Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 1215254" data-attributes="member: 177">I don't dismiss all quantitative measures.  I question them.  I admit that I'm thoroughly unconvinced that the operation of something as complex as the human mind can be accurately summed up in a single number.  The original intent of the exams was sound.  They were originally designed to screen children to see which ones might have troubles in school for whatever reason.  Maybe it was because they weren't bright.  Maybe it would be because they had dyslexia, or emotional difficulties, or because their parents didn't stress homework, or what have you.  The test didn't claim to identify the cause, but only note the effect.  The idea was to give the test, discover who might have difficulties in school, and then follow up in person and find the actual problem and deal with it.  And the exams are actually pretty decent at this job.The connection of those test scores with "intelligence" was, to be blunt, racist, eugenicist nonsense, conflated with inappropriate interpretation of statistics.  The "g" measure, statistically, tells you how well a person with a particular socre on one test is likely to score on other, similar tests.  With carefully constructed tests, you might be able to identify the socre with performance in school.  To go further and say that it measures "intelligence" is pretty darned weak, because there's lots of barriers to school and test performance that have nothing to do with intelligence.Be that as it may, my note was more of a practical bent.  I know of no quantitative measure that everyone here (or even everyone in the business of studying human mentation) accepts as valid.  That does make discussion difficult.  I tried to say that early on, but nobody listened.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />However, as Mr. Dyal has already pointed out, we don't have any quantitative measures on the population in question.   So, we can't really have the discussion based upon quantitative measures anyway, now can we?  When quantitative measures fail, we can fall back to qualitative measures.  These include, but are not limited to, the anecdotal evidence we gather here.  Hr.  I avoided Zander's foray into discussing such barriers at first, because it was dealing with skills, and not intelligence.  But I'll wade in now.First, I am not solidly convinced that being good or bad at a thing alone provides a measurable change in the probability that one takes up a given hobby.  An anecdotal analogy - I know many people who like to sing.  Some of them are good.  Many (perhaps more) are not so good, but they make joyous noise anyway, because they like it.  I know some people who don't like to sing.  Quite a few have very nice (if untrained) voices.  Some of them have nice, trained voices, but they don't find the practice particularly pleasureable.  From all this, I gather that actual singing ability has little to do with singing for one's own pleasure.  Now, singing at home for fun is a vastly different activity than gaming. The same dynamics may not apply.  But it does brinng up the question.RPGs do have some basic entry barriers.  You need junior high school literacy to read the rulebooks.  You need the most basic of math skills (addition and subtraction, usually of numbers less than about 20).  Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that being good at these skills makes one more likely to be a gamer.  The question is, though, if being good at those skills has much to do with intelligence.Those barriers are pretty darned low.  Very few people are limited to grade-school and below in them. As stated previously I think when cosidering "average intelligence", most folks are leaving out people that disadvantaged.  Anyone who leaves high school with a valid diploma is supposed to be good at these skills, well above these barriers.So, we're talking about people who don't leave high school with a valid diploma.  Well, in the US, I'm pretty sure that intelligence isn't the main determiner.  People drop out far more often due to social and economic pressures than due to lack of intelligence.   People slip through the cracks and leave without being able to read well more due to poor funding and teaching quality in schools than due to lack of intelligence.It seems we're talking about problems of economics, social status, and public education methods than we are about intelligence.  That's politics, and we probably shouldn't go there.Okay, let me ask this on the flip side - were there intelligent people before the invention of written language?</blockquote>

Verification