends who didn’t vote and all their children.

I am now depending on them following scientific advice to try to control the virus and keep me alive a little longer.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”― George Carlin

[lapfog_1]

1. Of course, Carlin was technically wrong

“Think of how stupid the median person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

[Shermann]

10. FALSE

Average in the context of his joke is describing an "ordinary" person, and not an arithmetic mean. Ordinary here implies not remarkably smart, nor remarkably stupid when compared with the entire population. So median intelligence.

[lapfog_1]

11. context is important

when he adds that "half the people" which defines average as the mathematical term... not as you state "ordinary".

So average IQ is the sum of all IQs divided by the number of people.

By definition median IQ is the number where exactly half of the population falls under.

But average is the term most people recognize, whether talking math or meaning ordinary like saying "Joe was an average man who lived in the suburbs"

so not FALSE as you state in all caps. Carlin was wrong... but lets forgive him because he was my favorite comedian of all time.

[ProfessorGAC]

13. Now Add Test Variation, And...

...practical effects of small changes, and the population fails to meet the model.
There is no practical talent difference between a 97 & a 100.
Then 3 people could test 97, 100, & 103, but actually be exactly the same.
Finally the distribution is highly platykurtic and skewed, as there are more people at 160 than 40. Much less than 40 is barely functional. That's a thankfully small fraction of the population.
So, while you're right in the purely mathematical sense, the IQ distribution makes that statistical rigidity flawed.

[Shermann]

16. Let's say I accept the definition of average as mean in this context

Carlin does not specifically say how we are grading "stupidity".

He could be numerically grading on a curve, in which case the average of those grades would in fact represent the median.

So I see two paths here for Carlin's statement to be sound.

[Bmoboy]

17. analyzing jokes

is not smart.

[greyl]

21. ? It depends on whether the analysis is fucking stupid or smart.

Signed,

The Aristocrats

[ismnotwasm]

24. lolololol!

[Celerity]

18. you are correct, and the median verus the average (mean) game is used to gaslight Americans in terms

of their relative wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult

The mean net wealth per adult in the US was 4th in the world in 2019 (432,365 USD)

BUT that is so skewed upward by the ultra wealthy

the median net wealth per adult was only 65,904 USD, 22nd in the world


The same thing is done for annual wages (or the even more deceptive GDP per capita, which takes into account tremendous sums generated by paper/financial gains and manipulation, things which often have little to no effect on a large percentage of people and is again skewed so artificially upward by the ultra wealthy).

[USALiberal]

19. Lol, ok! Nt

[matt819]

2. There is so much that is terrifying about these people.

I think it was a new appointee to Joe Biden‘s coronavirus task force who said that politicizing the wearing of masks is like the politicizing of toilet paper. The fact that these fantastic idiots believe that the wearing of masks is oppressive and a violation of their rights is, frankly, beyond words. I don’t know how to describe the utter selfishness and stupidity. How do you overcome that?

I’ve read that, basically, you convert cult members one by one. There is no such thing as group de-programming. Maybe you call them in one by one to the head of the CDC or some other entity and give them a presentation. Maybe dumb it down or maybe you treat them as the adults they should be and tell them the facts. No media. No politicization. No condemnation. No ridicule. Just facts snd science. Would this work? Probably not. But as an experiment it might be worth a try.

[left-of-center2012]

3. Congratulations on your intelligence

I have tested well in the past on several IQ tests but I've never shared that with anyone in my 74 years other than my parents.

Perhaps now that you have broken the ice,
I will reconsider.

"Smarter than the average bear"

[Dagstead Bumwood]

6. Congrats. It aint easy to snag one of them pic-i-nic baskets.

[northoftheborder]

8. Love your DU name!

[ARPad95]

4. I think most DUers have an IQ above 115 and most hardcore Trumpers are on the other side of 100.

Psychologists revise the test every few years in order to maintain 100 as the average. Most people (about 68 percent) have an IQ between 85 and 115. Only a small fraction of people have a very low IQ (below 70) or a very high IQ (above 130). The average IQ in the United States is 98.

https://www.healthline.com/health/average-iq

vs.

[Botany]

5. One little nugget of hope for you

7 of the last 8 Presidential Election the Ds won the popular vote and the one time they didn't
it was 2004 and that election was way dirty and not just in OH.

BTW I really doubt that TRump picked up 11 million voters from 2016 too.

[captain queeg]

12. That last comment, about trump picking up 11 million more votes than in 2016:

Yeah I don’t believe. I don’t know or have met anyone who didn’t vote for trump last time who planned on doing vote for him this time. But I’ve met many who had voted for him before and now they won’t. Pretty strange that he got that many new voters. Of course there could be some who didn’t vote at al last time, and some who who just didn’t want to admit they were voting for Trump. But I think part of the reason trump is being so whiny (aside from him just being a whiny poor loser) is he really thought and had been told by the rethugs that the fix was in. Really with all the shit they were pulling leading up to the election, the fact that Joe won, really means it would have been a total landslide if the rethugs hadn’t done their best to defeat him.

[KentuckyWoman]

26. The math

2016
245.5 Million - Eligible to Vote
136.8 Million - Votes cast

2020
239.9 Million - Eligible to Vote
159.8 Million - Votes Cast


There is still plenty of room for growth.

[lunatica]

27. There are two very important facts to consider

One is that millions of Biden’s people actually flooded the streets in just about every major city and in many cities in other countries. They danced in the streets just at the announcement of his win. He didn’t ask them to. No one planned it. It was spontaneous.

The other is that a pathetically small number, about 10 thousand went to a “million man march” to back up their president. Some pathetic group planned it. It was not spontaneous.

These facts should tell us something very important. And factual about the support each man actually gets.

[Botany]

30. QAnon's Congress Critter posts picture of massive D.C. rally

Link to tweet

I had to deal with some of these QAnon/Boogaloo Bois/Proud Boys/Trumpers
doing some election protection work on the west side of Columbus, OH not
only are they nasty but they live in some kind of fantasy world fueled by booze,
meth, fox news, their pastors, internet crap, and the thought they need unlimited
guns to keep themselves safe from the big government and brown people who
right now are plotting with ANTIFA to invade their home/trailer.

[lunatica]

31. That about sums it up.

[Blue_true]

7. To bad covid19 isn't a bear. If it was, we could simply throw non-maskers

down and get away.

[moonscape]

9. Very scary is that the cult is not even an intelligence test. There

are other things going on. Sure, uneducated white men (racist plus lower IQ) are most vulnerable it seems, but a former friend is wicked smart in terms of IQ but is a devout Catholic trumper.

Another friend, liberal, was in Mensa (no comment) and has a lot of friends from those years. She knows quite a few, including her ex-husb, who are Trumpers.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

25. Yes, it's not just IQ.

I was a member of Mensa for one year shortly after high school, never renewing it by paying dues, and there was a SIG (Special Interest Group) for "Objectivists" back then... the Ayn Rand kooks.

Edit: I think a broad education is more important.

[keithbvadu2]

14. Don't most people think they are above average?

Don't most people think they are above average?

Dunning-Kruger effect?

When Trump belittled Rex Tillerson's intelligence, MENSA offered to give them an IQ test.

Trump was smart enough to not take them up on the offer.

[gulliver]

15. "Intelligence discrimination" is bad mojo.

Even the smartest person is an idiot, really. NB Socrates. It's not like we can choose the population's IQ distribution. That's a given, like gravity.

[JI7]

20. Most of them are not stupid. They are Racists and other types of Bigots. They don't like the changes

in the US with more minorities and same sex marriage.

[betsuni]

22. Well, I'm stupid and I will speak for my people.

There's an education gap when it comes to voting and it's not about intelligence. College makes you come in contact with different kinds of people and information, it makes one more open-minded. You learn how to research, be objective, comfortable with new ideas and difficult things like science.

"Whites who did not attend college were evenly split between the two parties in Pew surveys conducted from 1992 to 2008. But by 2015 white voters who had a high school degree or less were 24 percentage points more Republican than Democratic (57% versus 33%). ... Why did this diploma divide in party identification emerge -- and why did it emerge when it did? A key reason was race. For many years whites with less formal education had not mapped their views about race onto their broader political views. Because they tended to follow politics less closely, they had not fully learned or internalized the long-standing divisions between the Democratic and Republican Parties on civil rights and other issues related to race. But once Obama was in office, whites with less formal education became better able to connect racial issues to partisan politics. There was a large increase in the proportion of non-college-educated whites who knew that the Democratic Party was more supportive of liberal racial polices than was the Republican Party.

"The relationship between education and support for Donald Trump is plain: Trump did worse -- and Clinton better -- among whites with college degrees or some postgraduate education than among whites who did not have college degrees. However, this relationship disappeared once views of racial inequality and illegal immigration were accounted for in the statistical analysis. Because whites with more formal education have long had more positive views of racial and ethnic minorities, and because these views were themselves strongly related to how Americans voted in 2016, the education gap was largely a racial attitudes gap."

Sides, Tesler, Vavreck, "Identity Crisis, The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America"

[KentuckyWoman]

23. by iQ I supposedly rank in the top 10% ... but

I know for a fact I'm a stupid idiot.

This Air Force Engineer I know is super duper egghead smarty guy. Mensa smart. An engineer. He doesn't know what a ball ping hammer or a locking hex nut is. So I supposed some people get so smart they turn stupid....

Full circle.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

28. Being smart surely helps to avoid right-wing...

... brainwashing.

British comedian, Ricky Gervais, used to regularly interview Karl Pilkington, and it was hilarious to hear Karl's repeated misunderstandings of the world with his very concrete, non-abstract mind.

Karl was generally nice and kind-hearted during the interviews, but there's little doubt in my mind that he could've been turned into a hateful monster if he had been regularly exposed to simplistic right-wing propaganda for many years.

[roamer65]

29. It's a long way to general vaccine distribution.

People in this country are about to get a HARD dose of reality.

It’s gonna bite down hard and not let go.

Be smart, folks. The meek will inherit the Earth.

🦠